Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

Much of the data gathered by the Collier was lost with the general collapse on Castleman’s at the end of the Fifth Millennium. But in the early decades of the last century, investigators uncovered a trove of stored raw data in hard copy from the Array. No one had sorted it out, because much of it had since become available elsewhere.

The disks were marked with the dates they were thought to cover, but even about that there was uncertainty. Not that it mattered.

I sat down in front of a reader, took Belle’s record of our flight to Tinicum, and inserted it. Then I removed the first disk from box #1 and put it in also. “Tarim,” I said, “please activate.”

Status lamps came on.

“Tarim, I’m trying to find Tinicum 2116 in the Collier raw data. I’ve provided you with a spectrographic analysis and images of surrounding star patterns. Please commence search.”

“Working,” he said.

I opened a novel and sat back to wait.

Sometimes you get lucky. Tinicum 2116 had been inspected, and the entry turned up thirty minutes later, on the second disk.

Tarim posted a picture of the star, as seen through the Collier. Beneath were the results of the analysis, spelling out quantities of hydrogen, helium, iron, lithium, and whatnot. And a final line: Planets: 4.

Four.

We knew of three.

The fourth was another terrestrial.

No wonder the orbits hadn’t matched.

Two gas giants. And two terrestrials.

Bingo.

Lochlear called to ask whether I’d like to have dinner with him. Some of the faculty members got together most evenings. I’d stayed in the archives, going over the other disks to see whether there was more on Tinicum. There wasn’t. But I was bored and stiff when the invitation came, so I was more than willing to find something else to do.

He picked me up and escorted me to the faculty dining room, which was in an adjoining building. There were five or six others gathered when we walked in.

Lochlear did the introductions, everybody made room, and I was surprised to discover they’d heard of me. Kolpath? Furrowed brows all around. You were with Benedict when he found Margolia, weren’t you?

I allowed as how that was so.

They wanted to shake my hand. All of them. “Superb piece of work, Chase,” said an energetic young guy who looked as if he lifted barbells when he wasn’t in the classroom. They asked me to pass my congratulations to Alex, and to tell him they were all in his debt. It was a nice moment. A couple of them asked lightheartedly whether Rainbow was taking on help. And they wondered what I was doing at the university.

When I told them it was just basic research, they laughed, and a middle-aged woman with honey-colored hair said she’d keep it quiet, too, if she were out to bag the kind of game I usually went after. They all laughed again. And I sat there feeling like the queen of the walk.

The guy with the muscles wondered if we were positive about what we’d found. Was it really Margolia? “Yes,” I said. “There’s no question.”

They raised their coffee cups in a toast to Rainbow. “The University of the Americas appreciates you, Chase,” said a heavyset man in a red sweater. Galan Something-orother. His specialty was modern theater. I wondered what he thought of Lochlear’s plays.

They didn’t seem to feel any of the disappointment Alex and I had experienced.

Exhilaration was the order of the day. The middle-aged woman excused herself and left, returning a few minutes later with a copy of Christopher Sim’s Man and Olympian. “I was wondering if you’d sign it,” she said.

My connection with the Sim business was a long time ago, and I hesitated. It was a leather-bound edition, gilt edge, black ribbons. Not the sort of book you want casually to mark up. “Please,” she said.

I complied, feeling a bit foolish.

“What’s next?” asked Lochlear.

“Home,” I said.

“I mean, what’s the next project? McCarthy?”

Golis McCarthy was an archeologist who’d returned from a frontier world a century earlier, claiming to have brought back alien artifacts. Not Mute. Something else. He wouldn’t go into details, but during the next three months the artifacts went missing, supposedly weighted and dropped in the ocean by McCarthy. McCarthy and his people-seven of them altogether-refused to comment and, within seven months, all were dead, the victims of assorted accidents. It was a conspiracy theorist’s dream.

“No,” I said, “I think we’re just going to take it easy for a while.”

Lochlear leaned close. “Did you find what you came for?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

He beamed. “I’m glad we were able to help.”

The guy with the muscles, whose name was Albert, told me if we had anything more like Margolia up our sleeves, he’d appreciate an invitation to go along. I told him next time I’d be in touch.

When it was over, and we were on our way back to the library, Lochlear commented that I’d been a big hit. I was sorry Alex hadn’t been there.

I couldn’t resist taking a day to go sight-seeing. I went rafting, tried my hand at a canoe, rode a tour ship through the islands, and allowed Albert to take me to dinner.

There was a glorious late-summer sunset, and I decided that, if I ever found reason to relocate, the Destinies would be high on my list.

Sophocles, Dostoevski, al Imra, Bertolt, are all engaged, first and foremost, in mythmaking. They depict the best, and sometimes the worst, that is in us. They reveal how we wish to think of ourselves, how we would like to be, if only we had the courage.

- Muriel Jean Capaliana,

Introduction to The Complete Benoir, 2216 C.E.

I was becoming famous. Shortly after I entered the home system, the guys in ops told me there was a new sim I’d be interested in seeing. About Margolia. (There were, they said, two or three more in the works. Everybody was rushing to take advantage of the discovery.) Did I want them to relay it to me? It was called Margolia, Farewell.

I pretended to think it over. The truth was I thought, from the way they were talking, it was a dramatization of the flight Alex and I had made. So I put on a casual front and said sure, if they had a minute, they could send it.

To my disappointment, it turned out to be a historical epic about the last days of the colony. In this version it was a rogue planet that brought everything to grief.

A lone scientist arrives in the capital and seeks an audience with Harry Williams. The approach of the newly discovered world, he says, will be catastrophic. There’ll be quakes, tidal waves, volcanoes.

“It’s going to alter our orbit,” he adds.

“Will we survive?”

The scientist is tall, thin, gray, intense. Right out of Central Casting. “Mr. Director, I do not see reason for hope.”

“How long do we have?” asks Williams.

“Fourteen months.” (The writers either didn’t know or didn’t care that the colonists had had at least three years’ warning.) His colleagues react angrily, insisting such a thing could not happen. The world on which they stand is six billion years old. What are the odds that something like this would occur only a few decades after they’d arrived?

When the period of denial passes, there’s an effort to determine whose fault it is.

Williams takes to the airwaves, announces the finding, and accepts responsibility.

“We are working on a solution,” he tells his listeners.

There isn’t time to get help. So they decide to put as many people as they can on both ships and send them back to Earth. The watchword becomes Save the children! Then, catastrophic news from the engineers: Neither the Seeker nor the Bremerhaven is capable of making the long flight home.