Firebird (10 page)

“Come on, Chase. How long does it take to manufacture something?”

I liked Ramsay. He was just a few years out of journalism school, but I could already see he had a future in the field. He was personable and sufficiently corrupt to carve out a career for himself. Alex refers to it as flexibility, but I plan to write a book one day on how it happens that people of unflinching integrity rarely, if ever, rise to the top of any profession. I asked Alex for his opinion once, and he agreed that it was true more often than not, and said it was because people who were inflexible were dumb. I don't buy it, of course, and neither does he, really. Though sometimes I'm not so sure.

“Jack, give me a chance to look around a bit more, okay?”

“What about the aliens, Chase? People from another reality? Don't you have anything on that?”

“Not anything you could use.”

“I don't guess you have anything about the black holes? Or the colliding universes?”

“No.”

“Colliding universes is good. How about the undead?”

“Say that again?”

He smiled. He was tall, dark-haired, easygoing. He always looked as if he thought I was trying to get away with something.
“I talked to one of the people at that party you guys went to a few nights ago. He says that Robin might have been one of the undead.”
He broke into his trademark cackle.
“You have anybody out there who thinks he might have been a vampire?”

“Jack—”

“Okay. Seriously, Chase, I read somewhere that Robin predicted he'd vanish but that he'd be back one day.”

“I hadn't heard that, either.”

“He must really have been something else. I can't imagine what you could find that would beat this stuff.”

Meantime, I went looking for old news reports.

Two days after the quake, Elizabeth had reported to police that her husband might be in trouble. Cermak had transported him off-world, she explained. She didn't know where. “He does this all the time.” She'd just learned that Cermak was dead, and she was reported as frantic that Robin might be stranded somewhere.

Several days later, there were reports that a couple of people strolling along the water's edge had seen a skimmer that was similar to Cermak's touch down at Robin's house about an hour before midnight.

Elizabeth was shocked to hear it. “I was asleep,” she said. “I never heard him.” And as far as anyone could determine, he'd never gotten inside.

I was able to get some information on the lost yachts. Robin had taken four of them out somewhere between 1385 and 1393. None of them, as far as anyone could tell, ever came back. No explanation was offered other than that the vehicles were being used in experiments to improve cycling. Whatever that was.

The other two yachts were
Striker
and
Elizabeth.

The
Firebird
had been the last to go missing, in 1393, a few weeks before Robin himself had vanished.

Robin was born on Toxicon, the only child in a wealthy family. He got his master's degree at Kawasai University, and, according to people who knew him at the time, was pretty handy with the ladies. He married a singer, Mary Dexter, and accepted a teaching appointment at Cajun Barker College.

The marriage and the appointment both collapsed within the first few months. He started criticizing his colleagues, sometimes doing it in front of students, and periodically for the media. Some of the professors, he said, were not aware of what really went on in the subquantum world. They didn't understand about complexity. It was why they couldn't present a clear vision to the students.

Robin himself apparently had problems connecting with the students. Only a handful signed on for the second semester. The college responded by canceling all but one of his classes.

Meantime, he was caught in a local hotel with a stripper. There was a public fight with Mary, in which she tried to push him out of an airborne taxi, and the thing crashed onto the roof of the Kassner Building, which housed the medical department. When the physics department chairman, a Professor Makaius, called him in, he responded by telling a reporter from the college newspaper that at least he'd never propositioned a student. That had required Makaius to issue a denial that
be
had ever done any such thing. It looked for a time that there'd be lawsuits, but everything was dropped when Robin agreed to leave the school and to comment no further.

A year later, he showed up on Rimway, got his doctorate at Margala, convinced everyone he could be trusted, and joined the physics department at Kinesia. He remained there six years, met Elizabeth, who was a lawyer, and began looking for a way to prove the existence of other universes. People had been trying to do that, of course, for thousands of years. The consensus has long been that it can't be done. Most physicists believe there
are
other universes, but it does not appear that there's any way to demonstrate the proposition. Robin even took to talking about creating a bridge.

He lost interest in teaching, claimed that his students were deficient, and decided he had better things to do. In 1359, he bought the house on Virginia Island and retired there supposedly to do research. Elizabeth had specialized in criminal law, and criminal activity on the island was essentially nonexistent. Apparently, she was given a choice between her career and her marriage. She chose the marriage.

A year or so later, Elizabeth is quoted in a review article to the effect that she had never been happier.

From that point, there's not much on the record about their private lives. Both withdrew into the house and, across a thirty-four-year span, became relatively innocuous neighbors.

In 1376, Robin wrote
Multiverse,
which had been controversial from the start. It was, according to his Kinesia University colleague, William Winter, not a book for the faint of heart.

Winter? He was the one Ilena had mentioned. Seven years after publication of
Multiverse
, in 1383, he'd joined Robin on an expedition to Indikar. I couldn't find a clear explanation regarding the purpose of the flight. It seemed to have something to do with orbital fluctuations.

But Winter was killed, apparently attacked by a predator when they made the mistake of landing on a green world to do some sightseeing. The body was never found.

I had asked Father Everett about the incident. “We never really heard any details,” he said. “I didn't know Winter. But I noticed a change in Robin after that. I thought it hit him pretty hard. Elizabeth told me he blamed himself. In any case, he was never the same after that.”

EIGHT

I am not truly lost so long as someone, somewhere, can hear my voice.

—Vicki Greene,
Love You to Death
, 1423

I guess people will always see things in the night sky. There've been countless reports over the millennia of various kinds of sightings, of mysterious lights and unidentified objects and phantom vehicles. The vast majority do not stand up to close inspection. Some are simply ships that have arrived at the wrong place, for one reason or another, and are reluctant to go on the record, so they clear out without identifying themselves. Others are space rocks that catch momentary sunlight. Still others are incompetent smugglers. In one famous instance, the object was a firefly that had gotten onto a station and been caught in a sliding port.

But sometimes no ready explanation presents itself. The two events witnessed by Chris Robin, one at Sanusar, the other at Rimway, seem to fall into that category. Neither had ever been explained.

The vehicle at Sanusar in 1380 had approached within about fifty kilometers of the station. The scanners got visuals, but the visitor was never identified. Nothing that matched the design was known to exist among the commercial and naval fleets of the Confederacy or of the Ashiyyur.

By the mideleventh millennium, no space station had been in place longer than the one at Sanusar. At the time of the sighting, it had been in orbit more than three thousand years. Brandine Kovalar himself is said to have christened it. It had welcomed almost every major figure in the Confederacy at one time or another. It was where Myra Dawkin had stayed on her historic visit. It had provided the platform on which George Delios delivered his celebrated “Here I stand” address. Kyla Bonner had written some of her Twilight Sonnets in Korby's, a cafe in the main concourse. And Kip Berry had died somewhere in the Majestic Hotel—nobody was sure where—after taking the station back from the Debunkers. And, of course, at the beginning of the twelfth millennium, the station would fall briefly into the hands of the Mutes.

But over that vast span of time, there was probably no event more intriguing than the one that occurred at the end of the evening watch on Constitution Day, fifty-four years ago.

I downloaded the record and watched:

Tereza Urbanova was on duty, surveying an empty sky, when Jay Benson, the operational control AI—the only AI I'd ever heard of with a last name—informed her that an unscheduled vehicle had just been detected on the scopes.

“Where, Jay?”
she asked.

“Range eight thousand kilometers. Approaching.”

“What? And we're just now seeing them? How'd they get this close?”
Her display showed only a blip.

“I don't know, Tereza. I've started a systems check. No indication of a malfunction.”

“They're coming out of a jump.”
She made no effort to hide her irritation.
“They just jumped the hell in. Right on top of us.”

“I'll start the report.”

“I've been out here more than thirty years, Jay. Never seen it before. Never saw anything like it.”
She leaned over the board and opened a channel.
“This is Operations at Sanusar. Ship that has just entered system, please identify yourself.”

No response.

She centered the ship on her display.
“Mack, this is Ops. Hold the launch. Unknown vehicle in the area.”

“Will do, Tereza. Holding.”

It wasn't all that dangerous. But there's a courtesy thing. You just don't do that.

“Trajectory will take him past the station. But it will be close,”
she said.

“It might be a vehicle malfunction,”
said Jay.

“For his sake, I hope so. Can you give me a better look at it?”

“One second.”

While Tereza waited, she opened a channel to someone. Probably the chief of the watch.
“Marcos—”

“I see it, Tereza. Just follow protocol. I'll be down in a minute.”

“Still closing,”
said Jay.

She switched over to her Patrol link.
“Caleb.”

“Hold on, Ops. We see him.”

“Two minutes to closest approach,”
said Jay.
“Holding steady.”

“It's just passing through.”

Another voice, a steady-as-she-goes baritone:
“Yes, Tereza. What have you got on him?”

“Don't know who he is. You want to take a look?”

“What's the situation?”

“It just transited in. We've got one flight going out, but we're holding.”

“Okay,”
he said.
“No incoming?”

“Negative.”

“Good. I see them. We'll get after them.”

“They're still not responding,”
said Jay.
“Moving at nineteen thousand.”

Tereza leaned over her mike:
“Incoming Vehicle,”
she said,
“this is Sanusar Ops. Please identify yourself. You are in violation of procedure.”

The intruder had a vaguely ponderous shape. Exhaust tubes and scanner housings and maneuvering thrusters and everything else were all buried within the hull. Navigation lights blinked on and off. The ship looked vaguely throwback.
“How big is it, Jay?”

“Two hundred twenty meters.”

She could make out more lights now. On the bridge. And there was a line of illuminated windows.

“Who the hell are you?”
She propped her chin on her hand and stared at the display. Both of Sanusar's moons were visible.
“Jay, there's a hull designator of some sort. Can you make it out?”

“Let me try to get more definition.”

“Ops.”
A new voice. Female.
“Patrol ready to launch. Request permission.”

She checked her screens.
“You are clear.”

“Got a bad angle on the hull. I can see two characters, but they're not anything I recognize.”

Someone appeared in the doorway behind her. Probably Marcos, her supervisor.
“Maybe it's the Mutes,”
he said.

“Don't know. I hope not.”

Despite the baritone, Marcos was thin, smaller than she was, and he looked as if he'd be more at home in an academic setting.
“Have you been able to get any response from these people at all? “
he asked.

“Not a word.”

“Okay.”
He opened the channel to the Patrol.
“Who's got the conn?”

“Sandy.”

He nodded.
“Sandy. Try to get a better look at him if you can.”

“Will do, Marcos.”

Marcos leaned over Tereza and spoke into the mike:
“Unidentified Vehicle, slow down. Who are you? What's the problem?”

Nothing but static.

He grumbled something. Kept his eyes on the display.
“Where the hell is it going?”

“Marcos.”
Sandy's voice.
“Something strange is happening.”

“What?”
Marcos frowned and tried to enhance the image.

“I can see through it.”

“Say again, Sandy.”

“I can see
through
it. The damned thing's fading. It's disappearing.”

It was true. The hull had become transparent.

“Not possible,”
said Marcos. The calm authority was gone from his voice. It had been replaced by a note of uncertainty.

The intruder's navigation lights dimmed. We saw more stars. And then it was as if it had never been there.

“Ops,”
said Sandy.
“Did you see that?”