Seeker

by Jack McDevitt

  Ms. Goldcress was there and was every bit as uncommunicative in person as she had been on the circuit. How was she doing? Quite nicely, thank you. Had she ever been out to a site herself? No, too busy, unfortunately. When Alex wondered aloud whether the owner of the display items was present, she replied she was sure she didn’t know.

  She smiled politely at me in a manner that suggested she would appreciate it if I’d find something for Alex to do other than waste her time.

  “Did you pass my message to the owner?” he asked.

  We were standing by the Celian display, and she never took her eyes from it. “Yes,” she said. “I passed it on.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I left it with his AI.”

  As we walked away, he said quietly, “I’d like to brain her.”

  The attendees were antiquities dealers, with a sprinkling of academics and a few journalists. At seven we gathered in the Island Room for a banquet. There were approximately four hundred people present.

  The other guests at our table were impressed to discover they were sitting with the Alex Benedict. They were all anxious to hear details of his forays, and Alex, who loved every minute of it, was only too pleased to comply. Alex was a decent guy and he usually kept a level head on his shoulders, but he did enjoy having people tell him how well he’d done, and what remarkable contributions he’d made. He blushed with all good grace and tried to give me some credit, but they weren’t having it. And I could see he believed he was being appropriately modest. Humility, he once told me, is the trademark of greatness.

  When we’d finished the meal, the emcee rose to present a few toasts. The late Maylo Rilby, whose priceless collection had been donated by his brother, was represented by a vivacious young niece. She stood and we drank solemnly to her. We raised our glasses also to a commissioner from the University Museum. And to the outgoing president of the Antiquarian Caucus, who was retiring after seven years of service.

  There was some formal business to be taken care of, and eventually, they got around to the guest speaker, Oliver Bolton, the CEO of Bolton Brothers and a man of extraordinary celebrity. The odd thing about Bolton Brothers was that there were no brothers. Not even a sister. Bolton had founded the company twenty years earlier, so it wasn’t as if it had descended to him from an older generation. He’d been quoted as saying he’d always regretted that he had no siblings. The corporate name, he explained, was a concession to that sense of loss. I’ll admit here I had no idea what he was talking about.

  He was a tall man, graying, with a majestic presence, the kind of guy people reflexively make room for. And simultaneously like. He would have made an effective politician. “Thank you, Ben, thank you,” he said, after the emcee had piled on a solid five minutes of praise. Ollie Bolton, it seemed, was responsible for the reclamation of substantial pieces of the “Lost Centuries,” for the work that had allowed historians to rethink their conclusions about the Time of Troubles, and for a wide array of other accomplishments.

  He outlined a couple of his more celebrated experiences, apportioning credit among his associates and introducing them as he did. Then he told stories about himself. How unsettling it had been at Arakon when the workers went home and took their ladders with them and he’d remained stranded overnight in the tombs. And his night in jail at Bakudai, charged with grave robbing. “Technically, they were correct. But leave it up to the authorities, and the crystal basin over there, now headed for the museum, would still be buried in the desert.”

  More applause.

  He was by turns angry, impassioned, poetic. “We have fifteen thousand years of history behind us, much of it in a medium that preserves everything. The footprints of the first man to walk on Earth’s moon are still there,” he said. “I know we all share the same passion for the past, and for the relics that survive the ages, that wait for us in the dark places where no one goes anymore. It’s an honor to be here with you this evening.”

  “How come,” I whispered to Alex, “you’re not more like him?”

  “Maybe,” he said, “you’d prefer to work over at Bolton. I could arrange it.”

  “What’s he pay?”

  “What difference does it make? He’s a much more admirable figure than your current boss.”

  I was surprised. He was pretending to be kidding, but I could see I’d struck a nerve. “No,” I said. “I’m happy where I am.”

  Alex had looked away, and he needed several seconds to turn toward me again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Bolton played to his audience. “It’s always a privilege to speak to Andiquar’s antiquities dealers. And I understand we have a few guests from around the globe, and even two from off-world.” He took a minute to recognize visitors from the Spinners, and from Earth. “The home world.” (Applause.) “Where it all began.” (More applause.)

  I’d expected him to speak exclusively about himself, but he was too smart for that. Instead, he described the work “we all do,” and the benefits that accrue to all.

  “Fifteen thousand years,” he said, “is rather a long time. Punctuate it with war and rebellion, with dark ages and social collapse, and things have a tendency to get lost. Things that we should never forget. Like the Filipino women who, during a forgotten war, defied enemy soldiers to give food and drink to their own men and their allies during the Death March. Ah, I see some of you know about the Death March. But I wonder how much we’d know were it not for the work of Maryam Kleffner, back there in the rear.” He waved in that direction. “Hello, Maryam.”

  He picked out several more for personal kudos. “Historians do the brute work,” he said. “Their contribution cannot be overstated. And there are people like Lazarus Colt up front. Lazarus is head of the archeology department here at the university. Without Lazarus and his team, we wouldn’t know yet whether the Mindans on Khaja Luan were real or mythical. A golden civilization for a thousand years, and yet somehow it drifted into a backwater and was almost forgotten.

  “Almost.” He had the audience in his grip. He paused, and smiled, and shook his head. “But here is an example of where those of us who pursue and market antiques make our contribution. I spoke with Lazarus earlier this evening. He’d be the first one to tell you that they would never have found the Mindans, would never even have gone looking for them, had Howard Chandis not discovered a wine vessel buried in a hill. Howard, of course, is one of us.” He looked around to his left. “Stand up, Howard. Let everybody see you.”

  Howard stood and applause rolled through the room.

  Bolton spoke about twenty minutes. He finished with a flourish, observing that one of the more pleasant aspects of his profession was the company he got to keep. “Thank you very much.” And he bowed, preparatory to stepping down.

  One of the diners, a thin little man with black hair and pugnacious features, got up. There were a few whispers, and a woman one table from us said, “Uh-oh.” The applause died. Bolton and the little man were left staring at one another.

  Someone near him was trying to get him to sit back down. He resisted and straightened himself. Bolton smiled and remained congenial. “Did you have a question, Professor Kolchevsky?” he asked.

  Casmir Kolchevsky. The near-legendary archeologist who’d been pursued by the security bot. “I do,” he said.

  Alex reached for his wineglass. “This should be interesting.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “He doesn’t approve of people in our line of work. At least not those of us who go out and dig up their own merchandise.”

  “You take credit for a great deal,” Kolchevsky said. He was not the natural speaker Bolton was, but what his voice lacked in timbre, it more than made up in passion. He swung around to encompass the audience.

  He had a lined, windblown face, a long jaw, and eyes that, at the moment, blazed with anger. “I suppose nothing should surprise me anymore, but here I am, listening to you people honoring this thief, this vandal. He stands up there talking
as if he’s an honest man. As if he makes a contribution. You applaud him because he tells you what you like to believe about yourselves.” He turned back to the speaker. “I’ll tell you what you contribute.”

  I could see movement at the doors. Security people were spreading out into the room and weaving among the tables, closing on Kolchevsky.

  “You people have wrecked countless sites across the Confederacy, and beyond its borders. And if you haven’t done it personally, you’ve done it by proxy. You’ve done it by supporting—” Someone grabbed him and began pulling him away from the table. “Let go of me,” he demanded.

  A tall woman with the security detail had moved in behind him along with two or three others. She was saying something to him.

  “No,” he said, “we certainly can’t have this, can we? It doesn’t do to confront the truth, does it?” He continued to struggle. Reinforcements arrived. Someone at his table began struggling with one of the guards. Somebody else fell down. Kolchevsky by then had both arms pinned against his sides. “I’m leaving on my own,” he roared. “But this is a den of thieves. Nothing more.”

  They began dragging him toward the exit while he continued to resist. I’ll tell you, I couldn’t help admiring the guy.

  For several minutes after they got him outside, we heard raised voices. Bolton never moved from his position at the speaker’s table. When the disturbance seemed at last to have subsided, he straightened his jacket and smiled at the audience. “All part of the show, folks. Wait’ll you see what’s up next.”

  You might say the evening’s mood had been dampened. We wandered among the guests, and when the official proceedings ended, attended several of the parties. Alex was certain Goldcress’s client was on the premises. That he’d have to be there somewhere. “No way he could resist this.”

  “But how do you expect to find him?” I asked.

  “He knows us, Chase. I’ve been hoping he’d give himself away, maybe show a little too much interest in us. Maybe allow himself to watch too closely while we talked with his agent.”

  “And did you see anybody?”

  “I saw a lot of people keeping an eye on us,” he said. “But primarily on you.” That was a reference to my cherry red evening best, which was maybe a bit more revealing than I was accustomed to allow.

  But if anyone was there, he stayed clear of us. At the end of the evening, we went back to our hotel empty-handed.

  The day we returned home, I slept late. When I walked into the office at midmorning, Jacob posted a list of the day’s callers. Among them was a name I didn’t recognize. “Local woman,” he said. “Wants an appraisal.”

  Where antiquities are concerned, serious collectors prefer to do things face-to-face, especially if they think they have a potentially valuable artifact. In fact, where that kind of merchandise is concerned, Alex refuses to do a remote appraisal. But the vast majority of the stuff they show us is of minimal value, and you don’t need to see it up close to realize it.

  We get a lot of people directly off the street. They tend to be folks who’ve picked up something at an estate sale, or it’s maybe an inheritance, and they’ve begun wondering if it’s worth more money than they’d been told. When they do, under the assumption there’s nothing to lose, they call us. I take a look, then offer my assessment. Diplomatically, of course. The truth is that I’m no expert in matters antiqua, but I know junk when I see it. If I’m not sure, I pass it to Alex.

  Ninety-nine percent of the calls off the street are pure refuse. That’s a conservative estimate. So when, a couple hours later, I returned the call and her image blinked on in the office, my first thought was to take a quick look at what she had and send her on her way.

  She was a tiny, blond woman, nervous, not particularly well dressed, unable to look me in the eye. She wore gold slacks that would have fit better on someone with narrower hips. A creased white blouse was open at the throat and would have revealed a lot of cleavage if she’d had any. She had a blinding red neckerchief and a smile that was at once aggressive and shy. She was seated on a worn Springfield sofa, the kind that you get free if you buy a couple of armchairs.

  Greetings were short without being abrupt. “My name’s Amy Kolmer,” she said. “I have something here I’d like you to look at. I was wondering if it might be worth some money.” She reached out of the picture and came back with a cup, which she held up to the light.

  It was a decorative piece, the sort of thing you might buy in a souvenir shop. It was gray. A green-and-white eagle was etched into its side. There was something antiquated about the style in which the eagle was drawn. It was in flight, wings spread, beak open in an attack posture. A bit overdramatic. It might have been popular in the last century. A small banner was unfurled beneath the eagle, and something was written on it. It was too small to make out clearly, but I could see it wasn’t the Standard alphabet.

  She turned the cup so I could see the back side. It featured a ringed globe, with inscriptions above and below. Same type of symbols.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “What’s the language, Amy? Do you know?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  She looked puzzled. “It’s a cup.”

  “I mean, what kind of cup? Where did it come from?”

  “My boyfriend gave it to me.”

  “Your boyfriend.”

  “My ex-boyfriend.” Her eyes narrowed, and I could see things had come to a bad end. She was trying to turn whatever remained of the relationship into cash. “He saw me admiring it one time so he told me I could have it.”

  “Good of him,” I said.

  “I liked the eagle.” She stared at it for a long moment. “He gave it to me the night before we broke up. I guess it was supposed to be a consolation prize.”

  “Maybe.”

  “The cup’s worth more than he is.” She smiled. One of those smiles that tell you she wouldn’t feel especially upset if the boyfriend fell off a bridge.

  “Where did he get it?”

  “He always had it.”

  I could see I wasn’t going to get far with her. I was tempted to tell her what I believed, that the cup was worthless. But Rainbow has a code of ethics that requires me to know what I’m talking about. I fell back on our AI. “Jacob,” I said. “What’s the language?”

  “Searching,” he said.

  There was really nothing outré about the cup, nothing to set it apart, aside from the strange symbols. But I’d seen a lot of odd lettering during my years with Rainbow, and, believe me, it didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Jacob made a sound as if clearing his throat. It signaled he was surprised. Had Amy Kolmer not been on the circuit, I knew he would have made an appearance of his own. “It’s English,” he said. “Mid-American.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fourth Millennium,” I guessed.

  “Third. Nobody spoke English in the Fourth.”

  Amy came to life. She’d not expected any good news from me. But she’d overheard enough to raise her hopes. She looked at the cup, looked at me, looked back at the cup. “This thing is nine thousand years old?”

  “Probably not. The inscription uses an old language. That doesn’t mean—”

  “Hard to believe,” she said. “It’s in good shape for all those years.”

  “Amy,” I said, “why don’t you bring the cup over here? Let us take a close look at it?”

  The truth is that Jacob can give us all the physical details remotely. But Alex insists that a computer-generated repro is not the same as holding the actual object in his hands. He likes to imply there’s a spiritual dimension to what he does, although if you ask him point-blank he’d say it was all nonsense, but that there are qualities in a physical object that computers cannot measure. Don’t ask him to specify.

  So I made the appointment with Amy Kolmer for that afternoon. She showed up early. Alex came down and
ushered her into the office personally. His curiosity had been piqued.

  I didn’t particularly care for the woman. On the circuit, I’d sensed that she expected me to try to cheat her. In person, she went a different direction, playing the helpless but very sexual female. I suppose it was Alex’s presence that set her off. She fluttered and primped and cast her eyes to the floor. Poor me, life is hard but maybe I’ve gotten lucky and I surely would be grateful for whatever assistance you can lend. If she thought Rainbow’s asking price to broker a transaction would go down as a result of her efforts, she didn’t know Alex.

  She’d wrapped the cup in a piece of soft linen and carried it in a plastic bag. When we were all seated inside the office, she opened the bag, unwrapped the cup, and set it before him.

  He studied it closely, bit his lip, made faces, and placed it on Jacob’s bulk reader. “What can you tell us, Jacob?” he asked.

  The lamp in the top of the reader blinked on. Turned amber. Turned red. Dimmed and intensified. Went pretty much through the spectrum. The process took about two minutes.

  “The object is made of acryolonitrile-butadiene-styrene resins. Coloring is principally—”

  “—Jacob,” said Alex, “how old is it?”

  “I would say the object was constructed during the Third Millennium. Best estimate is approximately 2600 C.E. Error range two hundred years either way.”

  “What does the inscription say?”

  “The banner says New World Coming. And the lines on the back of the cup seem to be a designator. IFR171. And another term I’m not sure about.”

  “So the cup is, what, from an office somewhere?”

  “The letters probably stand for Interstellar Fleet Registry.”

  “It’s from a ship?” I asked.