Polaris (16 page)

“Everything?”

“Well, we left the fittings.”

“How about clothes? Jewelry? Books? Anything like that get left behind?”

“Yeah. I'm sure we left some stuff. We were looking for things that would have thrown some light on what happened. Look, Chase, it's been a long time. But we wouldn't have left anything of consequence.”

The disappearance of Jess Taliaferro embodied more than simply the loss of a supremely competent administrator. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to describe him as a great man. But he was the sort of person who works behind the scenes to make great men (and women) possible. We tend to overlook him, because he never aspired to political office. He never won a major award. He did not show up on the newscasts, save as the spokesman for a befuddled Survey when seven people walked off the
Polaris
into oblivion. But he was an inspiration and a bulwark to all of us who wanted to provide a better life and a brighter future for everyone.

——Yan Quo,
Taliaferro: The Gentle Warrior

Alex told me to take the next day off to compensate for the travel, but I went in anyhow that afternoon. When I got there, he was looking at screens filled with information about Jess Taliaferro.

The onetime director is the subject of three major biographies. He has appeared at least tangentially in dozens of histories of his era. I'd thumbed through much of the material by then. It was not that he was a towering political or scientific figure, or that the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research broke new boundaries during his thirteen-year tenure at its helm. But he seemed to know all the groundbreakers of the era. He was constantly in the company of councillors and presidents, major show business personalities, Galaxy prizewinners, and other news-makers. But more important from my point of view was that he seemed to be a man of iron principle. He was a champion of humane causes. Take care of the environment. Arrange things so nobody gets too much power.
Make sure we educate, rather than indoctrinate, our kids. Find a way to establish a permanent peace with the Mutes.

He was unstinting in his exertions, and he never backed away from a fight. He supported efforts to reduce government corruption, to achieve stable populations on the worlds of the Confederacy, to reduce the power of the media, to control corporate thieves. He battled developers who were willing to destroy archeological sites and pristine wilderness. He did what he could to protect species in danger of extinction.

He, Boland, and Klassner were close allies in these culture wars. “People never appreciated him,” one biographer observed, “until he closed up his office that last evening, said good night to his staff, and walked away from the world.”

In those days, Survey was located in Union Hall, an old stone building that had once been a courthouse. When Taliaferro was ready to go home, his skimmer routinely picked him up at the rooftop pad. But on that final day, he instructed his AI that he would be dining out and that he'd call for transportation if and when he needed it.

With whom was he planning to eat?

“Nobody knows,”
said Jacob.
“When investigators tried to figure out what had happened, they discovered he'd pretty much cleaned out his bank accounts, except for a modest sum that eventually went to his daughter, Mary. His only child, by the way.”

“What about his wife?”

“He was widowed. She died young. Boating accident. According to friends, he never stopped mourning her. But there was another woman later in his life.”

“Who was that?” asked Alex.

“Ivy Cumming. She was a physician.”

“How much money did he have?”

“Millions.”

That surprised Alex. “Where'd it come from?” he asked.

“It was old money,” I said. “His family'd been wealthy for generations. When its resources came under his control he began using it to support various causes. He seems to have been utterly unselfish.”

I had dinner with a friend, went home, and decided to take a whack at the Taliaferro avatar. I'd seen it briefly at the
Polaris
convention, of course, when I didn't even know who he was. Now I had a few questions.

There's always a problem, of course, with an avatar. It looks like the person it's representing, but you know it's really just a projection backed by a data retrieval system. People trust data retrieval systems, though, and the avatars look absolutely real. They're convincing, so everyone has a tendency to take these things at their word, when in fact all the information is based on the input provided by the subject himself, which is to say, it's somebody putting his best foot forward. And there might be additions by interested persons with agendas of their own. Consequently, they're no more reliable than the subject himself might have been. If you're approaching one of these conversations to learn something rather than to be entertained, you have to bring along a healthy skepticism.

Jess Taliaferro appeared standing on a rocky beach. He was a small man, middle-aged, with fading auburn hair that would not stay down and eyes that seemed a bit too far apart. He had too much stomach and not enough shoulder. When he moved, as he did constantly during our conversation, he was awkward, weaving from side to side in a flatfooted manner. There was much of the camaroo about him, the big southeastern bird that one finds waddling along shorelines looking for stranded sealife. He was quite ordinary in appearance. I would not have thought of him as a driving force. But there you are. You just never know.

“Hello, Ms. Kolpath,”
he said.
“You were at the convention, I believe.”

“Yes, I was. I enjoyed your presentation.”

“Very kind of you.”
He stopped by a stone bench, facing out to sea. It seemed to be the only structure in the area.
“May I?”
he asked.

“Please,” I said.

He sat down.
“It's lovely here at night.”
He was dressed in the antique manner of his era, colorful shirt, wide-open collar, cuffed trousers, a rakish blue hat with a tassel.

“Yes,” I said.

“How may I help you?”

How, indeed? A long wave broke and rolled up the beach. “Dr. Taliaferro, please tell me about yourself. What you care about. What you're proud of. How you felt on the day the
Polaris
set out. What you think happened.”

“About myself?”
He looked surprised.

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“Most people want to hear about the
Polaris.
Not about me.”

“You know why.”

“Sure. But it's as if I never did anything in my life except send those people to Delta Kay.”

He talked about his family, his dreams, his years of service to Survey.

“Did you ever have any indication at all,” I asked, “that there might be somebody else out there, other than the Mutes?”

His eyes slid shut.
“No,”
he said.
“Oh, look, we knew there would be other sentient life somewhere. We've always known that. The universe is just too big. It happened twice that we knew about, so we understood that it necessarily existed elsewhere. Once you had that much, once you knew it wasn't the result of some virtually impossible combination of events, then there had to be others. Had to be. The real question was whether they were scattered so far in time and space that we would never encounter another in the lifetime of the species.”

There were lights moving at sea.

“An intersection seemed so unlikely that we never seriously considered it. I mean, we had a policy in place, guidelines on what to do if anyone actually saw another ship out there. But we never believed it would happen. And we certainly assumed that if it did, the aliens would not be hostile. Cautious, perhaps, but not hostile.”

“Why not? The Mutes are hostile.”

“They're hostile because there was a series of incidents at the beginning, when we first discovered each other, that created conflict. It was mishandled on our end, and to a degree, on theirs. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't anybody's fault. People were surprised by an unprecedented situation and they reacted badly. Some of it's in the genes. We can't stand to
be near them. Have you ever been close enough to a Mute to feel the effect?”

He wasn't simply talking about their mind-reading abilities, but the fact that they touched something revolting deep in the bone. It was hard to say why; they were humanoid. But people reacted to them the way they did to large spiders, or snakes. Add to that the knowledge that, in their presence, your brain lay open to the sunlight. That you had to struggle not to think of anything that would embarrass you. That the creature knew more about you than you did because all the walls were down, all the rationalizations and pretensions set aside. They knew, for example, precisely how we reacted to them. It made diplomacy difficult.

“No, I've never seen one.” There weren't many of them running around inside the Confederacy. They didn't like us very much either. “Are you sure they weren't involved?” I asked.

“We looked into it. You know, of course, they'd have to come through the Confederacy to get to Delta Karpis. Or go exceedingly far out of their way.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Not at all. Things had been quiet between them and us for a long time when the
Polaris
happened.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at the moon. It wasn't Rimway's moon. Too big, and hazy with atmosphere. In fact, it had oceans.
“We couldn't see any motive they'd have to kidnap the people on the
Polaris.
Certainly none worth risking war over. We talked to some of them. I personally talked with a representative.”
He made a face at the memory and tried to shake it off.
“He said they had nothing to do with it. I believed him. And I've seen no reason to change my mind.”

“Why would you take his word? There don't seem to be any other likely suspects.”

“Because whatever else you want to say about them, Chase, they are notoriously poor liars.”

“Okay.”

“Furthermore, I couldn't see how they could have accomplished it. They couldn't have approached the
Polaris
without being seen. Had that
happened, Maddy would surely have sounded the alarm. We'd have known.”

“Afterward,” I said, “you mobilized everything you had to look for them.”

“Yes. In fact, a sizable portion of the Confederate navy went out and conducted the search. And, although we didn't encourage anybody, at least not officially, a lot of corporate and even some private vessels helped. The hunt went on for more than a year.”

“I assumed there'd been a campaign to get everyone involved.”

“We didn't need a campaign. You don't know what it was like at the time. People were scared. We thought something new had shown up. Something with hostile intentions and advanced technology. Something completely
different.
It was almost as if we'd discovered a supernatural entity. It was so bad there was even talk of an alliance with the Mutes. So a lot of corporate types sent their ships out. Became part of the effort.”
He moved some sand around with his feet. He was wearing sandals.
“It generated good publicity for them. For the corporations.”

“And never a sign of anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“That's correct. We never found anything.”

One of the vents came on and delivered cool air into the room. We sat quietly, listening to it. It was reassuring, evidence that basic physical law still ruled. “Dr. Taliaferro,” I said, “do you have a theory? What do you think happened to them?”

He considered it.
“I think they were taken,”
he said finally.
“By whom, or for what purpose, I don't know.”

His bench was placed just beyond the reach of the incoming tide. We watched a wave play out and sink into the sand. “Why was there an empty compartment on the
Polaris?
”

“You mean, why were there only six passengers instead of seven?”

“That's the same question. But, yes.”

“That's easy to explain. The eighth compartment was reserved for me.
I'd
intended to go.”

“For you?” He nodded.”

“You were fortunate. Why did you change your mind?”

“Something happened at the office. I just don't know what it was. I was never informed. I, the avatar. Whatever it was, it was serious enough that I felt constrained to cancel out of the flight.”

“It was at the last minute.”

“Yes. We were literally boarding the
Polaris.
”

I pressed for an explanation, but he insisted he had none. Whatever it had been, Taliaferro had kept it to himself. And I recalled seeing the director leaving early at the Skydeck launch. “Dr. Taliaferro, how about your disappearance? Why would you have walked off the way you did?” I should mention that it was a rhetorical question. No answer would be forthcoming.
This
Taliaferro was a construct of what was known of the man. It was, in effect, only his public persona. I wasn't disappointed.

“It
is
strange, isn't it?”

“Yes. What do you think?” Might as well push the point. I'd heard the question asked at the convention, and he'd offered no explanation. But the atmosphere was better on that beach, alone and in casual surroundings as opposed to the clamor in the meeting room.