Jack McDevitt: Firebird

“I understand,” he said, “that you have some personal effects that once belonged to Chris Robin?”

“Yes, we have access to some, Jerry. But they haven't been placed on the market yet.”

“Magnificent,” he said. “What actually do you have?”

I told him. Then asked how it happened that he knew about them.

“I just happened to hear about it.” His tone suggested he'd outmaneuvered us. “Word of something like this gets around. You know what I mean? Can I see what they look like?”

“Not yet, Jerry. The owner wants to keep them under wraps for the time being. But I'm glad to hear you're interested. If you like, we'll notify you as soon as they become available.”

“What's the delay?”

I couldn't very well tell him that Alex was planning some backroom conniving. “They're still clearing the official documents,” I said.

“Damn.” He sounded genuinely disappointed. The odd thing was that Jerry had always been a collector of objects associated with the collapse of the Ilurian Era. That's literally several worlds and sixteen centuries away. He'd done some ancestral research and convinced himself that his forebears were among the thieves chased out during the Rebellion, so he was interested in anything connected with them. We'd been able to get a few modestly priced items for him: a dissembler-which is a weapon since outlawed-that had once belonged to an earlier Jeremy Muldoon, a vase that had been the property of a prostitute associated with one of the rebels, and one or two other objects from the period. But I'd never known him to be interested in other antiquities.

“Did you want these for yourself, Jerry?” I asked. “Or are you acting as someone's agent?”

“Are you kidding, Chase? They would be for me. Absolutely.” Outside, two capers were chasing each other through the snow, waving furry tails. “All right. You will let me know, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“As soon as you have something.”

Three minutes later, there was a second call. It was more of the same.

“Sure,” Alex said. “I leaked the story.”

“Why?”

“Call it a test run.”

“I'm amazed that anybody would care that much about a physicist. Even one who disappeared. I mean, we have pilots who've disappeared, pharmacists, librarians, all kinds of people. So you've dug up responses from a few people who don't have enough to do. What's it prove?”

“Chase,” he said, “you need to stop thinking about Robin as a physicist.”

“Really? What would you suggest?”

“Try 'celebrity.'“

“It's been a pretty well-kept secret.”

“You travel,” he said, in his locked-on imitation of Collier Ibsen, the actor who'd made a career of playing tough guys, “in the wrong circles, sweetheart.”

We got a few more calls from potential customers asking about Chris Robin, and Alex looked quite pleased. “If we play this correctly,” he said as we lifted off in the late afternoon for Sanova and the monthly meeting of the Christopher Robin Society, “we might have a serious winner here.”

“You should consider a career as a sales consultant,” I said. He smiled and pretended to take it as a compliment.

The meeting was being held at the Jubilee Country Club, which, in better times, had been a posh operation designed for people who enjoyed showing off their wealth. But they'd come under new management which, we heard, had lost the personal touch with their customers, the clientele had gone away, and the Jubilee fell into a state of general deterioration. When we walked through the front doors, I got a sense of a lost age, of a place whose time had passed.

The meeting was being held in the main ballroom, with panels assigned to conference rooms. We signed in with a middle-aged woman sitting at a table just inside the door. She produced two badges, and we went inside.

I'm not sure what I expected. A seance, maybe. A team of ghost hunters. Someone who'd encountered stalkers from another universe.

Alex disapproved of my attitude. “They do trade ideas here,” he told me sternly. “Keep in mind this is primarily a social event. But it's also a place where people can talk about wild ideas, whatever they might be, without fear of getting laughed at. I should also mention that the tradition here is that comments made during the evening stay here. Nothing gets recorded. Nothing gets repeated, without permission.”

There were about fifty attendees present when we arrived. Another ten or fifteen drifted in while we wandered around, introducing ourselves and engaging in small talk. Then the president called the meeting to order, made some business announcements, and introduced the keynote speaker, a trim woman with cinnamon-colored hair whom he described as an expert on the subject of disembodied consciousness. The woman thanked us for coming, said she hoped we would find the evening instructive, and expressed her appreciation that there were still open-minded people in the world. “The Latrill branch of the Society,” she said, “sends its warmest wishes.” She expressed regret that modern society had failed to recognize the scientific contributions of Chris Robin simply because they did not fit easily into the common misperceptions of how the universe worked. “It's hard not to wonder what he might have given us,” she said, “had his lifetime not been cut short.”

That got some applause.

She gazed around the room, nodded to a couple of people in back, and smiled. “Some of my colleagues,” she continued, “suspect he was spirited away by the forces of corporate greed. There might be something to that. If his work on dark energy had panned out, it would have delivered a body blow to some of the corporate powers, and I don't need to tell you who they are. Unfortunately, it looks as if dark energy has reached a dead end. I personally doubt there's any truth to this particular conspiracy theory. Though we all love conspiracies, this one is simply too mundane. But until we know for certain, assuming we ever do, the suspicion will always be there.”

She mentioned something called the nanodrive, which would allow us to cross to Andromeda. And she praised Robin's work on colliding universes, and how exciting it would be if we could somehow communicate with these other realities. “Imagine meeting another version of yourself,” she said. “Although I confess that some of my associates tell me that, for some of us, one is quite enough.”

That got some laughs. “I'd love to think,” she continued, “that somewhere, we are all gathered at another Jubilee Country Club. But instead of mourning for Chris Robin, he is standing here with us, our guest of honor, sharing a drink with Harry over there.” Everybody turned toward a tall, white-haired man who smiled. Those who had glasses raised them in his direction, and the rest applauded.

She sat down to more applause and had to rise again when it did not subside. The president thanked her for her illuminating remarks. “If that is so,” he added, “I'd be inclined to wonder whether that happy group could imagine our situation.” He paused, sighed, and announced that the first two panels would start at the top of the hour.

A screen at one of the conference rooms announced that the opening topic would be “The Multiverse.” The room filled up quickly, while the panelists took their places behind a table. I should mention that the attendees all seemed to be professionals of one kind or another. They were articulate, obviously knowledgeable, and enthusiastic.

The panelists talked about how a multiverse was the only way we could rationally explain our own existence, where the requirements for a universe friendly to life were extreme: a gravity constant within narrow limitations, the tendency of water to freeze from the top down, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and a number of other very precise settings. “You have to have a lot of universes, an enormous number of them, in fact,” said the panel moderator, a short bald man who drummed his fingers constantly while talking. “You have to have literally billions before the settings can become right by accident. Unless, of course, you're willing to admit divine intervention.”