“Well, for one thing, he kept buying yachts. And then losing them.”
“Did they sink somewhere?”
“Not that kind of yacht, Chase. The interstellar kind.”
“Oh.” I thought about it. “How many yachts did he lose?”
“Four or five.”
“You're not serious?”
“Oh, yes. I'm quite serious. They were all pretty creaky, apparently. At least that's what I read. But he'd buy one, take it out somewhere, and the next thing we knew he was buying another.”
“Did you hear what was happening to them?”
“Just that they'd broken down or something and got left somewhere. I remember Elizabeth telling me that he used them for experiments. But I don't know what sort of experiment.”
“Thanks, Father,” I said.
“He gave them dramatic names. One, I think, was called the Starhawk.”
“The Starhawk.”
“And the one I really liked-” He laughed. “That was the Firebird.”
“That is poetic,” I said.
“That, too, I suppose. It's Stravinsky.”
Shortly after I got back to the Windraven, Ramsay called. “I haven't really had much time yet, Jack,” I told him. “Give me another couple of days.” I couldn't tell him that some of the neighbors thought Robin had been cheating on Elizabeth so maybe she'd killed him. Or that he was an atheist. And I didn't really have much else.
“Come on, Chase. How long does it take to manufacture something?”
I liked Ramsay. He was just a few years out of journalism school, but I could already see he had a future in the field. He was personable and sufficiently corrupt to carve out a career for himself. Alex refers to it as flexibility, but I plan to write a book one day on how it happens that people of unflinching integrity rarely, if ever, rise to the top of any profession. I asked Alex for his opinion once, and he agreed that it was true more often than not, and said it was because people who were inflexible were dumb. I don't buy it, of course, and neither does he, really. Though sometimes I'm not so sure.
“Jack, give me a chance to look around a bit more, okay?”
“What about the aliens, Chase? People from another reality? Don't you have anything on that?”
“Not anything you could use.”
“I don't guess you have anything about the black holes? Or the colliding universes?”
“No.”
“Colliding universes is good. How about the undead?”
“Say that again?”
He smiled. He was tall, dark-haired, easygoing. He always looked as if he thought I was trying to get away with something. “I talked to one of the people at that party you guys went to a few nights ago. He says that Robin might have been one of the undead.” He broke into his trademark cackle. “You have anybody out there who thinks he might have been a vampire?”
“Jack-”
“Okay. Seriously, Chase, I read somewhere that Robin predicted he'd vanish but that he'd be back one day.”
“I hadn't heard that, either.”
“He must really have been something else. I can't imagine what you could find that would beat this stuff.”
Meantime, I went looking for old news reports.
Two days after the quake, Elizabeth had reported to police that her husband might be in trouble. Cermak had transported him off-world, she explained. She didn't know where. “He does this all the time.” She'd just learned that Cermak was dead, and she was reported as frantic that Robin might be stranded somewhere.
Several days later, there were reports that a couple of people strolling along the water's edge had seen a skimmer that was similar to Cermak's touch down at Robin's house about an hour before midnight.
Elizabeth was shocked to hear it. “I was asleep,” she said. “I never heard him.” And as far as anyone could determine, he'd never gotten inside.
I was able to get some information on the lost yachts. Robin had taken four of them out somewhere between 1385 and 1393. None of them, as far as anyone could tell, ever came back. No explanation was offered other than that the vehicles were being used in experiments to improve cycling. Whatever that was.
The other two yachts were Striker and Elizabeth.
The Firebird had been the last to go missing, in 1393, a few weeks before Robin himself had vanished.
Robin was born on Toxicon, the only child in a wealthy family. He got his master's degree at Kawasai University, and, according to people who knew him at the time, was pretty handy with the ladies. He married a singer, Mary Dexter, and accepted a teaching appointment at Cajun Barker College.
The marriage and the appointment both collapsed within the first few months. He started criticizing his colleagues, sometimes doing it in front of students, and periodically for the media. Some of the professors, he said, were not aware of what really went on in the subquantum world. They didn't understand about complexity. It was why they couldn't present a clear vision to the students.
Robin himself apparently had problems connecting with the students. Only a handful signed on for the second semester. The college responded by canceling all but one of his classes.
Meantime, he was caught in a local hotel with a stripper. There was a public fight with Mary, in which she tried to push him out of an airborne taxi, and the thing crashed onto the roof of the Kassner Building, which housed the medical department. When the physics department chairman, a Professor Makaius, called him in, he responded by telling a reporter from the college newspaper that at least he'd never propositioned a student. That had required Makaius to issue a denial that be had ever done any such thing. It looked for a time that there'd be lawsuits, but everything was dropped when Robin agreed to leave the school and to comment no further.
A year later, he showed up on Rimway, got his doctorate at Margala, convinced everyone he could be trusted, and joined the physics department at Kinesia. He remained there six years, met Elizabeth, who was a lawyer, and began looking for a way to prove the existence of other universes. People had been trying to do that, of course, for thousands of years. The consensus has long been that it can't be done. Most physicists believe there are other universes, but it does not appear that there's any way to demonstrate the proposition. Robin even took to talking about creating a bridge.
He lost interest in teaching, claimed that his students were deficient, and decided he had better things to do. In 1359, he bought the house on Virginia Island and retired there supposedly to do research. Elizabeth had specialized in criminal law, and criminal activity on the island was essentially nonexistent. Apparently, she was given a choice between her career and her marriage. She chose the marriage.
A year or so later, Elizabeth is quoted in a review article to the effect that she had never been happier.
From that point, there's not much on the record about their private lives. Both withdrew into the house and, across a thirty-four-year span, became relatively innocuous neighbors.
In 1376, Robin wrote Multiverse, which had been controversial from the start. It was, according to his Kinesia University colleague, William Winter, not a book for the faint of heart.
Winter? He was the one Ilena had mentioned. Seven years after publication of Multiverse, in 1383, he'd joined Robin on an expedition to Indikar. I couldn't find a clear explanation regarding the purpose of the flight. It seemed to have something to do with orbital fluctuations.
But Winter was killed, apparently attacked by a predator when they made the mistake of landing on a green world to do some sightseeing. The body was never found.
I had asked Father Everett about the incident. “We never really heard any details,” he said. “I didn't know Winter. But I noticed a change in Robin after that. I thought it hit him pretty hard. Elizabeth told me he blamed himself. In any case, he was never the same after that.”
Jack McDevitt
Firebird
