Seeker

FIVE

There’s something about having a black hole in the neighborhood that leads to sleepless nights.

- Karl Svenson,

Strumpets Have All the Fun, 1417 Morinda is one of three black holes known to exist inside Confederacy space. The name also serves the large armored orbiting space station that was home to a thousand researchers and their support staffs, who were measuring, poking, taking the temperature of, and throwing assorted objects into, the beast. Most of them, according to the info tabs, were trying to learn how to bend space. There were even a few psychologists conducting experiments related to the way people perceive time.

I had never been there, nor had I ever seen a black hole before. If that’s the correct terminology, since you don’t really see a black hole. This one wasn’t particularly big, as these things go. It was maybe a couple hundred times the mass of Rimway’s sun. A ring of illuminated debris, the accretion disk, enclosed it, firing off X-ray jets and God-knows-what other kinds of radiation, and sometimes even rocks.

That’s why the station is armored and equipped with Y-beam projectors. Most of the action is predictable, but the experts claim you never really know. They don’t worry much about the rocks, which they can dissolve. But radiation is a different kind of problem.

I jumped into the system at a range of about 70 million kilometers from the hole. That was closer than I should have been, but still a safe distance. Quantum travel is convenient because it’s instantaneous. But the downside is that there’s a larger degree of uncertainty to it than there was with the old Armstrong engines. It’s a modest difference, but it’s there, and it’s enough to get you killed if you don’t give yourself plenty of room so you don’t materialize inside a planet, or for that matter in the same space as anything too big for the prods to push out of the way.

I needed three days to coast into the station. While en route I arranged billeting, called my old friend Jack Harmon who was there on assignment and let him know I was coming and he could expect to buy me a drink, and checked out what I could find on Hap’s sister.

Her name was Kayla Bentner. She was a nutritech, whose chief responsibility was to see that food supplies at the station were healthful. Her husband Rem was a lawyer. I know you’re wondering why a space station needs a lawyer, but this is a big operation.

People are always renegotiating contracts and quarreling over assigned time on the instruments. They also get married, make out wills, file for separation. And occasionally they sue one another.

At a place like that, the lawyer is the neutral party, the guy everybody trusts. Not like back home.

I thought about letting Kayla know I was coming, but then decided it would be best not to make a big deal of it. So I cruised into my assigned berth on the evening of the third day, checked into my hotel room, met Harmon in a small bistro, and spent the evening recalling old times and generally enjoying myself. I’d hoped he might know either Kayla or her husband. That would have made the job easier, but no such luck.

In the late morning I planted myself outside the offices of the Support Services, where Kayla worked, and when she came out to go to lunch, I fell in behind.

She was with two other women. I followed them into a restaurant called Joystra’s, which was a no-frills place. The tables were too close together and management expected you to eat up and move on. Furniture, curtains, and tableware all looked as if they had been made on the run. But it was located on the station’s outer perimeter, and there was a wall-length window with a view of the accretion disk. It wasn’t much to look at, a large shining ring that under other circumstances would have been just another shining ring, of which the Orion Arm has plenty, but it was ominous because you couldn’t get out of your mind what was at the center of the thing.

Kayla didn’t look much like her brother. She was tall, trim, serious. Civilized. You looked into her light blue eyes, and you could see somebody was home. Half the people in the restaurant seemed to know her, and exchanged greetings with her as she passed.

She and her friends were shown to a table, and I was next in line, wondering how to manage getting an introduction when I caught a break. Sharing tables during peak hours was a common practice at the station. “Would madam mind?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Perhaps the three ladies who just came in-”

“I’ll attend to it.” The autohost was tall, lean, black mustache, constantly smiling, but it was the kind of smile that looked glued on. I’ve never understood why the people who arrange these things can’t get the details right. He strode over to the table where Kayla and the others were seated and made his request. The women looked my way, one of them nodded, and Kayla raised a hand in my direction.

I went over. Introductions all around. I gave my name as Chase Dellmar. “I know you from somewhere,” I told Kayla, putting on my best puzzled frown.

She studied me. Shook her head. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

I pressed an index finger against my lips and creased my brow, thinking deeply about where we might have connected. There was some back and forth about places we’d both worked. No link there. Different schools. Must be my imagination. We ordered, lunch came, we talked aimlessly. The women were all assigned to the same facility.

There was a problem of some sort with the boss, who was forever taking credit for other people’s ideas, who wouldn’t listen to anyone, and who didn’t spend enough time with the software. That was station-speak for someone who didn’t socialize, a capital crime in a small society. The usual cautions about supervisors fraternizing with the help didn’t apply to the same degree in places like Morinda.

I waited until we were finished and dividing the check. Then it struck me. I brightened, looked directly at Kayla, and said, “You’re Hap’s sister.”

She went white. “You know Hap?”

“I was Chase Bonner when you knew me. I used to come by the apartment.”

She frowned.

“Years ago, of course. I can understand you might have forgotten.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I remember you. Of course. It’s just that it’s been so long.”

“I can’t believe I’d run into you here.”

“Yes. That’s a wild coincidence, isn’t it?”

“How’s Hap? I haven’t seen him in a lot of years.”

“Oh. He’s okay. I guess. Actually, I haven’t seen him myself in a long time.” We were out of the restaurant by then, trailing behind her companions. “Listen,” she said, “it’s been a pleasure to see you again, uh…” She had to struggle for the name. “Shelley.”

“Chase.” I smiled gently. “It’s okay. We didn’t spend that much time together. I wouldn’t expect you to remember me.”

“No. I remember you. It’s just that I have to get back to work, and I guess my mind is on other things.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand. How about letting me buy you a drink while I’m here?

Maybe this evening?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Chase. My husband-”

“Bring him along-”

“-doesn’t drink.”

“Dinner then. My treat.”

“I can’t let you do that.” Still backing away from me.

“It’s okay. It’s something I’d really like to do, Kayla.”

“You have a number?” I gave it to her. “Let me check with him, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay. I hope you can make it.”

“I’m sure we can manage it, Chase. And thank you.”

We met at the same place where Jack and I had eaten the evening before. I brought him along to balance the sides.

Remilon Bentner was a pleasant enough dinner companion, easygoing, plainspoken, a good conversationalist. He and Jack, it turned out, both played a game that had become popular at the station. It was called Governance, and required participants to make political and social-engineering decisions. We have, for example, implants that will stimulate intelligence. No known side effects. Do we make them available to the general public? “I did, and I got some unpleasant surprises,” said Rem. “High IQs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

“In what way?” I asked.

Jack was drinking coffee. “Beyond a certain level, roughly one-eighty, people, young ones especially, tend to become disruptive. Rebellious.”

“But that,” I said, “is because they become restless, right? Their peers are slower, so the brighter ones lose patience.”

“Actually,” said Rem, “they’re simply harder to program. You ever wonder why human intelligence is set where it is?”

“I assume,” I said, “it’s because the dumber apes walked into the tigers.”

“But why not higher?” asked Jack. “When Kasavitch did his Phoenician study at the beginning of the last century, he concluded there was no evidence humans are any smarter now than they were at the dawn of history. Why not?”

“Easy,” said Kayla. “Fifteen thousand years is too short a time for evolutionary effects to take hold. Kasavitch-did I get his name right?-needs to come back in a hundred thousand years and try again. I think he’ll see a difference.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bentner. “There seems to be a ceiling.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The experts think that once you get past one-eighty, you become too much of a social problem. Uncontrollable. Herd-of-cats syndrome. Authority tends to be a bit mindless no matter how you structure the political system. The high-IQ types have a hard time tolerating it.” He grinned. “That puts them at a serious disadvantage. These people get to about seven years old and after that they have to learn everything the hard way. Where a truly superior intelligence should help them, it becomes a handicap. In the old days, the tribe would get sick of it and wouldn’t protect them. So the tigers got them.”

“The same thing,” said Jack, “seems to be true among the Mutes. They have more or less the same range we do. And the same ceiling.” The Mutes were the only known alien race. They were a telepathic species.

“I’d expect,” I said, “that the rules would be different for telepaths.”

Bentner shook his head. “Apparently not. Jack, what did you do? Did you use the implants?”

Jack shook his head. “No. I didn’t think a whole society full of people who thought they knew everything would be a good idea.”

“Smart man. My society became unstable within two generations. I’ve a friend whose state collapsed altogether.”

“Did you know,” said Jack, “that the suicide rate among people with genius-level IQs is almost three times what it is among the general population?”

“We’re dumb for a reason,” I said.

“That’s right.” Bentner grinned. “And thank God for it.” He lifted a glass. “To mediocrity,” he said. “May it flourish.”

A few minutes later, I mentioned as a by-the-way that my hobby was collecting antique cups. That caught nobody’s interest. But I turned to Kayla. “Now that I think of it, you guys had one.”

“One what?”

“An antique cup. Remember? It had that strange writing on it.”

“Not us,” she said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

“Sure,” I said. “I remember it clearly. It was gray, with a green-and-white eagle.

Wings spread.”

She considered it. Pursed her lips. Shook her head. Then surprised me. “Yes. I remember. It was on the mantel.”

“You know,” I said, “I always admired that cup.”

“I hadn’t thought about it in years. But that’s right. We did have one like that.”

“Those were good days, Kayla. I don’t know why that cup sticks in my memory. I tend to associate it with happy times, I guess.”

“That sounds as if you’re having problems.”

“No. Not at all. But that was a more innocent age. You know how it is.”

“Of course.”

She and I were drinking tea, and we each took a sip. “I wonder where it is now,” I said. “The cup. Do you still have it?”

“I don’t know where it is,” she said. “I don’t have it. I haven’t seen it since I was a girl.”

“Maybe Hap has it.”

“Could be.”

“You know,” I said, “when I get home I think I’ll look him up. It would be nice to see him again.”

Her features hardened. “You wouldn’t like him now.”

“Oh?”

“He’s too much like his father.” She shook her head in disapproval. “Well, let it go.”

We talked about her work on the station, and when I saw an opening, I went back to the cup: “You know, I was always intrigued by it. By the cup. Where did it come from originally, Kayla? Do you know?”

“I’ve no idea,” she said.

“Hap never struck me as someone interested in antiques.”

“Oh,” she said, “I doubt it’s an antique. But you’re right about Hap.” A darkness drifted into her eyes. “He wasn’t interested in anything this side of alcohol, drugs, and money. And women.”

She regretted having said that, and I tried to look sympathetic and moved the conversation along. “Somebody probably gave it to him.”

“No. We had it up on the shelf as far back as I can remember. When Hap and I were both kids.” She thought about it. “I suspect he might still have it.”

“You know,” I said, “I seem to recall there were a couple other pieces like it.”

“No, Chase,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Dinner finally arrived. “I’m pretty sure it’s the only one we had. Now that I think of it, I believe Mom told me once that my father gave it to her.”

Alex’s celebrity has spilled over, to a degree, on me. I seem to have not quite enough to draw autograph seekers, but I do get the occasional crank. Next morning, I was standing in a souvenir stall picking up a snack to take back to my room when a small, sharply dressed, middle-aged man with disheveled black hair asked whether I wasn’t Chase Kolpath. The tone was already vaguely hostile. And it took me a moment to realize this was the same guy who’d disrupted Ollie Bolton’s remarks at the Caucus.

Kolchevsky.

I could have denied who I was. I’ve done that in the past, but I didn’t think it would work with this character. So I owned up.

“I thought so,” he said.

I started edging away from him.

“No offense intended, Ms. Kolpath. But you seem like a capable young lady.”

“Thank you,” I said, grabbing a cherry cheesecake more or less at random and pointing my key at the reader to pay for it.

“Please don’t run off. I’d like a moment of your time.” He coughed lightly. “My name is Casmir Kolchevsky. I’m an archeologist.”

“I know who you are,” I said. Kolchevsky, despite his hysterical behavior on that earlier occasion, was not small potatoes. He had done major excavations on Dellaconda, in Baka Ti. It was a civilization that had prospered for almost six hundred years before going into a sharp decline. Today it was nothing more than a handful of villages. The reasons behind its collapse remained very much a subject for debate.

Some thought their technological development had outrun their good sense, others that they’d been victimized by a cultural revolution that had split them into a series of warring subgroups, and still others that their dinnerware had contained too much lead, leading to widespread infertility. Kolchevsky had done much of the fieldwork at Baka Ti, had in the process recovered a substantial number of antiquities that were now housed in museums. And he’d established a reputation for both brilliance and bellicosity.

“Good. No need then to stand on ceremony.” He looked up at me as he might have looked at a cat with a broken leg. “I’ve read about you,” he said. “You’re obviously talented.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

“May I ask what in heaven you’re doing working for Benedict?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, come now. You know what I’m talking about. You and your partner are a pair of temple thieves. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I’m really quite appalled.”

“I’m sorry you disapprove of what we do, Professor.” I tried to get by him, but he blocked my exit.

“The day will come, young lady, when you’ll look back over these years and regret your actions.”

“Professor, I’d appreciate it if you would let me by.”

“Of course.” But he didn’t move. “Benedict,” he went on, warming to his subject, “is a grave robber. A looter. Objects that should be the property of everyone wind up as showpieces in the homes of the wealthy.” His voice softened. “You know that as well as I do.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. “You don’t sound as if you’re open to other opinions, so why don’t we just agree to disagree and let it go at that? Now, I’ll ask you again, please stand out of my way.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “I really didn’t mean to give offense. But I wonder whether you’re aware what your association with him does to your own reputation?”

“I’m inclined to wonder, Professor, who appointed you guardian of the world’s treasures?”

“Ah, yes. By all means, when no defense will suffice, go on the attack.” He stood aside. “That’s not a very satisfactory response, is it?”

“It wasn’t a very satisfactory question.”

I’d decided to spend a couple of days with Jack. But before going down to meet him for lunch, I sent a message to Alex, advising him that the mission had been futile. I was coming home with nothing. I didn’t mention Kolchevsky.