Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

The locations of six are known, none of which is in the area of interest. But there were substantially more.”

“But we don’t know where they were located.”

“That is correct.”

Serendipity is only twelve light-years from the place where the dwarf plowed into Delta Kay. Had Delta Kay still been a living star, it would have been at almost a right angle to the plane of the local solar system, bright and yellow in Serendipity’s northern skies.

“Might as well go home,” said Alex.

Belle stepped onto the bridge, blond and beautiful and wearing a workout suit.

Her shirt said

. This one, whose programing was virtually identical to the original’s, enjoyed making personal appearances. She shook her head, signaling that she wished she could help.

It was out there somewhere, a forgotten station where the Polaris passengers had found refuge. But where? A sphere with a diameter of 120 light-years makes a pretty big search area. “Not so fast,” I said. “How did Maddy know it was there? If there is such a place, how’d they happen to find out about it?”

“I have no idea,” said Alex.

And I remembered Nancy White at the outstation, the fact of its existence borne away by the ages. “Given enough time,” she’d said, “it’s what happens to us all.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nancy White. She was especially interested in things that get abandoned.

Worlds, cities, philosophies. Outstations. ”

“She knew of one in this area?”

“I don’t know. She does a show that includes a tour of one of them. Chai Ping, or Pong, or something like that.” I looked at Belle.

“ Checking, ” Belle said. She leaned back against a bulkhead and let her gaze drop to the deck.

Alex wandered over to the viewport and looked down into the darkness. “I can’t imagine,” he said, “that we ever thought they might have come here.”

“Had to look, Alex. It was the only way to be sure.”

Belle lifted her eyes. “I’ve reviewed the show in question. White locates Chai Pong at a point eleven hundred light-years from Delta Karpis.”

Well out of range.

Alex grumbled something I couldn’t make out. The air felt thick and heavy.

“Maybe she found more than one.”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“If so, it might be in her work somewhere. In her commentaries, her essays, her notebooks. Maybe even in another of the shows.”

“Starting a comprehensive review,” said Belle. “This will take a few minutes.”

“Meantime,” said Alex, “there’s no point hanging around here.”

“Let’s sit tight,” I said, “until we know which way we’ll be going.”

Belle brightened and raised a fist in triumph. “It’s in her Daybook,” she said. “In a collection of ideas for essays and programs.”

“What does it say?” asked Alex.

“Are you familiar with Roman Hopkin?”

“No.”

“He’s a longtime friend of White’s. An historian who seems to have spent most of his time doing research for her. Anyhow, he discovered Chai Pong. In 1357.”

The Daybook appeared on-screen:

3/11/1364

Hopkin has found another. How many lost pieces of the Kang are out there? This one, he says, is near Baku Kon, in the dusty embrace, as he put it, of one of the gas giants in the system. (He always tends to overstate things.) He says it’s going down soon. Into the atmosphere. He thinks it’ll happen sometime during the next few centuries. It’s apparently been abandoned for two thousand years. He says it looks as if they cleared out in a hurry, and left everything. Ideal site for reclamation. It’s a microcosm of the Kang culture of the period. He’s going back in a month, and he promised I can go along.

I read it several times.

“Nancy White,” continued Belle, “is the only one of the Polaris passengers to do extensive off-world travel. She has, as you know, a reputation for a cosmic perspective. She is celebrated primarily because - ”

“Skip it, Belle. A Kang platform would have been a major discovery. Why didn’t we hear of it before?”

“Hopkin was dead three months later.”

“Another murder?” I asked.

“It doesn’t seem so. He died trying to rescue a woman who was attempting to commit suicide from a skyway. She climbed over the railing. He tried to stop her, but she apparently put up a fight and took him with her.”

“And Nancy White kept the second Kang discovery quiet,” I said.

“Belle,” said Alex, “where’s Baku Kon?”

A star map flashed onto one of the screens. Here was Delta Karpis. And there, at a range of forty-five light-years, a light blinked on and grew bright. “It would have been easy for them,” Alex said.

Belle caught his eye. “Alex,” she said, “I have a transmission for you. From Jacob.”

“From Jacob? Okay. Let’s see it.”

She put it on-screen:

Alex, I’ve received a message from one Cory Chalaba, who’s with the Evergreen Foundation. I take it you know her. She says the woman in the picture came by to look at the exhibit. She didn’t want to comment further except to ask me to relay the message and to get back to her. I assume you know what it means.”

Teri Barber.

Alex nodded. “She wants to know whether Barber might try to steal the artifact.”

“What are you going to tell her?” I asked.

“It should be safe enough. It’s been in that case for sixty years. Barber will realize that stealing it would only call attention to it. No, that’s not where the danger lies.”

“You’re talking about Baku Kon?”

“Yes, indeed. She’ll assume that we know. That we’ve figured it out.”

“And she’ll be waiting for us when we get there.”

He pushed back in his chair and folded his hands. “Wouldn’t you?”

Baku Kon was a class-B blue-white star, surface temperature twenty-eight thousand degrees Kelvin. The catalog indicated it was relatively young, only 200 million years old. Like Sol, it had nine planets. And, as if it had been designed by a mathematician, the gas giants were the inner- and outermost, and the third, fourth, and fifth.

The inner giant was in a marked elliptical orbit that would literally carry it through the sun’s atmosphere. The Kang weren’t going to put a station there.

Generally, when you were deciding the location of an outstation, you would want to be close enough to the sun to be able to take advantage of the free energy it supplies, but you don’t want to have to put up a ton of shielding to protect yourself from radiation.

“The third one,” I told Alex.

Finding an outstation after it’s been shut down is not an afternoon at the beach.

If it’s not lit up, if it’s not putting out a signal, you’ve no easy way to distinguish it from the thousands of other rocks that are usually orbiting a big world. So we had to start an elimination process. Pull in close to a candidate, look for antennas, dishes, collectors, whatever, cross it off the list, and move on to the next. You could be at it for a while. And we were. Days and nights began to run together.

Life on board settled into a routine. Alex spent a lot of time reading White’s work, hoping to find something that Belle might have missed. “She tells stories here,” he said, “like being with her father on Rimway when she was a girl, and both moons lined up during a total solar eclipse. It happens at sporadic times, sometimes not for thousands of years. But this was 1338, and it was going to happen again just fourteen years later. They talked about where each of them would be when it did, and she said she wanted to be with him, made him promise. But he died two years early, and she describes watching the event alone, or at least watching it without him.” He nodded and took a sip from a coffee cup.