Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

“Yes, Harry,” said Alex.

“What kind of system is it? What kind of system do you live under?”

“We have a republic. As does Earth. We’re spread out now across more than a hundred worlds. And you’ll be happy to know we live well, we have free institutions, by any reasonable definition. And life is good.”

“That amazes me.”

“You didn’t think we would do well?”

“We weren’t doing well in my time.” He looked out across the lawn. It was getting late in the day, and the sky was gray and cold. “It feels so much like home.”

Something flapped past too quickly to allow a good look. He stared after it. “I just can’t believe I’m actually on another world.”

“We don’t think of it that way.”

“I guess not. Is that a cemetery over there?”

“Yes. It’s just off the property line.”

“It looks old.”

“It was there when I was a boy, growing up here.” Alex smiled. “I was always scared of it.”

“How long have we been here? On Rimway?”

“A long time. More than six thousand years.”

He shook his head. “You’ve been here longer than we’d had civilization on Earth.”

“About the same length of time.” Alex’s gaze was locked on him. “So you didn’t like life in the American Republic?”

“We were looking for a better place.”

“Where’d you get the starships?” I asked.

“The Seeker was bought from Interworld. A salvage dealer. The Bremerhaven was built by the Chinese. It was a famous ship in its time. It was part of the fleet that hauled people and equipment to Utopia.”

“Utopia?” I asked.

Harry sighed. “It was an early effort to colonize. It didn’t go well. Either.” He wandered over to the bookcase and began examining the titles. “I never heard of any of these people,” he said.

Alex waved the comment aside. “Was it your idea to head out to the stars?”

Harry looked tired. “I doubt it was the idea of any single individual.” He seemed to be trying to remember. “It was probably an idea that grew out of the group. I don’t recall any one person coming forward with it. There was a lot of talk about getting away. Could we get a ship? Could we find a place of our own? In the beginning, it was just talk.” He looked overcome with emotion. “A place of our own. It became our mantra.”

“How did you find five thousand people willing to go?”

“Fifty-three hundred is closer to the correct figure. We started with eighty. But the genetics wouldn’t work, so we opened the plan to friends. Others who were tired of the kind of society they lived in.”

“And they joined?” I said.

He laughed. “Not many people, even the bravest, are willing to leave home permanently. But there was a steady stream until finally we had to cut it off.”

“There’d been other settlement attempts. You mentioned Utopia.”

“Yes. By the time we were ready, there was already a history of failure. They’d been at it for a long time when we launched.”

“How’d the government react? Did they make an effort to stop you?”

“They were glad to see us go. We were branded as unpatriotic by unofficial spokesmen, and eventually by the general population. But we were actually given whatever assistance we needed.”

“Who decided which world you’d settle?”

“No one person. We sent out a few of our people, a group of scientists, and some other specialists. They found the place-”

“And were sworn to secrecy.”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t have thought it possible to keep such a secret.”

“Alex,” he said, “we all understood that if anyone compromised the location of the colony world, we would be followed by all the evils and stupidities we were trying to leave behind. Do you know where Margolia is?”

“You know I don’t.”

“It appears we were successful.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “You have any ideas?”

“We could hunt through every system in the Wescott record. But we have no guarantee the Seeker wasn’t somewhere else.”

“Chase, you said they were allotted a specific area of sky for each mission. How big is the area?”

“Big.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Out where the Wescotts were, it probably holds thirty thousand class Gs.”

“Well, at least that narrows it down.” He glanced at Jacob’s control panel. “What about the AI?”

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe we’ve been taking the wrong tack. Instead of trying to find their leased vehicle, maybe we should have been looking for the Survey ship they used.”

“The Falcon.”

“Was that its name?”

“Yes.”

“Would the AI have recorded everything?”

“Yes. But the Wescotts could have deleted whatever they didn’t want known.”

“That’s a pretty serious offense, isn’t it? If they get caught?”

“Yes.”

“You said nobody ever checks the AIs. So why bother changing it?”

“That’s a point,” I said. “But before you get excited, Survey reconditions the things every few years. They come in, clear the system, maybe upgrade it, and reinstall it.”

“Every few years?”

“Yes. The AI the Wescotts had would have been cleared a long time ago.”

He sat quietly and made a few offhand comments about the weather and the cemetery, and on a few business-related matters. I thought the subject had been dropped until he said, abruptly, “Let’s give it a try anyhow.”

“Give what a try?”

“The AI. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Alex, there’s no point.”

“There’s nothing to lose. Let’s get on the circuit and ask. Maybe they download everything into a master file. Who knows?”

He went off for lunch with a client. I called Survey and got one of their avatars.

Elderly man, this time. A bearded eminence. “Yes, young lady,” he said, “how may I be of service?”

I told him what I wanted, that I was looking for details on the Wescott flights during the 1380s and early ’90s. That I hoped that data from the Falcon AI might be available.”

“We have the official logs on file, you know,” he said, as if that solved everything.

“Yes, of course. But we think there might have been an error. We’d like to recover the AI, if that’s possible.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you to hold a moment, please?”

He was gone. Survey is like most other bureaucracies. When they ask you to hold, they pump images of waterfalls and sandy beaches and mountaintops at you, throw in some soft music, and keep you waiting an hour. This was different. I got the waterfall, but they were back within a minute. A human being this time.

“Hi, Chase,” he said. “I’m Aaron Winslow. You wouldn’t remember me but we met at the Polaris event last year.”

“The one that blew up.”

“Yes. What a terrible thing that was. But I was glad to see most of us came through it okay. How can I help you?”

“Aaron, I work for Rainbow.”

“Yes, I know. Alexander Benedict’s company.”

“Right. I was doing some research on the deaths of the Wescotts, back in ’98. I was hoping that the AI from their ship, the Falcon, might have survived.”

“After thirty years? I don’t think so, Chase. They’re absolutely religious about reprogramming them at six-mission intervals.” He was biting his lower lip. “You say they used the Falcon?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” He looked off to one side, probably at a data screen. “Hold on a second.”

“Okay.”

“The Falcon’s before my time. In fact, it was sold off after its last mission with the Wescotts.”