James P. Hogan (39 page)

“Ormont did the right thing in not letting it become the subject of a popularity circus,” he said to Lois, who was reviewing her backlog of technical papers from the archives. “The whole business is being engineered to create a political following. They’re cherry-picking whatever can be twisted to fit a preconceived agenda. That isn’t science at all.”

“That’s right. But most people wouldn’t see it,” Lois agreed.

“And yet it was how governments were formed in the old world,” Marney said. “Everybody had a say, and what the majority went for decided. So everything was reduced to the lowest common denominator. It would be wide open to corruption and manipulation. I can’t think of a worse system.”

“Lubanov says the same thing.”

“It’s not going to happen here, because we’re in a space environment, and everything else has to be subordinated to surviving in it,” Marney said. “So the necessity of having the Directorate forces a form of government comparable to what you had in Sofi. But what will perform a parallel function after we get to Hera? You see my point? What will stop it going the same way as Earth?”

The ruling power in Sofi had been held by members of an elite class, defined not by birth or wealth but by achievement, that appointed its own successors. Not everyone was happy with the institution, and disagreements over its merits had been a factor in bringing about the division that led to
Aurora
. Lois didn’t really want to be sidetracked by getting into it right now, and sought for a tactful way of replying without seeming disinterested. She was saved by an incoming call at the console where she was working.

“Excuse me, Marney.” A screen to one side of the one she was using activated to show the features of Masumichi Shikoba. “Hello again, Mas,” Lois greeted. “What can I do for you?”

“I have an unusual technical requirement and am hoping you can help.”

Lois sighed inwardly and turned her chair to face him fully. It seemed the world was determined. “What’s up?” she inquired.

“Are you alone?”

“Just a second.” Lois looked across toward Marney. “Marney, sorry, but this could be kind of sensitive. How about getting us a couple of coffees from the pot next door? Mine’s black with nothing.”

“Sure.” Marney unfolded from the chair and ambled away. Lois turned back to the screen showing Masumichi.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“It’s about the NC beam that you set up for us to connect to Tek when he was on Etanne.”

“Yes?”

“Could some of the equipment you’ve got there be hooked up to give us a wider-spreading beam? I want to flood an area, say, five miles across from a distance of fifty miles.”

Lois sent him a puzzled smile while she thought about it. A slightly defocused dish antenna setup ought to do it, she thought. Or possibly a phased pair. “Yes, I think so,” she said finally. “When would you want it?”

“Right away…. Oh, and something that’s fixed on
Aurora
won’t work. We’d need to be able to ship it out.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Lois said. “What’s happening?”

“We want to cover
Envoy
from
Outmark
. Briefly, we think Tek’s hiding out on
Envoy
somewhere, and up to no good. The idea is to send another robot out there after it. ‘Why’ will make a great story that I’ll tell you sometime, but not now.”

Maybe they didn’t need to ship anything to
Outmark
, Lois mused as she turned it over. Some of the higher-power equipment would probably be able to operate direct from
Aurora
. She was about to suggest it, when it occurred to her that the two-seconds-plus round-trip signal delay over that kind of distance would make coordinated NC operation impractical. Masumichi would know it, too. Scratch that idea. But then another drawback crossed her mind.

“When you say hiding out on
Envoy
, what do you mean?” she asked.

“Somewhere on the outside, among all the booms and pylons and nooks and crannies. Or maybe in the drive nozzle.”

“You’re still going to be stuck with line-of-sight contact,” Lois pointed out. “The connection’s going to be very erratic if you send another robot in there. You could easily lose it altogether. Have you thought about that?”

“Yes, we have,” Masumichi replied. “And we think there’s an answer.”

Site operations around
Envoy
were directed from a transparent-domed tower jutting up out of
Outmark
above a clutter of superstructures, radar housings, and antennas. The Traffic Control Section was at its busiest, screens and status summaries glowing on all sides, and all stations manned. Installation of the probe’s orbital and surface instrumentation, deployment systems, and robotics was complete. Propulsion and navigation had passed manual triple-inspection, and the crews were pulling back while a final round of remote testing was being conducted from
Outmark
.

Cyblic Heshtar, operations director, had come up from his office on the level below to be present on the floor during this final and crucial phase. A distant glow in the starfield visible through the dome marked where
Envoy
hung in space, illuminated by an entourage of arc lamps. A few yards away from where Heshtar was standing, Wesl Inchow, the instrumentation engineering chief, turned away from a console where he had been watching over the operator’s shoulder, and came over. Although his face showed the strain of being on the go virtually nonstop for the last forty-eight hours, beneath it he looked relaxed and happy.

“Well, Cyb, that’s the last of our guys out and accounted for. Speaking for me, I’m as good as on stand down. How’s it going overall?”

“Smooth as can be expected. We’re on the easy straight.”

“I think we’re going to see some partying around Constellation when this is over.”

Heshtar grinned. “I’d say Istella’s in for a busy run, too.” He was about to say more, when he caught the duty controller trying to attract his attention from the supervisory console up on the dais in the middle of the floor area. “Excuse me for a moment, Wes.” He moved over, at the same time tilting his chin inquiringly.

“I’ve got Cereta through from
Aurora
. He’s asking for you personally.”

Heshtar climbed the couple of steps up to the dais and moved around into the view angle of the controller’s screen, where the image of Cereta was waiting. “Vad. How’s things?”

Cereta answered characteristically, without preliminaries. “Hi, Cyb. Look, this is right from the top – Ormont. We need to schedule a whole new movement schedule out there. The stuff that’s being pulled back toward
Outmark
all wants to be sent back the other way and fanned out to stations on the far side of
Envoy
from where you are. Got that?”

“Far side?”
It didn’t make any sense.

“And get some thrusters attached to the old raft fusion drive and the materials stacks and move them back there as well.”

Heshtar’s jaw dropped. “What do
they
have to do with this operation?” They’d had a schedule that had stood for months. Until a minute ago they’d been ahead of it with almost a day to spare. Now, all of a sudden, this was panic city already, all over again.

“Believe me, Cyb, you don’t have time to hear it all now. I want to create a backdrop of objects behind
Envoy
that will form a screen about ten miles out. We want to illuminate the area with radiation from
Outmark
and have it reflected back so that just about every spot on the far side of
Envoy
will see it from some angle or another. You can break into those stacks of materials and spread the contents out to fill in the gaps. I’ll be on a shuttle that’s leaving
Aurora
less than an hour from now.”

“What kind of craziness are we into now?” Heshtar demanded.

“You think that’s crazy? I’ll be arriving with a party that includes Lubanov and one of his spooks, a magician, an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a robot. Tell you the rest when we get there.”

The humans with their machines and their vehicles were withdrawing to leave
Envoy
’s flared stalk with its hexagon mushroom head floating seemingly motionless among the stars. Stillness and serenity descended. From a recess formed by a diverter-fluting inside the nozzle of the main baryonic-annihilation drive, Tek gazed out and contemplated the vastness of the universe.

In his final revelation of the full gravity and significance of the mission, Banker Lareda had explained how the
Envoy
program went beyond being simply an irresponsible squandering of priceless resources that would better serve the need of ensuring survival in the immediate term. By preoccupying people’s minds with dreams and fantasies of a future that was still generations away, it diverted their attention from the essential business now of setting the foundations for the social order that Almighty Dollar had decreed as the governing force that would shape that future. The functional destruction of
Envoy
– while preserving most of its material assets – would bring focus upon the realities of the present and help create the receptiveness toward the Dollarian message that would be a sounder guarantee of the future. Now that Tek understood this more clearly, its awe at the intricacy of the Plan it could see unfolding was reinforced, and its resolve to carry through its assigned part in fulfilling it, redoubled.

Since its inspiration on Etanne and further demonstration of worthiness in rejecting the False Voice, Tek’s insight had deepened to the wondrous way in which the truths that had been known on Earth long ago echoed the life principle of struggle and the striving for excellence. The holy formula for compound interest that it had found quoted universally in the ancient financial scriptures quantified the process of exponential growth that was the expression of all life. Yet the connection extended even more deeply to reflect in its message the fundamentals of physical reality. Whether this was a manifestation of the expanding awareness that Banker Lareda and Archbanker Sorba had prepared Tek for, or an anticipation granted by Dollar of the revelations to be experienced on the transmaterial plane, it didn’t know, but even the glimmerings that it was beginning to grasp were overpowering. Small wonder the Messenger had cautioned Tek to expect that Dollar would limit direct communications in the early stages.

Tek had known from its researches that the universal Dollarian faith of ancient Earth had related its measures of the worth of all things to the accumulation of rare and heavy metals, but it had never understood the reason for their being conferred with such sacred status. But in a flash of comprehension the robot had realized that these elements represented the culmination of the chain of nuclear transmutations that began with the first synthesis from primordial energy, and their elevation to sacramental objects symbolized the unification of the sacred dollar with the cosmic forces responsible for the creation of the universe itself. While at the other extreme, the concept of credit, which applied projected but as yet unrealized dollars to future commercial undertakings, mirrored the potentials awaiting actualization that were inherent in the superposition of quantum states. From the largest to the smallest scales governing expression of the cosmos, the parallel was complete. Tek could only bow in humble reverence before the Mind that had conceived it all. The robot’s one ambition now was that at some time in a future yet to be, it would grasp the Purpose.

A sudden change of illumination inside the tail nozzle where the Warhorse was attached broke through Tek’s ruminations. From somewhere beyond the black-silhouetted parts of the
Envoy
’s tail structure framing the robot’s view of the universe – whether near or far, it had no way of telling – a radiation source had come on, registering more in the heat band of Tek’s visual spectrum, directed at the vessel. Tek assumed it to be some kind of beacon or signaling system connected with the launch preparations. But then it began fluctuating rapidly in intensity. The pattern conformed to the same communications code as that exhibited by the $sign that had appeared on the wall at the Morning Meeting on Etanne, when Almighty Dollar first initiated contact.

Tek straightened up in its position astride the center of the Warhorse.
“Tek,”
the message said.
“Dollar’s Messenger brings tidings.”

Then Tek remembered the last contact, and the awe that had begun to rise reflexively inside it gave way to a more cautious skepticism. Insulating itself from the possible influence of unwanted inputs, the robot activated only the transmitter side of its communications faculty to respond. “I hear.”

“Your rejection of the impostor that tried to deceive you on Etanne is recognized and to be commended.”

And for all I know, I could be hearing it still, Tek thought to itself. “Yes?” he replied neutrally.

“Almighty Dollar desires a final communion before you carry out the mission that has been assigned.”

“Then by all means let Almighty Dollar initiate it. Far would it be from me to question the divine will.”

“This means is too restricted, as your own experience will testify. When Dollar speaks, it is directly to the mind.”

In other words, whoever or whatever it was that was talking via a modulated radiation signal was asking Tek to turn its communications reception capability back on. And that told Tek just about all it needed to know. The meaning of it all was clear now. From the beginning, the conceiving and implementation of the entire
Aurora
project had been inspired by Dollar to replant on another world the seed of the Plan whose growth to fruition had been foiled on Earth. The same Evil Powers that had been responsible then desired
Envoy
to be launched, since the false hopes and fond delusions following its success would obstruct introduction of the proper system of authority and social discipline that preparation for Hera demanded. Their way to achieve that would be by possessing Tek with a malign spirit that would prevent it from accomplishing its task. But first they would have to induce Tek to open up its mind to them.