Only the fact that it was a Sunday gave Christopher hope of catching a booth free. Had he waited until Monday, he would have had to settle for using his entry terminal. But waiting did not seem like a good idea. Saturday night’s chill had persisted into Sunday, with Jessie vanishing without explanation soon after rising. He stayed in the house and spied on her, monitoring her skimmer’s locator and Jessie’s family subaccount long enough to follow her to LifeCare and see a health services charge appear.
Then guilt took over, and he left himself, partly to avoid being there when Jessie returned, as least until he had satisfied the one request he could cheerfully accommodate. He took the tram in and walked to Building 16 from the stop, risking the bright poison sun after three days of the gray clouds, wind, and soaking rains of Tropical Storm Jennifer.
“Staff. Any booths open?” he asked, waggling his identification badge at the scheduler.
“Sure,” the woman said without looking up. “Three of them. Take your pick.”
He settled in 11, waited until the door glided shut, and asked for Biographical.
“Ready.”
“Find Jessica Alexis Cichuan.”
The hyper’s response was ordinarily instantaneous, but the table remained black for a long two seconds. Then the system chirped and the results came up:
. JUANITA INEZ CICHUAN, changed to JESSICA ALEXIS CICHUAN April 9, 2085 FHS Registry #TD-0943-3912 b. Brownsville, Texas, 06:26 CDT, April 9, 2070
• Mother: Dolores Maria Cichuan (deceased)
• Father: Duane Allen Kent
• Siblings: Luis Cichuan
“Huh,” Christopher said in surprise. “She changed her name. Find English equivalents, Juanita, Inez.”
JUANITA —>> pet form of Spanish JUANA
JUANA —>> Spanish of • JANE • JOAN
INEZ —>> Spanish of AGNES
“Huh,” Christopher said again. A butterfly named Joan Agnes. No wonder— “Return. More.”
END OF THREAD
“Visual.”
NOT AVAILABLE
Frowning, Christopher opened the door and walked back down the corridor to the Testing desk. “Are all the bio stacks up?” he asked.
“For what population?”
“Contemporary.”
The woman turned to her terminal. “They’re all up.”
“You’re sure?”
“Unless they’re lying to me. Problem?”
“I guess not,” Christopher said uncertainly. He retreated back to booth 11 and cocooned himself there with his doubts. Briefly, he considered looking up Jessie’s parents, but decided not to. It’ll be hard enough pretending I don’t know one family secret. He heard himself telling Jessie, “They know your name and when and where you were born. Sorry, that’s it.” No comfort there. Better to say nothing. Better to lie—
“Find Loi Lindholm.”
The full expanse of the table was filled by the response. There was a still photo, life size, flattering. From San Francisco, maybe two years ago—about the time I met her, he thought. Before she cut her hair short. Before the cheek tattoo. There was a lengthy biography, with her apprenticeship to Rolf Dannenberg highlighted. There was a list of Loi’s major sculpts, a partial list of her clients, an exhibition record. And there were thirty or more bullets noting where more information was available. A rich thread.
Looking at the picture, Christopher realized belatedly that while living in San Francisco, where self-definition by dress and demeanor were survival arts, Loi had stood out by being defiantly conventional. But since coming to Houston, as conservative a major city as remained in the United States, she had taken pains to be anything but conventional. The raked haircut. The hammered silver collar. The tattoo, a delicate thing of ink and silicone. The open trine, her young man on one arm, her young woman on the other.
Playing to her audience. Playing the iconoclast artist. Playing the Lady From the West. Give them a show. But looking at the picture, he also realized how much he preferred the way she had looked then to the way she looked now, and how little say he had had about the changes.
That was an unhappy thought, and he had had enough of those for one weekend.
“Clear,” he said, and the table blanked.
He tried to think about Jessie and what he could do. There were mechanisms for correcting errors, but this was not an error. Jessie had done nothing to earn her any larger place in the archives of her species. It was not a slight. It was the truth, but one she was poorly equipped to either overlook or accept.
It had not been a trivial request. She would not forget. It might be a few weeks before she would ask again, but she would ask again. It’s not fair, she had said. I don’t want to be forgotten.
But she would be. And Loi would not. Loi lived through her creations. A trick of transcendence, the artist creating the art, the art re-creating the artist.
Jessie would find no comfort in that. But if she looked, she would find a great deal of company. Within their circle of friends there were two, perhaps three, who would merit a longer notice in the hyper. The rest, himself included, were merely part of the census. This many born this day, that many died.
A lie invited—but he had no ammunition with which to lie. He racked his memory for details she had offered in conversation these last few months, and then gave up, knowing that to be caught in a lie would be worse than telling the truth. He would tell her matter-of-factly, and show her a dump of his own entry so that she would know she was not alone. Loi was an exception, was exceptional. As was William McCutcheon.
If it was painful, well, he knew what that felt like. He would help her grow through it. Pain was a pointed lesson in living, a reality check for the beclouded.
“Find Christopher Thomas McCutcheon.”
The entry was as it had been the first time he looked himself up in the hyper. He earned one extra line for being staff, one extra line for having had both donor and host mothers, lost one for having been content with his name, but otherwise it was a copy of Jessie’s, simple, short, and shallow.
He was pleased.
But only for a moment.
Then, perversely, he began to think about what was missing from the display. He had earned two degrees, in Salem’s grueling general studies program and Stanford’s comparatively easy Information Sciences. He had won a Hastings Award at sixteen, a songwriting contest at nineteen. He had signed a marriage contract and dissolved it. He had written an essay for the Oregonian, played guitar on KSFO’s Tunnel Visions. And more. A whole life, not just a moment of birth and a diagram of blood relations.
But there it was:
CHRISTOPHER THOMAS McCUTCHEON FHS Registry #OS-1029-0349 b. Vernonia, Oregon, 23:40 PST, May 16, 2067
• Mother: [Donor] Sharron Ria (Aldritch) McCutcheon
(deceased)
[Host] Deryn Glenys Falconer
• Father: William Lowell McCutcheon
• Siblings: Lynn-Anne
Aldritch Library Staff, Diaspora Project, Houston
“Print and clear,” Christopher said.
He took the dump and left the booth, wondering what was wrong. He had expected it to be brief. He had seen it before. What he didn’t expect was that, this time, he would care.
CHAPTER 10
—UGC—
“… a few seconds of death…”
Flying into the Kasigau Launch Center, Mikhail Dryke could not fail to note how dramatically different the company’s Kenyan spaceport was from its Brazilian kin. Though both served the same function and embraced the same basic facilities, the facilities were counterparts, not twins.
The difference began with the setting. Kasigau had taken over not former rain forest, but the nyika, the wilderness of dry mountain highlands southeast of Tsavo National Park. This was land that for centuries had known drought and famine better than rain and plenty. Land that had been picked over but rarely fought over, for the prize was too meager. Allied had paved its runways and sprawled its structures
across a landscape which had scarcely any ecology to disrupt. Taita’s elephants and rhinos were already long gone when the construction crews arrived.
At Prainha, the incredible guy-and-column mountain of the launch tower rose nearly four kilometers above the river plateau. The tower was the unchallenged centerpiece of the Para. At night, its fairy-castle lights were visible from Macapa and Belem, and even from ships in the Atlantic off the coast of the Ilha de Marajo. The nearest natural feature that could compare with it was half a continent away.
The aperture of Kasigau’s launch tower stood as far above sea level as Prainha’s, above as much energy-stealing atmosphere. But it stood not on river plateau, but atop Kasigau Rock, a small round-topped mountain. Consequently, the tower’s central beam tube was half the height, and the shrunken fairy castle clung to the contours of the mount like a great spindly-legged insect which had paused there in its wanderings.
And if that were not enough to diminish it, there was Kilimanjaro, its dramatic volcanic profile rising from the Masai Steppe to the west. Inbound to Kasigau, the Celestron slicing down through the high thin air, Dryke had been gifted with a long look at Kilimanjaro’s steep western face and rugged snowcapped summit. Against that memory, the Kasigau cannon looked like the unfinished skeleton of a mountain, a child’s backyard imitation of the real thing.
“That’s one heck of a scenic outlook you folks built for yourselves,” he said to the air controller.
“Only view of Kilimanjaro anywhere in the nyika,” came the answer. “Four thousand meters up and not a cloud in sight. Not that anyone ever gets to enjoy it, except the tube monkeys and mirror mechs.”
Dryke understood. For Kasigau was strictly freight, its ten-gigawatt compound laser array hurling a steady procession of pilotless T-3 capsules on one-way journeys into orbit. No pilots’ colony, no astronaut union or joybirds here. Kasigau belonged to the working class, to the high-energy laser techs and the mirror mechanics, the loaders and launch bosses of the self-named “HELcrews.” The complex mechanical ballet they performed, sending a fully loaded T-3 skyward every twenty-two minutes, day and night, was the only show in town.
One launch every twenty-two minutes. Almost three per hour. Sixty-five a day, lifting thirteen hundred tonnes of electrochemicals, microphysics, and human consumables from ground to orbit. But even at that pace, Kasigau was running at less than fifty percent of design capacity. Prainha was regularly topping ninety launches a day, with an amazing peak record of one hundred twenty-two.
Most of the difference was infrastructure. Prainha was thirty-five years old, mature, settled. Kasigau was just thirteen years old, gangly and growing. The airways, roadways, railways, and seaways which fed it were still unequal to the task of supporting Kasigau’s design capacity. Especially the seaways. Even with the recent upgrade of the railhead and freight handling, the port at Mombasa was overwhelmed.
The transshipment bottleneck was not, at heart, a security problem. But Site Director Yvonne Havens was looking to Dryke for a solution all the same. What Havens wanted was to stream-line the cargo security procedures enough to boost the schedule to eighty or more cycles a day. To Dryke’s annoyance, Sasaki had endorsed the request, obliging Dryke to come to Kenya and study the options.
“Most of the company’s reserve launch capacity is there, at Kasigau,” Sasaki had reminded him. “The long-term solution is here, with the new launcher proposed for Almeirim. But the company can’t justify the capital investment in a third spaceport under present conditions. So we must look at Kasigau. A single additional lift a day means another seven thousand metric tons a year. We can use the capacity, especially since the mix here must shift toward passengers when we begin ferrying colonists to Memphis.”
Havens was a plump fast-talking black woman who wore the wound-wire bracelets and patterned cheek scars of the Rendille, the most popular of Kenya’s revival tribalisms. Using her smile as a commentary, she underlined Sasaki’s point while she and Dryke toured the spaceport together.
“Kasigau is insurance—leverage,” she said as they walked through the cargo assembly center. “We’re what keeps the Brazilians from jacking the transshipment taxes on Prainha. We’re what helps keep the can drivers in line. We could fly T-2s out of here with no one at the stick, and they know it. But it’s all a bluff if we can’t run at capacity.”
“If you compromise security and have to close down for a few months because of a hit, you won’t even have a bluff.”
“I don’t want our security compromised,” she said, smiling. “I want it factored out of the traffic stream.”
The conversation continued in the skimmer. “I looked at your incident log before I came here,” Dryke said. “The cargo inspectors stopped a half dozen bombs and booby traps in the last six months. Your perimeter defense smothered a shoulder SAM and two planes so far this year.”
“I’m very proud of our security team. Homeworld hasn’t touched us.”
“Homeworld hasn’t tried. All you’ve seen so far are amateurs. Shiftas. Bandits.”
“Amateurs do not own shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles,” she said stiffly.
“Anyone can own one, if they’ve got a hundred thousand dollars and a contact in Chile or South Africa,” Dryke said. “And besides, only an amateur would try to use a shoulder SAM against a T-ship. You’ve got ten gigawatts of laser energy to play with and a mirror system up in the castle that can split a dozen secondary beams off the main beam. Anything that gets within a thousand meters of a capsule on the beam is going to be fried. I’m not worried about someone shooting down a T-ship. It’s a surprise package in the cargo that worries me.”
They had reached the operations center entrance, but Havens made no move to leave the skimmer. “It’s a trade-off, Mr. Dryke,” she said, smiling. “I need another hundred tonnes a day. I could use another four hundred. Balance that against a slightly greater risk of an accident—”
“Not an accident. A terrorist hit.”
The smile widened. “You’re not the only one who’s been reading, Mr. Dryke. I’ve looked at your report on Jeremiah and the Homeworld. They’re not terrorists. They’re protesters. They’re playing a public opinion game. They’ve never killed anyone. They’re not going to strike blindly at Kasigau. And you’ve already said they can’t knock down a can. So why are you tying my handlers up in knots?”
“To make sure that Jeremiah isn’t tempted by opportunity.”
“There are no guarantees, Mr. Dryke. Make it difficult for him. That will be enough.”
Dryke frowned. “I won’t know if I can agree with that until I’ve seen more.”
“What do you want to see next?”
“I think Mombasa.”
“We can go there now, if you like.”
“Now is fine,” Dryke said. “But I’ll go by myself, thank you.”
“As you prefer,” she said, cracking the skimmer’s door open. She climbed out, then turned and squatted to peer back inside at Dryke. “Please try to remember, Mr. Dryke—it’s not that we’re reckless. We’re desperate. And that changes the rules sometimes.”
Dryke nodded. “For Jeremiah, too,” he said.
In the choppy waters of Formosa Bay, two hundred kilometers from the fences of Kasigau, a small fishing boat flying the flag of the East African Union rode a sea anchor against a gentle breeze. The nameless craft had made its way up the coast from Zanzibar over the last sixteen hours, running the Pemba Channel under a blazing midday sun and passing Mombasa in the night.
It was rigged and outfitted for anchovy fishing, with fine-mesh purse seines, brails, and buoys. But none of the five men aboard were fishermen.
Throughout the morning, one of the five had stood on the bow, scanner raised to his eyes, watching the freighters from Kasigau tear across the sky. The launch trajectory for the T-ships carried them nearly overhead, bright sparks against the blue sky, already two hundred kilometers up and moving two thousand meters per second, racing for orbit.
The column of light on which the freighters climbed was invisible. Only at its base, where the beam shattered stray dust particles into clouds of ions, could it be seen, a pale glowing needle anchored to the top of the launch tower, barely visible on the far horizon, and pointed unerringly at the streaking spark of the spacecraft.
While one watched, the others removed the nets which had concealed the massive sea-green canister lashed against the stern gunwale. The canister was as long as the boat was wide and half a meter in diameter. It was heavy enough to take the concentrated efforts of all four men, aided by the boat’s net winch, to raise it off the deck and carefully lower it into the water off the stern.
There it turned end-up and bobbed like a half-filled bottle, a bare thirty cents showing above the gentle waves. A wire-rope tether stopped it from floating away with the light current.
A second man joined the first on the bow. “Everything’s ready.”
“The Zodiac ready?”
“It’ll take five minutes. Do you have the mark?”
“I have it. Easy as skeet-shooting.”
“I’ll make the call.”
In a tiny belowdeck cabin, he hunched over a small military comlink, addressed its output at a private satellite in synchronous orbit over Sumatera, and sent a sixty-character code burst. He had no idea where the message went from there, only that some ten seconds later he had his answer.
He shut down the comlink and stowed it, then rejoined the man on the bow. “Jeremiah says the 2:20 and 3:05 launches are the best targets of opportunity, if we can wait.”
The man with the scanner swept the shoreline, the sea. “Six months to get this far,” he said at last. “We can wait. We can wait at least that long to do it right.”
Mikhail Dryke’s initial tour of Mombasa had yielded little of value.
The Quiet Pools Page 10