Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“Shouldn’t you have cleared it with me first?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d approve.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Rainbow Enterprises will get a lot of publicity out of it.”

“I understand that, but—”

“What?”

“We have to be concerned about the privacy of our clients. Did you stop to consider that?”

“Sure. I’ve changed all the names.”

“Chase, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“Maybe we should get back to The Grand Collapse . Or did we just have one?”

There was a distinct growl. But he said, “No, we’re fine.”

“Good. I’m working on the Sunset Tuttle one now.”

“All right. Let’s try to concentrate on Garnett Baylee, okay? And do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“If anyone asks, I never knew about any of this.”

I started paging through draft one of The Grand Collapse . And glanced down at the bottom of the screen, where the word count was over three hundred thousand. “This is impossible, Alex,” I said. “We’ll be here for a year trying to go through all this.”

“You don’t have to read everything, Chase. Just scan—”

Unfortunately, Marco Collins was impossible to scan. I had never read him before, but the book just sucked me in. I couldn’t believe I was looking at an early draft. (There were two, plus the book itself, to go through.)

I’ve read the standard histories that most people have, but I’d never seen anything like this one, which was a tour through the general collapse. I was present when the global economy, almost without warning, crashed on Thursday, March 8, 3021. Collins explained how it had happened, and even though I’ve never had any interest in economics, I couldn’t break away from it. I was in the North American Stock Exchange when the sale orders began to arrive. A few days later, I watched angry mobs in Chicago rampage through the downtown area in defiance of a government too weak to respond.

We didn’t get out for lunch. Alex picked up some cookies somewhere, and we got by on those.

I was seated in a living room with a small family in Casper, Wyoming, when the internet went down. Within hours, personal-communication devices began to fail. Suddenly, a group of people who had been connected all their lives to the rest of the world found themselves completely cut off. Angry voices filled the streets. No one had any idea what had caused the problem.

It didn’t go away. A few hours later, the lights went out. The power system failed, and the only way people could talk with each other was to go outside and knock on doors. It was chilling, a life I couldn’t imagine.

Fortunately, the weather was mild. A militia unit showed up to provide security. But within a few days, food deliveries began to fail, and the militia seemed unable to do much to ease the problem. Gradually, they faded from the scene. And the first raiders appeared. For a time, the raiders traveled in trucks and cars, but with the electricity down, they had no way to recharge. Eventually, they switched to horses. They ignored money, which was becoming irrelevant. They stole supplies and killed at will. The town organized its own defense force, but it was running out of food. Another blow came when the water system shut down.

They had to learn the farming and hunting skills earlier generations took for granted. And how to make bullets and shoes. Many of them died in the process. People wandered into Casper on occasion with news of civil war, plague, utter chaos.

It never ended. New generations appeared, adapted, and hung on as best they could.

“Chase, you there?”

“Oh, yes, Alex. Hi.” The windows were dark, and the lights had come on.

“They’re closing. We have to go.”

“Okay.” I took a minute and finished the section. Then I shut down the screen. “Ready when you are.”

It was raining when we went outside. We stood on the portico, out of the downpour. The campus grounds were empty, save for a couple of girls waiting in a lit doorway. Alex looked up at the sky. The storm was not likely to dissipate soon. “You find anything at all?” he asked.

“No. To be honest, I got caught up in the reading.”

“Maybe it would be a good idea to stay with the searches.”

“I know. Dumb.”

He laughed. “I understand. Collins is pretty good, but we don’t have time to go through it all.”

“I can’t imagine living the way those people had to.”

Alex smiled. “We take a lot for granted, Beautiful.”

I found Zorbas’s name in the second draft of The Grand Collapse .

He was born in Giannouli, in a Greece that, like the rest of the world, was coming apart. His parents were wealthy, and when he was ten, they moved to North America in an effort to get away from the general instability. But the Americas were as tumultuous at the time as everybody else. When he was twenty-two, he went back to Giannouli, but the place was in chaos, so he aborted and returned home.

Not much is known about him from that point until, about twenty years later, he has become director of the Prairie House. He first appears in Huntsville as a stranger approaching Abraham Cutler, with a plan to save the Apollo artifacts at a time when the Space Museum, and the entire area, was under siege by desperate mobs.

“Collins describes the attacks by thugs determined to loot the museum. The security people held on, but the area was coming apart. He quotes Mary Castle, a historian living in that period, as saying that Zorbas was determined to save the Apollo artifacts. The Dakotas weren’t especially safe either, but Zorbas was convinced he could protect them. In any case, it was far more stable than Huntsville. Cutler apparently knew him, or in any event trusted him. They put together a working generator and used it to recharge a small fleet of trucks. Then they loaded everything onto the vehicles and took it to Grand Forks, where it was stored in the Prairie House. When conditions deteriorated there, Zorbas moved the artifacts again. Cutler is out of the picture by then.

“Zorbas puts together another truck convoy. And they load it with the artifacts. But where does it go? Collins doesn’t say. He admits that there’s no way to verify that it even happened.”

When we looked at the published version, the section about Zorbas took the action as far as the Prairie House in Grand Forks. But after that, there was no further mention of what happened. We could not find a copy of Lost Cause , the Mary Castle book cited by Collins.

We spent several more days going through the material and were about to give up when I caught something. Usually it’s Alex, but my turn had come. “Shawn Silvana,” I said.

“What about him?”

“Shawn’s a female. And the big thing is that she’s still alive.”

“What else?”

“I was looking at her Coming Home to Aquarius . It’s a history of the early colonial years in space.”

“Why do we care?”

“It’s dedicated to my good friend and mentor Marco Collins .”

“And you think that she might know—”

“—What Collins really believed about the artifacts. Why he deleted the material about Zorbas. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Shawn Silvana had fashioned a long career tracing the development of human worlds from their early outpost stage through the middle years as communities and cultures took hold, and finally evolving to their present state, in which they functioned simultaneously as independent entities and members of the Confederacy. She was based at the North American Historical Center, in Brimbury, 120 kilometers west of Winnipeg.