Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home (15 page)

“Actually, the media isn’t usually all that interested in antiques. But you’re right, we’d like to find out what happened to the artifacts, sure. But I’m surprised you’d know about that.”

She smiled again. “Why else would a celebrity of your stature be down here?”

“Well,” Alex said, trying to look modest, “we could be here for any number of reasons.”

“Sure you could. Your Aunt Susan lives down the block, for one.” Another quick smile. “So, do you have any idea what might have happened to them? To the artifacts?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“But you do hope to solve an eight-thousand-year-old mystery?”

Alex laughed. “Madeleine, I’d love to.”

“Do you have a lead?”

“Not really, no.”

“Mr. Benedict, where will you go from here? What can you hope to find that everyone else has missed?”

“Probably nothing. But there’s never any harm in looking.”

“But you must have something to work on?”

“Madeleine, if we find anything, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

*   *   *

The conversation continued like that for another few minutes. Alex avoided mentioning Baylee. I suspected she knew about him, but if she did, she didn’t bring up his name, either. Finally, she thanked him and left.

We walked out of the church grounds and returned to the car. “You okay?” I asked him.

“I’m fine.” He took a deep breath.

“She’s quite a package, isn’t she?” I said.

“Oh.” He smiled. “She’s okay. Not in your league, though.”

We do not always behave in a reasonable manner. Sometimes we are acting out a role we wish to play but know we cannot. Sometimes we are simply responding to a distant echo.

—Adam Porterro,
An Idiot’s Rules for Life
, 7122
C.E.

We spent the night in Union City and, in the morning, started for Bantwell University. It was located in Winnipeg, the world capital, which was located about 170 kilometers north. Alex called them shortly after we got started. He identified himself and asked to speak with the head of the archeology department.

“That would be Professor Hobart, Dr. Benedict. Hold one, please.”
People frequently granted Alex degrees he didn’t have.

Then a new voice:
“Dr. Benedict, this is Jason Summerhill. Professor Hobart isn’t available at the moment. May I help you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Professor Summerhill, the doctorate is a mistake. Call me Alex. I’m working on a research project regarding Garnett Baylee. He used to be a professor at Bantwell.”

Laughter at the other end.
“Alex, I know who Baylee is. Everyone in the department does. But he never worked here. Not as far as
I
know.”

“Really? I was informed last evening that he did. It would have been quite a few years ago.”

“Can you hold a moment, Alex? Let me check.”

A woman took over:
“This is Shirley Lehman, Alex. Baylee never worked for us.”

“Okay. Misunderstanding somewhere, I guess. Did you by any chance know him, Shirley?”

“I met him. He spent some time here, but that was years ago. But he wasn’t in the classroom. As best I can recall, he was doing research.”

“Do you have any idea what he was looking for? I’m doing some research on
him
. Trying to fill in some blank spaces.”

“No, Alex. I wish I could help. You might check with the library. That was where he spent most of his time.”

*   *   *

Winnipeg was all green landscapes, broad parks, beautiful homes. Thick forest on the north and west shielded the city from the cold winds of long winters. The Miranda Cone, named for the woman who had brought the North American Federation back during the Time of Troubles, rose 187 meters over Grantland Park on the southern side. Monuments, some dating back thousands of years, dominated fountains, parks, and government buildings across the city. The university sprawled over a wide area on the west side. Its architecture had been created in the mode of the last century, using cylinders, cubes, triangular pyramids, and polygons.

The campus was crowded with students when we arrived. Two mag streetcars were disgorging passengers as we pulled into the parking lot at Union Hall, which housed the library. Something, presumably a subway, rumbled past underfoot. We got out of the car, went inside, and made for the central desk. A librarian, studying a display, looked up as we approached. “Can I help you?”

“Hello,” Alex said. “My name’s Benedict. We’re working on a book about Garnett Baylee. Do you know who he is?”

She was middle-aged, thin, and well pressed. Her hair, tied in a knot, was beginning to gray. “Yes, I’ve heard his name,” she said. “What precisely do you need?”

“He came here regularly at one time. About eighteen or nineteen years ago. Do you by any chance remember his being here?”

She smiled. “Not really. That’s a long time ago.”

“Of course,” said Alex. “Is there a way to find out what he was working on here?”

“Wait a minute.” She seemed to be having a conversation with herself. “Sure. I’m not sure I can tell you anything, but I can show you the library record. It would have what he was looking at.”

“Beautiful,” Alex said. “Would we be able to get access to the same material?”

“Just a moment.” She got up and disappeared through a doorway.

*   *   *

The record consisted of a list of titles of histories, essays, and papers, authors’ names, and dates. The dates would have been those on which Baylee examined the document. There were also two collections of poetry. Alex looked pleased as we walked away from the desk. “Marco Collins,” he said. “No surprise there, I guess. Shawn Silvana. Frederick Quintavic.” There were maybe fifty more authors.

“You know all these people?” I asked.

“I know their reputations. Some of them. I’d guess they’re
all
historians or archeologists. Some of them have been dead for centuries. Let’s get started and see if any lights go on. This shouldn’t take long.”

I laughed. “Alex, you may not have noticed, but that’s a lot of material.”

“With luck, we’ll be finished in time for lunch. We’ll start at the end of the list. If he found anything here, that’s most likely where it’ll be, just before he cleared out.”

“You’re making an assumption.”

“Well, it’s hard to imagine it happened any other way.”

“Okay,” I said. “I hate to be the dummy, but what precisely are we looking for?”

“Anything that touches on moving the artifacts, either from the Huntsville Space Museum, or from Centralia. Preferably the latter.”

*   *   *

Baylee had spent his last four days at Bantwell going through material left by the historian Marco Collins. “He’s the one we want to talk to,” I said.

Alex nodded. “That would be ideal. Unfortunately, he died about twenty years ago.”

We looked through the Collins inventory. He had wide-ranging interests, but he seemed to have specialized on the New Dawn, the recovery from the Dark Age. “What we need to do,” said Alex, “is try to narrow down any of his work that touched on the artifacts.” He gave me a series of search terms, Apollo artifacts, Cutler, Grand Forks, Zorbas. “Dmitri Zorbas is probably the most critical one. He’s the person associated with the last days of the Prairie House. He was the crusader, the guy who tried to salvage artifacts when things turned ugly in Grand Forks.”

“I’ve heard the name before,” I said.

“He’s pretty well-known for his efforts to recover books that had gotten lost.” We sat down at a table, in front of a pair of displays. Alex brought up a list of the Collins material. It included a diary covering twenty-seven years, final versions and early drafts of seven histories, several hundred essays, and more than twenty thousand pieces of correspondence.

“Collins is easily our most likely candidate. So we should be careful going through this.”

To make things more daunting, the books were all doorstops. I looked at the titles:
The Grand Collapse: The Last Days of the Golden Age
;
Beaumont
(Margot Beaumont, of course, was the British president who played a key role in initiating the New Dawn);
Incoming Tides: How Climate Change Brought Everything Down
;
A Brief History of Civilization
;
Looking Back at the Future
(a title suggesting Collins was not an optimist about our own chances);
Beyond the Moon: The Great Expansion
; and, finally,
How to Create a Dark Age
.

“Where do you want me to start?” I said.

“Go with that one.” He indicated
The Grand Collapse
. “That’s the one Baylee was spending most of his time with near the end. That and the correspondence. I’ll check that.”

While there were only seven books, there were twenty-two drafts. “If you write a book,” said Alex, “I doubt you can do it in a single draft. The writers I’ve known won’t even let anyone
see
their first draft. We probably don’t have anything earlier than a third draft.”

“This one’s marked first draft.”

“Don’t believe it.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Fortunately, since the books are probably all available, we shouldn’t have to go through the drafts at all.”

“That sounds reasonable. But we’re trying to find something that’s been overlooked. There’s a good chance that would have happened because it didn’t make the final cut.” His expression suggested he sympathized. “You obviously don’t know much about how writers work.”

That hit home.

“What?” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Alex, I have a confession to make.”

Those intense eyes locked on me. “About what?”

“I’ve been recording some of the stuff we’ve been doing. Writing memoirs.”

“Oh. I thought for a minute you were going to say you believed this is a fool’s errand. No, that’s okay. If you want to do that, it’s not a problem. Maybe eventually you’ll be able to contribute them to somebody’s archives.”

“Well, actually it’s probably past that point.”

He swung his chair around to face me. “What do you mean?”

“The first one will be released in the spring.”

“The first one? You mean you sold one of the memoirs?”

“Actually I sold the first three.”

His jaw dropped. “The first
three
?”

“The Polaris incident. And two others.”

“Chase, you can’t be serious.”

“You’re a big name, Alex. The publishers think they’ll sell pretty well.”

“Shouldn’t you have cleared it with me first?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d approve.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Rainbow Enterprises will get a lot of publicity out of it.”

“I understand that, but—”

“What?”

“We have to be concerned about the privacy of our clients. Did you stop to consider that?”

“Sure. I’ve changed all the names.”

“Chase, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“Maybe we should get back to
The Grand Collapse
. Or did we just have one?”

There was a distinct growl. But he said, “No, we’re fine.”

“Good. I’m working on the Sunset Tuttle one now.”

“All right. Let’s try to concentrate on Garnett Baylee, okay? And do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“If anyone asks, I never knew about any of this.”

*   *   *

I started paging through draft one of
The Grand Collapse
. And glanced down at the bottom of the screen, where the word count was over three hundred thousand. “This is impossible, Alex,” I said. “We’ll be here for a year trying to go through all this.”

“You don’t have to read everything, Chase. Just scan—”

Unfortunately, Marco Collins was impossible to scan. I had never read him before, but the book just sucked me in. I couldn’t believe I was looking at an early draft. (There were two, plus the book itself, to go through.)

I’ve read the standard histories that most people have, but I’d never seen anything like this one, which was a tour through the general collapse. I was present when the global economy, almost without warning, crashed on Thursday, March 8, 3021. Collins explained how it had happened, and even though I’ve never had any interest in economics, I couldn’t break away from it. I was in the North American Stock Exchange when the sale orders began to arrive. A few days later, I watched angry mobs in Chicago rampage through the downtown area in defiance of a government too weak to respond.

We didn’t get out for lunch. Alex picked up some cookies somewhere, and we got by on those.

I was seated in a living room with a small family in Casper, Wyoming, when the internet went down. Within hours, personal-communication devices began to fail. Suddenly, a group of people who had been connected all their lives to the rest of the world found themselves completely cut off. Angry voices filled the streets. No one had any idea what had caused the problem.

It didn’t go away. A few hours later, the lights went out. The power system failed, and the only way people could talk with each other was to go outside and knock on doors. It was chilling, a life I couldn’t imagine.

Fortunately, the weather was mild. A militia unit showed up to provide security. But within a few days, food deliveries began to fail, and the militia seemed unable to do much to ease the problem. Gradually, they faded from the scene. And the first raiders appeared. For a time, the raiders traveled in trucks and cars, but with the electricity down, they had no way to recharge. Eventually, they switched to horses. They ignored money, which was becoming irrelevant. They stole supplies and killed at will. The town organized its own defense force, but it was running out of food. Another blow came when the water system shut down.

They had to learn the farming and hunting skills earlier generations took for granted. And how to make bullets and shoes. Many of them died in the process. People wandered into Casper on occasion with news of civil war, plague, utter chaos.

It never ended. New generations appeared, adapted, and hung on as best they could.

*   *   *

“Chase, you there?”

“Oh, yes, Alex. Hi.” The windows were dark, and the lights had come on.

“They’re closing. We have to go.”

“Okay.” I took a minute and finished the section. Then I shut down the screen. “Ready when you are.”

It was raining when we went outside. We stood on the portico, out of the downpour. The campus grounds were empty, save for a couple of girls waiting in a lit doorway. Alex looked up at the sky. The storm was not likely to dissipate soon. “You find anything at all?” he asked.

“No. To be honest, I got caught up in the reading.”

“Maybe it would be a good idea to stay with the searches.”

“I know. Dumb.”

He laughed. “I understand. Collins is pretty good, but we don’t have time to go through it all.”

“I can’t imagine living the way those people had to.”

Alex smiled. “We take a lot for granted, Beautiful.”

*   *   *

I found Zorbas’s name in the second draft of
The Grand Collapse
.

He was born in Giannouli, in a Greece that, like the rest of the world, was coming apart. His parents were wealthy, and when he was ten, they moved to North America in an effort to get away from the general instability. But the Americas were as tumultuous at the time as everybody else. When he was twenty-two, he went back to Giannouli, but the place was in chaos, so he aborted and returned home.