Fenn shook his head. “I can’t force you to accept them.”
“We haven’t been in a situation,” Alex said, “where having a bodyguard would have changed anything.” We were all sitting in the Rainbow office. “Has the investigation been making any progress?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Did the exhumation order for Crisp go through?”
“Yes. I told you it would.”
“Are they going to dig him up?”
“No. They didn’t even take it to a hearing. They told us the case was closed a quarter century ago.”
I took to reading and watching everything I could find about the Polaris and the people who had ridden her on that last mission.
Nancy White was possibly best known for her fireside forays into the natural world. Her living room (or the set, whichever it actually was) looked extraordinarily cozy, comfortable, snug. White customarily sat in an oversized armchair, in the soft glow of an antique lamp on a side table. She was usually sipping a drink and talking to the viewer in a tone that implied we were all good friends, enjoying an evening together. There was inevitably a storm beating at the window, sometimes thunder and lightning, sometimes heavy snow. But it added to the warmth and good feeling inside.
This was a living room, she liked to remind us in one of her signature comments, that looked out on the cosmos. “Like your own.” She specialized in drawing parallels between natural processes and the human condition. Nothing is forever, not even a black hole. Springtime on Qamara, a world with (as she put it) too much ellipse in its orbit, was brief and quickly buried beneath a years-long winter, but the flowers were all the more valued for that reason.
Early in each of the White conversations, we leave the living room and sail among galaxies, or watch the fierce harridans of Dellaconda glide through the valleys of that distant world, or plunge into the fiery interior of Regulus, or soar through the churning atmosphere of a newly born world. If there was a recurrent theme, it was the significance of the moment. Life is not forever. Take the cup and drink. Seize the day.
Enjoy the jelly donut.
One of her more moving shows used the ancient outstation Chai Pong as its central symbol. During the golden days of the Kang Republic, twenty-six hundred years ago, several successive heads of state engineered a major push into the Veiled Lady. The Kang set themselves an ultimate goal of mapping the nebula, a task that would take centuries, even for an exploration fleet many times the size of the fortyplus ships they had available. But they made the commitment and devoted their wealth and energy to the enterprise. They built outstations (one of which was Chai Pong) and established bases and for centuries they moved among those far suns, discovering and recording living worlds, including the one at Delta Karpis. In a show recorded exactly one year before the Polaris departure, she observed that the Kang had established an outstation, since lost, somewhere in the Delta Kay region. (It was the Kang who initially found the incoming white dwarf and predicted the eventual collision.) Locating another technological species had not been their stated mission. They simply wanted to know what was out there. The habitable worlds were too far to establish settlements, even had the Kang been of a mind to make the effort. But the point that White stressed was that in all those years, amid all those missions, no living civilization was ever discovered.
“It has always been argued that placing ourselves at the center of creation is an act of supreme arrogance,” she said from the Chai Pong control room. “But in a very real sense, it is nonetheless true that humans are central to the scheme of things.
Cosmologists tell us that we cannot ask why the universe exists. We cannot ask about its meaning. These are misleading questions, they say. It exists, and that is the sum of all we know on the subject.” She stops at this point and lifts a cup to her lips. “Maybe, in a narrow sense, they’re right. But in a broader context, we can argue that all the workings of the cosmos seem designed to produce a conscious entity. To produce something that can detach itself from the rest of the universe, stand back, and appreciate the vault of stars. Birds and reptiles are not impressed by majesty. If we were not here, the great sweep of the heavens would be of no consequence.”
In the end the Kang, exhausted in spirit and treasure, abandoned their outstations, gave up, and went home.
Chai Pong orbited a rocky world in the Karaloma system. The platform, the world, and the system had been all but forgotten. “Given enough time,” White said, “it’s what happens to us all.”
Alex had a combination den and workroom at the back of the house. He’d covered the walls with pictures of the Polaris passengers, all in settings that emphasized their humanitarian contributions. Warren Mendoza looking down a line of injured patients in a surgical hut on Komar during one of its endless guerrilla wars. Chek Boland helping give out coffee and sandwiches at St. Aubrey’s in a poor section of a terrestrial city. Garth Urquhart landing with a relief unit in a famine-stricken village in South Khitai. Nancy White helping rescue workers in flood-ravaged and diseaseridden Bakul, also in South Khitai. A middle-aged Martin Klassner sitting behind a set of drums for the Differentials, a group of scientists with, maybe, musical talent, in one of a series of fund-raising events for survivors of a civil war on Domino. And, of course, there was the celebrated picture of Tom Dunninger, gazing at sunset across the West Chibong Cemetery.
It was supposed to be a day off. I’d gone in to conduct some minor piece of business. Alex, seeing that I was staring at the walls, stopped what he was doing. “It’s common to all of them, isn’t it?” he asked.
“You mean that they were all humanitarians?”
“They were all true believers.”
“I suppose you could put it that way. It strikes me that the people who make the contributions are always true believers.”
“That may be,” he said. “But somewhere in the mix, people need to be pragmatic.” I asked what he was suggesting, but he just shrugged and denied any deep significance. “I do have a surprise for you, though,” he said.
After what we’d been through, I thought I was about to get a bonus or a raise or hazardous duty pay. So it came as something of a disappointment when he handed me a headband. “Jacob,” he said, “show her.”
I was in a dining room, seated, facing the head table. It was a big room, and I saw the logo of the Al Bakur Hotel.
“Never heard of it,” I told Alex.
“It was torn down,” he said. “Forty years ago.”
The attendees numbered about three hundred. There was a constant buzz of conversation, and the clink of silverware and glass, and I smelled lemon and cherries in the air.
A chime sounded and a heavyset middle-aged woman seated at the center of the head table stood and waited for the room to quiet. When she had everyone’s attention, she welcomed the audience, told them how pleased she was to see the turnout, and asked the organization’s secretary to read the minutes of the previous meeting.
Alex leaned in my direction. “We don’t need to see this,” he said. The speaker and the diners accelerated and blurred. He stopped it a couple of times, shook his head, and finally arrived at the place he wanted.
“… featured speaker for the evening,” the heavyset woman was saying, “Professor Warren Mendoza.”
“This is 1355,” said Alex, as applause broke out.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” A relatively young and slim Mendoza rose and took his place behind the lectern. The Polaris was still ten years away. “It’s my pleasure to be here with you this evening. I want to thank Dr. Halverson for the invitation, and you folks for the warm reception.
“I won’t mince words. I want you to know that you have my full support. There is no more important work being done today than the effort to stabilize population.”
“It’s the White Clock Society,” said Alex, keeping his voice low.