“That’s not true,” Christopher said reflexively.
“Look at the way you got jealous about Loi and me making love,” Jessie answered. “You got angry at her for being with me. You didn’t get angry at me for being with her.”
“That’s not what that was about.”
“It’s okay,” Jessie said. “I understand. You two have the most history together. It’s natural. And I’m not saying I don’t think you both love me. But I need more if I’m going to be happy. I need someone who belongs to me the way you two belong to each other.”
“I spend a lot of time with you,” he protested. “This last month I know I’ve seen you more than I’ve seen Loi. I even think we’ve made love more often than Loi and I have.”
“When it suits you,” Jessie said with a sudden chill. “When it suits you, you’re more than ready.”
“Be fair, Jessie—”
“There’s a perspective problem,” Loi was saying. “Christopher, you have a full-time job and a time-consuming hobby. You spend a lot of what’s left over with Jessie. But that’s a much smaller part of her life than it is of yours.”
“Am I supposed to not work?” he asked indignantly. “Are you saying you feel neglected, too?”
“Jessie and I have different needs,” Loi said. “You know that I’ve never expected you to fill all of mine. I don’t feel neglected. You’ve always been just what I wanted you to be. But I’m not the one who’s unhappy.”
Christopher could not keep his expression from souring as he looked to Jessie. “I think this is really low, for you to lobby Loi behind my back. We talked about this once already.”
“No, we didn’t.”
He snapped, “We did, too, when Loi was in Geneva. Did she tell you about that?” The last was aimed at Loi.
“This is a different subject,” Jessie said.
“What?”
She looked down. “You were right about the baby. I wasn’t being fair to you that night.”
“Well—” Christopher was nonplussed. “Then what are we talking about?”
“I want to know if I can propose a new addition to the family.”
Christopher felt a sudden wave of panic, which he made a noble effort to suppress. “I don’t understand something. Is this a theoretical discussion? Or are we talking about someone specific?”
“Don’t be dense, Christopher,” said Loi. “Jessie would like to ask John Fields over Saturday for dinner and a discussion.”
“The cyclist? From the club?”
“Yes. He was here once—you met him.”
“Are you fucking him?” he asked, incredulous.
“Not yet. He wants all of us to talk before we get involved. He’s very principled.”
The door to Christopher’s sympathies, which had been weakly propped open, suddenly slammed shut. “No,” he said harshly, jumping to his feet.
“Chris—” Loi began warningly.
“No dinner, no discussion, no John Fields. We’re just learning how to be three. We’re not bringing someone else in.”
“Chris, if Jessie is unhappy, we may lose her,” Loi said. “Is that what you want?”
“What does she have to be unhappy about? She’s had everything handed to her. She said it herself—she’s got freedom, privacy, a comfortable home, money—our money. She’s got time enough to go cycling every day, to watch every damn crier made in the last century, to go looking for sparking buddies in every neighborhood inside the loop—”
“Christopher,” Loi said sharply.
“I thought you liked John,” Jessie said meekly.
“I like John all right for somebody I spent ten minutes talking to once,” Christopher said. “But that’s a long way from saying, ‘Sure, come on, move in, by the way, Jessie likes it hard.’ ”
“I didn’t ask—”
“You’d better figure out what’s wrong with you. You’re grabbing for people like zoners grab for pills. First Loi, then a baby, now John—people aren’t teddy bears, goddammit, you can’t start a fucking collection. Does John know what you’re going to want from him? Does he know that six months from now you’re going to whisper, ‘Guess what, I’m fertile,’ just as he’s about to come?”
Christopher was shouting at the end, but barely aware of it. The room was suddenly chaos—Jessie crying, cringing, Loi shouting and trying to drag him away from her. He shook off her grip and turned on her, his angry words a snarl. Loi grabbed at his wrist again, and only then did he realize that he had been shaking a clenched fist at her, at Jessie, that his body was coiled and charged to strike at them, to smash them down.
In horror and shock, he backed away, dropping awkwardly into the chair where he’d been sitting. Jessie took that moment to escape, running up the stairway and disappearing into her room.
“Jesus,” Christopher whispered, covering his mouth with his hands and staring at the carpet.
“Where did that come from?” Loi asked, her voice hard and unsympathetic.
“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “You know I’ve never done that before—”
“Once is enough.” She frowned unhappily. “I never thought I’d see you come on like lord and master of a feudal castle. What in the world is going on with you?”
“I—I just got a little too wound up. The way Jessie’s been—”
“You can’t blame this on her.”
“Everything I said is true,” he insisted. “I just—didn’t say it very well.”
Loi shook her head dismissively. “I don’t think you said one word about what you really feel.”
“We’ve got what we need right here,” he said, looking up at her with a plaintive expression. “If we have to make some adjustments, all right, we’ll make them. But bringing someone else in is crazy. That’s going to change everything.”
“Don’t you realize that you just changed everything? You lost control at just the idea of talking about expanding the family. You went so blood-crazy that you were ready to hurt us to have your way. That isn’t healthy, and you know it.”
“I don’t have to do this and I’m not going to,” he said stubbornly. “You can’t guilt me into saying yes.”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell what you have to do,” she said softly but firmly. “If you want to stay part of this family, you’re going to have to go to an R.T. and start working on this.”
Christopher was numbly silent for a long time. “This scares me, Loi. I don’t know if I want to know what’s inside me that could make me do something like this.”
“You scared us.”
“I know,” he said.
Loi studied him. “I’m going upstairs to be with Jessie,” she said finally. “Let me know what you decide.”
“I think she needs to go, too,” he said as she started away.
“You’re not in any position to set conditions,” Loi said pointedly.
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. Get your own house in order, Christopher. Then maybe your opinions on Jessie will matter to me again.”
CHAPTER 13
—UUC—
“… for the silent Earth.”
Eyes closed, Hiroko Sasaki endured the final touch-up of her makeup and powder. The corporation’s image doctor, a round-bellied American named Edgar Donovan, hovered nearby, fretting.
“You have to remember that no matter how much Minor smiles at you, he’s not your friend,” Donovan said. “The smiles don’t go out to the audience. When they cut to him, it’ll be for a raised eyebrow or a frown.”
“I will remember.”
“And don’t be surprised if he tries something to provoke you. You took a lot of power out of his hands by insisting on a live interview. He’s going to try to get that back.”
“I fully expect so.”
“I’m not saying you were wrong, mind you,” Donovan added. “The board’s delighted that you finally agreed to come out of the shadows and stand up for the company. And I’m delighted with the c
onditions—live, ninety minutes, and here at Prainha. That’s as close as we can get to a level playing field. Which tells us how much RCA wanted this one.”
“Yes,” Sasaki said. The makeup artist stepped back, her work finally complete, and Sasaki opened her eyes. She looked around the inner office until she found Mikhail Dryke, a silent spectator in a window well. “Are you ready?”
“We’re ready,” Dryke said.
Sasaki smiled a brave smile. “Then I will go face the jaguar.”
Except for his eyes, Julian Minor, senior correspondent for RCA Telecasting’s Newstime, looked more like a terrier than a jaguar. Barely 170 centimeters tall, with a round-heeled walk and close-cropped fuzzy beard, he seemed unequal to the attention he received when he entered a room.
But on camera, the walk and the height were irrelevant, and the beard became a mask which served only to focus attention on Minor’s eyes. His eyes unmasked the hunter in him. They could punctuate a comment with an angry flash, puncture a defense with a skeptical smirk. From just a meter or two away, the challenging intensity of his gaze could paralyze thought.
It was a candidate for the Russian presidency who had given Minor his nickname. Emerging from what would be a career-ending interview with Minor, Sterenkov had complained bitterly that to look across into Minor’s eyes was like looking into the tall grass and seeing the gleam of a jaguar’s eyes. In time, Minor’s reputation itself became a weapon; later victims sometimes destroyed their own credibility simply by trying to avoid his gaze.
For all that, Minor enjoyed a reputation for fairness. He was tough, direct, and aggressive; if you were strong, direct, and honest, you could survive, and might even earn a sympathetic hearing.
Or so Donovan promised.
Centered and calm, Hiroko Sasaki sat in the bergere armchair Donovan had chosen for her (“You disappear in a big, soft couch”) and waited for the interview to begin. On a monitor a few meters away and angled toward her, the introductory backgrounder on the Diaspora Project and the Singapore “disaster” was continuing.
Almost certainly, the backgrounder was infuriatingly slanted and misleading. But Sasaki was not watching. She had already succeeded in making herself not see the screen, had drawn in her focus until it and the camera operator and the Skylink engineer disappeared. Once the interview began, there would be no temptation to watch herself.
Minor looked up from his notes and smiled at her. She became a shadow and let the smile pass through her like a breeze.
“One minute,” someone said. Sasaki tugged the sleeves of her red blouse (Donovan again: “Dress international. Let’s not play to latent racism by looking ethnic”) down to her wrists, rested her elbows on the slender wooden armrests, folded her hands in her lap. The next time Minor looked up at her, she met his gaze and answered his smile with a bow of her head.
“Good evening,” he said to his camera. “This is Julian Minor in Prainha, Brazil, the busiest spaceport on the globe. Just five kilometers from where I sit, a launch cannon identical to that blamed in the tragedy in Singapore is busy hurling twenty-ton shells into the sky.
“With me is Hiroko Sasaki, Director of the Diaspora Project, a division of Allied Transcon, which owns and operates this spaceport. Director Sasaki, are we safe here? And how can you be sure?”
“No one is ever perfectly safe, anywhere, anytime, Mr. Minor,” she said smoothly. “But you are safer now than you would be waiting on a railroad platform for a train or crossing a city street. You are safer now than you were when flying from New York, to Belem last night for this interview. Every year, more than two hundred thousand people die worldwide in transportation accidents. Space flight is the safest form of transportation, and the T-ships are the safest form of space flight.”
The eyebrow arched. “Is your answer to the families of the thirty-seven dead in Singapore that they were just unlucky?”
“Mr. Minor, when I heard what happened that day, I wept,” Sasaki said. “It was a terrible moment, and one I deeply wish could have been prevented. But—”
“But you could have prevented it,” Minor pounced. “Isn’t that true? Don’t your own operating rules, Allied’s own documents, anticipate exactly the kind of failure that took place? If you knew it could happen, why didn’t you take steps to prevent it?”
Launch services were the responsibility of Allied’s Starlifter Division; Sasaki and the Diaspora Project were, properly speaking, merely their customers. But Donovan had warned her that there was no point in trying to draw fine distinctions or correct every misstatement.
“But of course, we did,” Sasaki said. “Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a perfect machine.”
“That’s certainly true of your launch cannon,” Minor said. “I have reports here of more than sixty launch failures. It seems to me that the only way you could feel safe here is not to think about it.”
Sasaki frowned. “In thirteen years of operation at Kasigau and thirty-five years here, Allied has launched more than a million pay loads. There have been just sixty-one launch aborts. And only once has an abort resulted in any loss of life. I regret the Singapore accident. But I don’t see where I need apologize for the safety record of the Kare-Kantrowitz launchers or of Allied’s Launch Services Division.”
Minor settled back in his chair. “I notice that you avoid calling these systems ‘launch cannon,’ an expression which is in such widespread colloquial use that it’s in every general lexicon. Why is that?”
“I resist the coinage,” she said. “It’s misleading.”
“Well, now, I’ve heard those launchers at work,” Minor said with a convivial smile. “They sure sound like cannon to me. Isn’t this linguistic legerdemain an attempt on your part to mask the military origins of Allied’s technology, what Jeremiah calls your bloody heritage?”
“I find an interesting irony here,” Sasaki said. “Yes, nationalist tensions drove the technologies that lifted us into space. We use high-energy lasers and tracking systems created for a ballistic missile defense. The first all-points aerospace plane was designed as a bomber-interceptor for the United States Air Force. The first space station was a Russian spy base. The first moon landing was a political power play. The first boosters began as weapons of war.”
“Then you admit—”
She did not pause. “I am prompted to wonder at times where we would be if we humans hadn’t been fighting each other tooth and nail. I am not ashamed of the pedigree of our tools. On the contrary, I think that in many cases we have redeemed the creators of those tools by finding better uses for them than those for which they were originally intended.”
“I hear in that answer exactly the kind of arrogance of which Allied stands accused—”
“Stands accused by whom, Mr. Minor?”
“By Homeworld. By public opinion. Isn’t arrogance implicit in the fact that within an hour of the Singapore tragedy, the Kasigau cannon was back in operation?”
“What’s implicit is necessity,” she said calmly. “Prainha and Kasigau are lifelines for the orbital communities—for Technica and Horizon and Aurora. All of the aerospace vehicles owned by all of the planet’s governments and corporations could not make up the shortfall if Prainha and Kasigau shut down—”
Donovan and Dryke had been monitoring the broadcast from Sasaki’s private inner office, using the center four cells of the display wall. While Donovan sat self-evidently at ease, lounging back in Sasaki’s Swendon club chair, Dryke stood, sometimes pacing by the windows, sometimes standing close enough to the display that its changing patterns of light played on his face.
“Come on, come on,” Dryke muttered to himself.
“She’s doing wonderfully,” Donovan said. “She’s absolutely fine.”
“I wasn’t talking to Hiroko,” Dryke said.
“Director Sasaki, how much has Memphis cost?” Minor was asking.
“How much does a city cost?” Sasaki replied.
“Excuse me?”
�
��Before I answer, I want to know that you’ll have something appropriate to compare it to. How much is invested in a modern community of ten or fifteen or twenty thousand? Draw a circle around one and tell me. How much in their roads, their businesses, their homes? How much in their play yards and factories? Don’t draw the circle too small—”
Attagirl,” Donovan said, sitting forward and beaming.
“—don’t leave out the land that grows their food, the quarries and mines and wells that supply their stone and water and steel. How much for the endless maintenance to keep what you’ve built whole? How do you value the man-years of unpriced labor? How much did it cost to bring it all together? How much has it cost to keep it alive?”
“Not a billion dollars a person.”
“That’s your figure, not mine,” Sasaki said. “How much, Mr. Minor? Everything that goes into Memphis has a price tag, because it’s all being done at once, by one organization. I know what building this city cost. But that number would mean nothing to you or to the audience, because you don’t know the value of what you’ve inherited yourselves.”
If she said more, neither Donovan nor Dryke heard it. There was a buzzing sound, which Dryke later decided sounded like electric butterfly wings. The four-cell display seemed to collapse toward its center, then stabilized with a new image: a red-haired, bearded man perhaps forty years old.
“Of course you know what Memphis costs,” said the image. “A good thief always knows the value of what he steals—”
“Yes,” Dryke said approvingly. “There you are.”
“What the hell is that?” Donovan demanded, brow wrinkling.
Dryke walked forward a step and studied the face. “Not what, Mr. Donovan. Who.”
“And who is—”
“Jeremiah.”
Recovering quickly from his surprise, Donovan scrutinized the display. “Any chance that’s what he really looks like?”
“Not much.”
“I thought not,” Donovan said, then looked quizzically at Dryke. “Ah—shouldn’t you be doing something?”
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