The Silent War gt-11

by Ben Bova

  Her one obvious change was her domicile. For years Pancho had lived with her sister in a pair of adjoining two-room units on Selene’s third level. When she traveled to Earth she stayed at corporate-owned suites. After her sister left, Pancho spent several months feeling lonely, betrayed by the sister she had raised from infancy—twice, since Sis had died and been cryonically preserved for years while Pancho watched over her sarcophagus and waited for a cure for the cancer that took her first life.

  Once Sis was revived from her liquid-nitrogen immersion, Pancho had to train her all over again to walk, to use the toilet, to speak, to live as an adult. And then the kid took off for distant Saturn with a team of scientists and their support personnel, starting her second life in independence, as far from her big sister as she could get.

  Eventually Pancho realized that now she could live in independence, too. So she splurged for the first time in her life. She leased several units from the nearly bankrupt Hotel Luna and brought in contractors who broke through walls and floors to make her a spacious, high-ceilinged, thoroughly modern home that was perfectly suited to her personality. The double-height ceilings were a special luxury; no one else in Selene enjoyed such spaciousness, not even Martin Humphries in his palatial mansion.

  Some said she was competing with Humphries, trying to show that she too could live in opulence. That thought had never occurred to Pancho. She simply decided to build the home of her dreams, and her dreams were many and various.

  In every room, the walls and floors and ceilings were covered with smart screens. Pancho could change the decor, the ambiance, even the scent of a room with the touch of a button or the mere utterance of a word. She could live in the palace of the Caliph of Baghdad, or atop the Eiffel Tower, or deep in the fragrant pine forest of the Canadian Rockies, or even out in the flat dusty scrubland of her native west Texas.

  This night, though, she walked on the barren, pockmarked surface of the Moon, as the cameras on the floor of the crater Alphonsus showed it in real time: silent, airless, the glowing blue and white crescent of Earth hanging in the black star-strewn sky.

  Mandy doesn’t want Lars to know what she’s been going through, Pancho finally realized, because he’d go wild and try to kill Humphries, but Humphries’s people would kill Lars long before he got anywhere near the Humper.

  She stopped her pacing and stared out across the dark uneven floor of Alphonsus, dotted with smaller craterlets and cracked here and there by rilles. Maybe that’s what Humphries wants. He promised Mandy he wouldn’t try to kill Fuchs if Mandy married him, but now he’s making her life so miserable that Lars’ll come after him. And get himself killed.

  That’s just like the Humper. Make the other guy jump to his tune. He won’t go after Lars; he’ll make Lars come after him.

  What’ll Lars’s reaction be when he finds out Mandy’s going to have a baby? Will that be enough to set him off? Is that why Humphries impregnated Mandy? He’s got one son already, somebody to carry on his gene line. Rumor is the kid’s his clone, for cripes sake. Why’s he need another son?

  To kill Lars, that’s why, Pancho answered herself.

  What should I do about it? Should I do anything? Warn Lars? Try to help Mandy, show her she’s got somebody she can depend on? Or just stay the hell out of the whole ugly mess?

  Pancho gazed out at the tired, worn, slumped ringwall mountains of Alphonsus. They look like I feel, she said to herself. Weary. Worn down.

  What should I do? Without thinking about it, she called out, “Decor scheme, deep space.”

  The lunar surface abruptly disappeared. Pancho was in the midst of empty space, stars and glowing nebulas and whirling galaxies stretching out into the blackness of infinity.

  “Saturn vicinity,” she called.

  The ringed planet appeared before her eyes, hovering in emptiness, a splendid, eye-dazzling oblate sphere of delicate pastel colors with those impossible bright-white rings floating around its middle.

  That’s where Sis is, Pancho thought. Hundreds of millions of kilometers away.

  Abruptly, she shook her head, as if to clear it. “Versailles, Hall of Mirrors,” she called. And instantly was in the French palace, staring at her own reflections.

  What should I do about Mandy? she asked herself again. Then a new thought struck her: What do I want to do?

  Me. Myself. What do I want to do?

  Once Pancho had been a roughneck astronaut, a tomboy who dared farther and played harder than all the others. But ever since her younger sister was struck down by cancer, so many years ago— so many lifetimes ago—Pancho had lived her life for others. Her sister. Then Dan Randolph came along, hired her as an astronaut and, as he lay dying, bequeathed his share of Astro Corporation to her. Ever since, she had been fighting Dan’s fights, striving to hold Astro together, to make it profitable, to keep it out of Humphries’s clutching paws. And now—Amanda?

  What about me? she wondered. What do I want to be when I grow up?

  She studied her reflection in the nearest mirror and saw beyond the floor-length party skirt and glittering lame blouse, beyond the cosmetic therapies, to the gawky, gangling African-American from west Texas that lay beneath the expensive exterior. What do you want out of life, girl?

  Her reflection shook its head at her. Doesn’t matter. You inherited this responsibility from Dan Randolph. It’s on your shoulders now. Mandy, Humphries, even this guy from Nairobi Industries, it’s all part of the game you’re in. Whether you like it or not. What you want doesn’t matter. Not until this game is finished, one way or the other. Especially not now, with the Humper starting to peck away at Astro again. He’s starting the war again. I thought it was all finished and over with eight years ago, but Humphries is starting again. Third freighter in as many weeks, according to this morning’s report. He’s only knocked off unmanned freighters so far, but this is just the beginning. He’s probing to see how I’m gonna react.

  And it’s not just Humphries, either, Pancho reminded herself as she walked slowly along the mirrored corridor. It’s the whole danged world. Earth’s just starting to recover from the greenhouse cliff a li’l bit. Raw materials from the Belt are so blasted cheap they’re providing the basis for an economic comeback. But if Humphries gets complete control of the Belt he’ll jack up prices to wherever he wants ’em. He doesn’t care about Earth or anybody besides himself. He wants a monopoly. He wants a goddam empire for himself.

  You’ve got responsibilities, lady, she said to her reflection. You got no time to feel sorry for yourself.

  “Acropolis,” she commanded, striding back to her bedroom through colonnades of graceful fluted columns, the ancient city of Athens visible beyond them, lying in the hot summer sun beneath a sky of perfect blue.

  Once in her bedroom Pancho made two phone calls: one to the investment firm in New York that she always used to check out potential business partners or rivals; the other was a personal call to Big George Ambrose, in his room in the very same Hotel Luna.

  She was surprised when the phone’s synthesized voice told her that George Ambrose had already left Selene; he was returning to Ceres.

  “Find him, wherever he is,” Pancho snapped at the phone. “I want to talk to him.”

  EARTH: CHOTA MONASTERY, NEPAL

  The first thing Nobuhiko Yamagata did once he returned to Earth following Humphries’s party was to visit his revered father, which meant an overnight flight in a corporate jet to Patna, on the Ganges, and then an arduous haul by tilt-rotor halfway up the snowy slopes of the Himalayas.

  Saito Yamagata had founded the corporation in the earliest years of the space age and made it into one of the most powerful industrial giants in the world. It had been Saito’s vision that built the first solar power satellites and established factories in Earth orbit. It had been Saito who partnered with Dan Randolph’s Astro Corporation back in those primitive years when the frontier of human endeavor barely reached to the surface of the Moon.

  When Nobuhiko
was a young man, just starting to learn the intricacies of corporate politics and power, Saito was stricken with an inoperable brain tumor. Instead of stoically accepting his fate, the elder Yamagata had himself frozen, preserved cryonically in liquid nitrogen until medical science advanced enough to remove the tumor without destroying his brain.

  Young Nobu, then, was in command of Yamagata Corporation when the greenhouse cliff plunged the world into global disaster. Japan was struck harder than most industrial nations by the sudden floods that inundated coastal cities and the mammoth storms that raged out of the ocean remorselessly. Earthquakes shattered whole cities, and tsunamis swept the Pacific. Many of the nations that sold food to Japan were also devastated by the greenhouse cliff. Croplands died in withering droughts or were carved away by roaring floods. Millions went hungry, and then tens of millions starved.

  Still Saito waited in his sarcophagus of liquid nitrogen, legally dead yet waiting to be revived and returned to life.

  Under Nobuhiko’s direction, Yamagata Corporation retreated from space and spent every bit of its financial and technical power on rebuilding Japan’s shattered cities. Meanwhile, he learned that he could use nanomachines to safely destroy the tumor in his father’s brain; the virus-sized devices could be programmed to take the tumor apart, molecule by molecule. Nanotechnology was banned on Earth; fearful mobs and acquiescent politicians had driven the world’s experts in nanotech off the Earth altogether. Nobu understood that he could bring his father’s preserved body to Selene and have the nanotherapy done there. But he decided against it.

  He did not stay his hand because of the horrendous political pressures that would be brought to bear on Yamagata Corporation for using a technology that was illegal on Earth, nor even because of the moral and religious outcry against such a step—although Nobuhiko publicly blamed those forces for his decision. In truth, Nobu dreaded the thought of his father’s revival, fearing that his father would be displeased with the way he was running the corporation. Saito had never been an easy man to live with; his son was torn between family loyalty and his desire to keep the reins of power in his own hands.

  In the end, family loyalty won. On the inevitable day when the corporation’s medical experts told Nobu that his father’s tumor could be safely removed without using nanomachines, Nobu felt he had no choice but to agree to the procedure.

  The medical experts had also told him, with some reluctance, that although persons could be physically revived from cryonic suspension, their minds were usually as blank as a newborn baby’s. Long immersion at cryogenic temperature erodes the synaptic connections in the brain’s higher centers. No matter that the person was physically an adult, a cryonic reborn had to be toilet trained, taught to speak, to walk, to be an adult, all over again. And even then, the mind of the reborn would probably be different from the mind of the person who had gone into the cryonic suspension. Subtly different, perhaps, but Nobuhiko was warned not to expect his father to be exactly the same personality he’d been before he had died.

  With some trepidation, Nobu had his father revived and personally supervised his father’s training and education, wondering if the adult that finally emerged from all this would be the same father he had known. Gradually, Saito’s mind returned. He was the same man. And yet not.

  The first hint of Saito’s different personality came the morning that the psychologists finally pronounced their work was finished. Nobu brought his father to his office in New Kyoto. It had once been Saito’s office, the center of power for a world-spanning corporation.

  Saito strode into the office alongside his son, beaming cheerfully until the door closed and they were alone.

  He looked around curiously at the big curved desk, the plush chairs, the silk prints on the walls. “You haven’t changed it at all.”

  Nobuhiko had carefully returned the office to the way it had been when his father was declared clinically dead.

  Saito peered into his son’s eyes, studied his face for long, silent moments. “My god,” he said at last, “it’s like looking into a mirror.”

  Indeed, they looked more like twin brothers than father and son. Both men were stocky, with round faces and deep-set almond eyes. Both wore western business suits of identical sky blue.

  Saito threw back his head and laughed, a hearty, full-throated bellow of amusement. “You’re as old as I am!”

  Automatically, Nobu replied, “But not as wise.”

  Saito clapped his son on the shoulder. “They’ve told me about the problems you’ve faced. And dealt with. I doubt that I could have done better.”

  Nobu stood in the middle of the office. His father looked just as he remembered him. It was something of a shock for Nobu to realize that he himself looked almost exactly the same.

  Feeling nervous, uncertain, Nobu gestured toward the sweeping curve of the desk. “It’s been waiting for you, Father.”

  Saito grew serious. “No. It’s your desk now. This is your office.”

  “But—”

  “I’m finished with it,” said Saito. “I’ve decided to retire. I have no intention of returning to work.”

  Nobu blinked with surprise. “But all this is yours, Father. It’s—”

  Shaking his head, Saito repeated, “I’m finished with it. The world I once lived in is gone. All the people I knew, all my friends, they’re all gone.”

  “They’re not all dead.”

  “No, but the years have changed them so much I would hardly recognize them. I don’t want to try to relive a life that once was. The world moves on. This corporation is your responsibility now, Nobu. I don’t want any part of it.”

  Stunned, Nobuhiko asked, “But what will you do?”

  The answer was that Saito retired to a monastery high in the Himalayas, to a life of study and contemplation. Nobu could not have been more shocked if his father had become a serial killer or a child molester.

  But even though he filled his days by writing his memoirs (or perhaps because he began to write his memoirs) Saito Yamagata could not entirely divorce himself from the corporation on which he had spent his first life. Whenever his son called him, Saito listened greedily to the events of the hour, then offered Nobuhiko the gift of his advice. At first Nobu was wary of his father’s simmering interest in the corporation. Gradually, however, he came to cherish his father’s wisdom, and even to rely upon it.

  So now Nobuhiko flew to Nepal in a corporate tilt-rotor. Videophone calls were all well and good, but still nothing could replace a personal visit, face to face, where no one could possibly eavesdrop.

  It was bitingly cold in the mountains. Swirls of snow swept around the plane when it touched down lightly on the crushed gravel pad outside the monastery’s gray stone walls. Despite his hooded parka, Nobu was thoroughly chilled by the time a saffron-robed lama conducted him through the thick wooden door and into a hallway paneled with polished oak.

  Saito was waiting for him in a small room with a single window that looked out on the snow-clad mountains. A low lacquered table and two kneeling mats were the only furniture, but there was a warm fire crackling in the soot-blackened fireplace. Nobu folded his parka neatly on the floor and stood before the fireplace, gratefully absorbing its warmth.

  Wearing a kimono of deep blue, decorated with the flying crane emblem of the Yamagata family, his father waited in patient silence until Nobu grew uneasy and turned from the fireplace. Then Saito greeted his son with a full-bodied embrace that delighted Nobu even though it squeezed the breath out of him. Altitude and bear hugs did not mix well.

  “You’ve lost a kilo or two,” said the elder Yamagata, holding his son at arm’s length. “That’s good.”

  Nobuhiko dipped his chin in acknowledgment.

  Saito slapped his bulging belly. “I’ve found them! And more!” He laughed heartily.

  Wondering how his father could gain weight in a monastery, Nobu said, “I spoke with Martin Humphries. He apparently does not know that we are backing the Africans.”


  “And Astro?”

  “Pancho Lane launched an investigation of Nairobi Industries. It has found nothing to tie us to them.”

  “Good,” said Saito as he knelt slowly, carefully on one of the mats. It rustled slightly beneath his weight. “It’s better if no one realizes we are returning to space operations.”

  “I still don’t understand why we must keep our interest in Nairobi Industries a secret.” Nobu knelt on the other mat, close enough to his father to smell the older man’s aftershave lotion.

  Saito patted his son’s knee. “Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation are fighting for control of the Belt, aren’t they? If they knew Yamagata will soon be competing against them, they might combine their forces against us.” Nobu shook his head. “Pancho Lane despises Humphries. And he feels the same about her.”

  With a knowing grin, Saito countered, “They might hate each other, but their personal feelings wouldn’t stop them from uniting to prevent us from establishing ourselves in the Belt. Personal emotions take a back seat to business, son.”

  “Perhaps,” Nobu conceded.

  “Work through the Africans,” Saito counseled. “Let Nairobi Industries establish a base on the Moon. That will be our foothold. The prospecting ships and ore carriers they send to the Asteroid Belt will return profits to Yamagata.”