Polaris Read online

  “You underestimate him, Chase.” He signaled Windy that we’d take it. “He has the gavel that was used in the first trial in his hometown. And he owns a circuit board from the Talamay Flyer.” The first overwater antigrav train in the Parklands. The Flyer had made its initial run more than three hundred years ago between Melancholy Bend and Wildsky. The trip was still a subject of legend, a race against Suji bandits, a cyclone, and, finally, an apparently lascivious sea serpent.

  Windy passed the bracelet to the retainer and Alex decided the time had come to negotiate for more selections. “Winetta,” he said, “I have several people who would love to have items from this collection—”

  She looked pained. “I wish I could help, Alex. I really do. But the agreement is six. I’m not authorized to go any farther.”

  “We’re more than willing to pay fair prices, Windy. I shook hands with your dictator. And Chase made a play for him. That should be worth something.”

  She pressed her lips together, imploring him to keep his voice down. “You have my gratitude, Alex. Really. And you, too, Chase.” That seemed below the belt. “But there’s no negotiating room.”

  “You could say you had to make the commitment to get me over here.”

  “Look.” She sighed. “I’ll toss in an extra one. Make it seven. But that’s all.”

  “Windy, look at all this stuff. Nobody’ll ever miss it. I need twelve pieces. You have enormous influence here, and it would mean a lot to me.” He actually managed to look downcast. I knew the routine. I’d seen him in action too often. He was good. He always made you feel sorry for him. “How many times have I spoken to audiences here about the Christopher Sim thing?”

  “A lot,” she admitted.

  “Have I ever declined an invitation?”

  “No,” she conceded, “you haven’t.”

  “Have I ever charged a korpel?”

  “No.”

  “It must all have been volunteer work?”

  “Yes, Alex, it was all volunteer work.”

  “You bring other speakers in at a hundred per. Benedict does it free.”

  The reason for that, of course, was that Benedict saw his appearances at Survey as an important channel for meeting and impressing prospective clients. Windy’s eyes slid shut. She was no dummy, and she knew the routines, too. But she didn’t want to offend him.

  “You run the place, Windy. Everybody knows that. Whatever decision you make, Ponzio will go along with.”

  “Nine,” she said, finally. “And so help me, Alex, that’s it. Fini. Completo.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Winetta.”

  “Yes, we can all see that.”

  He smiled. “We’ll try to get by. And thanks. I’m grateful.”

  She looked at him sidewise. “When I get fired, Alex, I hope you can find room for me at Rainbow.”

  “Windy, Rainbow will always have a place for someone with your talents.”

  There were countless items, tableware, safety goggles, VR bands, towels, washcloths, even a showerhead.

  “Windy,” I said, “where are the ship’s logs?”

  She looked around, checked her pad. “Over in the corner.” She indicated the rear of the room. “But we’re holding them back.”

  “Why?”

  “Actually, we’re not putting everything up for sale. We’re saving a few items for the Polaris exhibition.”

  It turned out they were withholding some prime stuff. In addition to the logs, there was Martin Klassner’s leatherbound copy of Sangmeister’s Cosmology, with comments penned in the margins, many of them believed to have been done during the flight (according to the data card); Garth Urquhart’s notes, which had allowed his son to complete the memoirs of his political years, published a decade after his disappearance as On the Barricades; and Madeleine English’s certification for interstellars. There was also a picture of the pilot and her passengers taken on the space station just prior to departure on that final flight. Copies of the picture, a data card said, would be available in the gift shop the next day. Alex picked up a glass imprinted with the ship’s seal. It was long-stemmed, designed for champagne. For celebrations. “How do you think this would look in the office?” he asked.

  It was gorgeous. Arrowhead. Star. CSS 117. “You could never drink from it,” I said.

  He laughed. The glass went into the container, and we moved on.

  He found a command jacket that he liked. It was Maddy’s, of course, blue and white, with trimmed breast pockets and a Polaris shoulder patch. He asked my opinion again.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  He turned to Windy. “Why weren’t the personal items returned to the families?”

  We’d stopped beneath the banner depicting Nancy White. Even in that still image, she was a woman on the move, her eyes penetrating the jungle, while she listened, perhaps, to the rumble of a distant waterfall. “Quite a woman,” said Windy.

  “Yes. She was.”

  “The personal stuff was retained during the investigations. But they went on for years. Until recently, they’d never really stopped. At least not officially. I guess Survey just never got around to giving the stuff back. The families probably forgot about it after a while, or lost interest, so it just remained in storage.”

  “What would happen if the families came forward now?”

  “They no longer have a claim. They get seventeen years, after which the items become Survey’s property.” She looked down at a pendant. “Another reason they weren’t anxious to return this stuff was the possibility it might be contaminated in some arcane way. With a virus or maybe a nano.”

  “A nano that makes people disappear?”

  She softened. “What can I tell you? I wasn’t there. But they must have been desperate for some kind of answer. They put everything into safekeeping, assuming that eventually something might be needed. I don’t guess it ever happened. They even sterilized the hull, as if a plague might somehow have caused the problem.”

  “And eventually they sold the ship.”

  “In 1368. To Evergreen.” Windy sounded unhappy. “Evergreen got a bargain price. The Polaris became the Sheila Clermo, and last I heard she was still hauling engineers and surveyors and assorted VIPs around for them.” She smiled and checked the time. Got to move on. “Now,” she said, “what else would you like to look at?”

  We picked up a leather-bound Bible with Garth Urquhart’s name on the inside title page. And a plaque commemorating the eight earlier missions of the Polaris. Koppawanda in 1352, Breakmann in 1354, Moyaba in 1355. That was a Mute world. Or at least, it was in their sphere of influence.

  “They thought they’d found a white hole,” said Alex, reading my mind.

  Windy smiled. “Now that would have been earthshaking.” But they don’t exist. Theoretical figments. White holes sound good, sound like something that should be there because they’d add a lovely symmetry to cosmic processes. But the universe doesn’t pay much attention to our notions of esthetics.

  Other destinations were listed, all places they’d named as they arrived, usually after one of the passengers. Sacarrio, whose sun was going to go supernova within the next ten thousand years; Chao Ti, once thought to be a source of an artificial radio signal; Brolyo, where a small settlement had taken root and prospered. The mission durations had extended as long as a year and a half.

  I was headed toward a notebook, which, according to the attached certificate, had belonged to Nancy White. Its contents, to respect her privacy, had been deleted. That, of course, considerably reduced its value. But it was good to know there was still some integrity in the world. Alex lowered an eyebrow and went instead for a vest. It was the one Maddy could be seen wearing in some of the pictures from the flight. “Priceless,” he said, shielding the remark from Windy.

  “That’s seven,” I told him.

  Before we’d arrived, he’d remarked that the items connected with Maddy would be especially valuable. I had my doubts. “She was carrying cele
brities,” I told him. “Historical figures.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The captain is the tragic figure in this. Add to that the fact that she’s beautiful.”

  “White looked pretty good.”

  “White didn’t lose her passengers. Take my word for it, Chase.”

  He’d always been right before on such matters. So we added one of her uniform blouses (there were two available), and paused over a dark green platinum etui decorated with flowers and songbirds. It came with a certification that it had been the personal property of Madeleine English. Alex picked it up and opened it. Inside were a pen, a comb, a wallet, a string of artificial pearls, a set of uniform bars, and two pairs of earrings. “This all included?” he asked Windy.

  She nodded. “It had cosmetics in it, too,” she said. “But they were rotting out the interior.”

  They agreed on a price that I thought was high, but it was a nice package, and Alex smiled benignly, the way he did when he wanted you to think he’d paid too much and was already having regrets. He gave it to Windy, and she handed it over to the aide, who showed us that we’d used up our allotment.

  We wandered through displays of furniture and equipment across the back of the room. The captain’s chair, a conference table, display screens, even a vacuum pump. VR gear. But these kinds of items, except the chair, were impersonal and would provoke less interest.

  “You got the pick of the lot,” Windy said. She looked as if she meant it.

  When we left, the Mazha was in the process of examining a wall plaque depicting the ship’s schematic. “How many is he getting?” I asked.

  She cleared her throat. “They didn’t put a limitation on him.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “He’s a head of state.” She allowed herself a smile. “When you take over a government, we’ll do the same for you.”

  We headed finally into an adjoining room, followed by the young man with the case. He wasn’t much more than a kid. Nineteen, at most. While Windy tallied up the bill I asked him where he was from.

  “Kobel Ti,” he said. West coast.

  “Going to school here?”

  “At the university.”

  While we talked, Alex transferred payment. The aide told me how happy he was to have met me, made a self-conscious pass, and handed over the items. I decided it was my night.

  Windy gazed down at the case and asked whether we wanted her to have it sent over to the office. “No,” Alex said, “thanks. We’ll take it with us.”

  I noticed the Mazha leave the exhibition room, surrounded by his people, and pass quickly into the corridor. He looked worried.

  We were starting for the exit when a security guard appeared in midair. A projection. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve received a warning that there may be a bomb in the building. Please evacuate. There is no cause for alarm.”

  Of course not. Why would anyone think there was cause for alarm? Suddenly I was being swept along by Alex. He had me in one arm and the container in the other. Windy, trailing behind us, called out that she was sure there was a mistake somewhere. Who would put a bomb in Proctor Union?

  It became a wild scramble. The exit was through a doorway that would accommodate no more than three people at a time. A few of the less mobile ones went down. Alex told me gallantly to have no fear, and when we stopped to try to help a woman who had fallen, the crowd behind us simply pushed us forward. I don’t know what happened to her.

  “Stay calm,” the projection was saying. Easy enough for him. He was probably in another building.

  The crush in the passageway was a nightmare. People were yelling and screaming. I was literally carried through the front door without my feet touching the ground. We exploded out onto the portico. Alex briefly lost the case, and he risked getting trampled to retrieve it.

  Security officers kept us moving. “Please stay well away from the building,” they were saying. “Keep calm. There’s no immediate danger.”

  Nobody needed persuading. The crowd was scattering in all directions by then.

  The security force directed the flow toward the bridges across the Long Pool. But they’d already jammed up as we came down the stone steps. So they changed tactics and moved the rest of us across the face of the buildings, out past the wings. I noticed Ponzio ahead of me. Windy, to her credit, was one of the last people to come out through the doors. And she barely got clear before Proctor Union shuddered and erupted in a fireball.

  FiVe

  These watches and books and blouses are all that are left of the lives of their owners. It is the reason they are precious, the reason they have meaning. In most cases, we do not know the details of the person whom they served. We do not know what he looked like, or what color his eyes were. But we know he lived as surely as you and I do, that he bled if injured, that he loved the sunlight. One day, in another spot, others may congregate to gaze in awe at my shoes, or the chair in which I will sit this evening. It is why such things matter. They are simultaneously the link that binds the generations, and the absolute proof, if we needed it, that someone lived here before who was very much like ourselves.

  —Garth Urquhart,

  from the dedication of the Steinman Museum

  The warning had come just in time. It helped that everything in the place was flame-resistant, so after the initial blast there was no fire. Nevertheless, it was a bad moment. The blast knocked us all off our feet. Hot debris rained down on us. A big piece of something hissed into the Long Pool, and a statue of Reuben Hammacker, one of Survey’s founding fathers, was decapitated.

  Emergency vehicles arrived within minutes and began picking up the injured. Other units showed up and sprayed water or chemicals on what remained of Proctor Union. A large cloud of steam formed overhead. I heard later that the Mazha was bundled into his skimmer and lifted away within seconds. We didn’t know what kind of condition he was in, but at that point no one was thinking much about him.

  The building was demolished. A smoking ruin. My first thought was that there had to be ten or twenty dead. We staggered around in a kind of daze. Everyone was in shock. I’d twisted a knee at some point during the panic and collected a couple of burns. Nothing major, fortunately, but it hurt. Alex complained that his jacket was torn, something I really needed to hear. He seemed otherwise okay. When I got myself together I went looking for Windy. But the place was boiling with confusion, people wandering around screaming and crying, searching for friends, trying to figure out a way to get home, asking one another what had happened.

  I couldn’t find her, although I found out later she was okay. Knocked down by the blast, but she came away with a few cuts and bruises and a broken ankle. One of the rescue workers corralled me and asked if I was all right and when I told her I was fine she insisted on looking in my eyes and the next thing I knew I was being loaded into a skimmer along with several others, and we were hauled off to a hospital.

  They did an exam and told me everything was superficial, don’t worry, gave me some painkillers, and suggested I have someone come get me.

  Alex had followed the emergency vehicle, and he came to my rescue. While he filled out the forms, I talked on the circuit with a trim, blond, impeccably dressed man who identified himself as an agent from the NIS. Wanted to ask about the explosion. What did I recall?

  “Just the bang,” I said.

  “You didn’t see anyone suspicious?” He was good. He operated in low key, and he seemed sympathetic.

  “No.”

  “Are you okay, Ms. Kolpath?”

  “Just bumps and bruises,” I said.

  “Good. Did you happen to notice whether anyone left early?”

  What the hell. “We were all leaving a bit early.”

  “I mean before the warning.”

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have noticed. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  Alex signed me out of the casualty ward. They insisted on putting me in a wheelchair, an
d helping me get to the pad, where I was loaded into the company skimmer.

  “Assassination attempt?” I asked.

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  “That’s pretty vicious,” I said. “They were prepared to take out all those people just to get him.”

  “Don’t be too harsh on them. The guy needs killing.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “Look at it this way, Chase. It’s a major break for us.”

  I must have stared at him. “Have you lost your mind, Alex?”

  “Think about it a minute. Rainbow now owns the only surviving artifacts from the Polaris. Other than the ship itself.”

  “Well, good for us.”

  We lifted off the rooftop, turned west, and headed for my place. “I’ll take you home. Then, if you want, I’ll get us something to eat.”

  It was late, well after midnight, but I suddenly realized I hadn’t had much dinner, and, in spite of everything, I was hungry. “That sounds good,” I said.

  “Take the next couple of days. Stay off the knee until you’re feeling okay.”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  “You can conduct any business that comes up from your place.”

  “You’re the world’s greatest boss.”

  He smiled. “Kidding.”

  We passed over Lake Accord. I saw a boat down there, lit up, having a party. “All that security,” I said. “I wonder how they got the bomb past the guards.”

  “They didn’t have to. Whoever did it planted it in the storage area. On the lower floor, under the auditorium. The media are saying they came in the back way.”

  “They didn’t have the back sealed off?”

  “Apparently not. They’d blocked off the stairways. You could get into the lower floor, but you couldn’t get up to the auditorium. As it turned out—”

  “—It didn’t occur to anyone somebody might bomb the place?”

  He fought back a yawn. “When’s the last time you heard of anybody bombing a building? With people in it?”