Seeker

TEN

I was there when the Seeker left orbit, December 27, ’88. I’d made my decision and stayed behind. So I watched my sister and some of my lifelong friends start out for a distant place that had no name and whose location had not been disclosed. I knew, as I watched the monster ship slip its moorings and begin to move into the night, that there would never come a time that I would not question my decision to stay behind. And I knew, of course, that I would never see any of them again.

- The Autobiography of Clement Esteban, 2702 C.E.

When I walked into my office next morning, Alex asked what had happened to my lip.

By then I’d pretty much had it with the Seeker, the cup, and the Margolians.

“Hap paid me a visit.”

“What?” Alex turned purple. “Are you okay? Where is he now? Here, sit down.”

How wobbly did I look? “I’m fine,” I said. “A few bruises, nothing more.”

“Where’s he now? That son of a bitch.”

I believe that was the only time I ever heard Alex use the term. “I talked to Fenn this morning. He says they’ll probably put him away for a while. This one is over the top.

He’s assaulted Amy twice now, plus a couple of other girlfriends. Maybe they’ll finally decide he’s not responding to treatment.”

I described what had happened. He broke into a huge grin when the Baylok showed up. “Good,” he said. “That was a brilliant idea.”

“Yes. It was Carmen’s.”

“Who’s Carmen?”

“My AI.”

He squinted at my bruises, told me he hoped they got Hap off the streets. Then he sat down beside me. “How about Amy?”

Usually, when I check in, he says good morning, tells me what our priorities are for the day, and goes upstairs to look over the markets. But this time he seemed at a loss for words. He told me he was glad it was nothing serious, that I hadn’t been injured, that it must have been a scary experience. He bounced out of the chair and came back minutes later with coffee and toast.

He made a few more comments about how glad he was I’d come through it okay, and was I sure I wasn’t hurt, had I been to see a doctor. And before I’d quite locked in on him again he got one past me. “Before we give up on the Margolians,” he said, “we have another lead I’d like you to follow. If you feel up to it.” He waited while I ran it through a second time and realized I was receiving an assignment among all the well wishes. “Last one,” he promised. “If nothing comes of this, we’ll write the whole thing off.”

“What do you need?” I asked.

“Mattie Clendennon. She trained at navigation school with Margaret and stayed close to her.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s her number? I’ll talk to her first thing.”

“It’s not that easy.”

Another off-world run, I thought.

“No.” He looked guilty. It takes a lot to make Alex Benedict look guilty. “She’s apparently a bit strange.”

“Stranger than Hap?”

“No. Nothing like that. But it looks as if she likes to live alone. Doesn’t much talk to anybody.”

“She’s off-line.”

“Yes. You’ll have to go see her.” He put a picture up. “She’s in her eighties. Lives in Wetland.”

It was hard to believe Mattie Clendennon was that young. Her hair had gone white; she appeared to be malnourished; and she simply looked worn-out. The picture was two years old, so I wondered if she was even still alive.

Alex assured me she was. So I took the misnamed nightflyer next morning and arrived in Paragon by midafternoon. From there I caught the train to Wilbur Junction, rented a skimmer, and went the last hundred kilometers to Wetland. Despite its name, it was located in the middle of the Great Northern Desert; Wetland was a small town that had been a major tourist draw during the last century when desert sports were all the rage. But its time had come and gone, the tourists had left, the entrepreneurs had bailed out, and fewer than two thousand inhabitants were left.

From a distance it looked big. The old hotels were clustered on the north side around the water park. The gravity works, where dancers and skaters had free-floated, resembled a large covered bowl in the downtown area, and the Egyptian replicas, pyramids, Sphinx, and stables, lay windblown on the western edge of the city. Here, in the good days, you could bring your friends, mount a drome (the closest thing Rimway had to a camel) and set off to explore the glories of the ancient world. The Temple of Ophir toward the sunrise, the Garden Palace of Japhet the Terrible a few kilometers farther on (where, if you stayed alert and rode with skill, you might be able to get out with your valuables and your life). This was a place where you came to escape from VR, where the adventure was real. More or less.

It was all before my day, of course. I’d have enjoyed spending some time there during those years. People today sit in their living rooms too much. Everything’s vicarious, as somebody said. No wonder most of the population’s overweight.

The streets were quiet. A few people wandering around. No sign of kids.

I had an address. Number one Nimrud Lane. But Carmen had been unable to match it with a location. So I had no idea where I was going. There were only a few landing pads, and those all seemed to be private. You wanted to come down, you came down on the desert.

I descended near a stone building designed to look like an enhanced pagoda, climbed out, and dropped down onto the sand. The sun was in the middle of the sky, bright and unblinking, but it was cold rather than hot. Not at all what you’d expect.

I tried my address out on a couple of passersby, but they shrugged and said they had no idea. “Try City Center,” one said, pointing to the pagoda.

I walked into it five minutes later and stood in the lobby, which felt like a place bypassed by history. A bank of elevators lined the far wall. Worn chairs and divans were scattered about. There was only one other person there, an elderly man on a sofa peering at a notebook.

I approached a service counter and a male avatar appeared, looking fresh and helpful.

Dark hair brushed back, amiable features, eyes a bit larger than you’d see in a normal human. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “My name’s Toma. May I help you?”

I gave him the address, and he looked puzzled. “It doesn’t seem to be in the atlas.

May I ask you to wait a moment while I consult my supervisor?”

He was gone less than a minute. “I should have realized,” he said. “It’s out at the Nimrud exhibit. Or at what used to be the Nimrud exhibit. It’s in private hands now.”

It was nine kilometers northwest of the city. One of the old stops from the days when caravans filled with tourists ran out of Wetland.

Mattie Clendennon lived in a palace. High stone walls, spires at each of the four corners. Arched entrance, up a flight of broad stairs, everything guarded by sculptures of people in antique dress. Enormous windows. Angled skylights. Flags and parapets.

There was a large interior courtyard filled with more statuary, shrubs, and trees. A fountain threw spray across the walkway. The only sign of decay was a dust-filled pool in a portico on the eastern side of the building.

I debated landing in the courtyard, thought better of it, and set down in front of the main entrance. I used my link to say hello, but got no response.

I got out, pulled my jacket tight against a cold wind, and stood admiring the building for several moments. The town officially claimed that the various ancient outposts surrounding Wetland were authentic, in the sense that this was how Nineveh and Hierakonopolis and Mycenae had actually looked, and felt, in their glory days.

Nimrud, according to my notebook, had been part of the Assyrian Empire.

The truth was that the only thing I knew about Assyrians was the line from Byron.

I went up the front steps (cut at the actual dimensions from the original, according to the claims), walked beneath the arch, and stopped before a pair of ornately carved wooden doors. They were big, maybe twice my height. Iron rings were inset at about eye level. I pulled on one.

“Who’s there, please?” Female voice. Not an AI, I decided.

“Chase Kolpath. I was looking for Mattie Clendennon.”

“What about? I don’t know you, Kolpath.”

“You’re Ms. Clendennon?”

“Who else would I be?”

A grump. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk to me for a few minutes about Margaret Wescott.”

Long pause. “Margaret’s gone a long time. What could there possibly be to talk about?”

The wooden doors remained shut. Hunting cats were carved into them. And guys with war helmets and shields. And lots of pointed beards. Everybody had one. “Might I come inside?”

“I’m not alone,” she warned.

“That’s fine. I mean you no harm, Ms. Clendennon.”

“You’re too young to have known her.”

“That’s so. I did not know her. But I’m doing some research about her.”

“Are you a journalist?”

“I’m an antiquarian.”

“Really? That seems an odd way to make a living.”

“It’s been a challenge.”

Another long pause. One of the doors clicked and swung out. “Thank you,” I said.

“Come straight ahead until you reach the rear of the passageway. Then turn left and go through the curtains.”

I crossed a stone floor into a shadowy chamber. The walls were covered with cuneiform, and stone cylinders mounted around the room depicted kings accepting tribute, archers stationed atop towers that looked exactly like the ones surrounding the palace, warriors going head-to-head with axes, shining beings handing tablets down from the sky. Weapons racks, filled with axes, spears, and arrows, ran along two sides of the chamber. Shields were stored near the entrance.

Following her directions, I passed through another door into a broad passageway, took an elevator up to the fourth level, and turned left into a waiting room. I heard footsteps clicking on the stone, and Mattie Clendennon joined me. Her pictures didn’t do her justice. I’d expected a feeble, half-deranged old woman. But Mattie was ramrod straight. She radiated energy and strolled across that stone floor like a cat. She was tall, imperious, with gray-green eyes and thin, intense features. A smile played about her lips.

“Welcome, Chase Kolpath,” she said. “I don’t get many visitors.”

She wore sand-colored clothes and a trooper hat, the sort of thing you might have wanted if you were going out to do some excavations. Somehow this eighty-year-old woman did not look at all absurd in the outfit.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Clendennon,” I said.

She shifted her gaze to the engravings that surrounded us. “This is where they found the Gilgamesh Epic,” she said.

“Really?” I tried to sound impressed, thinking that the woman was out of her head.

She read my reaction. “Well, of course, not literally. This is a replica of the palace at Khorsabad. Which is where George Smith found the tablets.”

She led the way down a long corridor. The stone gave way to satin curtains, thick carpets, and lush furniture. We turned into a room furnished with modern chairs and a sofa. Curtains were drawn across two windows, softening the sunlight. “Sit down, Kolpath,” she said. “And tell me what brings you to Sargon’s home.”

“This is a magnificent place,” I said. “How do you come to be living here?”

One silver brow arched. “A mixed compliment? Is there a problem?”

“No,” I said. “It just seems a bit unusual.”

“Where better?” She studied me, making up her mind whether I was friend or whatever, and came down on my side of things. “Would you like a drink?”

She mixed us a couple of black bennies while I drew one of the curtains aside and looked out the window. Wetland, which should have been on the horizon, was missing. In its place I saw a city with minarets and towers. “Baghdad,” she said, “in its glory days.”

It was a projection. “It’s lovely,” I said.

“You should see it at night, when it lights up.” She handed me my drink. “I decided I didn’t like life on Rimway very much. So I’ve gone back to a better time.”

I looked around the room, with its climate control and its synthetic walls and its VR capability.

She laughed. “That doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I get the best of both worlds here.

Baghdad is romantic, but needs to be kept at a distance.”

I sampled the black benny and complimented her on it.

“It’s my favorite.” She started to sit but changed her mind. “Here, Kolpath, let me show you something.” We walked back out into the passageway, made a couple of turns, passed through several rooms, and came into an enormous chamber. Just enough sunlight filtered into it to cut through the gloom. It was filled with clay pots and more stone cylinders. All were engraved. “Each group tells a story,” she said.

“Over there, the deeds of Sennacherib. To your right, the glories of Esarhaddon.

There-” She produced a lamp, turned it on, and directed the beam onto a podium.

“The Crystal Throne itself.”

It glittered brilliantly in the lamplight.

“What’s the Crystal Throne?”

“Sargon, my dear. My, they did neglect your education, didn’t they?”

“Sometimes I think so.”

She laughed, a pleasant sound like tinkling ice cubes. “You’re a security officer of sorts, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Of sorts. Actually, the AI handles the security.” She smiled. “Just in case you had any ideas.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” I said. “I’ve no use for a crystal throne.”

We returned to the sitting room, where she produced another round of drinks. “Now,” she said, “what is this about Margaret that brings you to the palace?”

“She was a close friend of yours, wasn’t she?”

“Margaret Wescott.” She looked around the room, as if trying to locate something.

“Yes. I never knew anyone else like her.”

“In what way?”

“She was a marvelous woman. She cared about things. You got her for a friend, you knew she’d always be there if you needed her.”

“How about Adam? How well did you know him?”

She thought it over. “Adam was okay. He was like most men. A bit slow. Selfabsorbed. I don’t think he ever appreciated what he had. In her, I mean.”

“He took her for granted?”

Smile. “Oh, yes. Adam was too busy looking at the stars, worrying about things that were far away, to see what was under his nose.”

“But he didn’t mistreat her?”

“Oh, no. Adam wouldn’t have harmed a fly. And he loved her. It was just that it was a kind of limited love. He loved her because she was physically attractive, and she enjoyed the same kinds of things of things he did, and because she shared his passion for the outer boundaries. And because she was the mother of his daughter.” She looked around the room again. “It’s depressing in here. Why don’t we open the curtains, dear?”

I helped, and sunlight streamed in.

“Much better,” she said. “Thank you. Have you met their daughter? Delia?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet young thing. She has a lot of her mother in her.”

She paused, obviously lost in the past. I took advantage of the opening: “Did Margaret ever suggest to you that she and Adam might have discovered something unusual during one of their flights?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course. Did you know about that?”

“I know they found something.”

“She always told me to keep it quiet.”

“What did they find?” I asked.

She drew back into the present and looked at me closely, trying to decide whether she could trust me. “Don’t you know?”

“No. I know there was a discovery. I’m not sure what it was. Did they find Margolia?”

Her eyes locked on me. “They found the Seeker,” she said.

“The Seeker.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes.”

“They went back several times, trying to extract information from it. But everything was too old.”

“I’d think so.”

“They hoped it would tell them where Margolia was.”

“And it didn’t.”

“No. But they didn’t have enough time. They were still working on the problem when they went out on that damned skiing vacation.”

“Where is the Seeker?”

“I don’t know. She told me once, but I really have no recollection. Just coordinates.

Numbers, and who remembers them?”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did she write it down?”

“If she did, it’s a long time gone.” She managed another smile. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you hoped to hear.”

“No, it’s okay. But they actually found the Seeker.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

“I didn’t think they’d want me to. I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t mentioned Margolia. You already had part of the story. So I figured no harm done.” She looked cautiously at me. “I hope I’m right.”

“I’ve no interest,” I said, “in damaging anyone’s reputation. I understand they boarded it.”

“That’s correct.”

“Can you tell me what they saw?”

“A dead ship.” She lowered her voice, as if we were in a sacred place. “It was carrying a full complement.”

“Of crew?”

“Of passengers. I’ll never forget the look on Margaret’s face when she told me.”

My God, I thought, the ship’s capacity was, what, nine hundred people? “Lost together,” she said. “Whatever happened, they were lost together.”

When I got back to the office, a call from Delia Wescott was waiting for me. “I have something you might want to see. Can you come to the island?”

Delia lived on Sirika, which was several hundred kilometers southeast of Andiquar. I got directions from her and grabbed a southbound train for Wakkaida, which is a seacoast community. From there I took a cab, settled into the backseat and relaxed while it rose above the shoreline and headed out to sea.

It was early evening by then. The skies were clear, and the first stars had shown up in the east. The cab passed over a pair of large islands and joined some local traffic.

Sirika appeared on the horizon. It was an unremarkable place, mostly just a refuge for people with a lot of money and an inclination to get away. Its population was only a few thousand.

Its houses were all outrageously big, and they came with columns and colonnades and pools. They all had boathouses, which looked better than most people’s homes.

We angled down toward a villa situated on a hilltop. It was modest, as things went in that neighborhood, located amid a vast expanse of lawns. There was a decent guesthouse off to one side. We drifted toward the landing pad, and Delia got on the circuit. “Welcome to Sirika, Chase.” A door opened below, and two kids, a boy and a girl, charged out onto the walkway. Delia followed behind.

The cab touched down, the kids cheered, and I disembarked. She introduced the children. They wanted to look inside the cab, so I held it a minute before paying up.

Then they ran off, accompanied by a peremptory warning from their mother not to go far, dinner’s about ready. Delia looked proudly after them until they disappeared into a cluster of trees. “It’s a long way from Andiquar,” she said, “but I’m glad you could make it.”

“I had a good book,” I said.

We went inside. It was a showy home, with high ceilings, lots of original art, marble floors. “My husband’s away on business,” she said. “He asked me to tell you he was sorry not to be here.”

She directed me into a sitting room. It was small, cozy, obviously the place where the family hung out. Two armchairs, a sofa, and a dark-stained coffee table, on which stood a metal box. Music was being piped in. I recognized Bullet Bob and the Ricochets.

“I know you’re anxious to hear why I asked you to come,” she said. “After you asked me about the Seeker, I called my aunt Melisa. She took care of me after my folks died.

She didn’t know anything about a discovery, but she and my father weren’t all that close anyhow. Aunt Melisa wasn’t interested much in outer space.

“I’d talked to her as I told you I would, and she said at first there wasn’t anything we’d care about. From my parents. But she went looking and she called me the other day to tell me about something she’d found.” Delia indicated the box.

I followed her gaze and she nodded. Open it.

Folded inside was a white shirt wrapped in plastic. It was marked with the same eagle emblem I’d seen on the cup. “Beautiful,” I said.

“Melisa tells me she remembers now that there was other stuff. Clothes, boots, electronic gear. Data disks.”

“My God. What happened to it?”

“It got tossed. She said she kept it a few years, but it looked old, and the electronics didn’t seem to do anything, weren’t compatible with anything, and she couldn’t see any reason to store it. She kept the shirt as a memento.”

“Did she get rid of the disks, too?”

“She says everything went.” She sighed. Me, too. “Which brings us to the other reason I wanted to talk to you.” She looked worried.

“Okay.”

“If you’re right, if they really did discover the Seeker, they must not have reported it.

It’s going to turn out my parents hid information from Survey.”

“Yes,” I said. “Actually, that’s the way it looks.”

“How serious is that?”

“I don’t know.” I told her why we thought they’d have kept it quiet. That they might have felt it was necessary to protect the artifact. I put the best light on it I could. But Delia was no dummy.

“No matter,” she said. “If that’s what happened, it won’t look good.”

“Probably not.”

“Chase, I don’t want to be part of anything that’s going to harm their reputations.”

She paused. Looked around the room. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m not sure where I go from here.”

“I’ll do what I can to protect them,” I said.

“But you won’t be able to do much, will you?”

“Probably not,” I admitted.

On the way home, I watched Insertion, the classic horror show in which superphysical emotionless humans from Margolia have infiltrated the Confederacy. They’ve come to regard the rest of us as impediments to progress, which they define in terms of enhanced intelligence and a “higher” set of moral values. These, of course, don’t seem to include prohibitions against murdering people who discover the secret or simply get in the way.

If you’ve seen it, you haven’t forgotten the desperate chase through the skyways and towers of New York City, during which the narrative’s hero, fleeing a dozen bloodthirsty Margolians, tries to get to the authorities to warn them. En route he has to use lubricating oil, electrical circuits, an automatic washer, and several other devices, to escape. The Margolians could do all the superintelligent double talk they wanted, and bend metal, and the rest of it, but when it came to the crunch, it was obvious that good old native Confederate ingenuity would win out every time. I especially liked the lubricant gig, which he used to send one of his pursuers sliding off a partly constructed terrace.

I don’t care for horror shows. In this one, twenty or so people are killed off in an astonishingly wide range of ways, most involving lots of blood, gouging, and impaling. (I couldn’t figure out why the Margolians carried those long pokers when they could far more easily dispatch folks with scramblers.) That’s a lot more murder victims than I can normally tolerate in an evening. But I wanted to get a sense of what other people had been making of the Margolian story.

Well, there you are. Insertion was fun, in a childish way. But it seemed unlikely anything like that could actually happen.