She couldn’t tell how far away it was. The link with the skiff was just visuals, and she stared transfixed, paralyzed a moment in fear, unwilling to turn her attention away long enough to call up all the operational information. Exhaust streamed off the hard surface in sharp lines of white and black gas. A black outcropping of stone grew in her view. It looked to be a mountain, slowly approaching. Landing sideways on it could cause a tumble, grinding her skiff apart as it rolled. Involuntarily she cringed away from the approaching metal surface.
The roar abruptly stopped. She held her breath. And then she hit the asteroid.
It felt like failing off her bed: a sudden impact, but not a hard one.
She lay there a long while, expecting a second impact, a bounce and then a crash. It did not come. Instead, the back of the skiff folded open, an automatic action following the emergency landing. The crash foam dissipated into the vacuum, a retreating white fog. She got to her knees, brushing foam from her visor.
The mountain she’d seen approaching lay next to the skiff: an outcrop of stone shorter than her. She laughed at it. “You’re not so tough,” she told it.
She stood very slowly, testing her feet. She didn’t trust the hard stone to hold her. She could jump into orbit if she weren’t careful. But, by moving very slowly, she found she could maintain the illusion of walking on the metal surface.
She told the skiff to send a blast of radar through the asteroid. From this close, it could analyze the pulse, and tell her how much nickel really lay in the rock. She would learn now if enough nickel threaded through this rock to make old Nine-Four satisfied with its investment in her. She had lied to him: she had made no estimates of her own. She’d just gambled that Eleven-Ten wouldn’t want the rock if it weren’t worth something.
The analysis came back. Three million tons.
She held her breath a long moment. Then she hissed, “Stupid stupid stupid!” Three million tons. A huge stake. If she had kept her percentage, she would have more than enough to buy back all her shares in herself. She would have been free!
“I’m so stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” She kicked the little mountain three times, punctuating her point.
She sighed, and closed her eyes. She floated in absolute silence. Even the suit’s usual hisses and clinks were quiet. The only sound, a dim surging throb, was her own heart. She listened to it slow. Then she opened her eyes and looked around again, at the black mountains of metal, at the horizon that she could walk over, and at her black skiff, resting on the stone beside her. She was lightyears from everything, on an asteroid as dead and old as space itself. Alone, a thirteen-year-old girl. Citizen of Earth. Citizen of the Galaxy. But alone.
The skiff’s radio pinged her. Her suit identified the sender: nasty little Eleven-Ten, no doubt wanting to ask for a deal.
She smiled. She’d won. She beat Eleven-Ten, that disgusting worm. And she’d done what she’d told old Nine-Four she was going to do: she got a stake. A big stake. It didn’t matter that she had no share in the rock. She’d proved she could mine asteroids. She could do it again. And she would.
Margherita Calvino looked up at the strange stars and shook her fists at them.
“You see that!” she yelled. “I was like Amelia Earhart! I was like Chuck Yaeger! Buzz Aldrin! You hear me? I landed it! A human! An Earthling! A kid! And you know what? I’ll find another good metal asteroid. And another. And more! Asteroids better than this one. I’ll buy myself back. I can do anything you can, you Rinneret, and better! Just try me! Just try! Because I’m from Earth!”
CHAPTER 5
Alone in his frigid office, DiAngelo called his receptionist. “Carol, honey, they gone?”
Her voice answered immediately from the ceiling speakers. “That giant bear thing? Thank god, yes. I followed them around, like you asked. They talked to some people in the labs, and then they left the building straight after. When that bear-thing got into the elevator—I swear the elevator swayed, I thought it might break—but they rode to the lobby, and walked right out.”
“Good. Thanks. Get me a car, would you?”
“A car?”
“Yeah, a car. I left something at home. Have the car wait out back. I’ll be right out there.”
“Yes sir.”
“And clear my afternoon for the next two hours.”
“You have the meeting with your transition committee in fifteen minutes,” she reminded him. “They’re already downstairs.”
“Damn. That’s right. OK. I’ll take that. But have the car waiting. I’ll leave right after.”
“Yes sir.”
_____
The black limousine crept across Manhattan. DiAngelo fumed in the back seat, checking his watch every few seconds. Traffic hardly made a sound, nowadays, except for the endless honking of horns. But the quiet engines didn’t help: the long wait, the lack of motion, the crowding of mirrored car windows to your left and right all tortured him, made him feel his life wasted away in a row of worthless vehicles while the world rushed along, somewhere else. Nothing to do but wait, and stare out the windshield at the grimy back of a sitting truck, full of some useless crap but still ahead of him in line.
When the car finally crawled up in front of his building, he leapt out without a word, and stomped through the front door. He nodded at the doorman, caught a blessedly empty elevator, and rode it to the top.
When he stepped into his penthouse, he held his breath and listened for a moment. Silence. He exhaled in relief. His wife was not home. If she were in the house, he’d be able to hear her: she was never alone, she was never silent. With her out, he could get to his home office without having to explain himself.
DiAngelo hurried through the foyer and down the hall beyond, shoes clacking on the marble floors. He stopped before a heavy, locked door off the living room. He pulled a key from his vest and opened the deadbolt, then slipped inside his corner office. Two walls looked out over Central Park. The other walls were lined with books. A desk and single chair sat boldly in the middle of the room, keeping vigil over a tall decorative box, a cube about a meter on a side. The desk was bare except for a single sculpture of a horse standing in one corner, a gift from an art dealer.
He pushed the door closed and turned the deadbolt. A small panel next to the door slid aside to reveal a row of LED-topped switches. He threw these up.
“Room sealing,” a soft voice said, as shutters slowly slid down over the windows, clipping the view of Central Park. Dim LEDs glowed in the now dark room.
“Call the Rinneret,” DiAngelo said.
The box slowly opened, its sides parting and laying on the floor, to reveal a cylinder that gleamed like quicksilver.
There was a long silence while the cylinder pulsed with a dim glow. DiAngelo fumed, leaning forward on the tips of his toes, actively cultivating his anger as he waited. He started to sweat in the modest warmth of the room. He pulled of his coat and threw it over the desk. He paced toward and then away from the metal cylinder, waiting for it to activate.
“Come on, come on, come on,” he complained.
“Connecting....”
An image sputtered into form in the middle of the room, right above the cylinder: a life-sized Rinneret, stretched out so that it spanned from one corner of the office to the room’s center. DiAngelo had seen a few Rinneret, enough to know that this one was unusual: its exoskeleton was very shiny, and very red. It had a name that sounded like someone coughing up silverware, and which meant something like diplomat number something or other. It turned its compound eyes towards DiAngelo and made clicking noises. After a moment the house computer translated.
“Is there an emergency? This is not the contracted communication time.”
DiAngelo walked up to the image till his face almost penetrated the hologram. He suppressed a smile when the Rinneret backed away, even though they could not actually touch.
“Yeah, there’s a fucking emergency,” DiAngelo said. “Two Predators, one of them a Sussuratian all fang
s and claws and tongue and appetite and bad attitude, just paid me a visit.”
A pulsing tremble went through all the limbs of the Rinneret. “Why?”
“Because you put some of those waterbears, those tardigrades, in that weapon you aimed at Neelee-ornor. Our deal was—” DiAngelo held up his fist, and counted off by pulling up fingers, “First, that I supply you with some choice organisms. Second, I act as your secret liaison into Terrestrial commerce. And, three, I hide your big ugly dangerous friends here on Earth. You, in turn, get the Galactic Empire the hell off Earth. We had no agreement for me to supply weapons and no agreement for me to help you attack the oldest race in the Galaxy.”
“If we had succeeded in attacking Neelee-ornor,” the Rinneret said, “the domination of Earth would have stopped. Earth would have been forgotten.”
“Yeah, and if Oz is over the rainbow you and I could go live there instead. You screwed me over, asshole. You need to understand something.” He poked a rigid index finger through the hologram, stabbing at air. “I cannot be touched. You cannot hurt me. Don’t think because I’m a primitive Earthling and you got the rayguns that you can hurt me. You can’t. But I can hurt you. You fuck with me again and I will end you. You think I can’t? You think I’m a little savage down here at the stinking bottom of the gravity well? No, you bug, I can fuck you over so bad you won’t know what day it is on your little asteroid there. Because I have your lords and masters down here, don’t I?”
DiAngelo leaned back. “Now, we’re almost finished, you and I. Do you understand me? We’re almost out of business. You don’t get a second chance. One more fuck up from you and I’ll dump your guests out into the Atlantic after cutting them into shark bait. And it’s pretty clear who calls the shots in your dog and pony show. Those guys die, and you are going to die next. Am I right? Because they’re like me. They are going to demand you pay for your mistakes.”
The inscrutable insect face seemed to shiver as it clicked and squeaked. “My translationware is not performing satisfactorily,” the reply came back.
“Yeah, well, you let your translationware stew on what I said for a few days and then you call me back and beg forgiveness and maybe, just maybe, I won’t step on you like the bug you are.”
He turned his back. “Transmission off,” he said.
The changing light in the room told him that the Rinneret hologram had disappeared. He walked to the door and flipped the glowing switches down, turning off the room’s security controls. The box closed around the metal cylinder. And then, like a black cloud clearing, the shutters rose over the windows, revealing the sun-filled park. He squinted at it a moment. It could still satisfy him, even angry and worried as he was, to remember he lived with windows looking onto the greatest city green on Earth. But then his eyes settled on one of the silver pylons being erected on the other side of the Central Park.
“Goddamn Galactics,” he hissed. “They’re all just bugs.”
He turned back to the door, threw the deadbolt, but just stood there, holding the door handle, shaking. There was something unpleasant, painful, even slightly grotesque, to these fits of anger. But he also knew he loved them. It gave him a rush, to let such rage loose.
“God help me,” he whispered. “I’m getting too old for this shit.” But then, he thought, if not me, who else?
Everything was falling apart, all around them. He’d just had the meeting with his transition team, the seven people who were preparing the new management for Genmine so he could take it public. And they told him the bad news: they wanted to delay the I.P.O. because they couldn’t find managers. People were quitting left and right. They had plans to live on the Galactic citizenship welfare, to travel, see the Galaxy, finally join some goddamn Galactic cooperative or other where all the profits were shared equally.
“Idiots,” DiAngelo said aloud. No one seemed to be doing anything to try to save the whole human race, all of human history, all human art and science—the things his father had loved and taught him to love. Verdi, Dante, Virgil, Michelangelo. Those things would be lost in a sea of alien noise, they’d be swallowed and digested and turned to junk food to feed the massive maw of Galactic civilization. And humans were going to just let it happen, and all of them would stop making music or paintings or businesses or houses, if the Galaxy just handed them leftover bug art and bug buildings.
“Shakespeare will be made into a carnival barker,” he hissed. “Verdi will be played in some bathroom in outer space while giant insects shit. Earth will be a zoo. A zoo where the bugs can come and look at the fat, lazy human animals.”
Who was going to stop that? Not those pathetic Terran Liberation Front clowns. It fell, like everything fell, to men like him. It fell to the makers and the shapers. And no one was going to thank him for it.
He was calm now. He opened the door.
“Oh, Alfie!” a voice shrieked.
He jumped, surprised. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, there she stood, with two cameras floating behind her shoulders, and a human cameraman standing a few paces to her flank and aiming a black cylinder of gleaming lenses at DiAngelo.
“Vicky,” he said. “You look lovely as always.”
Victoria DiAngelo was taller than him, by a few inches, and thirty years younger. Red-haired, athletic, with large breasts that most people assumed were not real. Most people were right. She blinked when she talked, drawing attention to her green eyes. She was dressed now in slim black pants and a tight-fitting shirt of some kind of sporty material. She looked ready to go for a run, almost, except that she wore fat diamonds in her ears and around her throat that would surely have bounced painfully, were she to move quickly. Exercise clothes were the new fashion nowadays. Unlike exercise.
Victoria had been the perfect trophy wife, when they got married, three years before. Beautiful, a little over the top, a little extravagant in everything. She knew how to please him and understood that that was what she was there for. And she had remained the perfect trophy wife for the two years that followed. But then came Wealthy Wives of the Upper East Side.
DiAngelo looked at the cameraman, with his long black hair pulled behind his ears, and his fat belly hanging over pressed jeans. Bobby, he called himself. What kind of an idiot called himself “Bobby”?
The two floating robotic cameras shifted. They were as annoying as fat yellow wasps. Galactic technology, he noted with distaste.
DiAngelo wanted to swear, and swat the insidious little robots, and then he wanted to kick the fat cameraman in the ass. The cameraman always looked bored, and after a few weeks that became a far worse insult than if the man had laughed at them openly. It was like he was saying, all day long, my god these people are so uninteresting. Most of the time, his mouth hung open in an expression that looked like a perpetual yawn. His eyes were always behind the camera monitor, and DiAngelo suspected half the time his eyes were closed.
Worst of all, the cameraman ate constantly. He pressed a sandwich into his mouth now, and chewed on it languidly, lips open. But he managed somehow to still keep the camera steadily aimed, like some accusatory weapon, at DiAngelo’s face.
One good kick in the ass, DiAngelo thought. Someday I’m going to give him one good kick in the ass that lifts him right off the floor. Then I’ll smash his camera. Maybe I’ll smash it over his head. Bobby. What kind of an idiot is called “Bobby”?
But not today. Today, he couldn’t kick the cameraman’s fat ass. He and Victoria had an agreement. In the house, during the day, she and her television show had free reign. In exchange, the cameras stayed out of his office, out of his life, and—most importantly—out of the bedroom.
“Vicky,” he repeated, “sorry, hon, I left something in my home office, and I needed it for work. But now I gotta run back to the office. Meetings. Big deals.”
She craned her neck to look over his shoulder as he turned to pull the office door closed. She watched him closely as he locked it and pocketed the key.
“It’s just a boring old office, darling. And as a private equity investor it’s my duty to keep all my files under lock. It prevents insider trading.”
She hummed skeptically. “It seems so much more mysterious than that, if you ask me....”
He forced a smile and threw up his hands. “Well, like I said: the office.”
“Oh, stay a minute and have a drink, Alfie.” She headed for the bar. “You’ll never believe what happened!”
He hesitated, his smile frozen on his lips. The cameras were all turned on him. The cameras seemed to paralyze his face, locking a grimacing fake smile onto it. DiAngelo hated this about himself and about the cameras: like his wife, he started acting the second the cameras aimed their hungry black eyes at him. As if he were a puppet and they jerked his strings. He acted nice, and happy, and patient. Even though he wasn’t particularly nice, he was never happy when the cameras were on him, and he was a complete stranger to patience.
So now he was fixed in their gaze. He couldn’t leave. He couldn’t swear. He couldn’t try to save the human race. He had to stay at least a minute and act like the wealth-producing husband of the spoiled wife of the upper east side of Manhattan, so that fat strangers eating Twinkies on their coaches in Hoboken or Muncie could watch his wife shop and drink and eat all day long.
Those that don’t make, consume, he thought. Usually they consume too much.
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