by Ben Bova
“But perhaps—”
“Perhaps nothing! They’ve destroyed me; I’m going to do my damnedest to destroy them. And you in particular, Elliott, you goddamned lying bastard!”
Danvers looked up at the astrobiologist, his face white with shock, his eyes filled with tears.
Molina took his wife by the wrist and slammed out of the stateroom, leaving Alexios alone with the bishop.
“I didn’t do it,” Danvers mewed, bewildered. “As God is my witness, I never did any of this.”
Alexios scratched his chin, trying to prevent himself from gloating. “Would you allow me to check your computer? I presume you brought your memory core with you when you came to Mercury.”
Danvers nodded glumly and gestured toward the desk, where the palm-sized computer rested. Alexios spent a half hour fiddling with it while the bishop sat on the sofa in miserable silence. Alexios found the trace of the message he had paid to have planted in the computer’s core. It looked as if it had been erased from the active memory, but still existed deep in the core.
Getting up from the desk at last, Alexios lied, “Well, if it’s in your machine’s memory it would take a better expert than me to find it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Danvers said, his heavy head drooping.
“I should think it would be important.”
His voice deep and low with despair, Danvers said, “You don’t understand. A scandal like this will ruin me. The New Morality doesn’t permit even a suspicion of wrongdoing among its hierarchy. We must all be above evil, above even accusations of evil. This… once Victor tells people about this… I’ll be finished in the New Morality. Finished.”
Alexios took a breath, then replied, “Maybe you can get a position as chaplain on a prison ship, or out in the Asteroid Belt. They could use your consolations there.”
Danvers looked up at him, blinking. He seemed to have aged ten years in the past half hour.
Alexios smiled, thinking, You wouldn’t last a month out there, you fat old fraud. Somebody would strangle you in the middle of your hymns.
OBSERVATION LOUNGE
Alexios fidgeted nervously as he stood in Himawari’s dimmed observation lounge, gazing through the glassteel blister as the star-flecked depths of infinite space spun slowly, inexorably past his altered eyes. The eyes of heaven, he said to himself, half-remembering a poem from his school days. The army of unalterable law, that’s what the poet called the stars.
I should feel triumphant, he thought. Victor’s career is in tatters, and Danvers is in disgrace. All that’s left is Yamagata and I’ll be taking care of him shortly. Yet he felt no delight in his victory over them. No triumph. He was dead inside, cold and numb. Ten years I’ve waited to get even with them and now that I have … so what? So Victor will spend the rest of his life in some obscure university trying to live down his mistake here on Mercury. And Danvers will be defrocked, or whatever they do in the New Morality. What of it? How does that change my life?
Lara, he said to himself. It all depends on Lara. She’s the one I did this for. She’s the one who kept me alive through all those long years out in the Belt. My only glimmer of hope when I was a prisoner, a miserable exile.
As the torch ship rotated, the surface of Mercury slid into view, barren, heat-blasted, pitted with craters and seamed with cracks and fault lines. Like the face of an old, old man, Alexios thought, a man who’s lived too long. He saw a line of cliffs and the worn, tired mountains ringing an ancient crater. He knew where Goethe base was, but he could not see the modest mound of rubble covering its dome from the distance of the ship’s orbit, nor the tracks of the vehicles that churned up the thin layer of dust on the ground down there.
Once we’ve built the mass driver you’ll be able to see it from orbit, he thought. Five kilometers long. We’ll see it, all right.
The door behind him slid open, spilling light from the passageway into the darkened compartment. Alexios’s heart constricted in his chest. He did not dare to turn around, but in the reflection off the glassteel bubble he saw that it was Lara.
He slowly turned toward her as she slid the door shut. The compartment became dim and shadowed again, but he could see her lovely face, see the curiosity in her eyes.
“You asked me to meet you here?” she said, her voice soft and low.
He realized he’d been holding his breath. He nodded, then managed to get out, “It’s one of the few places aboard ship where we can meet privately.”
“You have some further information about my husband?”
“No … not really…” It took all his self-control to keep from reaching out and clasping her in his arms. Surely she could hear his heart thundering.
“I don’t understand,” Lara said with a little frown. “You asked me to see you, to come alone, without Victor.”
“Lara, it’s me,” he blurted. “Mance.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“I know I look different,” he said, the words coming in a rush now. “I had to change my appearance, my background, I came here to Mercury but I had no idea you’d come out here too and now that you’re here I can’t keep up the masquerade any longer, I want to—”
“Mance?” she whispered, unbelieving.
“Yes, it’s me, darling.”
She staggered back several steps, dropped onto the bench running along the compartment’s rear bulkhead. “It can’t be,” she said, her voice hollow.
He went to her, knelt before her, grasped both her hands in his own. “Lara, I’ve gone through hell to find you again. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
She was staring at him, searching for the Mance Bracknell she had known. He could see the play of starlight in her eyes and then the harsh glare reflected from Mercury casting her face into stark light and shadow.
“I know I don’t look the same, Lara. But it really is me, Mance. I have a new identity. I’m a free man now. The old Mance Bracknell is dead, as far as the officials are concerned. But we can begin our lives again, Lara, we can take up where we left off.”
She shuddered, like a woman coming out of a trance. “Begin our lives again?”
“Yes! I love you, dearest. I want to marry you and—”
“I’m already married. I have an eight-year-old son. Victor’s son.”
“You can divorce Victor. Nobody will blame you for leaving him.”
Recognition lit her eyes. “You did this to Victor! It wasn’t Elliott, it was you!”
“I did it for you,” he said.
“You destroyed my husband’s career and ruined Elliott.”
“Because I love you.”
“What kind of love is that?”
Alexios saw the disgust in her eyes. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They destroyed me. Victor deliberately lied at my trial. He wanted me out of the way so he could have you. He stole you from me. He stole my entire life!”
“And now you’ve stolen his.”
“Yes! And I want you back. You’re the reason I’ve done all this.”
“Oh, my god,” she moaned.
“You loved me, you know you did. You said you wanted to be with me. Well, now we can—”
“And Elliott, too? What do you have against him?”
Anger rising inside him, Alexios said, “He’s the one who started the scheme to destroy the skytower. Him and his New Morality hatred for nanotechnology or anything else that they can’t find in the Old Testament.”
“Destroy the skytower?”
“It was sabotaged. Deliberately knocked down. They didn’t care how many people they killed, they just wanted the tower destroyed. And me with it.”
She stared at him. “You’re saying that Victor helped to bring the tower down?”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. But he lied at my trial. He was perfectly willing to lie so that the blame would all be dumped on me. So that I’d be sent off Earth and he’d have you to himself.”
Lara shook her head, just the slightest
of movements, as she said, “I can’t believe that. I don’t believe any of this!”
“But it’s true! It’s all true! Victor is a lying thief and Danvers helped him.”
She sagged back on the padded bulkhead. Alexios climbed to his feet and sat beside her.
“I know it’s a lot to accept all at once. But I really am Mance Bracknell. At least I was, once. Now I’m Dante Alexios. I’m fairly prosperous; I can offer you a fine life back on Earth. Victor stole you from me. I want you back.”
“He’s my husband,” Lara repeated weakly.
He looked directly into her eyes. In the dim lighting of the compartment he could not see any tears in them.
“Lara, you can’t tell me that you love Victor the way you loved me.”
She said nothing.
“We were perfect for each other,” he said. “The minute I first saw you, back in that dull statistics class with the Chinese T.A. who could barely speak English, I fell hopelessly in love with you.”
For long moments she remained silent. Then, “You certainly didn’t show it.”
“I was too shy. It didn’t seem possible that anyone as wonderful as you would have the slightest interest in me.”
Lara smiled faintly.
“We belong together, Lara. They’ve separated us for so many years, but we can be together again now.”
Again that slight shake of her head. “So many years have gone by.”
“But we can start again,” he urged.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It can be, if you want it to be. Victor got what’s coming to him. He’s finished, out of the picture.”
“He’s my husband,” she said, still again.
“He stole you from me!”
She looked away for a moment, then turned back to him. “Look, Mance or Alexios or whoever you are. I am married to Victor Molina. He’s the father of my child. You’ve tried to ruin him—”
“Nothing less than he deserves,” Alexios growled, feeling his anger simmering inside him again. “In fact, he deserves a lot worse.”
“What you’ve told me might save him,” Lara said.
Alexios was thunderstruck. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him. “You’d take him over me?”
“Mance Bracknell is dead,” Lara said, her voice flat and cold. “So be it. We could never recapture what we had all those years ago. Do you think I could leave Victor and go with you, knowing what you’ve done to him?”
“But he deserves it!”
“No, he doesn’t. And even if he did, his wife should be by his side, protecting and supporting him. For the sake of our child, if for no other reason.”
“You belong with me!”
“No. My place is with my husband and son, no matter what happened in the past.”
“That’s…” Alexios ran out of words. This has gone all wrong, he said to himself. All wrong.
Lara got to her feet. “I’m going to tell Victor about this, and then McFergusen. I won’t mention Mance Bracknell. I’ll simply tell them that you confessed to me that you planted the false evidence.”
“They’ll find out who I am!” Alexios pleaded. “They’ll send me back to the Belt!”
“Not if you can prove that the skytower was sabotaged. Not if you can lead the authorities to the people who are really responsible for all those deaths.”
He stood up beside her, his knees unsteady, and watched as she abruptly turned away from him and left the observation lounge. He stood frozen, watching as the door slid closed. Then he felt the glare from Mercury’s surface blaze through the heavily tinted blister of glassteel. It felt like the hot breath of doom.
GOETHE BASE
It’s all gone wrong, Alexios said to himself as he sat miserably alone in his sparely furnished office at the construction base. Horribly wrong.
Lara, Victor, and Danvers had left for Earth on the ship that had shepherded the six new power satellites from Selene. She must be telling Victor everything, Alexios thought. It’s only a matter of time before the IAA or some other group sends investigators here to check me out. If they suspect I’m not who I say I am, they’ll want to do DNA scans on me. If I refuse they’ll get a court order.
It’s finished, he told himself. Over. She’s not the same Lara I knew. The years have changed her.
He stood up and studied his reflection in the blank wall screen. They’ve changed me, too, he realized. He paced across the little office, thinking that he was still all alone in the universe. Lara doesn’t love me anymore. No one in the entire solar system cares about me. There’s only one thing left to do. Get Yamagata down here and finish the job. Make him pay before they come after me. After that, it doesn’t matter what happens.
Yet he hesitated. When the investigators come I could tell them the whole story, tell them how Yamagata sabotaged the skytower, how he’s the one who’s really responsible for all those deaths.
But the mocking voice in his head sneered, And they’ll believe you? Against Yamagata? Where’s your evidence? He’s murdered everyone connected with the sabotage. Toshikazu was the last one, and his assassins even killed themselves so there’d be no possible witnesses remaining.
Alexios knew the severed end of the skytower lay more than four thousand meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic, near the fracture zone where hot magma wells up from deep beneath the Earth’s crust. No one would send an expedition to search for the remains of nanomachines that had probably been dissolved by now, he knew.
He also knew that Saito Yamagata maintained the convenient fiction that his son ran Yamagata Corporation. He was in a lamasery in Tibet when the skytower went down, Alexios remembered. Yes, of course, the voice in his mind taunted. He pulled all the strings for this vast murderous conspiracy from his retreat in the Himalayas. Try getting the authorities to buy that.
Alexios shook his head slowly. No, I’m not going to try to get the authorities to do anything. I’m going to take care of Yamagata myself. I’m going to end this thing once and for all.
He told the phone to call Saito Yamagata.
Yamagata was clearly uncomfortable about being out on the surface; Alexios could see the unhappy frown on his face through the visor of his helmet. Don’t worry, he said silently, you won’t be out here long. Only for the rest of your life.
The two men were riding a slow, bumping tractor across the bleak surface of Mercury, dipping down into shallow craters and then laboring up the other side, moving farther and farther from the base. It was night; the Sun would not rise for another hour, but the glow of starlight and the pale glitter of the zodiacal light bathed the bleak landscape in a cold, silvery radiance.
Despite all the months he’d been on Mercury, Alexios still could not get accustomed to the little planet’s short horizon. It was like the brink of a cliff looming too close; the edge of the world. In the airless vacuum the horizon was sharp and clear, no blurring or softening with distance, a knife edge: the solid world ended and the black infinity of space lay beyond.
“You’ll be out of camera range in two more minutes,” the base controller’s calm flat voice said in Alexios’s helmet earphones.
“You have a satellite track on us, don’t you?” he asked.
“Affirmative. Two of ’em, as a matter of fact.”
“Our beacon’s coming through all right?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good enough.”
Even though the tractor’s glassteel cabin was pressurized, both Yamagata and Alexios were wearing full spacesuits, their helmet visors closed and sealed. Safety regulations, Alexios had told Yamagata when the older man had grumbled about getting into the uncomfortable suit.
“How far are we going to go?” Yamagata asked as the tractor slewed around a house-sized boulder.
Taking one gloved hand off the steering controls to point out toward the horizon, Alexios said, “We’ve got to get to the other side of that fault line. Then we’ll double back.”
Yamagata g
runted, and the frown on his face relaxed, but only slightly.
It had been easy enough to get him down to the planet’s surface.
“I’d like to show you the site we’re considering for the mass driver,” Alexios had told Yamagata. “Naturally, we can’t make the final decision. That’s up to you.”
Yamagata’s image in Alexios’s wall screen had turned thoughtful. “Is it necessary for me to inspect this location personally?”
Choosing his words carefully, Alexios had replied, “I understand, sir, that it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable to come down here to the surface. Even a little dangerous, to be truthful.”
Yamagata had stiffened at that. Drawing himself up to his full height, he’d told Alexios, “I will come to the base tomorrow. My transportation coordinator will inform you of when you may expect me.”
Alexios had smiled. Touch the man on his Japanese brand of machismo and you’ve got him. The old samurai tradition. He doesn’t want to lose face in front of his employees.
“I received a report from my son’s technical experts in Japan,” Yamagata said, staring straight ahead as he sat alongside Alexios in the lumbering tractor. “They believe your numbers on the solar cell degradation problem are exaggerated.”
Alexios knew perfectly well that they were. “Exaggerated?” he asked.
“Overstated,” said Yamagata, his voice muffled slightly by the spacesuit helmet.
It was impossible to shrug inside the heavy suit. Alexios said smoothly, “I admit that I showed you the worst-case numbers. I thought it best that way.”
Yamagata grunted. “We may not have to harden the power satellites after all.”
“That’s good news, then,” Alexios replied. It didn’t matter now, he thought. None of it mattered any more.
Yamagata was silent for several kilometers. Then, “What makes you think this is the best site for the catapult launcher?” he demanded. “If it takes this long to get there, why is this site so preferable?”
Alexios smiled behind his visor. “It’s that blasted fault line. If you approve the site, we’ll bridge over it. But right now we have to go all the way around it. Won’t be long now, though.”
