Echo. Part 6

Alex obviously liked the munson. He tasted it, scribbled some notes. Revisited his drink. Closed the notebook and used it to project a holo of the tablet. "Did you ever see this this?"

Basil grinned. "Yeah. Sure. He had that in his office."

"Did he ever tell you what it was?"

"He said it was from an old settlement somewhere in the Veiled Lady. I don't remember where."

"But it was a human human settlement?" settlement?"

"Sure. Of course."

"Did he say say that? that? Human? Human?"

Basil pulled at his beard. "It's been a long time," he said. "It's hard to remember exactly what he told me. But he sure as h.e.l.l would have been jumping up and down if there'd been aliens. And I wouldn't have forgotten."

"Okay. Thanks."

"Alex?" He hesitated. "Do you, uh, know something I don't?"

"Not really. We're just trying to pin everything down."

"Well, I can tell you there was was something unusual about it. About the tablet." something unusual about it. About the tablet."

"What's that?"

"I don't really know. But he had a special cabinet built for it. It wasn't on display, like his other stuff. He had it locked away most of the time." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Tell you the truth, I'd forgotten about it. Is it valuable?"

"That's one of the things we're trying to find out. It was found in the garden by the current occupant of the Rindenwood house."

"You mean our our house." house."

"Yes."

"In the garden?"

"Yes."

Basil shook his head. "I just don't know."

"The last time you saw it, it was in the cabinet."

"Yes."

"How long did he have it? Do you know?"

"Not long, I don't think. I don't remember seeing it before I was in college. He got it just shortly before he died. Two or three years, I guess."

"Basil, do you have any idea how it might have wound up in the garden?"

"My fault, probably."

"How's that?"

"I didn't see much of my father after I left home. I got back now and then. But neither of us was really comfortable. When he died, I inherited the property. And I sold it. I recall inviting the buyers-I think their name was Harmon, something like that-I invited them to keep any of the furniture they liked. I didn't really have a place for it. And I guess the cabinet was one of the pieces they kept."

"You weren't interested in the tablet?"

"I don't think it ever even occurred to me. I just wanted to get the sale over with."

Alex finished his drink and put the gla.s.s on the table. "That was excellent."

"Do you want some more?"

"No, thanks." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Basil, we can't find any record of his missions. Of where he went, what he did. He says somewhere that he'd marked a lot of places as empty if anyone was following up on his work. But there's no indication of any such record. Did he keep a journal? Anything that might help us trace his activities?"

"Sure. My father kept the logs from his flights. A record of everything, as far as I know. Where he went. What he saw. Pictures. Charts. Impressions. All kinds of stuff."

"Marvelous," Alex said. "Would you let us see it?"

"I don't have it."

"Who does?"

"A friend of his. Hugh Conover."

"How did Conover get it?"

"I gave it to him."

"Why?"

"He asked the same question you just did. And I couldn't see that they had any value. At least not to me."

"When would that have been, Basil?"

"It was right after he died."

"Okay. I don't guess you happen to know where I can reach this Conover?"

"No. I haven't seen him for twenty years."

"Okay. He 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.

G.o.d 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 a.s.sociation, 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 s.p.a.ce 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." "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."

n.o.body ever wrote a biography about him. n.o.body ever granted him a major award. Interviews always depicted him as a one-dimensional lunatic, a figure of fun who fell into a cla.s.s of "experts" defined by ghost hunters, Nostradamus enthusiasts, and people who could make out the face of G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion, 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 Inst.i.tute, and Lisa Ca.s.savetes, 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 n.o.body remembered the cabinet, let alone what had been in it. "In fact," said Ca.s.savetes, 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 been in his office."

n.o.body could a.s.sign a probable source for the tablet. "Yes," said Bryce, who was tall and gangly, with arms and legs too long for his body, and a tendency to frame each phrase as though we should be taking notes, "they do vaguely resemble Late Korbanic. No question. But look at these characters here-"

Audree called the same day we talked to Bryce. When she appeared in the middle of the conference room, we knew immediately that she wasn't bringing good news. "Guys," "Guys," she said, she said, "I'd say you were right not to believe your sources. There's no sign of the tablet anywhere in the Trafalgar area." "I'd say you were right not to believe your sources. There's no sign of the tablet anywhere in the Trafalgar area."

"Could you have missed it?"

"Sure. It's possible. There was a pretty bad storm just before we started the search. It might have stirred up the mud a bit. And in any case, there are a lot of rocks down there. Still, if I were betting-"

"You'd say it's not there."

"That's what I'd say. You want me to go back and look some more? I can do it, but we'll have to charge."

"No. Let it go."

"Sorry. Call me if you change your mind."

When she'd blinked off, Alex grumbled something about idiots dropping things in rivers, and asked Jacob to show him the family trees of Ara and Doug Bannister.

"What has that to do with anything?" I asked.

"You remember who originally wanted the tablet?"

"Doug's aunt."

"Maybe. Ara said 'our aunt.' Let's see who that might include."

There were two aunts on Doug's side, three on Ara's. Jacob ran a search on all five women. One was married to an archeologist. But the guy's specialty was early Rimway settlers. No likely connection there. Three more gave us nothing of significance. But the fifth was a different story.

Her name was Rachel Bannister. She was a retired interstellar pilot. And she'd had an a.s.sociation at one time with Sunset Tuttle.

"What kind of a.s.sociation?" Alex asked.

"I'm still searching."

Alex looked satisfied. "I'm beginning to think they lied to us."

"They didn't throw the tablet into the river?"

"Exactly. What else do we have, Jacob?"

"Her hobbies are listed as gardening and rimrod." Rimrod was a card game quite popular at the turn of the century. Rimrod was a card game quite popular at the turn of the century. "She's something of an amateur musician. And she's also affiliated with the Trent Foundation." "She's something of an amateur musician. And she's also affiliated with the Trent Foundation."

"As a volunteer?"

"Yes. According to this, she spends several hours a week tutoring girls who are having problems in school. As a matter of fact, she's worked with a number of charitable organizations in Andiquar."

"Been doing that a long time?"

"Thirty years or so."

"Sounds like a pretty good woman," I said.

"She worked for World's End Tours for four years, until 1403. Resigned in the spring of 1403. And here's the Tuttle connection."

"Don't tell me," Alex said. "She used to be his girlfriend."

"You hit it on the head, Alex."

"That might explain," I said, "why she wanted the tablet."

"Sentimental attachment?"

"Yes."