“Good. She’s a lucky cat. Oh, by the way, I have news.”
“You’re going to be the new WSA director.”
He laughed. “No. Even better: I’m retiring.”
“You’re kidding, Jake.”
“No. I’m pulling the plug.”
“You spend a few weeks with me, and it’s all over, huh? Well, that’s pretty much the way I’ve always affected good-looking guys.”
That broke him up. “Priscilla, you’re priceless.”
“So where are you going?”
“The Blue Ridge. I’m going to settle in Virginia.”
“That’s kind of sudden, isn’t it?”
“It’s time.”
“Why Virginia? I thought you were from Pittsburgh.”
“I have a cabin up there. It’s been my vacation spot for years.”
“Well, I’m happy for you, Jake. But I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, Priscilla. If you ever need me, just call—”
* * *
HER LIFETIME AMBITION went beyond mere piloting. She wanted more than simply taking an interstellar into deep space. There was nothing intrinsically interesting about that. She expected to go farther, to get onto the exploration side. Head for places no one had ever seen. Most of the pilots did nothing more than haul passengers and cargo between research stations and, in a couple of cases, service people working at extraterrestrial archeological sites, places where civilizations had once flourished but which, for reasons not yet clearly understood, had grown dysfunctional and died, taking the inhabitants with them. There was only one known world with living intelligent beings. That was the awkwardly named Inakademeri, an attempt to render in English one of the inhabitants’ own names for their world. Priscilla could never understand why the experts hadn’t settled on something a bit less difficult to pronounce. Surely, the natives had other names for their world. In any case, it had been shortened to Nok.
Nok was not a place anyone would want to visit. The aliens were bipeds whose appearance was not wildly different from that of humans, but there was a problem. They were impossibly boring. They were locked in a centuries-old series of conflicts arising out of politics and religion and anything else they could think of to fight over. Fortunately, their technology was nineteenth-century, more or less. But, as one of her teachers had put it, they lacked history majors.
Reproductions of their art hung in museums, and translations of their literature had been made available. But they wrote long-winded novels, painted abstracts that Priscilla could make no sense of, and practiced religions that, in some instances, advocated killing nonbelievers. Their advocates claimed it was simply a matter of giving them time to develop. The bad news was that they’d had roughly a ten-thousand-year head start over humans. Maybe in the end, she thought, we would discover that whatever occupants on other worlds looked like, they would all behave uncomfortably like us. Except possibly worse. There might, in the end, be no aliens worth getting to know. At least none close enough for us to find.
But she was forgetting the Monument-Makers. And whoever had been at Talios.
Priscilla had sat in on a conversation in the Cockpit the night before she’d left on her qualification run. She’d heard Preacher Brawley, one of the most respected pilots in the business, going on about how the age of exploration was over. The various governments, after two decades, saw interstellar flight as nothing but a drain on resources. And private corporations were exclusively involved in making money. Tours, orbiting hotels, and potential colonies. But the corporations did not want to make investments that had only a long-term payoff, let alone do any blue-sky science. She suspected that Kosmik would gladly sell off their interstellar operations if they could find a buyer. And the governments were doing everything they could to withdraw funding.
So now, mostly, we weren’t doing much other than transporting cargo and passengers. There were several small, privately funded operations, like the Academy Project, that were actually trying to move farther out. But they needed resources.
She would, for the time being, have to settle. Kosmik, Inc. had an office just off the main concourse. She’d submitted a résumé within hours of getting back from the certification flight. Her shuttle didn’t leave until four, so she had plenty of time. Why not take some good news home?
She called them. “My name’s Hutchins,” she said to the young man who answered. “I’d like to work for Kosmik. As a pilot.”
He passed her along to an older guy with heavy eyebrows and a receding hairline. He looked out at her from the display. “You look a little young, ma’am. How much experience do you have?”
“I’ll be receiving my license next month.”
“Are you on the Wheel now?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked away momentarily. Seemed to be speaking to someone else. “When can you come in?”
* * *
HIS NAME WAS Howard Broderick. He was chewing his lip. “So you want to do missions for us, is that right?”
“That’s correct, Mr. Broderick. I’d like very much to be part of Kosmik.”
He took a couple more chews, glanced down at a notepad, then looked up at her. “Why?”
“Because Kosmik is leading the way in an age of discovery. They’re making history. I’m not sure that we’ve ever done anything more significant than what is happening right now. I want to be part of it.”
“I see.” His eyes narrowed. “You were on the mission that came in yesterday, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re smiling. Why?”
She was wondering how he’d react if she told him that she’d helped rescue a cat. “I was just thinking how much I’ve looked forward to this moment.”
“Yes. I’m sure. It says here you lost Captain Miller. Not you, but the mission you were part of.”
She nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry to say that’s correct.”
“Do you mind telling me what happened?”
She ran through it again, avoiding some of the more difficult details. And again she faced the question she suspected she’d hear a few more times before this was over. “How did they decide who was going to go down to the cargo bay?”
“Captain Miller simply went down without telling anyone what he intended to do.” That was, of course, the truth.
“And nobody understood what was going on?”
“Mr. Broderick, I’ve told you as much as I know.”
“I see.” He wasn’t impressed with her answer. As if she should have been aware. He exhaled. Nodded. “Is there anything else we should know?”
“I think that’s about it.”
“If we decide to take you on, when would you be able to start?”
“The certification ceremony’s December 22.”
“That’s irrelevant, Priscilla. You’re already certified. The ceremony’s just a ceremony. So when could you start?”
“It’s been a long haul. I’d like to get a few days off.”
“Okay. Make sure we have your code. We’ll see you back here next Friday. December 4.”
“Thank you.” She tried to keep her voice level. “I can do that.”
“Excellent. Congratulations and welcome aboard.”
* * *
NEWSDESK
After all these years, it’s difficult to see what possible benefit can come out of space exploration, with its enormous costs and assorted risks. We’ve known for a long time that there are other intelligences in the universe although after more than thirty years of looking around, we’ve yet to find anyone we can talk to, other than the barbarians on Inakademeri. And we clearly have nothing to learn from them.
Our explorers have gone out more than sixty light-years. We’ve seen some ruins, and we’ve discovered the Great Monuments, probably the one serious benefit we’ve gotten from all this. But the reality is that we’ve had better sculptors at home though no one wants to admit it.