I tossed her a piece of the tuna. She was about to grab it when the door opened behind me and Alex came out. She vanished, as did all the others except a couple of goops who retreated a few meters and turned to watch.
“I see you’ve got company,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“Gabe’s run into a brick wall trying to settle the trophy issue. It’s frustrating for him because he’s pretty sure it was an alien relic, and he thought he had it locked away in his room.”
“He probably did, Alex. But we had the keys. Or at least I did.”
“It’s not your fault. Not anybody’s fault.” He raised a hand and waved at the goops. They remained frozen. “Anyhow he’s going to pursue the issue and I’d like you to go with him.”
“Sure. Where’s he going?”
“To Chippewa.”
“Ouch.”
“He’s hoping he can locate someone who was on the Venture when Harding found the trophy. Or at least was with him when something out of the way happened that eventually led him to it.”
“Like what?”
“I have no idea. He figures he’ll know it when he finds it. Basically, he suspects it’s some sort of joke, but he doesn’t want to give up on it without getting a satisfactory explanation. He doesn’t want to let it get away.”
“That’s already happened.”
“I understand that, Chase. Still, I’d feel better if you went with him. Do you mind?”
“When’s he leaving?”
“In a couple of days. He was going to book a flight with Orion Express, but I think he’d be more comfortable in the Belle-Marie. With you.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Good. I’ll tell him you asked to go along. Okay? He’s concerned about imposing on you.”
“Sure, tell him I’d like to go.” Despite everything that had been happening, I’d still been finding some time for Chad, but this was going to take a few days. I called him and explained.
His image stood in the center of my office. He was trying to look as if it was really no problem. “Hell, Chase,” he said, “I knew what I was getting into right from the start. I can live with it.”
• • •
Gabe appeared minutes later. “You don’t have to do this, Chase. It’s okay. I’m getting tickets. I’m going to ride out on the Burgundy.”
“You really want to do that when we have the Belle-Marie available?”
“That means tying you up for a week or two. There’s no need to do that.”
“It’s up to you, Gabe. I’m interested in going, but it’s your call.”
“Well,” he said. “I’d enjoy the company. If it’s not a problem for you.”
That afternoon a package arrived for him. It was about the size of a small chair. “It’s heavy,” I said. “Where do you want them to put it?”
“Is it from Datatech?”
I checked the labels. “Yes.”
“In the skimmer.”
“This thing is going with us?”
“Yes.”
He came out a few minutes later. We’d put it in the cargo locker, where it was a close fit. While I watched he stripped the wrapping away and stood back. It was a black metal box with smooth edges. He showed me an electronic device that, he said, would be inserted on top of the box, where it would serve as a receiver. “It’s a radiotelescope. With a hypercomm unit.”
“What do we do with it?”
“We put it in orbit. It listens for radio signals with a specific pattern. Or an artificial pattern. If it intercepts anything, it will use the hypercomm to notify us.”
“Gabe, how much did you spend?”
“Let me worry about that, Chase.”
• • •
I was pleased to have an opportunity to climb into the Belle-Marie again with Gabe. Though he wasn’t quite the same now. He seemed considerably younger than when we’d last gone out on a mission. That said, the more time we spent talking about the lost trophy, the less hope I had that anything would actually come of it. I wouldn’t have bothered with the search at all, had Gabe not been there. And to be honest, I wasn’t very excited about setting out for a long ride that was almost certainly not going to lead anywhere. But it was good just to be with him. Made me feel like I was twenty-two again.
Well, as a wise man once said, when faced with a long ride, take a good book. Or a library.
• • •
We eased away from Skydeck and a half hour later set course for Chippewa and slipped into hyperspace. Chippewa was about twenty-three hours away.
Gabe and Alex had striking personality differences. Gabe loved interstellar travel, although it was the arrival that especially stoked his interest. Nothing appealed to him quite as much as watching the darkness draw away from the ship and seeing stars appear as we came out of hyperspace. Gabe was the more patient of the two. And he was also a better passenger. Both of them had a passion for reading, but Gabe was more inclined to sit up front with me and talk about whatever was on his mind. Alex usually buried himself in a book.
Gabe was also the partygoer. He enjoyed a loud celebration, conducted one whenever he had an excuse, and knew how to make everybody happy. Alex attended parties whenever we received an invitation, but he was always primarily interested in simply getting through the evening. I don’t think I’ve ever commented on this before, but I’ve had the impression that Alex, unlike his uncle, never really learned to enjoy himself. I’m not sure that isn’t also true of me.
For most of the flight out to Chippewa, Gabe sat beside me on the bridge. He was a good conversationalist, but he arranged things so that, for the most part, we talked about topics primarily of interest to me. How glad he’d been to see my mom at the party. Was I dating anybody seriously now? (He was happy to hear about Chad.) How had life been with Alex? He mentioned again how pleased he was that I’d stayed on with Rainbow Enterprises. “I’d have hated to come back here and find you gone.” He grinned. “Good pilots are hard to come by.”
I wanted to ask him about April, but it didn’t seem like a good idea so I avoided the subject. But after a few hours, he brought her up. “Losing her,” he said, “was the hardest part of this whole thing. She was a big part of my life. But you know that. And I don’t know why I’m talking about her in the past tense. She’s in a good marriage, as far as I can tell. So at least that worked out well.”
“I suspect most guys,” I said, “would prefer to see a woman they’d lost in an unhappy marriage.”
“Oh, that’s not true, Chase. Is that how you’d feel if you lost someone? That you’d want him to be miserable?”
“I’d want him to miss me. I’d want him to feel the loss.”
“You ever gone through anything like that?”
“Not really. A little bit, but it was strictly high school stuff.”
“I suspect,” he said, “that if it ever happens to you, you’ll wish him well. No matter how it goes.”
“I think you’re being unduly optimistic, Gabe.”
“Maybe. But I doubt you’ll ever have the experience. Any guy who lets you walk away would have to be deranged.”
XVIII.
Visiting another world, no matter the presence of towns and orchestras and ball games, always requires adjustment. Weight changes, up or down; days have too many, or too few, hours; forests fill the air with a different scent; sunlight has a different tint; the sky has too many or too few moons, or none at all; and the Big Dipper is gone. These characteristics of ordinary life, that one rarely notices, suddenly take over reality.
—FRANCOIS CHERUBIN, “MAKING ADJUSTMENTS,” FROM MOONLIGHT MEMORIES, 3714 CE
Chippewa is a world of snowcapped mountains, giant trees, and herds of furry beasts rumbling across wide plains on seven continents. Its population recently exceeded 40 million. Hunters and boaters love the place and continue
to take up permanent residence. The gravity is the lowest of any of the Confederate worlds, down almost 20 percent lower than Earth’s, so visitors automatically feel more energetic. I’d have enjoyed getting a couple of days’ relaxation on the ground, but I knew long before we arrived that wasn’t going to happen. I’d forgotten how intense Gabe was on a mission. He loved riding canoes down rivers with rapids, but he just didn’t have time for nonsense when archeological business was pressing.
Chippewa was located in a fairly sparse section of the Orion Arm. We docked the Belle-Marie at Ventnor Station, checked into the McKernan Hotel, the only one on the platform, and wasted no time visiting the Orion Express Center. A dark-eyed young man who looked as if he was wrapped too tight sat behind a counter on the concourse between the Constellation Restaurant and a game shop. There was a decent crowd but everyone was walking past. He tried to look happy when we stopped. “Can I help you?” he asked, more or less ignoring Gabe. A name tent identified him as Bentley.
Gabe appeared surprised. “Bentley,” he said, “I think this is the only interstellar tour service I’ve seen that isn’t run by an AI. You guys must get pretty busy.”
“We believe in maintaining personal contact with our customers,” he said. Then he manufactured a smile. “We don’t use an AI because my dad owns the business. He thinks this is a good experience for me.”
“Is he right?” Gabe asked.
“It’s not bad. Are you folks interested in going out on one of our tours? We have several that will be leaving over the next few days. I suspect you’d find any of them pretty interesting. There’s one this afternoon that will be traveling out to Portman’s Star. You still have time to get seats if you want.” He managed another smile, but it never reached his eyes.
“What’s Portman’s Star?” I asked.
“It’s a Cepheid Variable. It’s been shrinking for the past three weeks. The Rambler will get you there just in time to see it erupt.”
“The star’s going to explode?” Gabe asked, casting a frown in my direction. “Won’t that be a bit dangerous?”
“Oh, no, no. No. It’s not going to explode, sir. It’s a variable. It shrinks and then kind of swells up. Very suddenly. Every few weeks. It’s not at all dangerous, but it’s great to watch. If on the other hand you don’t want that, we have—”
“It’s okay,” Gabe said. “Actually we’re not in the market at the moment for a tour. We were hoping to get some information.”
“I see.” He reached for a pack of brochures stacked at the end of the counter, picked out one, and offered it to him.
“Thank you,” Gabe said.
“If you’re going to be in the area for a while, we have special prices on two of our tours next week—”
“That’s all right. We expect to be gone by then. We’re glad to see you guys are still in operation. You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”
“More than forty years.”
Gabe glanced in my direction, signaling I should take it. “Bentley,” I said, “Orion Express had a vehicle, the Venture, that was active here between 1410 and 1416 Rimway time. I think that would be 1812 to 1817 on your calendar. Have you a record of anything unusual happening on board? An observation they might have reported? A discovery? Anything like that?”
He was shaking his head before I had a chance to finish. “That’s twenty years ago, miss. I wasn’t here for much of that time. But I don’t think we’ve ever had any unusual incidents.”
“Could you take a look at the record? Just to be sure?”
“I’m not sure where to look.” He activated a screen, studied it, pushed a few keys, shook his head some more. “No. I don’t see any indication of unusual activity. Sorry.”
Gabe tried again: “It would help if we could identify some passengers who might have ridden on the vehicle at that time.”
“On the Ventnor?”
“The Venture.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He did some more head shaking. “We couldn’t release that kind of information even if we had it, sir. It’s a privacy matter. But I honestly don’t think we had anything unusual anyway.” He glanced at the screen again but didn’t do anything to create data.
“Okay. Thanks for your help.” Gabe looked in my direction. “Looks as if we’ll have to go to plan B.”
• • •
We hadn’t expected any help from Orion Express. Privacy issues make it next to impossible to get any information unless you’re with the police. Fortunately we had an alternative. It would require some time, but that would be a small price to pay. One of the more encouraging features that we could expect from people who take an interstellar flight is that they like to talk about it. We retired to our hotel room and started a datanet search for people on Chippewa with connections to the Venture.
We were both surprised by the number of hits. Unfortunately most of them were connected with a Venture theme park, several Venture restaurants, and two films: Midnight Venture, a romance, and Venture Into Darkness, in which a group of teenagers spend the night in a haunted house. The name showed up in several other categories. “I guess,” said Gabe, “we need to narrow this a bit. Let’s include ‘Orion Express’ in the search.”
That reduced the number of hits to just over two hundred. “Okay,” said Gabe, “I’ve got half of them. Read through the rest and see if you can find something.”
Half were from people who’d known someone who had taken a tour. A few described their plans having been canceled at the last minute, or arriving too late and discovering they’d been replaced. One claimed to have tried to buy the Venture. Others reported having made plans to ride the Venture but then dropped the subject. We ended with seventeen people who said they’d been passengers.
Harding got generally good reviews. “The kids loved it.” “Mom thought it was long, but she enjoyed it.” “It was scary. I didn’t actually throw up, but I wouldn’t try it again.” “It was the ride of my life.”
Others described planetary rings, Bentley’s Cepheid Variables (without using the term), dragons on a cliff top, and riding a lander down to a planetary surface in a light rain. A few had stories that were hard to believe. One described a near collision with a comet, another claimed to have seen an asteroid with some glock art painted on it. “Glock” is a Chippewa term for abstract. Another insisted she’d seen a passing vehicle in hyperspace that had blinked its lights at them. Another claimed there’d been a close encounter with another lander just before they’d touched down. And there was the inevitable report of the appearance of an alien vessel.
There were several who claimed to have met their spouses on the journey. One of them commented that the flight had been the luckiest move he’d ever made. It had given him Tara.
I mentioned the alien sighting to Gabe but he shook his head. “We can check it later, but it sounds unlikely. Where’d the trophy come from? Did they stop and exchange gifts?”
We broke and went for dinner where, for the most part, we talked about what we’d been reading. We ordered a local wine, which was exquisite. Can’t remember the name, but I recall thinking, as we finished and started back to the hotel, that the wine would be the part of the trip I’d always remember.
We were only a few minutes back at work when Gabe looked up and said he thought he had it. A vid portrayed a guy talking about his experience on the Venture. The guy was identified as “Big Jonathan Harway.” The date translated to 1415 on the Rimway calendar, the fifth year of Harding’s service for Orion Express and about eight years before he joined the Octavia team.
“We signed on for the New Worlds Tour, where they take you to the Oceanside Hotel on Elysium,” according to Big Jonathan.
I stopped the vid. “Bingo,” I said. “That’s the hotel with the trophies.”
“Yes, indeed.” Gabe couldn’t have looked happier. “But it probably won’t amount to anything.”
We restarted the video clip: “That’s on the frontier. There are several systems within e
asy range of the hotel. The hotel was new. Hardly anybody’s been out there before, and if you’re willing to go deep you can get to a system where you actually would be the first to see it. We went deep.
“We found a living world, a planet that had spectacular views. The sky was full of moons. I think it had nine or ten. The pilot said we had to be careful because there might be aliens. We got pretty excited about that.
“We took the lander down to a mountaintop but we stayed inside. There were scary-looking animals like big cats, giant ones, charging around. And clouds of little bugs that also looked dangerous. I remember thinking that it wouldn’t be a good place to break down. We picked up radio signals from someplace too. But we never found out where.”
He broke off there and went on to talk about a visit to a zoo with his niece. There was nothing more. We did a search on Big Jonathan. He had posted a ton of comments on every imaginable subject, politics, scientific advances, HV shows he enjoyed, eruptions over the behavior of online commentators. But if we added either “signals” or “radio” to the search, we got nothing we hadn’t already seen.
We took a look at the Orion Express Center pamphlets. One of them had a picture of the Oceanside Hotel with a description of how to obtain reduced rates. But there was nothing about silver trophies or invented languages.
Gabe sent Big Jonathan a message asking to talk with him. The guy was obviously not shy. He called, reversing the charges, a half hour later. I was in my own room when it happened.
• • •
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