Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

Three of the holograms were views of the river. It looked wide and tranquil. The woman appeared in one of them, standing beside a tree, gazing thoughtfully at the opposite bank.

Two were not recoverable. The other seven had been made in the vicinity of the house, including one with the mother and child standing in an open front door, providing our only real glimpse into the interior. I could make out an armchair and a table with a lamp on it. The girl appeared in each of the seven.

There were two chairs on the porch, and a table supporting a potted plant. Someone had draped a jacket on the back of one of the chairs. A toy wagon had been left out front on the lawn. And we saw the walkway that connected the house with the gate.

We went back to the river and looked more closely at the ring of light on the other side. “Can we get closer?” I asked Belle.

She focused on the ring, then moved rapidly toward it. It expanded, broke into individual lights. The lights looked as if they might be traffic.

“Okay,” said Alex. “Let’s see the girl’s jumpsuit again. Up close.” The child appeared front and center. Laughing. Pulling at the mother. The jumpsuit had a shoulder patch.

I recognized it. The suit and the patch. “It’s from the Seeker.”

“Made especially for kids,” he said. “Probably a souvenir.” He looked up at the sky, but the stars were hidden. “This is Margolia,” he said.

I’d gone to bed thinking how good it would be to get home again, and I was just drifting off to sleep when Alex knocked at the cabin door. I turned on a lamp, grabbed a robe, and told him to come in.

He was holding a cup of coffee. “Sorry to bother you, Chase.”

“It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

“I just thought of something, and I wanted to run it by you.”

There was only one chair in the room, so I sat up on the bed and left it for him. “Go ahead,” I said.

“We’ve been talking about a catastrophe of some kind. That’s the only likely reason they’d have packed all those kids on the Seeker. It was a rescue effort.”

“Sure. Has to be. The colony ran into something. A virus. Famine. Maybe even aliens.”

“You’re thinking small, Chase.”

“Small? Aliens show up and that’s small?”

“We both know the planetary system here is screwed up, right? I mean, we’ve only been able to find three worlds, and one of them is in a lopsided orbit.”

“There’s nothing unusual about that, Alex. There are lopsided systems everywhere.”

“But this is the one where we found the Seeker. That suggests at least the possibility of a connection.”

“Alex, what are we talking about?”

“Put the catastrophe on a planetary scale.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe something came through this system and either plowed into the colony world or ejected it.”

“Or knocked it into the sun. It’s possible. But it seems pretty unlikely.” The chance of a collision was remote. But, if something had come this wayHis eyes looked distant. “I think the odds are pretty good,” he said, “that’s exactly what happened. They arrived and set up on that pleasant world in the holograms. Built a city. Spread out a bit. Nice little places in the country with porches and swings.

They were there long enough for the two ships to get old. The house we saw needed repair. Then they got an event.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Maybe a rogue world passing through. I don’t know. I’m not a planetary scientist.

We should have brought that friend of yours along.”

“Shara.”

“Yeah. Shara. She might have been able to give us a better idea.”

“It would explain everything. If they hadn’t maintained the ships, or they’d simply gotten old-”

“-Neither was reliable. Neither could make it on its own. So they had to cannibalize one to give the other a chance. The plan would have been to send it to get help.

Provided there was time. I mean, Earth was what, a year away? And another year back.”

“The fact that they loaded it up with kids suggests time was short,” I said.

“Or that they thought they’d solved the Seeker ’s problems.”

He took a deep breath. “I’d like to know what actually happened.”

“If they got ejected from the system, we won’t find them.”

“No, I don’t suppose we would.” He tapped his fingertips on the navigation monitor.

“Why don’t we run a test? See if we can confirm that this system was really home to the colony world.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“We look for the moon.”

“The moon?”

“Sure. Margolia had a moon. We have a picture of it.”

“Well, maybe we do. But even so, the moon would probably have gotten booted, too.”

“We don’t know that. In any case, I don’t see that it hurts to look.”

“Okay,” I said. “If it’s still in the system, it shouldn’t be too hard to locate.” We knew what one side of it looked like. There was a lot of debris floating around, but not many spheres.

He went up to the bridge. I padded along behind him in bare feet, and we directed Belle to run through the images again.

The moon was actually visible in three of the holograms. She put them on display one by one. We had only the face of the satellite to work with, but it would be enough. We studied its details, craters here and here. Ridges over there and up toward the pole.

Mountain range thus and so. “Are we ready to do a sweep, Belle?” I asked.

“Say the word.”

We decided the moon would most likely be in a solar orbit and started our search accordingly.

We found four candidates the first day, but eliminated them quickly. Alex became engrossed in the effort. He talked with Belle incessantly, quizzing her about where we were looking, whether we were wasting time on one prospect or another, whether she was still following the search parameters that we’d set out for her.

She started getting irritable. By the beginning of the fourth day, when we were far from the sun and deep in the system with nothing resembling a moon anywhere on the scopes, she lost patience and told us she’d let us know when she had information of interest. “In the meantime,” she added, “we need to be thorough. Even if this doesn’t look like a promising area, we want to eliminate it so we don’t have to come back here later when we start wondering if maybe we missed something.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m annoying the computer,” he told me.

I’d done extended travel with Alex on numerous occasions, and if you’re going on a long cruise, he’s as good to have along as anybody. He can hold up his end of a conversation. He has a sense of humor. He’s reasonably patient. And usually he knows when to be quiet. Nevertheless, when you put two people into a confined space over a long period of time, with no break, things do tend to get fractious. I’ve seen studies that indicate it’s not so much being limited to seeing the same person day after day as it is the confinement within bulkheads. Put two people on a desert island, with sun, wind, and open sea, and you don’t get the same effect at all.

So we made full use of the VR capabilities. We went to the theater, attended a concert, sat on the beach with hordes of other people, took our meals in virtual restaurants, went to sporting events and tried to scream along with the crowd. We played in a chess tournament in India, walked along the coast at Sea Gate, watched Parvis Kuney do his comedy act in the Royale, and wandered through the ancient Louvre.

The problem with all this is that it’s virtual, and as the days pass, you become increasingly aware of that fact. There was nothing constructive to be done. Alex could spend time updating himself on the latest developments in the world of antiquities. I read mysteries. And after a while, it got old.