Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

“Maybe. How much does it cost to lease an interstellar?”

“A lot.”

“They did it on a regular basis. But there’s no record they ever stopped anywhere with it. They made a number of flights, according to Delia, but she can’t remember getting off the ship. All she has is the recollection of a station. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“People working for Survey don’t usually disembark.”

“But they weren’t working for Survey. This was after they’d left the organization. Did you know that at the time they quit they only had six years remaining before Wescott would have been eligible for retirement from the program? Why do you think he left early?”

“Well, for one thing, they had a baby daughter. Maybe the Survey lifestyle wasn’t working.”

He thought about it. “You might be right,” he conceded. “But then they start making flights on their own.”

“I know.”

“So where were they going?”

“I have no clue.”

“Might have been a good idea to press Delia a bit more.”

“She was a kid at the time, Alex. I assumed she wasn’t remembering things very well.

That they were sight-seeing tours.”

“Chase, this is more than thirty years ago. It predates the quantum drive. It’s back in the days when it took weeks to go anywhere. Would you travel a couple of weeks in a closed cabin with a six-year-old if you didn’t have to?”

“Actually, having a six-year-old aboard might be fun.”

He plunged ahead as if I hadn’t spoken. “They weren’t away from Survey six months before they were out making more flights. On their own money.”

“Okay. I’ll admit it makes no sense to me. So where does that leave us?”

He looked at a point somewhere back of my left shoulder. “They were doing something other than sight-seeing. I think they found something. On one of the Survey missions. Whatever it was, they wanted to be able to claim it for themselves.

So they kept quiet about it. Left early. And then went back.”

“You’re not suggesting they discovered Margolia?”

“No. But I think they were looking for it. That’s why they made several flights.”

“My God, Alex. That would be the find of the century.”

“Of all time, love. Answer a question for me.”

“If I can.”

“When you’re out with Survey researchers, who determines where the mission goes?”

“As I understood it, the researcher was responsible. If there was more than one, their head guy did it. In either case, they submitted a plan to the operational people. It targeted a given area, laid out objectives, and stipulated any special reasons for the flight, other than general survey. If Ops approved, the mission went forward.”

“Could they change their minds en route? Change the plan?”

“Sure. Sometimes they did. If they saw a more interesting star, they thought nothing of making a side trip.”

“They kept a log, of course.”

“Of course. The researcher turned a copy over to Ops at the end of the mission.”

“Was the log validated in any way?”

“How do you mean?”

“How would Survey know the researcher had actually gone where he said he had?”

Strange question, that. “Well,” I said, “the ship comes back with data from the systems that were visited.”

“But the AI also maintained a record, right?”

“Sure.”

“Did they check the log against the AI?”

“Not that I know of. What reason would they have to do that? I mean, why would they be concerned that someone would lie?”

“I’m just saying if. If somebody found something they didn’t want to make public, didn’t want to report to Survey, Survey would never know. Right?”

“Probably not.”

“Chase, I think they found the Seeker.”

“The space station? But she said it had lights.”

“A child’s memory.”

“I think she’d remember if it had no lights. I think that would be a striking feature.”

“She might have been looking at reflections from their navigation lights.”

“All right. But if they did-and I don’t for a minute believe it-they would also have found Margolia.”

“Not necessarily.”

I was on the sofa, and I felt the air go out of it as I leaned back. “It’s only a cup,” I said. “They could have got it anywhere. It might have been lying around for thousands of years.”

“In somebody’s attic?”

“More or less.”

He tried to smother a laugh, then gave up.

“If they found the Seeker, why didn’t they find Margolia?”

“I don’t know. That’s a question we’d want to answer.”

“Why didn’t they report finding the ship?”

“If they had, Survey would have owned it. And everybody in the Confederacy would have been out there poking around. I’m guessing the Wescotts didn’t want that. And if they discovered it later, on their own, they could claim it for themselves.” He looked excited. “So we proceed on that assumption. First thing is to find the Seeker. Which is going to be in one of the systems they visited.”

“Their last Survey mission,” I said. “How many planetary systems were involved in that last flight? Do we know?”

“Nine.”

“Well, that should make it simple enough. Margolia will be a terrestrial world located in the biozone. Nine systems will take a while to look at, but it can be done.”

“I don’t think it would be that easy.”

“Why not?”

“Because if we’re right, the Wescotts knew where the Seeker was. Yet they apparently had to make a number of flights. No landfall, though, according to Delia.

So they didn’t find the lost colony. Why not?”

“Beats me.”

“It suggests the colony isn’t in the same system as the Seeker.”

“Maybe they found the place and just didn’t let Delia out of the ship.”

“Don’t you think they’d have said something if they’d come across Margolia?

Discovery of the age? There’d be no reason to sit on that. No, I think, for whatever reason, the Seeker and Margolia aren’t located in the same place.”

“That means we’d be hunting through nine planetary systems for a ship?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we can do that, too. But it would take some time.”

“Chase, we can’t even be sure they made the discovery on the last mission. They might have found it earlier and thought it a good idea to do nothing for a while. After all, how would it look if they left Survey prematurely, then a couple years later, or whatever, they make a major discovery in one of the systems they’d recently visited officially?”

That would pile up the numbers. “How many systems did the previous mission visit?”

“Eleven.” He went over to the window. It was a cold, gloomy day. And a storm was approaching. “We have to pin things down a bit. I think what we need to do is talk with the Wescotts.” He folded his hands together and braced his chin on them.

“Jacob?”

“Yes, Alex?”

“Be good enough to get us Adam and Margaret Wescott.” Since they were long dead, he was of course referring to their avatars, which might or might not exist.

Even if no avatar were available, it was possible for a reasonably competent AI to cobble together what the records implied about a given individual and create a personality, within a given margin of error.

For almost three thousand years, people have been constructing their own avatars as “gifts” to posterity. The net is full of them, mostly creations of men and women who’d lived their lives and moved on to the hereafter leaving no other trace of their existence than their natural offspring and whatever they’d installed in cyberspace.

This latter type of avatar was of course notoriously unreliable, because it tended to be a wish-fulfillment ideal. It was usually the embodiment of wit, or virtue, or courage, constructed of qualities its original never approached. I doubt anybody has ever put an avatar into the system without improving it substantially over the original model.