Seeker Page 2

  There was an open door.

  Well, not open in the sense that the hatch was ajar. Someone had cut into it. Had cut a large hole that we should have seen coming down if we’d been paying attention.

  Alex grumbled something over the circuit about vandals and started angrily toward it. I fell in behind. “Watch the gravity,” I said, as he stumbled but caught himself.

  “Damned thieves.” Alex delivered a series of imprecations. “How’s this possible?”

  It was hard to believe that someone had beaten us here because artifacts from Gideon V had never appeared on the market. And there was no historical record that the base had been found.

  “Has to be recent,” I said.

  “You mean yesterday?” he asked.

  “Maybe they didn’t know what they had. Just broke in, looked around, and left.”

  “It’s possible, Chase,” he said. “Maybe it happened centuries ago. When people still remembered where this place was.”

  I hoped he was right.

  It was usually the case that when archeologists found a ransacked site, the ransacking had been done within a few hundred years of the era during which the site had operated. After a reasonable length of time, people forget where things are. And they get permanently lost. I sometimes wonder how many ships are floating around out in the dark, having blown an engine and eventually faded from the record.

  I should mention that we’re not archeologists. We’re strictly business types, matching collectors with merchandise, and sometimes, as now, hunting down original sources. This had looked like a gold mine moments ago. But now—Alex was holding his breath as we approached the opening.

  The hatch had been cut away by a torch. It lay off to one side. And there was only the lightest coating of dust on it. “This just happened,” he said. I’ll confess that Alex is not exactly even-tempered. At home, in social circumstances, he’s a model of courtesy and restraint. But in places like that lunar surface, where society is a long way off, I occasionally get to see his real feelings. He stared at the fallen door, picked up a rock, said something under his breath, and threw the rock halfway into orbit.

  I stood there, a kid in the principal’s office. “Probably my fault,” I said.

  The inner hatch was also down. Beyond it, the interior was dark.

  He looked at me. The visor was too opaque to allow me to see his expression, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. “How do you mean?” he asked.

  “I told Windy.” Windy was Survey’s public relations director, and a longtime friend.

  Alex wasn’t appreciably taller than I am, but he seemed to be towering over me. “Windy wouldn’t say anything.”

  “I know.”

  “You told her over an open circuit.”

  “Yeah.”

  He sighed. “Chase, how could you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I was trying not to whine. “I didn’t think there’d be a problem. We were talking about something else and it just came up.”

  “Couldn’t resist?”

  “I guess not.”

  He planted one boot on the hatch and shoved. It didn’t budge. “Well,” he said, “no help for it now.”

  I straightened my shoulders. Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better. “Won’t happen again.”

  “It’s okay.” He was using his spilled-milk voice. “Let’s go see how much damage they did.”

  He led the way in.

  The domes were connected by tunnels. Staircases led to underground spaces. These places are always ghostly, illuminated only by wrist lamps. Shadows chase themselves around the bulkheads, and there seems always to be something moving just outside the field of vision. I remember reading how Casmir Kolchevsky was attacked in a place like this by a security bot that he had inadvertently activated.

  The vandals had been relentless.

  We wandered through the operational sections, through a gym, through private living quarters. Through a kitchen and dining room. Everywhere we went, drawers were pulled out and their contents dumped. Cabinets were cut open, storage lockers broken apart. The place had been ransacked. There wasn’t much remaining that could have been put up for sale or would have been of interest to a museum. We found ourselves treading carefully past broken glass and data disks and overturned tables. Some clothing will survive for a surprisingly long time in a vacuum. But we found only a handful of pieces, most of them victims of whatever chemicals had been in the original material. Or sufficiently mundane that nobody would have cared. It doesn’t much matter where a pullover shirt has come from. Unless it’s been worn by a legendary general or an immortal playwright, nobody cares. But the jumpsuits, which usually carry a shoulder patch, or a stenciled identity over a pocket, GIDEON BASE or some such thing, are worth their weight. We found only one, badly frayed. The inscription was of course in Celian characters, framing a tall, narrow peak. “The station’s emblem,” said Alex.

  They’d also stripped the operations center. Electronic gear had been taken. They’d torn the panels apart to get access. Again, the objective had been to find parts marked as belonging to the base. It looked as if anything not meeting that standard had been yanked out and dropped on the deck.

  Alex was in a rage by the time we were finished. All four domes, and the underground network, had been treated the same way. There’d been one exception to the general chaos. We found a common room, littered with debris. The deck was covered with projectors and readers, and data crystals that would have gone dry long before six centuries had passed. A broken pitcher and some ice lay in one corner, and a partially torn-up carpet had been dragged into another. But a small table stood in the center of the room, and a book lay open on it, arranged for the convenience of anyone seated in the lone chair.

  “Well,” I said, looking down at it, “at least it won’t be a complete blowout. That thing will bring some money.”

  Or maybe it wouldn’t.

  It was last year’s edition of The Antiquarian Guide.

  “Look as if the vandal knew we’d be here,” Alex said. “He’s saying hello.”

  TWO

  I told him he was an idiot. I explained that he was auctioning off our history, converting it to baubles and handing it over to people who had no concept who Mike Esther was. And that when he was finished, when the last crystal had been taken from the museum and sold to the jewelers, there would be nothing left of the men and women who had built our world. He smiled and shook his head and I thought for a moment that his voice caught. “Old friend,” he said, “they are already long gone.”

  —Haras Kora,

  Binacqua Chronicles, 4417 C.E.

  Winetta Yashevik was the archeological liaison at Survey, and she doubled as their public relations chief. Windy was the only person to whom I’d revealed our destination, but I knew she would never have given information away to any of Alex’s rivals. She was a true believer. In her view, we turned antiquities into commodities and sold them to private buyers. It was an offense against decency, and she always contrived, without saying anything directly, to make me feel that I was ethically unfit. I was, if you like, the lost sheep. The one that had been corrupted by the mendacity of the world and didn’t seem able to find its way home.

  It was easy enough for her to sit in judgment. She’d been born into wealth and never known what it was to go without anything. But that’s another matter.

  When I stopped by her office at the Survey complex, on the second floor of the Kolman building, she brightened, waved me inside, and closed the door. “You’re back more quickly than I expected. Did you not find the place? I hope.”

  “It was there,” I said. “Right where Alex said it would be. But somebody got there first and broke in.”

  She sighed. “Thieves everywhere. Well, anyhow, congratulations. Now you know how the rest of us feel when you and Alex have taken over a site.” She paused, smiled as if she wanted me to think she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, just kidding, you know how it is. But she was enjo
ying herself. “Were you able to make off with anything at all?”

  I ignored the phraseology. “The place was cleaned out,” I said.

  Her eyes slid shut. I saw her lips tighten, but she said nothing. Windy was tall, dark, passionate about the things she believed in. No halfway measures. Me she tolerated because she wasn’t going to throw a friendship overboard that went all the way back to when we were both playing with dolls. “No idea who they were?”

  “No. It happened recently, though. Within the last year. Maybe within the last few days.”

  Her office was big. There were pictures from various missions on the paneled walls, as well as a scattering of awards. Winetta Yashevik, Employee of the Year; Harbison Award for Outstanding Service; Appreciation from the United Defenders for contributions to their Toys for Kids program. And there were pictures from excavations.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Windy, we were trying to figure out how it happened.” I took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but as far as we can figure, you’re the only one who knew in advance where we were going.”

  “Chase,” she said, in a level tone, “you told me to keep it quiet, and I did. You also know I would never help one of these vandals.”

  “We know that. But we were wondering if the information got passed on in any way? If anybody else in the organization knew?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m sure I didn’t tell anybody.” She thought about it. “Except Louie.” That was a reference to Louis Ponzio, the director.

  “Okay. That probably means somebody’s listening in on us.”

  “Could be.” She looked uncomfortable. “Chase, we both know the director doesn’t run the tightest ship on the planet.”

  Actually I didn’t know.

  “That may or may not have been the problem. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “It’s okay. It was probably the comm system.”

  “Whatever. Listen, Chase—”

  “Yes?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to feel you can’t tell me things.”

  “I know. It’s not a problem.”

  “Next time—”

  “I know.”

  Fenn Redfield, Alex’s old police buddy, was at the country house when I got back. Alex had told him what happened. Not an official complaint, of course. There was none to be made. “But there’s a possibility somebody’s doing some eavesdropping.”

  “Wish I could help,” he said. “You guys just have to be more careful what you say over an open circuit.” Fenn was short, stocky, a walking barrel with green eyes and a deep bass voice. He had never married, loved to party, and played cards regularly in a small group with Alex.

  “Isn’t it illegal to eavesdrop on people?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “Such a law would be unenforceable.” He made a face to suggest he was thinking it over. “But it is illegal to own enabling equipment. I can keep an ear open, but what you should do, Alex, is install a scrambler system.”

  That sounded good, but it wasn’t very practical when you’re trying to solicit calls from new clients. So Fenn assured us he’d let us know if they learned anything, which meant, of course, that we were on our own.

  We had lunch before going back to the office. Alex is big on lunch. He thinks a good lunch is what life is really about. So we stopped at the Paramount House and decided over sandwiches and potato salad that we would opt for a cryptosystem that would secure calls between Alex and me, and between the office and our more significant clients. And to Windy.

  Despite failing to capitalize at Gideon V, Rainbow was prospering. Alex had all the money he could possibly want, much of it deriving as a by-product of the celebrity status he’d achieved from the Tenandrome and Polaris affairs. But he’d have been wealthy even without those fortuitous events. He was a good businessman, and everybody trusted him. If you had an artifact you wanted to put a value to, you knew you could take it to Alex and get an honest appraisal. In our business, reputation is everything. Add his basic integrity to the fact that he’s at least as knowledgeable as any of his competitors, and throw in his genius for public relations, and you have the formula for a profitable operation.

  Rainbow is headquartered on the ground floor of his home, an old country house that had once served as an inn to hunters and sight-seers before civilization—or development—washed over it. Tradition has it that Jorge Shale and his team came down hard nearby, the first landing on Rimway. Alex, who grew up there, claims he used to go looking for evidence of the event. After several thousand years, of course, there wasn’t going to be any, even assuming the location was correct. But it got the young Alex interested in history, and especially that part of it that involved digging and produced artifacts. Leftovers. Pieces of another time.

  I’m his pilot, social director, and sole employee. My title is executive assistant. I could have taken any title I chose, up to and including chief of operations. It was midwinter when we got back from the Celian base. We let our clients know we were home and fielded hopeful queries about new artifacts. No, I spent the afternoon explaining, we hadn’t brought anything home. We’d had a washout.

  It was one of those slate gray days warning of impending snow. The wind was out of the north, literally howling against the house. I was still hard at work when Alex wandered down from his quarters upstairs. He was wearing a thick gray sweater and black slacks.

  He’s about average height, average everything really. He is not by any stretch an imposing figure, until the lights come on in those dark brown eyes. I’ve said elsewhere that he doesn’t really care that much about antiquities for their own sake, that he prizes them exclusively as a source of income. He has seen that comment and strongly objects to it. And I’ll admit here that I may have misjudged him. He was, for example, still angry over what he called the looting of Gideon V. And I understood there was more to it than simply the fact that someone had beaten us there.

  “I found them,” he said.

  “What’s that, Alex?”

  “The artifacts.”

  “The Celian stuff?”

  “Yes,” he said. “What did you think?”

  “They showed up on the market?”

  He nodded. Yes. “They’re being offered for sale by Blue Moon Action.” He brought up the inventory and we looked at a gorgeous collection of plates and glasses, some pullovers, some work uniforms, all carrying the Celian characters for Gideon V, and the familiar mountaintop. There was also some electronic gear. “This magnetic coupler,” read the advertising, “would look elegant in your living room.” The coupler was labeled with a manufacturer and a date seven centuries gone.

  Alex directed Jacob to get Blue Moon on the circuit. “I wanted you to hear what they say,” he told me. I took station back near the bookcase, where I wouldn’t be visible. An AI answered.

  “I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge,” Alex said.

  “That’ll be Ms. Goldcress. May I tell her who’s calling?”

  “Alexander Benedict.”

  “One moment, please.”

  A blond woman about my age appeared. White blouse, blue slacks, gold earrings and bracelet. She smiled pleasantly. “Hello, Mr. Benedict. What can I do for you?”

  “You have some Celian artifacts for sale.”

  An armchair blinked on beside her and she lowered herself into it. “That’s correct. We haven’t closed the bidding yet. Actually, we won’t do so until next week.” She hesitated. “Which of the pieces were you interested in?”

  “Ms. Goldcress, may I ask how you came by the artifacts?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not at liberty to say. However, the objects will come with a fully documented certificate of authentication.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “The owner doesn’t wish his name known.”

  “You’re simply acting as his agent?”

  “That’s correct.” They stared at e
ach other across the open space of the office, she in her armchair, Alex standing, leaning back against my desk. “By the way, the catalog shows only a fraction of what’s available. If you’re interested, the entire inventory of Celian antiques will be on display at the Antiquarian Caucus this weekend. In Parmelee.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Would you be willing to put me in touch with him?”

  “With whom?”

  “With the owner.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Benedict. I really can’t do that. It would be unethical.”

  He casually produced a transmit card and laid it on the desk. “I’d be extremely grateful.”

  “I’m sure you would. And I’d help if I could.”

  Alex smiled. “It’s a pleasure to know there are still professionals in the business.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Might I ask you to pass a message to him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Ask him to call me.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  She signed off, and he made an irritated sound. “It’s a fool’s errand,” he said. “You can bet we won’t hear from him.”

  I was looking up the Antiquarian Caucus. “Bolton’s guest of honor this year,” I said. Ollie Bolton headed Bolton Brothers, a historical recovery firm for more than half a century. “The Caucus has several exhibitions scheduled.”

  It was a two-hour train ride. “Book it,” he said. “You never know who might turn up at one of these things.”

  The event was being held at Medallion Gardens, among breezeways and glass enclosures and a hundred varieties of flowering plants. We arrived during the late afternoon, shortly after the antiquities exhibit had opened. It featured the Rilby Collection, which was in the process of being transferred to the University Museum; and several pieces of three-thousand-year-old electronics from the Taratino, the first manned vessel known to have left the galaxy. And, of course, the Celian artifacts.

  That was painful, knowing they could—and should—have been ours. In addition to the material we’d seen in the catalog, there were musical instruments, chess and suji sets, a lamp, and three framed pictures (still remarkably sharp despite their age), all with backdrops from the base. One was of a woman, one of an elderly man, and the third of a pair of young children, a boy and a girl. The boy’s name was Jayle. Nothing more was known about anybody.