They were colleagues. Dunninger had been working almost four years at the Epstein Retreat. Mendoza, at Forest Park, had been the man against whom Dunninger bounced ideas.
Dunninger crossed the room, picked up his drink (which he’d left on a table), and rejoined his group. But he looked furious.
Alex brought us back to the office. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Just a disagreement.”
“You don’t think there was more to it than that? I thought it looked pretty serious.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “When you can’t hear anything, it’s hard to tell.”
Alex went through a series of facial contortions, puzzled, annoyed, sad. Then he exhaled. “I think it was the last chance,” he said.
“For what?”
He looked up at the tall-stemmed Polaris glass in the bookcase. “Answer that, and everything else might fall into place.”
Alex had dinner with potential suppliers that evening. When he’s out entertaining, he always reroutes his link so that any call gets diverted to me. Which is okay, but there’s no provision for me to reach him. His theory was that nothing could come up that I wasn’t qualified either to handle or defer. I could have had it inscribed in bronze and put in the office. Company motto.
So it happened that, as I was getting ready to pack it in for the day, Jacob informed me that a gentleman was on the circuit asking to speak with Alex. “Audio only,” he said.
“Who is it, Jacob?”
“He doesn’t seem to want to identify himself, Chase.”
Ordinarily, I’d have told Jacob to refuse the call. Sometimes we get contacted by unscrupulous types who have lifted something from a museum, or made off with it in some other dubious way, and they want to have us take it off their hands. It’s a magnificent piece of work, they say. And you can’t beat the price. These kinds of people always stay away from the visuals. Usually, though, they will give us a name. It just won’t be the right one.
But in the present climate, I thought I should hear what it was about before terminating things. So I told Jacob to put him on.
“Hello?” The voice was subdued and anxious.
“Go ahead. This is Chase Kolpath.”
“I wanted to speak to Mr. Benedict.”
“I’m sorry. He’s not here. Can I help you?”
“Can I reach him? It’s important.”
“I’m afraid not. I’d be happy to help if I can.”
“Do you know when he’ll be available?”
“What’s your name, please?”
I heard a distinct sigh. “It’s me, Chase. Marcus Kiernan.”
That got my attention. “Marcus, I’m sorry, but I really have no way to get to him. You’ll have to talk to me.”
He took a deep breath. In the background, I could hear the buzz of conversation. He was in a public place, trying to ensure that we didn’t track him.
“Mr. Kiernan, are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“If you want to talk to someone, it’ll have to be me. What can I do for you?”
“Meet me.” He said it a bit louder than necessary, as if he’d just taken a difficult decision.
“Why?”
“I’ve something to tell you.”
“Why not just tell me?”
“I don’t want to broadcast it.” Another pause. “Come alone.”
“Why? Did you want another shot at me?”
“That wasn’t me.”
“It was your girlfriend, Barber. What’s the difference?”
“Please,” he said.
I let him wait while I listened to my heartbeat. “All right,” I said.
“Chase, if anybody’s with you, I’ll clear out.”
“Where are you going to be?”
He thought for a moment. “In the lobby of Barkley Manor. In one hour.”
I don’t know what kind of impression I make on people, but I don’t like to think I look dumb. “No,” I said. “I’ll be at the base of the Silver Tower in forty minutes. I’ll wait five minutes, then I’m gone.”
“I don’t think I can get there in forty minutes.”
“Give it your best.”
Andiquar is the Confederate seat of power, and the Hall of the People constitutes the visible symbol of its presence. It’s a magnificent, sprawling, marble structure, four stories high, roughly a half kilometer long. At night, it’s bathed in soft blue light. The flags and banners of the Confederate worlds snap along its front in the winds off the ocean, and thousands of visitors arrive every day to gawk and take pictures. At night, the dazzling light display draws even larger crowds.
The Council meets there; the executive offices are located symbolically on the lower floors; and the Court convenes in the eastern wing. A series of fountains feed the White Pool, which runs the length of the building.
The Archive, which houses the Constitution, the Compact, and the other founding documents, is adjacent the Court. At the opposite end of the White Pool stands the Silver Tower of the Confederacy. In the daytime, visitors can go inside the Tower and take the elevator to the top, where a balcony circles the building. There are substantial crowds at almost any hour. Which was why I’d chosen the location.
I called Fenn. He was out of the office. At home. I had the code for his place, but he’d not be able to reach the Tower in time. So I left a message for Alex, grabbed my scrambler and put it in my jacket, jumped into my skimmer—it was now the only one we had left—and took off. Then I started to call Fenn again. But I hesitated. He’d send somebody from the station and maybe scare Kiernan away.
In a crowd, on the ground, I should be reasonably safe. If it was a setup, I thought I’d taken the initiative away from him.
It was starting to snow as I lifted away from the country house. But traffic was light going downtown, and I made good time, dropping onto one of the capitol landing pads with ten minutes yet to get to the Tower.
I patted my jacket, reassured by the bulge. I wished I had something lethal, but you can’t really get your hands on a serious weapon without going through a lot of red tape. If it came to it, though, the scrambler would put his lights out, and that would be sufficient.
In case you’re wondering, I was qualified to use the weapon. I wasn’t exactly an expert, but in my full-time piloting days there’d been places I’d gone that you didn’t want to visit unarmed.
The snow had all but stopped. There hadn’t been enough to get any accumulation, but it felt as if more was coming.
The landing pads are on the roof of the Archives. You ride down in an elevator and come out one of the ramps into Confederate Square, close to the statue of Tarien Sim. The usual sight-seers were thinning out, most headed for dinner, some just getting out of the weather. I hurried along the perimeter of the White Pool toward the Tower.
It was closed for the evening when I got there, but there were still people gathered around its entrance, looking up toward the illuminated balcony. It was an obelisk, not really all that high. Only a few stories, actually. But it was a brilliant piece of craftsmanship—reflective, seamless, polished. It had been erected more than two centuries ago as a tribute to the men and women who had come to the aid of the Dellacondans and their allies in the long war against the Mutes. That was the action that had led directly to the formation of the Confederacy, which marked the first time in its long history that the human family had stood united. Well, almost united. There were always places like Korrim Mas.
It occurred to me belatedly that I should have worn a wig, or done something else to change my appearance.
I scanned the crowd, looking for Kiernan. There was no sign of him, but I was still a few minutes early. I stayed close to a group of tourists who were gathered at the edge of the pool. They were mostly standing with their heads back, looking up. I did much the same, while trying to keep an eye on my ground-level surroundings.
I’d assumed coming out that I was reasonably safe. But I began thinking how e
asy it would be to pick somebody off at that location. There were lots of bushes and trees lining the pool, and still more scattered across the Square. Any of them could hide a sniper. For that matter there was nothing to stop a killer from walking up alongside me and using a knife. It would be over before I knew there was a problem.
So I kept my back to the pool, tried to watch the shrubbery, tried to watch everything.
A family of three paused in front of me and took pictures of the Tower. On the far side of the pool, someone squealed in delight, and I saw running kids.
It was past the designated hour.
If he’d been unable to get here, he would have called. Right? Tried to get a delay.
A security bot wheeled past.
An older man with three or four people in tow explained how young he had been when he’d first gone there, and how the city had changed since then.
A couple of lovers strode by, holding hands, absorbed in each other.
A skimmer drifted down, hovered over the pool, then hurried away. A couple of people tossed coins into the water and smiled at each other.
The crowd opened up a bit, but I still saw no sign of Kiernan.
A group of young boys, all about twelve or thirteen, invaded the area. A kuwallah team, judging by their jackets. Two men were with them. The kids charged to the front of the Tower, and one of the men tried to slow them down.
I imagined Kiernan speeding through the night, trying to get there before I left to tell me—what? That it had all been some sort of terrible mistake? Nothing personal, you understand.
Off to my right, in the direction of the Archives, someone screamed. I heard the sound of running, then spotlights began to come on. It was a frosty sort of illumination.
People were moving toward the Archives.
Whatever was happening, I decided it was prudent to stay clear, to remain where I was. Lights appeared in the sky and began to descend. Security bots hurried past and cleared a perimeter. Within minutes, emergency and police units had arrived.
Word got passed around that someone had fallen from the roof of the Archives. “A man,” they said.
The emergency vehicles touched down. I threw caution aside and tried to get close. I arrived just in time to see somebody carried into a med unit. Moments later it lifted away.
Police officers fanned out through the crowd looking for witnesses.
Kiernan never showed up.
I wasn’t entirely surprised when Fenn called in the morning to tell us about the man who’d been killed at the Archives. “Identified him from Ida’s pictures,” he said. “It’s Kiernan. The same guy. No question.”
Alex told him I’d been there. Fenn’s expression hardened. “You’re not going to be satisfied until you get yourself killed, are you, Chase?”
“I tried to call.”
“Next time try harder.”
“It won’t happen again,” said Alex.
“You keep telling me that. I can’t protect you if I don’t know what’s going on.”
I told him about Kiernan’s call. He listened. Nodded. Scribbled something down. “All right,” he said. “Thanks. We’ve got his DNA, and we are working now on establishing who he is.”
“Good. Let us know, okay?”
“If you hear anything more from these people, anything, would you be good enough to contact me? Right away?”
SiXTeeN
We cannot excise death from the process. If we sincerely wish to keep grandparents and elderly friends, and eventually ourselves, in full flower for an indefinite period, we had best be prepared to give up having children. But do that, and the creativity and the genius and the laughter will abandon the species. We will simply become old people in young bodies. And all that makes us human will cease to be.
—Garth Urquhart, Freedom Day Address, 1361
The AI at the Epstein Retreat, Dunninger’s longtime lab, had been named Flash, after a pet retriever. Three days after the departure of the Polaris, campers had gotten careless. The timber was dry, a fire wasn’t properly put out, and the woods caught. The lab was completely destroyed.
When we’d gotten tired trying to figure out what Kiernan had wanted to tell us, we went back to trying to decipher the nonverbal communication between Dunninger and Mendoza. Eventually we got around to looking at the news coverage of the fire.
The blaze was already out of control when the media arrived. The fire brigade was only a few minutes behind, but by then the area was an inferno.
Epstein was located on a bank of the Big River. The facility consisted of two white one-story mod buildings, the living quarters, and the laboratory. At one time they’d been a boating facility and restaurant. There’d been rumors that Dunninger had been close to a solution to the Crabtree problem, but I had trouble believing he’d have gone off to a distant star system if he’d been on the verge of making the greatest discovery in history.
The fire had completely engulfed the lab. The buildings themselves, of course, resisted the flames, but the forest came all the way out to the water, so everything around them had burned. Lab materials burst into flame, or melted. In the end, the Epstein structures still stood, charred and smoking, but nothing else survived.
There was no serious effort to save the facility. Apparently some private homes along the western rim of the valley had been in danger, and the firefighters went there first. By the time anyone got near the laboratory it was too late. Judging from what we learned of the blaze, it wouldn’t have mattered in any case. There’d been a long drought, and the trees went up like tinder.
Flash was gone, too. The AI, not the dog. The core material for Dunninger’s work on life extension, which he called, simply, the Project, had not yet been submitted for peer review. It was gone as well. Up in smoke, you might say. Had he maintained a duplicate data bank elsewhere? Probably. But no one knew where it might be, or how it might be accessed.
There were no fatalities during the incident, and most of the homes on the western perimeter were saved. The rescue services congratulated themselves, and the media reported how fortunate everyone was, how it could easily have been a disaster.
Alex wanted to hear how Dunninger had responded when he heard the news, but his reaction never made the public nets. We dug around and discovered that his response to the damage was listed in the Environmental Service archives. But to get into those we’d have to make application and provide an explanation for the request. “We should take a run out there tomorrow,” he said. “Get a look at the records.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Afterward we can go to lunch.” Alex enjoyed his lunches.
The Environmental Services Department is located along the perimeter of a preserve named Cobbler Green, about ten kilometers southwest of Andiquar. It’s a quiet area favored in the daytime by young mothers and in the evening by lovers. Sable trees, flowering bushes, sculpted brooks, curving walkways, traditional and virtual statuary. The building itself is, in the spirit of the neighborhood, an unadorned two-story structure covered with vines.
We walked into the main lobby, which was manned by an autoprocessor. “Good morning,” it said in a gender-neutral voice. “How may I help you?”
Alex explained that we wanted to see the Polaris record that would detail Thomas Dunninger’s response to the news that his laboratory had been destroyed. “Thirteen sixty-five,” he added.
“Very good,” it said. “There is a corresponding archive. The application forms are displayed. Please use the designated headbands.”
We sat down at a table, put on the headbands, and the applications appeared. We each completed one, citing antiquity background (whatever that might mean) as the purpose. A few minutes later, we were directed to an inner cubicle. A bored-looking middle-aged man in a Forestry Service uniform appeared and introduced himself as Chagal, or Chackal, or something like that. He directed us to a screen, told us to call him if we needed help, turned, and left. An access board powered up, and the screen turned o
n.
We got some numbers and a tag identifying the date and time of the desired communication. Fourth day of the flight, 1365, audio only. We listened to a station comm officer inform the Polaris, attention Dr. Dunninger, that a forest fire had destroyed the Epstein laboratory. “At this time,” the officer said, “reports indicate complete destruction of the facility. Nothing of value is believed to have survived other than the buildings, and they are damaged. This includes, unfortunately, the AI.”
A reply came back two days later. It was Madeleine’s voice: “Skydeck, the news of the fire has been passed as you requested. If there’s anything additional, please let us know.” Then she signed off.
“That’s it?” I asked.
Alex exhaled. “Damn.”
“I thought he’d get on the circuit and demand details. How it happened. Whether there was anything at all left. Stuff like that.”
“Apparently not. Of course, complete destruction pretty much says it.” We got up and started for the door.
“So what now?” I asked.
“How far’s Epstein?”
The Epstein Retreat had been located in West Chibong, in the north country. We booked a flight, left that evening, and got into Wahiri Central shortly after midnight. Not good planning. We checked into a hotel and set out the following morning in a taxi.
West Chibong is exactly what it sounds like: isolated, remote, one of those places where, once you get beyond the town limits, there’s nothing for a hundred kilometers in any direction except mountains and forest. The Big River runs through the area, providing good fishing, according to the locals, and, of course, it features the Wainwright Falls.
Alex told the taxi to pass over the Epstein site. It didn’t have any idea what he was talking about so he sighed and directed it instead to take us to Special Services, which housed Air Rescue, Forest, and Environment.
It was headquartered in a big, grungy, domed building downtown. Not exactly ramshackle, but close. The interior was impersonal, drab, damp, not a place where you’d want to work. I’d expected to find pictures of the rescue services in action, skimmers dropping chemicals on blazing trees, emergency technicians tending to victims, patrols chasing a runaway boat through rapids. But the walls were undecorated, save for a few dusty portraits of elderly men and women you probably wouldn’t have wanted to have over for dinner. There’d been a time when I’d thought briefly about doing something like this for a living. The rescue services especially had always seemed glamorous. And it would have been nice to dedicate my life to helping people in trouble. But I either grew out of it or found out the pay wasn’t very good.
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