Firebird

by Jack McDevitt

  I had no idea where to go from there, so I left a note for Alex, who was out of the building, and went back to my routine duties. They included fielding a generous offer for Korman Eddy’s Clockwork, if we could come up with it. “Disappeared off that train,” the would-be customer said. “I’d love to be able to give it to my wife for our anniversary.” I was tempted to tell him what Alex had concluded about Clockwork, but I let it go.

  “We’ll let you know, Mr. Spiegler,” I said, “if we get a line on it. But I’m not hopeful.”

  When Alex got back, he stuck his head in my office, said hello, and told me we might have a link. “David Lisle,” he said, “is an emeritus professor of history at Margala. And he was a friend of Winter’s.”

  “Good,” I said. “You found him in one of Winter’s books?”

  “No. I started looking for someone with a similar academic background who shared his interest in the sightings.”

  “Have you been in touch with him?”

  “He had to tend to his garden.”

  “What?”

  “His garden comes before all else, apparently.” He looked tired. “He’s making up his mind about what he wants to tell me.”

  “You think he knows something?”

  “Judging by the way he reacted when I asked him about Winter’s death, I don’t think there’s any question.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Told me he was busy planting juleps.” He sat down and grumbled something about people who were preoccupied with a sense of their own importance.

  “What do we know about him?” I asked.

  “He’s written a few articles. One of them mentions a sighting a thousand years ago at Fishbowl. The station operators reportedly heard an unknown language on the radio. They said the voice was human, they didn’t think there was any question about that, but they’d never heard the language before.” Of course, nobody alive as recently as a thousand years ago had ever heard any unknown language. Unknown languages haven’t existed for a long time.

  “That would be the Fishbowl sighting in Winter’s journal,” I said.

  “Correct.”

  “Lisle and Winter were on the faculty together at Oxnam University for several years, back in the 1850s. It’s where they became friends. If there’s a connection between Villanueva and the sightings, there’s a good chance Winter would have mentioned it to Lisle.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Shen Chi. It’s about a hundred klicks from Virginia Island.”

  “Where all the action is—”

  “Seems that way.”

  “He going to call you back?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “You want me to sit in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “In case he has privacy issues, it’s always a good idea to have someone you can send out of the room.”

  In the end, we had to call him. “Sorry,” he told us. “I forgot. Been busy.”

  David Lisle bent under the weight of his years. He was, I suspected, close to his third century. His face was wrinkled, his voice a bit too loud, and he wore an uneven, scraggly gray beard. He was lowering himself carefully into a large armchair. His bleary gaze touched Alex, moved around the room, and settled on me. “Who’s the woman?” he asked.

  “Chase,” Alex said, “this is Professor Lisle. Professor, this is Chase Kolpath. She’s my partner.”

  He studied me intently, considering, I thought, whether he wanted me present. Eventually, he must have decided I did not constitute a threat. “You’re extraordinarily lovely, my dear,” he said. His eyes didn’t leave me as he addressed Alex: “Had I known about Ms. Kolpath, I’d have preferred that you come in person.”

  “Thank you, Professor,” I said. “You’re very kind.”

  He started to smile but slipped into a spasm of coughing and choking as if he’d just swallowed something.

  “Are you okay?” asked Alex.

  It was that strange inclination we all have to ask someone who’s choking to speak to us. Lisle gradually got control of himself, held out a palm, and nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “I have a couple of allergies that show themselves at this time of year.” He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Then: “Now, what was it we were talking about earlier, Joseph?”

  “Alex, Professor. My name is Alex.”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry.” He pressed his fingertips against his temple. “The years are getting to me, I fear. So how can I help you?”

  “We were talking about your old friend William Winter.”

  “Oh, yes. Bill. Hard to believe it’s been as long as it has.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Yes, indeed. By God, there was no one like him. Died too early.”

  “What happened to him, do you know?”

  “Only what’s been reported. He went out on a mission of some sort, though God knows what it was, and he never came back. He was with Christopher Robin.”

  “They went looking for something to do with the space-station sightings?”

  “What?” He held a hand behind one ear, inviting Alex to speak louder.

  “Did they go looking for what was causing the sightings at the space stations, Professor?”

  That set him off on a long round of laughter that ended in another spasm. He fought his way through it and finally raised his palm again, assuring us he was okay, inviting us to be patient. “Sightings? Lights in the sky? Yes, certainly, that was what he wanted to find. Look for these strange things that come and go, whatever they are. And what he found was his own exit.”

  “What exactly were they looking for, Professor?”

  “I don’t know what he expected to find. He didn’t want to discuss it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think because whatever it was, he was concerned it would be perceived as silly.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  Lisle hesitated. Bit his lip.

  “They didn’t go to Indikar, did they?”

  “You know that?”

  “Yes, we know. Was it Villanueva? Was that where they went?”

  He needn’t have said anything. His reaction gave it away. Eyes closed, regret written large on those gray features, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Why, Professor? Why did they go to Villanueva?”

  “God help me, Joseph, I don’t know.”

  “No idea at all?”

  “He told me he’d bring it all home with him. And we’d go out and celebrate together. That’s what he said.”

  “Professor, you must have had some idea why they went there.”

  “Only that it had to do with the contact flights.”

  “The unidentified ships.”

  “Yes.”

  “What precisely did he say?”

  “Alex, it’s been almost half a century. Or has it been longer? The years pass so quickly.” He was hurting. Whether it was physical or not, I couldn’t tell. “I remember asking Robin later, after Bill had been lost, what it had been about. He wouldn’t say. Still wouldn’t tell me, damn him. I lost a good friend. But he just shook his head, told me I wouldn’t believe it anyway, and walked away.” He looked exhausted. “There was something else, though, now that I think of it. Something Bill said before they left.”

  “What was that, Professor?”

  “He said that, with luck, they’d find it in the churches.”

  “Find what?”

  “I don’t know.” He sank back exhausted in his chair. “When I asked him to explain, he just laughed and said there’d be plenty of time for that later. Sure there was.” His teeth clamped together, and he sucked in air. “I told him not to go. I kept telling him what might happen. But he was determined to do it.”

  “Churches.” Alex tasted the word. Frowned. “He said churches. Not church.”

  “That’s correct.” He shook his head. “God knows what he was talking about.” Lisle never cracked a smi
le.

  Villanueva was reportedly a beautiful world, stable climate, gravity index almost exactly that of the home world, fertile land, a biosystem that was quick to adapt to human needs. According to legend, it was where the first off-world lemon tree sprouted. It had served as a home to human pets. Cats and dogs and parrots all did well there. The planet had a moon even lovelier than Earth’s because it had an atmosphere and consequently emitted a softer, more luxuriant glow than Luna. Its broad oceans and deep forests and snowcapped mountains reportedly won the hearts of visitors. It was an ideal outpost. But its prospects as a colony world were dim.

  When the first survey ships arrived, during the third millennium, they were probably already aware of the dust cloud. Tradition denies it, though, picturing a scenario in which the explorers landed in a peaceful green valley, bathed in its crystal springs, listened to the wind in the trees, and partied under its luminous moon, only to discover, later, that the world was moving toward destruction at a rate of about twenty million kilometers per day. It would be a long time before it arrived in the danger zone. Centuries. But eventually the bright skies would darken, and the flowers and shrubs would freeze into stumps. Meanwhile, though, the world was an Eden. And it must have seemed to a few early adventurers that there was more than time enough. Time to live out their lives, time for their children, and their grandchildren. They needed only avoid creating a permanent presence.

  They named the place Villanueva because it was Earth as everybody had always dreamed it should be. A magnificent garden world, where the day was always cool, and the birds always sang. So they did what anyone would have done: Despite the cloud, they built homes. Villanueva became the place where you stopped if you were headed out along the Orion Arm, where people climbed out of the crowded spartan ships of that primitive era for a few days in the tropical breezes of the world that everybody loved.

  They set a space station in place and named it Felicity. It became a haven for casinos and sex clubs. The support facilities on the ground expanded. And expanded again. People moved in. The cloud was too far down the road to worry about.

  Towns took root. The towns became cities. Population soared. Young families saw it as an opportunity to get in on a ground floor, or as an adventure, or as an ideal place to raise kids. A thousand years, eight hundred years, whatever, it was a long time. Somebody else’s problem.

  Estimates range widely as to what the global population was when it finally happened. Most historians put it at about a billion. By then, Villanueva had become fully independent, and prosperous beyond anyone’s dreams. Even when the outer planets began to drift into the cloud, the population, which everyone had expected would shrink dramatically at that point, continued to increase. The skies grew dark, and the days became cooler, but there was still no concerted effort to leave. The reports indicated that people thought they could ride it out. Stay with their homes and just wait for the passage to end. Trust in the Lord. This, even though Villanueva’s time in the cloud would be in excess of three hundred years.

  Today, the word itself, Villanueva, is shorthand for catastrophe.

  Felicity, encountering too much resistance from the dust, lost her orbital velocity and went into a death spiral. It plunged into one of the oceans. People at that time still depended on farming, but the farms didn’t survive. Eventually, they tried to escape, but it was much too late. Emergency supplies and equipment were shipped in. When, three centuries later, the world came out of the cloud—a small one, by cosmic standards—no one was left.

  And something odd had happened: Civilization on the world had been high-tech, of course, by the standards of the time. It had been powered by the most advanced kinds of automated systems then known. From today’s point of view, of course, they were primitive. But that may have played in their favor. They were simpler, and therefore more resistant to the pressures imposed by deteriorating climatic conditions. So that it’s not entirely correct to say that no one was alive when the world emerged from the far side of the cloud.

  The technology was still in place and still functioning. The maintenance systems had, according to contemporary accounts, upgraded themselves. The problem, as Marcy Lee observes in Last Days, was that nobody thought to turn off the lights.

  I know that doesn’t sound like a problem. But a salvage team, sent in after the event, encountered resistance of an unexpected kind. The technology, apparently, didn’t want to be shut down. Several people were electrocuted, and a technician died when a power train broke loose and fell on him. The “accident” was reportedly accompanied by a spoken warning, over the comm links belonging to the team, that they were trespassing and should leave immediately.

  Later efforts met with similar results. Stories surfaced of would-be scavengers landing on Villanueva and either becoming the victims of seeming accidents or disappearing altogether. A team sent in to destroy the data-control system was locked in an underground chamber. When they attempted to blow a hole in the door, the place collapsed on them. It was all straight out of one of Vicki Greene’s horror novels. Eventually, the authorities decided the rational course was to cordon the place off, and they did just that. Villanueva was declared out of bounds, and satellites were established warning travelers that any who went groundside did so at their own risk.

  Even Alex, though he had no doubt that the right Villanuevan artifacts would bring good money, had never considered a salvage attempt.

  When David Lisle signed off, Alex remained motionless in his chair, his arms folded, his eyes half-closed, lost in thought.

  “Alex,” I said, “we have no idea what we’d be looking for.”

  “The churches, Chase.”

  “Which means what? We’re talking about a civilization which, from its very beginning, knew the end times were coming. Knew when they were coming. When the place finally collapsed, they had a billion people. I wonder how many churches there were?”

  He got up and walked over to the window. Lovely day. “Chase, I don’t expect you to get involved with this one. In fact, I won’t allow you to. I’m going to hire somebody for this. I’ll find somebody who’s got a little combat experience.”

  I laughed. There might have been a touch of bitterness there. If so, I’m not sure where it came from. That he was including me out, or that we were going to go off and do something crazy. “And who would that be?” I said. “Marko Banner?” The big devil-may-care leading man who specialized in whacking his way out of impossible situations.

  “It’s out of the question, Chase. Sorry.”

  “Alex, it’s an exercise in futility.”

  “I know it seems that way. But I can’t just give up on it. Something very big is going on here.”

  I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. “My God, Alex, you have no idea what you’re even looking for.”

  SIXTEEN

  People always find something to worry about. The Nile’s going to rise. An asteroid’s coming close next year. We’re going to make a mess of the atmosphere. It’s always something. But sometimes they have a point.

  —Marcy Lee, Last Days, ca. 6314 C.E.

  Music is so intrinsically a part of the human experience, that it is hard to imagine our lives without it. How much are we indebted to the first person who beat on a drum, who carved out a pipe, who noticed that strings make pleasing sounds?

  —Alois of Toxicon, addressing the Continental Music Institute, 8847 C.E.

  I probably didn’t help my cause by mentioning that if we were ever going to head out on an idiot’s ride, Villanueva would be the place to go. There was no way Alex could back down after that. He was already going through a list of candidates to sit beside him on the mission. He’d need a pilot, of course. Not me, because I’d cause too much trouble. He didn’t offer an explanation but just tried to laugh it off. “The bottom line, Chase,” he said, “is that if things go wrong, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for something happening to you.”

  And, to tell the truth, I’d have been happy
to stay out of it. But I was afraid he’d get himself killed. “Look, Alex,” I said. “I think this is crazy. I won’t hide that. Because we don’t have enough to go on. We don’t have a clue what we’re looking for. But that doesn’t mean I’ll step aside while someone else goes in my place.”

  He glanced at his calendar with the sort of expression that he uses to suggest I’ve forgotten who’s boss. “Chase,” he said, “you don’t have a say in the matter.”

  “Sure I do. Leave me behind, and I won’t be here when you get back.”

  He barely blinked. “Then you’ll have to leave, Chase.”

  “This time, I won’t come back.”

  He took his time about answering. We were in the conference room. “Look,” he said, “this thing is just too dangerous.”

  “Then call it off. At least until we know what we’re doing.”

  “How about if we put it off for a couple of days? Have you ever seen The Firebird?”

  “Not really. They lost it forty years ago.”

  “No. I’m talking about Igor Stravinsky.”

  I’d heard the name. “The sculptor,” I said.

  “He was a composer.”

  “Sure. But no, I haven’t. It’s a ballet, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t much care for ballets.”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Robin would give his yacht the same name?”

  “As what?”

  “The ballet.”

  “Oh.” I guess I shrugged. “Not really.”

  His gaze went to the ceiling. He was operating in the company of children again. “Chase—”

  “It’s a coincidence.”

  “Father Everett told you he loved the classical composers. Naming his yacht Firebird was a tribute to Stravinsky.”

  “Okay. So what?”