Polaris

TWELVE

Alex had some questions to ask Hans Waxman, the math teacher. But Waxman didn’t know us and would probably be reluctant to talk to strangers about his girlfriend. So we looked for a better way.

Waxman ate breakfast most mornings at a quiet little place called Sally’s, just off the northern perimeter of the Trinity University campus. Several days after we’d toured Teri Barber’s apartment, I arranged to be waiting for him.

I’d selected a table near the front window. Alex waited in a park across the street, relaxing on a bench, trying to look inconspicuous. I wanted Waxman to be able to see the passing traffic, so I put my hat on the chair that had its back to the window.

I set my reader on the table and brought up The Mathematical Dodge. It’s a collection of puzzles and logic problems, and I made sure I angled it so he could see the title as he came in the door.

He arrived at his usual time, looking thoughtful and distracted, his mind presumably on that morning’s classes. He was, as they say in the girls’ locker, a juicy piece-tall, blond, nice jaw. Looked even more congenial in person than he had in the picture. We made eye contact and I smiled and that was all it took.

He came over, shuffled his feet a bit, and said hello. “I see you enjoy doing puzzles,” he added.

“Just a hobby.” My. He was attractive. In an innocent sort of way. The kind of guy you don’t see around much anymore.

I’d ordered a fruit plate with hot chocolate. The chocolate arrived while he was considering how to pursue the gambit. I decided to save him the trouble and held out a hand. “Jenny,” I said.

The smile widened. It was a shy grin, made all the more appealing in a guy who should have been able to get anybody he wanted. “Nice to meet you, Jenny. My name’s Hans. May I join you?”

The truth is I started regretting the lie before I delivered it. Alex had instructed me to avoid using my name, but I was thinking, yes, he was a bit young for me, but what the hell. Now, with the deception, he was forever off-limits. “Sure,” I said.

He picked one of the remaining chairs, with the window view that I wanted him to have, and sat down. “Are you a teacher, Hans?” I asked.

“Yes. Math. How did you know?”

I nodded toward the book. “Most people would take no notice.”

“Oh.” The smile widened. “Am I that obvious?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. But we’re close to the school, and you look as if you belong-” I stopped, canted my head, and let him see I was impressed. “I don’t think I’m getting this right.”

“It’s okay, Jenny. Thank you. In fact, I have a class in forty-five minutes.” He ordered eggs and toast, and I asked where he was from. He started talking about faroff places. My fruit dish showed up, and things went swimmingly. He wondered what I did for a living.

I admitted to being a financial advisor finishing a vacation on Trinity. “From Wespac,” I said. Wespac was safely in the middle of the continent. “Going home tomorrow.”

His face dropped. He looked genuinely distressed, and I have to confess I was charmed. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “It would have been nice to be able to get together again. Assuming you’d have been willing.” He picked up the menu but didn’t look at it. “Are you by any chance free this evening? I’d love to take you to dinner.”

I hesitated.

“There are some excellent restaurants on the island. But you know that.”

“Yes. I do. And I wish I could, Hans. But I’m committed.” Sweet temptation. I would have enjoyed doing it and letting the rest of the evening play out as it would. It wasn’t a reaction I usually had with strangers, even handsome ones. I was thinking, though, that it would be a way to get back at Barber. Take her guy and show him the time of his life. But that would have been an indecent way to treat Hans.

“What’s funny, Jenny?”

“Nothing, really,” I said. “I always meet the good-looking guy as I’m headed out of town.” I let him see I wasn’t entirely joking.

I steered the conversation back to teaching, to his passion for mathematics, to his frustration that his students rarely recognized the elegance of equations. “It’s as if they have a blind spot,” he said.

“How long have you been at Trinity, Hans?” I asked.

“Six years. Ten if you count my time as a student.”

“I have a friend who teaches here. In the literature department.”

That got his attention. “Really? Who?”

“Her name’s Teri.”

He smiled. “I know her,” he said. Noncommittal.

“I’d expected to surprise her, but she seems to have gone off somewhere.”

His eggs came. He tried one, commented how good it was, and bit into the toast.

“She left the island. I don’t know where she is.”

“You mean, since the accident?”

“You know about that?”

“I know a skimmer went into the ocean. The police were looking for her. They think she saw it happen.” I paused. “I hope she’s okay.”

“So do I. I don’t know the details. But I think the police believe she was responsible for it.”

“I heard the same thing. But I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Neither do I.” He shrugged it off.

Sally’s was automated. Our bot showed up and refilled my hot chocolate.

“Hans,” I said, “I got the impression last time I talked to her, a few days before the accident, that something was on her mind.”

His gaze met mine. Steady. Worried. “Me too. She’s been down a bit lately.

Depressed.”

“It was unlike her in the old days. She was always upbeat.”

“I know.”

“Any idea what it might be about?”

“No. She wouldn’t tell me anything. Denied anything was wrong.”

“Yeah. That’s what she told me, too. I wonder what happened?” I was trying to be casual, yet sound concerned. Not easy for somebody whose acting skills are pure wood.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“How long has she been like that?”

He thought about it. “A few weeks.” He made a guttural sound. “I hope she’s okay.”

I wanted to bring the Polaris into the conversation, but couldn’t think of an indirect way to do it. So I just blurted it out: “She used to be fascinated by the Polaris. ”

“The ghost ship, you mean?” he asked. “I didn’t know. She never mentioned it.”

I wasn’t quite finished with my meal, but I moved the plate off to one side. That was a signal to Alex, who was armed with a projector.

“It was a strange business,” I said. I went on for a minute or two in that vein, recounting the many times I’d heard Teri wonder aloud what had happened to the people on the mission. Meantime, Marcus Kiernan’s simulacrum, projected by Alex, came strolling along the sidewalk. In full view of Hans. Of course, there was no way for Hans to know it wasn’t actually Kiernan himself out there. The simulacrum stopped just outside the door to study the menu.

Hans was pointed directly toward the window. Couldn’t have missed him. But he gave no sign of recognition. He simply went on quietly eating his breakfast. He did not know, and had never seen, Marcus Kiernan.

After Hans left for his classes, I strolled outside and went across the street into the park.

Alex was waiting. He’d heard the conversation on my link. I detailed my impressions for him while he sat casually, watching a couple of toddlers riding swings under their mother’s supervision. It seemed to me we hadn’t learned anything helpful.

Other than that he didn’t know Kiernan.

“I’m not so sure,” he said.

“In what way? What else do we know now that we didn’t know before?”

“He said the change in her mood began a few weeks ago. That puts it about the time Survey announced it would auction the artifacts.”

That night I was at home reading a mystery when Alex called. “I found something in the archives,” he said.

He sent it over and stayed on the circuit while I dimmed the lights, put on my headband, and looked at it.

We were inside a paneled room. Book-lined walls. Bokkarian artwork. Flowers.

Old-fashioned furniture. Lots of people milling around, shaking hands, embracing. I saw Dunninger. And Urquhart. “Where are we?” I asked.

“University of Carmindel, the evening before the Polaris flight.”

“Oh.” I spotted Nancy White in a corner of the room. And Mendoza. And there was Maddy, striding among the giants like a goddess.

“They held a celebration for everyone associated with the Polaris the night before they left.”

Mendoza was talking with two women. “The younger one,” said Alex, “is his daughter.”

Jess Taliaferro was engaged in an animated conversation with a man whose dimensions dwarfed him. A Tupelo. Connections somewhere with a low-gravity world. Taliaferro himself was smiling, nodding, looking earnest. Obviously feeling good. He was well turned out for the occasion: blue karym jacket, white neckpiece, gold buttons and links.

“Martin Klassner’s over by the table.”

Klassner sat beside a middle-aged woman and a little girl. The little girl was playing with a toy skimmer. Zooming it around and landing it on Klassner’s arm. He seemed to be enjoying the attention.

“He was pretty sick,” Alex said. “I’m not sure what it was.”

“Bentwood’s,” I told him. It was ironic that Klassner would be traveling with two of the great neurological research people of the age, but no one could do anything for him. Bentwood’s, of course, is beaten now. You go down to the clinic, and they give you a pill. But then“The woman is Tess, his wife. And the little girl is a grandchild.” Tess looked worried.

Chek Boland stood in a small mixed group near a window. “The caption indicates those are all people from the literature department. One of them, the one in the white gown, is Jaila Horn. A major essayist in her time.”

“I never heard of her.”

“It says she’s pretty much forgotten today. Only read by scholars. She was planning to write about the collision. About Delta Kay. She saw lots of analogies between what was going to happen to the star and what institutional authority does to individual freedom. Or something like that.”

“She didn’t go?”

“She was on the Sentinel. ”

Nancy White had been cornered by a group of young people who, I suspected, were graduate students. White had managed several careers. One of them consisted of doing shorthand biographies of the great scientists. But her most famous work was Out of the Trees, an attempt to reconstruct the early progress of knowledge.

Where was the first evidence that we’d begun to believe that the universe worked according to a system of laws? Who had first realized that the cosmos was not eternal? Why did people instinctively resist the notion? How had scientists first come to understand the implications of the quantum world? Who had first understood the nature of time?

Well, I didn’t understand the nature of time. And neither did anybody I could think of.

Occasionally I was able to make out a comment. “Wish I were going with you.”

“Is there any danger?” “Not going to happen again within traveling range probably, for a hundred thousand years.”

“Is there a point to all this?” I asked. It felt like a rerun of the other farewell, on Skydeck.

“Let me fast-forward.”

He rippled through, and the celebrants raced around the room at a ferocious rate, gulping down drinks and raiding the snack table. Then he returned to normal, and they were saying good-bye, moving toward the doors. Final shaking of hands. Tell your brother I said hello.

White extricated herself from her attending party and circled the room, nodding, accepting embraces. “Is that her husband at her side?” I asked.

“The big one?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “They’ve been married nineteen years. His name’s Karl.”

Dunninger and Mendoza carried small crowds with them as they passed out of the room. Maddy English waited near the bar, talking earnestly with a red-haired olive-skinned man. “Sy Juano,” Alex said. “He’s a financial manager, it says here.” It seemed as if she smiled past him, her thoughts concentrated elsewhere. The conversation seemed to be ending. Juano was nodding yes, then he leaned over and kissed her. She looked a bit reluctant.

The picture went off, and the AI brought the lights up. “Well, that was interesting,” I said.

Alex looked at me as if I were the slow kid in the classroom. “You didn’t notice?”

“Notice what?”

“Teri Barber.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I thought you’d pick her out right away.”

“Teri Barber was there?”

“Well, not Barber herself. It might have been Agnes.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “Where?” I asked.

“Take another look.” He told Jacob to rerun the last two minutes. Dunninger and Mendoza and their satellites trying to squeeze through the door. Maddy allowing Juano to kiss her. He hung on, chastely pressing his cheek against hers, as if he knew they were in the center of the picture.

“Freeze it,” I said.

“Well, what do you think?”

I stared at Maddy. At the same blue eyes, the perfectly sculpted jaws, the pert nose, the half smile playing about the full lips. A few more lines. Otherwise-“Yes,”

I said. “If she were younger, they’d be very close.”

“Make her twenty-three, Jacob. And change her hair color. Go with black.”

Her features softened. The intensity gave way to a leisurely innocence. The creases that were just appearing on her brow and at the corners of her mouth went away. The skin around the jaws tightened.

Add the black hair, shorten it.

“You thought Teri Barber resembled Maddy?” he said.

Well, I’d been right. She was Maddy. They were identical.

The record said that Madeleine English had never borne a child. But there was an army of nieces and cousins, and when we looked through the pictures of current family members, we found three who resembled Teri Barber and seemed to be about the right age. One in particular, Mary Capitana, was a dead ringer. But Mary was a medical intern at a Kubran hospital in the middle of the Western Ocean, and the other two also had careers that would have prevented their living on Trinity Island in their spare time.

We couldn’t find any record on Agnes Lockhart Shanley prior to her superluminal certification in 1397. Whatever she’d told the board about her background was subject to privacy laws. Her only known address was in a resort town with the ominous name Walpurgis, eleven hundred kilometers up the coast. She’d left there two decades ago, in 1405, according to the data file. After which there was no further record.

Current residence was unknown.

Walpurgis is one of those places that was bypassed in the boom of the last ten years. For whatever reason-you’d have to find a sociologist to explain it-the crowds have abandoned the northern coastal resorts for the islands.

Not that the area is poor. But when Alex and I got there it looked as if most of the inhabitants lived off the minimum subsistence income and didn’t do much else.

The center of town was anchored by large crumbling hotels built in the last century, a few restaurants done up in gaudy colors, and some sporting palaces. A plethora of walks and ramps overlooked the ocean, and the entire south side was dedicated to a vast warpark, which had probably gone bust when big-time gaming faded a few years ago. Nothing was moving in its streets.

We were riding Rainbow’s new skimmer, purchased to replace the one that had been lost. It located Shanley’s old address and brought us down onto a public pad near a fading, two-story house on a corner near the western edge of town. An elderly woman with a white dog was coming out of a store, her arms filled with packages. A few kids were playing in a nearby schoolyard. Otherwise, there was no sign of life.

“This place has seen better days,” said Alex.

Well, I thought, so have we all.

Lawns were overgrown and full of weeds. The houses leaned in one direction or another. Creepers were strangling the trees, and it didn’t look as if anyone had touched the hedges for years. It was a gray, dismal day, threatening but not delivering rain, and we could see lights in most of the windows. A cheer went up from the schoolyard. Kids are amazing. Feed them, give them a toy, and they never notice the wreckage around them.

The walkway wound past the school and a run-down park with climbing bars and a ball field. The house Agnes and her husband had lived in stood near a cluster of stacia trees. It was green and white, but the colors had faded. The front porch sagged, the shutters needed replacing, and a post light leaned at an unseemly angle.

“Yes?” said the AI as we approached. “May I be of assistance?”

The front door was big, heavy, and scored by too many years of wind and sand.

“Yes,” Alex said. “My name’s Alex Benedict. I’d like very much to talk with the occupant. I’ll only take a moment of his time.”

“If you’d care to state your business, Mr. Benedict, I’ll inform her.”

“I was admiring the house. I’m interested in a possible purchase.”

“One moment, please.”

“You have no shame,” I said.

“What do you suggest? Tell him we’re here to ask questions about a missing starship captain?”

“I could see you living here.”

“It’s a nice out-of-the-way place.”

“ That’s true.”

Alex stepped down off the deck and looked up, pretending he was inspecting the roof. Abruptly the door opened and a tired-looking woman in her fifties appeared. She looked suspiciously from one of us to the other. In this part of the world, visitors were never good news.

She resembled the neighborhood, listless, passed-by, dilapidated. In an age when no one is hungry, no one need go without shelter, and in which one need not even work if he, or she, chooses a life of leisure, I remain surprised that there are still people who seem unable to put their lives together. Or maybe the lack of necessity is the reason. “Mr. Benedict,” she said, throwing a suspicious glance my way, “the house has not been put up for sale.”

“I’m interested nevertheless.”

She studied us, decided she had nothing to lose, and stepped aside so we could enter. The interior was more or less what you would have expected: worn furniture, no curtains, bare floors. A few family pictures decorated the walls. Everyone was either very young or very old.

“My name is Casava,” she said. “Casava Demmy.”

We completed the introductions, and Casava showed us around. The house was musty, but not disheveled. While we walked, we asked about the property. How much would she want for it? What kind of neighbors did she have? How long had she been living there? “Eighteen years. It’s a nice house. Needs some work, as you can see. But it’s very solid.”

“I can see that. Yes.”

“Close to the beach.”

“Yes. It is quite nice. It looks as if the former owner took good care of it, too.”

“Yes, he did. Tawn Brackett. Good man, he was.”

“Before Tawn was here,” said Alex, “a couple owned the house. Ed and Agnes Crisp.”

Casava’s expression hardened. “Is that what this is about?” she asked. “The murder?”

Alex did a double take. “What murder?”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “It was supposed to have been an accident. But I doubt it.”

“Who got murdered?”

“Why, her husband. Ed.” She shook her head at the depravity of the world. “You knew about the Crisps, but you didn’t know what happened?”

“No. What happened?”

“He died in a fall. Off Wallaba Point. She was with him at the time. They’d only been married a few years.”

“Did you know her?” asked Alex.

Suddenly she looked reluctant. “Just in passing,” she said.

Alex showed her his comm link. He transferred some funds. I couldn’t see how much. “What can you tell us about Agnes?”

She took a moment to retrieve her own link, which was in a table drawer. She checked her account, looked at both of us as if trying to decide what our interest was, and shrugged. “Yes. I knew her. We were the same age. Dated some of the same men, in fact. Before she got married, of course.”

“Of course. Was she a friend?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“What kind of person was she? Why do you say she killed her husband?”

“It’s a long time ago, Mr. Benedict. I never really knew her that well.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It won’t go any farther.”

We were back in the living room. She was looking closely at Alex, then she turned her gaze on me, and I could have sworn she was asking me whether she could believe Alex. I nodded yes, of course. “I wouldn’t want you to think,” she said finally, “that I don’t trust you, but a moment ago you were telling me you wanted to buy my house.”

We waited. A dog started barking outside.

“It just seemed strange. They went walking one night, and he didn’t come home.

I think she got tired of him.”

“Did she give you any reason to believe that?”

“She struck me as someone who’d get tired of any man pretty quick.”

“What else can you tell us?”

“She was a pilot of some sort. She had a pretty high opinion of herself. Thought she was better than everybody else. I was living over in Brentwood when she first came to town. I was at that time just out of school. We both belonged to a theater group. That’s how I met her.”

“You did some shows together?”

“Yes. I had a good voice then.”

“Do you know what she piloted?”

“I was a singer,” she said. She listed a few of the shows she’d been in. We listened, tried to look impressed, and Alex asked his question again. “Starships,” she said. “Like I told you. She used to be gone for long periods of time. Off to the stars.

She’d drop out of sight for months. Even after she got married.”

“Did they have any children?”

“No. No time for kids, I guess.”

“Did they have any family that you knew of?”

“I really don’t remember, Mr. Benedict. Actually, I’m not sure I ever knew.” She shook her head. “The only thing I can tell you is that she was gone a lot. Then her husband died. And not long after that she took off for good, and we never saw her again.”

“But she sold the house first.”

“I guess so. I don’t know.”

“Did she tell anyone she was leaving?”

“If she did, I didn’t know about it.” She shrugged again. This time I thought I saw regret. “Don’t know what happened to her.”

“How long did she live in Walpurgis? Do you know?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe ten years.”

We went down to the city hall, logged in, and began scrolling through the public record.

The first item of interest was the dead husband. We found that easily enough in news accounts dated over a twelve-day period in late autumn, 1404.

CASINO EMPLOYEE FALLS TO DEATH FROM PRECIPICE

And, eight months later:

Police denied today they are working on the assumption that Agnes Crisp’s disappearance is connected with the death of her husband last year.

There were pictures of Agnes, in uniform and in civilian clothes. Some wedding pictures. She and Ed made a handsome couple.

Ed had been a young worker at one of the casinos. The reports jibed with what Casava had told us. They’d gone out walking one night. To Wallaba Point. According to friends, they went there frequently. It was part of a workout routine. But on that particular evening Agnes admitted there’d been a quarrel. Apparently there was some pushing and shoving, although Agnes denied that she’d sent him over the edge. “He lost his footing,” she’d insisted. “I loved him.” Apparently the police uncovered no convincing evidence to the contrary. No arrest was ever made.

What had the argument been about? “We were trying to decide about kids. I didn’t think we were ready to do that because he didn’t earn that much, and I’d have to give up my career.”

We checked the almanac. It had been a moonless night, dark and overcast.

Crisp had had the build of a moonball player. Young, athletic, good features. He wore his black hair cut short in the style of the day. He’d had dark, penetrating eyes, a broad forehead, dark skin. Neatly clipped beard and mustache. Was employed as a host at the Easy Aces Casino. He didn’t look like the sort of person who would accidentally stumble off a cliff.

There was no avatar available.

Police had questioned Agnes for several days. People who knew them said there were no problems between them. They were good together, everyone seemed to think. (I wondered if anyone had questioned Casava.) Nevertheless, suspicions in the town ran high.

Ed Crisp reminded me of somebody.

“Again?” asked Alex. “Who this time?”

I was running my interior catalog. Clients. Relatives. People from sims. “James Parker,” I said. The actor.

“Everybody you see,” he said, “reminds you of somebody else. He doesn’t look at all like Parker.”

Actually he didn’t. But there was someone. Well, I’d think of it later.

Casava and her husband had bought the house near the school in 1409. Brackett had picked it up three and a half years earlier.

The media archives revealed that, on a pleasant day in the late spring of 1405, eight months after Crisp’s death, Agnes had sold her house, left Walpurgis, and not returned. No one knew where she had gone.

She’d bought the house in 1396. There was no mention of a former husband. Or of children. That seemed to suggest she was not Teri Barber’s mother. It looked as if we were chasing the wrong rabbit.

“Maybe not,” said Alex. “When people leave a place, they usually stay in contact with somebody. Right? A friend. Someone they’d worked with. Or people down at the club. Agnes did theater.”

“I don’t-”

“People don’t do theater without getting close to other people. Can’t be done.”

“How do you know?”

He laughed. “I don’t. But I think it has to be true. Yet this woman stayed in touch with nobody.”

“Nobody that we know of.”

“Okay. Anyhow, what I was getting at: Who else did something like that?”

“You mean walked off and disappeared? Taliaferro. But that’s an odd sort of link.”

“Odd ones are the best. Teri Barber would have been three or four at the time all this happened.”

“But we don’t have a connection between Barber and Shanley. Other than that they look alike.” I began to suspect we were seeing patterns where none existed.

There were all kinds of studies that showed people tended to find the things they looked for, even if some imagination was required.

Several weeks after Agnes had gone, there was a final piece of news:

Attempts to identify Edgar Crisp’s family and notify them of his death have been unsuccessful. Crisp was a native of Rambuckle, in the Rigellian system.

He came to Walpurgis in 1397.

“About the same time as Agnes,” I said.

“Yes.” Alex’s brow furrowed. “Why couldn’t they locate his family?”

“I don’t know. What are the rules on Rambuckle? I’ve never been there.”

“Maybe they don’t maintain a directory.”

“I guess not.”

He was making faces, the way he always did when he was trying to puzzle something out. “But I wonder whether we’re looking at somebody else with a fictitious identity.”

“Oh, come on, Alex. If you were going to adopt a pseudonym, would you opt for Edgar Crisp? ”