Village in the Sky


 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Acknowledgments
 Prologue
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 Epilogue
 About the Author
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Start of Content
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Prologue
 Epilogue
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Copyright
 
 
 
 
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 Jack McDevitt
 Nebula Award - Winning Author
 “The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.”
 —Stephen King
 Village in the Sky
 An Alex Benedict Novel
 
 
 Publisher’s Notice
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 Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: simonandschuster.biz/online_piracy_report.
 
 
 
 
 
 For Ann and Ron Fleury
 Friends of a lifetime
 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 Thanks to my editor, Joe Monti, and to my agent, Chris Lotts. To Walter Cuirle, Larry Wasserman, Michael Fossel, and David deGraff for scientific support. To Maureen and Christopher McDevitt for their oversight. Also I’m indebted to Michio Kaku for the inspiration provided by his 2008 book, Physics of the Impossible.
 
 
 Dates not marked CE are from the Rimway calendar. Action is set in the twelfth millennium.
 
 
 
 PROLOGUE 1436, Rimway Calendar
 
 There is no quality, no essence, no effect so distressing as the silence that pours out of the stars.
 —Edmund Barringer, Lifeboat, 8788, C.E.
 
 I never thought the day would come when I’d settle in to write an Alex Benedict memoir in which Alex and I are the bad guys. It started when Quaid McCann took the Columbia on a routine mission for the Visitation Project. McCann was on the board of directors of the project, which was about to close down. Again. Officially, they were compiling a list of habitable worlds for eventual colonization. But, as everyone connected with the organization knew, they were really looking for someone to talk with. The first interstellar vehicles had been activated in ancient times, nine thousand years ago. They’d gone out into local planetary systems, and gradually moved on to distant stars, where they found nothing other than a few archeological sites, only a few of which had shown any sign of an advanced civilization. But they were all long gone. The evidence indicated that while life was not rare, intelligence was almost nonexistent. And when advanced civilizations developed, they inevitably destroyed themselves. Humans had come close to doing that, but we’d been lucky. The right people had shown up at the right times.
 Human colonies were established around neighboring stars while we came gradually to accept the unrelenting silence that seemed as much a part of the natural order as starlight. Eventually we discovered the Ashiyyur, the only intelligent beings with whom we’d been able to sit down. But they did not have a speech capability. The Ashiyyur communicated by telepathy. They were the Mutes. And they read our minds as well as their own, so we were never comfortable in their presence.
 Missions like this one seemed pointless. The scientific world supported the efforts of people like McCann, although they showed no confidence that he would ever find anyone. His wife, Edna, had given up hope that he would ever recognize it