Seeker

TWENTY-SIX

In the morning of the world, When earth was nigher Heaven than now.

- Robert Browning,

Pippa Passes, 1841C.E.

The media interviewed Kolchevsky in the morning. “I won’t pretend I was a friend,” he said. “I won’t even pretend the world is not better off with him gone. But I would have preferred that he had seen the error of his ways. I’m sure the police will spare no effort to bring the perpetrator of this heinous act to justice.”

I let Alex know, and he announced he’d break off his vacation, which was in its last day anyhow, and come directly home. “Until we know who did this,” he said, “it’s possible you and I are still in somebody’s sights. Be careful.”

Fenn summoned me to his office. It appeared, he said, the victim had been on his way to meet me when his vehicle went down. “I take it you have no idea what he wanted to tell you?”

“No,” I said. “None whatever.” I’d suspected it might have been an attempt to pry me loose from Alex. But that sounded too much like my ego working overtime. And even if it were true, I could see no way it would help the investigation along.

He asked about Alex’s relations with him. Had the animosity become overt? “No,” I said. “You don’t think Alex had anything to do with this?”

He shook his head. “No. I know him too well to believe anything like that. Still, Alex had reason if anybody did. Where is he, precisely?”

He told me he’d want to talk to Alex as soon as he showed up.

The perpetrator remained hidden as spring passed into summer. We became more cautious than ever. Nobody could get near either the Rainbow skimmer or our personal vehicles without setting off alarms. We both carried weapons all the time, and I learned to keep a close watch on my surroundings. It wasn’t the way I wanted to live. But the weeks passed, and nothing more happened.

Reports continued to come in from the mission. The Exeter reported something new:

They’d found a transparent globe in solar orbit. It was forty-eight meters in diameter.

Inside was a thick layer of frozen earth, and beneath the earth were watering and heating systems.

There was an airlock. And a few trailing cables and power lines.

Spike was baffled. It had been adrift in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s a greenhouse,” said Alex.

I had to admit that was what it sounded like to me, as well. But why? What purpose could it have served?

Alex sent a question: Was the Bremerhaven ’s lander still on board the ship? “What’s that have to do with anything?” I asked.

“Patience,” he said. “We have a greenhouse. Now everything depends on the lander.”

Fenn let us know that the trail had gone cold. Alex asked whether there were no suspects at all. “None,” he said. “Bolton had lots of friends and admirers. Hard to find anybody who wanted him dead. Other than his ex-wife. And maybe a few competitors.” He gave Alex a significant look.

After a while I felt the need for some time off and took a weekend to get away with my current love interest. With both of them, in fact, but that’s another story. I turned everything off so I was out of touch with the office. I’ve already admitted I wasn’t as committed to the Margolians as Alex was. Whatever else we could say about them, they were a long time dead, and it was just hard to get excited. But I spent an undue amount of time worrying about Alex, who’d become fixated.

I wasn’t surprised when I got back to my apartment and found a boatload of messages from him waiting for me. “Chase, call me when you get in.”

“Chase, call when you can.”

“Chase, we were right.”

“They’ve started finding human remains.”

“It looks as if there were thousands of them at the south pole. People who survived the event.”

Spike reported back. There was no lander on the Bremerhaven. “Excellent,” said Alex.

“Apparently they tried migrating,” Windy told us one morning in late summer. “They headed toward the poles in summer, and back to the equator in winter. The winters were long; the summer was short. But Emil thinks they were able to survive for a while.”

“How long?” Alex asked.

“They’re still putting the evidence together. But it looks like a few generations.” She took a deep breath. “Hard to imagine the courage of those people. You wonder what kept them going.”

Waiting for help to come, I thought. Hoping someone would find them.

“They built some aircraft. And Emil says he found evidence of pretty ingenious food production facilities.”

The living conditions began to emerge. The polar retreat became a large, sprawling base, much of it underground to facilitate cooling during the summer. Living quarters were necessarily spartan, but functional. Anything that got you away from the sun during solar passage must have looked pretty good.

I tried to imagine what it had been like when the planet rolled in close. How big had the sun appeared in the afternoon sky? Had it been possible even to stick your head outdoors?

The answer, according to the estimates we were getting, was a surprise. The experts were saying yes. The amount of heat in the polar regions during the hottest part of the summer was on a par with temperatures at Rimway’s equator. Hot, yes. But downright pleasant in contrast with the rest of the planet.

By the end of the year, the mission had found the remnants of a library. Several thousand volumes. “But unfortunately beyond recovery,” Brankov said. We had been to lunch with Windy and returned with her to her office to find that piece of news waiting.

Beyond recovery.

Brankov let us see the library. An interior room, no windows, walls lined with shelves, shelves filled with mush.

“Books just won’t survive long under the best of conditions,” he said. “These are the worst.” I vividly remembered the jungle and the damp humid air.

Eventually the estimate came in: “We think they managed to hang on for almost six hundred years.”

Brankov looked like a military guy. About fifty. Blond hair cut short, jumpsuit absolutely correct, diction perfect. “They couldn’t maintain their technology. Not indefinitely under these conditions. Eventually they must have simply worn out.” He looked away and shook his head. “You’d have to be here to understand what they faced.” He was in a modular hut, one of those traveling shelters. Through a window, we could see a heavy snowstorm raging.

“Six hundred years,” said Alex. Back and forth, equator to pole, every twenty-one months, while the world alternately boiled and froze.

I looked out at the balmy weather that passes for summer in Andiquar. Windy said, “I wonder if anybody ever even looked for them.”

I was thinking how they’d wanted to be left alone.

We got more news as we slid into autumn. Some of the original towns were found, the ones built by the first arrivals on Margolia. I wondered whether any part of the house we’d seen in the holograms had survived. And what had happened to the little girl posing so happily with her mother.

Alex became engrossed in Margolian research. He traveled to libraries on the continent and in the islands. He brought home extracts on the movement, which he read religiously. They were mostly from books that had appeared originally in the twenty-eighth century. A number of them had been privately printed, family histories, church records, journals. He commented that such things survive because they tend to get thrown into trunks or attics, and when they show up a couple centuries later, there’s historical interest. “So people take care of them. Reproduce them. Get through the first two hundred years,” he said, “and you have it made.”

When I asked what he was looking for, he laughed and pushed a sheaf of documents away. “The Bremerhaven,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to the Bremerhaven.”

Jacob’s call light began blinking. Transmission for Alex. “Dr. Yashevik, sir. She wants you to call when you have a moment.”

He told Jacob to connect, and moments later Windy appeared. “Thought you’d like to know. They found this at about twenty degrees south latitude.” The light changed and we were in an excavation, during a blizzard, looking at part of a building. A cornerstone, in fact, with symbols we couldn’t read. Except the number. “It says Paul DeRenne School. 55. We have no idea who Paul DeRenne is.”

“What’s the number?” asked Alex. “The year it was built?”

“That’s what they think.”

Fifty-five. “That would have to be the fifty-fifth year from the foundation of the colony,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Has anybody been willing to make a guess how long a year was out there, prior to the event?”

“They think it would have been about ten percent shorter than a standard year.”

“So the school was built about forty-nine years after the landing, terrestrial time.”

“Somewhere in there.”

“Assuming the colony was founded 2690, that would have been about 2739 by the terrestrial calendar.”

“Yes.”

“The thing hit in 2745.”

“Yeah. I wonder if they even knew it was coming when they built the school.”

Alex rubbed his forehead. “Probably not. Would the building have been tenable afterward? After the event?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Windy sighed. “If it was, you wouldn’t want to be there during summer or winter.”

“No,” said Alex. “I guess not.”

“It would have meant a lot of running around,” I said.

“They might not have had much choice,” said Alex. “It’s not as if they could have stayed a few months at the pole, and the rest of the year on the equator. They would have needed bases between. Places to stay. Maybe this became one. Spring City. I can’t imagine they were able to stay very long in any one place.”

“I’m surprised they just didn’t give up,” said Windy. She seemed saddened by the news. I think we’d all hoped the end had come quickly.

Alex smiled. “Six centuries.” He told Jacob to enlarge the cornerstone. “Incredible.” It had begun to get dark outside. Our outside. Rain clouds building. “Anything else?” he asked.

“They found a monument. Maybe the place where the colonists first set foot on the ground. Hard to say for sure. Everything’s so broken up.”

“What’s it look like?”

The lights flickered and we were standing beside pieces of stone that were being painstakingly reassembled into a wall. There were fragments of an inscription that read, when translated, On this site, and -in the name of-, and foot. And a zero.

There’d been another figure in front of the zero, possibly a nine, or an eight. Followed by C.E. “Common Era,” said Windy.

“It’s Earth-related,” said Alex, for my benefit.

“We think,” she continued, “the colonists arrived in January 2690. More or less.

Emil says they wouldn’t be likely to refer to terrestrial dates, in concrete, except for terrestrial-related events. They can only think of one.”

She was back on the circuit again just before we closed up for the day. “Got something else. Emil says he thinks they found the ground terminal for the flights down from orbit. It’s in the southern temperate zone.”

“Jacob,” said Alex, “let’s see the map.”

I didn’t realize we had one. A globe of Margolia appeared. It showed the now-familiar island-continents, rivers, mountain chains. The location of the south polar base was marked and the various sites that the mission had uncovered.

Windy told us where the terminal was, and Jacob duly marked it. “It was located just outside a major city.”

Okay. No surprise there. “Any sign of a lander?”

“No,” she said. “They’ve scanned the area pretty closely. Emil says the jungle probably ate it. Was there a lander on board the Seeker?”

“Yes,” said Alex. “It was there.” He signed off and looked at me, waiting for me to say something.

What did he want from me? “Why are you smiling like that?” I asked. “What’s all this about the lander?”

“Where is it?”

“Dissolved,” I said. “Part of the jungle.”

“How’d they get down from the orbiter?”

“How’d who get down from the orbiter?”

“Whoever released the Bremerhaven from its tethers?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t come down. Maybe they-”

“Right,” he said. “Maybe they boarded the ship.”

“No. The ship wouldn’t function.”

“Then where’s the lander?”

“It’s on the ground somewhere. They’ll find it. It’s buried.”

“There’s another possibility,” he said.

“Which is what?”

“Chase, I want you to do a favor for me.”

I sighed. Loudly. “Okay.”

“I’ve been talking to every historian, librarian, and archivist I can think of.”

“About what?”

“Anything that might help us. I want you to check something out.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been to Earth, right? No? Historic place. It’s about time you paid a visit.”