Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

It was a little overwrought, but there was no doubting her sincerity. Emily had not been trained as a scientist, so she tended to draw conclusions based on emotional need rather than on evidence. The human race could not be alone because the universe was so big . Because we needed to have someone to compare notes with.

The reality, of course, was that the appearance of life on Earth seemed to require a set of circumstances so unusual and so fortuitous that it might very well have been a unique event. It was quite possible that the human race was the only intelligent species in all those billions of light-years. In the dark of the night, Kim suspected that was precisely the true state of affairs. She would not have admitted it, not even to Solly. She’d been riding point for too many years, trying to engender enthusiasm for Beacon, which was the only Institute project that seemed to have the capacity to get people excited.

Yoshi Amara had left no written work behind, save her doctoral thesis, which dealt with atmospheric thermodynamics. She was still in her early twenties when she joined the Tripley team. Her flight on the Hunter , as far as Kim could determine, was the first time she’d been away from the home world.

She ran some videos of Emily urging the Algonda Chamber of Commerce to get behind a public funding for elderly citizens; conducting a leadership program for managers at All-Purpose Transport; speaking to the class of ‘71 at Mellinda University, saying all the things one usually says to graduates; participating in a symposium on the topic “Where Do We Go from Here?”—which was about population loss and not space exploration—and arguing strenuously for a concerted effort to persuade people to have more children.

She switched over to her Tripley file and watched Kile at the charter meeting of the Foundation, trying to explain why it was essential to pursue the search for celestials. It never seemed to occur to him that they might not exist. He struggled a bit. It was, after all, not an easy argument to nail down. Someone in the audience commented that we all know how humans behave and if there are celestials out there and they operate the way we do, maybe finding them wouldn’t be such a good thing. Let them be, he said.

By midnight she’d concluded that Emily’s companions on the Hunter –Tripley, Amara, and the pilot, Kane—were everything they purported to be. It might be true that all but Kane edged into fanaticism, including Emily, but there was no doubt that, had they succeeded in their attempt to find evidence of other civilizations, had they actually encountered something alive beyond St. Johns, they would have broadcast it to the world.

That meant Sheyel was wrong. Had to be. Yet there was a good chance the shoe from the villa had belonged to Yoshi.

And Gaerhard was hiding something. He’d done what the records indicated was a routine repair job almost three decades ago. And when she mentioned it he knew immediately what she was talking about.

Andra had provided several hundred accounts of the Mount Hope explosion and its aftermath.

Kim studied pictures of the area before and immediately after the explosion. The crater was there, of course, a kilometer and a quarter wide, looking as if someone had dropped a nuke. Trees for vast distances had been scorched and blown down. The valley had been decimated.

There were literally hundreds of pictures of the destruction, buildings wrecked, fires burning, rescue workers pouring in, dazed survivors wandering through the carnage.

Investigators had estimated the yield at several kilotons. But there was no radiation. A government commission had finally labeled the incident “due to cause or causes unknown.”

No record could be found of a vessel that had lost fuel cells, or of improper disposal of spent units. Of course it would not have been in a perpetrator’s interest to get caught, and records were not difficult to falsify.

Authorities pursued independent investigations of both the disappearance of the women, and of the explosion. Neither ever came to anything.

The Mighty Third Memorial Museum was dedicated to the exploits of the Third Fleet during the brief but bloody war with Pacifica. Theory had once held that interstellar war would never happen because of energy consumption limitations, the problems inherent in subduing a planetary-sized hostile population, the impossibility of bringing an opponent’s interstellar force to combat should they wish to avoid it, and the fact that nothing one might steal was worth the effort to carry it off.

All this reasoning broke down because it assumed war was a rational exercise, carried on for rational purposes.

Historically, few leaders have calculated a cost-benefit ratio before plunging into combat. Kings often provoked conflict for the sole purpose of feeding their troops at someone else’s expense. Or to get tens of thousands of malcontents out of the country and pointed somewhere else, as happened during the Crusades, and again on Tigris during the Andrean Wars.

Historians were still arguing over details of the slide sixty years before into the war between Greenway and Pacifica, the only one ever fought between star systems. It was a war that neither side wanted. The critical factor seemed to have been everyone’s conviction that armed conflict was impossible. Both governments therefore had felt free to engage in threats and posturing.

The shooting began when a PacForce destroyer mistook a cruise ship for an intelligence-gathering mission and fired on it, killing 212 passengers and most of the crew. When they refused to apologize—the liner apparently had been off course—the steps to war had followed swiftly one after another.

The conflict eventually raged for eighteen months. There were several major battles. Embargoes were placed on third parties, raids against military targets spilled over and killed tens of thousands, and electronic warfare had constantly shut down power grids and computer systems.

Markis Kane became one of the celebrated names during the war. He began as an escort captain and ended as the commanding officer of a squadron of destroyers. He was decorated half a dozen times. He avenged the worst atrocity of the conflict, the terror attack on Khatalan, which killed sixty thousand people, by destroying the battle cruiser Hammurabi , which had led the assault. His best-known exploit, however, was at Armagon, where his squadron disrupted an attacking line of destroyers. His own vessel, the escort 376 , had been badly damaged and was for a time thought lost. He brought it back full of holes, its guidance systems gone, its weapons blown out, half its crew dead. But it had arrived in home skies with all flags flying.

The exploit had entered story and song. Books had been written, and there were few children on Greenway who had not played at being Markis Kane on the 376 .

The Third Fleet had been Greenway’s principal attack arm. It had won most of the victories, and absorbed most of the casualties. Its commander in chief had risen to the premiership on the strength of his performance, and its veterans still gathered in meeting places around the world.

The Mighty Third Memorial Museum was located on a peaceful hilltop on the western edge of Seabright, where, according to tradition, women and men from Earth had made their first landing on Greenway. The site looked down on a reflecting pool and a carefully cut green lawn and a series of walkways. Landing pads accommodated hundreds of visitors daily.

Kim stepped out of her cab and strolled up a gravel path that wound beneath a clutch of ancient oaks. Two of them were supposed to have been planted by the crew of that first lander, launched by the Constellation . But the descent had been six hundred years ago and the oaks couldn’t be more than half that old. Nevertheless it was a pleasant legend and no one bothered to dispute it.