by Hammond, Ray
The sun was setting behind them, on the other side of the mountain behind the house, but she could see it reflected on the swell of the Atlantic in front of her. The sun created a panorama of lambent reflections across the surface of the gentle sea, like a thousand camera flashes – Miss World again, for a moment.
‘This is beautiful,’ she breathed as she sat down under the high canopy provided by the old tree. She guessed it had been imported as a mature specimen and replanted here with enormous care. There was a wash of sea breeze and a breath of pine needles in the air and Calypso cared not a jot that these were probably artificially augmented. The sound of cicadas in the shrubs enhanced the ambience.
Tye was watching her silently, head cocked to one side. As he smiled, his own beauty complemented the surroundings.
‘Have a drink,’ he said, lifting a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket. He pulled two crystal glasses towards him across the white linen tablecloth, poured carefully and expertly and returned the bottle to its chill. He handed her a glass.
‘To a beautiful evening,’ he proposed as he lifted his own.
She raised her glass, touched it against his and watched in surprise as he took a long draught. She had assumed he never touched alcohol. She savoured the vintage Krug.
‘How’s Tommy doing today?’ he asked.
*
Like her boss, Connie worked late most evenings. She had an apartment in a condo down near Hope Town beach, but she also had a little room in the house where she would sometimes stay over when things were particularly frantic. Now was just such a time. The forthcoming weekend celebrations were stretching every resource. In the outer office, thirty-seven of her day-shift executive team were still at their desks twelve hours after they had arrived there. The night shift was hot-desking elsewhere in the Tye Corporate headquarters.
Most of the work entailed travel details and final confirmations. Tye Logistics had been working on plans for nearly nine months and the event organizers seemed totally professional, being used to organizing diplomatic summits in Washington as well as major sporting events. But there were still a thousand things that needed her personal attention or approval.
Her system trilled. She looked at the ident and accepted. ‘Yes, Raymond, how are you this evening?’
‘I need to speak with Tom urgently,’ the normally polite network chief almost snapped.
Connie shook her head. ‘He can’t be disturbed for anything this evening, Ray. Those are his absolute orders. May I help?’
She saw Liu shake his head anxiously. ‘We’re suffering widespread network failures,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re still functioning, but we’re fire-fighting. I lost two air traffic management satellites over Europe today. One pilot had to override the system to stop his computers putting the passenger jet down on the fucking Champs Elysées!’
He broke off. Tom’s bad language was catching.
‘I’ve had to issue an advisory to the FAA and the other aviation bodies for pilots to revert to manual flying and for the ATC to decouple network control. Passengers all over the world are complaining about bumpy landings and there are major delays because the air traffic controllers have forgotten how to control the traffic manually.’
‘My God,’ exclaimed Connie, now seriously alarmed. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know. It just seems sporadic and random. I’ve checked everything. There is no apparent physical cause and no sign of anybody sabotaging the networks. And it’s not just us; other network operators are reporting faults, too. Also, and this one is ultra serious, one of the off-planet deposit-box satellites is missing. It’s just disappeared.’
Connie considered. She had spent days in the Network Control Center during the Los Angeles traffic crises and she knew the significance of this information – she also knew the financial implications of losing track of one of their ultra-secure-deposit satellites.
‘It will be another hour before I can get to him,’ she said, checking the time. ‘Leave it with me.’
*
‘So how are you going to make it rain in Ethiopia, Tom?’
The evening had gone well – better than Calypso had imagined it could. Tom had been relaxed, charming and attentive. The food had been exotic. For a starter they had been served a stuffed egg-plant dish called Imam Bayildi.
‘It’s Turkish. The chef says it is supposed to make you swoon,’ laughed Tom.
To follow they ate a Hawaiian concoction called laulu, palm-leaf-wrapped, charcoal-baked albacore tuna caught off the island that afternoon. A selection of organically grown, genetically modified vegetables was served on the side. The food was simply stunning!
‘Michel doesn’t often get a chance to show off when we’re here on the island,’ Tom explained.
Calypso knew that Michel Geronde was Michelin-starred and, according to below-stairs rumour, only frequent pay rises stopped the celebrated chef leaving Tom’s entourage to go back to ‘cooking for real people’. She had also heard that fourteen assistant chefs provided by a catering company would be arriving next week to help him prepare for One Weekend in the Future.
As she had anticipated, the conversation turned to Tommy. But far from wanting to limit his son’s movements and activities, Tom now seemed genuinely pleased that the boy was flowering so happily.
‘You’ve done a great deal for Tommy. Thank you.’ He lifted his glass to toast her. ‘I think I have someone for him to play with, if you think it is a good idea?’
She raised an eyebrow.
‘We flew that little girl back from Ethiopia with us – you know, Biya, the blind girl from the village.’
Now Calypso was intrigued.
‘She’s coming out of the clinic tomorrow. It was fairly straightforward, and one hundred per cent successful. She now has twenty-twenty vision.’
Calypso nodded. As a doctor she knew that trachoma was easy to cure if the necessary skills and facilities were at hand.
‘She’ll be staying up here until after the party, so I wondered if you and Tommy would look after her?’
‘Of course, but . . . you’re keeping her here to show her on TV, aren’t you?’
Tom laughed. ‘Don’t be cynical, Calypso,’ he chided. ‘You can do a lot of good through such publicity.’
Which had brought her to her question about the rain.
He sat back in his chair and twirled the long stem of his crystal wine glass. ‘Have you heard about our Phoebus Project, Calypso?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t get involved much with others on the island.’
‘The Ethiopia rain thing is all a bit of a stunt, dreamed up by the perception people in Washington,’ he explained. ‘We’re about to launch a new solar-energy service and they felt this would get the maximum media attention and give us a favourable spin.’
‘It’s certainly done that!’ she laughed. The papers and newscasts had seemed full of nothing but the Ethiopian appeal.
‘I suppose you’re sending a fleet of refuelling tankers flying over to Africa to bomb them with water.’
‘It would evaporate before it even hit the ground.’ He smiled. ‘It’s rather more ambitious than that, Calypso. I’m a little nervous about it myself, but my weather people are sure they can do it.’
He sat up straight and reached for the bottle of red wine. He lifted it, one eyebrow raised questioningly, and when Calypso nodded he refilled her glass. Then he topped up his own glass of white.
‘Over the last ten years I’ve nurtured a dream about a new form of solar energy.’ He sat back in his chair, studying the wine in his glass. Then he looked up. ‘You realize that we’re fast running out of everything on this planet: water, usable land, food, energy?’
She nodded.
‘Twenty years ago a bunch of crazy Russians had this idea of putting a space mirror into orbit and reflecting a little sunshine back to Siberia. Just enough to extend twilight in the winter evenings and to bring the morning sun a little earlier.’
>
He paused and took a sip of wine.
‘They carried out only one full-scale experiment, in February ninety-nine, but that failed. Then Russia disintegrated: the economy collapsed, the wars in the south started. The companies concerned closed down, but a year or so later the founder of the project, the man with the original idea, got in contact with the president of Tye Aerospace in Florida. I saw the proposals and I realized that with some of our technology and financing this concept could be significantly expanded. In fact, I now think it will turn out to be perhaps the most significant thing I have ever done.’
He stared into his wine again, then raised it to his lips.
‘We’ve been building large-scale catoptric-energy stations, solar reflectors, for over six years, Calypso. You must have seen some of the shuttle launches from the Cape . . .’
She nodded.
‘Many of those are for putting the components into position. We then build the Solaris energy stations in Earth orbit before boosting them out to exactly where we want them to be. We’re building six new stations at this moment.’
‘I think I’ve met some of your women astronauts,’ nodded Calypso. ‘They hang out down at Mario’s.’
He hesitated as if considering. ‘Would it surprise you if I said I sometimes wished I could hang out down at Mario’s myself?’ he asked.
She smiled. She had her own small experience of celebrity status, and its frequent loneliness, to help her understand.
‘We choose women to do the construction because they are lighter and they get along with each other better than men do when they are shut up together for months at a time. In space, strength counts for nothing. It is dexterity, creativity and the ability to live peacefully at close quarters that matter.’
Calypso lifted her head and looked up at the stars and the bursts of laser light. ‘I’d like to go into space,’ she sighed. Then she realized she had absolutely no idea why she had said such a thing.
‘No, no, we need you too much here, Cally.’
She stared at him. That was what Tommy called her.
‘Well, using the sunlight we then capture we can reflect it back to affect the weather, Calypso. Would it surprise you to know that the atmosphere has tides?’
It did, and her face showed it.
‘Highs and lows, twice a day, just like the sea, only it’s caused by the cycles of heat and cold as the sun rises and sets as well as by the magnetism of the solar system. What we do is add our energy to those tides to make them bigger in certain small areas. Over a period of days the theory is that the boosted upswings become so great that the warm air funnels upwards in anabatic columns, towards the upper atmosphere, and the cold air is pushed down to take its place. It’s called inverting the atmosphere. When the cold air descends rapidly it becomes warmer and the moisture inside it turns to rain. The Phoebus people proved that they could do that a couple of months ago. They had a trial run making rain on some remote islands in the Atlantic, the driest inhabited place on Earth. I sent Marsello to observe the rainfall for himself.’
That overdressed lawyer that Tom seemed to spend so much time with.
‘Here’s to rain in Ethiopia.’ Calypso raised her glass, not knowing what else to say.
‘I’m frightened it might even snow,’ Tom replied, laughing softly.
*
In mid-August, afternoons in Beijing are so hot that only the very poorest of the city’s fourteen million people will be found out on the streets.
As Jeremy Corbett, vice-president Asia of Tye Private Banking Services Inc. stepped out of his air-conditioned club to look for an air-conditioned taxi he was surprised to find two tall, fit, smartly suited men appear beside him.
‘Mr Corbett,’ the taller of the two stated. ‘Please come with us.’ His English was good.
A dark BMW saloon arrived beside them and the rear door opened from the inside. The taller man held out an ident, English-language side uppermost. It was the badge of the Red Army Military Police.
‘I think you’ve got the wrong man,’ objected Corbett stupidly as he felt a hand on the back of his head. But he was pushed down into the car and someone got in beside him.
The large saloon was pulling away at speed even before the door was properly closed.
*
Sitting back in her chair, Connie yawned and stretched. She desperately wanted to hand over to her night exec but had to wait until Tom finished his dinner engagement. She needed to tell him about Raymond Liu’s worries.
A face appeared at the doorway. ‘Have you got your AutoSec on?’ asked Miguel Sanchos, her night-shift external-interface manager.
Connie glanced at her screen. ‘Yes, sorry. What is it?’
‘The Solaris people are desperately trying to reach Tom. I wonder if you’d take it.’
Connie looked at her watch. It was now very late but Tom had not appeared yet. She nodded, and switched her system back to live as Miguel disappeared. A moment later she was looking at Easy Zee Zee in the Solaris Control Center.
‘Yo, Connie,’ intoned the systems designer.
Yo, yourself, she thought. ‘What is it, Mr Zorzi?’ she asked, deliberately abrupt.
‘I really need to reach Tom right away,’ he said.
‘He can’t be disturbed at the moment, for anything,’ replied Connie. ‘What’s it about?’
‘We’ve been watching that storm out in the south-east Atlantic and it looks like it’s building up and heading our way. We’ve got eleven hundred millibars and dropping and the wind speed is already sixty miles an hour and rising. The mets are predicting a Category Five if it crosses the pond and develops. I wanted permission to see if we can zap it.’
Connie pursed her lips. She knew that everybody in the programme was under strict instructions to keep everything connected with the Phoebus Project an absolute secret until 30 August. All of the plans called for the rain in Ethiopia to be its major launch point. To have maximum impact, that would need to be the first major demonstration.
‘Can it be done discreetly – so no one realizes?’
Zee Zee shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s never been tried before. But the alternative is a hurricane arriving at the same time as Tom’s party guests.’
Connie nodded. ‘OK, leave it with me.’ She glanced at the time on her screen. ‘I should be able to talk to Tom very soon.’
She flicked the system off and wondered what was keeping her boss so unusually long.
*
Everything but the wine and their coffee cups had been cleared away and they had turned their chairs so that they could look down the length of the island with its twinkling lights. They had finished drinking the wine and there had been a long silence. Calypso was wondering whether this was the time to leave.
‘Are you happy here, Calypso?’
She considered. ‘Very,’ she said emphatically.
‘Would you consider staying here on a more permanent basis?’
She frowned in the warm darkness. A full-time contract had been signed soon after their last altercation had been resolved. ‘I’m not sure what you mean . . .’
‘I had my fiftieth birthday a few weeks ago, Calypso. I was just wondering . . .’
She nodded, encouraging him, but he tailed off and said no more.
‘You look astonishingly good on it, Tom.’ She hesitated, then asked a question to which she already had a partial answer. ‘How do you do it?’
‘It is said that we all owe a death to nature,’ he responded after a moment’s silence. ‘But it is not a debt I am prepared to pay, not for a very long time. Our generation is one of the last that will be forced to suffer the absurd brevity of a biblical lifespan. If we could leap a hundred years ahead we would see our great-grandchildren, in their very youthful forties, shaking their heads in sadness that we are gone, that we were so close to the point where medical science could extend our lives dramatically, but we just missed the boat.’
She sensed he had turned to look at he
r.
‘I don’t intend to let that happen to me. The future arrives unevenly, Doctor, and I live at the most technologically advanced point on our planet. Hope Island represents the future and I intend to be here to join my grandchildren in their sadness that so many of those alive today will have died needlessly – within a hair’s breadth of the necessary technology becoming available. As Professor Keane likes to say, we shall soon be leaving this animal form.’
Calypso offered no comment on Professor Keane or her work. She turned and stared at him, wondering if he would say more. It was his turn to look away.
‘I suppose it must be obvious, and it will become more so as time goes by. I may have lived for fifty years but my body has not aged at all for the last sixteen years. You see, I have been the guinea pig in a unique experiment that seems to have been very successful. I have been taking gene therapy to prevent free-radical damage and sclerosis in the body’s cells and nervous system – I thought it only right that I should be the one to risk a long-term trial. A number of others in our research team have since joined me as the doctors are now convinced of the safety of this therapy. We plan to start seeking regulatory approvals for the drug next year – but it will have to be individually customized for each patient.’
She inclined her head in understanding but she had a thousand questions.
‘It will be our next big marketing push, after the Phoebus Project. Think it will catch on?’
She smiled at the absurdity of his question. He would actually be offering the prospect of extreme longevity – the eternal dream of humankind.
But his earlier question still hung there.
‘You were asking me if I’d like to stay here on a more permanent basis?’
They were both now staring straight ahead again in an elongated, almost palpable silence.
‘I think you understand me better than most,’ Tom ventured. ‘At least, I know you’re qualified to understand . . .’
As he tailed off again, she sensed he was gathering himself.
‘We’d make an amazing couple, Calypso.’
She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She continued to stare stolidly ahead.