Infinity Beach (2 page)

“You had several calls,”
he said.
“Mostly congratulatory.”
He ticked off a list of names, friends and professional colleagues, and a few relatives.

“And at least one,” she said, “that
wasn’t
congratulatory?”

“Well, this one too commended you. But that wasn’t the reason he called. It was from Sheyel Tolliver.”

Sheyel? That was a name out of the past. Sheyel had been a professor of history at the university during her undergraduate years. He’d been a superb instructor, and he’d taken an interest in her despite the fact that she was a physics major. She was somewhat adrift then. Her parents had died in a flyer accident, the first one recorded in Seabright in five years. It had happened during her second year, and Sheyel had gone out of his way for her, had made himself available when she wanted to talk, had encouraged her, reassured her, and in the end got her to believe in herself. But that was fifteen years ago. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“Only that he wishes to speak with you. I don’t think he’s well.”

“Where is he?”

“In Tempest.”
Three hundred kilometers away.

She was pleased that he’d remembered her. But she couldn’t imagine why he was contacting her after so many years. “That’s really strange,” she said.

“He asked that you call him directly when you returned home.”

She glanced at her link. It was past 1:00
A.M.
“I’ll call him in the morning.”

“Kim, he was quite specific.”

“It’ll have to wait. I’m sure he didn’t expect me to get him up in the middle of the night.” She went into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee, talked idly with the AI for twenty minutes, and decided to call it a night.

She showered, turned out the lights, and stood at her window looking at the breakers. The section of the sky which held Alpha Maxim had rotated up over the roof where she
couldn’t see it. The fire on the beach had apparently been abandoned but had not quite gone out. She watched sparks rising into the night.

“It is beautiful,”
said Shepard.

Something ached within her, but she couldn’t have said what it was. The tide was out and had not yet turned, so the sea was silent. She could almost have believed the ocean wasn’t there tonight, gone into the dark with Emily.

It was hard, on this special night, to put her sister out of her mind. Their last day together had included a frolic in the surf. They’d had a rubber sea horse from which Kim kept deliberately sliding off.
Help, Emily.
And the beautiful woman whose image she knew she’d one day inherit had pretended endlessly to be startled anew and would splash to her rescue. That Kim would one day
be
Emily had made her impossibly happy. There’d been pictures of Emily at seven, and Mom had always shaken her head over them. “Why, isn’t that Kim?” she would say, knowing quite well who was in the picture.

At the end of that afternoon, Emily had told her she was going away for fifteen months. An eternity to a child. Kim had been angry, had refused to speak as they rode home in a taxi.

It was the last time she saw her sister. And there had rarely been a day in all the years since that she had not wished she could get that taxi ride back.

A few months later she’d been leaving for school and her mother had sat her down and told her something had happened, they weren’t sure what, but—

Nobody could find her. Emily was supposed to have come home, and had come back to Greenway ahead of schedule. She’d come down from Sky Harbor into Terminal City and gotten into a cab with another woman to go to their hotel. But she never got there. And nobody knew what had happened.

Someone was walking on the beach. A woman with a dog. Despite the cold. Kim watched until they disappeared around the bend at the shoal and the beach was empty again. “Yes, it is beautiful, Shep,” she said.

She pulled on a fresh pair of pajamas, which were of course connected to Shepard’s systems and capable of producing a wide range of sensations. The curtains rustled in a sudden breeze and she climbed into bed. Shepard turned out the lights.
“Program tonight, Kim?”
he asked.

“Please.”

“You wish me to choose?”
She usually left it to him. It was more exciting that way.

“Yes.”

“Goodnight, Kim,”
he said.

Cyrus was apologetic.
“Kim,”
he said,
“the insertion won’t work. That means the programming is useless.”
He looked impossibly handsome in the subdued light of the operations center.

“Which means you can’t detonate the payload.”

“That’s right.”

She glanced up at Alpha Maxim on the screens.
“We don’t have time to rewrite the code.”

He nodded.
“Mission’s blown.”

“Maybe not,”
she said.
“We can try to do it by the seat of our pants.”

“Kim, we both know that’s not possible.”
His eyes widened.
“I say we concede the effort and make the most of the moment—”

“Cyrus—”

“I love you, Kim. What do we care whether the star goes up or not?”

Shepard woke her at seven. Orange juice and toast were waiting.
“You know,”
he observed,
“he’s not a responsible commander.”

“I know,” she said.

“Do you want me—?”

The juice was delicious. “Keep the program the way it is,” she said.

“As you wish, Kim.”
He was laughing at her.
“And you have an incoming call. From Professor Tolliver.”

At seven o’clock? “Put him through,” she said.

Sheyel Tolliver had aged. The energy seemed to have drained away. His face had grown sallow. His beard, black in the old days, had gone to gray. But he smiled when he saw her. “Kim,” he said, “I apologize for calling you so early. I wanted to get you before you left for work.”

“It’s good to hear from you, Professor. It’s been a long time.”

“Yes, it has.” He sat propped against a couple of cushions in an exquisitely carved chair with dragon’s-claw arms. “I saw you last night. You’re very good.” Kim had been on most of the newscasts. “I should congratulate you, by the way. You’ve done well for yourself.”

She let him see she did not like the job. “It’s not the field I’d have chosen.”

“Yes.” He looked uncomfortable. “One never knows how things will turn out, I suppose. You had planned to be an astronomer, as I recall.”

“An astrophysicist.”

“But you’re quite good behind a lectern. And I thought you’d have made a decent historian.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

His mood darkened, became somber. “I’d like to talk to you about something quite serious, and I want you to hear me out.”

“Why would I not do that?”

“Save the question for a few minutes, Kim. Let me ask you first about the Beacon Project. Have you any influence over it?”

“None whatever,” she said. “I just do their PR.”

He nodded. “Pity.”

“Why is that?”

He thought very carefully about his reply. “I’d like to see it stopped.”

She stared at him. “Why?” There’d been some protest groups who thought triggering stars was immoral, even though no ecosystem was involved. But she couldn’t believe
that her tough-minded old teacher could be involved with
that
crowd.

He rearranged his cushions. “Kim, I don’t think it’s prudent to advertise our presence when we don’t know what’s out there.”

Her respect for him dropped several levels on the spot. That was the kind of sentiment she could accept from someone like Woodbridge, who never thought about the sciences other than as a route to better engineering. But Sheyel was another matter altogether.

“I really think any concerns along those lines are groundless, Professor.”

He pressed an index finger against his jaw. “We have a connection you probably don’t know about, Kim. Yoshi was my great granddaughter.”

“Yoshi—?”

“—Amara.”

Kim caught her breath. Yoshi Amara had been the other woman in Emily’s cab. She’d also been one of her sister’s colleagues on the
Hunter
, on its last mission.

Both women had returned with the
Hunter
after another fruitless search for extraterrestrial life, this one cut short by an equipment malfunction. They’d gone down in the elevator to Terminal City, where they were booked at the Royal Palms Hotel. They’d taken the cab and ridden right off the planet.

“You’re right,” Kim said. “I didn’t know.”

He reached beside him, picked up a cup, and sipped from it. A wisp of steam rose into the air. “I recall thinking when I first saw you,” he said, “how closely you resembled Emily. But you were young then. Now you’re identical. Are you a clone, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Yes,” said Kim. “There are several of us spread across four generations.” Save for nuances of expression and their hair styles, they were impossible to tell apart. “You knew Emily, then?”

“I only met her once. At the farewell party before the
mission left. Yoshi invited me. Your sister was a brilliant woman. A bit
driven
, I thought. But then, so was Yoshi.”

“I think we all are, Professor,” Kim said. “At least everybody worth knowing.”

“Yes, I quite agree.” He studied her for a long moment.

“How much do you know about the last voyage? On the
Hunter
?”

Actually, not much. Kim wasn’t aware there was anything to know. Emily wanted to find extraterrestrial life. Preferably
intelligent
extraterrestrial life. And she’d cared about little else, except Kim. Emily had gone through two marriages with men who simply did not want to deal with an absentee wife. She’d shipped out on the
Hunter
any number of times, often on voyages of more than a year’s duration. They’d found nothing, and she had come back on each occasion certain that next time would be different. “They didn’t get far. They had engine trouble, and they came home.” She felt puzzled. What did he expect her to say?

His smile left her feeling as if she were once again an undergraduate. Was it really that long ago he had led them in work songs from the era then under study, the terraforming years on Greenway? His classroom had rocked with “Granite John” and “Lay My Bones in the Deep Blue Sea.”

“I think there was a little more to it,” he said. “I think they found something.”

“
Something
? What kind of
something
?”

“What they were looking for.”

Had it been anyone else, she would have simply found a way to terminate the conversation. “Professor Tolliver, if they did, they forgot to mention it when they got back.”

“I know,” he said. “They kept it quiet.”

“Why would they do that?” She adopted her best let’s-be-reasonable tone.

“I don’t know. Maybe they were frightened by what they’d found.”

Frightened?
The ship’s captain was Markis Kane. A war hero who had a wing of the Mighty Third Memorial Museum all to himself. He’d been killed a few years ago while
attempting to rescue children during a forest fire in North America. “That’s hard to believe,” she said.

“Nevertheless, I think it’s what happened.”

There’d been only four people on the
Hunter
. Kane, Emily, Yoshi. And Kile Tripley, head of the Tripley Foundation, which had sponsored the missions. He too had vanished, and that was an odd business. Tripley and Kane had both lived in the Severin Valley in the western mountain region of Equatoria. Three days after the
Hunter
had returned from its mission, after the women had disappeared, a still-unexplained explosion had ripped apart the eastern face of Mount Hope, had leveled Severin Village and killed three hundred people. Tripley had never been found after the event and was presumed buried somewhere in the rubble.

Most of the experts at the Institute thought it had been a meteor, but no trace of the object had ever been found. The force of the explosion had been estimated at roughly equivalent to a small nuclear bomb.

“It’s all connected,” Tolliver said. “The
Hunter
mission, the disappearances, the explosion.”

There’d been stories to that effect for years. It was a favorite subject of the conspiracy theorists. And maybe there was something to it. But there was no evidence, and she hated sitting here with Sheyel Tolliver talking about Mount Hope. It saddened her to see her old teacher reduced to a believer in cover-ups and visitors from other worlds.

There were all sorts of lunatic theories about the incident. Some said that a micro black hole had come to ground. They’d searched the logs of ships and aircraft on the other side of Greenway looking for an indication that the hole had emerged from the ocean. Much as researchers had a thousand years before, after the Tunguska event. As it turned out, there
had
been a spout under a heavy sky, so the story had gained credence. Even though everyone knew there could be no such thing as a micro black hole.

Others were convinced a government experiment had gone wrong. The experiment was said by one group to have involved time-travel research; by another, mass transfer
ence. Still others thought an antimatter alien ship had exploded while trying to land.

“Kim,” he said, “how much do you know about Kile Tripley?”

“I know he was a wealthy freelance enthusiast who wanted to make a name for himself.” Tripley had been the CEO of Interstellar, Inc., which specialized in restoring and maintaining jump engines, which moved starships into and out of hyperspace.

“He was a tough-minded man, had to be in that business,” Tolliver said. “Have you by any chance read Korkel’s biography?”

She hadn’t.

“He made it quite clear that Tripley wasn’t going to be satisfied just bagging a bacterium somewhere. He wanted to find a thinking creature. A
civilization
. It was the whole purpose of the Foundation—the whole purpose of his existence.”