Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

During the next few days, he spoke to every living relative who’d had any kind of connection with Baylee. Most hadn’t known him very well. “He was away all the time,” they said. A few weren’t even aware of his connection with the Golden Age. Others knew, but it had no real significance for them. He had spent so much time away that no one had maintained contact with him. And we found nobody who had even heard of a Corbett transmitter.

  * * *

  I got a call one afternoon from Juanita Biyanca while I was closing up. “I represent the Capella Families,” she said. “Is Alex available?” She was probably well into her second century. And she looked like a woman on a mission.

  “What is the Capella Families?”

  “It’s exactly what it sounds like. The families are coming together. We don’t trust the government to handle the rescue properly. We don’t want them trying anything that will get everybody killed.”

  I could hear Alex in the kitchen. “Hold on a second, Juanita. Let me see if he’s back yet.” I signaled Jacob to ask Alex whether he wanted to take the call.

  Moments later, he walked into my office. “Hello, Juanita. What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Benedict, it’s becoming obvious they are not going to be able to get everyone off when the Capella comes back. We want to make sure they don’t do something silly and maybe lose the ship altogether. Consequently, we’d like you to sign a petition demanding they take no chances. That they do not touch the engines. Would you be willing to do that?”

  He looked my way with a pained expression. “Juanita, I understand your concern, and I know John Kraus will take no risks with the passengers’ lives. But the issue is more complicated than you make it sound. I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to help you with that.”

  “I see.” She let him see she was disappointed. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about them taking unnecessary chances.”

  “There’s something else. We’re soliciting for two volunteers to board the ship and stay with it when it goes down again. We need to let the passengers know what’s happening. You’ve been a significant figure in this business from the start, and we were hoping you would be willing to help.”

  “You mean you want me to go on board?”

  “It could save the situation, Mr. Benedict.”

  I looked at him and shook my head no. Don’t do it. He rolled his eyes. “Juanita, I don’t think it’s a good idea. The SRF will have radio contact with Captain Schultz, and I think you can trust them to inform her about what is happening.”

  “Well,” she said, “you have more confidence in these people than I do.”

  “I may know them a little better.”

  She broke off with a cold good-bye and was gone. Alex turned laser eyes in my direction. “You didn’t actually think I might go along with that, did you?”

  “I just wanted to be sure,” I said.

  “I appreciate your confidence.”

  TEN

  The measure of a prize is often its elusiveness. What we really care about is to possess something no one else has.

  —Salazar Kester, On the Hunt, 4211

  With the Capella rendezvous approaching, excitement in the media and the general public was ramping up. And interest in the other lost ships was reviving as well. Sabol and Cori Chaveau, the two girls who had been rescued from the Intrépide, were in the news again. The Intrépide had left the French outpost at Brandizi eight thousand years ago. The passengers were not only still alive, but for them only a few weeks had passed.

  Unfortunately, it had taken too much time to catch up with the ship, and the two girls were the only passengers we’d been able to rescue before the ship was dragged away again. Sabol was thirteen and Cori three years younger. Probably they were the youngest guests ever to turn up on The Charles Koeffler Show.

  “How did it feel,” Koeffler asked them, “when you found yourself in a place that must have seemed so strange to you?”

  “It was scary,” said Sabol. “We’d grown up in Brandizi, which had only a few thousand people. It’s so crowded here. And everyone we knew back there is gone.”

  “The worst part of it,” added Cori, “is that Dad is still on the Intrépide. And it’s not like the Capella, which will show up every five and a half years.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “The Intrépide won’t be back again for sixty-five years.” Both girls had mastered Standard, but the ancient accent held fast. Neither would ever be mistaken for a native.

  “I’m sorry,” said Koeffler. “I’m sure your rescuers did everything they could.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sabol. “Dot Garber brought us across. But she went back for others and got caught.”

  “You live with Dot’s daughter, don’t you?”

  “Yes. She’s been very nice. Out of this world.”

  “I suspect, Sabol, that a lot of people would say you and Cori have been out of this world.” Both girls smiled and blushed.

  Cori’s eyes closed momentarily. “You know, this whole thing is hard to believe. I mean, it was only a little more than a year ago when we left Brandizi. And we get here, to a place that didn’t even exist when we left home. And people tell us that Brandizi is gone. That nobody lives there anymore. What’s really hard to accept is that everything we knew as kids, all those people, the house where we lived, our friends, that they’re just not there anymore. Haven’t been there for thousands of years. I can’t believe that. And what’s even sadder, nobody except us”—she glanced at her sister, who nodded—“nobody except us even knows they existed.” More tears were coming.

  “Well,” said Koeffler, “you remember them. You and Sabol. As long as you are here, they won’t be forgotten.”

  * * *

  Baylee might not have left an avatar, but he had a serious presence on the net. Check out almost any archeological occasion, a convention, a luncheon, a conference, a strategy meeting at a university, anything at all of that nature that had happened before about 1416, and you could find him. He received awards, appeared as a speaker, performed as host, presented the prizes. The events had usually occurred on Earth, but there were occasional entries from Rimway as well. The records from Earth had been imported since, of course, no direct connection between the webs of the two worlds existed.

  There was no denying that everybody loved him. He was greeted with enthusiastic applause on every occasion. People crowded up to the head table to shake his hand, to whisper words of encouragement, to get their picture taken with him. Incredibly, at an awards dinner at Polgar University on the Alpine Islands, I caught a glimpse of Gabe talking with him.

  Baylee, in his younger years, looked good. He was short, but he had a full head of hair, blue eyes, and a smile that inevitably lit up the room. He told jokes on himself, describing how he blundered about the various dig sites but consistently “found good stuff” because he always traveled with smart people. “I’ve been fortunate,” he said at the dedication of the Cambro Museum in St. Louis. “I’ve had a good run. We’ve tried to do what archeologists are supposed to do, which is to rescue the past, to keep history alive, and if I’ve been able to do that to a reasonable degree, it’s been because of people like Lawrence Southwick and Anne Winter, both of whom are here today. Anne, Lawrence, would you guys please stand?” They did, and the place rocked with applause.

  I enjoyed watching Baylee perform. He had a sparkling sense of humor and a warm personality. But what really came across was his passion for history. At the Luganov Museum in Belgrade, he was shown a nineteenth-century vase. His eyes glowed as he looked at it, and he obviously wanted to touch it. His hosts urged him to go ahead, and finally he did, pressing his fingertips against it as if it were sacred. One of them even apologized, explaining that they’d have given it to him to take home if they could.

  I watched him tour the Great Pyramid. And, on the Greek islands, stand with tears running down his face staring at the government building that now occupies the grounds which had
once been home to the Acropolis. “Hard to believe,” he said to an interviewer, “that we could have been so stupid.” The Acropolis, of course, was destroyed during the Dark Age. Nobody knows the details.

  “The most important thing we’ve done,” he said to an audience at Andiquar University, “was to get off-world. That was the single act that opened the universe to us. We owe all that to the men and women who made the Apollo flights possible and especially to those who put their lives at risk, and who sometimes paid the price, to actually ride the vehicles. They got us started. Once we’d set foot on the Moon, it was inevitable that we’d go on to Rimway and Dellaconda and the edge of the galaxy. We knew it would take a while. That we’d get in our own way. That we’d be discouraged by the vast distances involved simply in going to Mars. We understood that we were probably facing an empty and cold universe. But it was the beginning, and in our hearts we must have known we would not be stopped.” At that point, he paused and looked out across his listeners. “It is our severe loss that so little remains from that Golden Age. What would we not give to be able to hold in our hands the helmet Alan Shepard wore on that first fateful flight?”

  He visited Coranthe, the city that had served as the headquarters of Mary Latvin, who brought light back to the world at the depths of the Dark Age. There’s a picture of him standing beside her statue, her mantra inscribed on its base: NEVERMORE.

  It’s possible to watch him and his team at various dig sites, recovering artifacts. And celebrating after a visit to the Hadley Telescope, which is still in orbit, though of course it has not been used for three thousand years. The Hadley, of course, provided our first real clues about the conditions that led to the Big Bang.

  Baylee loved to celebrate. Recover an artifact, locate a promising dig site, translate an inscription in a lost language, possibly just get under cover before the rains came, all were good reason to raise the glass.

  Southwick and Winter showed up consistently. And on one occasion there were nine or ten of them in a modular hut drinking to Southwick, who, according to the caption, had saved Baylee’s life. No details were given, but Baylee’s left wrist was wrapped, and he looked unusually somber.

  One celebration took place on the deck of a boat. It belonged to the Southwick Foundation, and was almost as big as the Belle-Marie. Baylee, Southwick, and a half dozen colleagues had just recovered the notebooks of Adrian Chang.

  * * *

  The record indicated that when Baylee returned to Rimway permanently in 1417, he’d been a different person. He declined speaking invitations, avoided conferences that, in earlier years, he’d attended with enthusiasm, and on two occasions he sent representatives to accept awards for him. He had never done that before. People who qualified as old friends found him difficult to reach. Southwick seems to have been the exception.

  In a few personal letters published by others, Baylee revealed a sense of rage at the political leaders at the beginning of the Dark Age who, in his view, had through corruption and sheer stupidity allowed a glittering civilization to come apart. It wasn’t always clear precisely who he was talking about, and he probably wasn’t certain himself. Too much of the history of the period has been lost. It’s known the collapse was brought about primarily by economic failure and by the inclination of leaders to employ force over diplomacy. One comment by Baylee shows his frustration: “They had a technology that had taken them to the stars. They had stable governments, or at least most of them did. How could they possibly have given it all away? Look in their histories, and there are numerous comments about the development of a new Rome, about trying to do too much. Is that possibly what happened?”

  He was talking about the West.

  Most historians believe that there are historical cycles. They point to the Time of Troubles, which was still another collapse. Not as complete as the Dark Age (the second dark age, really), but nevertheless we came pretty close to going under again. Maybe it just happens every four or five thousand years. But Baylee’s bitterness extended beyond the general breakdown. He makes a particular point in arguing that maybe historians are right and we do live in a cycle, but there are some things that should be preserved. He doesn’t specify what, and I didn’t get the impression he was talking about artifacts. I suspect he had in mind the accomplishments of those who gave us science, who wrote the great books, who stood up to fanatics, and who took us to the stars.

  Many historians credit the space effort with ultimately saving the human race. It could not have survived, they argue, had it been confined to Earth, with its population problems, its deteriorating climate, and the human propensity to make war. Baylee was not among them. He argues that we would have found a way without the interstellars. Population growth, he says, was already easing around the world before those first manned missions went out beyond the Oort Cloud. We’d backed off most of the practices that had damaged the environment. We’d have eventually stopped the warfare, as we have in fact done over these last few thousand years. With a few minor exceptions, of course.

  “You don’t need faster-than-light,” Argent Pierson quotes him as saying. “All you need is enough sense to know when you’re in trouble. We have that. Sometimes it comes in a bit late. But when the chips are down, we’re pretty good at drawing the aces. What interstellar travel did for us was show us who we really were.”

  * * *

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Alex said. “I can’t imagine this guy coming home with a Corbett transmitter, dropping it into a closet, and forgetting about it.”

  “Does that mean we’re going to pursue this thing?”

  He looked amused. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that Gabe would have loved to get involved with.”

  “Maybe when the Capella shows up—”

  “Yeah.”

  It was supposed to be a joke. But I guess I should have thought before opening my mouth. It was unlikely Gabe would be getting off anytime soon.

  * * *

  Shara and I were back at the Hillside the following day. She seemed subdued. “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “John’s desperate.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Plan A looks like a disaster.”

  “You mean where we take as many off the ship as we can and let the rest go down the road for another five years?” I didn’t mean that to be as callous as it must have sounded.

  “Chase, we can’t even be sure how long it will stay accessible. Nobody talks about that. At least not in public.”

  “I thought you’d settled on ten hours.” The estimate kept changing, but it had never varied very much.

  “That’s based on our experiences with the other ships. And with some experiments. But those were much smaller and they were in different time/space streams and the bottom line is that we don’t know what we’re doing. Not for certain.

  “It’s a passenger vessel, so they have a connecting tube that will allow them to cross directly into another ship. We’re getting a break there. The last thing we’d want is to be opening and closing an airlock every few minutes. What scares me is the possibility that the Capella will fade out in the middle of the operation. If that happens, we could lose a couple of hundred people. It’s a nightmare.”

  “So what are they going to do? You said something before about a backup.”

  “I was talking about lifeboats.”

  “Lifeboats?”

  She stared down at her plate of strawberries and potato salad. “Yeah.” She scooped up some of the salad and bit into it. “They might work. There’s a downside, though. We’d be using the ship’s appearance this time to set things up. We won’t really be able to get many people off until it comes back.”

  “In five years.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, that’s better than the hundred years some people are talking about. What are the lifeboats?”

  “They’ve been under construction for a while. Some of us, including John, wanted a way to avoid stretching this thin
g out indefinitely. The boats should work. They’re self-inflatable. Each lifeboat can support sixty-four people for twenty-two hours, which should be plenty of time for the rescue vehicles to reach them. I’ve been inside one. It’s like the interior of a small shuttle. Sixteen rows of four seats divided by a center aisle. With washrooms. They have transmitters, lights, and a pair of jets to take them away from the Capella.

  “The plan is that when they get here, they open their cargo bay and we stack forty-four boats inside. Or as many as we can. That’s the mission. If we can get a few people off at the same time, so much the better.”

  “You’re going to be able to fit forty-four of these things into the cargo bay?”

  “Yes. They’re small packages and, as I said, they self-inflate. We’re hoping the space isn’t taken up by too much cargo. There’s no way to check that. We’ve talked with Orion, and they think we’ll probably be able to make it work. They’ve got three decks, and they should be able to inflate three vehicles per deck. So they inflate nine of the boats at a crack, and get their people on board. Meanwhile, for us, four and a half years go by.” She shook her head. “Then they’re back. We’re waiting for them. They open up, launch nine boats, and close the doors. We pick up the people in the boats. Then repeat the process. It should take about forty minutes to set up a second launch. That means if we get any kind of break we should be able to get everyone off in about three hours.” She lifted a strawberry on the tip of her fork and took a bite. “Did I tell you that Wainscot Pictures is threatening us?”

  “Who’s us?”

  “The SRF.”

  “What?” I almost spilled my iced tea. “About what?”

  “You know Guy Bentley is on the Capella?”

  “The comedian? Yes, I remember hearing that.”

  “The studio wants him back. They want us to arrange things so he’s one of the first people off the ship.”