Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  “Sure. I’ve changed all the names.”

  “Chase, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Maybe we should get back to The Grand Collapse. Or did we just have one?”

  There was a distinct growl. But he said, “No, we’re fine.”

  “Good. I’m working on the Sunset Tuttle one now.”

  “All right. Let’s try to concentrate on Garnett Baylee, okay? And do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “If anyone asks, I never knew about any of this.”

  * * *

  I started paging through draft one of The Grand Collapse. And glanced down at the bottom of the screen, where the word count was over three hundred thousand. “This is impossible, Alex,” I said. “We’ll be here for a year trying to go through all this.”

  “You don’t have to read everything, Chase. Just scan—”

  Unfortunately, Marco Collins was impossible to scan. I had never read him before, but the book just sucked me in. I couldn’t believe I was looking at an early draft. (There were two, plus the book itself, to go through.)

  I’ve read the standard histories that most people have, but I’d never seen anything like this one, which was a tour through the general collapse. I was present when the global economy, almost without warning, crashed on Thursday, March 8, 3021. Collins explained how it had happened, and even though I’ve never had any interest in economics, I couldn’t break away from it. I was in the North American Stock Exchange when the sale orders began to arrive. A few days later, I watched angry mobs in Chicago rampage through the downtown area in defiance of a government too weak to respond.

  We didn’t get out for lunch. Alex picked up some cookies somewhere, and we got by on those.

  I was seated in a living room with a small family in Casper, Wyoming, when the internet went down. Within hours, personal-communication devices began to fail. Suddenly, a group of people who had been connected all their lives to the rest of the world found themselves completely cut off. Angry voices filled the streets. No one had any idea what had caused the problem.

  It didn’t go away. A few hours later, the lights went out. The power system failed, and the only way people could talk with each other was to go outside and knock on doors. It was chilling, a life I couldn’t imagine.

  Fortunately, the weather was mild. A militia unit showed up to provide security. But within a few days, food deliveries began to fail, and the militia seemed unable to do much to ease the problem. Gradually, they faded from the scene. And the first raiders appeared. For a time, the raiders traveled in trucks and cars, but with the electricity down, they had no way to recharge. Eventually, they switched to horses. They ignored money, which was becoming irrelevant. They stole supplies and killed at will. The town organized its own defense force, but it was running out of food. Another blow came when the water system shut down.

  They had to learn the farming and hunting skills earlier generations took for granted. And how to make bullets and shoes. Many of them died in the process. People wandered into Casper on occasion with news of civil war, plague, utter chaos.

  It never ended. New generations appeared, adapted, and hung on as best they could.

  * * *

  “Chase, you there?”

  “Oh, yes, Alex. Hi.” The windows were dark, and the lights had come on.

  “They’re closing. We have to go.”

  “Okay.” I took a minute and finished the section. Then I shut down the screen. “Ready when you are.”

  It was raining when we went outside. We stood on the portico, out of the downpour. The campus grounds were empty, save for a couple of girls waiting in a lit doorway. Alex looked up at the sky. The storm was not likely to dissipate soon. “You find anything at all?” he asked.

  “No. To be honest, I got caught up in the reading.”

  “Maybe it would be a good idea to stay with the searches.”

  “I know. Dumb.”

  He laughed. “I understand. Collins is pretty good, but we don’t have time to go through it all.”

  “I can’t imagine living the way those people had to.”

  Alex smiled. “We take a lot for granted, Beautiful.”

  * * *

  I found Zorbas’s name in the second draft of The Grand Collapse.

  He was born in Giannouli, in a Greece that, like the rest of the world, was coming apart. His parents were wealthy, and when he was ten, they moved to North America in an effort to get away from the general instability. But the Americas were as tumultuous at the time as everybody else. When he was twenty-two, he went back to Giannouli, but the place was in chaos, so he aborted and returned home.

  Not much is known about him from that point until, about twenty years later, he has become director of the Prairie House. He first appears in Huntsville as a stranger approaching Abraham Cutler, with a plan to save the Apollo artifacts at a time when the Space Museum, and the entire area, was under siege by desperate mobs.

  “Collins describes the attacks by thugs determined to loot the museum. The security people held on, but the area was coming apart. He quotes Mary Castle, a historian living in that period, as saying that Zorbas was determined to save the Apollo artifacts. The Dakotas weren’t especially safe either, but Zorbas was convinced he could protect them. In any case, it was far more stable than Huntsville. Cutler apparently knew him, or in any event trusted him. They put together a working generator and used it to recharge a small fleet of trucks. Then they loaded everything onto the vehicles and took it to Grand Forks, where it was stored in the Prairie House. When conditions deteriorated there, Zorbas moved the artifacts again. Cutler is out of the picture by then.

  “Zorbas puts together another truck convoy. And they load it with the artifacts. But where does it go? Collins doesn’t say. He admits that there’s no way to verify that it even happened.”

  When we looked at the published version, the section about Zorbas took the action as far as the Prairie House in Grand Forks. But after that, there was no further mention of what happened. We could not find a copy of Lost Cause, the Mary Castle book cited by Collins.

  * * *

  We spent several more days going through the material and were about to give up when I caught something. Usually it’s Alex, but my turn had come. “Shawn Silvana,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “Shawn’s a female. And the big thing is that she’s still alive.”

  “What else?”

  “I was looking at her Coming Home to Aquarius. It’s a history of the early colonial years in space.”

  “Why do we care?”

  “It’s dedicated to my good friend and mentor Marco Collins.”

  “And you think that she might know—”

  “—What Collins really believed about the artifacts. Why he deleted the material about Zorbas. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  TWENTY

  The problem with The Dark Age is that we’re sitting here a hundred years after it went away, and nobody yet has turned the lights on.

  —Hamid Sayla, Lessons Learned, 3811 C.E.

  Shawn Silvana had fashioned a long career tracing the development of human worlds from their early outpost stage through the middle years as communities and cultures took hold, and finally evolving to their present state, in which they functioned simultaneously as independent entities and members of the Confederacy. She was based at the North American Historical Center, in Brimbury, 120 kilometers west of Winnipeg.

  Brimbury was a beautiful city, a glittering array of soaring towers and wide streets, aesthetic schools and houses, most in geometrically precise positions, separated by gardens and meadows. The Historical Center was headquartered in a wide building with a flowing dome and elevated walkways.

  We thought we had an appointment to talk with Professor Silvana, but when we went inside, an administrative aide apologized and informed us that she was on a field trip and that the data system had not been updated. “I’
m terribly sorry,” she said. “We don’t expect her back for several months.”

  My first reaction was that, since Silvana specialized in the development of planetary cultures, we would have to do some serious traveling to talk with her. But we caught a break. “No,” said the aide, “she’s in Europe. They’re doing a dig at Koratska.”

  “Would it be possible to talk with her?” Alex asked.

  “I can try,” she said. “Give me a minute.”

  We were led into a conference room and, moments later, Shawn Silvana blinked on. We knew her, of course, from the pictures in the books. She was well into her second century, with red hair and dark skin, and a lot of animation. She looked at us curiously, took off her field hat, and sat down on a large log. We could see behind her a section of the dig site, by which I mean a large hole. Beyond that was heavy forest.

  “What’s your name again?” she asked. “I didn’t have a good connection.”

  “Alex Benedict. This is my associate, Chase Kolpath.”

  It was dark, and the moon gleamed in the branches behind her. “Alex and Chase. That rings a bell.”

  “We’re antiquarians,” Alex said.

  She laughed. “Good. Excellent. Do you know what we’ve found here?”

  “I have no idea,” said Alex.

  “The headquarters of Andrew Boyle.”

  That caught his attention. “Marvelous. Are you sure? They’ve been looking for that for centuries.”

  “Oh, yes. There’s no question about it. This was his base.”

  “Who’s Andrew Boyle?” I asked.

  Alex responded: “He’s one of the heroes of the Dark Age. Died too soon. He was betrayed by one of his own people. If he’d survived, they might have been able to avoid some of the worst effects of the collapse.”

  “Well,” said Shawn, “that’s very good, Alex. You know your material. That’s certainly part of the mythology, but God knows it’s unlikely that any one person, even Boyle, could have headed off much of what was coming. It was too late by the time he got into the fight.”

  “Boyle,” said Alex, “lived during the period when the corporates and the governments were trying to get up and running again. There was a lot of turmoil, but it really seemed, for a short time, as if a transition to a more stable society was actually happening. He was a leader for the ages, and he was there at exactly the right moment. The situation had reached a tipping point, and it could have gone either way. He had a lot of support. Worldwide. After he was killed, everything came apart.”

  “Well,” said Shawn, “it was all a long time ago. Alex, to what do I owe the pleasure of this call? And I should tell you that I’m sorry I’m not there to see you in person. I don’t guess I could talk you into coming over here to Koratska?”

  “We appreciate the invitation, Shawn. Might some artifacts be available?”

  “We’d be happy to show you what we have. But everything we find is already designated. The university would run me out of town if I compromised any of the find.”

  Alex smiled. No surprise. “Shawn, are you familiar with Garnett Baylee?”

  “Of course,” she said. “He was a close friend.”

  Alex explained about the transmitter while her eyes widened. “We’re trying to figure out where he found it.”

  “You think he might have located the rest of the artifacts? The ones that were at Prairie House?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Incredible.” She was silent for a few moments. “How can I help?”

  “I was hoping you might have some idea where they were taken? Some hint?”

  “I have no idea, Alex. I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

  “You knew Marco Collins?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you ever discuss this with him?”

  “Sure.”

  “We read an account of the transfer from Huntsville to Grand Forks in an early draft of The Grand Collapse. And then that they were getting ready to move everything again away from Grand Forks. But it didn’t say where. And that whole section was cut out of the final version.”

  “Did he do that? I wasn’t aware of it. Well, that might have been because there was no specific evidence. No indication where they might have taken all that stuff. Assuming they did. He probably didn’t have anything more than the tradition.”

  “What do you know about Zorbas?”

  “Enough that I can believe the story, that he’d do anything necessary to rescue the artifacts. When the thieves and vandals arrived in Grand Forks, he became one of the leaders of the defense. He was one of the heroes of that era. We do have documentary evidence of that. But I suspect during that period he had a lot more to worry about than some artifacts.”

  “I was wondering,” said Alex, “if his heroic stature wasn’t the reason the tradition formed. That people thought sure, it was the sort of thing he would have done. Except, yes, maybe he was too busy saving lives.”

  Somebody handed Shawn a cup. Probably coffee. She sipped it. “It’s possible.”

  They both fell silent.

  “Okay,” said Alex, “thanks, Shawn. We won’t take any more of your time.”

  “Well, there is one thing that Marco mentioned.”

  Alex’s jaw tightened. “What?”

  “He told me he’d seen a comment attributed to Zorbas’s brother Jerome that he’d taken the artifacts to Greece.”

  “To Greece?”

  “To a place near where he was born. Larissa. But Marco didn’t buy it. Greece was even more disrupted then than North America was.”

  “Larissa,” said Alex. “Did Marco have any direct contact with Baylee?”

  “I have no idea, Alex. But it’s certainly possible. Marco would have been teaching at the university at about the same time Baylee was doing his research there.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Historians are not to be trusted. They believe what they wish, crushing facts underfoot and twisting outcomes to fit preconceptions. History, as it is presented to us, is no more than a point of view.

  —Algernon Eddy, Notebooks, 1366

  The final version of The Grand Collapse reported only that Dmitri Zorbas was “believed” to be at the Prairie House when the decision was taken to shut it down. Whether they were “shutting down” a trove of artifacts or simply a communal establishment is left unclear.

  “Do we head for the Aegean now?” I asked. Larissa was located north of the Pagasetic Gulf.

  “I don’t know,” said Alex. “What do you think?”

  That kind of indecisiveness was unlike him. “I assumed that was automatic. Why do you ask?”

  “It doesn’t feel right. I can’t believe he’d have taken the artifacts to Greece. They wouldn’t have been any safer. And he’d already given up twice on the area.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe it’s time to go home.”

  I can’t explain what happened next. I wasn’t ready to give up, but I was also inclined to agree that charging off to Europe with several truckloads of artifacts during a time of worsening instability didn’t seem like a smart move. On the other hand, what other course did we have? “Your call, Alex.”

  “Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

  He retired to his room, where I knew he’d go back to plowing through the library books, while I turned on the HV. I needed a break. I probably sat for an hour or so watching Last Man Out and The Harvey Gant Show. They’re pretty weak comedies, but I wanted something light. When they were over, I put on a talk show just as Alex, wrapped in a robe, came out of his room carrying his notebook and wearing a broad smile. “Chase,” he said, “did you look at either of the poetry books they gave us?”

  “No. I never got to them. Why?”

  “They’re both Marcel Kalabrian collections. I’d never heard of him before, but he was alive during the thirty-third century.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Does he have anything helpful to say?”

  The smile widened. He opened the notebook. “It’s call
ed ‘Coffee,’” he said.

  In the cold gray morning light,

  They loaded our history into their trucks

  And cars, and turned into the rising sun.

  They drank their coffee

  And rode out of town while the rest of us slept.

  “That’s a bit of a coincidence,” I said. “Was he there when they took the artifacts out of Huntsville?”

  “I don’t think he’s referring to Huntsville.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wrong image. The Huntsville transfer was made by plane.”

  “Then you’re thinking Prairie House?”

  His eyes met mine. “Kalabrian lived in Grand Forks.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  It’s Greek to me.

  —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1599 C.E.

  Like the other nations of the ancient world, Greece had long since ceased to exist. Nor was there any longer a place in that area known as Larissa. We knew, though, where it had been.

  The plane came in over rolling green fields, patches of forest, and occasional towns. Off to the east, the countryside turned rugged. Beyond it, the Aegean sparkled in the morning sunlight. Alex had spent most of the flight reading whatever he could find about Dimitri Zorbas. “Most historians don’t think he actually existed,” he said. “But at a distance of eight thousand years, the evidence for anybody’s existence, except major kings and presidents and people like Einstein and Kalaska, is questionable.”

  “Did you look up Larissa?”

  “‘Ancient Greek city located near present-day Elpis. Destroyed by Moravian rebels during the Sixth Millennium.’ It was a famous cultural center for a long time. There’s a list of major artists, playwrights, poets, and composers associated with the city.”