Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

Chai Pong orbited a rocky world in the Karaloma system. The platform, the world, and the system had been all but forgotten. “Given enough time,” White said, “it’s what happens to us all.”

Alex had a combination den and workroom at the back of the house. He’d covered the walls with pictures of the Polaris passengers, all in settings that emphasized their humanitarian contributions. Warren Mendoza looking down a line of injured patients in a surgical hut on Komar during one of its endless guerrilla wars. Chek Boland helping give out coffee and sandwiches at St. Aubrey’s in a poor section of a terrestrial city. Garth Urquhart landing with a relief unit in a famine-stricken village in South Khitai. Nancy White helping rescue workers in flood-ravaged and diseaseridden Bakul, also in South Khitai. A middle-aged Martin Klassner sitting behind a set of drums for the Differentials, a group of scientists with, maybe, musical talent, in one of a series of fund-raising events for survivors of a civil war on Domino. And, of course, there was the celebrated picture of Tom Dunninger, gazing at sunset across the West Chibong Cemetery.

It was supposed to be a day off. I’d gone in to conduct some minor piece of business. Alex, seeing that I was staring at the walls, stopped what he was doing. “It’s common to all of them, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You mean that they were all humanitarians?”

“They were all true believers.”

“I suppose you could put it that way. It strikes me that the people who make the contributions are always true believers.”

“That may be,” he said. “But somewhere in the mix, people need to be pragmatic.” I asked what he was suggesting, but he just shrugged and denied any deep significance. “I do have a surprise for you, though,” he said.

After what we’d been through, I thought I was about to get a bonus or a raise or hazardous duty pay. So it came as something of a disappointment when he handed me a headband. “Jacob,” he said, “show her.”

I was in a dining room, seated, facing the head table. It was a big room, and I saw the logo of the Al Bakur Hotel.

“Never heard of it,” I told Alex.

“It was torn down,” he said. “Forty years ago.”

The attendees numbered about three hundred. There was a constant buzz of conversation, and the clink of silverware and glass, and I smelled lemon and cherries in the air.

A chime sounded and a heavyset middle-aged woman seated at the center of the head table stood and waited for the room to quiet. When she had everyone’s attention, she welcomed the audience, told them how pleased she was to see the turnout, and asked the organization’s secretary to read the minutes of the previous meeting.

Alex leaned in my direction. “We don’t need to see this,” he said. The speaker and the diners accelerated and blurred. He stopped it a couple of times, shook his head, and finally arrived at the place he wanted.

“… featured speaker for the evening,” the heavyset woman was saying, “Professor Warren Mendoza.”

“This is 1355,” said Alex, as applause broke out.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” A relatively young and slim Mendoza rose and took his place behind the lectern. The Polaris was still ten years away. “It’s my pleasure to be here with you this evening. I want to thank Dr. Halverson for the invitation, and you folks for the warm reception.

“I won’t mince words. I want you to know that you have my full support. There is no more important work being done today than the effort to stabilize population.”

“It’s the White Clock Society,” said Alex, keeping his voice low.

Bone white, I thought. And it keeps ticking. It counts the time left before Rimway’s population outruns its resources to the degree that people begin to die in large numbers. Their slogan was on the wall behind Mendoza: WE CAN , OR NATURE WILL .

“Unless we persuade people there is a problem,” Mendoza was saying, “we will never be able to arrange a solution. Despite all our technology, there are hungry children on Earth, disease-ridden adults on Cordelet, economic dislocations on Moresby. Members of the Confederacy, during the past ten years, have suffered literally dozens of insurrections and eight full-blown civil wars. All are traceable, either directly or indirectly, to scarcity of resources. Elsewhere, economies go through their standard cycles, taking wealth from all and impoverishing many. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.”

“Am I hearing this right? This is the guy who’s trying to extend life spans.”

“No,” Alex said. “That’s Dunninger.”

“But Mendoza was helping him.” I looked at Alex. “Wasn’t he?”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

Mendoza talked for twenty-five minutes. He used no notes, and he spoke with passion and conviction. When it was over, he got a standing ovation. I’ve never worried much about overpopulation, but I wanted to join the general cheering. He was good.

Alex shut the program down and picked up a folder. “There’s something else that’s interesting. I’ve been looking into Taliaferro’s career.”

“What have you got?”

He opened the folder. “In 1366, a year after the Polaris, he conceived of, and pushed hard for, the Sunlight Project.”

“Which was what?”

“Accelerated educational opportunities for select graduate students. He made the project work, but in the long term it broke away from Survey and received direct government funding.”

“Why is it significant?”

“It became the Morton College.”

That afternoon, when I had some spare time, I had Jacob post the convention archive again. Alex told me I was consumed by the Polaris. He had room to talk.

I looked through it, thinking that if Bellingham/Kiernan had been there, then Teri Barber might have been present as well. That meant I had to look at everything this time, not just the events I’d attended. Barber was a distinctive woman and would have been easy to spot. But there was no sign of her.

Alex joined me, though, and we spent the day at it. He got interested in the convention itself, and we listened to parts of several presentations.

I remembered my impression that the attendees were people trying to escape the routine of life, to add a bit of romance, to reach out and touch a less predictable kind of world. I saw the guy who thought everyone from the Polaris was alive and well and hidden in the woods somewhere. And the woman who’d claimed to have seen Chek Boland by the White Pool.

And the avatar of Jess Taliaferro.

I’d seen it at the convention and spoken privately with it later. But I froze the image and looked at it again, at the auburn hair turning prematurely gray. At the awkward middle-aged body. At the slightly puffy features. “Alex,” I said, “who is that?”

Alex chewed his upper lip and jabbed an index finger at the image. “Damn,” he said, “it’s Marcus Kiernan.” He tried to remember the alias. “Joshua Bellingham.”

Fenn called. “Alex, we don’t have a DNA record for Teri Barber.”

Alex frowned. “I thought everybody local was on record.”

“Well, all the law-abiding types. We got a sample from her apartment, but there’s nothing to match it to. And that’s not all. There’s nothing on Agnes either.”

Someone caught his attention. He nodded and looked at us. “Be right back.”

“Well,” said Alex, “now it’s beginning to make a little sense.”

“What makes sense? You got this figured out?”

“Not entirely.” He lowered his voice. “But it’s a darker business than we thought.”

Fenn reappeared. “We also ran an archival search on Crisp,” he said. “The results are just in.”