Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

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The audience seemed to take him seriously, though. At least seriously enough to agree or, in some cases, to try to refute the argument. One energetic woman protested vehemently that such a thing could not happen, and the debate wandered into talk about electrons and properties of space curvature and momentum.

The topic was, I thought, appropriately named. I moved down the corridor to the next room.

They were discussing whether one of the human worlds, most probably Toxicon, had sent a mission to co-opt the Polaris, grab the passengers, and put them to work in a secret project. An elderly woman whom everyone called Aunt Eva pointed out that the passengers included two medical researchers, a cosmologist, a science popularizer, a politician, and a psychiatrist. The politician and the cosmologist were retired. What sort of project would require the services of such a diverse group?

The answer came back that the kidnappers only wanted Dunninger and Mendoza. The neurobiologists. Did the audience know they were working on life extension?

Of course it did.

Somebody pointed out that the way to find the culprits was to look for a world whose politicians had stopped ageing.

The most popular explanations inevitably involved aliens. It provided an easy response to all difficulties. If there was a threatening alien presence, and the ship was ready to jump into Armstrong space, why didn’t it do so? Answer: The aliens had a device that prevented it. Why didn’t Maddy send a Code White? Same answer.

What were the aliens up to? There was widespread disagreement. Some thought they wanted a few humans to dissect. Others, that they were measuring human capabilities. That was why they’d selected this particular mission, with its all-star passenger list. That notion led to a whole other line of thought: that the aliens lived unknown among us and might take us at any time. That they looked like humans, but inside one would find a heart of darkness.

Some pursued a culinary argument, that the aliens merely wanted to find out whether we were digestible. Or tasty. Apparently, judging by the fact there’d been no incidents since, we did not suit their palate.

Dr. Abraham Tolliver read a paper arguing that the Polaris was indeed seized by an alien force, that the Confederacy and the Mutes had been aware of the existence of this force since pre-Confederate times, that the long on-again, off-again conflict between humans and Mutes was a hoax. What was actually happening, he said, was that both species recognized the presence of a lethal threat “out there somewhere,” and that the war had been trumped up between two allies to mask an arms race that would provide for the day when the attackers actually came.

The Polaris had its historians as well as its speculators. I wandered into a panel titled “Why Did Maddy Become a Star-Pilot?”

The credit, or the blame, was laid on her father’s shoulders. Maddy was one of six kids for whom the bar was set high, for whom no accomplishment was ever sufficient to merit praise. The father, who had the unlikely given name Arbuckle, was a small-town merchant who was apparently unsatisfied with his own life and consequently sought to taste success through his children, three of whom eventually needed psychiatric help.

One panelist thought Maddy had chosen her field in a failed attempt to satisfy him. (He was reported to have told her, at the graduation ceremony, that she should keep striving, that she could do better.) Another panelist thought she’d done it in order to get as far as possible from him.

Tab Everson was at the convention. He was scheduled to give a presentation, so I went. When he was introduced, he received loud applause for having given proper disposition to the remnants of the Polaris artifacts.

He thanked the audience and explained that he had been aboard the Polaris a couple of years earlier. “They call it the Sheila Clermo now,” he said, “but we all know what’s really inside the Foundation trappings.” He talked about Evergreen, which specializes in adapting crops and vegetation for use in off-world settlements, and in environmental pursuits. He had pictures of the CEO who had bought the ship, of the young Sheila, of the interiors, of the ship itself as it left dock on the day he’d visited. No theories anywhere, just a tour. He was in fact one of the more effective presenters of the evening.

A young woman on a panel titled The Grand Illusion insisted she’d seen Chek Boland less than a year earlier. “It was right here, beneath the statue of Tarien Sim at the White Pool. He was just standing there, gazing across the gardens. Last summer.

Last summer, it was.

“When I tried to talk to him, he turned away. Denied everything. But I’d know him anywhere. He’s older, of course. But it was him.”

Then there was the Black Ship session, with four panelists and a crowded room. The panelists were described by the moderator as various sorts of experts on the Polaris.

Apparently all had published something on the subject, which seemed to be the prerequisite for being recognized as an authority.

Each made a brief statement. In essence, two of them maintained there had been a black ship; the others insisted there had not.

“What’s a black ship?” I whispered to a young man next to me.

The question seemed to startle him. “The conspirators,” he said.

“What conspirators?”

“It’s the ship that took them away. Maddy and the passengers.”

“Oh. Toxicon again?”

“Of course not.” He might have been annoyed because I’d become a distraction to the quarrel that was breaking out in the front of the room.

A man who looked and talked like a lawyer had the floor. “The Trendel Commission,” he was saying, “ruled that out at the time. During the incident, no interstellar was unaccounted for.”

The idea seemed to be that a small private group, with the connivance of one of the persons on board the Polaris, had arrived in the neighborhood and succeeded in gaining entry before anyone realized their purpose. The intention was to demand ransoms for the return of the passengers. Because of their celebrity, the payoff would have been substantial.

The problem with this theory was that no ransom demand had ever been received. But that could be explained, too. The victims were taken aboard the other ship, awaited their chance, and stormed the bridge. In the ensuing melee, the black ship was damaged and was floating through Armstrong space, where it could never be found. An alternate theory was that during the fighting, one or more of the kidnap victims had been killed, thereby making it too risky to return the others. Again, there was a difficulty with both scenarios: No ship had gone missing during the target period.

A woman wearing a gold scarf was trying to shoot down that objection. “All it needed,” she said, “was for somebody to gundeck the data. Damn, why is everyone so blind?”

So the debate went round and round.

At the height of all this, Cazzie Michaels showed up. He came in and sat down beside me, but I didn’t notice he was there until he reached over and tugged on my arm. “Hi, Chase,” he said.

Cazzie was an occasional client. He had a passion for anything that came from the preinterstellar period. Which was to say, terrestrial artifacts. There just aren’t many of those around anymore.

I smiled back and, to my horror, he told me we’d straighten everything out about the black ship, and rose to be recognized. The moderator addressed him by name.

“Frank,” he said, “we have Chase Kolpath with us.” I cringed. “She pilots superluminals, and could probably settle some of these questions.”

“Good.” Frank looked at me and canted his head. Cazzie kept urging me to stand, and there was nothing for it but to comply. “Ah,” he said, “is that true, Chase?

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