His eggs came. He tried one, commented how good it was, and bit into the toast.
“She left the island. I don’t know where she is.”
“You mean, since the accident?”
“You know about that?”
“I know a skimmer went into the ocean. The police were looking for her. They think she saw it happen.” I paused. “I hope she’s okay.”
“So do I. I don’t know the details. But I think the police believe she was responsible for it.”
“I heard the same thing. But I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Neither do I.” He shrugged it off.
Sally’s was automated. Our bot showed up and refilled my hot chocolate.
“Hans,” I said, “I got the impression last time I talked to her, a few days before the accident, that something was on her mind.”
His gaze met mine. Steady. Worried. “Me too. She’s been down a bit lately.
Depressed.”
“It was unlike her in the old days. She was always upbeat.”
“I know.”
“Any idea what it might be about?”
“No. She wouldn’t tell me anything. Denied anything was wrong.”
“Yeah. That’s what she told me, too. I wonder what happened?” I was trying to be casual, yet sound concerned. Not easy for somebody whose acting skills are pure wood.
“Don’t know,” he said.
“How long has she been like that?”
He thought about it. “A few weeks.” He made a guttural sound. “I hope she’s okay.”
I wanted to bring the Polaris into the conversation, but couldn’t think of an indirect way to do it. So I just blurted it out: “She used to be fascinated by the Polaris. ”
“The ghost ship, you mean?” he asked. “I didn’t know. She never mentioned it.”
I wasn’t quite finished with my meal, but I moved the plate off to one side. That was a signal to Alex, who was armed with a projector.
“It was a strange business,” I said. I went on for a minute or two in that vein, recounting the many times I’d heard Teri wonder aloud what had happened to the people on the mission. Meantime, Marcus Kiernan’s simulacrum, projected by Alex, came strolling along the sidewalk. In full view of Hans. Of course, there was no way for Hans to know it wasn’t actually Kiernan himself out there. The simulacrum stopped just outside the door to study the menu.
Hans was pointed directly toward the window. Couldn’t have missed him. But he gave no sign of recognition. He simply went on quietly eating his breakfast. He did not know, and had never seen, Marcus Kiernan.
After Hans left for his classes, I strolled outside and went across the street into the park.
Alex was waiting. He’d heard the conversation on my link. I detailed my impressions for him while he sat casually, watching a couple of toddlers riding swings under their mother’s supervision. It seemed to me we hadn’t learned anything helpful.
Other than that he didn’t know Kiernan.
“I’m not so sure,” he said.
“In what way? What else do we know now that we didn’t know before?”
“He said the change in her mood began a few weeks ago. That puts it about the time Survey announced it would auction the artifacts.”
That night I was at home reading a mystery when Alex called. “I found something in the archives,” he said.
He sent it over and stayed on the circuit while I dimmed the lights, put on my headband, and looked at it.
We were inside a paneled room. Book-lined walls. Bokkarian artwork. Flowers.
Old-fashioned furniture. Lots of people milling around, shaking hands, embracing. I saw Dunninger. And Urquhart. “Where are we?” I asked.
“University of Carmindel, the evening before the Polaris flight.”
“Oh.” I spotted Nancy White in a corner of the room. And Mendoza. And there was Maddy, striding among the giants like a goddess.
“They held a celebration for everyone associated with the Polaris the night before they left.”
Mendoza was talking with two women. “The younger one,” said Alex, “is his daughter.”
Jess Taliaferro was engaged in an animated conversation with a man whose dimensions dwarfed him. A Tupelo. Connections somewhere with a low-gravity world. Taliaferro himself was smiling, nodding, looking earnest. Obviously feeling good. He was well turned out for the occasion: blue karym jacket, white neckpiece, gold buttons and links.
“Martin Klassner’s over by the table.”
Klassner sat beside a middle-aged woman and a little girl. The little girl was playing with a toy skimmer. Zooming it around and landing it on Klassner’s arm. He seemed to be enjoying the attention.
“He was pretty sick,” Alex said. “I’m not sure what it was.”
“Bentwood’s,” I told him. It was ironic that Klassner would be traveling with two of the great neurological research people of the age, but no one could do anything for him. Bentwood’s, of course, is beaten now. You go down to the clinic, and they give you a pill. But then“The woman is Tess, his wife. And the little girl is a grandchild.” Tess looked worried.
Chek Boland stood in a small mixed group near a window. “The caption indicates those are all people from the literature department. One of them, the one in the white gown, is Jaila Horn. A major essayist in her time.”
“I never heard of her.”
“It says she’s pretty much forgotten today. Only read by scholars. She was planning to write about the collision. About Delta Kay. She saw lots of analogies between what was going to happen to the star and what institutional authority does to individual freedom. Or something like that.”
“She didn’t go?”
“She was on the Sentinel. ”
Nancy White had been cornered by a group of young people who, I suspected, were graduate students. White had managed several careers. One of them consisted of doing shorthand biographies of the great scientists. But her most famous work was Out of the Trees, an attempt to reconstruct the early progress of knowledge.
Where was the first evidence that we’d begun to believe that the universe worked according to a system of laws? Who had first realized that the cosmos was not eternal? Why did people instinctively resist the notion? How had scientists first come to understand the implications of the quantum world? Who had first understood the nature of time?
Well, I didn’t understand the nature of time. And neither did anybody I could think of.
Occasionally I was able to make out a comment. “Wish I were going with you.”
“Is there any danger?” “Not going to happen again within traveling range probably, for a hundred thousand years.”
“Is there a point to all this?” I asked. It felt like a rerun of the other farewell, on Skydeck.
“Let me fast-forward.”
He rippled through, and the celebrants raced around the room at a ferocious rate, gulping down drinks and raiding the snack table. Then he returned to normal, and they were saying good-bye, moving toward the doors. Final shaking of hands. Tell your brother I said hello.
White extricated herself from her attending party and circled the room, nodding, accepting embraces. “Is that her husband at her side?” I asked.
“The big one?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “They’ve been married nineteen years. His name’s Karl.”
Dunninger and Mendoza carried small crowds with them as they passed out of the room. Maddy English waited near the bar, talking earnestly with a red-haired olive-skinned man. “Sy Juano,” Alex said. “He’s a financial manager, it says here.” It seemed as if she smiled past him, her thoughts concentrated elsewhere. The conversation seemed to be ending. Juano was nodding yes, then he leaned over and kissed her. She looked a bit reluctant.
The picture went off, and the AI brought the lights up. “Well, that was interesting,” I said.
Alex looked at me as if I were the slow kid in the classroom. “You didn’t notice?”
“Notice what?”
“Teri Barber.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I thought you’d pick her out right away.”
“Teri Barber was there?”
“Well, not Barber herself. It might have been Agnes.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “Where?” I asked.
“Take another look.” He told Jacob to rerun the last two minutes. Dunninger and Mendoza and their satellites trying to squeeze through the door. Maddy allowing Juano to kiss her. He hung on, chastely pressing his cheek against hers, as if he knew they were in the center of the picture.