Seeker (8 page)

“Sure,” he said.

I pointed it in the general direction of the projectors and squeezed. The monitor lit up and the lights chased each other around the case. “Good,” I said. “Uh-huh.” As if I’d picked up a significant piece of information. The kitchen opened off the living room. I could see a table, two chairs, and a mounted plate that said YOU’RE IN MY KITCHEN NOW. SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP. And another that said I’M THE BOSS HERE. There was no sign of an antique.

The bedroom — there was only one — opened through a door to my right. I got up and walked coolly into it.

“What the hell,” demanded the woman, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Just checking the projection system, ma’am.” Hap had thrown her name in my direction but I hadn’t caught it. “Have to be thorough, you know.” I saw nothing of interest. Unmade bed. More bare walls. A clothes chute stuck open. A full-length mirror with a chipped frame.

I aimed at the projectors and set the lights running again. “What does that do?” Hap asked.

I smiled. “Damned if I know. I just point and press. Somebody else does the download and analysis.”

He grinned at me, looked at the monitor, frowned, and for a moment I thought he was getting suspicious. “I’m surprised Dora hasn’t said something about being probed.” Dora would be the AI.

“They tell me it’s noninvasive,” I said. “Dora probably hasn’t noticed.”

“Is that possible?” He looked as if I were introducing gremlins.

“Anything’s possible these days.” I shut the instrument down. “Well, thank you very much, Hap.” I strolled back into the living room and picked up my jacket. The woman never took her eyes from me. “Nice to have met you, ma’am,” I said.

Hap got the door. He could have told Dora to open it, but he got it himself. It was a gesture that didn’t get by his companion. I smiled, wished him good afternoon, and slipped into the hallway. The door closed, and I immediately heard raised voices inside.

“Hap has a sister,” Alex said after I’d told him I didn’t think Hap had any more pieces from the
Seeker
.

“Do we care?” I asked. “About the sister?”

“She might be able to tell us where he got the cup.”

“That’s a long shot.”

“Maybe. At the moment it’s all we have.”

“Okay.”

“She lives on Morinda.”

“The black hole?”

“The station.”

Interstellar flights had become a lot less inconvenient with the arrival of the quantum drive. It was near-instantaneous travel within a range of a few thousand light-years. After a jump, you had to spend a few hours recharging, then you could go again. Theoretically, you could have jumped all the way to Andromeda in maybe a year or so, except that the equipment would require maintenance and would wear out long before you got there. And you couldn’t carry enough life support, or enough fuel. Nevertheless, the trip is feasible if we’re willing to make some adjustments. But nobody’s come up with a good reason yet to go. Other than a few politicians looking to find an issue to run on that won’t alienate people. The Milky Way is still ninety percent unknown territory, so it’s hard to see the point of an Andromeda mission. Other than to be able to say we did it. But in case anyone in authority is reading this and has plans along those lines, don’t look at me.

“I take it you want me to go talk to her,” I said.

“Yes. Woman to woman is best.”

“We promised Amy we wouldn’t let the family know we’re interested in the cup.”

“We promised her that Hap wouldn’t find out. Chase, the woman is on
Morinda
. Moreover, she and her brother haven’t spoken for years.”

“Where’s the mother?”

“Dead.”

“And the father?”

“Dropped out of sight early. I can’t find anything on him.”

There’s something about having a black hole in the neighborhood that leads to sleepless nights.
— Karl Svenson,
Strumpets Have All the Fun,
1417

Morinda is one of three black holes known to exist inside Confederacy space. The name also serves the large armored orbiting space station that was home to a thousand researchers and their support staffs, who were measuring, poking, taking the temperature of, and throwing assorted objects into, the beast. Most of them, according to the info tabs, were trying to learn how to bend space. There were even a few psychologists conducting experiments related to the way people perceive time.

I had never been there, nor had I ever seen a black hole before. If that’s the correct terminology, since you don’t really
see
a black hole. This one wasn’t particularly big, as these things go. It was maybe a couple hundred times the mass of Rimway’s sun. A ring of illuminated debris, the accretion disk, enclosed it, firing off X-ray jets and God-knows-what other kinds of radiation, and sometimes even rocks.

That’s why the station is armored and equipped with Y-beam projectors. Most of the action is predictable, but the experts claim you never really know. They don’t worry much about the rocks, which they can dissolve. But radiation is a different kind of problem.

I jumped into the system at a range of about 70 million kilometers from the hole. That was closer than I should have been, but still a safe distance. Quantum travel is convenient because it’s instantaneous. But the downside is that there’s a larger degree of uncertainty to it than there was with the old Armstrong engines. It’s a modest difference, but it’s there, and it’s enough to get you killed if you don’t give yourself plenty of room so you don’t materialize inside a planet, or for that matter in the same space as anything too big for the prods to push out of the way.

I needed three days to coast into the station. While en route I arranged billeting, called my old friend Jack Harmon who was there on assignment and let him know I was coming and he could expect to buy me a drink, and checked out what I could find on Hap’s sister.

Her name was Kayla Bentner. She was a nutritech, whose chief responsibility was to see that food supplies at the station were healthful. Her husband Rem was a lawyer. I know you’re wondering why a space station needs a lawyer, but this is a big operation. People are always renegotiating contracts and quarreling over assigned time on the instruments. They also get married, make out wills, file for separation. And occasionally they sue one another.

At a place like that, the lawyer is the neutral party, the guy everybody trusts. Not like back home.

I thought about letting Kayla know I was coming, but then decided it would be best not to make a big deal of it. So I cruised into my assigned berth on the evening of the third day, checked into my hotel room, met Harmon in a small bistro, and spent the evening recalling old times and generally enjoying myself. I’d hoped he might know either Kayla or her husband. That would have made the job easier, but no such luck.

In the late morning I planted myself outside the offices of the Support Services, where Kayla worked, and when she came out to go to lunch, I fell in behind.

She was with two other women. I followed them into a restaurant called Joystra’s, which was a no-frills place. The tables were too close together and management expected you to eat up and move on. Furniture, curtains, and tableware all looked as if they had been made on the run. But it was located on the station’s outer perimeter, and there was a wall-length window with a view of the accretion disk. It wasn’t much to look at, a large shining ring that under other circumstances would have been just another shining ring, of which the Orion Arm has plenty, but it was ominous because you couldn’t get out of your mind what was at the center of the thing.

Kayla didn’t look much like her brother. She was tall, trim, serious. Civilized. You looked into her light blue eyes, and you could see somebody was home. Half the people in the restaurant seemed to know her, and exchanged greetings with her as she passed.

She and her friends were shown to a table, and I was next in line, wondering how to manage getting an introduction when I caught a break. Sharing tables during peak hours was a common practice at the station. “Would madam mind?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Perhaps the three ladies who just came in—”

“I’ll attend to it.” The autohost was tall, lean, black mustache, constantly smiling, but it was the kind of smile that looked glued on. I’ve never understood why the people who arrange these things can’t get the details right. He strode over to the table where Kayla and the others were seated and made his request. The women looked my way, one of them nodded, and Kayla raised a hand in my direction.

I went over. Introductions all around. I gave my name as Chase Dellmar. “I know you from somewhere,” I told Kayla, putting on my best puzzled frown.

She studied me. Shook her head. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

I pressed an index finger against my lips and creased my brow, thinking deeply about where we might have connected. There was some back and forth about places we’d both worked. No link there. Different schools. Must be my imagination. We ordered, lunch came, we talked aimlessly. The women were all assigned to the same facility. There was a problem of some sort with the boss, who was forever taking credit for other people’s ideas, who wouldn’t listen to anyone, and who didn’t spend enough time with the software. That was station-speak for someone who didn’t socialize, a capital crime in a small society. The usual cautions about supervisors fraternizing with the help didn’t apply to the same degree in places like Morinda.

I waited until we were finished and dividing the check. Then it struck me. I brightened, looked directly at Kayla, and said, “You’re Hap’s sister.”

She went white. “You know Hap?”

“I was Chase Bonner when you knew me. I used to come by the apartment.”

She frowned.

“Years ago, of course. I can understand you might have forgotten.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I remember you. Of course. It’s just that it’s been so long.”

“I can’t believe I’d run into you here.”

“Yes. That’s a wild coincidence, isn’t it?”

“How’s Hap? I haven’t seen him in a lot of years.”

“Oh. He’s okay. I guess. Actually, I haven’t seen him myself in a long time.” We were out of the restaurant by then, trailing behind her companions. “Listen,” she said, “it’s been a pleasure to see you again, uh . . .” She had to struggle for the name. “ — Shelley.”

“Chase.” I smiled gently. “It’s okay. We didn’t spend that much time together. I wouldn’t expect you to remember me.”

“No. I remember you. It’s just that I have to get back to work, and I guess my mind is on other things.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand. How about letting me buy you a drink while I’m here? Maybe this evening?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Chase. My husband—”

“Bring him along—”

“—doesn’t drink.”

“Dinner then. My treat.”

“I can’t let you do that.” Still backing away from me.

“It’s okay. It’s something I’d really like to do, Kayla.”

“You have a number?” I gave it to her. “Let me check with him, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay. I hope you can make it.”

“I’m sure we can manage it, Chase. And thank you.”

We met at the same place where Jack and I had eaten the evening before. I brought him along to balance the sides.

Remilon Bentner was a pleasant enough dinner companion, easygoing, plainspoken, a good conversationalist. He and Jack, it turned out, both played a game that had become popular at the station. It was called Governance, and required participants to make political and social-engineering decisions. We have, for example, implants that will stimulate intelligence. No known side effects. Do we make them available to the general public? “I did, and I got some unpleasant surprises,” said Rem. “High IQs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

“In what way?” I asked.

Jack was drinking coffee. “Beyond a certain level, roughly one-eighty, people, young ones especially, tend to become disruptive. Rebellious.”

“But that,” I said, “is because they become restless, right? Their peers are slower, so the brighter ones lose patience.”

“Actually,” said Rem, “they’re simply harder to program. You ever wonder why human intelligence is set where it is?”

“I assume,” I said, “it’s because the dumber apes walked into the tigers.”

“But why not
higher
?” asked Jack. “When Kasavitch did his Phoenician study at the beginning of the last century, he concluded there was no evidence humans are any smarter now than they were at the dawn of history. Why not?”

“Easy,” said Kayla. “Fifteen thousand years is too short a time for evolutionary effects to take hold. Kasavitch — did I get his name right? — needs to come back in a hundred thousand years and try again. I think he’ll see a difference.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bentner. “There seems to be a ceiling.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The experts think that once you get past one-eighty, you become too much of a social problem. Uncontrollable. Herd-of-cats syndrome. Authority tends to be a bit mindless no matter how you structure the political system. The high-IQ types have a hard time tolerating it.” He grinned. “That puts them at a serious disadvantage. These people get to about seven years old and after that they have to learn everything the hard way. Where a truly superior intelligence should help them, it becomes a handicap. In the old days, the tribe would get sick of it and wouldn’t protect them. So the tigers got them.”

“The same thing,” said Jack, “seems to be true among the Mutes. They have more or less the same range we do. And the same ceiling.” The Mutes were the only known alien race. They were a telepathic species.

“I’d expect,” I said, “that the rules would be different for telepaths.”

Bentner shook his head. “Apparently not. Jack, what did you do? Did you use the implants?”

Jack shook his head. “No. I didn’t think a whole society full of people who thought they knew everything would be a good idea.”

“Smart man. My society became unstable within two generations. I’ve a friend whose state collapsed altogether.”