Polaris

SIXTEEN

The AI at the Epstein Retreat, Dunninger’s longtime lab, had been named Flash, after a pet retriever. Three days after the departure of the Polaris, campers had gotten careless. The timber was dry, a fire wasn’t properly put out, and the woods caught.

The lab was completely destroyed.

When we’d gotten tired trying to figure out what Kiernan had wanted to tell us, we went back to trying to decipher the nonverbal communication between Dunninger and Mendoza. Eventually we got around to looking at the news coverage of the fire.

The blaze was already out of control when the media arrived. The fire brigade was only a few minutes behind, but by then the area was an inferno.

Epstein was located on a bank of the Big River. The facility consisted of two white one-story mod buildings, the living quarters, and the laboratory. At one time they’d been a boating facility and restaurant. There’d been rumors that Dunninger had been close to a solution to the Crabtree problem, but I had trouble believing he’d have gone off to a distant star system if he’d been on the verge of making the greatest discovery in history.

The fire had completely engulfed the lab. The buildings themselves, of course, resisted the flames, but the forest came all the way out to the water, so everything around them had burned. Lab materials burst into flame, or melted. In the end, the Epstein structures still stood, charred and smoking, but nothing else survived.

There was no serious effort to save the facility. Apparently some private homes along the western rim of the valley had been in danger, and the firefighters went there first. By the time anyone got near the laboratory it was too late. Judging from what we learned of the blaze, it wouldn’t have mattered in any case. There’d been a long drought, and the trees went up like tinder.

Flash was gone, too. The AI, not the dog. The core material for Dunninger’s work on life extension, which he called, simply, the Project, had not yet been submitted for peer review. It was gone as well. Up in smoke, you might say. Had he maintained a duplicate data bank elsewhere? Probably. But no one knew where it might be, or how it might be accessed.

There were no fatalities during the incident, and most of the homes on the western perimeter were saved. The rescue services congratulated themselves, and the media reported how fortunate everyone was, how it could easily have been a disaster.

Alex wanted to hear how Dunninger had responded when he heard the news, but his reaction never made the public nets. We dug around and discovered that his response to the damage was listed in the Environmental Service archives. But to get into those we’d have to make application and provide an explanation for the request.

“We should take a run out there tomorrow,” he said. “Get a look at the records.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Afterward we can go to lunch.” Alex enjoyed his lunches.

The Environmental Services Department is located along the perimeter of a preserve named Cobbler Green, about ten kilometers southwest of Andiquar. It’s a quiet area favored in the daytime by young mothers and in the evening by lovers. Sable trees, flowering bushes, sculpted brooks, curving walkways, traditional and virtual statuary.

The building itself is, in the spirit of the neighborhood, an unadorned two-story structure covered with vines.

We walked into the main lobby, which was manned by an autoprocessor. “Good morning,” it said in a gender-neutral voice. “How may I help you?”

Alex explained that we wanted to see the Polaris record that would detail Thomas Dunninger’s response to the news that his laboratory had been destroyed.

“Thirteen sixty-five,” he added.

“Very good,” it said. “There is a corresponding archive. The application forms are displayed. Please use the designated headbands.”

We sat down at a table, put on the headbands, and the applications appeared. We each completed one, citing antiquity background (whatever that might mean) as the purpose. A few minutes later, we were directed to an inner cubicle. A bored-looking middle-aged man in a Forestry Service uniform appeared and introduced himself as Chagal, or Chackal, or something like that. He directed us to a screen, told us to call him if we needed help, turned, and left. An access board powered up, and the screen turned on.

We got some numbers and a tag identifying the date and time of the desired communication. Fourth day of the flight, 1365, audio only. We listened to a station comm officer inform the Polaris, attention Dr. Dunninger, that a forest fire had destroyed the Epstein laboratory. “At this time,” the officer said, “reports indicate complete destruction of the facility. Nothing of value is believed to have survived other than the buildings, and they are damaged. This includes, unfortunately, the AI.”

A reply came back two days later. It was Madeleine’s voice: “Skydeck, the news of the fire has been passed as you requested. If there’s anything additional, please let us know.” Then she signed off.

“That’s it?” I asked.

Alex exhaled. “Damn.”

“I thought he’d get on the circuit and demand details. How it happened. Whether there was anything at all left. Stuff like that.”

“Apparently not. Of course, complete destruction pretty much says it.” We got up and started for the door.

“So what now?” I asked.

“How far’s Epstein?”

The Epstein Retreat had been located in West Chibong, in the north country. We booked a flight, left that evening, and got into Wahiri Central shortly after midnight.

Not good planning. We checked into a hotel and set out the following morning in a taxi.

West Chibong is exactly what it sounds like: isolated, remote, one of those places where, once you get beyond the town limits, there’s nothing for a hundred kilometers in any direction except mountains and forest. The Big River runs through the area, providing good fishing, according to the locals, and, of course, it features the Wainwright Falls.

Alex told the taxi to pass over the Epstein site. It didn’t have any idea what he was talking about so he sighed and directed it instead to take us to Special Services, which housed Air Rescue, Forest, and Environment.

It was headquartered in a big, grungy, domed building downtown. Not exactly ramshackle, but close. The interior was impersonal, drab, damp, not a place where you’d want to work. I’d expected to find pictures of the rescue services in action, skimmers dropping chemicals on blazing trees, emergency technicians tending to victims, patrols chasing a runaway boat through rapids. But the walls were undecorated, save for a few dusty portraits of elderly men and women you probably wouldn’t have wanted to have over for dinner. There’d been a time when I’d thought briefly about doing something like this for a living. The rescue services especially had always seemed glamorous. And it would have been nice to dedicate my life to helping people in trouble. But I either grew out of it or found out the pay wasn’t very good.

“Yes, folks,” said an AI. “What can I do for you?” Sexy voice. This was going to be a unit made up primarily of young males.

“My name’s Benedict,” Alex said. “My associate and I are doing research. I wonder if I could speak with someone for a few minutes? I won’t take much time.”

“May I ask the subject of your research, Mr. Benedict?”

“The forest fire in 1365.”

“That’s a long time ago, sir. Just a moment, please. I’ll see if the duty officer is available.”

The duty officer, despite my expectations, was a woman. She was a tiny creature, early thirties, brown eyes, brown hair. She wore the standard forest green uniform and looked happy to have visitors. “Come on back, people,” she said, leading us down a passageway and into an office. “I understand you want to talk about one of the 1365 fires.”

Uh-oh. “You had more than one?”

She introduced herself as Ranger Jamieson. There was something irrepressible about her. I never saw her again after that interview, but to this day I remember Ranger Jamieson. And I’ve promised myself I’ll find a reason to go back again one day and say hello.

She brought numbers up on her monitor. “Looks like seventeen. Of course, that depends on how you define the term.”

“You had seventeen fires that year?”

She nodded. “It’s about average for this region. We only cover a narrow area, but we get droughts on a regular basis. It has to do with the winds. And we have lots of campers, some of them not too bright. We also get a fair number of lightning strikes. In summer or fall, it doesn’t take much to start a blaze.”

“The one I’m looking for took out the Epstein Retreat.”

She looked blank. “I beg your pardon?”

Well, there you are. We were assuming everybody on the planet knew about the Epstein lab, but as a matter of fact, a few weeks earlier I hadn’t heard of it myself.

Alex explained what it did, who’d worked there, what might have been lost. Its connection with the Polaris incident.

“How about that?” she said when he’d finished. “I know about the Polaris.

That’s the starship that disappeared back in the last century, right?”

“The passengers disappeared. Not the ship.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. That was odd, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“And they never figured out what happened?”

“No.”

Her eyes brushed mine. Okay, so she didn’t exactly know about the Polaris either. That’s not really big news in most people’s lives. “And you think there’s a connection with the fire?”

“We don’t know. Probably not, but the fire happened right after the Polaris left.”

Alex gave her the specific date.

“Well, let’s see what we have, Mr. Benedict.” She sat down in front of a display.

“Thermal events, 1365,” she said. Data appeared, and she began running down the list with her index finger. “You know, the problem here is that we’ve never kept very good records. Especially before 1406.”

“Fourteen oh-six?”

“Don’t quote me.”

“Of course not. What happened in 1406?”

“We had a scandal and there was a reorganization.”

“Oh.”

She smiled. “Well, here we are.” She studied the screen, brought up fresh displays, shook her head. “I don’t think we have anything that’s going to be much help to you, though.” She got out of the way for us, and we looked through the data. It was all technical details, when the fire started, its extent, estimated property loss, analysis of the cause of the blaze, and a few other details.

“What exactly,” asked the ranger, “did you want to know about the fire?”

What did we want? I knew Alex: He was operating on the assumption that he’d recognize it when he saw it. “It says here the cause was careless campers. How much confidence would you have in that conclusion?”

She flicked back and forth in the record, and shrugged. “Actually,” she said, “not much. We always determine the cause of a fire. In the sense that we announce a cause. But-” She paused, cleared her throat, folded her arms. “We’re a little more exacting, now. In those years, if they had lightning on a given night, and later there was a fire, lightning was ascribed as the reason unless there was some specific circumstance indicating otherwise. You understand what I’m saying?”

“They made it up as they needed to.”

“I wouldn’t want to put it quite that way. It was more like taking a best guess.”

She smiled, carefully distancing herself from those long-ago rangers.

“Okay,” Alex said. “Thanks.”

“I wouldn’t want you to think that’s the way we operate now.”

“Of course not,” said Alex. “You wouldn’t have any way of determining where the lab was located, I don’t suppose?”

“I can ask around.”

“It was somewhere along the riverbank,” he said.

She brought up the same news report we’d looked at earlier and zeroed in on a river. “That’s the Big. It’s about forty-five klicks northeast of here. I can give you a marker.”

The marker would allow the skimmer to find it. “Yes, please.”

“Something else. There’s a man you might want to talk to. Name’s Benny Sanchay. He’s been around here a long time. Kind of a regional historian. If anybody can help you, he can.”

Benny was well into his second century. He lived in a small cabin on the edge of town, behind a cluster of low hills. “Sure,” he said, “I remember the fire. There were some complaints later that the rangers let the lab go. Didn’t bother with it because they didn’t think it was important.”

“Was it important?” I asked.

He squinted at Alex while he thought it over. “Must have been. All these years later and here you folks are asking about it.”

Benny Sanchay was small and round. He was one of the few men I’ve seen who had no hair left on his skull. He wasn’t given to shaving, and his eyes were buried in a mass of whiskers and wrinkles. I wondered whether he’d spent too much time looking into the sun.

He invited us inside, pointed to a couple of battered chairs, and put a pot of coffee on. The furniture was old, but serviceable. There was a bookcase and a general-purpose table. The bookcase was sagging under the weight of too many volumes. Two large windows looked out on the hills. The thing that caught my eye was a working range. “That would be worth a fair amount of money,” Alex told him, “if you wanted to sell it.”

“My stove?”

“Yes. I could get you a good price.”

He smiled and sat down at the table. There were pieces of notepaper stacked on it, a pile of crystals, a reader, and an open volume. Down to Earth. By Omar McCloud. “What would I cook with?” he asked.

“Get some hardware, and your AI’ll do it.”

“My AI?”

“You don’t have one,” I said.

He laughed. It was a friendly enough sound, the kind you get when someone thinks you’ve deliberately said something silly. “No,” he said. “Haven’t had one for years.”

I looked around, wondering how he stayed in touch with the world.

He glanced at me. “I’ve no need of one.” He propped his chin on his elbow.

“Anyhow, I enjoy being alone.”

So we were in the presence of a crank. But it didn’t matter. “Benny,” Alex said, “tell me what you know about the loss of the lab.”

“It’s not good for you,” he continued, as if Alex hadn’t spoken. “You’re never really alone if you’ve got one of those things in the house.” I got the sense he was laughing at us. “What was it you wanted to know?”

“The lab.”

“Oh. Yes. Epstein.”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“The fire was set deliberately. It started near the lab. They did it when the wind was blowing east.”

“You know that? Know it for a fact? That it was deliberate?”

“Sure. Everybody knew it.”

“It never came out.”

“It didn’t become a story because they never caught anybody.” He got up, checked the coffeepot. “Almost ready.”

“How do you know it was deliberate?”

“Do you know what was going on at the lab?”

“I know what they were working on.”

“Eternal life.”

“Well,” I said, “I think they were talking about life extension.”

“ Indefinite. That was the term they were using.”

“Okay. Indefinite. What are we getting at?”

“There were a lot of people who didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“Like who?” I immediately began thinking about the White Clock Society.

He laughed again. His voice changed tone, and he began to sound as if he were talking to a child. “Some folks don’t think we were meant to live indefinitely. Forever.

We had a local church group, for example, thought what Dunninger was trying to do was sacrilegious.”

Now that I thought of it, I remembered having heard something about that. “The Universalists.”

“There were others. I remember people coming in from out of town. They were doing meetings. Writing letters. Collecting signatures on petitions. Getting folks upset. I always thought that’s why Dunninger took off.”

“You think he believed he was in danger?”

“I don’t know whether he thought they’d try to kill him or anything like that. But they were trying to intimidate him, and he didn’t strike me as a guy who stood up well to bullies.” He went back to the stove, moved the coffeepot around, decided it was okay, and poured three cups. “And religious types weren’t the only ones.”

“Who else?” I asked.

“Lamplighters.”

“The Lamplighters? Why would they care?” They were a service organization with outposts-that’s what they called their branches-in probably every major city in the Confederacy. They were a charity. Tried to take care of people who’d been left behind by the general society. The elderly, orphans, widows. When a new disease showed up, the Lamplighters put political pressure where it did some good and made sure the funding got taken care of. Several years ago when an avalanche took out a small town in Tikobee, the local government moved the survivors out and arranged to get everybody patched up, but it was the Lamplighters who went in long term, took care of the disabled, spent time with people who’d lost spouses, and saw to it that the kids got their education. Urquhart and Klassner had been Lamplighters.

“Yeah, they did a lot of good,” said Benny. “I’ll give you that. But it’s not the whole story. They can be fanatics if you get on their wrong side. If they decide you’re dangerous, somebody’s going to pollute the streams, or you’re fooling with something that could blow up, they could get pretty ugly.”

The coffee was good. The flavor was a little off what I was used to, a little minty, maybe. But it was better than the stuff I got at home. Benny shook his head at the sheer perfidy of the Lamplighters and how people like us could not know them for what they really were.

He had to be exaggerating. I thought of the Lamplighters as people who were forever arriving on disaster scenes to pass out hot beverages and provide blankets.

“They sent representatives to the lab to ask Dunninger what they were going to do to prevent the human race from stagnating when people stopped dying.”

“How do you know, Benny?”

“Because they always made sure everything they did got plenty of publicity. And the other side got put in the worst possible light. They thought death was a good idea.

Gets rid of the deadwood. So to speak. They actually said that. And when they didn’t get anywhere with the lab they got on the media. For a while we had demonstrators out there.”

“At Epstein.”

“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his head. “And then there were the Greenies.”

People who worried about the effect of population on the environment.

“Other people said they’d have to do away with the minimum subsistence payouts, because the government wouldn’t be able to afford to pay all the people who’d become eligible.

“It got so bad they had to hire security guards. At the lab.”

“Did you know any of them, Benny? The guards?”

He broke into a wide, leathery grin. “Damn, Alex,” he said, “I was one.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. I worked up there about six months.”

“So you knew Tom Dunninger.”

“I knew Mendoza, too. He was here a couple of times.”

“Did they get along?”

“Don’t know.” His face scrunched up while he considered the question. “My job was mostly outside.”

“How did Dunninger react to the opposition?”

“Well, he didn’t like it much. He made some efforts to reassure everyone. Gave interviews. Even attended a town meeting once. But it seemed as if it didn’t matter what he did, what he said, things just got worse.”

“How about Mendoza?”

“I don’t know that he ever got involved with the demonstrators. No reason for him to. I mean, he was just in and out a couple of times.”

“Were there any incidents while you were there? Anybody try to break into the lab?”

He swung his chair around, pulled a hassock forward, and put up his feet. “I don’t think anybody ever actually got into the lab who shouldn’t have been there. Not while I was there, anyhow.” He thought about it. “They got close. Right up to the doors a couple of times. People sticking signs under my nose. Making threats.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Oh, they were saying they’d close the place down. It got so that Dunninger wouldn’t go into town. We did his shopping for him. But conditions never really got completely out of hand. The idiots came and went. Sometimes for whole weeks we wouldn’t see anybody. And then they’d start showing up every day.”

“The police must have been involved.”

“Yes. They made some arrests. For trespassing. Or making threats. I really don’t remember the details.” He squinted. “People can really be sons of bitches when they want to.”

“What’d you think about it?”

“I thought the protestors were damned fools.”

“Why?”

“Because anybody who knew anything understood he wasn’t going to succeed.

We weren’t intended to live forever.” He thought about it. “On the other hand, if somebody actually figured out how to do it, I sure wouldn’t want to see anybody stop him.”

Twenty minutes later Alex and I were drifting over the Big River searching for the Epstein ruins that the marker said were down there. It turned out there weren’t any.

Benny had warned us there’d be nothing left, but we thought he was exaggerating, that there’d be something, a scorched wall, a few posts, a collapsed roof.

The trees came out to the river’s edge. They were relatively new growth, the older trees having been destroyed in the fire. There were still signs of destruction, fallen trunks, blackened stumps, but whether they were from the 1365 fire, or another one, there was really no way to know. Nor, I suppose, did it matter.

“Look for a bend in the river,” Benny had told us. “You can see a small island out there with a lot of rocks piled on it. The lab’s located just west of the bend, on the south bank.”

We found a few pipes sticking out of the ground, some buried paving, and the remnants of a power collector submerged in heavy brush. That was all.

The river was wide at that point. The island with the rocks would have taken a few minutes to swim to. I stood on the bank and wondered how the past sixty years might have been different had the fire of 1365 not happened.