by Ben Bova
Lara said nothing. She didn’t know what she could say.
“I wanted Mance out of the way,” he admitted, his voice so low she could barely hear him. “I was so crazy in love with you. I still am.”
He burst into tears.
Lara got up from the desk chair and went to the bed. Cradling her husband’s head in her arms she crooned soothingly, “I understand, darling. I understand.”
“I shouldn’t have done it, I know,” Molina blubbered. “I ruined Mance’s life. But I did it for you. For you.”
Lara was quite dry-eyed. “What’s done is done,” she said. “Mance is dead now. We’ve got to live the rest of our lives.”
As she held him, Lara did not think of Mance Bracknell, nor of the strangely vicious man who called himself Dante Alexios. She did not think of Bishop Danvers or her husband, really, or even of herself. She thought of their son. Only Victor, Jr. He was the only one who mattered now.
SUNRISE
The rim of the slowly rising Sun was like molten lava pouring heat into the tractor’s little bubble of a cab. Yamagata saw that Alexios was steering directly toward the sunrise and the yawning rift.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
Turning the lumbering vehicle just before it reached the edge of the fault line, Alexios leaned on the brakes. The tractor ground to a halt.
“We get off here,” he said.
“I thought—”
“Let’s stretch our legs a little,” said Alexios, popping the hatch on his side of the glassteel bubble.
Although he felt nothing inside his spacesuit, Yamagata realized that all the air in the cabin immediately rushed into the vacuum outside. Alexios turned back toward him and tapped the keypad on the wrist of his spacesuit. Yamagata heard the man’s voice in his helmet earphones, “We’ll have to use the suit radios to speak to one another now.”
“You intend to kill me, then?” Yamagata asked as he opened the hatch on his side.
“You murdered four million people,” Alexios said, his voice strangely soft, almost amused. “I think executing you is a simple act of justice.”
“I see.” Yamagata clambered slowly down from his seat to the hard, rock-strewn, airless ground. I’m in the hands of a madman, he thought.
“In case you’re wondering,” Alexios said as he walked around the tractor toward Yamagata, “your suit radio won’t reach the base. Not without the tractor’s relay, and I’ve disabled the tractor’s outgoing frequency.”
“I can’t call for help, then,” said Yamagata.
“Neither can I.” With that, Alexios touched a control stud on his suit and the tractor started up again, silently churning up puffs of dust from the ground, and started trundling away from them.
“You’re not going with it?” Yamagata asked, surprised.
“No, I’ll stay here with you. We’ll die together. Back at the base they’ll see the tractor’s beacon and think everything is normal. Until it’s too late.”
Yamagata almost laughed. “This is a simple act of justice?”
“Maybe not so simple, after all,” Alexios agreed. “I’ve been dispensing justice for several days, but I don’t quite seem to have the proper knack for it.”
Alexios stepped closer to him. Yamagata backed away a few steps, then realized the edge of the fault rift was close behind him.
“Dispensing justice?” he asked, stalling for time to think. “What do you mean?”
“Molina and Danvers,” Alexios answered easily. “I’m the one who brought those Martian rocks here. I led Molina to them and he took the bait like the fool that he is.”
“And Danvers?”
“I put the blame on him. Now they’re both heading back to Earth in disgrace.”
“You’ve deliberately ruined their careers.”
“They deserve it. They destroyed my life, the two of them. They took everything I had.”
He’s insane, Yamagata told himself. The tractor was dwindling slowly, lumbering off toward the disturbing close edge of the horizon.
“Message for Mr. Yamagata.” He heard the voice of the base controller in his helmet’s earphones. “From the captain of the freighter Xenobia.”
Alexios spread his gloved hands. “We can’t reply to them.”
“Then what—”
The controller didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. “Here’s the incoming message, sir.”
Yamagata heard a soft click and then a different voice spoke. “Sir! I apologize for interrupting whatever you are doing, illustrious sir. The captain thought you would want to know that one of the passengers aboard ship has committed suicide. Bishop Danvers slit his throat in the lavatory of his cabin. The place is a bloody mess.”
Yamagata stared hard at Alexios, but only saw his own reflection in the heavily tinted visor of the spacesuit’s helmet.
“Thank you for the information,” he said, in a near whisper.
“They can’t hear you,” Alexios reminded him.
The base controller’s voice returned. “Is there any reply to the message, Mr. Yamagata? Sir? Can you hear me?”
Alexios walked to the rim of the rift. Damn! he said to himself. If they don’t hear anything back they’ll start worrying about us.
“Mr. Yamagata? Mr. Alexios? Reply, please.”
If they send out a rescue team they’ll go after the tractor, Alexios thought. It won’t be until they find that we’re not on it that they’ll start hunting for us.
He gripped the arm of Yamagata’s suit. “Come on, we’re going to take a little walk.”
Yamagata resisted. “Where do you want to take me?”
Pointing with his free hand, Alexios said, “Down there, to the bottom of the rift. With the Sun coming up you’ll be more comfortable sheltered from direct sunlight. It’ll be cooler down there, only a couple of hundred degrees Celsius in the shade.”
“You wish to prolong my execution?”
“I wish to prevent our being rescued,” Alexios replied.
Yamagata stepped to the edge of the rift. Inside the spacesuit it was difficult to see straight down, but the chasm’s slope didn’t seem terribly steep. Rugged, though, he saw. A slip of the foot could send me tumbling down to the bottom. If that didn’t rupture my suit and kill me quickly, it might damage my radiators and life support pack enough to let me boil in my own juices.
He looked back at Alexios, standing implacably next to him. “After you,” Alexios said, gesturing toward the edge of the rift.
Yamagata hesitated. Even with only the slimmest arc of the Sun’s huge disk above the nearby horizon a flood of heat was sweeping across the barren ground. Dust motes sparkled and jumped like fireflies, suddenly electrified by the Sun’s powerful ionizing radiance. Both men stared at the barren dusty ground suddenly turned manic as the particles danced and jittered in the newly risen Sun. Slowly they fell to the ground again, as if exhausted, their electrical charges neutralized at last.
They looked out to the horizon and gazed briefly at the blazing edge of the Sun; even through the deeply tinted visors of their helmets its overpowering brilliance made their eyes water. The Sun’s rim was dancing with flaming prominences that writhed like tortured spirits in hell.
Yamagata heard his spacesuit groan and ping in the surging, all-encompassing heat. He looked down into the chasm again, and the after-image of the Sun burned in his vision. Turning around slowly in the cumbersome suit, he started down the pebbly, cracked slope backwards. Alexios followed him. It was hard, exhausting work. Yamagata’s booted foot slipped on a loose stone and he went skittering down the pebbly slope several meters before grinding to a stop. Alexios came skidding down beside him.
“Are you all right?”
It took Yamagata several panting breaths before he could reply, “What difference does it make?”
Alexios grunted. “You’re all right, then.”
Yamagata nodded inside his helmet. The suit seemed intact; its life support equipment still functioned.<
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Both men were soaked with perspiration by the time they reached the bottom of the rift. Yamagata looked up and saw that the edge of the chasm was ablaze with harsh light.
“Sunrise,” said Alexios. “You come from the land of the rising sun, don’t you?”
Yamagata decided he wouldn’t dignify that snide remark with a reply. Instead he said, “The message for me was that Bishop Danvers has committed suicide.”
Silence for several heartbeats. Then Alexios said, “I didn’t expect that.”
“He slit his throat. Very bloody, from the description.”
“I imagine it would be.”
“You are responsible for his death.”
Again a long wait before Alexios replied, “I suppose I am, in a way.”
“In a way?” Yamagata jeered. “You planted false evidence and accused him falsely. As a result he killed himself. Murder, it seems to me. Or was that an execution, too?”
“He was a weak man,” Alexios said. His voice sounded tight, brittle, in Yamagata’s earphones.
“Weak or strong, he is dead because of you.”
No reply.
Yamagata decided to twist the knife. “I am not a Christian, of course, but isn’t it true that in your religion killing one man is just as hideous a sin as killing millions?”
Alexios immediately snapped, “I’m not a Christian, either.”
“Ah, no? But do you feel any guilt for the death of Bishop Danvers?”
“He destroyed my life! Him and Molina. He got what he deserved.”
Yamagata nodded inside his helmet. “You feel the guilt, don’t you?”
“No,” Alexios snapped. Then he raised his hand and pointed to the steep wall of the chasm. Yamagata saw that the slim line of glaring sunlight made the rift’s edge look molten, so brilliant that it hurt his eyes to look up there.
“In five or six hours we’ll be in the direct sun. A few hours after that our life support systems will run out of air. Then all the guilts, all the debts, they’ll be paid. For both of us.”
VALLEY OF DEATH
Alexios could not see Yamagata’s face as they stood together in the bottom of the fault rift. I might as well be looking at a statue, he thought. A faceless, silent statue.
But then Yamagata stirred, came to life. He began walking down the rough uneven floor of the chasm, heading in the direction opposite to the path of the unoccupied tractor. Alexios realized he was heading back toward the base.
“You’ll never make it,” he said. “The base is more than thirty klicks from here. You’ll run out of air long before then.”
“Perhaps so,” Yamagata replied, sounding almost cheerful in Alexios’s helmet earphones. “However, I find it easier on my nerves to be active, rather than standing by passively waiting to die.”
Despite himself, Alexios started after him. “You don’t expect to be rescued, I hope.”
“When I was in Chota Lamasery the lamas tried to teach me to accept my fate. I was a great disappointment to them.”
“I imagine you were.”
They walked along the broken, stony ground for several minutes. The walls of the rift rose steeply on both sides higher than their heads, higher even than the fins of the radiators that projected from their life support packs. The ground was hard, cracked here and there. Pebbles and larger rocks were strewn along the bottom, although not as plentifully as they were up on the surface. The planetologists would have a field day here, Alexios thought. Then he grinned at his inadvertent pun.
Yamagata stumbled up ahead of him and Alexios automatically grabbed him in both gloved hands, steadying him.
“Thank you,” said Yamagata.
Alexios muttered, “De nada.” Sweat dripped into his eyes, stinging. He felt perspiration dripping along his ribs. “I forgot to put on a sweatband,” he said, wishing he could rub his eyes, mop his brow.
Yamagata made no reply, but Alexios could hear the man’s steady breathing through the suit radio.
“I think the lamas made some impression on you,” Alexios said, after almost half an hour of silent, steady, sweaty walking.
“Ah so?”
“You’re taking this all very stoically.”
“Not at all,” Yamagata replied. “I am walking toward the base. I am doing what I can to get myself rescued. I have no intention of dying without a struggle.”
“It won’t do you any good.”
“Perhaps not. But still, one must try. You didn’t accept your fate when you were exiled, did you?”
That brought a flash of anger back from Alexios’s memory. “No, I guess I didn’t.”
“Yet now you are committing suicide,” Yamagata said. “You could have thrown me out of the tractor and returned to the base alone. Why give up your own life?”
“I have nothing left to live for.”
“Nonsense! You are still a young man. You have many productive years ahead of you.”
Thinking of Lara, of the skytower, of Danvers lying slumped in a ship’s lavatory splattered with his own blood, Alexios repeated, “I have nothing left to live for.”
“Not even the stars?” Yamagata asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The reason I came to Mercury, the real purpose behind building these power satellites, is to use them to propel a starship. Perhaps many starships.”
Without a heartbeat’s pause Alexios countered, “The reason I lived, the real purpose behind my life, was to build a tower that gave the human race cheap and easy access to space. You destroyed that. Finished it forever. They’ll never build another skytower. They’re too frightened of what happened to the first one.”
“And for this you would deny the stars to humankind?”
“I’m not interested in humankind anymore. The stars will still be there a hundred years from now. A thousand.”
“But we could do it now!” Yamagata insisted. “In a few years!”
“We could have been riding the skytower to orbit for pennies per pound by now.”
Yamagata grunted. “I believe you have a saying about two wrongs?”
“You’re a murderer.”
“So are you.”
“No, I’m an executioner,” Alexios insisted.
“A convenient excuse.” Yamagata wondered what Alexios would say if he revealed that Nobuhiko had destroyed the skytower. He shook his head inside the bubble helmet. Never, he told himself. Nobu must be protected at all costs. Even at the cost of my own life. My son has done a great wrong, but killing him will not make things right.
On they walked. With each step it seemed to grow hotter. Down at the bottom of the fault rift they were in shadow, yet the Sun’s glaring brilliance crept inexorably down the chasm’s wall, as slow and inescapable as fate. They could see the glaring line of sunlit rock inching down toward them; it made the rock face look almost molten hot. The heat increased steadily, boiling the juices out of them. Alexios heard his suit fans notch up to a higher pitch, and then a few minutes later go still higher. Even so he was drenched with perspiration, blinking constantly to keep the stinging sweat out of his eyes. He licked his lips and tasted salt. Wish I had a margarita, he thought. Then he realized how foolish that was. Maybe I’m getting delirious.
Yamagata kept moving doggedly along.
“Let’s rest a couple of minutes,” Alexios said to him.
“You rest, if you wish. I’m not tired.”
Not tired? Alexios thought that Yamagata was simply being macho, unwilling or perhaps unable to show weakness to a man he took to be an inferior. He’s older than I am, Alexios told himself. A lot older. Of course, he must have had all sorts of rejuve therapies. Or maybe he’s just too damned stubborn to admit he’s tired, too.
The heat was getting bad. Despite the suit’s insulation and internal air conditioning, Alexios was sloshing. His legs felt shaky, his vision blurred from the damned sweat. He could feel the Sun’s heat pressing him down, like the breath of a blast furnace, like a torrent
of molten steel pouring over him. Still Yamagata plowed ahead steadily, as if nothing at all was bothering him. Blast it all, Alexios thought. If he can do it, so can I. And he trudged along behind the older man.
Until, hours later, the harsh unfiltered rays of the Sun reached the fins of his suit’s radiator.
DEATH WISHES
Yamagata stumbled, up ahead of him. Alexios reached for the spacesuited figure but he was too slow. Yamagata pitched forward and, in the dreamlike slow-motion of Mercury’s low gravity, hit the ground: knees first, then his outstretched hands, finally his body and helmeted head.
Alexios heard him grunt as if he’d been hit by a body blow. The rift was narrow here; there was barely room for him to step beside the fallen man without scraping his radiator fins on the steep rocky wall of the chasm.
“Are you all right?”
“If I were all right I’d be on my feet,” Yamagata retorted, “instead of lying here on my belly.”
The bottom of the rift was half in sunlight now, the huge rim of the Sun peering down at them now like a giant unblinking eye, like the mouth of a red-hot oven. Alexios was so hot inside his suit that he felt giddy, weak. Blinking away sweat, he peered at Yamagata’s backpack. It looked okay. Radiator fins undamaged. No loose hoses.
“I can’t seem to move my legs,” Yamagata said.
“I’ll help you up.”
It was difficult to bend in the hard-shell suit. Alexios tried to reach down and grasp Yamagata by the arm.
“Put your hands beneath you and push up,” he said. “I’ll help.”
They both tried, grunting, moaning with strain. After several minutes Yamagata was still on his belly and Alexios sank down to a sitting position beside him, exhausted, totally drained.
“It’s… not going to … work,” he panted.
Yamagata said. “My nose is bleeding. I must have bumped it on the visor when I fell.”
“Let’s rest a few minutes, then try again.”