Free Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt

monumental discovery, and we are all going to be on the cover of Time . You. Me. The Laskers.” Her dark eyes filled with excitement. “There’s another reason to keep this close for the time being.”
    “What’s that?” asked Max.
    “There might be something else out there.”
     
    Lisa Yarborough had launched her professional career as a physics teacher in a private school near Alexandria, Virginia. But she had been (and still was) an inordinately striking woman who just flat-out enjoyed sex. While she discussed energy and resistance by daylight, she demonstrated after dark a great deal of the former and hardly any of the latter.
    Lisa discovered early that there was profit to be made from her hobby. Not that she ever stooped to imposing tariffs, but men insisted on showing her asubstantial degree of generosity. Furthermore, indirect advantages could accrue to a bright, well-endowed young woman who had never been shackled by either inhibition or an undue sense of fair play. She left the Alexandria school in the middle of her second year amid a swirl of rumors to take a lucrative position with a firm doing business with the Pentagon; her new company thought she could influence the military’s purchasing officers. She proved successful in these endeavors, using one means or another, and moved rapidly up the corporate ladder. If it was true that, in her own style, she slept her way to the top, she nevertheless refrained from conducting liaisons with men in her own chain of command, and in that way maintained her self-respect.
    Eventually she developed an interest in government and took a position as executive assistant to a midwestern senator who twice sought, without success, his party’s presidential nomination. She moved over to lobbying and did quite well for the tobacco industry and the National Education Association. At the law firm of Barlow and Biggs, she functioned as a conduit to several dozen congressmen. She received a political appointment and served a brief tour as an assistant commissioner in the Department of Agriculture. And eventually she became a director in a conservative think tank.
    It was in the latter role that Lisa discovered a facility for writing. She had kept scrupulous diaries since she was twelve, a habit that began around the time she’d first retired into the backseat of her father’s Buick with Jimmy Proctor. Jimmy had been her first real connection, so to speak, and she’d found the experience so exhilarating that she’d wanted to tell someone. But her girlfriends at the Chester Arthur Middle School weren’t up to it. And her parents were Baptists.
    Lisa should have been a Baptist, too. She had been exposed to the full range of ecclesiastical activities.She’d gone to youth group meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, services on Wednesdays and Sundays. But by senior year she’d slept with half the choir.
    While she was at the think tank helping demolish Dukakis’s bid for the White House, she’d decided to use her diaries to write an autobiography. Her promise to go into delicious detail about an array of prominent persons throughout government and the media produced a seven-figure advance. The think tank had promptly fired her because she did not confine herself to prominent Democrats.
    Old paramours and one-night stands had come to see her, pleading for selective amnesia. When persuasion and bribes didn’t work, they resorted to tears and threats, but she went ahead with the project. “If I don’t tell the truth,” she told a TV talk show host, “what will people think of me?”
    The book was Capitol Love . It became a best-seller and then a TV movie, and Lisa bought a chain of autoparts stores with the proceeds. The rest, as they say, is history.
    Lisa had first met April Cannon while Lisa was working at the Department of Agriculture. She’d gone to a dinner hosted by an environmental-awareness group. Her date had been one of the speakers, a tall, enthusiastic stag