Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

When I asked what he was looking for, he laughed and pushed a sheaf of documents away. “The Bremerhaven,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to the Bremerhaven.”

Jacob’s call light began blinking. Transmission for Alex. “Dr. Yashevik, sir. She wants you to call when you have a moment.”

He told Jacob to connect, and moments later Windy appeared. “Thought you’d like to know. They found this at about twenty degrees south latitude.” The light changed and we were in an excavation, during a blizzard, looking at part of a building. A cornerstone, in fact, with symbols we couldn’t read. Except the number. “It says Paul DeRenne School. 55. We have no idea who Paul DeRenne is.”

“What’s the number?” asked Alex. “The year it was built?”

“That’s what they think.”

Fifty-five. “That would have to be the fifty-fifth year from the foundation of the colony,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Has anybody been willing to make a guess how long a year was out there, prior to the event?”

“They think it would have been about ten percent shorter than a standard year.”

“So the school was built about forty-nine years after the landing, terrestrial time.”

“Somewhere in there.”

“Assuming the colony was founded 2690, that would have been about 2739 by the terrestrial calendar.”

“Yes.”

“The thing hit in 2745.”

“Yeah. I wonder if they even knew it was coming when they built the school.”

Alex rubbed his forehead. “Probably not. Would the building have been tenable afterward? After the event?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Windy sighed. “If it was, you wouldn’t want to be there during summer or winter.”

“No,” said Alex. “I guess not.”

“It would have meant a lot of running around,” I said.

“They might not have had much choice,” said Alex. “It’s not as if they could have stayed a few months at the pole, and the rest of the year on the equator. They would have needed bases between. Places to stay. Maybe this became one. Spring City. I can’t imagine they were able to stay very long in any one place.”

“I’m surprised they just didn’t give up,” said Windy. She seemed saddened by the news. I think we’d all hoped the end had come quickly.

Alex smiled. “Six centuries.” He told Jacob to enlarge the cornerstone. “Incredible.” It had begun to get dark outside. Our outside. Rain clouds building. “Anything else?” he asked.

“They found a monument. Maybe the place where the colonists first set foot on the ground. Hard to say for sure. Everything’s so broken up.”

“What’s it look like?”

The lights flickered and we were standing beside pieces of stone that were being painstakingly reassembled into a wall. There were fragments of an inscription that read, when translated, On this site, and -in the name of-, and foot. And a zero.

There’d been another figure in front of the zero, possibly a nine, or an eight. Followed by C.E. “Common Era,” said Windy.

“It’s Earth-related,” said Alex, for my benefit.

“We think,” she continued, “the colonists arrived in January 2690. More or less.

Emil says they wouldn’t be likely to refer to terrestrial dates, in concrete, except for terrestrial-related events. They can only think of one.”

She was back on the circuit again just before we closed up for the day. “Got something else. Emil says he thinks they found the ground terminal for the flights down from orbit. It’s in the southern temperate zone.”

“Jacob,” said Alex, “let’s see the map.”

I didn’t realize we had one. A globe of Margolia appeared. It showed the now-familiar island-continents, rivers, mountain chains. The location of the south polar base was marked and the various sites that the mission had uncovered.

Windy told us where the terminal was, and Jacob duly marked it. “It was located just outside a major city.”

Okay. No surprise there. “Any sign of a lander?”

“No,” she said. “They’ve scanned the area pretty closely. Emil says the jungle probably ate it. Was there a lander on board the Seeker?”

“Yes,” said Alex. “It was there.” He signed off and looked at me, waiting for me to say something.

What did he want from me? “Why are you smiling like that?” I asked. “What’s all this about the lander?”

“Where is it?”

“Dissolved,” I said. “Part of the jungle.”

“How’d they get down from the orbiter?”

“How’d who get down from the orbiter?”

“Whoever released the Bremerhaven from its tethers?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t come down. Maybe they-”

“Right,” he said. “Maybe they boarded the ship.”

“No. The ship wouldn’t function.”

“Then where’s the lander?”

“It’s on the ground somewhere. They’ll find it. It’s buried.”

“There’s another possibility,” he said.

“Which is what?”

“Chase, I want you to do a favor for me.”

I sighed. Loudly. “Okay.”

“I’ve been talking to every historian, librarian, and archivist I can think of.”

“About what?”

“Anything that might help us. I want you to check something out.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been to Earth, right? No? Historic place. It’s about time you paid a visit.”

The home world exercises its siren call over us all. No matter how far we wander, or how long we are gone, it waits patiently. And when we return to it, as we must, it sings to us. We came out of its forests, waded ashore from its seas. It is in our blood, for good or ill.

- Ali Barana,

Go Left at Arcturus, 1411

Earth.

It was an odd feeling, seeing Sol up close. The planet floated in the void, with its big scarred moon, and the continents, their outlines familiar, as though I’d been there before. As if I were coming home.

Harmony, the giant orbiting station, glittered in the night. Harmony was the most recent in a long series of orbiters. It began as a simple terminal and maintenance station a few centuries ago, but they kept adding to it, hotels here and rec areas there and a research facility out back. The original structure was hardly visible anymore, concealed within an array of pods and domes and spheres. There was a long argument raging at the time over whether to upgrade or replace it altogether.

A liner was leaving as I approached. It passed me, outward bound, light radiating off the bridge and through rows of viewports. It was a big ship, though not in the same league with the Seeker, and certainly not as romantic. As it passed me, it fired its main engines and accelerated away until all I could see was a fading star.

I turned the Belle-Marie over to the controllers, and they brought us into a docking area crowded with small vessels. Mostly corporate vehicles. A boarding tube attached itself to the hatch, and I climbed out.

Three hours later I was on the ground, on the original terra firma, asleep in a compartment on a glide train headed west across the North American continent. In the morning I got my first look up close at the Pacific, and caught a commuter flight for the Destiny Islands, the Queen Charlottes in ancient times, about eighty klicks up the coast. I could see traffic moving below, and people on beaches. Flotillas of sailboats dotted the ocean.

The Destinies consist of more than 150 islands in an area still preserved in a predominantly natural state. There were tall trees, morning mists, and eagles on the wing. I’d never seen an eagle, and I understood immediately why it was an appropriate symbol for an interstellar. I looked down on snowcapped mountains, blue lakes, winding streams. Two days later, on the flight out, I’d see a dozen or so gray whales gliding through the quiet waters.