Monica had loved this view. So had Cochrane. But now that its splendor continued without her, he begrudged each day it renewed itself, each day that it increased his time alone.
“The guests have arrived, sir,” Montcalm said.
“Guests,” Cochrane muttered. Was there no other name for those who had come to attend a funeral? Why not mourners? Why not victims?
“May I assist you?” Montcalm asked. He held out a powerfully muscled black arm. Growing up under high gravity had produced a generation of weight lifters here. The medical facilities in Micah Town worked round the clock to develop the technologies and treatments these children invariably required as they reached their fortieth Earth birthday and their strained hearts began to rebel against Centauri B II’s gravity. But the answers were locked in their cells, needing only a slight medical coaxing to come out and protect them, so their lives were safe. As Cochrane had thought fifty-six years ago, when he had first set foot on this world and done the unthinkable by removing his breathing mask to taste alien air without ill effect, humanity was meant to go to other worlds unencumbered—though his sinuses still troubled him each primary winter, when the planet was exposed to the light of a single sun and the plains exploded with temperate vegetation and a convulsion of flowers.
Standing before that view, Cochrane didn’t move away from Montcalm. He knew the young man meant well, though Cochrane would be damned if he’d admit it. Here on this world, his home, Cochrane had come to accept his age and his infirmities, mostly through Monica’s good humor and patience, and it was with that humor and acceptance that he took Montcalm’s arm and began the long walk back to the farmhouse. That welcoming white building, trimmed in green, had been Monica’s delight as well. Its façade was real wood, shipped from Earth at a horrendous cost no one would ever reveal, a gift from the newly formed world government to the man who had created the conditions for Earth’s dramatic recovery from World War III, though that recovery continued still.
Natural wood remained a luxury on Centauri B II, a world where rigid trees had not evolved. Engineered forests of Earth pines had been planted for fuel and cellulose production, but it would be decades still before there was a sustainable forest system which would allow the harvesting of trees for decorative purposes. Monica had understood the rarity of the gift Cochrane had been given. She had sketched the clapboard design for their house herself, overseen its installation, even sanded and painted sections of it on her own, to make it perfect for him.
And she had made it perfect. Everything she had done for him had been perfect.
Cochrane felt tears slip down his cheeks. How could she be gone from this world when so much of it reminded him of her? How could her youth have fled before he himself had died, almost thirty years her senior?
What had drawn him to her at first, Cochrane still didn’t know. Love, he supposed, though he didn’t really understand that emotion any better now than when he had been young. They had survived Battersea together. They had escaped the Optimum and found safety on the moon. Sir John had recovered there, in Copernicus City. The scar on Monica’s face had faded. Cochrane’s shattered ribs and punctured lungs had been made whole.
They had shared so much, Cochrane and Monica, that by the time their wounds had healed he supposed it had been inevitable they would feel themselves bound together. She had returned to Alpha Centauri with him, to finish her medical training at the colony’s first and only medical facility. She had been granted her degree here, one of this world’s first. Sir John had given her away at their wedding and had become an astronomer again, establishing the colony’s first observational outpost in his final, most productive years.
As those years and more had passed, Monica had always set aside time in her own life to listen to Cochrane, and to pay attention to him as no other had before her, and late at night as he dreamt of his role in the horror that had unfolded on Earth, thirty-seven million people dead in a war that had consumed the world like no other, she had held him and told him that he had done enough, that it had not been his fault.
Whatever he had meant to her, and he had never really understood why she had chosen to share her life with him, she had let him carry on. The superimpellors grew faster, sleeker, more efficient, the result of a thousand minds at work on the secrets of continuum distortion. While Monica had pursued her medical career on Alpha Centauri, Cochrane had ridden those new engines to other worlds, met other intelligent creatures, marveled at the similarity of their DNA and suspected, like half the scientists he knew, that some deeper pattern was afoot in the universe, or at least in this section of the galaxy.
And Monica had always been waiting for him when he returned, keeping him focused, understanding, paying attention.
Until two days ago.
Cochrane’s feet dragged along the dusty path leading from the ridge to the farmhouse. He could see the vehicles of the guests parked near the barn. Wheels had become passé on Earth, where energy had passed into a golden age of fusion reactors and sarium krellide batteries with virtually limitless energy density. But here in the colonies, cars and trucks and carriers still rolled and bounced along the unpaved roads on spring tires. Monica had said that in a hundred years, the entertainments of Alpha Centauri’s frontier days would depict wheeled vehicles in the same way the old flat movies of the American West depended on horses and wagons to show how times had changed.
She had always been looking to the future, the future she said Cochrane had created.
For that devotion to him, he had accepted her love, for though he had never understood why she loved him, never had he ever doubted her enthusiasm. In return, he hoped he had at least given her adventure, at least fulfillment. She had wept the night she had met the Vulcanians with him. She had thanked him for that, for including her in a moment in history when everything had changed because of what Cochrane had done. The Vulcanians, though some called them Vulcans, even now were negotiating closer ties with Earth, and Cochrane knew his gift of superimpellor research to those aliens had in part convinced them of what they would call the logic of the situation.
And now both Sir John and Monica were gone from his life. The dust of Earth to the dust of Alpha Centauri. It had happened before, Cochrane knew, and would happen again, this merging of the worlds through death. But once again he felt the sting of self-doubt without his wife, and feared he had been selfish once more—taking more from her than he could possibly have given. Never had he ever felt he had done enough. Never.
“They’re gathered out back,” Montcalm said as they passed the parked vehicles.
Cochrane knew why his guests were there, and not inside. He had planted fig trees in the back. Legend said it was under a fig tree that the Buddha had sat when he had received enlightenment. Cochrane liked the story and understood why Brack had told him about the trees. Newton had had his apple. Cochrane some nameless oak or elm in a suburb of London. And now, who knew who else would sit under trees on a hundred different worlds in the future, thinking new thoughts, receiving new enlightenment? Because of Buddah, Micah Brack, and Zefram Cochrane, there were fig trees on Alpha Centauri waiting just for that moment.
They passed a carrier whose flywheel hummed deep within it, the linear motors over its wheels still ticking as they cooled. It had a symbol of the scales of justice crookedly affixed to the door. The Centauri B II police force had arrived.
Cochrane remembered the way Monica had laughed at Sergei’s vehicle—the whole colony’s police force dependent on a single, used farm vehicle. Cochrane actually enjoyed that dependence, the fact that the whole colony could depend on just a single officer of the law in a single, slow-moving vehicle. Sergei spent more time working at the power station than he did as a police officer. There was no real need for police here. The lack of crime on the colony worlds had once given Cochrane hope that perhaps there were some parts of human nature that had been left forever in the past, burned in the fires with the ashes of the Optimum.
Sergei
waited for them in the doorway of the farmhouse, hat in hand, looking glum through his immense walrus mustache. He approached Cochrane and Montcalm, hand extended, mouthing his sorrow and his regret and speaking of his respect for Cochrane’s wife. Cochrane didn’t hear a word. He still could not believe Monica was no longer with him, that she wasn’t just on her way back from the clinic, smelling of antiseptic, anxious to slip out of her whites and share with him the adventures of her day and his. Surely these words Sergei said were meant for someone else to hear.
Cochrane knew that in his younger days, full of energy, full of his questing spirit, he had always wanted to be alone, always appreciated solitude, yet now in these latter years, when he had been granted his wish, he knew he was no longer desirous of solitude. He wanted to hear Monica’s soft voice again. He wanted to—
“—wasn’t an accident, sir.”
The last four words exploded in Cochrane’s mind. He blinked at the colony’s lawman. “What did you say?” he asked.
Sergei looked pained. “I took the wreck to the recycling depot,” Sergei said loudly, speaking too slowly and too precisely, as if talking to a child, or someone over eighty. Cochrane hated that kind of treatment. “To see if anything could be reclaimed.”
“Of course you did,” Cochrane said, wishing the young man—Sergei was fifty—would get to the point. “Of course you did. SOP.”
“And Crombie—he’s the tech on duty when I went there—Crombie takes one look at the engine hood and says some of those holes in it, well, sir, some of those holes aren’t from the flywheel fragments busting out. They’re from something else busting in.”
Cochrane stared at the lawman who was really a power station technician, trying to comprehend what he was saying.
Monica had been driving their carrier back to the farm from Micah Town. The flywheel had slipped out of its capsule and ripped apart the engine compartment, sending shrapnel into the passenger area. It had been a tragedy. But tragedies still happened. Every once in a while, things just broke.
The carrier had been ripped in half. The electrical system had ignited the fuel tanks. The storage batteries had exploded.
At the hospital, the medical team had not allowed Cochrane to view the body.
“I don’t understand,” Cochrane said. His heart fluttered in his chest.
“What I mean, sir, is that I think someone deliberately shot at your wife’s carrier.”
“Shot?” Cochrane repeated. He felt Montcalm’s powerful arm move around him as his legs weakened.
“I had Crombie cut out those hood sections—you know, entry holes—took them to the metallurgical department at the Foundation. Ionized gas residue, sir. All around the metal.”
Cochrane shook his head. This had no meaning for him.
“Whatever projectiles hit your car, they were propelled by a plasma burst.”
The memories flooded back to Cochrane. “You mean, a fistgun?”
Sergei shrugged, out of his league. “A military weapon of some sort, sir. But not a beam weapon. Projectiles absolutely. The Foundation’s going to go through the wreck again, see if they can find projectile fragments.”
Cochrane gaped at the man without speaking. His pulse hammered in his eardrums, the roar of a distant dark wave sweeping forward, unstoppable, consuming all.
Sergei had wrung his hat into a cloth tube. “Sir, I’ve never handled a homicide case before. I mean, this whole entire colony’s never had a homicide case before. I’d like … I’d like to turn it over to the Orbital Defense Bureau. They’re the closest thing to military we’ve got around here. Maybe they can send a pouch to Earth. Get some lab there to identify the weapon.”
Cochrane felt his chest continue to constrict. Could it be true? Could someone have taken Monica from him? Deliberately?
“Is … is that all right, sir?” Sergei asked.
Cochrane nodded. Of course it was all right. Whoever did this must be found, must be punished, must be … He heard Monica’s words come back to him from so long ago, even as he was consumed by the desire for revenge. Tempting, she said, her voice so young, so sure, but then we would become him.
“Please do … whatever you must,” Cochrane choked out.
Sergei nodded grimly. He started to walk off. Then he stopped, turned back, one finger lifted. “Uh, sir, just one more thing. I know they’re going to ask me. I …” He looked embarrassed. “Sir? Do you have any enemies? You know, someone who might have wished you harm?”
“Enemies,” Cochrane said, thinking of ashes. “Let me bury my wife, Sergei. Then we can talk.”
“Thank you, sir.” Sergei walked back to his carrier, smoothing his hat.
Montcalm escorted Cochrane around the house, toward the fig trees, where the guests were assembled by a simple grave. Sir John was buried nearby, out of the shade, so he could always be beneath the stars.
Throughout the service, Cochrane continued to feel as if each moment were happening to someone else. Just as he had felt that night on Earth, thirty-nine years ago, fleeing across the artificial turf of Battersea Stadium, the Optimum in its death throes all around him. The world hurtling toward the atomic horror. London in flames.
He heard another, less welcome voice from his past, echoing from long-vanished stadium seats and walls, a face repeated an infinite number of times around him.
You will never escape the Optimum! that voice screamed. You will never escape your destiny!
Throughout the service, hearing nothing, Cochrane stared up at the fluttering leaves of the fig trees. But there was no enlightenment for him that day. Only his destiny, bleak and inescapable as it had always seemed to him.
Later that day, that night, it was difficult to tell under the lighting conditions of midpoint, Cochrane sat in his study, listening to patient young voices, and he knew it would take a lifetime to explain the truth behind what their words described.
Sergei was there, and Montcalm. Melanie Ark from the Foundation’s metallurgical department, quiet and intense. Sirah Chulski of Orbital Defense, massive enough to block an asteroid on her own.
Montcalm had put down a plate of sandwiches left over from the food the guests had brought. Cochrane wasn’t hungry. Doubted he would be hungry ever again. But Ark went through them, one at a time, as methodically as she constructed superimpellor shielding, one molecular layer after another.
“There can be no doubt,” Chulski said. “It was a murder, Mr. Cochrane.”
Cochrane sat behind his desk and fingered a small metal medallion one of the Vulcans had given him years ago. It was a circle in which an off-center jewel served as the origin point of a triangle. The translation of what it represented had not been perfect. The linguists felt it would be many years still before communications were effortless. But the disk had held great meaning for the somber, pointed-ear aliens. Everyone fit within it, they had told him. But it was more than just a symbol of the universe; it meant behavior as well, as if they meant that all beliefs fit within it, too.
Cochrane decided the planet Vulcanis had never given birth to its own Optimum Movement.
He had no doubt that that was who had been behind the murder of his wife.
He just didn’t know if he could tell these young people the truth, without them discounting him because they thought that age had finally moved to claim his mind.
“But for us to be able to solve a murder,” Chulski said, “we need to know a motive.”
Sergei looked more sorrowful than even Cochrane felt. “Who would want to kill Dr. Burke?” he asked.
Cochrane sighed. “I don’t think whoever did it cared whether or not Monica lived or died.” All eyes were on him. “They wanted to hurt me.”
Chulski leaned forward. “Who did, sir?”
Cochrane couldn’t bring himself to say it. But he had no other choice. In the end, what did it matter if anyone believed him or not?
“The Optimum,” Cochrane answered, and from the reaction of the people in the room, he might as we
ll have said Jack the Ripper, as if that monster from old Earth could possibly be resurrected on another world.
“Sir,” Chulski said far too politely. “The Optimum Movement died a long time ago. And it was strictly an Earth-based aberration.”
“I’m from Earth,” Cochrane said, carefully putting the Vulcanian medallion down on the desk. “I had run-ins with the Optimum before the war. Colonel Adrik Thorsen in particular.”
“Colonel Thorsen’s dead, sir. So’s Colonel Green. The whole cadre.”
“’The evil that men do lives after them,’” Cochrane said.
Ark took another sandwich from the plate on the small table beside her. She looked at it intently, as if wondering what an atomic reading might reveal about its contents. “I have heard stories of Optimum cells still functioning,” she admitted. “There have been so many rumors of war criminals escaping Earth to live under assumed names in the colonies … maybe some of them are true.”
Sergei looked unconvinced. “You’re saying we have an Optimum cell on Alpha Centauri? C’mon, Melanie. They’d be reported so fast we’d be shipping them home before they had a second meeting.”
Ark popped the sandwich into her mouth and chewed it methodically.
“Maybe someone just arrived?” Montcalm suggested hesitantly. “You know, there’s a cell somewhere else, and they sent someone here to … to you know.”
Chulski shifted her impressive bulk in her chair, managing as always to make the others seem less significant. “We could check with immigration. Find out who’s come here in the past six months or so, and from where.” She glanced back at Cochrane. “You sure there’s no one else you can think of, Mr. Cochrane?”
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