Infinity Beach (8 page)

She looked through the specifications, examining the de
tails of the propulsion and navigation systems, life support, the onboard AI, and anything else that might eventually help. She was surprised to discover that the ship’s radio was omnidirectional, with enhancements.

That seemed odd until she recalled
Hunter
’s mission and the expectations of its passengers. They were not looking simply for
life
, but for
intelligence
. For them, success would come in one of two ways: the discovery of a city, or an encounter with another ship. If they found a city, they’d need general, rather than directed, broadcast capabilities. Hello to everybody. Kim was impressed: these people didn’t think small.

“Shepard,” she said, “connect me with Worldwide.”

The AI complied and a Worldwide graphic appeared onscreen, an animated starship smiling as it approached the corporation’s orbiting facility. A bay opened and light blazed out. A human hand wrote the Worldwide motto in gold script:
STYLE AND SUBSTANCE
. Then Kim was looking at a young woman, tall, blond, reserved.

“Good evening, Dr. Brandywine,” the woman said, reading Kim’s name off her monitor. “My name is Melissa. May I be of assistance?”

“Hello, Melissa. I’m a researcher for the Seabright Institute. I’d like very much to get a look at the
Hunter
. In person.”

She smiled and consulted something out of the picture. “Of course, Doctor. I can’t see that there’d be any difficulty. When did you wish to come by?”

“Friday?”

“That’ll be fine. Would late afternoon, say four
P.M.
, be convenient?”

“Yes,” said Kim. “Thank you. Oh, and one more thing? I’m especially interested in the ship’s history.”

“Ah yes.” A smile appeared at the corners of Melissa’s lips. “The Mount Hope business.”

“That too,” she said. “Can you tell me whether it’s possible to see the logs for the last Tripley Foundation flight?”

“Oh, I’m afraid not, Dr. Brandywine. We really don’t
have anything to do with that. I mean, the logs were never here.”

“Oh? Do you know who
would
have them?”

“I’m sure they’d have been turned over to the Archives when the ship first changed hands. That’s required by law.”

“Thank you, Melissa.” She signed off and summoned Shepard again. “I want to send a hypercomm message.”

“To?”

“I’m not sure. Operations at St. Johns. Check their administrative structure and
you
figure out where it should go.”

“Very good. Text?”

“Request the flight plan for the
Hunter
, last mission for the Tripley Foundation, Greenway year 573. Look up the date, whatever else it needs, and plug it in.”

“You want it transmitted immediately?”

“As soon as it’s ready.”

“Transmission time both ways will be about four days, Kim. Plus whatever time it takes them to put the response together.”

“Okay. And now you can get me the Archives, please.”

The circular seal of the Republic appeared: a white star on a field of green.
GRAND REPUBLIC OF EQUATORIA
was engraved along the upper rim, and its motto,
PEACE, JUSTICE, FREEDOM,
along the lower. Beneath the star she read
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
. Then the seal vanished and a young man gazed at her from behind a desk. He looked quite interested in what she had to say, suggesting he was a virtual secretary.

“Good evening, Dr. Brandywine,” he said. “I’m Harvey Stratton. How may I assist you?”

“Mr. Stratton, is it true the Archives stores the logs for interstellar flights?”

“And for interplanetary ones as well, Doctor.”

“Would it be possible to see the logs from a voyage that was completed in 573?”

“Oh.” His face clouded. “That comes under various privacy provisions. You’ll need a court order, I’m afraid.”

“A court order?”

“Oh yes. All ships’ logs are covered by the privacy statutes. Are you a law enforcement official?”

“No,” she said. “I was doing some research.”

Solly looked vastly amused.

“There is a provisionary public domain statute, however,” he said.

“Then they might be available after all?”

He consulted a screen. “For interstellar vessels, privately owned…” He hesitated, found what he wanted. “Looks like forty-five years from date of acquisition.”

“So—?”

“They’ll be available in eighteen years.” He smiled. “I guess that’s not much help.”

He ran down the various grounds which might persuade a court. Mostly they had to do with legal actions or engineering issues. Nothing sounded close to idle curiosity. She signed off.

“What now?”
asked Shep.

“What would
you
recommend?”

“It seems to me that none of this is a fruitful line of endeavor. Little green men. Ghosts. Surely there’s a more advantageous way to spend your time, Kim.”

Solly’s eyes grew luminous. “Do you always get lectured by your AI?”

She ignored him. “What happened at Mount Hope, Shep?”

“I don’t know. But I can speculate.”

“Please do.”

“I think it not unreasonable that someone was careless with a small quantity of antimatter. It is otherwise very hard to account for the estimated energy yield and the absence of meteoric residue.”

“What would anyone have been doing with antimatter on the east slope of the mountain?”

“Perhaps trying to escape a pursuer. The explosion occurred three days after Kane and Tripley returned home from the
Hunter
. Both lived in the area. One vanished. I
think it not unlikely that we are looking at the result of a theft gone wrong.”

“You’re suggesting Tripley stole his own fuel? Why?”

“It’s possible Kane took it, Tripley recovered it, and was unable to contain it. This is, of course, speculation based on no evidence.”

“What can you tell me about Benton Tripley?” she asked.

Shepard put everything on the screen. Benton was a clone of his father. In fact, more than half the population of Greenway during that period were clones. He was in his late thirties, had not married, but had a reputation as a womanizer. He was a board member for half a dozen influential organizations, a close personal friend of the Premier, the recipient of a dozen major philanthropic awards, the CEO of Interstellar, Inc., and the chairman of Lost Cause, which was the successor to the Tripley Foundation. Lost Cause devoted itself to raising money for various worthy enterprises. There were no poor anymore, but there were always children unexpectedly orphaned or cast aside, people who needed advanced educational opportunities, research possibilities, and so on. Lost Cause remained in the forefront of such efforts.

In fact, Lost Cause had stepped in to help Kim, providing scholarship funds after the deaths of her parents. But she’d never known much about the organization. There’d been a counselor who came around periodically to assure herself that Kim was all right, and the money transfers, which had arrived promptly every month. She’d eventually returned the money, but she’d always been grateful that Lost Cause was there when she needed them.

Benton Tripley looked precisely like his father, save that he was clean-shaven. He was tall, tanned, with brown, wavy hair brushed back, and a congenial smile that she didn’t believe for a minute. And there, she concluded, was another difference: Kile looked honest. There was something in Benton’s expression that she didn’t trust.

Shepard put up a series of pictures. She saw him shaking hands with other industrialists and with political figures, saw him surrounded by women in various vacation spots, saw
him defending himself against charges of unfair practices in court. He seemed to be everywhere.
TRIPLEY WELCOMES BARRINGER ISLAND DELEGATION. TRIPLEY CONSULTS WITH NEW YORK COUNTERPART KIP ESTERHAUS. TRIPLEY SHOWS HIGH SCHOOL GROUP AROUND SKY HARBOR.

But there
was
something she could use: Kim saw three starship models in his office.
Three.

And that gave her exactly the wedge she needed.

Shepard got back to her as the flyer approached Korbee Island.
“Message from Sheyel Tolliver,”
he said.

“Run it.”

Sheyel’s voice came on and gave the shoe size.
“Anything else, Kim?”
Shep asked.

She glanced at Solly, telling him silently that the size matched the shoe they’d found. “Yes. Put coffee on.”

“It’s a little less than definitive,” Solly said. “How many women would you say wear that size?”

“Quite a few,” she admitted. “How many of them do you think hang around starships?”

“We should do more of this,” Matt said. “Get ahead of the curve. Hand out prizes. It’s an easy way to make friends for the Institute.”

Well-heeled friends. Management had directed it be called the Morton Cable Award, after the man who’d done the breakthrough work for the development of transdimensional flight. Happily, Cable also had connections with the Institute.

Kim readily agreed—“great idea, Matt”—and suggested that, in view of Tripley’s affinity for decorative starships, they put the award in that form, rather than using a standard plaque. Matt approved and left the details to her judgment.

The cab picked her up early Friday morning. The ocean was still misty as the flyer rose into a crystal sky and arced toward the mainland. There were relatively few private vehicles on Greenway because taxis were cheap, well maintained, and readily available. She saw no seagoing traffic,
save for a westbound yacht. A couple of other cabs were in the air, circling aimlessly over the islands, waiting for calls.

Matt had arranged that Averill Hopkin would make the presentation to Tripley. Hopkin was a prizewinning authority in hyperspace propulsion techniques. He was already at Sky Harbor, doing consulting work for Interstellar. So it was all very convenient. Hopkin was dark skinned, dark eyed, a man without substance, Kim thought. His life seemed to be completely entwined in physics. She doubted that he had any idea how to enjoy himself.

The cab dropped her at the terminal. Fifteen minutes later she was on the Seahawk, a maglev gliding south over Seabright’s parklands. The Institute passed on her right, and the beaches on her left. Once outside the city it accelerated smoothly to six hundred kilometers per hour, occasionally tracking over open water, leaving a roiling wake in its passage.

The view from her window became a blur of seacoast, forest, and rivers. Passengers drew their shades and settled in with their links or a book. Some slept, some put on a helmet and watched a selection from the train library.

Kim brought up the
Autumn
on the screen mounted in front of her seat and looked for a long time at her own image. It chilled her, yet produced a curious sense of her own beauty and power. Markis’s affection for his subject was quite obvious.

Another passenger, a woman, paused in the aisle behind her. She self-consciously wiped the screen.

During the early days after Emily’s disappearance, Kim had occasionally sat with her mother while she conducted conversations with a simulation of the lost daughter. Her father had objected. Emily was
his
daughter too, he’d said. And it was best for all of them to let her rest. He’d been right: it had been a chilling business, and Kim had sworn she’d never do anything like it herself. When someone is gone, she’d decided, she’s
gone
. Using technology to pretend otherwise is
sick
. It had turned out to be easier to make the pledge than to keep it, though. Kim had spoken regularly
with Emily during her adolescence, and with her lost parents in the years immediately following the accident. In character, her father had abjured her during these sessions to let go.
You have your own life to live, Kimberly,
he’d said, frowning.
You can manage on your own.

The encounters had always left her hurting. Achieving maturity had been largely a matter of leaving phantasms behind. But she found that to do it, she had to confront the reality, to admit to herself that they were all really gone. To a degree, she understood that she’d been damaged by those conversations, especially those with Emily, because the woman who had vanished from her life when she was barely old enough to remember had lingered for another dozen years. By then, when Kim finally broke away, she had come to understand fully the depth of her loss.

She found a picture of Emily, Yoshi, and Tripley, taken during a farewell luncheon shortly before the departure of the
Hunter
. Emily was immaculately tailored in dark green slacks, light green blouse, off-white jacket. The ensemble emphasized the effect of her gold-flecked dark eyes.

Emily had had a reputation as an effective junior executive for a communications firm before joining the Tripley Foundation. Kim took a few minutes to listen to an address at a country club during which she described the purposes of the Foundation, what they had accomplished, and what they still hoped to achieve.
“There’s life out there somewhere,”
she’d said.
“And with your help we mean to find it.”

Emily was passionate, with a comedic sense of timing. She had all the qualities of a good speaker: she knew where she was headed, she told jokes on herself, and she knew how to deliver a one-liner. The applause at the end of her speech was loud and enthusiastic, and it was obvious that Emily could have recruited the whole bunch had she desired.

She’d married twice, but was unattached at the time of her disappearance. There had been no children.

Terminal City was located on an equatorial island two kilometers offshore. The Seahawk left the mainland at Mikai,
passed over a series of rocky headlands and began to slow down as it approached the Chibatsu Tunnel. The lights in the car brightened, and they saw a few gulls. Birds had learned to keep their distance from the trains, save at those sections along the route where they cut back to a safe velocity. From this point the train would be moving across the barrier islands, alternately accelerating and decelerating in rhythm with the tunnels. They were on the equator now, westbound.

Kim had begun reading Markis Kane’s favorite detective, Veronica King. She’d finished four of the books during the week since returning from the Severin Valley, and made several efforts during the ride to start another, but it was hard to keep her mind on it. She was thinking ahead to her interview with Benton Tripley, sculpting the questions she would ask.

They stopped at Cleavis Island. The train almost emptied out, but more people swarmed aboard. After they’d gotten moving again, Kim wandered down to the dining car and had lunch.

As she finished up a meal of greens and chicken, the train cleared its last tunnel, leaped Morgantown Bay, and ran into a heavy rainstorm. Along this section of coastline, the mountains came directly down to the sea. The Seahawk plunged into a canyon, and crossed the Edmonton Defile, which was really a series of ridges and channels.

They were twenty meters over the ocean, running along the side of a cliff, when Kim returned her attention to Veronica King and “The Demon Lamp.” The gimmick in the stories was that critical information was inevitably hidden in plain sight. “The Demon Lamp” was set at an archeological dig several layers deep on the large desert island Kawahl. Two people have been murdered, and the motive is said to be concealed in a tower. But there
is
no tower anywhere on that baking landscape. Except, of course, that there is: the dig site is the tower, now buried after several hundred years and a climate shift.

Kim finished the story as the Seahawk dropped gradually to sea level and the mountains fell away. She was on the
wrong side of the train to see it, but she knew that the skyhook was now visible.

There were always a few gasps from travelers who were looking at it for the first time. Skyhooks were, if not the most incredible of human engineering marvels, then certainly the most spectacular. Five of the nine worlds had them, and one was under construction on Tigris. Greenway’s skyhook, which was connected to Terminal City, was now about twelve kilometers away. Its enormous bulk rose out of the downtown area and soared into the clouds.

People were out of their seats, crowding to the right side of the car. Kim caught a glimpse of it, watched the sunlight strike its weathered sides. It always made her proud in some indefinable way.

Minutes later the train pulled into the terminal building and stopped. Passengers filed out into a vast agglomeration of shops and concourses, waiting areas and restaurants. Kim took a minute to locate herself, and then moved off at a leisurely pace toward the lift. There were people distributing religious literature, others soliciting signatures for political and social campaigns. Some wanted the board chairman of one of the train lines removed, others hoped to get support for a drive demanding research on increasing longevity.

Kim had some spare time, so she stopped on the main promenade for a glass of fruit juice. It occurred to her she’d put herself in Sheyel’s position: unless she was careful, Benton Tripley was going to conclude she was a lunatic.

The lift went up every other hour. The vehicle was divided into a lounge area, a VR facility, a souvenir shop specializing in Sky Harbor mugs and T-shirts, a coffee shop, and the Four Moons, a private club where members could relax around a leather-lined bar, shoot billiards, take over a VR booth, or nap.

The coffee shop was Nik’s. It was overpriced and the sandwiches tasted like plastic, but the coffee was good. The walls were covered with autographed pictures of celebrities
who had passed through. Once on board, Kim headed directly for Nik’s and found a corner table.

The lift’s capacity was listed at 120 people. On this day it was carrying half that number. Kim ordered coffee and cantaloupe, looked out her window at the vast interior of the mall, and heard the announcement that they would be departing in a moment. The gates closed with a click.

The floor trembled and unseen engines engaged. The concourse, with its crowds and brightly decorated shops, began to fall away. Then Kim was passing through a tangle of struts and cables.

It was all she’d be able to see for about ten minutes. The lift would rise on the inside of the central support until it cleared the lower atmosphere. Then, when it was beyond potential wear and tear from weather conditions, it would emerge into the sunlight.

Several of her fellow travelers were VIPs also headed for the
Star Queen
. She finished her snack, leaving most of the cantaloupe, and wandered through Nik’s, saying hello, renewing acquaintances. McWilliam was there from Extron Industries, and Larry Dixon from the National Philanthropic Society, and Jazz White, the counterball player who was featured in the
Star Queen
’s promotional campaign.

The lift came out of its protective sheath and the coffee shop filled with sunlight.

She strolled into the lounge and found a cushioned bench. Some of the passengers were buying souvenirs, and most of the kids were in the VR rec center. Others stood near the windows looking out at the view.

Like the “windows” on the
Hunter
, these were really screens, which displayed views from external imagers. Transparent panels were a hazard, the weakest point in an airtight environment, so they had long since been phased out. But only a close examination could reveal the difference.

Matt had wrangled the invitation to the
Star Queen
ceremonies by pointing out that the designer of her engines had been Max Esterly, onetime Institute director, and that an Institute presence on the day the great liner was converted into
a hotel was only appropriate. In fact, a plaque of Esterly had been mounted in the vessel’s main lounge. Matt’s real purpose, of course, was to remind the assorted decision-makers of the joys of technology, and that nothing worthwhile came free. It was
Kim’
s job to make them believers.

He’d given her a set of points to be driven home: If society does not move forward, it will decline. It
is
declining. We need to make some changes in the way we do things. The primary force in modern scientific research is the Institute. That was probably something of an exaggeration, but they said it at every opportunity so it had acquired the ring of truth.

She didn’t entirely agree with Matt’s approach. The belief that society was in decline was a permanent characteristic of every era. People always believed they lived in a crumbling world.
They
themselves were of course okay, but everybody around them was headed downhill. It was a tired drumbeat and she didn’t think bringing it up during the launch of the
Star Queen
Hotel would help generate anything except boredom.

Nevertheless she wondered whether something really
was
wrong. More than the end of scientific investigation. More than a society that sought its own pleasures to the exclusion of everything else. Some doomsayers were suggesting that the human race had simply grown old, exhausted itself in some metaphysical way. That it needed a challenge. Perhaps it needed to find others like itself, among the stars, with whom it could cooperate and compete. And trade war stories. That as things were, the species was just sitting on the back porch, waiting for God.

Much of the pessimism seemed to be coming from Earth, where it was almost the end of the third millennium, standard calendar. Historically such times had always generated cries that midnight had come for the race.

Whatever the truth might be, Kim thought that cutting the ribbon on the
Star Queen
Hotel was hardly an appropriate moment to throw a dead cat up the aisle.

Although the advent of artificial gravity had obviated the need for wheel-shaped space stations, the traditional configuration had remained in use everywhere except for the newest unit going up at Tigris. At one time there’d appeared to be a possibility for antigravity as well, but that breakthrough had proved elusive and was now thought to be impossible. Too bad: it was just the sort of goal the Institute needed to enlist the enthusiasm of the
Star Queen
crowd.

She was looking down on cloud banks and the curve of the world as the lift began to slow. People wandered about, collecting bags, making last-minute purchases, getting jackets onto their kids. It was a persistent belief among parents that Sky Harbor was drafty. The engines whined, the lift stopped, and the doors opened. Passengers filed out into the lobby of the Starview Hotel. Most inserted their cards into the registration dexes. Kim picked up the package she’d sent ahead, went to her room, showered, and worked on her remarks for the dedication. Through her window she could see Sky Harbor’s tail, the enormous counterweight to the lift, snaking out toward Lark, the innermost moon.