Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“Where is he now?”

“Ux died quite a few years ago, Tiel.”

Down the long corridor, I could hear voices as the playing room emptied out. “What happened to him?” He was middle-aged, and he looked healthy enough.

Hollander pressed his palms together. “He drowned. I guess it was only a year or so after the picture was taken.” His eyes grew thoughtful. “Queer business. He walked out onto a beach near his home one day in midsummer. A couple of families were there on an outing. He went past then without saying a word and simply walked into the sea.”

He turned slowly in my direction, but his eyes were unfocused. “Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “He was here for about two years before they went to Belarius. When he came back, he was different .”

“Belarius? Was that the second attempt?”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess both expeditions more or less blew up. The official word was that there were hostile conditions. Ux never mentioned it and, to my knowledge, no one around here pressed him about it. But something happened. At one point, there was talk that he’d brought something back.”

“How did he change?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It’s hard to put your finger on. For one thing, his game improved. No, don’t look at me like that: I mean really improved. He threw himself into his chess. Played like a man possessed. He opened up, and abandoned his old precise positional play for a ferocious combinative style. Listen, Tiel, chess players can change their approach to the game, but I never saw anything like this . It was like he was a different person.” He got up slowly and shut down the computer. “Furthermore, during that latter stage, he was the strongest player we had.

“That wasn’t the only thing. He became withdrawn, didn’t talk much to anyone. That kind of condition has to become pretty severe before you notice it in a chess club.”

We retraced our steps to the playing room. “Did he have a family? Anyone I might talk to?”

“No,” said Hollander. “None that I know of. But I can give you a list of people who knew him. Everyone liked him.”

“Who was with him on Belarius?”

He shook his head. “Nobody here. They still have some people at Survey who made the second flight. They’ll remember him.”

That seemed strange: we were on Survey’s grounds. “You mean there are no employees in Survey’s chess club?”

“They just lend us the space, Tiel.”

“Is it a coincidence,” I asked, “that Uxbridge’s name is the same as the bay’s? The one at the far end of the island?”

“That’s the only bay we’ve got. No: it’s no coincidence. He lived out there. At the point.”

“Jon,” I said, “I was there yesterday, and I didn’t see any houses. Not in the area of the bay, anyhow.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s in the bay now. Shortly after Ux died, somebody took a laser to the projector at the Point, and let the sea in. Pity: it was a fine house.”

My scalp began to prickle. “That sounds as if you’ve been inside it.”

“A few times. He used to invite one or another of us out sometimes to play a few games.” His eyes closed, and a rueful smile appeared. “He had a kind of trophy room at the back of the house, filled with plaques and artifacts and whatnot. There were two leather chairs he’d brought from Rimway. Tiel, they were probably the only leather chairs on Fishbowl! Those were fine evenings. And good chess.”

“Jon, was this before he went to Belarius?”

“Oh, yes.” He nodded. “I don’t think anybody ever went out to the house after he came back. The invitations stopped. At least mine did. Although, now that I think of it, he came to my place now and then. He just didn’t reciprocate any more.” He’d turned away and was looking out through the glass. Fishbowl’s rings illuminated the sky over the Admin Building.

“The destruction of the seawall,” he continued, “created some commotion, because people thought maybe we had a loony running around who was planning to sink the island. For a while they posted guards at all the projector stations, but nothing more ever happened, and I guess they finally decided it was just some kids. Now, the projectors are pretty well shielded.”

“They never made repairs at the Point?”

He shrugged. “Draining the new bay and reestablishing the screen would have been expensive, so we didn’t bother. No one ever stepped forward to take a proprietary interest. There’ve been proposals to go in and reclaim the land, but there’s really no reason to. So we named the bay after him instead.”

I showed him the holo of the Cordelet . “Is this what we’re talking about?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. The house is down there somewhere. Right about in the middle, I’d think.”

I wondered if it had ever occurred to anyone that somebody had specifically wanted to destroy Uxbridge’s home.

In the morning, I rented a skimmer. But instead of turning south and running down the coastline, I procrastinated, hovering aimlessly over Pellinor for an hour, and then drifting out to sea. I kept low, just above the waves, until my clothes were drenched with spray. Behind me, the land vanished into a hole in the ocean, bracketed by the cluster of brown hills to the south, and the upper levels of Pellinor’s wide ramps.

I settled into the water. Gideon was hidden behind thick white clouds. The white rim of Heli was just pushing out of the sea, and the color of the sky was changing while I watched.

I’m not sure how long I sat out there, listening to the water lap against the sideboards, thinking about the mad portraits and Reuben Uxbridge’s walk into the sea. If Hollander was correct, Uxbridge had undergone a basic personality change. As, to a lesser extent, Durell had.

I was no longer sure I wanted to know the truth, but I did not wish to be driven at some future date to return to Fishbowl because I couldn’t sleep well. What had begun as an innocent nostalgic excursion had become something radically different.

I buckled myself in, left the shields down so I could feel the rush of air, and started back. Only the drifting quill, their fibrilla dangling into the waves, broke the monotony of sea and sky. An ocean with a single shore gets little traffic.

Just off the Point, a school of large marine animals were sunning themselves. There must have been a hundred or more, huge creatures, of the stature of Rimway’s behemoth, or Earth’s sperm whale. They moved slowly, and their great dark eyes rolled curiously skyward to watch me pass. The articulation of fin and jaw was not so fine or detailed as I was accustomed to, but Fishbowl is a young world.

Abruptly, the sea fell away, and I was over the rills and valleys of the island. Then they too gave way, though not with the same breathtaking suddenness, to the burnished surface of Uxbridge Bay.

The mood of my first visit was gone: the sense of a place out of time, of a world with psychic links to an earlier age, had evaporated. And in its stead, despite the twin morning suns, I sensed only madness and despair.

I drifted over the waters of the bay, slowed to a few klicks, and locked in the pilot. Out near the Point, beyond the arc of hills, lay the sandy beach across which Uxbridge had strolled to his death.

The bay was almost perfectly circular. This was a feature not apparent in the Cordelet , where the harbor mouth appears quite distant, and the far shore rather near, suggesting a more elongated shape. Close in, the bottom was littered with rocks. But it was relatively clear, despite rippling shadows cast by currents, and clumps of undulating sea anima. A line of rocks lay close to the place where I’d stood my first day surveying the scene. Paralleling the coastline for a considerable distance, they were either a collapsed breakwater or the remains of a wall.