Alex was still on the circuit. “Thanks, Chase,” he said, with an edge in his voice. “You were very helpful.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn't think you'd want me to cut in when the guy was making so much sense.”
“Right.”
“Do you think there's anything to it? That Elizabeth might have been cheating?”
“I don't know. We may never know. There's no evidence.”
“Okay. Listen, have a good ride home. I have to go.”
“Hot date tonight?”
“Don't I always?”
“Chase, I want you to do something for me.”
“Okay.”
“Find out what happened to the Breakwater. Maybe we can get access to the log.”
FIFTEEN
The problem at Villanueva was that nobody thought to turn off the lights.
Why did they go to Villanueva?
At least we knew why they'd lied about their destination. Villanueva was on the list of hazardous worlds. Mention it on your proposed itinerary, and you could expect to have to justify the reason for your visit. Fill out the appropriate forms. Get permission from higher authority. And agree that, if you get into trouble, rescue may not be forthcoming.
I checked on the Breakwater. After Cermak died, the estate sold it to the CEO of a drug company. Wilson Broderick. He kept it for about a year, then donated it to a charity. They eventually scrapped it.
“Is Broderick still alive?” Alex asked.
“He died about ten years ago.”
“What about the AI?”
“It would have been destroyed along with the yacht.”
“Pity. If we had the log-”
“There might be one other possibility.”
“I'm listening.”
“The space stations don't keep the basic operations logs more than a few years. But they might still have the fueling records.”
“From forty years ago?”
“Maybe. It's worth checking into.”
“And if we found it, what would it tell us?”
“If they refueled when they got back, which most yachts have to do after a long flight, we'll be able to come up with a ballpark idea how far they went. It'll certainly tell us whether they went to Indikar. Or Villanueva.”
Fueling operations at Skydeck were run by Mandy Jhardain. Mandy's a quiet, easygoing type who never married. She didn't like commitments. In the end, she'd told me once, there's always somebody else. I've known Mandy a long time, and I can't imagine her in a permanent relationship. She always claimed she'd been built to roam.
When I asked about refueling records from the previous century, she laughed. “To be honest, Chase, I haven't cleared the data since I got here. It's supposed to happen automatically. Hold on a second.”
That didn't sound hopeful. I heard somebody saying no, heard the humming and burping of electronics. Then she was back. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Chase,” she said. “It looks as if we have everything for the past three years. I don't guess that would do you any good?”
I followed up on the Breakwater AI as well. Nobody could tell me for certain whether it had been destroyed along with the yacht. All Skydeck recycling had been done in those years by one of two companies, neither of which still existed. A retired employee of ProCon, one of the two, told me that even if the AI had survived, there'd be no way to determine what had happened to it.
I had no idea where to go from there, so I left a note for Alex, who was out of the building, and went back to my routine duties. They included fielding a generous offer for Korman Eddy's Clockwork, if we could come up with it. “Disappeared off that train,” the would-be customer said. “I'd love to be able to give it to my wife for our anniversary.” I was tempted to tell him what Alex had concluded about Clockwork, but I let it go.
“We'll let you know, Mr. Spiegler,” I said, “if we get a line on it. But I'm not hopeful.”
When Alex got back, he stuck his head in my office, said hello, and told me we might have a link. “David Lisle,” he said, “is an emeritus professor of history at Margala. And he was a friend of Winter's.”
“Good,” I said. “You found him in one of Winter's books?”
“No. I started looking for someone with a similar academic background who shared his interest in the sightings.”
“Have you been in touch with him?”
“He had to tend to his garden.”
“What?”
“His garden comes before all else, apparently.” He looked tired. “He's making up his mind about what he wants to tell me.”
“You think he knows something?”
“Judging by the way he reacted when I asked him about Winter's death, I don't think there's any question.”
“What did he say?”
“Told me he was busy planting juleps.” He sat down and grumbled something about people who were preoccupied with a sense of their own importance.
“What do we know about him?” I asked.
“He's written a few articles. One of them mentions a sighting a thousand years ago at Fishbowl. The station operators reportedly heard an unknown language on the radio. They said the voice was human, they didn't think there was any question about that, but they'd never heard the language before.” Of course, nobody alive as recently as a thousand years ago had ever heard any unknown language. Unknown languages haven't existed for a long time.
“That would be the Fishbowl sighting in Winter's journal,” I said.
“Correct.”
“Lisle and Winter were on the faculty together at Oxnam University for several years, back in the 1850s. It's where they became friends. If there's a connection between Villanueva and the sightings, there's a good chance Winter would have mentioned it to Lisle.”
“Where does he live?”
“Shen Chi. It's about a hundred klicks from Virginia Island.”
“Where all the action is-”
“Seems that way.”
“He going to call you back?”
“That's what he says.”
“You want me to sit in?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“In case he has privacy issues, it's always a good idea to have someone you can send out of the room.”
In the end, we had to call him. “Sorry,” he told us. “I forgot. Been busy.”
David Lisle bent under the weight of his years. He was, I suspected, close to his third century. His face was
