Polaris Page 4

  There are still a few people walking around who claim to be pure-blooded Shenji. I don’t know why they would. Their history is a mixed bag at best. When they weren’t exploring, they were running pogroms and inquisitions; but they’ve been dead and gone a long time, and that fact alone seems to make them intriguing to some folks. Alex has commented that being dead for a sufficiently long time guarantees your reputation. It won’t matter that you never did anything while you were alive; but if you can arrange things so your name shows up, say, on a broken wall in a desert, or on a slab recounting delivery of a shipment of camels, you are guaranteed instant celebrity. Scholars will talk about you in hushed tones. You will become a byword, and an entire age might even be named for you. History used to be simpler back when there wasn’t so much of it.

  Historians are forever announcing how they’d like to sit down with someone who’d actually hung out at the Parthenon during the years of Athenian hegemony, or had attended a Shenji parade. A survivor, if one could be found, would be hustled around town in the most luxurious skimmers, treated to the best meals, and taken to see the Council. He would show up as a guest on The Daylight Show.

  Go to Morningside today, the Shenji home world, and you’ll find a modern, skeptical, democratic society populated by waves of outsiders, people from all over the Confederacy. The tribes of true believers are gone, everybody’s a skeptic, watch your purse, and if you really think there are more aliens out there, I have a bridge I’d like you to look at.

  Alex had the kind of looks that could get lost easily in a crowd. His face was sort of bureaucratic, and you knew immediately that he liked working in an office, that he preferred a regular schedule, no surprises, and took his coffee with a sweetener. That was all true, actually. Although I have to confess we had a brief romantic fling years ago. But he was never going to commit to marriage, and I wanted him as a friend rather than a lover anyhow. So there you are.

  He was about average height, brown hair, dark brown eyes, and he looked out of place in a pressure suit. Or in an ancient outstation, drifting down dark corridors, with a lamp in one hand and a laser cutter in the other.

  He was reasonable, quiet, and he thought well of himself. He had never liked starships. In the early years, when we were using the old jump engines, he used to get sick every time we made the transition into or out of Armstrong space. He was interested primarily in number one. Liked making money, liked wielding influence, enjoyed being invited to the right parties. But at heart he was a good guy. He’d take care of a stray cat, always kept his word, and watched out for his friends. I should add that he was a reasonable boss. If occasionally erratic.

  We needed the cutters because the hatches, both inside and out, were nonfunctional, so we had to slice our way through a lot of them. My job was to do the slicing and pack any salable objects. His was to point out the stuff we’d take back.

  But after three days wandering around the station we had virtually nothing to show for it.

  He’d figured out the location of the place from clues left in Shenji archives. Just finding this outpost of Shenji culture would have considerable public relations value, but it wasn’t going to bring a cascade of wealth, which was what he’d expected.

  His good humor began to drain. As we fished pieces and bits, knobs and filters and chunks of dishware and broken glass and shoes and timers out of the debris, he took to sighing, and I’m sure inside the helmet he was shaking his head.

  I’d seen him like that before. What happens is that he begins to talk about the historical value of the artifacts and what a loss it is to the human race to find them in such terrible condition. He becomes a great humanitarian when things go wrong.

  The original plan had been to set up a base inside the station, but Alex wondered whether it was worth the effort. So every evening when we got tired, or bored, wandering around the place, we returned to the Belle-Marie for dinner. And then we looked at whatever we’d salvaged. It was a depressing time, and when I told him that maybe we should just close up shop and head home, he replied that I was giving up too easily.

  On the sixth day, when we were getting ready to pack it in, we found a chamber with odd damage. It appeared to be a conference room. It contained a table that could have seated about ten, and gray mottled bulkheads, one of which might once have been a display screen. The screen was smashed. Not smashed because objects were getting rolled around the room, because nothing was moving in there with much force. But smashed the way it would be if someone had taken a hammer to it.

  The table and chairs and some gunk that might once have been fabric were working their way across the overhead. The only thing that held us upright was our grip shoes, and I should tell you that standing there watching everything move around the room tended to make your head spin.

  “Vandals,” Alex decided, standing in front of the wall screen. He hated vandals. “Damn their hides.”

  “It happened a long time ago,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  The next room might have been a VR chamber. We checked the equipment, which was locked in place, and in fact everything in that room was secured, and the door had been closed, so it was in decent condition. Not that the equipment would work, of course. But it looked good. And I could see Alex brighten, mentally tagging some of the gear for shipment home.

  Then we found more signs of vandals, more damage to stationary objects. “They probably came in on a looting expedition,” he said. “Got exasperated at the conditions, and started breaking things up.”

  Yeah. Those looters are just terrible.

  But maybe they’d gotten discouraged too soon. We eventually wandered into what appeared to be the control room. And that was where we found the jade bracelet. And the corpse.

  The bracelet was on the left wrist. It was black, and engraved with an ivy branch.

  The corpse was in pieces, and the pieces were adrift. The torso was moving across the deck when we moved in. At first I didn’t know what it was. It was mummified, and it looked as if it had been either a woman or a child. While we were trying to decide about that, I discovered the bracelet. The arm was the only limb still attached.

  It wasn’t readily visible unless you handled the remains. Don’t ask me why I did. It was just that the corpse shouldn’t have been there, and I wondered what had happened.

  And there was the bracelet. “I think she got left behind,” I told Alex. There was no sign of a pressure suit, so she hadn’t been with the vandals.

  We had nothing to wrap her in, no way to secure the body. Alex stood staring at her a long time. Then he looked around the room. There were three control positions. They opened the outer doors remotely, maintained station stability, managed communications, kept an eye on life support, probably controlled the bots that serviced the living quarters.

  “I think you’re right,” he said at last.

  “Probably didn’t check when they left to be sure they had everybody.”

  He looked at me. “Maybe.”

  She was shriveled, dry, the face smoothed out, the features missing altogether. I thought how it must have been when she realized she’d been left behind. “If it really happened,” Alex said, “it had to have been deliberate.”

  “You mean, because she could have called them? Let them know she was here?”

  “That’s one reason.”

  “If they were shutting down the station,” I said, “they’d have killed the power before they left. She might not have known how to turn it back on.” He rolled his eyes. “So what other reason is there?”

  “They’d have used a team for a project like shutting down the station. There’s no way someone could have been here and not noticed what was going on. No. This was deliberate.”

  Three walls had been converted into display screens. There was lots of electronic gear. The rear wall, the one the corpse was climbing, was given over to an engraving of the mountain eagle that for centuries was the world symbol of the Shenji Imperium. T
wo phrases were inscribed below the eagle.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  Alex had a translator. He poked the characters into it and made a face. “The Compact. It’s the way the Shenji of that era referred to their nation, which was a polity of individual states. The Compact.” He hesitated. “The second term is harder to translate. It means something like Night Angel.”

  “Night Angel?”

  “Well, maybe Night Guardian. Or Angel of the Dark. I think it’s the name of the station.”

  An outstation always had a dozen or so rooms set aside as accommodations for travelers. You want to stay overnight, and maybe even sneak someone into your apartment without the rest of the world finding out, this was the place to do it. The room usually consisted of a real bed, as opposed to the fold-outs on the ships. Maybe a chair or two. A computer link. Possibly a small table and a reader.

  The compartments at the Night Angel were located two decks above the control room and about a kilometer away. We were looking to see if any appeared to have been lived in, but the passage of time was too great, and the contents of the rooms too thoroughly scrambled, so it was impossible to determine whether any of them might have been used by the victim.

  Eventually, we opened an airlock and, after retrieving the bracelet, gave the body to the void. I wasn’t sure it was the proper thing to do. After all, she’d been dead a long time and had herself become an object of archeological interest. I had no doubt Survey would have liked to have the corpse. But Alex wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t like mummies,” he said. “Nobody should be put on display after they’re dead. I don’t care how long ago they died.”

  Sometimes he got sentimental.

  So we watched her drift away, then we went back inside. The best finds came out of one of the dining rooms. Fortunately, everything there had been locked down, and it was in good condition. We spent two hours gathering glasses and plates and chairs, and especially stuff that had the station’s name on it, Night Angel. That’s where the money is. Anything with a seal. We also collected circuit boxes, switches, keyboard panels whose Shenji inscriptions, after a careful cleaning, were still visible. We removed vents and blowers and the AI (a pair of gray cylinders) and a water nozzle and a temperature gauge and a hundred other items. It was by far our best day at the outstation.

  We found a group of seventeen wineglasses, carefully stored, each glass engraved with the image of the mountain eagle. That alone would be worth a small fortune to a collector. We needed two more days to haul everything back to the Belle-Marie.

  Alex, celebrating our success, gave me a raise and invited me to take a couple of souvenirs. I picked out some settings, dinner dishes, saucers, cups, and silver. Everything except the silver was made of cheap plastic, but, of course, that didn’t matter.

  When we’d filled Belle’s storage area, there were still some decent items left over. Not great stuff, but okay. We could have come back to get them, made another flight, but Alex said no. “It’ll be part of the bequest to Survey.”

  By God he was a generous man.

  “We’ve got the pick of the merchandise,” he continued. “Survey will send the rest of it around to every major museum in the Confederacy. And they’ll be representing us. Everywhere they go on display, Rainbow will be mentioned.”

  As we slipped away from the platform, Alex asked what I made of the corpse.

  “Left by a boyfriend,” I suggested. “Or a husband.”

  Alex looked at me oddly, as if I’d said something unreasonable.

  TWO

  History is a collection of a few facts and a substantial assortment of rumors, lies, exaggerations, and self-defense. As time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the various categories.

  —Anna Greenstein,

  The Urge to Empire

  We left the Shenji outstation just after breakfast on the tenth day. We used nine hours to charge the quantum drive, so we were back in the home system in time for a late dinner. Of course, we needed another two days to travel from the arrival point to Skydeck, the Rimway orbital station.

  I was in favor of calling a press conference to announce our find, but Alex asked me coolly who I thought would come.

  “Everybody,” I said, honestly surprised that he didn’t see the advantage in culling maximum publicity out of the discovery.

  “Chase, nobody cares about a two-thousand-year-old space station. You do, for obvious reasons. And a handful of collectors. And maybe some researchers. But to the general public, it’s not sexy. It’s just a piece of leftover junk.”

  So okay. I gave in, grumbling a bit over a lost opportunity to talk to the media people. I confess I enjoy the spotlight, and I love being interviewed. So while we cruised into the inner system, I contented myself by putting together an inventory and writing a cover letter detailing what we’d found. Alex changed the emphasis here and there, and we transmitted it to our assorted clients and other possibly interested parties, and also to most of the major museums on Rimway. It described a dozen or so of the objects we’d brought back, advising prospective buyers to get in touch if they wanted to see the complete inventory. So when we docked at Skydeck, nobody was there, and no bands played. But we already had a few bids.

  And that evening, back in Andiquar, we had a celebratory dinner at Culp’s on the Tower.

  By morning we’d had more than a hundred responses. Everybody wanted details, most inquired about starting negotiations, and others wanted to know when they could see specified objects. I referred the money issues to Alex, while I arranged to have the merchandise shipped down from orbit.

  Rainbow had always been a profitable venture for him, and it had provided a good situation for me. It paid better than running around in an interstellar bus, it was less disruptive to my personal life, and in fact I loved the work.

  It’s an odd thing about collectors. The value of an artifact tends to be in direct proportion to the proximity the object would have had to the original owner, or at least the degree to which it could have been seen or handled by him. That’s why dinner plates and glasses are so popular, why a collector will pay good money for a panel board, while turning thumbs down on the recycler or generator that it controlled.

  If Alex had been one of those people given to framing an epigraph and hanging it on the wall, it would have read, THE PAYOFF’S IN FLATWARE. People love dishes and cups and forks and, if the historical background is right, they’ll pay almost anything to own them. Especially if a ship’s seal is present. The truth about our customers was that none of them was going to show up at the bargain store. In fact, it had become obvious to me that, unlike standardized goods, antiquities tend to become more sought after as the price goes up.

  The routine work took several days. By the end of the week money had begun to come in, and we were shipping off the first Night Angel objects. Although we hadn’t communicated directly with Survey, they’d learned of the find, as we knew they would, and the director got in touch with Alex. Where was the outstation? Was there any chance they could see it? Alex said he would try to arrange something. It was, of course, the signal for us to demonstrate our munificence. “How did you want to handle it?” I asked.

  “You take care of it, Chase. Go see Windy.”

  “Me? Don’t you think you should do this personally? Give it to Ponzio himself? You’re making a pretty big donation.”

  “No. I’d have a hard time containing myself. If we’re going to get maximum value out of this, humility is the way to go.”

  “You’re not good at that.”

  “My thought exactly.”

  Winetta Yashevik was the archeological liaison at Survey, and an old friend. We’d gone to school together. She didn’t approve of Alex because of his profession. Turning antiquities into commodities and selling them to private buyers struck her as grossly incorrect. When I’d gone to work for Rainbow twelve years earlier she told me it was a sellout.

  But she listened carefully while I d
escribed what we’d seen. She gazed at the ceiling with a help-me-stay-calm-Lord expression when I told her we’d taken “some” of the artifacts, and finally nodded solemnly when I announced the gift.

  “Everything you couldn’t carry off, I presume?” We were sitting on a love seat in Windy’s office. Old pals. It was a big office, on the second floor of the Kolman building. Lots of pictures from the missions on the paneled walls, a few 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 of dig sites. I recognized the collapsed towers at Ilybrium, but the others were just people standing around excavations.

  “We could have gone back,” I said. “We could have stripped the place clean.”

  She stared at me intensely for a moment, then relented. Windy was tall, dark, send-in-the-cavalry. She’d trained originally to be an archeologist, and had some field experience. She had a lot of good qualities, but she wasn’t someone I’d have put in a position that required diplomacy and tact. “How’d you find it?” she asked.

  “The archives.”

  A water clock in a corner of the room made a gurgling sound. “Incredible,” she said.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “We found a corpse. A woman.”

  “Really? You mean an old corpse?”

  “Yes. It looked as if she was left behind when they cleared out.”

  “No idea why? Or who she was?”

  “None.”

  “We’ll look into it when we get there. Maybe we can turn up something. I don’t suppose you brought it back with you?”

  I hesitated. “We put it out the airlock.”

  Her eyes closed, and she stiffened. “You put what out the airlock?”