Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home (18 page)

The white skimmer was back, ahead of us and off to starboard. I shielded my eyes from the sun. “It’s been hanging around for a while,” I said.

Khaled watched it while he continued drying himself. “We get a lot of those out here. They just fly over the museum so they can say they’ve been here.”

It was moving in a wide circle, angling around until it was directly ahead of us. Khaled threw the towel over one shoulder and watched as it turned in our direction. “You guys aren’t wanted by the police or anything, are you?”

“Not that I know of,” said Alex.

The skimmer was descending. Coming toward us now. It leveled off at an altitude of about a hundred meters. There was no longer any doubt that it was interested in us. “I’m not comfortable with this,” Khaled said. He walked onto the bridge and started the engines. “Pat, pull up the anchor.” Pat was the AI.

The chain began to move.

The skimmer kept coming. Its engine grew louder.

A hand appeared through an open front window. It was holding something. A weapon. It looked like a blaster.

“Heads up,” said Alex. He and I retreated toward the stern.

Khaled leaped back down onto the deck. He shoved Alex and me behind the after bulkhead and fell on top of us. I couldn’t see anything from there, but the engine kept getting louder. Then an explosion rocked the boat. The skimmer soared past, rose, and began another turn.

“Chase!” Alex’s voice. “You okay?” The overhead was blown off the cabin, and we were beginning to take on water. The deck was sliced wide open.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay. What the hell’s going on? Khaled, you all right?”

“I’m good.” He sounded enraged. “Heads up! That son of a bitch is going to do it again.”

We were on fire, and sinking.

Khaled pulled the antishark weapon out of his belt, scrambled onto the bow, and aimed it at the skimmer. By then, I was calling into my link: “Code five, yacht
Patriot
. We are under attack. Request immediate assistance. White skimmer unprovoked. Using a blaster.”

“Khaled!” Alex grabbed one of his legs. “Get down from there, you idiot. You’re giving him a target.”

“No, I’m not,” said Khaled. “I’m showing him a blaster.”

“That’s not a blaster,” I said. “
He’s
got the damned blaster. That’s only a stinger. Or whatever. Will it do any damage to him?”

“It
looks
like a blaster. And yes, if I can hit him, it will.”

“You’ll get yourself killed,” said Alex.

The skimmer came out of its turn and was angling toward us again.

The Patrol got back to me: “
Patriot
, we are on our way. Keep transmitting.” I slipped into the water in an effort to keep the hull between me and the skimmer.

Khaled was standing in as cocky a manner as he could manage, swinging the shark disrupter as if it could actually do some damage. Meantime, my link was connecting with our attacker.
“I have its registration number,”
it said.

“Open a channel to them,” I told it. Then: “I don’t know who you are, you nitwit, but your number has been forwarded to the Coast Patrol. Back off. We have a weapon!”

They raced overhead again, but this time they did not fire. Instead, they began to turn away and accelerate.

Khaled tossed me a life vest.

*   *   *

The Patrol got there in eight minutes. By then the
Patriot
had slipped beneath the surface, and the nutcase who’d jumped us was long gone. They hovered overhead in two vehicles and hauled us out of the water. Then one of the officers informed us that the skimmer’s registration number was invalid. “You didn’t actually get a close look at it, did you?”

“I didn’t think I needed to,” I said. “I thought I had its number.”

He looked sympathetic. “It’s bogus. They’re pretty easy to manipulate. We’ve been trying to do something about that for years, but the techs haven’t been able to figure out a way without violating all kinds of security laws.” He paused. “You have any idea who that might have been? You guys have any enemies who want you dead?”

He was talking to Khaled and me. Alex was in the other skimmer.

“I don’t know anybody,” said Khaled, “who’d want to do this.” He looked at me.

“Alex and I don’t even know anyone on the planet,” I said. It had occurred to me that it might have had something to do with Baylee, but that made no sense. Why would anybody care whether we found what we’d come looking for? “I have to think it was just a random nut on the loose.”

When we got back to shore, Alex admitted he’d given much the same answer. “But,” he added, “I don’t hold with coincidence.”

We thanked our rescuers. Everyone got a good laugh when they heard the attacker had been scared off by a shark stinger. Then we completed some documents. Polly showed up at the Guard station just as we were finishing. She apologized, as if it were her fault. “It’s a first for us. If you tell your friends about this incident, Chase,” she said, “I hope you don’t mention Eisa Friendly Charters.”

Love isn’t everything. But it renders the rest of the human experience virtually irrelevant.

—Edmund Barringer,
Lifeboat
, 8788
C.E.

When we got back to the hotel, Alex steered me over to a sofa in the lobby. “Chase,” he said, “I don’t think
we
were the targets this afternoon.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Khaled wasted no time getting the engine started and trying to get us out of there. In fact, he started the engine before the attack began.”

“You think this isn’t the first time it’s happened?”

“I’m not sure what to make of it. But we’d be smart to assume the worst. That it
was
aimed at us. But I think there’s something Khaled isn’t telling us. We should stop somewhere and pick up a couple of scramblers.”

“I was just about to suggest that.”

“Are you still going out with Khaled tonight?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if that’s a good idea?”

“We’ll be okay,” I said.

“All right. Enjoy yourself. But keep your eyes open.”

*   *   *

Khaled took me to a cabaret for dinner. We ate while a group called the Late Nighters played and sang about the wonders of love. Then we got a comedian who was actually entertaining. And the place filled with music again, and we went out onto the dance floor.

It made for an exhilarating evening, rendered poignant by the knowledge that we would probably never see each other again. Khaled looked at me with an air of wistfulness. And to be honest, I couldn’t decide whether my emotions that night were brought on by the circumstances or whether I really liked the guy. And the fact that I was carrying a scrambler gave the entire affair an added dimension. “You know who you look like?” I asked. “Zachary Conner.”

He really did. The rumpled brown hair, the square jaw, the electric eyes. He had everything but the mustache. I don’t know if he could have handled the romantic lead in
Last Man Standing
or
Starburst
. But he was close enough.

“You know,” he said, with a grin, “I hear that a lot.”

He had no easy means to travel to Rimway. And all my instincts barred me from even thinking about initiating something that had no chance of going anywhere. We talked about the attack off and on through the evening. While we were out on the floor, I asked whether he’d ever even
heard
of anything like this before?

“No,” he said. “That’s why I thought it might be directed at you and Alex.”

“There’s no reason,” I said, “why anybody should want to come after us. But I suppose it’s possible.”

“Well, I plan to be careful for a while. I’d suggest you guys be heads-up, too. Maybe you should back off this Baylee thing for a while.
That
might be the problem. In any case, I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

He was warm and gentle, and, unlike most guys, he wanted to talk about things I cared about, rather than about himself. He would have been worth hanging on to.

The evening ended on a note of lost opportunity. “If you get back here, Chase, or you have some free time before you go home to Rimway, let me know, okay? I’d love to do this again.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance, Khaled. But if it happens, I’ll let you know.”

“Good enough.”

We kissed, at first tentatively, then I took things into my own hands.

*   *   *

In the morning, we wandered down to the hotel restaurant and Alex asked me if I was ready to head out. I had mixed feelings, but a part of me was hoping we’d get an extra day in the area. “Why don’t we relax a bit?” I said. “Take some time for ourselves?”

“Oh.” He grinned. “It went that well, huh?”

“He’s a good guy. Saved our lives.”

“Okay. You can stay in the area if you want. I’m headed for Atlanta.”

“What’s in Atlanta?”

“The Albertson Data Museum.”

“Another museum?”

“They try to recover information that was lost when the first internet collapsed. That’s all. This has nothing to do with Baylee. I want to see if they have anything we can take back with us. For our clients.”

“Okay.” I hesitated. “I’ll go.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“Good. I think it’s safer.”

An autotray rolled up to the table, and our breakfasts were placed in front of us.
“Anything else you would like?”
asked the bot.

Alex waited until I’d indicated I was fine. “No, thanks,” he said. “This is good.” We’d just started eating when Alex frowned and touched his link. He listened for a moment and formed the words
Madeleine O’Rourke
with his lips. I needed a moment to place the name. She was the reporter from
The Plains Drifter
. “Yes, Madeleine,” he said, “what can I do for you?” He increased the volume so I could hear.

“Alex, I just heard about the attack. You and Chase are okay, right?”

“Yes, we’re fine. Just got dumped in the water, that’s all.”

“I’m so glad. Who was it anyhow? Any idea?”

“None.”

“Wow. Alex, is this the first time it’s happened?”

“Yes, Madeleine, it is.”

“You know any reason why someone would be trying to kill you?”

“To be honest, I assumed someone was angry with Eisa Friendly Charters. I don’t think it was aimed at us. No reason it would be.”

“Be careful about assumptions.”

“I try to be.”

“Good.”

Pause. Then: “How’d you find us?”

“Oh, come on, Alex. You’re a big name. And now you’ve been involved in
this
incident. You think you’re not visible?”

*   *   *

I went back to my eggs while Alex touched his link. “Connect me with
The Plains Drifter
. It’s in Centralia.”

“Why are you calling her back?” I asked.

“Hang on a second, Chase.”

Then a man’s voice:
“Good morning.
Plains Drifter.
This is Cam Everett.”

“Mr. Everett, I was trying to reach Madeleine O’Rourke.”

“Who?”

“Madeleine O’Rourke. She’s one of your reporters?”

“Umm, no. I never heard of her.”

“Oh. Sorry, Mr. Everett. Must have been a communication breakdown on my end. Thanks.” He disconnected and looked at me. “I think we might have just discovered who was in the skimmer.”

History is the witness of time, the torch of truth, the memory of who we are. It is the ultimate teacher about life, the messenger from the past.

—Cicero, 80
B.C.E.

Alex thinks the worst disaster in the history of the human race occurred when the internet shut down, apparently without warning, early in the Fourth Millennium. “The breadth of the loss,” he said, as we went in through the museum’s front doors, “is best illustrated by the fact that we don’t even know what disappeared.”

The vast majority of books, histories, classic novels, philosophical texts, were simply gone. Most of the world’s poetry vanished. Glimpses of Shelley and Housman and Schneider survived only in ancient love letters or diaries. Their work doesn’t exist anymore. Just like almost every novel written before the thirty-eighth century. We hear references to the humor of James Thurber, but we have nothing to demonstrate it. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent this time of the monasteries that salvaged so much during the first dark age. Within a few generations of the electronic collapse, a few people knew Pericles had been important, but hardly anyone knew why. And Mark Twain was only a name.

There’d been internets on the colonial worlds, but unfortunately they were all in their early years and the titles they carried tended to be largely limited to local novels.

The Albertson Museum, apparently, had locked down its reputation when it recovered a copy of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. That had given us a total of six Shakespearean plays. A bound copy of the six, titled
The Complete Plays
, was for sale in the gift shop. I couldn’t resist.

That got Alex’s approval. “It’s interesting,” he said, “we still use the term
bookshelves
, but we don’t put many books on them.”

Books aren’t generally available. You have to go to a specialty shop or a museum to find bound books. We’d kept the Churchill volume that we had come across several years ago on Salud Afar. It was
Their Finest Hour
, the second volume of his history of the Second World War. The rest, of course, is lost. At first, Alex had talked about selling it, but it wasn’t hard to persuade him to find a spot for it in my office, where it remains.

The museum had also posted a list of recently uncovered historical information. Most of it came from internets around the Confederacy. They aren’t connected, of course, so information thought lost in some places occasionally turns up in others. Anyhow, that was the day I discovered why the term
waterloo
meant bad news. And how it happened that
rubicon
had something to do with a point of no return. And I’d always known what people meant when they called someone a Benedict Arnold. That day I learned why.

We wandered through the displays, looking at household items dating back thousands of years, athletic equipment for games I’d never heard of, and kitchen gear from the days when people did their own cooking.

They had a theater where you could watch one of the movies from Hollywood’s early years. Hollywood was where they manufactured most of the films when the technology was just getting started. Only seven have survived from that era. All are shown in the theater, and are also available in the gift shop. In case anyone’s curious, they are
High Noon
,
South Pacific
,
Beaches
,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
,
Casablanca
,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, and
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
.

Alex spent several minutes gazing at the display. “You going to get any of them?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a fan of ancient movies. But
Casablanca
looks interesting.”

“Why don’t we get the entire package?”

I was surprised to discover that two songs I’d thought were more or less current, that I’d grown up with, had come from the films. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from
South Pacific
. And “Wind Beneath My Wings” came from
Beaches
. So we got the package.

They had some hardcover books for collectors. A few histories. Several copies of the Bible. Twenty or so novels I’d never heard of. Several commentaries on religion. A few histories, including a book titled
It Never Happened
, by Russell Brenkov. Brenkov was a Dark Age historian. His name had been mentioned during my college years, but I’d never read him.

There are also fictional characters who were once famous but who have been forgotten. Tarzan swung through jungles in a series of books that, in their time, are supposed to have outsold everything except the Bible. The search to identify him—it’s assumed he is a male—is still on.

Dracula, as far as we know, appeared in only one novel, but his name survives. He was apparently a physician. His name is associated with blood extraction. If that seems grim, it helps to recall that he practiced in an era during which invasive surgery was common.

Sherlock Holmes was lost for six thousand years before being rediscovered thirty years ago by people working with the Goldman Institute. Now, at least on Rimway, he’s enormously popular. His name never really disappeared from the language. It remains synonymous with deductive skills.

Superman and Batman got their start, we think, during the twenty-fourth century. Except for a brief period during the Dark Age, they’ve never gone away.

*   *   *

We joined a guided tour. The guide was explaining why so much had been lost, and how active efforts at recovery have been under way for centuries and would probably continue indefinitely. “When the early colonists first went out,” she said, “they took a lot of things with them, especially books and movies. A lot of it is still out there, we think, but we have never really organized things to bring it all together.”

A teenager wanted to know why they hadn’t combined the internet data yet. “After all,” he said, “it’s been thousands of years.”

The tour guide laughed. “I’d guess it’s because they keep growing. Keep acquiring information. I’m not sure what kind of effort it would take to figure out what’s missing from our system. Part of the problem with losing material is that very often you also lose the memory that it existed. In time, you no longer have a record of what’s gone. Digging through other data systems sounds like a good idea, but we don’t always know what we’re looking for. It tends to happen by accident. We don’t know, for example, how many Shakespearean plays there were. When we discovered
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, nobody here had ever even heard of it. It was a complete shock. They had it at the City on the Crag, but nobody here had come across it.”

“Are some of his other plays out there?”

“Possibly,” said the tour guide. “We hope. We have people visiting every world in the Confederacy, looking for that and whatever else might be available.”

*   *   *

“At one time,” said Alex, “archeology was just pick-and-shovel operations. Today it’s also a series of electronic searches.” We were standing in front of the statue of a man in the main entrance hall. It had been recovered from Lake Washington, but its identity was lost.

The museum has pictures of athletes in various types of uniforms, some wearing helmets, some outsized gloves, some carrying long sticks. People still play soccer, and we know a little about the other sports, but they’re long gone. Nobody’s even sure when they died out. He stared up at the statue. A phrase was engraved across the ceiling which is associated with him:
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

I’m not sure who he was, but I suspect I’d have liked the guy.

*   *   *

Baylee and Southwick were included with a list of contributors framed in the entry. “I’m not sure what we’d do without people like them,” I said. “Gabe’s name should be up there, too.”

I regretted the comment immediately. It was halfway out before I thought to shut it down, and by then it was too late. “You have to contribute to
this
museum to get that kind of recognition,” said Alex. “His name is up in a few places.” He was close to saying something more, but he cut it off. “Yeah,” he said finally, “he’s in good company.”

Time to change the subject: “How about we get something to eat?”

“Okay. That sounds like a good idea.”

We left the museum and crossed the street to the Barrista Grill. Soft music drifted through the dining area.

“So what’s next?” I asked, as we took a table near a window. The sky was filled with clouds.

“I don’t know. If it weren’t for the attack on the boat, I’d be about ready to give it up and head home. But somebody wants us to stop. Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“Madeleine O’Rourke changed the game.” The candles blinked on, and the table described a couple of specials and asked what we’d like. We ordered a bottle of wine with our meal and sat back to relax. Alex was lost in thought. I stared out the window, watching as rain began to fall. Two people had paused outside trying to make up their minds about coming in. The rain settled the matter for them.

The wine arrived.

Finally, I asked him what he was thinking about.

“
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
,” he said.

“Did you want to go watch it tonight?”

“That’s not what I mean. It struck me that when we were trying to find Larissa, we limited the search too much.” He picked up the bottle and popped the cork.

“You mean we should have looked off-world?”

“Very good.”

“There’s no colony with that name.”

“No, there isn’t. But there are six
places
in the Confederacy. Two states, two islands, and a mountain. We can eliminate them because they’re all on worlds that we hadn’t reached during the Dark Age.”

“You only named five.”

“The sixth one is a moon. Orbiting Neptune.”

“In
this
system?”

“Yes.”

“Beautiful.”

Alex smiled. “Let’s hope.” He took a deep breath and filled the glasses. “By the way, the place has a site that would have been perfect for hiding the artifacts.”

“Really?” I said. “What’s that?”

“There was a research station built out there during the twenty-fifth century. It was abandoned after about eighty years. Or four centuries. Depends whose history you read. In any case, it would have been a tempting place to store the museum artifacts.”

“Sounds more promising than the Aegean.”

“Yes. We assumed the reference was to the Greek area because Zorbas was born near there. But that might have gotten us thinking small.”

I picked up my glass. “Sounds good to me.”

“Maybe we have it this time.” He lifted his and took a deep breath. “Let’s hear it for the Neptunians.”