Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“No,” he said. “I was ambushed. I understand how it looks, about the bank accounts. But I still don’t think I’d have gone voluntarily.”

I’d dropped by Windy’s apartment shortly after the bombing to see how she was doing. By then she was on her way to recovery. The day after I talked with Taliaferro’s avatar, Alex announced he thought it incumbent on him to pay a visit.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I want to reassure myself she’s okay.”

“She’s fine.”

“I should let her see I’m concerned.”

“We sent her flowers. I stopped by. I can’t see there’s much point. But if you really want to-”

“Civic obligation,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

So we went. She was back at work by then, and the only trace of the injury was a blue cane left in a corner of the office. From her window, had she been so minded, she could have watched construction bots clearing off the last of the debris of what had been Proctor Union.

We’d brought candy, which Alex presented with a flourish. He could be a charmer when he wanted. She was receptive, and you would have thought they were the best of friends. There was no sign of the annoyance I’d seen over our refusal to return the artifacts.

We talked trivia for a few minutes. Windy had gone back to playing squabble, which required good legs. And gradually we worked around to our real reason for coming. Alex segued into it by mentioning that he’d just finished Edward Hunt’s Riptides, a history of the various social movements of the last century. An entire chapter was dedicated to Taliaferro. “Did you know,” he asked innocently, “that he was supposed to be on the Polaris? ”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That’s right. If you look at the pre-op passenger manifest, you’ll see his name.”

“What happened?”

“Some last-minute thing. I don’t know.”

“The last minute-”

“They were loading up and getting ready to leave.”

“And you have no idea at all why he backed out?”

“No. The story was that he got a call, some sort of problem at the office. But I don’t know the source. And you won’t find it recorded anywhere.”

“Were there any problems at Survey at the time? Something so serious that he’d have canceled out?”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing on the logs for that date. There were calls to Skydeck during the departure, but nothing official. It was all just to wish everyone good luck.”

“Maybe it was personal,” I said.

“He told Mendoza it was a call from the office.” She was bored with the subject.

“Of course, it could have been personal. Could have been something they were just relaying. Does it matter?”

“Do we know,” Alex persisted, “whether he returned to the Survey offices that day?”

“The day the Polaris left? I really have no idea, Alex.” She tried to look as if her head was beginning to hurt. “Look,” she said, “we have no record of the call. And it was all a long time ago.”

I asked Jacob what we had on Chek Boland.

Boland’s specialty was the mind-body problem, and his tack had been that we’d always been deceived by the notion of duality, of body and soul, of the mind as an incorporeal entity distinct from the brain. Despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, people still clung to the old notion.

Boland had done the breakthrough work, mapping the brain, showing why its more abstract functions were holographic rather than embedded in a specific location.

Why they were part and parcel of the way a brain was supposed to function.

Boland had been the youngest of Maddy’s passengers. He had dark eyes and looked like one of those guys who spent two or three hours at the gym every day. I watched him in the visual record, watched interviews, presentations at luncheons, watched him accept awards. The Penbrook. The Bennington. The Kamal. He was self-deprecating, easygoing, inclined to give credit to his colleagues. It appeared that everybody liked him.

Despite his accomplishments, he seems to be best known as the onetime mindwipe expert, who worked with law enforcement agencies for thirteen years to correct, as they put it, persons inclined to habitual or violent criminal behavior.

Eventually, he resigned, and later he became an opponent of the technique. I found a record of his addressing a judicial association about a year after he’d terminated his own law enforcement career. “It’s akin to murder,” he said. “We destroy the extant personality and replace it with another, created by the practitioner.

We implant false memories. And no part of the original person survives. None. He is as dead as if we’d dropped him out of an aircraft.”

But he’d spent thirteen years performing the procedure. If that was the way he felt, why did he not resign sooner? “I thought it was useful work,” he said in an interview. “It was satisfying, because I felt I was removing someone’s felonious characteristics and replacing them with inclinations that would make him, and everyone who had to deal with him, happier. I was taking a criminal off the streets and returning a decent, law-abiding citizen. It was painless. We reassured the victim that everything would be fine, and he would be back out in the world again by dinnertime. That was what I told them. Out by dinnertime. And then, God help me, I took their lives.

“I can’t answer the question why I was so slow to accept the reality of what I was doing. If there is a judgment, I hope I’ll be dealt with in a more lenient manner than I have dealt with others. I can only say now that I urge you to consider legislation banning this barbaric practice.”

A day or two after I’d looked through Boland’s background, we took several clients to dinner. When it was over, and they’d left, Alex and I stayed for a nightcap at the Top of the World. We were just finishing when I got a call from Marcia Cable.

“Chase, you told me to get in touch if anything unusual happened about Maddy’s blouse?”

We were sitting looking out over the vast tableau that Andiquar presents at night, the sky teeming with traffic, the two rivers filled with lights, the city aglow. “Yes,” I said, not quite focused yet. “What’s going on?”

“There was a guy just left here who came to look at it. It was the damnedest thing.”

“How do you mean?” I asked. Alex signaled for me to turn up the volume so he could hear.

“He told me he wanted to buy it. Offered a barrel of money. Damned near three times what I paid for it.”

“And-?”

“I’m not sure whether I’d have sold it or not. I’ll be honest, Chase. I was tempted. But after he looked at it he changed his mind.”

Marcia came from money. She’d gone to the best schools, married more money, was a skilled equestrienne, and specialized in taking over failing companies and turning them around. She had red hair, dark eyes, and a low tolerance for opposing opinions.

“He withdrew the offer?” I said.

“Yes. He said it wasn’t quite what he expected and that he’d decided it wouldn’t go well with his collection after all. Or words to that effect. Thanked me for my time, turned around, and left.”

Alex said hello and apologized for breaking in. “Marcia,” he said, “you say he looked at it. Did he handle it?”

“Yes, Alex. He did.”

“Any chance he could have done a switch?”

“No. After what Chase told me, I never took my eyes off him. My husband was there, too.”

“Okay. Good. What was his name?”

She paused, and I heard the bleep of a secretary. “Bake Toomy.”