Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [0]
The epigraph for chapter XVI is from “The Ballad of Kansas McGriff,” © 1997 by Bud Webster, and first appeared in The Hobo Times, Fall 1997. Used by permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2000 by Jack McDevitt
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First Eos paperback printing: February 2001
First HarperPrism hardcover printing: February 2000
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10 9 8 7
For the Brunswick Five:
Ted Barton,
John Goff,
Jack Kraus,
Ron Peiffer, and
George Tindle
They haven’t quite worked out the secret of life,
but they know it has something to do with lunch.
Acknowledgments
The author appreciates the advice and assistance of Jeffrey Hall of the Lowell Observatory; of Jimmy Durden, the Glynn County, Georgia, coroner; of my agent and friend, Ralph Vicinanza; of my son Chris McDevitt for devising FAULS; of writers Walt Cuirle and Brian A. Hopkins for their advice on early versions of the manuscript. Thanks also to Will Jenkins/Murray Leinster, for “First Contact,” and for his other magnificent forays into the imagination. To Caitlin Blasdell, my editor at HarperPrism. To Rebecca Springer. And of course to Maureen.
We have always stood along a beach opening onto an infinite sea. That sea beckons us, but for ages we were limited to looking across its expanse with our telescopes and our imaginations. In time, we learned to build outriggers and we got to a few of the barrier islands. Today we have finally in our hands a true four-master, a ship that will take us beyond whatever horizons may exist.
—KHALID ALNIRI, The “Infinity Beach”
Speech at Wesleyan
We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for eleven hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome or gentle, as impossibly strange or remarkably familiar, as godlike, as remote, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.
—SOLLY HOBBS to KIM BRANDYWINE,
On the occasion of their visit to Alnitak
Dates, unless otherwise indicated, are given in the Greenway calendar, whose Year 1 coincides with the first landing on that world in 2411 of the common era. The Green way and terrestrial year are almost identical in duration, which is one of the reasons that world was selected for terraforming.
Illustrations by James P. Beery
Prologue
■ AIM 3.513
“Don’t do it.” Kane, covered in blood, stood framed in the doorway.
“—no choice—” Tripley called as the flyer lifted off the pad. “Do what you can for her.”
As he’d feared, the bastards did not show up on his screen. But he could see their eerie companion, the spectral thing that floated through the moonlight. It was tracking northwest, toward Mount Hope. He had to assume it was escorting them. Riding shotgun.
The village fell away, and he was out over the lake. He switched to manual, climbed to