Coming Home

Book 7: An Alex Benedict Novel

by Jack McDevitt

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alternative History sci-fi; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers

Synopsis

Thousands of years ago, artifacts of the early space age were lost to rising oceans and widespread turmoil. Garnett Baylee devoted his life to finding them, only to give up hope. Then, in the wake of his death, one was found in his home, raising tantalizing questions. Had he succeeded after all? Why had he kept it a secret? And where is the rest of the Apollo cache? Antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his pilot, Chase Kolpath, have gone to Earth to learn the truth. But the trail seems to have gone cold, so they head back home to be present when the Capella, the interstellar transport that vanished eleven years earlier in a time/space warp, is expected to reappear. With a window of only a few hours, rescuing it is of the utmost importance. Twenty-six hundred passengers—including Alex’s uncle, Gabriel Benedict, the man who raised him—are on board.
Alex now finds his attention divided between finding the artifacts and anticipating the rescue of the Capella. But time won’t allow him to do both. As the deadline for the Capella’s reappearance draws near, Alex fears that the puzzle of the artifacts will be lost yet again. But Alex Benedict never forgets and never gives up—and another day will soon come around...

Release date: November 4, 2014

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 368

Sample

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dates not classified as Common Era (C.E.) are based on the Rimway calendar.

PROLOGUE

11,256 C.E.

When Alex Benedict graduated high school, his uncle Gabe, the only parent he’d ever known, provided the ultimate gift: a flight to Earth, the home world, the place where everything had started. It was a mixed blessing, though. Alex had a hard time adjusting to interstellar travel, though he didn’t like to admit it. The jumps in and out of transdimensional space upset his stomach. And the constant changes in gravity levels never helped. But there was no way he would pass on the opportunity to see the oceans and mountains so prominent in his reading. And the great cities, Paris and Denver, Berlin and Shanghai. And the Alps and the Grand Canyon. The pyramids, the Great Wall, and the Arkon. And, for Gabe’s sake, he pretended to be enthusiastic about touring the world capital in Winnipeg.

What most excited him was that Gabe had promised to include a visit to the Moon. That, of course, had been the stage for everything, where Neil Armstrong had climbed out of Apollo 11, stepped down onto the ground, and delivered his giant-leap statement.

But he was surprised to discover, on their arrival, that Armstrong’s footprints were no longer there. “What happened to them?” he asked Gabe.

His uncle frowned. “Actually, nobody knows.” Gabe was tall, with black hair beginning to gray, and sharp features that had been hardened by so many years digging into archeological sites under alien suns. “They were there for a while, but they disappeared during the Dark Age. Vandals, probably.” Gabe shook his head. “Idiots.” They were seated at a small round table in an observation lounge, drinking sodas and looking across the shops and hotels and cottages that covered the lunar surface at MoonWorld, the multiplex area reserved for tourists and shielded by a semitransparent dome. A few kilometers away, the cluster of walls and beams and platforms that had been the original Moonbase lay serenely in the vacuum, illuminated by the glow of the home world, which never moved from its position just over the horizon.

Alex leaned back in his seat. “Nine thousand years,” he said. “It just doesn’t look that old.”

“Time tends to stand still in places like this, Alex. If you don’t get wind and rain, nothing changes.”

Alex picked up a change of expression, a darkening of mood. “What’s wrong, Uncle Gabriel?” he said.

“I was just thinking how much I’d have enjoyed walking around and looking at the Apollo landers. The first manned spaceships.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were here for over a thousand years. But when everything collapsed, they took all that stuff back to Earth. Too many people had access to the Moon by then, and they wanted to preserve as much as they could. So they put the landers in museums. Primarily in the Space Museum in Florida. Most of the rest of it went to the Huntsville Space Museum, where they were keeping other artifacts from the Golden Age. Eventually, though, they had to move it out of there, too, because they were losing control of the area. There’d been a worldwide economic collapse. Alabama just wasn’t safe anymore. There was a lot of material from the first thousand years of off-world exploration. Helmets, personal gear belonging to the astronauts, electronic records from the early flights. Absolutely priceless stuff.”

“So where’d they move it to?”

“Some of it was taken to Centralia. Which in those days was called the Dakotas. We don’t know how much. Or what actually was saved.” A look of weariness came into his eyes. “Whatever was left was put into a storage facility there. After that, we don’t know what happened to it.”

“It would be nice to find them,” said Alex.

“Yes, it would. Some people have devoted their lives to trying to figure out what happened. Huntsville had artifacts from the very beginning of the space era. From the Florida Space Museum. From Moonbase. From Tyuratam. I’d give anything to have been able to look through all that.”

“Florida was underwater by then, I guess?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the Apollo flight modules?”

“They were left at the Florida Space Museum and went under with the rest of the state.”

“I bet you’d like to have one of those, Uncle Gabe.”

Gabe took on a negative look. “I’m not sure what it would sell for. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you could put on a bookshelf.”

“You’re kidding.”

Gabe smiled. “Alex, I’d give anything just to have a chance to touch one of them.” He sighed. “It’s a pity.”

“I don’t think I’d have wanted to be around during a dark age. It’s odd, though. They had interstellar flight. And data retrieval and everything.”

Gabe nodded. “None of it matters if you have an unstable society and tin-pot dictators. They had several hundred years of economic collapse. Widespread poverty. A few people at the top had all the money and influence. They had terrible overpopulation, struggles over water and resources. Civil wars. And widespread illiteracy.” The thirty-second to the thirty-ninth century. “It’s a wonder we survived.”

“But there were other worlds. Other places. How could they all have collapsed? I’ve read the books. I know what they say about greed and corruption. But I still don’t understand how people let it happen.”

“The colony worlds weren’t self-sufficient at the time, Alex. So they just got taken over. People with money and influence gradually pushed everyone else out of the way. It was like a disease.”

They sat quietly for a couple of minutes. Alex finished his soda and put the glass down. “Uncle Gabe, this would probably be a good place for a dig site. You ever think about coming here?”

“They don’t allow it, son.” He looked out at a crater rim. “I don’t think there’s much here anyway. The place has gotten a pretty thorough sweep.”

*   *   *

They strolled over to the museum. There were about forty people inside, wandering among the showcases, buying souvenirs, looking at portraits of astronauts and pilots and ships ranging from the Apollo vehicles to modern interstellars. They went into the showroom, which offered a virtual tour of the original Moonbase. Posters informed them the tour would show the facility as it had been on the morning of March 2, 2057, when the first manned voyage to Jupiter was nearing its objective. “Sounds like fun,” said Gabe. “Why don’t we watch?”

“Jupiter’s the big planet, right?” asked Alex.

“Yes. If it hadn’t been for Jupiter, we probably wouldn’t be here.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“It acted as a sweeper. Cleared out a lot of the debris that would have rained down on Earth. Usually, if you don’t have one of those in the planetary system, life stays pretty primitive. If it gets moving at all.”

“The Jupiter flight was the first manned mission after Mars, right?”

“Yes. Mars was the first off-world settlement. Unless you count Moonbase, of course.”

“I know that.” Alex made no effort to hide his annoyance.

“Sorry,” said Gabe.

“You know, Uncle Gabe, I can’t imagine how they traveled around in those days without a star drive. It must have taken forever to get anywhere.”

“It was fairly slow going, kid.”

“I mean, they needed three days to get to the Moon.”

Gabe laughed. “Yeah. They did. That’s correct.”

Alex looked out at the Earth. “You can almost touch it.”

*   *   *

They sat down in a theater area with about a dozen other people and put on headphones. The lights dimmed, and soft music filtered in. “Good morning, Alex,” said an amiable female voice. “Welcome to Moonbase.” The lights came back up, and Alex’s chair seemed to be moving along a curving corridor. His uncle was beside him. The others were gone. “My name is Leah,” the voice continued. “If you wish at any time to stop the tour, simply push the red button on the right arm of the chair. Push the yellow button to speak to your uncle.”

The corridor was cramped and gray. Not at all like the tasteful, spacious passageways of MoonWorld.

They turned left into an austere meeting room. Several people were seated on narrow chairs, and a young man in uniform was apparently checking off names and assigning quarters. Everybody wore odd clothing, the kind you saw in historical films. Hairstyles were strange. There was a pomposity in the way the women wore theirs. Girls looking like that would have been laughed out of Alex’s old high school. And the men all had facial hair. As if they were trying to look like people who desperately needed to be taken seriously. Most striking, though, there were people of different colors. Racial variations had long since gone away in most areas of the Confederacy after thousands of years of intermarriage. “Moonbase was established in 2041,” said Leah, “by a private corporation. Originally, the plan had been that it would be a government operation. Eventually, however, it became clear that wouldn’t work. Moonbase, Inc. came into existence, made possible by an agreement among seventeen nations and eleven corporations.”

Their chairs navigated out of the meeting room. “We are now in the living quarters,” said Leah. “Forty apartments are available for staff. Another thirty for visitors. The Galileo Hotel provides forty additional rooms.” They passed through a doorway and found themselves in the lobby of the Galileo. A cube-shaped transparent pool was elevated overhead. There were probably twenty kids and a half dozen adults swimming and splashing around while others watched from the sides.

“Nice place,” said Alex.

“If you mean the pool,” Leah said, “it was so popular that they had to enlarge it on three different occasions.” She took them to one of the apartments. “As you can see, it’s smaller than those available today.” But it looked comfortable. The bed folded out of a wall. A display screen was mounted on the opposite side. Beneath the screen, on a table, was an electronic device. “It’s a computer,” Leah explained. “Note the keyboard. It’s not unusual for the time. Data storage was still in a relatively primitive state.”

“Did any of them survive?” asked Gabe. “I mean, any of the computers they had at Moonbase?”

“There is one, which you can find at the Paris Deep Space Museum.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They disappeared, along with virtually everything else, during the Dark Age.”

Gabe took a deep breath.

The Moonlight Restaurant was the most misnamed facility Alex had ever seen. It was cramped, with dull yellow walls and drab chairs and tables, overflowing with maybe thirty people. They drifted past a souvenir shop, whose shelves were filled with magazines and jigsaw puzzles and pullover shirts, some with images of the Moon and of Moonbase. There were models of a primitive-looking ship that Alex would not have trusted to take him anywhere. “It’s the Isaac Newton,” said Leah. “It was one of the early vehicles carrying people to Mars.”

Everything in the shop was sold in packages bearing pictures of other antiquated space vehicles and astronauts in clunky pressure suits. And, of course, a ringed planet. Saturn.

“Uncle Gabe,” said Alex, “it’s too bad they didn’t leave some of the landers up here. Sitting on the Moon, they’d have lasted forever.”

“If nobody ruined them.”

“Think what one of them would sell for.” Alex couldn’t resist the comment because he knew how Gabe would react.

“That’s not what matters, son.”

*   *   *

The souvenir shop blinked off, and Leah took them outside. There was no multiplex in that era. The dome, of course, did not exist either. Several pieces of the automated equipment that had built the structure were scattered across the regolith. Three landing pads had been placed several kilometers away, near what appeared to be a cabin. “It’s actually a subway entrance,” said Leah. “It provides transport into the central complex.” They veered off again, toward an array of radio telescopes. “Solar collectors, Alex. They supply power for Moonbase. If you’ll look to your left, you will see that construction is getting started on a nuclear facility. At this time, it was still several years from completion.”

*   *   *

“As you are probably aware, Alex, March 2, 2057, is an historic date.”

“Because of the Jupiter flight.”

“Correct. Actually, they were going to Europa. They’re getting ready inside, so if no one has an objection, we’ll go to the command center and see what happens.” The lights blinked, and Alex was seated in a wide room with seven or eight people, all watching displays and talking into microphones. The displays were mostly carrying lines of numbers, but one had an image of a gray globe, which had to be Jupiter, and another was showing the rugged, broken surface of a moon. “Notice the giant red spot on the planet,” said Leah. “It’s a storm. It was at least five hundred years old at this time, but didn’t fade out of existence until the fifth millennium.

“The person in charge of overseeing the Europa operation is Nazario Conti. He’s over to your left.” Conti was short but imposing, wearing a relaxed attitude that suggested historic projects were simply part of the normal routine.

“Is that an accurate representation of him?” asked Gabe.

“No. In fact we know he existed and that he was one of the senior people on-site. But the records have been lost, so we don’t really have any idea what he looked like or even that he was present during the operation at this moment.”

Gabe did not reply, but his expression said it all. So much was gone.

“I should also add that the language has changed over nine thousand years. We’ll have these people speaking Standard.”

“What’s the name of the ship?” asked Alex.

“The Athena. It had a crew of seven or eight. Accounts vary. We know that the captain was Andrey Sidorov.”

“Have you a picture of him, Leah?”

“Regretfully, again, we do not.”

Something was happening. Conti had been summoned by one of the operators. He pressed a button, and a voice came in over the radio: “Moonbase, this is Athena. We have established orbit around Europa.”

The room filled with applause.

*   *   *

They had dinner in the hotel dining room. It was spacious and elegant, much in contrast with the mundane facilities that had been offered thousands of years earlier at the Moonlight. So far only the iced tea had arrived. Gabe tasted his. “You know,” he said, “the difference between what the Moon is now and what it was like during the Golden Age isn’t so much the nicer facilities.”

“How do you mean?”

“When only Moonbase was here, there was a timelessness about everything. You looked out the window, and you were living in a place that hadn’t changed in millions of years. Time probably didn’t even seem to exist. MoonWorld, on the other hand, is temporary. Come back next year, and there’ll be new shops. They’ll have installed a different elevator somewhere.” He closed his eyes and smiled sadly. “Imagine how complete the illusion would be if they’d left everything alone. If the landing modules were still out there. If you could still go see the Rover’s tire tracks.”

Alex nodded. “I guess so.”

“Well, in any case, this is where it all began, son. This place marks the height of the Golden Age.”

“Before they ran out of things to discover,” said Alex.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it exactly that way. But I guess you’re right: by the middle of the third millennium, we’d exhausted most of the big issues. We knew the universe was governed by mathematics. We knew about evolution. Relativity. Quantum mechanics. Particle theory. Consciousness. We were aware there was no Grand Unified Theory.” He shrugged. “Eventually, science became simply a matter of improving existing technologies.”

The food arrived. Grilled cheese for Gabe, pork roll sandwich for Alex. “So you’re saying there’s nothing left to discover?”

“I don’t know.” Gabe picked up his sandwich. “They’re talking about another breakthrough with life extension, but it may not be possible. And they’re still trying to find a way to cross to one of the parallel universes. Or for that matter, even to demonstrate they exist. But I think that’s about all that’s left.”

There were a couple of girls seated off to one side. One of them, a blonde, made eye contact with Alex. He tried a smile, but she looked away. “What?” asked Gabe, who noticed he’d been distracted.

“I was just thinking that when the opportunity shows up, you have to make your move.”

Gabe started on his meal. “Absolutely,” he said.

Alex smiled. His uncle thought his comment had something to do with MoonWorld. Well, maybe it did.

ONE

The Dark Age arrived like a thunderclap. The people of the world thought they were secure, that life would go on as it always had, and that they need not worry about details. So they did not pay sufficient attention to government and culture. They took their collective eye off what mattered. Science provided starships, but in the end the only thing the passengers cared about was a means of escape. Monetary systems collapsed, people quarreled endlessly over issues that could never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, political systems became hopelessly corrupted, and in the end, small armies of political, religious, and social fanatics delayed recovery across six centuries.

—Harold Watkins, Road to Ruin, 3711 C.E.

1435, RIMWAY CALENDAR. SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER.

It was a day that started slowly, like most days, then blew up. Twice. The first eruption came while I was tallying the monthly income for Rainbow Enterprises. A light snow was falling when our AI, Jacob, informed me we had a call. “It’s from Dr. Earl.”

Marissa Earl was an acquaintance of Alex’s, a psychiatrist who belonged to his book club. I went back into my office and sat down. “Put her through, Jacob.”

Marissa was fond of saying that psychiatry was the only scientific field that was still substantially unpredictable. I’d seen her only a couple of times, once at a fund-raising dinner, and again at a theater presentation. She was active in community arts and ran a few of the local events. When she blinked into my office, she was wearing a large smile while looking simultaneously troubled. But there was no missing the excitement. “It’s good to see you again, Chase,” she said. “Is Alex in the building?”

“He’s out of town, Marissa.”

“Okay. When do you expect him back?”

“In two days. Can I help you?”

She frowned. “Probably not. Could you get in touch with him for me?”

Sure, I thought. If I don’t mind having to make explanations later. Alex doesn’t like to have his time away from the office interrupted by anything short of an emergency. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, and we can take it from there?”

Marissa was relaxed on a couch. A box rested on the seat beside her. She glanced down at it, leaned back, and took a deep breath. “Does the name Garnett Baylee mean anything to you?”

“It rings a bell, but I don’t recall—”

“He was my grandfather. An archeologist.” Her eyes softened. “I never really saw much of him. He spent most of his time on Earth. Doing research. And, I guess, digging. He was especially interested in the Golden Age.”

“That’s a period Alex has always been intrigued by, too, Marissa.” It must have been a wild time. Nuclear weapons that could have ended the species overnight. The development of data processing and mass communications. People getting off-world for the first time. And, of course, it was when the big scientific discoveries were being made. Those who were around during those years saw incredible changes. New technologies constantly showing up. Diseases that had been fatal when you were a child were wiped out by the time you had kids of your own. Not like today, when stability rules. Or, as some physicists would say, boredom.

“He had a huge collection of books, fiction, from those years. My dad said he was always watching shows set in that period. And he was infuriated that so much had been lost.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to,” I said. “We still have pretty good visual records of the third millennium. We know its history. There are a few holes, but by and large—”

“I’m not talking about the history. What he cared about were the artifacts. Have you been to Earth, Chase?”

“Yes. I’ve been there. Once.”

“There’s not much left from the years when they were going to the Moon. It’s all gone. Other than a few old buildings and some dams. My grandfather was always looking for stuff. Like maybe a pen that Marie Curie had used. Or a chair that belonged to Charles Darwin. Or maybe Winston Churchill’s reading lamp.” She shrugged. “According to my father, it was his life. He spent years on Earth trying to track things down.”

I wondered who Darwin and Curie were. “How’d he make out?”

“He found a few things. An old radio. A few lost books. Nothing that was connected specifically to any historical figure, though—”

“Books? Anything significant?”

“Yes. One was Tender Is the Night.”

“Really? He was the guy who found that?”

“That’s correct.”

“I think he and Alex would have gotten along pretty well.”

“He contributed most of what he found to the Brandenheim Museum. It’s on display. You can take a look next time you’re down there. They have a whole section dedicated to him.”

“Sounds as if he had a decent career. You say you didn’t see much of him?”

“When I was about fourteen, he came back here to live with us. I’d only seen him once or twice before that, but I was so young, I can barely remember it. I was surprised to discover that our house belonged to him.” She was looking past me, into another time. “He apologized for not being around when I was younger. He was a nice guy. Did you know he found the only existing wristwatch? You know what that was?”

“I’ve seen them in the old clips.”

“It didn’t belong to anyone in particular, as far as we know. It was just a watch.”

“Okay.” The snow was coming down harder. “What actually can we do for you, Marissa?”

“His room was on the second floor. He was with us for about seven years. But then he had a stroke, and we lost him. That was almost eleven years ago. Dad eventually took over the room and used it as his office. And I guess nobody ever really cleaned it out. Recently, we came across something on a shelf in one of the upstairs closets.” She removed the lid from the box. My angle wouldn’t let me see inside it, but I had a pretty good idea where this was leading.

“Well, Marissa,” I said, “whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll be able to get you a decent price for it.”

“Good. That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” She reached into the box and took out a black electronic device, wrapped in a cloth. She set it on the seat beside her.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I took it to the Brandenheim. I thought the guy I was talking to would go crazy. He tells me it’s a—” She stopped and checked her link. “It’s a Corbett transmitter. It’s for sending messages through hyperspace. This one is apparently an early version. They thought I was going to donate it, which I had originally intended. I just wanted to get rid of it. But I got the impression it’s worth a lot. So I backed off. They got annoyed.” She smiled. “I guess I’m not much like my granddad.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll take a look. When Alex gets back, he can check the record, and if he needs to see it, we’ll have you bring it over.”

“Fine. I’d like to get an estimate of the value. You don’t have any idea, do you?”

“No, Marissa. I’ve never seen one of these things before.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were a pilot.”

“In my spare time, yes.” I was running a quick check on my notebook. And got a jolt. “Holy cats,” I said.

“What? What is it, Chase?”

“The Corbett is the breakthrough unit. It’s the earliest model there was.” The information I was getting indicated it dated from the twenty-sixth century. The early FTL flights had no reasonable way to talk to Earth. Until the Corbett came along. If the Brandenheim had it right, the thing was over eight thousand years old. There was only one known model in existence. So, yes, it was going to have some serious trade value. “Your grandfather never told you he had this?”

“No. He never mentioned it.”

“He must have said something to your parents.”

“My dad says no. He never knew it was there until he went into the closet to put some wrapping paper on the top shelf. There were already a couple of boxes on top of it, and a sweater. There wasn’t enough room, so he took everything down.” She looked at the transmitter. “This was in a case. It was the first time he’d seen it. In fact, he came close to tossing it out. Fortunately, he showed it to me on his way to the trash can.”

“All right. We’ll get back to you.”

“The museum says if I contribute it, they’ll put up a permanent plate with my name on it.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Depends how much I can get for it.”

“You say your grandfather gave them some artifacts?”

“Yes.”

“But they didn’t recognize this when you showed it to them? I mean, he hadn’t shown it to them at some point himself?”

“Apparently not. Maybe it was just something he decided to keep. Maybe he forgot he had it. He was getting old.”

I nodded. “Jacob, can you give me a three-sixty on this thing?”

Jacob magnified the transmitter and closed in on it. I got a close-up of the controls. Then he rotated the angle. It wasn’t especially striking, and it looked like a thousand other pieces of communication gear. About the size of a bread box. The exterior had a plastene appearance. There was a push pad, some dials, selectors, and a gauge. Imprints and markers were all in ancient English. And a plate on the back. “Jacob,” I said, “translate, please.”

“It says ‘Made by Quantumware, 2711, i