Bone white, I thought. And it keeps ticking. It counts the time left before Rimway’s population outruns its resources to the degree that people begin to die in large numbers. Their slogan was on the wall behind Mendoza: WE CAN , OR NATURE WILL .
“Unless we persuade people there is a problem,” Mendoza was saying, “we will never be able to arrange a solution. Despite all our technology, there are hungry children on Earth, disease-ridden adults on Cordelet, economic dislocations on Moresby. Members of the Confederacy, during the past ten years, have suffered literally dozens of insurrections and eight full-blown civil wars. All are traceable, either directly or indirectly, to scarcity of resources. Elsewhere, economies go through their standard cycles, taking wealth from all and impoverishing many. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.”
“Am I hearing this right? This is the guy who’s trying to extend life spans.”
“No,” Alex said. “That’s Dunninger.”
“But Mendoza was helping him.” I looked at Alex. “Wasn’t he?”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
Mendoza talked for twenty-five minutes. He used no notes, and he spoke with passion and conviction. When it was over, he got a standing ovation. I’ve never worried much about overpopulation, but I wanted to join the general cheering. He was good.
Alex shut the program down and picked up a folder. “There’s something else that’s interesting. I’ve been looking into Taliaferro’s career.”
“What have you got?”
He opened the folder. “In 1366, a year after the Polaris, he conceived of, and pushed hard for, the Sunlight Project.”
“Which was what?”
“Accelerated educational opportunities for select graduate students. He made the project work, but in the long term it broke away from Survey and received direct government funding.”
“Why is it significant?”
“It became the Morton College.”
That afternoon, when I had some spare time, I had Jacob post the convention archive again. Alex told me I was consumed by the Polaris. He had room to talk.
I looked through it, thinking that if Bellingham/Kiernan had been there, then Teri Barber might have been present as well. That meant I had to look at everything this time, not just the events I’d attended. Barber was a distinctive woman and would have been easy to spot. But there was no sign of her.
Alex joined me, though, and we spent the day at it. He got interested in the convention itself, and we listened to parts of several presentations.
I remembered my impression that the attendees were people trying to escape the routine of life, to add a bit of romance, to reach out and touch a less predictable kind of world. I saw the guy who thought everyone from the Polaris was alive and well and hidden in the woods somewhere. And the woman who’d claimed to have seen Chek Boland by the White Pool.
And the avatar of Jess Taliaferro.
I’d seen it at the convention and spoken privately with it later. But I froze the image and looked at it again, at the auburn hair turning prematurely gray. At the awkward middle-aged body. At the slightly puffy features. “Alex,” I said, “who is that?”
Alex chewed his upper lip and jabbed an index finger at the image. “Damn,” he said, “it’s Marcus Kiernan.” He tried to remember the alias. “Joshua Bellingham.”
Fenn called. “Alex, we don’t have a DNA record for Teri Barber.”
Alex frowned. “I thought everybody local was on record.”
“Well, all the law-abiding types. We got a sample from her apartment, but there’s nothing to match it to. And that’s not all. There’s nothing on Agnes either.”
Someone caught his attention. He nodded and looked at us. “Be right back.”
“Well,” said Alex, “now it’s beginning to make a little sense.”
“What makes sense? You got this figured out?”
“Not entirely.” He lowered his voice. “But it’s a darker business than we thought.”
Fenn reappeared. “We also ran an archival search on Crisp,” he said. “The results are just in.”
“And?”
“Ditto.”
“No record?”
His large heavy features were creased. “Not a thing. Other than what’s known about his life at Walpurgis. It’s as if he never existed prior to moving there. Alex, I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks as if it goes back a lot of years.” He looked up again at another distraction. “I have to go.”
“Okay.”
“Look, I’m not sure what we’re into. But I want you two to be careful.”
“We will.”
“I’ve talked to the people at Walpurgis. We’re taking another run at the exhumation order. If we can find out who Crisp was, maybe we’ll get an idea why he fell, or was pushed, off the cliff.”
During the next several days I hardly saw Alex. Then, on a cold, frosty morning minutes after I’d arrived, he walked into the office, dragged me away from a conversation with a client, and hustled me into the VR room. “Look at this,” he said.
Another party.
“This is about six weeks before the Polaris. ” Mendoza was front and center, smiling and talking with a small group of men and women in formal clothing. They all had drinks in their hands, and banners hung from the walls proclaiming YUSHENKO .
“It’s the opening of the Yushenko Laboratory,” Alex said.
I must have looked puzzled.
“You never heard of it?”
“No.”
“No surprise, I guess. It went under seven years later when the financial manager ran off with the funds, and contributions subsequently dried up. But for a while it looked like a researcher’s dream.” He pointed over my shoulder. “There’s Dunninger.”
We were on our sofa, in the center of the room, while the action swirled around us. Dunninger looked uncomfortable in formal wear. He stood near a long table, loaded with snacks. He also was attended by several people.
The sense of actually being present was undercut by the fact I could not hear what anyone was saying. We got a distant buzz of conversation, and occasionally it was possible to catch a phrase or two, but for the most part we were doing guesswork and trying to read nonverbals.
Mendoza seemed to be watching Dunninger. When Dunninger excused himself and left the room, Mendoza also broke away and arranged to be waiting for him when he came back. He took Dunninger aside and walked him back out into the corridor.
Just before they disappeared, Dunninger shook his head no, vehemently no.
They were gone about five minutes. When they returned, Dunninger was leading the way. He looked angry, and the conversation had apparently ended.
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.