Seeker

THREE

There is an almost mystical attraction for us in the notion of the lost world, of an Atlantis out there somewhere, a place where the routine problems of ordinary life have been banished, where everyone lives in a castle, where there’s a party every night, where every woman is stunning and every man noble and brave.

- Lescue Harkin,

Memory, Myth, and Mind, 1376 The Third Millennium was a long time ago, and the record is notoriously incomplete.

We know who the political leaders were, we know when and how the wars started (if not always why), we know the principal artists, literary movements, religious conflicts.

We know which nation threatened to do what to whom. But we’ve little idea what people’s lives were like, how they spent their time, what they really thought about the world in which they lived. We know of assassinations, but we don’t always know the rationale. Or even whether, when they happened, ordinary citizens mourned or breathed a sigh of relief.

Nine thousand years is a long time. And nobody except a few historians really thinks much about it.

So Jacob went looking for the Searcher. When he found nothing, he started recovering detailed accounts of the more famous interstellars, on the possibility we’d find mention of a similar name. “Maybe we don’t quite have the translation right,” he said. “English was a slippery language.”

So we went through accounts of the Avenger, which had played a prominent role in the first interstellar war between Earth and three of its colonies in the early thirty-third century. And the Lassiter, the first deep-space corsair. And the thirtieth century Karaki, the largest ship of its time, which had hauled a record load of capital goods out to Regulus IV to get that colony started. And the Chao Huang, which had taken a team of doctors to Maracaibo when, against all expectation, human settlers had been stricken by a native plague. (This was at a time when the experts still believed disease germs could only attack creatures evolved in the same biosystem.) There was endless information about the Tokyo, the first interstellar to vanish into the transdimensions. Never heard from again. There were pictures of its captain and first mate, and of various passengers, of the dining area and the engine room. Everything you wanted to know. Except where it went.

And the most famous of all the starships, the Centaurus, which made the first transdimensional flight to Earth’s neighboring star, requiring seven weeks to complete the journey one way. You have to smile at that: Seven weeks to go four light-years.

But there was no mention of a Searcher. Or an Explorer. There was a Voyager. Three of them, in fact. A popular name, obviously. And even a Hunter.

Few physical objects have survived from the Third Millennium. Most of them tend to be either ceramic, like Amy Kolmer’s cup, or plastic. There’s an axiom in our business that the cheapest stuff lasts longest.

I didn’t know anybody who was an expert on the era, so I checked the Registry and picked one at random, an assistant professor at Barcross University. His name was Shepard Marquard. He looked young, but he’d written extensively on the period and been recognized by his peers.

I called and had no problem getting through. Marquard was a good-looking guy, tall and redheaded, more personable than his pictures had led me to expect. “Most of the naval and shipping records from that era are lost,” he told me. “But I’ll see what I can do. I’ll look through what I have and get back to you.”

The following day, I took virtual tours of half a dozen museums and spent a lot of time wandering through third-millennium artifacts. I saw a plastic case that might once have been a container for makeup, an electronic device whose use could only be guessed at, a woman’s pair of high-heeled shoes, a couple of pens, a lamp, a sofa, a sheet of paper in laminated plastic described as a “classified section from a newspaper.” I didn’t know what a newspaper was, and neither did anybody else I was able to talk to. (Marquard told me later that it was information printed on paper and distributed physically across a wide area.) There was a man’s hat with a visor to keep the sun off. And a coin with an eagle on one side. Metal money. United States of America.

In God We Trust. It was dated 2006, and the data display said it was the second-oldest coin in existence.

I wandered through the exhibits, and when I’d seen everything I cared about, I settled into a reading room and opened one of the data files.

The Third Millennium was a turbulent era. Earth was crowded well beyond capacity.

Its inhabitants seemed to be constantly at war with each other, over politics, real estate, or religion. Political systems were generally corrupt and prone to collapse.

There were serious environmental problems left over from the Industrial Age, and the deterioration of the global climate seemed to coincide with political leaders who grew increasingly ruthless. The worst of these was Marko III, known to his American subjects as The Magnificent.

Midway through the twenty-fifth century, while Marko was jailing and killing as his mood dictated, Diane Harriman did her groundbreaking work in the dimensional structure of the space-time continuum, and twenty years later Shi-Ko Han and Edward Cleaver gave us the interstellar drive.

Another four years, and we’d discovered the first habitable world. It’s not surprising to read that a lot of volunteers signed up to head for the frontier.

I was getting ready to go home for the day when Jacob passed a call to me. “Chase,” said a familiar voice. “I think I have what you want.”

It was Marquard. “You’ve identified the Searcher,” I said.

“Yeah.” There was an odd intonation. “May I ask why you wanted to know?”

I told him about the cup. He listened without comment, and when I’d finished, the silence stretched out. “Your turn,” I said finally. “What have you got?”

“A surprise. Could you arrange to come by the school?”

“Can’t you just tell me what you have?”

“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you join me for dinner?”

Subtle as an avalanche. “Dr. Marquard, I really haven’t time to go all the way out to Barcross.” Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but it’s a long run.

“Call me Shep. And I guarantee you’ll find it worth your while.”

Barcross is a large diamond-shaped island, probably best known as a summer resort for singles. Years ago I went through a phase during which it was an occasional part of my social calendar. It was part surf, part moonlight, part dream. The kind of place that felt as if the love of your life was in the wings somewhere. I’m a bit more realistic now, but I still felt a touch of regret as I came in low over the ocean and looked down at the empty beaches and the villas beyond. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and lights were beginning to come on.

The island is engineered. It’s arranged with consecutively rising terraces as you move inshore, so that everyone, theoretically, has a view of the sea. It was off-season. A few hardy souls moved along ramps and walkways. Most of the shops and restaurants were closed.

Base population was forty thousand, with an additional forty distributed among surrounding islands. The university served seven thousand students, who came from all over the archipelago and from the mainland. It had a good reputation, especially for the sciences. If you planned to be a physician, it was exactly the right place to start.

The campus spread across two broad terraces, immediately below the municipal buildings, which occupied the highest point on the island. I turned the skimmer over to the guide, which brought me down onto a landing pad adjoining a dome. The dome housed a student center, several shops, and a restaurant. The restuarant was Benjamin’s. I remembered it from a long time ago, when it had been down near the beach.

Marquard surprised me by appearing from a side door. He strode quickly out onto the pad, opened the hatch, and provided a hand to help me down. In an age when chivalry ranks up there as just one more antiquity, it was a good way to start things off.

Barcross has probably the loveliest campus on the planet. It’s all obelisks and tortoiseshell buildings and pyramids, with a spectacular command of the sea. But it was cold that day, and a sharp blast of wind stayed at our backs and all but blew us into the student center.

“It’s good to meet you, Chase,” he said, steering us into Benjamin’s. “I appreciate your coming.” He was wearing gray slacks and a blue seashell shirt beneath a white jacket. He looked good, a tall, dashing type with a sense of humor and maybe a little bit shy, out for a night on the town.

We sat down and picked up our menus. Benjamin’s hadn’t changed much over the years. The dining area was bigger than in the old days, when the restaurant was located on a pier. And the selections had changed, of course. But it was still cozy, still subdued, and it still featured a seafaring ambience. There were sails and wheels and compasses scattered about, and one wall opened onto a virtual lighthouse and storm.

In addition, they still had images of celebrity entertainers, including the classic one of Cary Webber standing outside the restaurant on the pier, with the ocean at her back.

She looked lost. Cary had been a romantic favorite, but she died young, of course, and thereby became immortal.

We ordered wine and some breadsticks. When the server had gone, Marquard leaned across the table and whispered that I was striking. “But of course,” he said, “you already know that.”

I wondered if I was in for a long evening. I said thanks, propped my elbows on the table, folded my hands, and rested my chin on them. “Shep,” I said, “what do you have on the Searcher?”

“Wrong translation, Chase.” He looked around as if to ensure that we were alone-we were, save for a group of three or four students seated over by the window-and lowered his voice. “It’s Seeker.” He said it as if it had special significance.

“Seeker,” I said.

“That’s correct.”

“Okay.”

“Chase, I don’t think you understand. This might be the Seeker.”

“I’m sorry, Shep. I have no idea what we’re talking about. What’s the Seeker?”

“It’s one of the ships that carried the Margolians off to their colony.”

“The Margolians.”

He smiled at my ignorance. “They left Earth during the Third Millennium. Fled, I guess, is a better term. They told nobody where they were going. Went out on their own with five thousand people. And we never heard from them again. They’re the lost colony.”

Atlantis. Intava. Margolia. Light dawned. “They’re a myth, aren’t they?”

“Not really. It happened.”

“They didn’t care much for the home world.”

“Chase, they lived in a society that was nominally a republic-”

“-But-?”

“-It controlled the churches, and used the schools to indoctrinate rather than teach.

Patriotism was defined as unwavering support for the leader and the flag. Anything short of that was disloyal. The decisions of those in authority were not to be questioned.”

“What happened if you did? You got jailed?”

“Hellfire.”

“What?”

“You had a divinely imposed responsibility to submit to the will of the president.

Render to Caesar.”

“That’s not what ‘Render to Caesar’ means.”

“It got twisted a bit. Failure to support the political establishment, and for that matter the social establishment, in thought as well as in act, constituted a serious offense against the Almighty.”

“Weren’t there any skeptics out there?”

“Sure. But you don’t hear much about them.”

It was hard to believe people could ever have lived like that. “So it’s a famous ship?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Are you telling me the Seeker never came back, either?”

“That’s correct.” He leaned toward me, and the candlelight flashed off a row of white teeth. “Chase. If this cup you told me about is really from the Seeker, you couldn’t have done better.” The wine and breadsticks arrived. “You say a woman walked in off the street and just presented you with it? Without any explanation?”

“Yes. That’s pretty much what happened.” I was thinking how pleased Alex would be.

“I don’t suppose you have it with you?”

I smiled. “If I’d tried to take it off the premises, Alex would have had cardiac arrest.”

“And you’re sure it’s nine thousand years old?”

“That’s the reading we got.”

“Incredible.” He handed me my glass and lifted his own. “To the Margolians,” he said.

Indeed. “So what really happened to them?”

He shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

The wine was good. Candles. Firelight. And good wine. And good news. It was a hard combination to beat. “They vanished completely?”

“Yes.” The waiter was back. I tend to eat light meals, even when someone else is buying. I settled for a fruit salad.

The waiter asked whether I was certain, and assured me that the Cordelia breakers were excellent.

“The Seeker,” Marquard continued, “left Earth December 27, 2688, carrying approximately nine hundred people. Two years later they were back, and took off another nine hundred.”

“There was a third trip as well, wasn’t there?” I was beginning to remember the story.

“Yes. The other ship was the Bremerhaven. They made three flights each. Carried more than five thousand people out to the colony world.”

“And nobody knew where it was? How’s it even possible? You can’t leave the station without filing a movement report.”

“Chase, we’re talking about the beginning of the interstellar age. They didn’t have many rules then.”

“Who owned the ship?”

“The Margolians. According to the record, it was refitted after each flight.”

“That doesn’t sound as if it was in the best of shape.”

“I don’t know what it took to maintain an interstellar in that era.”

“Was a search conducted for them?”

“Hard to say. The records aren’t clear.” He finished off his wine and gazed at the rim of the glass, which sparkled in the candlelight. “Chase, the authorities probably didn’t try very hard. These were people who didn’t want to be found.”

“Why not?”

An easy smile spread over his features. He did look good. He sat a few moments, admiring my charms, or my physical attributes, or the breadsticks. He signaled his approval as the waiter showed up with a dish full of nuts and grapes. “They were perceived as troublemakers. They wanted to stay out of sight, and the government was happy to oblige them.”

“How were they troublemakers?” I asked.

“You ever been to Earth, Chase?”

“No, as a matter of fact. I’ve been wanting to make the trip for years. Just never got around to it.”

“You should do it. That’s where it all began. For an historian, the trip to Earth is de rigueur.

“You go there, and you see the great monuments. Pyramids, statues, dams. The Kinoi Tower. The Mirabulis. Stop by Athens, where Plato and his colleagues launched the civilized world. Visit London, Paris, Berlin. Washington, and Tokyo. St. Petersburg.

Famous places, once. Centers of power in their day. You know what they’re like now?”

“Well, I know they’re not capitals anymore.”

“Except Paris. Paris is forever, they say. Chase, Earth has always had a problem: It’s loaded with more people than its resources can support. It’s always been that way.

Ever since the Industrial Age. The results of too many people are that someone’s always hungry, there’s always a plague running loose somewhere. Ethnic jealousies always get worse when times are hard. Nations become unstable, so governments get nervous and impose strictures. Individual freedoms break down. One thing the place has never been short of is dictators. People there have old habits, old hatreds, old perspectives that they keep passing down from generation to generation, and never get rid of.

“The planet’s population today is about eight billion. When the Margolians left, it was more than twice that. Can you imagine what life must have been like?”

“So,” I said, “the Margolians were, what, downtrodden? Trying to find a place where they could feed their kids?”

“No. They were at the other end of the scale. They were intellectuals, by and large.

And they had their share of the wealth. But they didn’t like the noxious environment.

Noxious meaning both physically and psychologically. They had a dictator. A theocrat by the name of Carvalla, who was relatively harmless as dictators went. But a dictator nevertheless. He controlled the media, controlled the schools, controlled the churches.

You attended church or you paid the consequences. The schools were indoctrination centers.”

“Hard to believe people would consent to live like that.”

“They’d been trained to take authority seriously. In Carvalla’s time, if you didn’t do what you were told, you disappeared.”

“I’m beginning to see why they wanted to clear out.”

“They were led by Harry Williams.”

Another name I was obviously supposed to know. “Sorry,” I said.

“He was a communications magnate, and he was connected for years to various social and political movements, trying to get food for hungry kids, to make medical care available. He didn’t get into trouble until he started trying to do something about education.”

“What happened?”

“The authorities didn’t like his basic notion, which was that kids should be taught to question everything.”

“Oh.”

“They called him unpatriotic.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“An atheist.”

“Was he?”

“He was an agnostic. Just as bad.”

“In that kind of society, I suppose so. You said it was a theocracy?”

“Yes. The head of state was also effectively the head of the Church.”

“What happened to Williams?”

“Fifteen years in jail. Or seventeen. Depends on which sources you trust. He’d have been executed, except that he had powerful friends.”

“So he did get out?”

“Yes, he got out. But it was while he was in jail that he decided something had to be done. Revolution wasn’t possible. So the next best thing was to escape. ‘Joseph Margolis had it right,’ he’s reported to have said at a meeting of his associates. ‘We’ll never be able to change things.’ ”

“I take it Joseph Margolis is the guy they’re named for?”

“Right.”

“Who was he?”

“A British prime minister. A hero, and apparently something of a philosopher.”

“What was he right about?”

“That communication technologies lead easily to enslavement. That it is very difficult to maintain individual freedoms. He was fond of citing Benjamin Franklin’s comment to the American people: ‘We have given you a republic. Now see if you can keep it.’ ”

He saw I didn’t recognize Franklin’s name either. He grinned and offered to explain, but I got the drift. “There were no colonies at the time, were there?”

“Two small ones. But both were under control of the home world. There were no independents.”

“And the government acquiesced?”

“They encouraged him to go and offered assistance.” He stared through the window at the ocean. “Good riddance to troublemakers. But that meant they’d know the location of the colony. Williams wanted out from under their thumb. So he and whoever was with him had to go it alone.”

“Not possible,” I said.

“Some of the Margolians thought the same way. But he persuaded them to make the attempt. They believed they could create an Eden. A home for humanity that would embody freedom and security. An ideal place to live.”

“That’s been tried any number of times,” I said.

He nodded. “Sometimes it’s happened. Anyhow, they were desperate. They sent people out to look for the right world. When they found it, they kept its location secret, bought the two ships, and headed out. Five thousand of them.”

“That’s an incredible story,” I said.

“Harry went with the last group, more than four years after the first Margolians left.

He’s reported to have told the media that, where they were going, even God wouldn’t be able to find them.”

The server refilled our glasses. “And nobody ever did,” I said.

“No. Not as far as I can tell.”

Alex was not very demonstrative. If the building were burning, he’d suggest it might be prudent to make for the door. So the news that the cup was associated with both a famous ship and a celebrated mystery did not send him reeling with joy around the office. But I saw a glint of satisfaction in those brown eyes. “Jacob,” he said.

Jacob responded with a few bars of Perrigrin’s Eighth. The kind of majestic chords with which heroic figures in the sims customarily make their entrances. Alex told him to knock it off.

“How may I be of assistance?” Jacob asked, in the deepest baritone he could muster.

Alex rolled his eyes. “Jacob,” he said, “we’d like to know whether any artifacts from the two ships associated with the Margolians, the Seeker and the Bremerhaven, are currently available, or have been on the market at any time.”

“They’d be quite old,” said Jacob. “I’ll need a few moments.”

We made small talk for about a minute, then he was back. “I see nothing of that nature. Nothing associated with either vessel. There are six verified items connected with the Margolians themselves. And numerous suspect objects.”

“Name them, please. The ones that are verified.”

“A communications link of some sort. A pen with Jase Tao-Ki’s name engraved on it.

Tao-Ki was a prominent member of the group, and a substantial contributor. There is also a wall plaque on which is inscribed a commendation to the Margolians from a social welfare group. A lapel pin bearing their symbol and name. The symbol is a torch. A portrait of Harry Williams himself. And a copy of Glory Run, signed by its author, Kay Wallis. It’s an account of how they put the mission together. The signature is faded but can be seen in ultraviolet light. All six were left behind. There is nothing from them after their departure.”

“Who was Kay Wallis?” asked Alex.

“One of the founders of the organization. One of its prime defenders when people began to laugh at them. The record’s unclear, but it looks as if she died just before the final round of flights. She never left Earth.” He paused, perhaps expecting a comment.

But none came. “Wallis laid out their objections to various governmental policies in Glory Run. Basically they were concerned that each generation was subjected to a series of ideologies which, once imposed, were hard to get rid of, hampered independent thought, and led to various hostilities. She spells everything out. Get the religious groups under control. Reign in the corporate types. Recognize that dissent is healthy. Provide a level playing field so no one is disadvantaged.”

“If American society-that was America, right?-Yes, if American society was so oppressive, how’d she get it published?”

“It was published in China,” said Jacob, “one of the last strongholds of democracy on the planet.”

“The Margolians,” I said, “weren’t really disadvantaged.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed. “They had resources. But if you don’t have freedom of action, disadvantaged is the right word.” He scribbled something on a pad. “Let’s talk about the artifacts.” He requested a list of the amounts paid the last time the six Margolian objects had changed hands. Jacob reported two had been secret transactions. The other four printed out. Alex sighed. “Not bad,” he said.

Indeed. Tao-Ki’s pen went for several years’ worth of my income. And I was well paid. The others were higher.

Alex rubbed his hands together. “Okay. She’ll have to produce ownership documentation before any of this goes public.” He was, of course, speaking of Amy.

“You’ll take care of that?” I said. There would also be some negotiation involved, and that line of work was his specialty.

“Get through to her when you can. Find out if she’d be willing to meet us at the Hillside for a drink.”

I called Amy. She decided good things had happened and pressed me for information.

I explained that we were still gathering data, but that Alex wished to ask a few more questions. She wasn’t having it, of course. But that was okay. When we got to the Hillside, Alex would caution her not to pass the good news to anyone until we were sure nobody would dispute her ownership claim. We had to do that to protect ourselves since we would be facilitating the sale.

“I’ll be there,” she said.

Alex had placed the cup in our vault. I brought its image up and wondered about its history.

Probably, someone had collected it as a souvenir during the Seeker ’s early years, before it became associated with the Margolian migration. Or, it might have made one or two of the early flights to the colony world and come off the ship when it returned for the third mission. It was unlikely, but it could have happened that way. Were that the case, and we could show that it was, the cup would then become enormously valuable. But it was hard to see how we could take it that far.

When I mentioned it to Alex, he told me not to get excited. “FTL travel was a big deal in the twenty-seventh century,” he said. “What probably happened is that somebody got the trademark rights and produced cups and uniforms and all sorts of Seeker souvenirs for sale to the general public.”

The English characters looked especially exotic. Marquard had pronounced the ship’s name for me, in both Standard and in English. He’d admitted at the same time that there was some uncertainty about pronunciation. No original audio recordings remained from the period, so even though we could read the language, nobody knew for certain what it had actually sounded like.

See-ker. Accent on the first syllable.

Outward Bound.

Where had they gone? “So far away even God won’t be able to find us.”

Several accounts existed of various aspects of the story, the background of Harry Williams, the roots of the Margolian movement, contemporary attacks accusing the Margolians of being elitist, their probable destination, and, eventually, theories about their disappearance. They had done precisely what they said they would do, suggested some. They had gone so far out, that even now, thousands of years later, the world they’d selected remained undetected.

The common wisdom was that something had gone wrong and the colony had perished. Some thought that Margolia, over the ages, might have sidestepped the various bumps and reversals suffered by the mainline civilization, and moved so far ahead of it that they would not be interested in communicating with us. Me, I thought the common wisdom had it right.

Margolia had been the subject of several sims. Jacob showed me one. It was titled Invader, and had been produced less than a year earlier. In it, the hero discovers that Margolians have returned quietly to the Confederacy. They are highly advanced, they walk unrecognized among us, and they actually control the machinery of government.

They consider ordinary humans to be inferior and are planning a takeover. When the protagonist tries to warn the authorities, his girlfriend disappears, people begin dying, and there are lots of chases down dark alleys and through the corridors of an abandoned space station. The plot dissolves into a major shoot-out at the end, the young lady is rescued, and the good people of the Confederacy are alerted.

No one ever explained what conceivable reason the Margolians could have had in trying to take us over. But I’ll give the producers this: I was hanging on to my chair during the chase scenes.