by Ben Bova
Each time, once Alhambra’s crew unloaded the refined metals it had carried in its hold and taken a few days’ liberty, Captain Farad headed back to the dark silence of the Belt once more.
Like a vision of heaven, Bracknell said to himself as the glowing blue and white sphere dwindled in the distance. It grew blurry as his eyes teared.
He grew a beard, then shaved it off. He had a brief affair with a woman who signed aboard as a crew member to pay for her passage on a one-way trip from Earth to Ceres, feeling almost ashamed of himself whenever he saw Addie. By the time his erstwhile lover left the ship he was glad to be rid of her.
The captain never relaxed his vigilance over his daughter, although he seemed to grow more tolerant of Bracknell holding casual conversations with her. He even invited Bracknell to have dinner with himself and his daughter, at rare intervals. The captain was sensitive enough never to talk about Earth nor to ask Bracknell about his former life.
Addie began to explain Buddhism to him, trying to help him accept the life that had been forced upon him.
“It is only temporary,” she would tell him. “This life will wither away and a new life will begin. The great wheel turns slowly, but it does turn. You must be patient.”
Bracknell listened and watched her animated face as she earnestly explained the path toward enlightenment. He never believed a word of it, but it helped to pass the time.
On some visits to Earth, Alhambra picked up other groups of convicts exiled to the Belt. The captain forbade Bracknell and the other crew members to have anything to do with them beyond what was absolutely necessary.
When fights broke out among the prisoners in the hold, the captain lowered their air pressure until everyone passed out. Then Bracknell and other crew members crammed the troublemakers into old-fashioned hard-shell spacesuits and tethered them outside the ship until they learned their lesson. It had happened many times, but Bracknell never became inured to it. Always he thought, There but for the grace of god go I.
Then he would ask himself, God? If there is a god he must be as callous and capricious as the most sadistic tyrant in history. At least the Buddha that Addie tells me about doesn’t pretend to control the world; he just sought a way to get out of it.
There is a way, Bracknell would remind himself late at night as he lay in his bunk, afraid to close his eyes and see again in his nightmares the skytower toppling, crushing the life out of so many millions, crushing the life he had once known. I can get out of this, he thought. Slice my wrists, swallow a bottle of pills from Addie’s infirmary, seal myself in an airlock and pop the outer hatch. There are lots of ways to end this existence.
Yet he kept on living. Like a man on an endless treadmill he kept going through the paces of a pointless life, condemning himself for a coward because he lacked the guts to get off the wheel of life and find oblivion.
Except for Addie he had no friends, no companions. The captain tolerated him, even socialized with him now and then, but always kept a clear line of separation between them. The women that occasionally joined the crew hardly appealed to him, except when his needs overcame his reluctance. And even in the throes of sexual passion he thought of Lara.
If I could only see her, he thought. Talk to her. Even if it’s only a few words.
In the midst of his tortured fantasies he remembered the old message from Rev. Danvers, back when he’d just started this miserable banishment. Call me, the minister had said. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be held incommunicado with everyone back on Earth, Danvers had held out that slim hope.
Bracknell was wise enough in the ways of his captain to ask Farad’s permission before attempting to contact Danvers.
The captain snorted disdainfully. “Call somebody Earthside? Won’t do you any good, they won’t put the call through.”
Desperate enough to overcome his fears, Bracknell replied, “You could put the call through for me, sir.”
The captain scowled at him and said nothing. Bracknell returned to his duties, defeated.
Yet the next day, as Bracknell took up his station on the bridge, the captain said, “Take the comm console, Mr. Bracknell.”
Feeling more curiosity than hope, Bracknell relieved the communications officer. The captain told him to put through a call for him to the Reverend Danvers, routing it through New Morality headquarters in Atlanta. His fingers trembling, Bracknell wormed the speaker plug into his ear and got to work.
With more than an hour’s transit time for messages, there was no hope of a normal conversation. It took half his duty shift for Bracknell to get through to the communications program at Atlanta and learn that Danvers was now a bishop serving in Gabon, on Africa’s west coast.
When Danvers’s ruddy face finally came up on Bracknell’s screen, the captain called from his command chair, “Go ahead and see if he’ll talk to you.”
Danvers was sitting at a polished ebony desk, wearing an open-necked black shirt with some sort of insignia pinned to the points of his collar. Behind him a window looked down on the busy streets and buildings of Libreville and, beyond, the blue Atlantic’s white-frothed combers rolling up on a beach. A dark cylindrical form snaked through the greenery beyond the city and disappeared in the frothing surf. Bracknell’s heart clutched inside him: it was the remains of the fallen skytower, still lying there after all these years.
It took more hours of one-way messages and long waits between them before Danvers realized who was calling him.
“Mance!” Surprise opened his eyes wide. “After so many years! I’m delighted to hear from you.” The bishop turned slightly in his high-backed chair. “You can probably see the remains of the skytower. It’s a tourist attraction here. People come from all over Africa to see it.”
Bracknell’s insides smoldered. A tourist attraction.
“The locals have stripped a lot from it. Filthy scavengers. We’ve had to post guards to protect the ruins, but still they sneak in and rip off parts.”
Bracknell closed his eyes, trying to keep his temper under control. No sense getting angry with Danvers; he can’t help the situation. Get to the point, tell him why you’ve contacted him.
He took a breath, then plunged in. “I was wondering, hoping, that you might get a message to Lara Tierney for me,” he said, embarrassed at how much it sounded like begging. “I don’t know where she is now, but I thought perhaps you could find her and give her a message for me.”
Then he waited. His shift on the bridge ended and his replacement arrived at the comm console but the captain silently waved the woman away. Bracknell sat there attending to the ship’s normal communications while his eyes constantly flicked back to the screen where Bishop Danvers’s image sat frozen.
At last the attention light beneath that screen went from orange to green. The bishop’s image shimmered slightly and became animated. But his expression looked doubtful, uncertain.
“Mance, she’s Lara Molina now. She and Victor married more than eighteen months ago. I performed the ceremony.”
Bracknell felt his face redden with sudden anger.
“Under the circumstances,” Bishop Danvers continued, “I don’t think it would be wise for you to contact her. After all, it would be illegal, wouldn’t it? And there’s no sense bringing up old heartaches, opening old wounds. After all, it’s taken her all this time to get you out of her mind and begin her life again. Don’t you agree that it would be better if you—”
Bracknell cut the connection with a vicious stab of his thumb on the keyboard.
Married, his mind echoed. She married Victor. The man who betrayed me. And that pompous idiot performed the ceremony. He betrayed me, too. They’ve all betrayed me!
REVELATION
For weeks Bracknell stormed through his duties aboard Alhambra, raging inwardly at Molina and Danvers. He wanted to be angry with Lara, too; he wanted to be furious with her. Yet he found he couldn’t be. He couldn’t expect her to live out the rest of her life alone. But with Victor? S
he married that lying, back-stabbing son of a bitch? She doesn’t realize that Victor betrayed me, Bracknell told himself; Lara doesn’t know that Victor lied in his testimony at the trial. But Victor knew, and so did Danvers. Of that Bracknell was certain. They had combined to put him out of the way so that Victor could have Lara for himself.
Bracknell understood it all now. Victor betrayed him because he wanted Lara for himself. Once the skytower collapsed, Victor had the perfect opportunity to get me out of his way forever. And Danvers helped him, of that Bracknell was certain.
Once the skytower collapsed, he repeated to himself. Could they have made the tower collapse? Caused it? Sabotaged it? Bracknell wrestled with that idea for weeks on end. No. How could they? Victor didn’t know enough about the tower’s construction to bring it down. He’s a biologist, not a structural engineer. It would take a team of trained saboteurs, demolition experts. It would take money and planning and a ruthless cold-bloodedness that was frighteningly beyond Victor’s capability. Or Danvers’s. He doubted that even the New Morality at its most fanatical had the viciousness to deliberately bring the tower down. Or the competence.
No, Bracknell concluded. Victor simply took advantage of his opportunity. Took advantage of me. And Danvers helped him.
Still, his rage boiled inside him, made him morose and curt with everyone around him, even Addie. The captain watched his new attitude and said nothing, except once, when Bracknell was assigned to escorting a new group of convicts into their makeshift quarters down in the hold. One of the prisoners started a scuffle with another one. Bracknell dove into them swinging his stun wand like a club and beat them both unconscious.
“You’re starting to come back to life,” the captain said after a pair of husky crewmen had pulled him off the bleeding prisoners. He made a strange, twisted smile. “You’re starting to feel pain again.”
“I’ve felt pain before,” Bracknell muttered as they trudged up the passageway toward the bridge.
“Maybe,” said the captain. “But now you can feel the demon gnawing at your guts. Now you know how I felt when they killed my wife. How I still feel.”
Bracknell stared at him with new understanding.
Back and forth through the Belt sailed Alhambra, and then set out on the long, tedious journey to Earth to deliver refined metals and pick up convicts. It seemed to Bracknell, when he thought about it, that there were always more convicts waiting to be sent out to the Belt, always more men and women who’d run afoul of the law. Teenagers, too. The governments of Earth had found a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers: dump them out in the Asteroid Belt. They must be making the laws tighter all the time, more restrictive, he thought. Or maybe they’re just using banishment to the Belt instead of other punishments.
On one of Alhambra’s stops at Earth, still another set of convicts was herded into the empty cargo hold—sixteen men and eleven women, most of them looking too frightened to cause any trouble. Only two of the bunch had been guilty of violent crimes: a strong-arm mugger and a murderer who had stabbed her boyfriend to death.
Bracknell was surprised, then, when the alarm hooted shortly after they had locked the prisoners in the hold. From his duty station on the bridge he looked over at the intercom screen. Two men were beating up a third, a tall, skinny scarecrow of a man. He saw their hapless victim trying to defend himself by wrapping his long arms around his head, but his two attackers knocked him to the metal deck with a rain of vicious body blows, then began kicking him.
“Get down there!” the captain snapped to Bracknell as he tapped on the controls set into the armrest of his command chair. Bracknell jumped up from his own seat, ducked through the hatch and sprinted toward the hold. He knew that the captain was dropping the air pressure in there hard enough to pop eardrums. They’ll all be unconscious by the time I get to the hold, he thought.
He could hear the footfalls of two other crewmen following him down the passageway. Stopping at the hatch only long enough to slip on the oxygen masks hanging on the wall, the three of them opened the hatch and pulled out three of the unconscious bodies: the bloodied scarecrow and his two attackers. Leaving the other crewmen to deal with the attackers, Bracknell picked up the victim and started running toward the infirmary. The man was as light as a bird, nothing but skin and bones.
Addie was waiting at the infirmary. She allowed Bracknell to lay the unconscious man on one of the two beds there as she powered up the diagnostic sensors built into the bulkhead.
“You should get back to the bridge,” she said to Bracknell as she began strapping the man down.
“As soon as he’s secure,” Bracknell said, fastening a strap across the man’s frail chest. “He’s a prisoner, after all.”
The man moaned wretchedly but did not open his eyes. Bracknell saw that they were both swollen shut, and his nose appeared to be broken. Blood covered most of his face and was spattered over his gray prison-issue coveralls.
“Go!” Addie said in an urgent whisper. “I can take care of him now.”
Bracknell headed back to the bridge. By the time he slid back into the chair before his console, he could see that the other convicts were stirring in the hold, regaining consciousness as the air pressure returned to normal. The two attackers were already sealed into hardshell space-suits and being dragged to an airlock.
“What started the fight?” he wondered aloud.
“What difference does it make?” the captain retorted. “It wasn’t much of a fight, anyway. Looked to me like those two gorillas wanted to beat the scarecrow to death. He probably tried to proposition them.”
Half an hour later Bracknell punched up the outside camera view. One of the spacesuited figures was floating inertly at the end of a buckyball tether. The other had crawled along the length of his tether and was pounding at the airlock hatch with a gloved fist.
“Too bad there’s no radio in his suit,” the captain remarked sourly. “I imagine we’d pick up some choice vocabulary.”
Once his shift was finished, Bracknell headed for his quarters. As he passed the open door of the infirmary, though, Addie called to him.
He stopped at the doorway and saw that she was at the minuscule desk in the infirmary’s anteroom, the glow from the desktop screen casting an eerie greenish light on her face.
“You were the chief of the skytower project, weren’t you,” Addie said. It was not a question.
His insides twitched, but Bracknell answered evenly, “Yes. And this is where it got me.”
“Permanently exiled from Earth.”
He nodded wordlessly.
Glancing over her shoulder at the open doorway to the infirmary’s beds, Addie said, “The man you brought in, he keeps mumbling something about the skytower.”
“Lots of people remember the skytower,” Bracknell said bitterly. “It was the biggest disaster in history.”
She shook her head. “But this man is not who he claims to be in his prison file.”
“What do you mean?”
“The patient in the infirmary,” she said, “keeps babbling about the skytower. He says they want to kill him because he knows about the skytower.”
“Knows what?”
Addie’s almond eyes were steady, somber. “I don’t know. But I thought that you would want to speak with him.”
“You’re damned right I do.”
She got up from the desk and Bracknell followed her into the infirmary. Her patient was asleep or unconscious as they squeezed into the cramped compartment. The other bed was unoccupied. Medical monitors beeped softly. The place had that sterile smell of antiseptics overlaying the metallic tang of blood.
Bracknell saw a tall, very slim, long-limbed man stretched out on the narrow infirmary bed. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing when he’d been hurt: a pair of gray coveralls, wrinkled and dark with perspiration, spattered with his own blood. His face was battered, swollen, a bandage sprayed over one lacerated brow, another along the length of his broken nose.
His body was immobilized by the restraining straps, and a slim plastic intravenous tube was inserted in his left forearm.
Addie called up the diagnostic computer and scans of the man’s body sprang up on the wall beside his bed.
“He has severe internal injuries,” she said, in a whisper. “They did a thorough job of beating him. A few more minutes and he would have died.”
“Will he make it?”
“The computer’s prognosis is not favorable. I have called back to Selene to ask for a medevac flight, but I doubt that they will go to the trouble for a prisoner.”
Bracknell asked, “What’s his name?”
“That’s just it,” she said, with a tiny frown that creased the bridge of her nose. “I’m not certain. His prison file shows him as Jorge Quintana, but when I ran a scan of his DNA profile the Earthside records came up with the name Toshikazu Koga.”
“Japanese?”
“Japanese descent, third generation American. Raised in Selene, where he graduated with honors in molecular engineering.”
Bracknell gaped at her. “Nanotechnology?”
“I believe so.”
Bracknell stared down at the unconscious convict. He did not look Asian, there were no epicanthic folds in his closed eyes. Yet there was an odd, unsettling quality about his face. The skin was stretched tight over prominent cheekbones and a square jaw that somehow looked subtly wrong for the rest of his face, as if someone had roughed it out and pasted it onto him. The color of his skin was strange, too, a mottled gray. Bracknell had never seen a skin tone like it.