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artists, literary movements, religious conflicts. We know which nation threatened to do what to whom. But we’ve little idea what people’s lives were like, how they spent their time, what they really thought about the world in which they lived. We know of assassinations, but we don’t always know the rationale. Or even whether, when they happened, ordinary citizens mourned or breathed a sigh of relief.
    Nine thousand years is a long time. And nobody except a few historians really thinks much about it.
    So Jacob went looking for the
Searcher
. When he found nothing, he started recovering detailed accounts of the more famous interstellars, on the possibility we’d find mention of a similar name. “
Maybe we don’t quite have the translation right
,” he said. “
English was a slippery language
.”
    So we went through accounts of the
Avenger
, which had played a prominent role in the first interstellar war between Earth and three of its colonies in the early thirty-third century. And the
Lassiter
, the first deep-space corsair. And the thirtieth century
Karaki
, the largest ship of its time, which had hauled a record load of capital goods out to Regulus IV to get that colony started. And the
Chao Huang
, which had taken a team of doctors to Maracaibo when, against all expectation, human settlers had been stricken by a native plague. (This was at a time when the experts still believed disease germs could only attack creatures evolved in the same biosystem.)
    There was endless information about the
Tokyo
, the first interstellar to vanish into the transdimensions. Never heard from again. There were pictures of its captain and first mate, and of various passengers, of the dining area and the engine room. Everything you wanted to know. Except where it went.
    And the most famous of all the starships, the
Centaurus
, which made the first transdimensional flight to Earth’s neighboring star, requiring seven weeks to complete the journey one way. You have to smile at that: Seven weeks to go four light-years.
    But there was no mention of a
Searcher
. Or an
Explorer
. There was a
Voyager
. Three of them, in fact. A popular name, obviously. And even a
Hunter
.
     
     
    Few physical objects have survived from the Third Millennium. Most of them tend to be either ceramic, like Amy Kolmer’s cup, or plastic. There’s an axiom in our business that the cheapest stuff lasts longest.
    I didn’t know anybody who was an expert on the era, so I checked the Registry and picked one at random, an assistant professor at Barcross University. His name was Shepard Marquard. He looked young, but he’d written extensively on the period and been recognized by his peers.
    I called and had no problem getting through. Marquard was a good-looking guy, tall and redheaded, more personable than his pictures had led me to expect. “
Most of the naval and shipping records from that era are lost
,” he told me. “
But I’ll see what I can do. I’ll look through what I have and get back to you
.”
    The following day, I took virtual tours of half a dozen museums and spent a lot of time wandering through third-millennium artifacts. I saw a plastic case that might once have been a container for makeup, an electronic device whose use could only be guessed at, a woman’s pair of high-heeled shoes, a couple of pens, a lamp, a sofa, a sheet of paper in laminated plastic described as a “classified section from a newspaper.” I didn’t know what a newspaper was, and neither did anybody else I was able to talk to. (Marquard told me later that it was information printed on paper and distributed physically across a wide area.) There was a man’s hat with a visor to keep the sun off. And a coin with an eagle on one side. Metal money.
United States of America
.
    In God We Trust.
It was dated
2006
, and the data display said it was the second-oldest coin in existence.
    I wandered through the exhibits, and when I’d seen everything I cared about, I settled