Jack McDevitt: Infinity Beach

“ Only that he wishes to speak with you. I don’t think he’s well. ”

“Where is he?”

“ In Tempest. ” Three hundred kilometers away.

She was pleased that he’d remembered her. But she couldn’t imagine why he was contacting her after so many years. “That’s really strange,” she said.

“ He asked that you call him directly when you returned home. ”

She glanced at her link. It was past 1:00 A.M. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

“ Kim, he was quite specific. ”

“It’ll have to wait. I’m sure he didn’t expect me to get him up in the middle of the night.” She went into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee, talked idly with the AI for twenty minutes, and decided to call it a night.

She showered, turned out the lights, and stood at her window looking at the breakers. The section of the sky which held Alpha Maxim had rotated up over the roof where she couldn’t see it. The fire on the beach had apparently been abandoned but had not quite gone out. She watched sparks rising into the night.

“ It is beautiful, ” said Shepard.

Something ached within her, but she couldn’t have said what it was. The tide was out and had not yet turned, so the sea was silent. She could almost have believed the ocean wasn’t there tonight, gone into the dark with Emily.

It was hard, on this special night, to put her sister out of her mind. Their last day together had included a frolic in the surf. They’d had a rubber sea horse from which Kim kept deliberately sliding off. Help, Emily. And the beautiful woman whose image she knew she’d one day inherit had pretended endlessly to be startled anew and would splash to her rescue. That Kim would one day be Emily had made her impossibly happy. There’d been pictures of Emily at seven, and Mom had always shaken her head over them. “Why, isn’t that Kim?” she would say, knowing quite well who was in the picture.

At the end of that afternoon, Emily had told her she was going away for fifteen months. An eternity to a child. Kim had been angry, had refused to speak as they rode home in a taxi.

It was the last time she saw her sister. And there had rarely been a day in all the years since that she had not wished she could get that taxi ride back.

A few months later she’d been leaving for school and her mother had sat her down and told her something had happened, they weren’t sure what, but—

Nobody could find her. Emily was supposed to have come home, and had come back to Greenway ahead of schedule. She’d come down from Sky Harbor into Terminal City and gotten into a cab with another woman to go to their hotel. But she never got there. And nobody knew what had happened.

Someone was walking on the beach. A woman with a dog. Despite the cold. Kim watched until they disappeared around the bend at the shoal and the beach was empty again. “Yes, it is beautiful, Shep,” she said.

She pulled on a fresh pair of pajamas, which were of course connected to Shepard’s systems and capable of producing a wide range of sensations. The curtains rustled in a sudden breeze and she climbed into bed. Shepard turned out the lights. “ Program tonight, Kim? ” he asked.

“Please.”

“ You wish me to choose? ” She usually left it to him. It was more exciting that way.

“Yes.”

“ Goodnight, Kim, ” he said.

Cyrus was apologetic. “ Kim, ” he said, “ the insertion won’t work. That means the programming is useless. ” He looked impossibly handsome in the subdued light of the operations center.

“ Which means you can’t detonate the pay load. ”

“ That’s right. ”

She glanced up at Alpha Maxim on the screens. “ We don’t have time to rewrite the code. ”

He nodded. “ Mission’s blown. ”

“ Maybe not, ” she said. “ We can try to do it by the seat of our pants. ”

“ Kim, we both know that’s not possible. ” His eyes widened. “ I say we concede the effort and make the most of the moment— ”

“ Cyrus— ”

“ I love you, Kim. What do we care whether the star goes up or not? ”

Shepard woke her at seven. Orange juice and toast were waiting. “ You know ” he observed, “ he’s not a responsible commander. ”

“I know,” she said.

“ Do you want me—? ”

The juice was delicious. “Keep the program the way it is,” she said.

“ As you wish, Kim. ” He was laughing at her. “ And you have an incoming call. From Professor Tolliver. ”

At seven o’clock? “Put him through,” she said.

Sheyel Tolliver had aged. The energy seemed to have drained away. His face had grown sallow. His beard, black in the old days, had gone to gray. But he smiled when he saw her. “Kim,” he said, “I apologize for calling you so early. I wanted to get you before you left for work.”

“It’s good to hear from you, Professor. It’s been a long time.”

“Yes, it has.” He sat propped against a couple of cushions in an exquisitely carved chair with dragon’s-claw arms. “I saw you last night. You’re very good.” Kim had been on most of the newscasts. “I should congratulate you, by the way. You’ve done well for yourself.”

She let him see she did not like the job. “It’s not the field I’d have chosen.”

“Yes.” He looked uncomfortable. “One never knows how things will turn out, I suppose. You had planned to be an astronomer, as I recall.”

“An astrophysicist.”

“But you’re quite good behind a lectern. And I thought you’d have made a decent historian.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

His mood darkened, became somber. “I’d like to talk to you about something quite serious, and I want you to hear me out.”

“Why would I not do that?”

“Save the question for a few minutes, Kim. Let me ask you first about the Beacon Project. Have you any influence over it?”

“None whatever,” she said. “I just do their PR.”

He nodded. “Pity.”

“Why is that?”

He thought very carefully about his reply. “I’d like to see it stopped.”

She stared at him. “Why?” There’d been some protest groups who thought triggering stars was immoral, even though no ecosystem was involved. But she couldn’t believe that her tough-minded old teacher could be involved with that crowd.

He rearranged his cushions. “Kim, I don’t think it’s prudent to advertise our presence when we don’t know what’s out there.”

Her respect for him dropped several levels on the spot. That was the kind of sentiment she could accept from someone like Woodbridge, who never thought about the sciences other than as a route to better engineering. But Sheyel was another matter altogether.

“I really think any concerns along those lines are groundless, Professor.”

He pressed an index finger against his jaw. “We have a connection you probably don’t know about, Kim. Yoshi was my great granddaughter.”

“Yoshi—?”

“—Amara.”

Kim caught her breath. Yoshi Amara had been the other woman in Emily’s cab. She’d also been one of her sister’s colleagues on the Hunter , on its last mission.

Both women had returned with the Hunter after another fruitless search for extraterrestrial life, this one cut short by an equipment malfunction. They’d gone down in the elevator to Terminal City, where they were booked at the Royal Palms Hotel. They’d taken the cab and ridden right off the planet.

“You’re right,” Kim said. “I didn’t know.”