Jack McDevitt: Infinity Beach

“It’s a valid question, Canon,” she said, “but surely anyone intelligent enough to develop interstellar travel would be above shooting up strangers.”

“Hard to say.” He shrugged. “If we guess wrong, we could pay a substantial price.” He looked up at the clear, bright sky. “It’s obvious that Whoever designed the cosmos wanted to put distance between His creatures.”

They pulled on their jackets and walked out onto a terrace. The night was cold.

Seabright was only a few hundred kilometers north of the equator, but Greerrway, despite its name, was not a particularly warm world. The bulk of its population was concentrated in equatorial latitudes.

An array of telescopes had been set up at the north end of the terrace, away from the buildings. A technician stood beside one, talking with a girl. The telescope was pointed toward the southeast, where Alpha Maxim was just one more pinpoint of light.

The girl’s name was Lyra. She was the technician’s daughter, probably ten years old, and could reasonably expect to live two centuries.

“I wonder if she thinks she’ll be able to see the nova,” said Woodbridge.

Kim stepped to one side. “Ask her.”

He did, and Lyra smiled one of those vaguely contemptuous smiles that children use when they think adults are being condescending. “No, Canon,” she said, while her mother looked pleased. “It will not change in my lifetime.”

Nor of her kids, thought Kim. Light was so slow .

Woodbridge turned back to her. “Kim,” he said, “may I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to Emily?”

It was a strange question, coming apparently from nowhere. But maybe not, now that she thought about it. Emily would have wanted to be here tonight. Woodbridge had known her, and he understood that about her. “No,” Kim said. “She got in that taxi and never showed up at the hotel. That’s all I know.” She looked past the telescopes. Lyra’s mother had decided it was too cold to stay out any longer, and she was ushering the child inside. “We never heard a word.”

Woodbridge nodded. “It’s hard to understand how something like that could happen.” They lived in a society in which crime was almost unknown.

“I know. It was hard on the family.” She pulled her collar higher to ward off the night air. “She’d have supported Beacon, but she would have been impatient with it.”

“Why?”

“Takes too long. We’re trying to say hello in a scientific way, but nobody expects a reply for millennia. At best. She’d have wanted results tonight.”

“What about you?”

“What about what?”

“How do you feel about all this? I can’t believe you’re satisfied with Beacon either.”

She looked at the sky. Utterly empty, as far as the eye can see. “Canon,” she said, “I’d like to know the truth. But it isn’t something that drives my life.” I am not my sister.

“I feel much the same way. But I must admit I’d prefer it if we’re alone. Much safer that way.”

Kim nodded. “Why did you ask?” she said. “About my sister?”

“No reason, really. You look so much alike. And you’re both so caught up in the same issue. In there tonight, listening to you, I almost felt she were back.”

Kim called a cab and went up to the roof. While she waited she checked her mail and found a message from Solly: Don’t forget tomorrow.

Solly was one of the Institute’s pilots and a fellow diving enthusiast. They’d made plans several days ago to go down to the wreck of the Caledonian . That would be in the late afternoon, after the transmissions had come in from the Trent , and everyone had celebrated properly, and the media people had gone off to put together their stories.

Kim had visited the wreck before. The Caledonian was a fishing yacht, lying in twenty fathoms, on the seaward side of Capelo Island. She liked the sense of timelessness the sunken ship evoked, the feeling that she was living simultaneously in different eras. The excursion would also provide a break from the long hours and extended effort of the last few weeks.

The cab landed and she climbed in, touched her bracelet to the dex, and told it to take her home. It lifted, arced around toward the east, and accelerated. She heard the blatt of a horn as she left, a final farewell from someone celebrating either the blast or New Year’s. Then she was sailing over forest and parkland. Seabright’s towers in the north glittered with lights. The parks fell away into sandy beach and the cab arced out over the sea.

Greenway was predominantly a water world. Its single continent was Equatoria, and Seabright lay on its eastern coast. At its widest, it was just over seven hundred kilometers across. The globe-spanning ocean had no name.

The cab skimmed low over the water, crossed Bagby Inlet and the hotball courts on Branch Island. It sailed out beyond the channel, passed a couple of yachts, and began its approach to Korbee Island, a two-kilometer-long strip of land so narrow that many of its houses had ocean views front and back.

Kim’s home, like most of the others in the area, was a modest two-story with a wraparound lower deck. It was rounded at the corners to counter the force of the winds that blew almost constantly off the ocean.

The cab descended onto her landing pad, which was located behind the house on a platform elevated over the incoming tide. She climbed down and stood wearily for a moment, listening to the sea. The rest of the island seemed dark and silent except for the Dickensons, who were still celebrating the new year. Out on the beach, she could see a campfire. Kids.

It had been a long day and she was tired and glad to be home. But she suspected her weariness was not a result of the sixteen or so hours that had passed since she’d left home this morning; rather it had risen from her knowledge that she’d come to the end of something important. Beacon had been launched, and the public relations aspect of it would be given over to someone else. She would go back to her regular fund-raising duties. Damned poor career for an astrophysicist. The reality was that she didn’t sparkle at her specialty, but she did have a talent for talking people into giving substantial contributions.

Damn.

She started toward the house and the taxi lifted off. Lights came on. The door opened for her. “ Good evening, Kim, ” said Shepard. “ I see the program went well. ” Shepard was the household AI.

“Yes, it did, Shep. As far as we know, everything’s on schedule.” Like all AIs, Shepard was theoretically not self-aware. Everything was simulation. True artificial intelligence remained beyond the reach of science, and the common wisdom now held that it was impossible. But one was never sure where simulation ended. “Of course we won’t really know for another twelve hours.”

“ You had several calls, ” he said. “ Mostly congratulatory. ” He ticked off a list of names, friends and professional colleagues, and a few relatives.

“And at least one,” she said, “that wasn’t congratulatory?”

“ Well, this one too commended you. But that wasn’t the reason he called. It was from Sheyel Tolliver. ”

Sheyel? That was a name out of the past. Sheyel had been a professor of history at the university during her undergraduate years. He’d been a superb instructor, and he’d taken an interest in her despite the fact that she was a physics major. She was somewhat adrift then. Her parents had died in a flyer accident, the first one recorded in Seabright in five years. It had happened during her second year, and Sheyel had gone out of his way for her, had made himself available when she wanted to talk, had encouraged her, reassured her, and in the end got her to believe in herself. But that was fifteen years ago. “Did he say what he wanted?”