Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

“-doesn’t drink.”

“Dinner then. My treat.”

“I can’t let you do that.” Still backing away from me.

“It’s okay. It’s something I’d really like to do, Kayla.”

“You have a number?” I gave it to her. “Let me check with him, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay. I hope you can make it.”

“I’m sure we can manage it, Chase. And thank you.”

We met at the same place where Jack and I had eaten the evening before. I brought him along to balance the sides.

Remilon Bentner was a pleasant enough dinner companion, easygoing, plainspoken, a good conversationalist. He and Jack, it turned out, both played a game that had become popular at the station. It was called Governance, and required participants to make political and social-engineering decisions. We have, for example, implants that will stimulate intelligence. No known side effects. Do we make them available to the general public? “I did, and I got some unpleasant surprises,” said Rem. “High IQs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

“In what way?” I asked.

Jack was drinking coffee. “Beyond a certain level, roughly one-eighty, people, young ones especially, tend to become disruptive. Rebellious.”

“But that,” I said, “is because they become restless, right? Their peers are slower, so the brighter ones lose patience.”

“Actually,” said Rem, “they’re simply harder to program. You ever wonder why human intelligence is set where it is?”

“I assume,” I said, “it’s because the dumber apes walked into the tigers.”

“But why not higher?” asked Jack. “When Kasavitch did his Phoenician study at the beginning of the last century, he concluded there was no evidence humans are any smarter now than they were at the dawn of history. Why not?”

“Easy,” said Kayla. “Fifteen thousand years is too short a time for evolutionary effects to take hold. Kasavitch-did I get his name right?-needs to come back in a hundred thousand years and try again. I think he’ll see a difference.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bentner. “There seems to be a ceiling.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The experts think that once you get past one-eighty, you become too much of a social problem. Uncontrollable. Herd-of-cats syndrome. Authority tends to be a bit mindless no matter how you structure the political system. The high-IQ types have a hard time tolerating it.” He grinned. “That puts them at a serious disadvantage. These people get to about seven years old and after that they have to learn everything the hard way. Where a truly superior intelligence should help them, it becomes a handicap. In the old days, the tribe would get sick of it and wouldn’t protect them. So the tigers got them.”

“The same thing,” said Jack, “seems to be true among the Mutes. They have more or less the same range we do. And the same ceiling.” The Mutes were the only known alien race. They were a telepathic species.

“I’d expect,” I said, “that the rules would be different for telepaths.”

Bentner shook his head. “Apparently not. Jack, what did you do? Did you use the implants?”

Jack shook his head. “No. I didn’t think a whole society full of people who thought they knew everything would be a good idea.”

“Smart man. My society became unstable within two generations. I’ve a friend whose state collapsed altogether.”

“Did you know,” said Jack, “that the suicide rate among people with genius-level IQs is almost three times what it is among the general population?”

“We’re dumb for a reason,” I said.

“That’s right.” Bentner grinned. “And thank God for it.” He lifted a glass. “To mediocrity,” he said. “May it flourish.”

A few minutes later, I mentioned as a by-the-way that my hobby was collecting antique cups. That caught nobody’s interest. But I turned to Kayla. “Now that I think of it, you guys had one.”

“One what?”

“An antique cup. Remember? It had that strange writing on it.”

“Not us,” she said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

“Sure,” I said. “I remember it clearly. It was gray, with a green-and-white eagle.

Wings spread.”

She considered it. Pursed her lips. Shook her head. Then surprised me. “Yes. I remember. It was on the mantel.”

“You know,” I said, “I always admired that cup.”

“I hadn’t thought about it in years. But that’s right. We did have one like that.”

“Those were good days, Kayla. I don’t know why that cup sticks in my memory. I tend to associate it with happy times, I guess.”

“That sounds as if you’re having problems.”

“No. Not at all. But that was a more innocent age. You know how it is.”

“Of course.”

She and I were drinking tea, and we each took a sip. “I wonder where it is now,” I said. “The cup. Do you still have it?”

“I don’t know where it is,” she said. “I don’t have it. I haven’t seen it since I was a girl.”

“Maybe Hap has it.”

“Could be.”

“You know,” I said, “when I get home I think I’ll look him up. It would be nice to see him again.”

Her features hardened. “You wouldn’t like him now.”

“Oh?”

“He’s too much like his father.” She shook her head in disapproval. “Well, let it go.”

We talked about her work on the station, and when I saw an opening, I went back to the cup: “You know, I was always intrigued by it. By the cup. Where did it come from originally, Kayla? Do you know?”

“I’ve no idea,” she said.

“Hap never struck me as someone interested in antiques.”

“Oh,” she said, “I doubt it’s an antique. But you’re right about Hap.” A darkness drifted into her eyes. “He wasn’t interested in anything this side of alcohol, drugs, and money. And women.”

She regretted having said that, and I tried to look sympathetic and moved the conversation along. “Somebody probably gave it to him.”

“No. We had it up on the shelf as far back as I can remember. When Hap and I were both kids.” She thought about it. “I suspect he might still have it.”

“You know,” I said, “I seem to recall there were a couple other pieces like it.”

“No, Chase,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Dinner finally arrived. “I’m pretty sure it’s the only one we had. Now that I think of it, I believe Mom told me once that my father gave it to her.”

Alex’s celebrity has spilled over, to a degree, on me. I seem to have not quite enough to draw autograph seekers, but I do get the occasional crank. Next morning, I was standing in a souvenir stall picking up a snack to take back to my room when a small, sharply dressed, middle-aged man with disheveled black hair asked whether I wasn’t Chase Kolpath. The tone was already vaguely hostile. And it took me a moment to realize this was the same guy who’d disrupted Ollie Bolton’s remarks at the Caucus.

Kolchevsky.

I could have denied who I was. I’ve done that in the past, but I didn’t think it would work with this character. So I owned up.

“I thought so,” he said.

I started edging away from him.

“No offense intended, Ms. Kolpath. But you seem like a capable young lady.”

“Thank you,” I said, grabbing a cherry cheesecake more or less at random and pointing my key at the reader to pay for it.

“Please don’t run off. I’d like a moment of your time.” He coughed lightly. “My name is Casmir Kolchevsky. I’m an archeologist.”

“I know who you are,” I said. Kolchevsky, despite his hysterical behavior on that earlier occasion, was not small potatoes. He had done major excavations on Dellaconda, in Baka Ti. It was a civilization that had prospered for almost six hundred years before going into a sharp decline. Today it was nothing more than a handful of villages. The reasons behind its collapse remained very much a subject for debate.