Free Polaris by Jack McDevitt

Polaris.
    â€œAccording to the archives,” he told me, “people riding the Clermo were ‘uncomfortable’ aboard her. Didn’t sleep well. Heard voices. There were reports of restless electronics, as if Madeleine English and her passengers were somehow trapped inside the control units. Marion Horn rode on the ship while he was in the process of making his architectural reputation, and he swore he always had the feeling he was being watched. ‘By something in pain.’ And he added, ‘I know how that sounds.’ ” Kassem was seated on a bench in front of a marble facade, on which was engraved TRUTH , WISDOM , COMPASSION . He looked amused. “The most famous—or outrageous—claim came from Evert Cloud, a merchandising king who was one of Evergreen’s top contributors. Cloud claimed to have seen a phantasmic Chek Boland standing by the lander. According to Cloud, the spectre pleaded with him to help it escape from the Polaris. ”
    When I passed all that on to Alex, he was delighted. “Great stories,” he said. “They’ll do nothing but enhance the value of the artifacts.”
    Sheila Clermo, by the way, was the daughter of McKinley Clermo, the longtime guiding force behind Evergreen’s environmental efforts. She died at fourteen in a skiing accident.
    Jacob put together a pictorial history of Maddy English. Here was Madeleine at age six, with ice cream and a tricycle. And at thirteen, standing with her eighth-grade class in the doorway of their school. First boyfriend. First pair of skis. Maddy at eighteen, playing chess in what appeared to be a tournament. Jacob found a partial recording of Desperado, in which, during high school, she played Tabitha, who loved, alas, too well.
    He showed me Maddy at flight school. And at Ko-Li, where she qualified for superluminals. There were dozens of pictures of her certification, standing proudly with her parents (she looked just like her mother),celebrating with the other graduates, gazing over the training station just before her final departure.
    I knew the drill pretty well. I’d been through Ko-Li myself, and, though it has evolved and adjusted during the seventy-odd years since it counted Maddy among its graduates, it is still, in all the ways that matter, unchanged. It is the place where you are put to the test and you discover what you can do and who you are.
    It’s fifteen years since I went through, and I grumbled constantly while I was there. Two-thirds of my class flunked out. I understand that’s about average. The instructors could be infuriating. Yet my time there set the standard for me, for what I’ve come to expect of myself.
    I’m not sure any of that makes sense. But had I not graduated from Ko-Li, I would be someone else.
    I suspect Maddy felt the same way.
    There was a picture of her with a middle-aged man at Ko-Li. They were standing in front of Pasquale Hall, where most of the simulations were conducted.
    The man looked very much like Urquhart!
    â€œAs an adolescent,” said Jacob, “she was something of a problem. She hated school, she was rebellious, she ran off a couple of times, and she got involved with the wrong people. There were some arrests, and her parents could do nothing with her. Urquhart met her when he toured a juvenile incarceration facility. They were already talking about a partial personality reconstruction. He was apparently impressed by something he saw in her, persuaded the authorities he’d take responsibility for her. And he did. It was a bumpy ride, but he got her through high school. A few years later she completed her degree work, and eventually he got her the appointment to Ko-Li.”
    He ran a clip. Maddy on a ship’s bridge being interviewed for a show to be presented at the Berringer Air & Space Museum: “I owe everything to him,” she said. “Had he not come forward, God knows what would have happened to