Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [5]
Kim had visited the wreck before. The Caledonian was a fishing yacht, lying in twenty fathoms, on the seaward side of Capelo Island. She liked the sense of timelessness the sunken ship evoked, the feeling that she was living simultaneously in different eras. The excursion would also provide a break from the long hours and extended effort of the last few weeks.
The cab landed and she climbed in, touched her bracelet to the dex, and told it to take her home. It lifted, arced around toward the east, and accelerated. She heard the blatt of a horn as she left, a final farewell from someone celebrating either the blast or New Year’s. Then she was sailing over forest and parkland. Seabright’s towers in the north glittered with lights. The parks fell away into sandy beach and the cab arced out over the sea.
Greenway was predominantly a water world. Its single continent was Equatoria, and Seabright lay on its eastern coast. At its widest, it was just over seven hundred kilometers across. The globe-spanning ocean had no name.
The cab skimmed low over the water, crossed Bagby Inlet and the hotball courts on Branch Island. It sailed out beyond the channel, passed a couple of yachts, and began its approach to Korbee Island, a two-kilometer-long strip of land so narrow that many of its houses had ocean views front and back.
Kim’s home, like most of the others in the area, was a modest two-story with a wraparound lower deck. It was rounded at the corners to counter the force of the winds that blew almost constantly off the ocean.
The cab descended onto her landing pad, which was located behind the house on a platform elevated over the incoming tide. She climbed down and stood wearily for a moment, listening to the sea. The rest of the island seemed dark and silent except for the Dickensons, who were still celebrating the new year. Out on the beach, she could see a campfire. Kids.
It had been a long day and she was tired and glad to be home. But she suspected her weariness was not a result of the sixteen or so hours that had passed since she’d left home this morning; rather it had risen from her knowledge that she’d come to the end of something important. Beacon had been launched, and the public relations aspect of it would be given over to someone else. She would go back to her regular fund-raising duties. Damned poor career for an astrophysicist. The reality was that she didn’t sparkle at her specialty, but she did have a talent for talking people into giving substantial contributions.
Damn.
She started toward the house and the taxi lifted off. Lights came on. The door opened for her. “Good evening, Kim,” said Shepard. “I see the program went well.” Shepard was the household AI.
“Yes, it did, Shep. As far as we know, everything’s on schedule.” Like all AIs, Shepard was theoretically not self-aware. Everything was simulation. True artificial intelligence remained beyond the reach of science, and the common wisdom now held that it was impossible. But one was never sure where simulation ended. “Of course we won’t really know for another twelve hours.”
“You had several calls,” he said. “Mostly congratulatory.” He ticked off a list of names, friends and professional colleagues, and a few relatives.
“And at least one,” she said, “that wasn’t congratulatory?”
“Well, this one too commended you. But that wasn’t the reason he called. It was from Sheyel Tolliver.”
Sheyel? That was a name out of the past. Sheyel had been a professor of history at the university during her undergraduate years. He’d been a superb instructor, and he’d taken an interest in her despite the fact that she was a physics major. She was somewhat adrift then. Her parents had died in a flyer accident, the first one recorded in Seabright in five years. It had happened during her second year, and Sheyel