Gift From The Stars (7 page)

That was all accomplished now, faster than anyone had thought possible, and everybody was rich and happy. The world was a different place. Space travel had been pushed aside, to be sure, but that was no reason for Adrian’s disappearance. He was only a small voice unheard against a general background of self-satisfaction.

Only—if this were a Hitchcock movie, something else should be happening about now.

As if that were a cue, the door swung open, and a man and a woman in one-piece gray suits, like ill-matched twins, were inside the shop, not so much entering as materializing. They displayed no weapons, but their hands alone looked lethal. “You’ll come with us,” the woman said as if there were no question of non-compliance.

The man seated behind the ancient metal desk was tall and thin to the point of emaciation. His dark eyes seemed too large for his face. Frances thought of the movie
Freaks
, but in real life people couldn’t stare unless they had paid admission. She looked away uncomfortably and studied the room; life was like a movie set—a person could tell a great deal about a character from his surroundings and even anticipate the actions that were going to happen. But this place offered few clues. It was a second-floor office in a twenty-five-story building in what had once been a thriving suburban business development. As the suburbs had sprawled farther into the countryside, they had dragged the administrative centers with them, but now the virtual office had replaced the old vertical units with their requirements for transportation and elevators and air-handling equipment and toilets and food and drink.

The office to which Frances had been escorted by the improbable twins matched its location. Its windows looked out upon buildings being razed and land returned to meadow and park. A shabby sofa covered in something that looked like green leather stood against one wall, and
equally shabby side chairs occupied each end of a battered wooden coffee table. Above the sofa was a tattered poster of a bullfight in Mexico City. On the opposite wall was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
.

“Well, Mrs. Farmstead,” a voice said from behind the desk, “are you pleased with what you’ve done?” The voice was strangely familiar.

Frances looked back quickly. “Makepeace?”

The skeletal man nodded.

“What have they done to you?” The last time Frances had seen William Makepeace he had been an immense fat man, like Sidney Green-street in
The Maltese Falcon
, in a vast, empty hangar.

“The same thing they did to you,” Makepeace said. “Or we did to ourselves. We shed our weight with biogenetic help. With me the pendulum swung a bit too far; on you it looks good, and the rejuvenation process seems to have served you well.”

“I cut my hair,” Frances said absently, touching her gray bob. “But what are you doing here? The national government is virtually out of business.”

Makepeace looked down at his bony hands. “A good bureaucrat can always find work. A good bureaucrat is someone who does his job efficiently and quietly, accepts blame for whatever fails, and passes along any credit to his superiors. Now I serve the Energy Board.”

Nobody paid attention to the administration of utilities as long as whatever they supplied was cheap and uninterrupted. But Frances had heard of the Energy Board. She remembered vaguely that it was governed by five Chairs representing his or her continent and overseeing its distribution of the energy stolen from the sun.

“You asked me if I was pleased with what we had done, Adrian and I, and I presume you mean the world we created when we released the alien designs. And my answer is that the world has managed to absorb alien technology without a tremor.”

“Proving that you were right and the rest of us were wrong,” Makepeace said.

“So it would seem. Has the world ever been in better shape? Energy is being broadcast from mountain-top receiving stations, global warming is being reversed, pollution is being cleaned up, and the quality of life around the world is being raised to Western standards. People everywhere are happy and prosperous, education is universal, the arts are flourishing, the ghettos are being depopulated and demolished, the birthrate has dropped to a supportable level—what’s not to like?”

“A virtual paradise,” Makepeace said, as if in agreement.

Frances looked at Makepeace. “Virtual? Maybe that’s the right word: utopia may not be here yet, but it isn’t unimaginable. The only thing on which we haven’t made any progress is spaceflight. No matter what we do, nobody will let us build a ship.”

“You can’t expect people to get excited about space when they have everything they need here on Earth,” Makepeace said.

“That’s one of the problems with paradise, isn’t it?” Frances observed. “No one wants to leave.”

The ceiling lights above them went dark. Frances twitched, but Makepeace sat unmoved, as if the occurrence were commonplace. The only light came through the windows behind him.

“If it’s paradise,” Makepeace said, “why are violent crimes and acts of terrorism on the increase?”

“That’s news to me.”

“And to most people. In good times bad news seems to drop below the horizon. Nobody notices.”

The overhead lights came on again.

“Or maybe it doesn’t get reported,” Frances said.

“Censorship, Mrs. Farmstead?” Makepeace said. When he shook his head, it looked as if it might fall off his pipe-stem neck. “No need, and no means. The Energy Board is in the business of distributing energy, and it has no facilities for controlling the media. And even if it could, so much is available on the Internet that omissions in the media would be obvious. The answer is that nobody is paying attention.”

“Except you.”

Makepeace nodded carefully. “A few bureaucrats like me are paid to keep track and to ask why these things are happening.”

“You didn’t bring me here to get my opinion,” Frances said flatly.

“Adrian Mast has disappeared,” Makepeace said.

“So I found out. And there is no proof he ever existed.”

“No electronic proof,” Makepeace said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not easy to delete physical evidence, written documents, files, that sort of thing,” Makepeace said. “No one can work magic. But we’ve become dependent on electronic information, and a search program with instructions to eliminate anything it finds can remove the most available evidence of a life. But why would anyone do that?”

“I thought it was you,” Frances said. She made a sweeping gesture that included the office and the bureaucracy it represented.

Makepeace shook his head. “Maybe it was Adrian himself.”

Now it was Frances’ turn to look skeptical.

“Aliens?” Makepeace suggested.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Frances said. “Why would they send us plans if they were here already?”

“To throw us off the track?”

“I still think it was you,” Frances said, “or someone who looks a lot like you, or like you used to look. But whoever it was, I’m going to find out.”

Makepeace looked as pleased as his death-mask face could manage. “I hoped you would, Mrs. Farmstead,” he said.

Frances studied the cabin nestled in a grove of oak trees. A lot had happened to her and to Adrian in ten years, as well as to the rest of the world. Consultants seldom needed to meet in person with their clients anymore, and Adrian had retreated from his urban apartment to this rustic isolation. Frances had visited his apartment a couple of times, but Adrian’s move had been part of the distancing process that had resulted, over the past half-dozen years, in little more than holiday greetings. She hadn’t even known he had moved until she had inquired for him at his former building.

Now she wondered whether she had identified the situation correctly. Maybe it wasn’t a Hitchcock scenario after all; maybe it was a horror story or a mystery. It was important to get the genre right. Otherwise you wouldn’t know what to look for or how to behave.

The cabin had no close neighbors. The taxi that had brought her had passed a few farmhouses along the way, but none were near enough for its occupants to keep track of Adrian’s coming and goings. Here, far from the city, Frances missed its busybodies. In the police shows, neighbors witnessed whatever happened at any time of day or night; the difficulty was persuading them to talk. Maybe that was what Adrian had been looking for: anonymity. The only community that mattered to him was scattered around the world, and had only a faint hope of coming together, some day, out among the stars.

Finally, after circling the house and finding only a browsing rabbit to startle into leg-kicking terror and a quail that exploded from some underbrush, Frances decided to go in. The door was unlocked. In the movies an unlocked door was a cue for the detective to draw his pistol and sidle cautiously into the room beyond, steadying his weapon with both hands, aiming first one way and then the other. But she had no weapon, and she swung the door open and walked in, uncertainty fluttering in her stomach.

The doorway opened directly into a living room. It had smooth painted walls, casement windows, and a hardwood floor—not at all like the inside of a cabin; it was one thing to desire the rough-hewn honesty of a cabin and another to live in one. The only concession to tradition was a big fireplace set into the left wall; in front of it was a rag rug and a sofa upholstered in multi-colored tapestry, with matching chairs at each end. A desk, with a closed laptop computer on top, stood against the opposite wall. Beside the desk, a lawyer’s bookcase with glass fronts held three shelves of eclectic books. No one else was in the room, and everything was neat, the way Frances remembered Adrian’s apartment, as if the cabin had been untenanted since he left or was taken.

Two doorways, one with a closed door, occupied the far wall. She opened the door to the one on the left. Beyond was a bedroom with an adjoining bath. The bed was made and the bedroom was empty and neat; so was the bath, with folded towels draped in racks. The shower was dry. The other doorway led to a kitchen and breakfast table with four chairs. For the first time Frances noticed something out of place; the remains of breakfast dishes cluttered the table: a bowl, a box of cereal, a mug, a spoon. The bowl was empty, but the mug was half full of cold coffee; a sheen of oil floated on top.

Adrian had been interrupted just after breakfast but before he had finished his coffee. She went back to the living room and sat down in one of the tapestry-covered chairs, frustrated. So big a problem; so little information. She thought back to her earlier observation about the cabin: identifying the genre was essential. Each had its peculiar protocols, and if you didn’t ask the right questions, the answers you got would be either irrelevant or misleading.

So, she thought, this was a mystery, and she needed to ask questions about motivation. The first possibility was that Adrian had left of his own volition interrupted by a message or a messenger, with a summons so urgent his morning coffee couldn’t be finished. But what was so urgent that a man as organized as Adrian couldn’t finish his coffee? Or leave a message? The second possibility was that he had been abducted. The room revealed no sign of a struggle, but that wasn’t conclusive: he could have been surprised at the door or compelled to leave by overwhelming odds or weapons.

She looked from the fireplace to the computer on the desk against the opposite wall. She stood up and walked to it, released the catch, and raised the monitor into place. She pushed the power button. When the icons swam into view, she called up Adrian’s files. A numbing array of folders appeared on the screen. Adrian had been busy. The titles seemed
to describe reports related to his consulting business; a few of them seemed to deal with his plans to build a spaceship. She could come back to those later, if necessary.

She returned to the icons and clicked on his e-mail server. Unlike the programs themselves, this one required a password and clicking on “okay” did no good. She tried several passwords, including her name, her birthday (did Adrian know it?) and his, recalling that unlike Adrian she had sent him greetings on those occasions, “Winterbotham,” “Cavendish,” “stars,” and “space.” Then she tried “giftie,” and the files opened.