Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

Maddy didn’t even have time to get off a Code White. Not a blip. People talk about some sort of alien whatzis, but how the hell could they get through the airlock before she’d sent off an alert?” He tried the drink and looked at me across the top of the glass. “I’ve never been able to come up with any kind of explanation. They were just gone, and we didn’t have any idea, any at all, what had happened to them.”

I watched a couple of people seated against the wall trying to mollify a cranky kid. “Your team took everything out of the Polaris, right?”

“Yes.”

“Everything?”

“Well, we left the fittings.”

“How about clothes? Jewelry? Books? Anything like that get left behind?”

“Yeah. I’m sure we left some stuff. We were looking for things that would have thrown some light on what happened. Look, Chase, it’s been a long time. But we wouldn’t have left anything of consequence.”

Alex told me to take the next day off to compensate for the travel, but I went in anyhow that afternoon. When I got there, he was looking at screens filled with information about Jess Taliaferro.

The onetime director is the subject of three major biographies. He has appeared at least tangentially in dozens of histories of his era. I’d thumbed through much of the material by then. It was not that he was a towering political or scientific figure, or that the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research broke new boundaries during his thirteen-year tenure at its helm. But he seemed to know all the groundbreakers of the era. He was constantly in the company of councillors and presidents, major show business personalities, Galaxy prizewinners, and other newsmakers. But more important from my point of view was that he seemed to be a man of iron principle. He was a champion of humane causes. Take care of the environment.

Arrange things so nobody gets too much power. Make sure we educate, rather than indoctrinate, our kids. Find a way to establish a permanent peace with the Mutes.

He was unstinting in his exertions, and he never backed away from a fight. He supported efforts to reduce government corruption, to achieve stable populations on the worlds of the Confederacy, to reduce the power of the media, to control corporate thieves. He battled developers who were willing to destroy archeological sites and pristine wilderness. He did what he could to protect species in danger of extinction.

He, Boland, and Klassner were close allies in these culture wars. “People never appreciated him,” one biographer observed, “until he closed up his office that last evening, said good night to his staff, and walked away from the world.”

In those days, Survey was located in Union Hall, an old stone building that had once been a courthouse. When Taliaferro was ready to go home, his skimmer routinely picked him up at the rooftop pad. But on that final day, he instructed his AI that he would be dining out and that he’d call for transportation if and when he needed it.

With whom was he planning to eat? “Nobody knows,” said Jacob. “When investigators tried to figure out what had happened, they discovered he’d pretty much cleaned out his bank accounts, except for a modest sum that eventually went to his daughter, Mary. His only child, by the way.”

“What about his wife?”

“He was widowed. She died young. Boating accident. According to friends, he never stopped mourning her. But there was another woman later in his life.”

“Who was that?” asked Alex.

“Ivy Cumming. She was a physician.”

“How much money did he have?”

“Millions.”

That surprised Alex. “Where’d it come from?” he asked.

“It was old money,” I said. “His family’d been wealthy for generations. When its resources came under his control he began using it to support various causes. He seems to have been utterly unselfish.”

I had dinner with a friend, went home, and decided to take a whack at the Taliaferro avatar. I’d seen it briefly at the Polaris convention, of course, when I didn’t even know who he was. Now I had a few questions.

There’s always a problem, of course, with an avatar. It looks like the person it’s representing, but you know it’s really just a projection backed by a data retrieval system. People trust data retrieval systems, though, and the avatars look absolutely real. They’re convincing, so everyone has a tendency to take these things at their word, when in fact all the information is based on the input provided by the subject himself, which is to say, it’s somebody putting his best foot forward. And there might be additions by interested persons with agendas of their own. Consequently, they’re no more reliable than the subject himself might have been. If you’re approaching one of these conversations to learn something rather than to be entertained, you have to bring along a healthy skepticism.

Jess Taliaferro appeared standing on a rocky beach. He was a small man, middle-aged, with fading auburn hair that would not stay down and eyes that seemed a bit too far apart. He had too much stomach and not enough shoulder. When he moved, as he did constantly during our conversation, he was awkward, weaving from side to side in a flatfooted manner. There was much of the camaroo about him, the big southeastern bird that one finds waddling along shorelines looking for stranded sealife. He was quite ordinary in appearance. I would not have thought of him as a driving force. But there you are. You just never know.

“Hello, Ms. Kolpath,” he said. “You were at the convention, I believe.”

“Yes, I was. I enjoyed your presentation.”

“Very kind of you.” He stopped by a stone bench, facing out to sea. It seemed to be the only structure in the area. “May I?” he asked.

“Please,” I said.

He sat down. “It’s lovely here at night.” He was dressed in the antique manner of his era, colorful shirt, wide-open collar, cuffed trousers, a rakish blue hat with a tassel.

“Yes,” I said.

“How may I help you?”

How, indeed? A long wave broke and rolled up the beach. “Dr. Taliaferro, please tell me about yourself. What you care about. What you’re proud of. How you felt on the day the Polaris set out. What you think happened.”

“About myself?” He looked surprised.

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“Most people want to hear about the Polaris. Not about me.”

“You know why.”

“Sure. But it’s as if I never did anything in my life except send those people to Delta Kay.”

He talked about his family, his dreams, his years of service to Survey.

“Did you ever have any indication at all,” I asked, “that there might be somebody else out there, other than the Mutes?”

His eyes slid shut. “No,” he said. “Oh, look, we knew there would be other sentient life somewhere. We’ve always known that. The universe is just too big. It happened twice that we knew about, so we understood that it necessarily existed elsewhere. Once you had that much, once you knew it wasn’t the result of some virtually impossible combination of events, then there had to be others. Had to be.