Jack McDevitt - Firebird

“Did they check with the Mutes?”

“Yes. They said it wasn't one of theirs.” He sat back, looked out at the morning sun. “I think we should do a little traveling, Chase.”

“Tippimaru?”

“No. Remember Tereza Urbanova?”

“Umm. Not exactly.”

“She was the Ops officer at Sanusar.”

“Okay. Yes, of course.”

“Jacob found an interesting posting about her online.”

“Really?”

“Her husband is quoted by a friend as saying she never got over the sighting.”

“Why not?” I asked. It wasn't as if the incident had threatened the station.

“I don't know. But she's still at Sanusar. Retired now.”

We watched every available visual involving Robin that we could find. He gave out awards, addressed community gatherings, presided over graduations. He was an accomplished speaker and invariably won over his audience right from the start because he consistently made them, rather than himself, the center of his remarks. If the audience was composed primarily of teachers and librarians, he inevitably pointed out that it was teachers and librarians who had given us civilization. On one occasion we watched him talk to a crowd of law-enforcement officials, and he observed that it was the police who held civilization together. With engineers and architects, he doted on the sheer joy of living in a modern city, with its combination of convenience and majesty.

He was good.

The Carmichael Club was a group of mathematicians who'd loved him, and apparently had invited him in at every opportunity. They took particular pleasure in jousting with him. They tended to talk about a hidden universe rather than an alternate one. And during the Q amp;A sessions, he was invariably asked the off-the-wall questions that everyone enjoyed. Was entanglement evidence of another level of cosmic law? Had he yet found a bridge for crossing over to another reality? If there was an alternate Chris Robin out there somewhere, was there any chance he was a lawyer?

“But here's something I wanted you to see,” said Alex.

At one of the Carmichael events, a young woman with auburn hair got the floor for a moment. “In all seriousness, Professor Robin,” she said, “you often speak of blue sky science. You're enthusiastic about concepts that may always be beyond our reach. How much effort are you willing to expend, how far are you willing to go, on, say, the shadow universe, before you concede that no proof is possible?”

Robin nodded. “How far am I willing to go? What's my transportation look like?”

Laughter rippled through the audience. “Whatever you like.”

“Okay. Whatever it takes. Put me in the Constellation, and I'll ride to the other side of the Milky Way. If I'm on foot, I'll walk a thousand kilometers, if I have to, to get the result I need.”

Someone in front jumped in: “Why a thousand kilometers?”

“Because I'll be headed south, into better weather, and a thousand kilometers will bring me more or less to the shoreline.” That got more laughter. Then he continued: “I guess what I'm trying to say, Catherine, in my mangled way, is that the chase is never over.”

“So, Alex,” I said, “what did we learn from that?”

“Hold on. Here's something from an address to undergraduates at Que Pakka University. Robin had been telling them how shy he'd been as a graduate student, and how important it was that he'd learned to trust himself, how it was something they all needed to do. “Until you believe in yourself,” he said, “no one else will believe in you. Except maybe your mother. No one else will ever take you seriously.”

A male student, moments later, commented that it was hard to believe that Robin had ever been shy. “You've come a long way, Professor,” he said.

Robin nodded. “A thousand kilometers. And I had to. Or I would never have had the opportunity to speak with you.”

“He likes the reference,” I said. “A thousand kilometers.”

“I found six other times that he used it.”

“Okay. So what do we take from that?”

“All eight occasions occur between 1389 and 1393. I couldn't find any prior to that period.”

“I still don't see-”

“I know. It probably means nothing. But it's worth keeping in mind. It certainly seems to have been in his.”

Alex went on the Kile Ritter Show that evening, where he was his usual charming self while describing his interest in the missing physicist and how he certainly didn't want to suggest that Robin had walked across a bridge into an alternate reality, but of course that was what some people thought. “The problem with a lot of our critics,” he said, “is that their minds are closed. Shut down. Anything that doesn't fit easily into their worldview, they won't even consider as a possibility. Kile, as you know, that's not the way science works.”

Three days later, we held the auction. The books, especially the ones with the more outrageous handwritten comments by Robin, brought in most of the money. That was no surprise. They had the personal touch that most of the other items lacked. It was why a functioning AI, that could have re-created conversations with Robin, would have been worth a small fortune. The Carpathian hat also did well. (Robin had actually owned two. He had apparently been wearing the other one when he went missing. It was just as well, Alex said. A lone Carpathian hat would be more valuable than the total for two of them.)

The auction was held in a center-city hotel. Alex had several of the pictures enhanced, and they were projected onto the walls. One that particularly caught my interest was an idyllic image of Robin and his wife standing arm in arm under a tree. It was early evening, and they were looking out to sea. A sailboat was tacking away toward the setting sun, and it seemed somehow suggestive of what would later happen.

We framed a number of the pictures, and they went, too. Along with certificates guaranteeing exclusive possession.

You can measure success by the level of disappointment among those who don't get what they want. Please notify me, they were saying, if anything else shows up.

When it was over, Alex called me aside. “Audree and I are going to see The Last Rebel over the weekend. I've two extra tickets if you'd like to come.”

“It's an opera, isn't it?”

“It's a ballet.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “But I don't think so. I'm not much for ballet. Especially the prehistoric stuff.”

“Consider it part of the work, Chase. We may come across one of these productions someday. Most of them are lost.”

“I wonder why.”

“You're sure, now? The offer includes dinner.”

Jack McDevitt

Firebird

Despite what people say, Sanusar is not a world lacking in pleasant weather. Just don't be away on the wrong weekend or you might miss it.

— Racine Vales, Memoirs, 10,762 C.E.

We made Sanusar in a day. It's one of only four worlds in the Aurigae system. One of the others is an enormous gas giant, on the verge of igniting. One of the local comedians famously said that if somebody crashed on it, the thing would gain enough mass to start a nuclear reaction, and they'd have a second star.

All four worlds are in wildly irregular orbits, and in fact they cross one another's paths occasionally. There is, however, no concern that any of them will collide with Sanusar. If nothing changes, the big one will swallow it eventually, but the date has been projected so far ahead that the universe itself will be in severe decline when it does. There was apparently a close encounter with a passing star or something a billion years ago, which is believed to have created the present situation.

The result, of course, is that temperatures on Sanusar vary extensively, and there is no permanent settlement in the standard sense. A few ground facilities provide shelter for visitors, who are predominantly people who like an unstable climate, or who just want to get their picture taken here, or be able to say they've been to Sanusar. There are some who come because they feel it provides a religious setting. For others it is a place where they can experience the arbitrariness of a nature that, at home, seems so solid and dependable. You don't get that in the confines of a space habitat, they'll tell you. Even one circling a black hole. You need hills and open water and something alive to provide a sense of the value of your home world. By something alive, they're talking about misshapen arboreal growths. It's the only known world with fully developed vegetation that does not have animal life beyond that of a microscopic variety. It existed at one time, but vanished long ago when the environment was effectively reshaped. Until Sanusar, biologists had held that plants could not exist without an animal population.