Seeker by Jack McDevitt Page A

Amy. She decided good things had happened and pressed me for information. I explained that we were still gathering data, but that Alex wished to ask a few more questions. She wasn’t having it, of course. But that was okay. When we got to the Hillside, Alex would caution her not to pass the good news to anyone until we were sure nobody would dispute her ownership claim. We had to do that to protect ourselves since we would be facilitating the sale.
    “I’ll be there,”
she said.
     
     
    Alex had placed the cup in our vault. I brought its image up and wondered about its history.
    Probably, someone had collected it as a souvenir during the
Seeker
’s early years, before it became associated with the Margolian migration. Or, it might have made one or two of the early flights to the colony world and come off the ship when it returned for the third mission. It was unlikely, but it could have happened that way. Were that the case, and we could show that it was, the cup would then become enormously valuable. But it was hard to see how we could take it that far.
    When I mentioned it to Alex, he told me not to get excited. “FTL travel was a big deal in the twenty-seventh century,” he said. “What probably happened is that somebody got the trademark rights and produced cups and uniforms and all sorts of
Seeker
souvenirs for sale to the general public.”
    The English characters looked especially exotic. Marquard had pronounced the ship’s name for me, in both Standard and in English. He’d admitted at the same time that there was some uncertainty about pronunciation. No original audio recordings remained from the period, so even though we could read the language, nobody knew for certain what it had actually sounded like.
    See-ker.
Accent on the first syllable.
    Outward Bound.
    Where had they gone?
     
     
    “So far away even God won’t be able to find us.”
    Several accounts existed of various aspects of the story, the background of Harry Williams, the roots of the Margolian movement, contemporary attacks accusing the Margolians of being elitist, their probable destination, and, eventually, theories about their disappearance. They had done precisely what they said they would do, suggested some. They had gone so far out, that even now, thousands of years later, the world they’d selected remained undetected.
    The common wisdom was that something had gone wrong and the colony had perished. Some thought that Margolia, over the ages, might have sidestepped the various bumps and reversals suffered by the mainline civilization, and moved so far ahead of it that they would not be interested in communicating with us. Me, I thought the common wisdom had it right.
    Margolia had been the subject of several sims. Jacob showed me one. It was titled
Invader
, and had been produced less than a year earlier. In it, the hero discovers that Margolians
have
returned quietly to the Confederacy. They are highly advanced, they walk unrecognized among us, and they actually control the machinery of government. They consider ordinary humans to be inferior and are planning a takeover. When the protagonist tries to warn the authorities, his girlfriend disappears, people begin dying, and there are lots of chases down dark alleys and through the corridors of an abandoned space station. The plot dissolves into a major shoot-out at the end, the young lady is rescued, and the good people of the Confederacy are alerted.
    No one ever explained what conceivable reason the Margolians could have had in trying to take us over. But I’ll give the producers this: I was hanging on to my chair during the chase scenes.
     
FOUR
     
Drink deep the cup of life;
Take its dark wine into your soul,
For it passes round the table only once.
— Marcia Tolbert
Centauri Days,
3111 C.E.
     
     
    The Hillside was an exquisite, posh club along the Riverwalk. The kind where they don’t put any prices in the menu because you’re not supposed to care. They had a human