we passed between two columns and went inside, where we were greeted by a young man dressed in formal garb. “Good afternoon” he said. “Mr. Winter will be with you shortly.”
He was a hologram. Standing in front of a lamp in the hallway, he cast no shadow. He smiled politely, led us into a reception room, and asked us to be seated. When we'd complied, he smiled again, turned on his heel, and left.
The room was luxuriously furnished with thick satin curtains, a dark, padded sofa, three armchairs, and an exquisitely carved coffee table. Several pieces of twelfth-century transliteral art were mounted on the walls, along with a lush, fur-lined tapestry and a framed wedding picture of William Winter, Sr., and his bride. Two sculpted busts, a man and a woman from another age, looked across the room at each other.
We heard voices in the hallway. Then a short, plump man entered the room. “Mr. Benedict,” he said. “So good to meet you. And Ms. Kolpath. I'm Billy Winter. What can I do for you?”
Alex expressed his admiration for the property and said something about the pleasant weather. Winter asked if we'd like something to drink. Of course. That would be very kind. Winter spoke to the AI, and Alex got to the point. “As I mentioned,” he said, “we're doing some research on eminent fourteenth-century figures, men and women who had a permanent effect on the development of the culture. We'd like very much to talk with you about your father.”
Our host settled into an armchair. “My time is yours,” he said.
A bottle of wine was brought in by a middle-aged woman, who smiled politely, took three glasses from a cabinet, and put them before us. She withdrew, and Billy filled the glasses. We raised them to his father, and to the Arcane Club, of which he'd been a founding member, and which included some of the century's most influential thinkers. Maria Cauley, who'd been a major contributor to court reform, had been a member. And Lyle Kashevik, the neurologist who'd argued the necessity of religion for inner peace while warning against its vulnerability to abuse. And Indira Khalalla, who developed the moonlight pheromone that was so potent that moralistic opponents took her to court to block its use. Michael Goshok had belonged during the years when he was leading the effort to ban AIs that could theoretically read minds by examining facial expressions. Goshok had been a liaison with the Mutes, and he must have understood what it would have meant to humans to have their minds open for all to see.
“Did your father ever explain to you,” Alex asked, “why he wanted to go to Indikar?”
“No,” said Billy. “I was only ten when it happened. He said goodbye, and suddenly he just wasn't around anymore. My mother told me that she never understood what it was about.”
“Had he gone out on missions like that before? That you're aware of?”
“No. It was the first time he'd been off-world.” The mother, we knew, had died several years earlier. “She used to talk about how she'd had a bad feeling the first time she'd seen him.”
Alex leaned back in his chair. “You mean Chris Robin?”
“Yes.” Billy took a long swallow of the wine. “If you ever figure out why he went, if you find out why my father died, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.”
Alex assured him he would. He got up and walked over to the wedding picture. The couple looked happy, even exultant, the way newlyweds inevitably do. The groom might have been a bit too poised. The bride, whose name was Suniya, was literally aglow. I love old wedding pictures. Sometimes I suspect we all peak at that moment, and that afterward we get back to the business of living, and it's a downhill run.
“You wanted to see his papers,” said Billy.
“Yes, if we may.”
“Absolutely.” He raised his voice a notch: “Miranda, make everything available to Chase and Alex, if you will.”
“As you wish, Mr. Winter,” said the AI. I couldn't help noticing the formality. Most people are on first-name terms with the house system.
“Your father left a substantial reputation behind,” said Alex.
“Have you read him?” he asked. He was looking at me.
Alex bailed me out. “Of course,” he said. “I read War, Peace, and Mr. Kargolo when I was in college.”
“It won the Excelsior Award in 1376.”
“Deservedly. I've also read The Libertines.”
“He was especially proud of that one. It didn't win any awards, but he thought it was his best work.” He beamed. Then it was back to business: “Alex,” he said, “as I mentioned to you, everything in the documents is available for your inspection. But nothing may be downloaded, other than his books.” The other titles were Mathematics and God; The Grand Cycle; Mutes, Philosophers, and Lawyers; and Our Day in the Sun. “I wouldn't want you to think I don't trust you, but it's a precaution that my father always insisted on, so I feel a certain duty-”
“It's no problem, Billy.”
“So what are we looking for?”
I'd asked the question on the way to the house and expected Alex to respond with his trademark line that we'd know it when we saw it. But he was a bit more precise this time, though not much: “Chase, we want to know the reason for his connection with Robin.”
The amount of material contained in Winter's papers was breathtaking. Aside from notes on the six books he'd written, which were probably more extensive than the books themselves, there were journals, diaries, comments on whatever he happened to be reading, and records of conversations. There were observations on the culture, on political events, on the media, on religion, on theatrical performances, on his dietary tastes, on child rearing, on marriage, and on AIs (which, he maintained, were in fact conscious entities and therefore should be granted rights identical to people). There was hardly an aspect of human behavior that he left untouched. And he included a few chess games.
“Alex,” I said, “we're going to be here for years.”
“Chase,” he said, “you go through the journals. Look for anything that rings a bell.” He went to the far side of the room, pulled the curtains to block off some of the sunlight, and sat down at a table.
Robin's name turned up in various contexts, as a friend, as a brilliant-if somewhat erratic-physicist, as an occasional luncheon companion, as a favorable reviewer, as a reviewer who'd found fault with some of Winter's conclusions about human evolution (“Robin thinks we are not getting any smarter”), and as a pioneer in the field of subquantum research.
“He always felt,” Winter wrote, “that he'd been born in the wrong era. He envied those who'd lived during the scientific golden age, the period from Francis Bacon to Armand Castillo. From the concept that the world could be explained without invoking the supernatural, which can be traced to the arrival in Italy of the Greek scholars who'd fled the fall of Constantinople in the thirteenth century. And which continued until Castillo demonstrated nine hundred years later that there would never be a Grand Unified Theory. That the cosmos was essentially a masterpiece of disorganization, and therein lay its essential elegance.
“Robin felt that once that had happened,” Winter said, “there was nothing left to do except construct applications. Collect data. And watch the sun go down in the evening. I'm sorry to say that it's difficult to take issue with him on that point.”
Elsewhere, he described Robin as a beneficiary of a line of complexity issues worked out by Friedmann Koffer, the physicist who had contributed so much to the conclusion of hostilities during the Mute War. Winter also mentioned that Robin's work on the multiverse would not have been possible without the efforts of a team that combined with Mute scientists after the conflict to begin looking into the possibility of devising an experiment to establish the existence of alternative universes.
I read a detailed explanation, but I couldn't understand much of it. I decided that Winter was either pretty advanced in the sciences for a historian or that he simply wasn't very good at explaining things.
The reality was that there could be a connection between these two guys that would not necessarily cite Robin's name. So I spent the rest of the morning scanning the journals, looking for multiple-universe issues, the golden age, the subquantum world, Koffer, and the sightings. Something. I found a few possibilities.
Winter was also interested in the occasional sightings by the space stations that seemed to have no explanation. He referred to them as “Sanusar events” and recorded dates and details for some going back more than three thousand years. His sole comment: They've been with us a long time.
Winter enjoyed analyzing how the human outlook had changed as a result of the discovery that we were not alone. What would we be like now, he was fond of asking, if we still believed the universe was empty except for us?
