Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [15]
He was refilling their glasses. “No. Not really. But when the sun goes down, it becomes a different kind of world.”
“Hell of an attitude for a starship pilot.”
He let her see how much he was enjoying the beer. “Maybe I’ve been out in the dark too many times,” he said.
Alpha Maxim had erupted in an explosion that would be visible for a billion light-years. Of course, if a response had to come from that kind of distance nothing human would be here to receive it. The species would long since have evolved into something else.
The news accounts were filled with Beacon stories, including excerpts from religious and conservation figures, who’d entered into an unusual alliance, declaring the detonations either acts against God or against the environment.
Kim understood people’s objection to blowing up suns, even suns with planetary systems which would never be home to anything except iron and methane. The worlds that had been engulfed yesterday had been orbiting Maxim for time out of mind, and it seemed indecent to disturb them.
She shook off the misapprehension and her thoughts drifted to Sheyel Tolliver. She’d been tempted to call him after she got back from the Caledonian dive, talk to him casually as though last night’s conversation had not been at all unusual, to assure herself that he was okay, that he had taken no offense. But she decided it was better left alone.
She spent much of the following day in a conference with Matt Flexner, trying to draw up a strategy for squeezing additional funds from the central government. Elections were imminent and the Premier knew that either of his prospective opponents would turn money for the Institute into another example of government waste.
The problem, as Kim saw it, was to demonstrate why the Institute was valuable to the taxpayers, who tended to see it as a way to create jobs for overeducated people with nowhere to go. Kim hated to admit it, but she wasn’t sure the taxpayers were altogether wrong. She did not, of course, share that opinion with Matt. Only Solly knew how she felt.
Matt Flexner had literally been around the Seabright Institute for a century. At thirty, he’d been one of its showpieces, a world-class physicist, doing breakthrough work in transdimensional structure. But the extension of life had underscored quite clearly what scientists had always known: that truly creative work must be done during the early years, or it will not be done at all. Genius fades quickly, like the rose in midsummer. And all the genetic enhancement known to science had not been able to change that melancholy reality.
Matt had adjusted, passed his work unfinished to younger hands, and gone into less demanding fields. Public relations, Kim thought sadly, recognizing that her genius had never got off the train. If Matt had come up short, at least he’d been in the game. People would remember him.
He still looked thirty, of course. He had a broad forehead and a whimsical smile and a long nose. His hair and beard were black, and he was an extraordinarily gifted tennis player.
Kim was his chief lieutenant.
She told him that she’d be gone for a couple of days. Her schedule was her own. Nobody cared how she came and went as long as she got the job done. And the immediate job was to persuade the members of the Germane Society that the Institute was a worthy recipient for donations.
It would, she thought, be rather nice if she could find a supernatural being in the Severin Woods. It would open a whole new field of scientific inquiry.
She went home early, slept for an hour, then made some hot chocolate and carried it into the living room. “Shep,” she said, “see what you can find out about Markis Kane after 573.”
“Searching,” he said.
The sky was gray and cold. A stiff wind beat against the house.
“Not much here. He was an artist of some note.”
“Artist? You sure it’s the same guy?”
“Oh yes. It’s the same person. Apparently his work has a modest reputation.”
“Okay. What else?”
“He left Greenway in June 579, on a flight to Earth. Worked several years there in Canada