Mercury (21 page)

Bracknell called up a map of the city and told his computer to highlight the unused buildings. The wall screen showed four of them in red.

“Take your pick,” he said to Danvers, gesturing to the screen.

Danvers stood up and walked to the map, studying it for several moments. “This one,” he said at last, rapping his knuckles against the screen.

“That’s the smallest one,” said Bracknell.

“My congregations have not been overwhelming. Besides, the location is good, close to the city’s center. More people will see their friends and associates going to services. It’s a proven fact that people tend to follow a crowd.”

“It’s the curious monkey in our genes,” Bracknell said easily.

Danvers tried to erase the frown that immediately came over him.

“Was that too Darwinian for you?”

“We are far more than monkeys,” Danvers said tightly.

“I suppose we are. But we’re mammals; we enjoy the companionship of others. We need it.”

“That’s true enough, I suppose.”

“So why don’t you join Lara and me at dinner tonight? We can talk over the details of your new chapel.”

Danvers was surprised at the invitation. He knew, in his mind, that a man could be a non-Believer and still be a decent human being. But this man Bracknell, he’s leading this nearly blasphemous skytower project. I mustn’t let him lull me into friendship, Danvers told himself. He may be a pleasant enough fellow, but he is the enemy. You either do God’s work or the devil’s. There is no neutrality in the struggle between good and evil.

The restaurant was only half full, Bracknell saw as he came through the wide-open double doors with Lara. A lot of the construction people had already left. Once the geostationary platform was finished, they would shift entirely to operational status.

He saw that Rev. Danvers was already seated at a table, chatting with the restaurant’s owner and host, a tall suave Albanian who towered over his mestizo kitchen staff. As soon as the host saw Bracknell and Lara enter, he left Danvers in midsentence and rushed to them.

“Slow night tonight,” he said by way of greeting.

Bracknell said, “Not for much longer. Lots of people heading here. By this time next year you’ll have to double the size of this place.”

The host smiled and pointed out new paintings, all by local artists, hanging on the corrugated metal walls. Village scenes. Cityscapes of Quito. One showed the mountains and the skytower in Dayglo orange. Bracknell thought they were pretty ordinary and said nothing, while Lara commented cheerfully on their bright colors.

The dinner with Rev. Danvers started off rather awkwardly. For some reason the minister seemed guarded, tight-lipped. But then Lara got him to talking about his childhood, his early days in the slums of Detroit.

’You have no idea of what it was like growing up in that cesspool of sin and violence. If it weren’t for the New Morality, Lord knows where I’d be,” Danvers said over a good-sized ribeye steak. “They worked hard to clean up the streets, get rid of the crooks and drug pushers. They worked hard to clean
me
up.”

Lara asked lightly, “Were you all that dirty?”

Danvers paled slightly. “I was a prizefighter back then,” he said, his voice sinking low. “People actually paid money to see two men try to hurt each other, try to pound one another into unconsciousness.”

“Really?”

“Women, too. Women fought in the ring and the crowds cheered and screamed, like animals.”

Bracknell saw that Danvers’s hands were trembling. But Lara pushed further, asking, “And the New Morality changed all that?”

“Yes, praise God. Thanks to their workers, cities like Detroit became safer, more orderly. Criminals were jailed.”

“And their lawyers, too, from what I hear,” Bracknell said. He meant it as a joke, but Danvers did not laugh and Lara shot him a disapproving glance.

“Many lawyers went to jail,” Danvers said, totally serious, “or to retraining centers. They were protecting the criminals instead of the innocent victims! They deserved whatever they got.”

“With your size,” Lara said, “I’ll bet you were a very good prizefighter.”

Danvers smiled ruefully. “They could always find someone bigger.”

“But you beat them, didn’t you?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “Not very many of them.”

“And now you fight for people’s souls,” Lara said.

“Yes.”

“That’s much better, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Bracknell looked around the restaurant. Only about half the tables were taken. “Looks like a slow night,” he said, trying to change the subject.

“Mondays are always slow,” said Lara.

“Not for us,” Bracknell said. “We topped off the LEO platform today. It’s all finished and ready to open for business.”

“Really!” Lara beamed at him. “That’s ahead of schedule, isn’t it?”

Bracknell nodded happily. “Skytower Corporation’s going to make a public announcement about it at their board meeting next month. Big news push. I’m going to be on the nets.”

“That’s wonderful!”

Danvers was less enthusiastic. “Does this mean that you’re ready to launch satellites from the LEO platform?”

“We already have contracts for four launches.”

“But the geostationary platform isn’t finished yet, is it?”

“We’re ahead of schedule there, too.”

“But it’s not finished.”

“Not for another six months,” Bracknell said, feeling almost as if he were admitting a wrongdoing. Somehow Danvers had let the air out of his balloon.

By the time they finished their desserts and coffee, theirs was the only occupied table in the restaurant. The robot waiter was already sweeping the floor and two of the guys from the kitchen were stacking chairs atop tables to give the robot leeway for its chore.

Danvers bade them good night out on the sidewalk and headed for his quarters. Bracknell walked with Lara, arm in arm.

As they passed through the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, Lara said, “Rev. Danvers seems a little uncomfortable with the idea that we’re living in sin.”

Bracknell grinned down at her. “Best place to live, all things considered.”

“Really? Is that what you think?”

Looking up at the glowing lights of the tower that split the night in half, Bracknell murmured, “Urn … Paris is probably better.”

“That’s where the board meeting’s going to be, isn’t it?”

“Right,” said Bracknell. “That’s where Skytower Corporation turns me into a news media star.”

“My handsome hero.”

“Want to come with me?” he asked.

“To Paris?”

“Sure. You can do some clothes shopping there.”

“Are you saying I need new clothes?”

He stopped in the darkness between streetlamps and slipped his arms around her waist. “You’ll need a new dress for the wedding, won’t you?”

“Wedding?” Even in the shadows he could see her eyes go wide with surprise.

Bracknell said, “With the tower almost finished and all this publicity the corporation’s going to generate, I figure I ought to make an honest woman of you.”

“You chauvinist pig!”

“Besides,” he went on, “it’ll make Danvers feel better.”

“You’re serious?” Lara asked. “This isn’t a joke?”

He kissed her lightly. “Dead serious, darling. Will you marry me?”

“In Paris?”

“If that’s what you want.”

Lara flung her arms around his neck and kissed him as hard as she could.

“Look on my works, ye mighty,” quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, the chief engineer, “and despair.”

In a moment of whimsy brought on by their joy at his birth, his parents had named him after the poet. Emerson suspected their euphoria was helped along by the recreational drugs they used; certainly he saw enough evidence of that while he was growing up in the caravan city that trundled through the drought-dessicated former wheat belt of Midwestern America.

His father was a mechanic, his mother a nurse: both highly prized skills in the nomadic community. And both of them loved poetry. Hence his name.

Everybody called him Waldo. He learned to love things mechanical from his father and studied mechanical engineering through the computer webs and satellite links that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Once he grew into manhood Emerson left the caravan and entered a real, bricks-and-mortar engineering college. All he wanted was a genuine degree so that he would have real credentials to show prospective employers. No caravan life for Waldo. He wanted to settle down, get rich (or at least moderately prosperous), be respectable, and build new things for people.

His life didn’t quite work out that way. There was plenty of work for a bright young engineer, rebuilding the shattered electrical power grid, erecting whole new cities to house the refugees driven from their homes by the greenhouse floods, designing solar power farms in the clear desert skies of the Southwest. But the various jobs took him from one place to another. He was still a nomad; he just stayed in one place a bit longer than his gypsying parents did.

He never got rich, or even very prosperous. Much of the work he did was commissioned by the federal or state government at minimum wage. Often enough he was conscripted by local chapters of the New Morality and he was paid nothing more than room, board, and a pious sermon or two about doing God’s work. He married twice, divorced twice, and then gave up the idea of marriage.

Until a guy named Bracknell came to him with a wild idea and a gleam in his eye. Ralph Waldo Emerson fell in love with the skytower project.

Now that it was nearly finished he almost felt sad. He had spent more years in Ecuador than anywhere else in his whole life. He was becoming fond of Spanish poetry. He no longer got nauseous in zero gravity. He gloried in this monumental piece of architecture, this tower stretching toward heaven. He had even emblazoned his name into one of the outside panels that sheathed the tower up here at the geostationary level, insulating the tower from the tremendous electrical flux of the Van Allen belt. Working in an armored spacesuit and using an electron gun, he laboriously wrote his full name on one of the buckyball panels.

He laughed at his private joke. Someday some maintenance dweeb is going to see it, he thought, and wonder who the hell wrote the name of a poet on this tower’s insulation skin.

Now he stood at the control board in the compact oval chamber that would soon be the geosynch level’s operations center. His feet were ensconced in plastic floor loops so that he wouldn’t float off weightlessly in the zero gravity of the station. Surrounding him were display screens that lined the walls like the multifaceted eyes of some giant insect. Technicians in gray coveralls bobbed in midair as they labored to connect the screens and get them running. One by one, the colored lights on the control board winked on and a new screen lit up. Emerson could see a dozen different sections of the mammoth geostationary structure. There was still a considerable amount of work to do, of course, but it was mostly just a matter of bringing in equipment and setting it up. Furnishing the hotel built into the platform’s upper level. Checking out the radiation shielding and the electrical insulation and the airlocks. Making certain the zero-g toilets worked. Monkey work. Not creative. Not challenging.

There was talk of starting a new skytower in Borneo or central Africa.

“ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” he muttered to himself. “To sail beyond the sunset.”

“Hey, Waldo,” the voice of one of his assistants grated annoyingly in the communication plug in his right ear, “the supply ship is coming in.”

“It’s early,” Emerson said, without needing to look at the digital clock set into the control board.

“Early or late, they’re here and they want a docking port.”

Emerson glanced up at the working screens, then played his fingers across the keyboard on the panel. One of the screens flicked from an interior view of the bare and empty hotel level upstairs to an outside camera view of a conical Masterson Clippership hovering in co-orbit a few hundred meters from the platform. He frowned at the image.

“We were expecting an uncrewed supply module,” he said into his lip mike.

“And we got a nice shiny Clippership,” his assistant replied. “They got our cargo and they want to offload it and go home.”

Shaking his head slightly, Emerson checked the manifest that the Clippership automatically relayed to the platform’s logistics program. It matched what they were expecting.

“Why’d they use a Clipper?” he wondered aloud.

“They said the freight booster had a malf and they swapped out the supply module with the Clippership’s passenger module.”

It didn’t make sense to Emerson, but there was the Clippership waiting to dock and offload its cargo, and the manifest was exactly what they expected.

“Ours not to reason why,” Emerson misquoted. “Hook ’em to docking port three; it’s closest to them.”

“Will do.”

Franklin Zachariah hummed a cheerful tune to himself as he sat shoe-homed into the cramped cockpit of the Clippership. The pilot, a Japanese or Vietnamese or some kind of Asian gook, shot an annoyed glance over his shoulder. Hard to tell his nationality, Zach thought, with those black shades he’s wearing. Like a mask or some macho android out of a banned terminator flick.

Zachariah stopped his humming but continued to play the tune in his head. It helped to pass the boring time. He had expected to get spacesick when the rocket went into orbit, but the medication they’d given him was working fine. Zero gravity didn’t bother him at all. No upchucks, not even dizziness.

Zachariah was an American. He did not belong to the New Morality or the Flower Dragon or any other fundamentalist movement. He did not even follow the religion of his forefathers. He found that he couldn’t believe in a god who made so many mistakes. He himself was a very clever young man—everyone who had ever met him said so. What they didn’t know was that he was also a very destructive fellow.