Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

What we really wanted, of course, was that yes, it had traveled with the Searcher, and that preferably it had belonged to the captain. Ideally, we would also find out that the Searcher was in the record somewhere, that it had accomplished something spectacular, or better yet, gotten wrecked, and, to top everything, its captain would be known to history.

“See to it, Chase. Put Jacob on the job, and find out whatever you can.”

There is an almost mystical attraction for us in the notion of the lost world, of an Atlantis out there somewhere, a place where the routine problems of ordinary life have been banished, where everyone lives in a castle, where there’s a party every night, where every woman is stunning and every man noble and brave.

- Lescue Harkin,

Memory, Myth, and Mind, 1376 The Third Millennium was a long time ago, and the record is notoriously incomplete.

We know who the political leaders were, we know when and how the wars started (if not always why), we know the principal artists, literary movements, religious conflicts.

We know which nation threatened to do what to whom. But we’ve little idea what people’s lives were like, how they spent their time, what they really thought about the world in which they lived. We know of assassinations, but we don’t always know the rationale. Or even whether, when they happened, ordinary citizens mourned or breathed a sigh of relief.

Nine thousand years is a long time. And nobody except a few historians really thinks much about it.

So Jacob went looking for the Searcher. When he found nothing, he started recovering detailed accounts of the more famous interstellars, on the possibility we’d find mention of a similar name. “Maybe we don’t quite have the translation right,” he said. “English was a slippery language.”

So we went through accounts of the Avenger, which had played a prominent role in the first interstellar war between Earth and three of its colonies in the early thirty-third century. And the Lassiter, the first deep-space corsair. And the thirtieth century Karaki, the largest ship of its time, which had hauled a record load of capital goods out to Regulus IV to get that colony started. And the Chao Huang, which had taken a team of doctors to Maracaibo when, against all expectation, human settlers had been stricken by a native plague. (This was at a time when the experts still believed disease germs could only attack creatures evolved in the same biosystem.) There was endless information about the Tokyo, the first interstellar to vanish into the transdimensions. Never heard from again. There were pictures of its captain and first mate, and of various passengers, of the dining area and the engine room. Everything you wanted to know. Except where it went.

And the most famous of all the starships, the Centaurus, which made the first transdimensional flight to Earth’s neighboring star, requiring seven weeks to complete the journey one way. You have to smile at that: Seven weeks to go four light-years.

But there was no mention of a Searcher. Or an Explorer. There was a Voyager. Three of them, in fact. A popular name, obviously. And even a Hunter.

Few physical objects have survived from the Third Millennium. Most of them tend to be either ceramic, like Amy Kolmer’s cup, or plastic. There’s an axiom in our business that the cheapest stuff lasts longest.

I didn’t know anybody who was an expert on the era, so I checked the Registry and picked one at random, an assistant professor at Barcross University. His name was Shepard Marquard. He looked young, but he’d written extensively on the period and been recognized by his peers.

I called and had no problem getting through. Marquard was a good-looking guy, tall and redheaded, more personable than his pictures had led me to expect. “Most of the naval and shipping records from that era are lost,” he told me. “But I’ll see what I can do. I’ll look through what I have and get back to you.”

The following day, I took virtual tours of half a dozen museums and spent a lot of time wandering through third-millennium artifacts. I saw a plastic case that might once have been a container for makeup, an electronic device whose use could only be guessed at, a woman’s pair of high-heeled shoes, a couple of pens, a lamp, a sofa, a sheet of paper in laminated plastic described as a “classified section from a newspaper.” I didn’t know what a newspaper was, and neither did anybody else I was able to talk to. (Marquard told me later that it was information printed on paper and distributed physically across a wide area.) There was a man’s hat with a visor to keep the sun off. And a coin with an eagle on one side. Metal money. United States of America.

In God We Trust. It was dated 2006, and the data display said it was the second-oldest coin in existence.

I wandered through the exhibits, and when I’d seen everything I cared about, I settled into a reading room and opened one of the data files.

The Third Millennium was a turbulent era. Earth was crowded well beyond capacity.

Its inhabitants seemed to be constantly at war with each other, over politics, real estate, or religion. Political systems were generally corrupt and prone to collapse.

There were serious environmental problems left over from the Industrial Age, and the deterioration of the global climate seemed to coincide with political leaders who grew increasingly ruthless. The worst of these was Marko III, known to his American subjects as The Magnificent.

Midway through the twenty-fifth century, while Marko was jailing and killing as his mood dictated, Diane Harriman did her groundbreaking work in the dimensional structure of the space-time continuum, and twenty years later Shi-Ko Han and Edward Cleaver gave us the interstellar drive.

Another four years, and we’d discovered the first habitable world. It’s not surprising to read that a lot of volunteers signed up to head for the frontier.

I was getting ready to go home for the day when Jacob passed a call to me. “Chase,” said a familiar voice. “I think I have what you want.”

It was Marquard. “You’ve identified the Searcher,” I said.

“Yeah.” There was an odd intonation. “May I ask why you wanted to know?”

I told him about the cup. He listened without comment, and when I’d finished, the silence stretched out. “Your turn,” I said finally. “What have you got?”

“A surprise. Could you arrange to come by the school?”

“Can’t you just tell me what you have?”

“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you join me for dinner?”

Subtle as an avalanche. “Dr. Marquard, I really haven’t time to go all the way out to Barcross.” Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it’s a long run.

“Call me Shep. And I guarantee you’ll find it worth your while.”

Barcross is a large diamond-shaped island, probably best known as a summer resort for singles. Years ago I went through a phase during which it was an occasional part of my social calendar. It was part surf, part moonlight, part dream. The kind of place that felt as if the love of your life was in the wings somewhere. I’m a bit more realistic now, but I still felt a touch of regret as I came in low over the ocean and looked down at the empty beaches and the villas beyond. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and lights were beginning to come on.

The island is engineered. It’s arranged with consecutively rising terraces as you move inshore, so that everyone, theoretically, has a view of the sea. It was off-season. A few hardy souls moved along ramps and walkways. Most of the shops and restaurants were closed.

Base population was forty thousand, with an additional forty distributed among surrounding islands. The university served seven thousand students, who came from all over the archipelago and from the mainland. It had a good reputation, especially for the sciences. If you planned to be a physician, it was exactly the right place to start.