shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“He might not be easy. I heard that he’s living off-world.”
“I’ll check on it. Thanks.”
Basil was making faces while he tried to remember. “I think I heard that he was out by himself somewhere.”
“By himself?”
“Completely. His own world.” He laughed. “Literally. He always was one of these antisocial guys. Fit right in with my dad.”
Says the guy sitting on top of a mountain with no link.
FIVE
God must love archeologists, to have given us such an extended history, and several hundred worlds, filled with abandoned temples and lost cities and military trophies and histories of places we’ve forgotten existed. If the physical sciences began long ago to run out of targets for blue-sky research, the archeologist finds his field of interest expanding with every generation.
—Tor Malikovski, keynote address for the Wide World Archeological Association, on the occasion of its move from Barrister Hall to the Korchnoi University Plaza, 1402
Hugh Conover had been an anthropologist whose career had followed an arc with similarities to Tuttle’s. He, too, was looking for signs of intelligent life elsewhere. But his primary interest was in places where people, human beings, had landed and lived, outposts in remote areas, cities buried in jungles or beneath desert sands, bases established and subsequently abandoned during the dawn of the interstellar age. If he’d come across something utterly new, that would have been fine. Magnificent, in fact. But he knew the odds. And he was too smart to let anyone think he took the possibility seriously.
Like Tuttle, he’d been a pilot. And also like Tuttle, he’d usually traveled alone.
Moreover, Conover had enjoyed moderate success.
His most famous achievement had been the discovery of a previously unknown space station, dating from the twenty-seventh century, on the edge of the Veiled Lady. That had happened in 1402. For seventeen years after that, he had labored in the field and, while making a reasonable contribution to the state of historical knowledge, he’d produced nothing else of a spectacular nature. Finally, in 1419, he’d retired. Three years later, he announced that he was going away. And he did. If anyone knew where he was, it wasn’t on the record.
We continued looking for data on Tuttle.
We asked Jacob to determine whether anyone had ever taken charge of his papers. He needed a few seconds to respond. “I do not have a listing, Alex.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “I’d have been surprised if we’d found anything.”
“Apparently he was never considered a suf ficiently substantive figure that anyone asked for them.”
Nobody ever wrote a biography about him. Nobody ever granted him a major award. Interviews always depicted him as a one-dimensional lunatic, a figure of fun who fell into a class of “experts” defined by ghost hunters, Nostradamus enthusiasts, and people who could make out the face of God in the Andrean Cloud. His media coverage seldom revealed the man himself. There were death and wedding notices, and one item describing how he’d pulled a drowning kid out of the Melony during a summer festival. The bottom line was that, aside from that single interstellar passion, there wasn’t much information to be had about him.
Some of his old colleagues were still active. We visited as many as we could get to, Wilson Bryce at Union Research, Jay Paxton at the University of York, Sara Inagra at the Quelling Institute, and Lisa Cassavetes, who’d long since gone into politics and been elected to the Legislature.
Several had been to the Rindenwood house on various occasions, but those visits, of course, had been long ago, and nobody remembered the cabinet, let alone what had been in it. “In fact,” said Cassavetes, who was probably 160 but who primped and grinned while implying her interest in Tuttle had been limited to the bedroom, “I don’t recall ever having
“He might not be easy. I heard that he’s living off-world.”
“I’ll check on it. Thanks.”
Basil was making faces while he tried to remember. “I think I heard that he was out by himself somewhere.”
“By himself?”
“Completely. His own world.” He laughed. “Literally. He always was one of these antisocial guys. Fit right in with my dad.”
Says the guy sitting on top of a mountain with no link.
FIVE
God must love archeologists, to have given us such an extended history, and several hundred worlds, filled with abandoned temples and lost cities and military trophies and histories of places we’ve forgotten existed. If the physical sciences began long ago to run out of targets for blue-sky research, the archeologist finds his field of interest expanding with every generation.
—Tor Malikovski, keynote address for the Wide World Archeological Association, on the occasion of its move from Barrister Hall to the Korchnoi University Plaza, 1402
Hugh Conover had been an anthropologist whose career had followed an arc with similarities to Tuttle’s. He, too, was looking for signs of intelligent life elsewhere. But his primary interest was in places where people, human beings, had landed and lived, outposts in remote areas, cities buried in jungles or beneath desert sands, bases established and subsequently abandoned during the dawn of the interstellar age. If he’d come across something utterly new, that would have been fine. Magnificent, in fact. But he knew the odds. And he was too smart to let anyone think he took the possibility seriously.
Like Tuttle, he’d been a pilot. And also like Tuttle, he’d usually traveled alone.
Moreover, Conover had enjoyed moderate success.
His most famous achievement had been the discovery of a previously unknown space station, dating from the twenty-seventh century, on the edge of the Veiled Lady. That had happened in 1402. For seventeen years after that, he had labored in the field and, while making a reasonable contribution to the state of historical knowledge, he’d produced nothing else of a spectacular nature. Finally, in 1419, he’d retired. Three years later, he announced that he was going away. And he did. If anyone knew where he was, it wasn’t on the record.
We continued looking for data on Tuttle.
We asked Jacob to determine whether anyone had ever taken charge of his papers. He needed a few seconds to respond. “I do not have a listing, Alex.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “I’d have been surprised if we’d found anything.”
“Apparently he was never considered a suf ficiently substantive figure that anyone asked for them.”
Nobody ever wrote a biography about him. Nobody ever granted him a major award. Interviews always depicted him as a one-dimensional lunatic, a figure of fun who fell into a class of “experts” defined by ghost hunters, Nostradamus enthusiasts, and people who could make out the face of God in the Andrean Cloud. His media coverage seldom revealed the man himself. There were death and wedding notices, and one item describing how he’d pulled a drowning kid out of the Melony during a summer festival. The bottom line was that, aside from that single interstellar passion, there wasn’t much information to be had about him.
Some of his old colleagues were still active. We visited as many as we could get to, Wilson Bryce at Union Research, Jay Paxton at the University of York, Sara Inagra at the Quelling Institute, and Lisa Cassavetes, who’d long since gone into politics and been elected to the Legislature.
Several had been to the Rindenwood house on various occasions, but those visits, of course, had been long ago, and nobody remembered the cabinet, let alone what had been in it. “In fact,” said Cassavetes, who was probably 160 but who primped and grinned while implying her interest in Tuttle had been limited to the bedroom, “I don’t recall ever having
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