Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

Thick forest green curtains were drawn over the windows. You sank into the carpets.

Quilts were thrown across the sofa and one of the chairs.

“How long has she been missing?” Alex asked.

“We’re not sure. The school was on a semester break. Nobody can recall having seen her for about a week.” He glanced out the window. “Nice place. I understand they have a waiting line if it becomes available.”

“You think she might be coming back?”

“I doubt it.” He tugged at his sleeves. “All right, this is obviously the living room.

Kitchen’s over there, on the other side of the hallway. Washroom through that door.

Two bedrooms and another washroom upstairs. Everything pretty well kept.”

“But only one person living here.”

“She has money,” I said.

“That’s what’s strange. We checked her finances. She’s comfortable but not well-off. This apartment is an extravagance. Unless - ”

“She has accounts under other names,” said Alex.

There were several prints on the walls. An old man deep in thought, a couple of kids standing on a country bridge, a ship gliding past a ringed planet. “It’s a furnished unit. Everything belongs to the owner. She left clothes and some assorted junk. But no jewelry. No ID cards.”

“She knew when she left,” Alex said, “that she wasn’t coming back.”

“Or that that there was a chance she wouldn’t, and she wanted to be ready to run.”

Her bedroom was in the back of the house, overlooking the ocean. It was cozy, dark-paneled walls, matching drapes and carpet. The bed was oversized, with lots of pillows. It was flanked by side tables and reading lamps. A couple of framed pictures stood atop a bureau: Barber laughing and having a good time with a half dozen students; Barber posing with a male friend on the front steps of what was probably a school building.

“Who’s the guy?” I asked.

“Hans Waxman. Teaches math.”

Alex took a close look. “What’s he have to say?”

“He’s worried about her. Says she’s never done anything like this before. Just taken off, I mean. They’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship over the last year.”

“And her students like her, you say?”

“Yeah. They say she was a good teacher. Nobody seems to know anything about her personal life. But they really like her. They couldn’t understand why we were interested in her.”

“Did you tell them?”

“Only that we wanted to talk to her because we thought she might have been a witness to an accident.”

The guest bedroom was a bit smaller, with a view of the chopping block. A chair, a table lamp, a picture of Lavrito Correndo leaping across a stage.

“Anything ring any bells?” Fenn asked.

“Yes,” said Alex. “What’s missing?”

“How do you mean?”

“Your office has pictures of your entire career, from when you first started. At the house, I can walk around and see pictures of your folks, of your wife and kids, of you on the squabble team. Even, if I recall, of me.”

“Oh.”

“She has pictures,” I said, pointing to them.

“Those are from last week. Where’s her past?” Alex held up his hands as though the apartment were empty. “Where was she before she came to Trinity?”

An ornate mirror hung over the sofa. The drapes were pulled back, and sunlight poured in through a series of windows.

“How about you, Chase? See anything?”

“Actually,” I said, “yes. Let’s go back downstairs.” There was a dark blue quilt thrown over one of the chairs. Embroidered in its center was a white star inside a ring.

It had to be handwoven, and it looked as if it had been around a while.

“What is it?” asked Fenn.

“Who do you think owns the quilt? The landlord?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It has a connection with somebody who pilots superluminals.”

Fenn squinted at the quilt. “How do you know?”

“Look at the seal. Here, let me show you.” I killed the picture, and we were back at the country house. I touched my bracelet to the reader. The screen darkened, and my license appeared on it:… That Agnes Chase Kolpath is hereby certified to operate and command superluminal vessels and vehicles, class 3. With all responsibilities and privileges appertaining thereto. Witness therefore this dateSignatures were attached.

“Agnes?” Alex said. “I didn’t know that was your given name.”

“Can we proceed?” I asked.

They both laughed.

The background symbol on the document was, of course, Diapholo’s ring and star. “It’s named for the fourth-millennium hero,” I said. “He sacrificed himself to save his passengers.”

“I know the story,” said Alex. “But I don’t think the design is quite the same.”

“The style has changed over the years.” I returned us to Barber’s living room and adjusted to a better angle on the quilt. “This is pretty close to what it used to look like.”

“When?”

“Sixty years ago. Give or take.”

“So who could the pilot have been? Her grandfather?”

I shrugged. “Anybody’s guess. But the quilt looks like an original. Does it belong to her or the landlord? And you might have noticed Barber looks a lot like Maddy. Maybe they’re related.”

Fenn called again that afternoon. He’d talked with the landlord. The quilt belonged to Barber. He also reported that the Teri Barber who graduated from the University of Warburlee was not the same Teri Barber who’d been teaching the last few years at Trinity.

Superluminal certification records showed no listing for anybody named Barber.

So Alex and I fed her image to Jacob. “See if you can find anyone,” I told him, “who has or had a license who looks enough like her to be a relative.”

“That’s fairly vague,” he complained. “What are the search parameters?”

“Male and female.” I looked at Alex. “You think she might actually have been born in Womble?”

“Probably not. But it’s a place to start.”

“How far back?”

“All the way. The certification design’s been around a while.”

“Anywhere over the last sixty years,” I told Jacob. “Born in, or lived in, Womble. On Korval.”

“Looking,” he said.

“Take your time.”

“Of course this is very nonscientific. It calls for an opinion.”

“I understand.”

And, after a few moments: “Negative search.”

“You don’t need to find a duplicate,” I told him. “Anybody who looks remotely like her would do.”

“There are no persons, male or female, licensed to operate interstellars, who at any time lived in Womble on Korval.”

“Try the same search,” said Alex. “But go planetwide.”

He produced three pilots, two male, one female. I didn’t think any of them looked much like Barber. “It’s the best I can do.”

“Proximity to Womble?” asked Alex.

“Closest one is eight hundred kilometers.”

Detailed information on the families was blocked under the privacy laws.

“Doesn’t matter,” Alex said. “I don’t think Teri Barber exists. Let’s try something else. Same search, substitute Rimway. The Associated States.”

I wondered whether Fenn would institute a search of college yearbooks from, say, 1423 to 1425. “She had to graduate from somewhere.”

“The database would be pretty big,” said Alex. “Anyhow, who says she had to graduate from somewhere?”

“I have a hit,” said Jacob. “A female pilot.”

“Let’s see her, Jacob.”

She looked like Teri Barber. She was wearing a gray uniform and her hair was brown instead of black. But the certificate was dated 1397. Thirty-one years ago.

“She’s a pretty good match,” Alex said. The woman would now be in her midfifties.