Mercury

THE SKYTOWER

Lara Tierney couldn’t catch her breath. It wasn’t merely the altitude, although at more than three thousand meters the air was almost painfully thin. What really took her breath away, though, was the sight of the tower splitting the sky as the ancient Humvee rattled and jounced along the rutted, climbing road. Mance, sitting beside her, handed her a lightweight pair of electronic binoculars.

“They’ll lock onto the tower,” he shouted over the grinding roar of the Humvee’s diesel engine. “Keep it in focus for you.”

Lara put the binoculars to her eyes and found that they really did make up for some of the bumps in the Humvee’s punishing ride. The skytower wavered briefly, then clicked into sharp focus, a thick dark column of what looked in the twin eyepieces like intertwined cables spiraling up, up, higher and higher, through the soft clouds and into the blue sky beyond, up into infinity.

“It’s like a banyan tree,” she gasped, resting the binoculars on her lap.

“What?” Mance Bracknell yelled from beside her. They were sitting together on the bench behind the driver, a short, stocky, dark-skinned mestizo who had inherited this rusting, dilapidated four-wheel-drive from his father, the senior taxi entrepreneur of the Quito airport.

Lara took several deep breaths, trying to get enough air into her lungs to raise her voice above the noise of the Humvee’s clattering diesel engine.

“It’s like a banyan tree,” she shouted back, turning toward him. “All those strands … woven together … like a … banyan.” She had to pull in more air.

“Right! That’s exactly right!” Mance yelled, his dark brown eyes gleaming excitedly. “Like a banyan tree. It’s organic! Nanotubes spun into filaments and then wrapped into coils; the coils are wound into those cables you’re looking at.”

She had never seen him so tanned, so athletically fit, so indestructibly cheerful. He looks more handsome than ever, she thought.

“Just like a banyan tree,” he repeated, straining to make himself heard. “Damned near a hundred thousand individual buckyball fibers wound into those strands. Strongest structure on the face of the Earth.”

“It’s magnificent!”

Bracknell’s smile grew wider. “We’re still almost thirty kilometers away. Wait’ll you get up close.”

Like the beanstalk of the old fairy tale, the skytower rose up into the heavens. Lara spent the jouncing, dusty ride alternately staring at it and then glancing at Mance, sitting there as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning opening his presents. He’s doing something that no one else has been able to do, she thought, and he’s succeeding. He has what he wants. And that includes me.

All during the long flight from Denver to Quito she had wondered about her impulsive promise to marry Mance Bracknell. For the past three years all she’d seen of him was his quick visits back to the States and his occasional video messages. He had gone to Ecuador, asked her to marry him, and she had agreed. She had flown to Quito once before, when Mance was just starting on the project. He was so busy, so happily buried in his work that she had quietly returned home to Colorado. He didn’t need her underfoot, and he barely raised more than a perfunctory objection when she told him she was going back home.

That was more than three years ago. I have a rival for his attentions, Lara realized. This tower he’s building. She wondered if her rival would always stand between them. But when Mance called this latest time and asked her to come to Ecuador and stay with him, she had agreed immediately even though he hadn’t mentioned a word about marriage.

Once she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport terminal in Quito, the way his whole face lit up when he caught sight of her, the frenetic way he waved to her from the other side of the glass security partition as she went through the tiresome lines at customs, the way he smiled and took her in his arms and kissed her right there in the middle of the crowded airport terminal—she knew she loved him and she would follow him wherever he went, rival and marriage and everything else fading into trivia.

“…if it works,” he was hollering over the rumble of the truck’s groaning engine, “we’ll be able to provide electricity for the whole blinking country. Maybe for Colombia, Peru, parts of Brazil, the whole blasted northwestern bloc of South America!”

“If what works?” she asked.

“Tapping the ionosphere,” he answered. Gesturing with both hands as he spoke, he shouted, “Enormous electrical energy up there, megawatts per cubic meter. At first we were worried that the tower would be like a big lightning rod, conducting down to the ground. Zap! Melt the bedrock, maybe.”

“My god,” Lara said.

“But we insulated the outer shell so that’s not a problem.”

Before Lara could think of something to say, Mance went on, “Then I started thinking about how we might tap some of that energy and use it to power the elevators.”

“Tap the ionosphere?”

“Right. It’s replenished by the solar wind. Earth’s magnetic field traps solar protons and electrons.”

“That’s what causes the northern lights,” Lara said, straining to raise her voice above the laboring diesel’s growl.

“Yep. If we work it right, we can generate enough electricity to run the blinking tower and still have enough to sell to users on the ground. We can recoup all the costs of construction by selling electrical power!”

“How much electricity can you generate?” she asked.

“What?” he yelled.

She repeated her question, louder.

He waggled his right hand. “Theoretically, the numbers are staggering. Lots of gigawatts. I’ve got Mitchell working on it.”

That’s a benefit no one thought about, Lara said to herself. The original idea of the skytower was to build an elevator that could lift people and cargo into space cheaply, for the cost of the electrical energy it takes to carry them. Pennies per pound, instead of the hundreds of dollars per pound that rocket launchings cost. Now Mance is talking about using the tower to generate electricity, as well. How wonderful!

Then a new thought struck her. “Isn’t this earthquake territory?” she shouted into Mance’s ear.

His grin didn’t fade even as much as a millimeter. He nodded vigorously. “You bet. We’ve had two pretty serious tremors already, Riehter sixes. The world’s highest active volcano is only a couple hundred kilometers or so from our site.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not for us. That’s one of the reasons we used the banyan tree design. The ground can sway or ripple all it wants to—the tower’s not anchored to the ground, just tethered lightly. It won’t move much.”

Lara realized she looked unconvinced because Mance added, “Besides, we’re not on a fault line. Nowhere near one. I got solid geological data before picking the site. The ground’s not going to open up beneath us, and even if it did the tower would just stand there, solid as the Rock of Gibralter.”

“But if it should fall … all that weight…”

Mance’s smile turned almost smug. “It won’t fall, honey. It can’t. The laws of physics are on our side.”

DATA BANK

Skyhook.Beanstalk. Space elevator. Skytower. All these names and more have been applied to the idea of building an elevator that can carry people and cargo from the Earth’s surface into orbital space.

Like many other basic concepts for space transportation, the idea of a skytower originated in the fertile mind of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian pioneer who theorized about rocketry and astronautics in relative obscurity around the turn of the twentieth century. His idea for a “celestial castle” that could rise from the equator into orbital space, published in 1895, may have been inspired by the newly built Eiffel Tower, in Paris.

In 1960, the Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov revived the concept of the space elevator. Six years later an American oceanographer, John Isaacs, became the first outside of Russia to write about the idea. In 1975, Jerome Pearson, of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, brought the space elevator concept to the attention of the world’s scientific community through a more detailed technical paper. The British author Arthur C. Clarke popularized the skyhook notion in several of his science fiction novels.

Although it sounds outlandish, the basic concept of a space elevator is well within the realm of physical possibility. As Clarke himself originally pointed out, a satellite in geostationary orbit, slightly more than thirty-five thousand kilometers above the equator, circles the Earth in precisely the same time it takes for the Earth to revolve about its axis. Thus such a satellite remains constantly above the same spot on the equator. Communications satellites are placed in geostationary Clarke orbits so that ground-based antennas may be permanently locked onto them.

To build a skytower, start at geostationary orbit. Drop a line down to the Earth’s surface and unreel another line in the opposite direction, another thirty-five thousand kilometers into space. Simple tension will keep both lines in place. Make the line strong enough to carry freight and passenger elevators. Voila! A skyhook. A beanstalk. A skytower.

However, in the real world of practical engineering, the skytower concept lacked a suitable construction material. All known materials strong enough to serve were too heavy for the job. The tower would collapse of its own weight. A material with a much better strength-to-weight ratio was needed.

Buckyball fibers were the answer. Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a sphere that reminded the chemists who first produced them of a geodesic dome, the type invented by the American designer R. Buckminster Fuller. Quickly dubbed buckyballs, it was found that fibers built of such molecules had the strength-to-weight ratio needed for a practical space elevator—with a considerable margin of error to spare. Where materials such as graphite, alumina, and quartz offer tensile strengths in the order of twenty gigapascals (a unit of measurement for tensile strength) the requirements for a space elevator are more than sixty gigapascals. Buckyball fibers have tensile strengths of more than one hundred gigapascals.

By the middle of the twenty-first century all the basic technical demands of a skytower could be met. What was needed was the capital and the engineering skill to build such a structure: a tower that rises more than seventy thousand kilometers from the equator, an elevator that can carry payloads into space for the price of the electricity used to lift them.

Backed by the nation of Ecuador and an international consortium of financiers, Skytower Corporation hired Mance Bracknell to head the engineering team that built the skytower a scant hundred kilometers from Quito. People in the streets of the Ecuadorian capital could see the tower rising to the heavens, growing thicker and stronger before their eyes.

Many glowed with pride as the tower project moved toward completion. Some shook their heads, however, speaking in worried whispers about the biblical Tower of Babel. Even in the university, philosophers spoke of man’s hubris while engineers discussed moduli of elasticity. In Quito’s high-rise business towers, men and women who dealt in international trade looked forward to the quantum leap that the tower would produce for the Ecuadorian economy. They saw their futures rising as high as the sky, and quietly began buying real estate rights to all the land between Quito and the base of the tower.

None of them realized that the skytower would be turned into a killing machine.

CIUDAD DE CIELO

“It’s huge,” Lara said, as she stepped down from the Humvee. Inwardly she thought of all the phallic jokes the men must be making about this immense tower.

“A hundred meters across at the base,” Bracknell said, heading for the back of the truck where her luggage was stored. “The size of a football field.”

The driver stayed behind his wheel, anxious to get his pay and head back to the airport.

“It tapers outward slightly as it rises,” Bracknell went on. “The station up at geosynch is a little more than a kilometer across.”

The numbers were becoming meaningless to her. Everything was so huge. This close, she could see that each of the interwound cables making up the thick column must be a good five meters in diameter. And there were cables angling off to the sides, like the roots of a banyan, except that there were buildings where the cables reached the ground. They must be the tethers that Mance told me about, Lara thought.

“Well,” he said, grinning proudly as he spread his arms, “this is it. Sky City. Ciudad de Cielo.”

It was hard to take her eyes off the skytower, but Lara made the effort and looked around her. At Mance’s instruction, the taxi had parked in front of a two-story building constructed of corrugated metal walls. It reminded her of an airplane hangar or an oversized work shed. Looking around, she saw rows of such buildings laid out along straight paved streets, a neat gridwork of almost identical structures, a prefabricated little city. Sky City. It was busy, she saw. Trucks and minivans bustled about the streets, men and women strode purposively along the concrete sidewalks. Very little noise, though, she realized. None of the banging and thumping that usually accompanied construction projects. Of course, Lara thought: all the vehicles are powered by electrical engines. This city was quietly intense, humming with energy and purpose.

Then she smiled. Somewhere down one of those streets someone was playing a guitar. Or perhaps it was a recording. A softly lyrical native folk song, she guessed. Its gentle notes drifted through the air almost languidly.

Bracknell pointed. “The music’s coming from the restaurant. Some of our people have formed groups; they entertain in the evenings. Must be rehearsing now.”

He picked up both her travel bags and led her from the parking lot up along the sidewalk toward the building’s entrance.

“This is where my office is. And my living quarters, up on the second floor.” He hesitated, his tanned face flushing slightly. “Uh, I could set you up in a separate apartment if you want…”

Both his hands were full with her luggage, so she stepped to him and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly. “I didn’t come all this way to sleep alone.”

Bracknell’s face went even redder. But he grinned like a schoolboy. “Well, okay,” he said, hefting her travel bags. “Great.”

Lara had brought only the two bags with her. They were close enough to Quito for her to buy whatever she lacked, she had reasoned.

Bracknell’s apartment was small, utilitarian, and so gleamingly neat that she knew he had cleaned it for her. Through the screened windows she could see the streets of the little city and, beyond them, the green-clad mountains. The skytower was not in view from here.

“No air conditioning?” she asked as he plopped her bags onto the double-sized bed.

“Don’t need it. Climate’s very mild; it’s always springtime here.”

“But we’re on the equator, aren’t we?”

“And nearly four kilometers high.”

She nodded. Like Santa Fe, she thought. Even Denver had a much milder climate than most people realized.

As she opened the larger of her two bags, Lara asked, “So the weather’s not a problem for the skytower?”

“Even the rainy season isn’t all that bad. That’s one of the reasons we picked this site,” Bracknell said as he peered into the waist-high refrigerator in his kitchen alcove. He pulled out an odd-shaped bottle. “Some wine? I’ve got this local stuff that’s pretty bad, and a decent bottle of Chilean—”

“Just cold water, Mance,” she said. “We can celebrate later.”

He nearly dropped the bottle he was holding.

Bracknell had a surprise for her at dinner: Victor Molina, whom they had both known at university.

“I had no idea you were part of this project,” Lara said, as they sat at a small square table in the corner of the city’s only restaurant. A quartet of musicians was tuning up across the way. Lara noticed that their amplifiers were no bigger than tissue boxes, not the man-tall monsters that could collapse your lungs when they were amped up full blast.

The restaurant was hardly half filled, Lara saw. Either most of the people eat at home or they come in much later than this, she reasoned. It was a bright, clean little establishment. No tablecloths, but someone had painted cheerful outdoor scenes of jungle greenery and colorful birds on the tabletops.

“Victor’s the reason we’re moving ahead so rapidly,” Bracknell said.

Lara refocused her attention on the two men. “I thought you were into biology back at school,” she said.

“I still am,” Molina replied, his striking blue eyes fastened on her. He was as good-looking as ever, she thought, in an intense, urgent way. Lara remembered how, at school, Molina had pursued the best-looking women on campus. She had dated him a few times, until she met Mance. Then she stopped dating anyone else.

Before she could ask another question, the robot waiter rolled up to their table. Its flat top was a display screen that showed the evening’s menu and wine list.

“May I bring you a cocktail before you order dinner?” the robot asked, in a mellow baritone voice that bore just a hint of an upper-class British accent. “I am programmed for voice recognition. Simply state the cocktail of your choice in a clear tone.”

Lara asked for sparkling water and Bracknell did the same. Molina said, “Dry vodka martini, please.”

“Olives or a twist?” she asked the robot.

“Twist.”

The little machine pivoted neatly and rolled off toward the service bar by the kitchen.

Lara leaned slightly toward Molina. “I still don’t understand what a biologist is doing on this skytower project.”

Before Molina could reply, Bracknell answered, “Victor’s our secret weapon. He’s the one who’s allowed us to move ahead so rapidly.”

“A biologist?”

Molina’s eyes were still riveted on her. “You’ve heard of nanotechnology, haven’t you?”

“Yes. It’s banned, forbidden.”

“True enough,” he said. “But do you realize there’s nanotechnology going on inside your body at this very instant?”

“Nanotech?”

“Inside the cells of your body. The ribosomes in your cells are building proteins. And what are they other than tiny little nanomachines?”

“Oh. But that’s natural.”

“Sure it is. So is the way we build buckyball fibers.”

“With nanomachines?”

“Natural nanomachines,” Bracknell said, trying to get back into the conversation. “Viruses.”

The robot brought their drinks and, later, they selected their dinner choices from the machine’s touch screen. Molina and Bracknell explained how Molina had used genetically engineered viruses to produce buckyball molecules and engineered microbial cells to put the buckyballs together into nanotubes.

“Once we have sets of nanotubes,” Molina explained, “I turn them over to the regular engineers, and they string them together into the fibers that make up the tower.”

“And you’re allowed to do this in spite of the ban on nanotechnology?” Lara asked.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” Molina said lightly.

“But we’re not shouting the news from the rooftops,” Bracknell added. “We want to keep this strictly under wraps.”

“It’s a new construction technique that’ll be worth billions,” Molina said, his eyes glowing. “Trillions!”

“Once we get it patented,” Bracknell added.

Lara nodded, absently taking a forkful of salad and chewing contemplatively. Natural nanotechnology, she thought. Genetically engineered viruses. There are a lot of people who’re going to get very upset when they hear about this.

“I can see why you want to keep it under wraps,” she said.

PUBLISH OR PERISH

“What I really want,” Molina was saying, “is to get into astrobiology.”

“Really?” Lara felt surprised. In all the weeks she had been at Ciudad de Cielo, this was the first time he’d broached the subject with her.

She was walking with the biologist along the base city’s main street, wearing a colorful wool poncho that she’d bought from one of the street vendors that Mance allowed into town on the weekends. The wind off the mountains was cool, and it had drizzled for a half hour earlier in the morning. The thick wool poncho was just the right weight for this high-altitude weather. Molina had pulled a worn old leather jacket over his shirt and jeans.

“Astrobiology’s the hot area in biology,” he said. “That’s where a man can make a name for himself.”

“But you’re doing such marvelous things here.”

He looked over his shoulder at the skytower looming over them. Gray clouds scudded past it. With a discontented shrug, Molina said, “What I’m doing here is done. I’ve trained some bugs to make buckyball fibers for Mance. Big deal. I can’t publish my work; he’s keeping the whole process secret.”

“Only until the patent comes through.”

Molina frowned at her. “Do you have any idea of how long it takes to get an international patent? Years! And then the Skytower Corporation’ll probably want to keep the process to themselves. I could waste the best years of my career sitting around here and getting no credit for my work.”

Lara saw the impatience in his face, in his rigidly clenched fists, as they walked down the street. “So what do you intend to do?”

Molina hesitated for a heartbeat, then replied, “I’ve sent an application to several of the top astrobiology schools. It looks like Melbourne will accept me.”

“Australia?”

“Yes. They’ve just gotten a grant to search for more Martian ruins and they’re looking for people.”

“To go to Mars?”

He made a bitter smile. “Australia first, then maybe Mars. If I do well enough for them here on Earth.”

“I suppose that would be a good career move for you, Victor.”

“Ought to be. Astrobiology. The field’s wide open, with all the discoveries they’re making on the moons of Jupiter and all.”

“Then you’ll be leaving us?”

“I’ve got to!” His voice took on a pained note. “I mean, Mance won’t let me publish my work here until that fucking patent comes through. I’ll be dead meat unless I can get into an area where I can make a name for myself.”

“You and Mance work so well together, though,” Lara said. “I know he’ll be shocked when you tell him.”

“He doesn’t need me around here anymore. He’s milked my brain and gotten what he wants.”

Lara was surprised at the bitterness in his voice. “Mance will miss you,” she said.

“Will you?”

“Of course I’ll miss you, Victor.”

He licked his lips, then blurted, “Then come to Melbourne with me, Lara! Let’s get away from here together!”

Stunned, Lara staggered a few steps away from him.

“I’m in love with you, Lara. I really am. The past couple of months … it’s been so…” He hesitated, as though gasping for breath. “I want to marry you.”

He looked so forlorn, so despairing, yet at the same time so intense, so burning with urgency that Lara didn’t know what to reply, how to react.

“I’m so sorry, Victor,” she heard herself say gently. “I really am. I love Mance. You know that.”

He hung his head, mumbling, “I know. I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have told you.”

“It’s very sweet of you, Victor,” she said, trying to soften his anguish. “I’m really very flattered that you feel this way. But it can’t be.”

“I know,” he repeated. “I know.” But what he heard in her words was, If it weren’t for Mance I could fall in love with you, Victor.

Elliott Danvers knew that the elders of the New Morality were testing him. He had sweated and struggled through divinity school, accepting the snickers and snide jokes about a punch-drunk ex-prizefighter trying to become a minister of God. He had kept his temper, even when some of his fellow students’ practical jokes turned vicious. I can’t get into a fight, he would tell himself. I’d be accused of attempted manslaughter if I hit one of them, and they know it. That’s why they feel free to torment me. And I’m not clever enough to outwit them. Be silent. Be patient with those who persecute you. Turn the other cheek. This nonsense of theirs is a small price to pay for setting my life on a better path.

He graduated near the bottom of his class, but he graduated. Danvers was a man who drove doggedly onward to complete whatever task he was burdened with. He had learned as a child in the filth-littered back alleys of Detroit that you took what came and you dealt with it, whether it was the punches of a faster, harder-hitting opponent or the thinly veiled contempt of a teacher who’d be happy to flunk you.

His reward for graduating without getting into any trouble was a ministry. He was now the Reverend Elliott Danvers, D.D. His faculty advisor congratulated him on bearing all the crosses that his playful classmates and vindictive teachers had hung on his broad shoulders.

“You’ve done well, Elliott,” said his advisor, a pleased smile on his gray, sagging face. “There were times when I didn’t think you’d make it, but you persevered and won the final victory.”

Danvers knew that his academic grades had been marginal, at best. He bowed his head humbly and murmured, “I couldn’t have made it without your help, sir. And God’s.”

His advisor laid a liver-spotted hand on Danvers’s bowed head. “My blessings on you, my son. Wherever the New Morality sends you, remember that you are doing God’s work. May He shower His grace upon you.”

“Amen,” said Danvers, with true conviction.

So they sent him to this strange, outlandish place in the mountains of Ecuador. It’s a test, Danvers kept telling himself. The elders are testing my resolve, my dedication, my ability to win converts to God.

Ciudad de Cielo was a little prefab nest of unbelievers, scientists and engineers who were at best agnostics, together with local workers and clerks who practiced a Catholic faith underlain with native superstitions and idol worship.

Worst of all, though, they were all engaged in an enormous project that smacked of blasphemy. A tower that reached into the sky. A modern, high-technology Tower of Babel. Danvers was certain it was doomed to fail. God would not permit mortal men to succeed in such a work.

Then he remembered that he had been placed here to do God’s work. If this tower is to fail, I must be the agent of its destruction. God wills it. That’s why the New Morality sent me here.

Danvers knew that his ostensible task was to take care of people’s souls. But hardly anyone wanted his help. The natives seemed quite content with their hodge-podge of tribal rituals and Catholic rites. Most of the scientists and engineers simply ignored him or regarded him as a spy sent by the New Morality to snoop on them. A few actively baited him, but their slings and barbs were nothing compared to the cruelty of his laughing classmates.

One man, though, seemed troubled enough to at least put up with him: Victor Molina, a close assistant of the chief of this tremendous project. Danvers watched him for weeks, certain that Molina was showing the classic signs of depression: moodiness, snapping at his coworkers, almost always taking his meals alone. He looked distinctly unhappy. The only time he seemed to smile was on those rare occasions when he had dinner in the restaurant with the project chief and the woman he was living with.

Living in sin, Danvers thought darkly. He himself had given up all thought of sex, except for the fiendish dreams that were sent to tempt him. No, he told himself during his waking hours. It was the desire for women and money that almost led you to your destruction in the ring. They broke your hand, they nearly destroyed your soul because of your indecent desires. Better to pluck out your eye if it offends you. Instead, Danvers used modern pharmacology to keep his libido stifled.

He approached Molina carefully, gradually, knowing that the man would reject or even ridicule an overt offer of help.

During lunchtime the city’s only restaurant offered a buffet. After thinking about it for weeks, Danvers used it as an opening ploy with Molina.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” he asked, holding his lunch-laden tray in both hands. “I hate to eat alone.”

Molina looked up sourly, but then seemed to recognize the minister. Danvers did not use clerical garb; he wore no collar. But he always dressed in a black shirt and slacks.

“Yeah, why not?” Molina said. He was already halfway through his limp sandwich, Danvers saw.

Suppressing an urge to compliment the scientist on his gracious manners, Danvers sat down and silently, unobtrusively said grace as he began unloading his tray. They talked about inconsequential things, the weather, the status of the project, the sad plight of the refugees driven from coastal cities such as Boston by the greenhouse flooding.

“It’s their own frigging fault. They had plenty of warning,” Molina grumbled, finishing his sandwich. “Years of warning. Nobody listened.”

Danvers nodded silently. No contradictions, he told himself. You’re here to win his confidence, not to debate his convictions.

Over the next several weeks Danvers bumped into Molina often enough so that they started to be regular luncheon partners. Their conversations grew less guarded, more open.

“Astrobiology?” Danvers asked at one point. “That’s what you want to do?”

Molina grinned wickedly at him. “Does that shock you?”

“Not at all,” Danvers replied, trying to hide his uneasiness. “There’s no denying that scientists have found living organisms on other worlds.”

“Even intelligent creatures,” Molina jabbed.

“If you mean those extinct beings on Mars, they might have been connected in some way with us, mightn’t they?”

“At the cellular level, maybe. The DNA of the extant Martian microbial life is different from ours, though, even though it has a similar helical structure.”

Danvers wasn’t entirely sure of what his luncheon companion was saying, but that didn’t matter. He said, “It doesn’t seem likely that God would create an intelligent species and then destroy it.”

“That’s what happened.”

“Don’t you think that the Martians were a branch of ourselves? After all, the two planets are—”

“About sixty million kilometers apart, at their closest,” Molina snapped.

“Yes, but Martian meteorites have been found on Earth.”

“So?”

“So Mars and Earth have had exchanges in the past. Perhaps the human race began on Mars and moved to Earth.”

Molina guffawed so loudly that people at other tables turned toward them. Danvers sat silently, trying to keep a pleasant face.

“Is that what you believe?” Molina asked at last, between chuckles.

“Isn’t it possible?” Danvers asked softly.

“Possible for creatures with a stone age culture to build spacecraft to take them from Mars to Earth? No way!”

Molina was still chuckling when they left the restaurant. No matter, Danvers thought. Let him laugh. I’m winning his trust. Soon he’ll be unburdening his soul to me.

As the weeks flowed into one another, Danvers began to understand that winning Molina’s trust would not be that easy. Beneath his smug exterior Victor Molina was a desperately unhappy man. Despite his high standing in the skytower project, he was worried about his career, his future. And something else. Something he never spoke of. Danvers thought he knew what it was: Lara Tierney, the woman who was living with Bracknell.

Danvers felt truly sorry for Molina. By this time he regarded the biologist as a friend, the only friend he had in this den of idolaters and atheists. Their relationship was adversarial, to be sure, but he was certain that Molina enjoyed their barbed exchanges as much as he himself did. Sooner or later he’ll break down and tell me what’s truly troubling him.

Many, many weeks passed before Danvers realized there was something about Molina that was jarringly out of place. What’s Victor doing here, on this damnable project? Why is a biologist involved in building the skytower?

NEW KYOTO

Nobuhiko Yamagata stood at his office window gazing out at the city spread out far below him. Lake Biwa glittered in the distance. A flock of large birds flapped by, so close that Nobu inadvertently twitched back, away from the window.

He was glad no one was in the office to see his momentary reaction. It might look like cowardice to someone; unworthy weakness, at least.

The birds were black gulls, returning from their summer grounds far to the north. A sign that winter is approaching, Nobuhiko knew. Winter. He grunted to himself. There hasn’t been enough natural snow to ski on since my father died.

Nobu looked almost like a clone of his illustrious father: a few centimeters taller than Saito, but stocky, short-limbed, his face round and flat, his brown eyes hooded, unfathomable. The main difference between father and son was that while Saito’s face was lined from frequent laughter, the lines on Nobu’s face came from worry.

He hadn’t heard from his father for more than a year now. The elder Yamagata had gone into a fit of regret over the killings out in the Asteroid Belt and become a true lama, full of holy remorse and repentance. It’s as if he’s died again, Nobu thought. He’s cut off all contact with the world outside his lamasery, even with his only son.

The clock chimed once. No matter, Nobuhiko thought as he turned from the window. I can carry my burdens without Father’s help. Squaring his shoulders, he said to the phone on his desk, “Call them in.”

The double doors to his office swung inward and a half-dozen men in nearly identical dark business suits came in, each bearing a tiny gold flying crane pin in his lapel, each bowing respectfully to the head of Yamagata Corporation. They took their places at the long table abutting Nobu’s desk like the stem of the letter T. No women served on this committee. There were several women on Yamagata’s board of directors, but the executive committee was a completely male domain.

There was only one item on their agenda: the skytower.

Nobuhiko sat in his high-backed leather desk chair and called the meeting to order. They swiftly dispensed with formalities such as reading the minutes of the previous meeting. They all knew why they were here.

Swiveling slightly to his right, Nobu nodded to the committee’s chairman. Officially, Nobuhiko was an ex-officio member of the executive committee, present at their meetings but without a vote in their deliberations. It was a necessary arrangement, to keep outsiders from accusing that Yamagata Corporation was a one-man dictatorship. Which it very nearly was. Nobu might not have had a vote on this committee, but the committee never voted against his known wishes.

“We are here to decide what to do about the skytower project,” said the chairman, his eyes on Nobuhiko.

“It is progressing satisfactorily?” Nobu asked, knowing full well the answer.

“They are ahead of schedule,” said the youngest member of the committee, down at the end of the conference table.

Nobuhiko let out a patient sigh.

“When that tower goes into operation,” fumed one of the older men, “it will knock the bottom out of the launch services market.”

One of Nobu’s coups, once he took the reigns of the corporation from his father, had been to acquire the American firm Masterson Aerospace Corporation. Masterson had developed the Clippership launch vehicle, the rocket that reduced launch costs from thousands of dollars per pound to hundreds, the doughty little, completely reusable vehicle that not only opened up orbital space to industrial development, but also served—in a modified version—as a hypersonic transport that carried passengers to any destination on Earth in less than an hour.

By acquiring Masterson, Yamagata gained a major share not only of the world’s space launching market, but of long-distance air travel, as well.

“One tower?” scoffed one of the other elder members from across the conference table. “How badly can one tower cut into the launch services market? How much capacity can it have?”

The other man closed his eyes briefly, as if seeking strength to deal with a fool. “It is not merely the one tower. It is the first skytower. If it succeeds, there will be others.”

Nobu agreed. “And why pay for Clipperships to go into orbit when you can ride a skytower for a fraction of the cost?”

“Exactly so, sir.”

“The skytower is a threat, then?”

“Not an immediate threat. But if it is successful, within a few years such towers will spring up all along the equator.”

“Fortunate for us,” said another, smiling, “that most of the equator is over deep ocean instead of land.”

No one laughed.

“How much of our profit comes from Clippership operations?” Nobuhiko asked.

“Not as much from space launch services as from air transportation here on Earth,” said the comptroller, seated on Yamagata’s left.

Nobu said softly, “The numbers, please.”

The comptroller tapped hurriedly on the palmcomp in his hand. “It’s about eight percent. Eight point four, so far this year. Last fiscal year, eight point two.”

“It’s pretty constant.”

“Rising slightly.”

Nobu folded his hands across his vest, a gesture he remembered his father using often.

“Can we afford to lose eight percent of our profits?” asked the youngster.

“Not if we don’t have to,” said the comptroller.

“We own part of this skytower project, don’t we?” Nobu asked.

“We bought into it, yes. We have a contract to supply engineers and other technical staff and services. But it’s only a minor share of their operation, less than five percent. And the contract will terminate once they begin operations.”

Nobu felt his brows rise. “We won’t share in their operating profits?”

The comptroller hesitated. “Not unless we negotiate a new contract for maintenance or other services, of course.”

“Of course,” Nobuhiko muttered darkly. Sweat broke out on the comptroller’s forehead.

The office fell silent. Then the director of the corporation’s aerospace division cleared his throat and said, “May I point out that all of our discussion is based on the premise that the skytower will be successful? There is no guarantee of that.”

Nobuhiko understood him perfectly. The skytower could be a failure if we take action to make certain it fails. Looking around the conference table, he saw that each and every member of the executive committee understood the unspoken decision.

CIUDAD DE CIELO

Elliott Danvers was not brilliant, but he was not stupid, either. And he possessed a stubborn determination that allowed him to push doggedly onward toward a goal when others would find easier things to do.

Why is a biologist working on the skytower project? When he asked Molina directly, the man became reticent and evasive.

“What’s a New Morality minister doing here, in Ecuador?” Molina would counter.

When Danvers frankly explained that his mission was to provide spiritual comfort to all who sought it, Molina cocked an eyebrow at him. “Aren’t you here to snoop on us, Elliott?” Molina asked, good-naturedly. “Aren’t your superiors in Atlanta worried that this project is a modern Tower of Babel?”

“Nonsense,” Danvers sputtered.

“Is it? My take on the New Morality is that they don’t like change. They’ve arranged North America just the way they like it, with themselves in control of the government—”

“Control of the government!” Danvers was truly shocked at that. “We’re a religious organization, not a secular one.”

“So was the Spanish Inquisition,” Molina murmured.

Despite their differences, they remained friends of a sort. Bantering, challenging friends. Danvers knew quite well that the only other man in Sky City that Molina regarded as a friend was the project director, Mance Bracknell. But something had come between them. No, not something, Danvers thought. Someone. Lara Tierney.

Molina invited Danvers to have dinner with him from time to time. Once, they joined Bracknell and Lara on a quick jaunt to Quito and dined in the best restaurant Danvers had ever seen. It didn’t take long for Danvers to understand Molina’s problem. Before the main courses were served he realized that Molina was in love with her, but she loved Bracknell. The eternal triangle, Danvers thought. It has caused the ruin of many a dream.

For himself, Danvers treasured Molina’s company. Despite his atheistic barbs, Molina was the only close friend Danvers had made in this city of godless technicians and dark-skinned mestizos who worshipped their old blood-soaked gods in secret.

Yet the question nagged at him. Why is Molina here? What can a biologist do for this mammoth project?

After many weeks of asking everyone he knew, even men and women he had barely been introduced to, the path to understanding suddenly came to him, like a revelation from on high.

The woman. Lara Tierney. She is the key to Molina’s presence here. To get him to tell the truth, Danvers realized, to open up his inner secrets, I must use his love for this woman. That’s his vulnerable spot. Still, he wavered, reluctant to cause the pain that he knew Molina would feel. Danvers prayed long hours kneeling by his bedside, seeking guidance. Do I have the right to do this? he asked. The only answer he received was a memory of his mentor’s words: Remember that you are doing God’s work.

And then the revelation came to him. The way to promotion, the path to advancement within the New Morality, was by stopping this godless project. That’s why they sent me here, he realized. To see if I can prevent these secularists from succeeding in their blasphemous project. That’s how they’re testing me.

Danvers rose from his knees, his heart filled with determination. The hour was late, but he told the phone to call Molina. He got the man’s answering machine, of course, but made a date with him for dinner the following night. Not lunch. What he had to do would take more time than a lunch break. Better to do it after the working day is finished, in the dark of night. Be hard, he advised himself. Show no mercy. Drive out all doubts, all qualms. Be a man of steel.

Dinner wasn’t much, and afterward Danvers and Molina walked slowly up the gently rising street toward the building where they both were quartered. The skytower was outlined by safety lights, flashing on and off like fireflies, trailing upward until they disappeared into the starry sky. A sliver of a Moon was riding over the mountains to the east. The sky was clear, hardly a cloud in sight, the night air crisp and chill.

All through dinner Danvers had avoided starting this probe into his friend’s heart. But as they approached their building, he realized he could delay no longer.

“Victor,” he began softly, “you and Bracknell and Ms. Tierney seem to be old friends.”

“We all went to university together,” Molina replied evenly.

The lamps along the street were spaced fairly widely, far apart enough for the two men to stroll through pools of shadow as they walked along. Danvers saw that Molina kept his eyes down, watching where he was stepping rather than gazing up at the skytower looming above them.

“You studied biology there?”

“Yes,” said Molina. “Mance bounced around from one department to another in the school of engineering.”

“And Ms. Tierney?”

Through the shadows he could hear Molina’s sudden intake of breath. “Lara? She started out in sociology, I think. But then she switched to engineering. Aerospace engineering, can you believe it?”

“That was after she’d met Bracknell.”

“Yeah, right. After she met Mance. She went so goofy over him that she switched her major just to be closer to him.”

“You were attracted to her yourself, weren’t you?”

“Fucking lot of good it did me once she met Mance.”

Danvers walked on for a few steps in silence. He heard the bitterness in Molina’s voice, and now that he had touched on the sore spot he had to open up that wound again.

“Did you love her then?” he asked.

Molina did not answer.

“You still love her, don’t you?”

“That’s none of your damned business, Elliott.”

“I think it is, Victor. You’re my friend, and I want to help you.”

“How the hell can you help me? You want to pray for a miracle, maybe?”

“Prayer has its powers.”

“Bullshit!”

Danvers nodded in the darkness. Victor’s in pain, no doubt of it. My task is to use his pain, channel it into a productive course.

“Why did you come here, then? If you knew that Bracknell was heading this project, didn’t you expect her to show up, sooner or later?”

“I suppose I did, subconsciously. Maybe I thought she wouldn’t, that they were finished. I don’t know!”

“But you came here, to this project. Did you volunteer or did Bracknell ask to come?”

“Mance called me when he got the go-ahead for the project. All excited. Said he needed me to make it work.”

“He needed you?”

“Like an idiot I agreed to take a look at his plans. Next thing I knew I was on a plane to Quito.”

“Why did he need you?”

“I didn’t think Lara would come down here,” Molina went on, ignoring the question. “I figured Mance would be so fucking busy with this crazy scheme of his that he wouldn’t have time for her. Maybe he’d even forgotten her. Damned fool me.”

“But why did he need you?” Danvers insisted.

“To make the buckyball fibers,” Molina snapped, “what the fuck do you think?”

Ignoring Molina’s deliberate crudities, Danvers pressed, “A biologist to build the fibers?”

“A biologist, yeah. Somebody who can engineer viruses to assemble buckyballs for you. You need a damned smart biologist to work down at the nanometer scale.”

Danvers sucked in his breath. “Nanomachines?”

They were under a streetlamp now and Danvers could see the pain and anguish in Molina’s face. For several long moments the biologist struggled for self-control. At last he said calmly, coldly:

“Not nanomachines, Elliott. Viruses. Living creatures. Is this what you’re after? Trying to find out if we’re using nanoteeh so you can turn us in to the authorities?”

“No, Victor, not at all,” Danvers half-lied. “I’m trying to find out what’s troubling you. I want to help you, I truly do.”

“Great. You want to help me? Find some way to get Mance out of the picture. Get him away from Lara. That’s the kind of help I need.”

ATLANTA

The headquarters building of the New Morality was not as large as the capital of a secular government, nor as ornate as a cathedral. But it was, in fact, the seat of a power that stretched across all of the North American continent north of the Rio Grande and extended its influence into Mexico and Central America.

In the days before the greenhouse floods, the New Morality was little more than a fundamentalist Christian sect, sterner than most others, that concentrated its work in the rundown cores of cities such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other urban blights. It did good works: rescuing lost souls, driving drug dealers out of slum neighborhoods, rebuilding decaying houses, making certain that children learned to read and write in the schools it had installed in abandoned storefronts. In return for these good works, the New Morality insisted on iron discipline and obedience. Above all, obedience.

Then the Earth’s climate tumbled over the greenhouse cliff. After half a century of warnings from climatologists that were ignored by temporizing politicians and ridiculed by disbelieving pundits, the global climate abruptly switched from postglacial to the kind of semi-tropical environment that had ruled the Earth in earlier eons. Icecaps melted. Sea levels rose by twenty meters over a few years. Coastal cities everywhere were flooded. The electrical power grid that sustained modern civilization collapsed. Killer storms raged while farmlands eroded into dust. Hundreds of millions of men, women, and children were driven from their homes, their jobs, their lives, all of them hungry, frightened, desperate.

The New Morality rejoiced. “This is the wrath of God that has been called down upon us!” thundered the Reverend Harold Carnaby. “This is our just punishment for generations of sinful licentiousness.”

Governments across the world turned authoritarian, backed by fundamentalist organizations such as the Holy Disciples in Europe and the Flower Dragon in the Far East. Even the fractious Moslems came together under the banner of the Sword of Islam once Israel was obliterated.

After decades of authoritarian rule, however, people all across the Earth were growing restive. The climate had stabilized, although once again scientists were issuing dire warnings, this time of a coming Ice Age. They were ignored once again as the average family moved toward economic well-being and a better life. Prosperity was creeping across the world once more. Church attendance was slipping.

Carnaby, now a self-appointed archbishop, mulled these factors in his mind as he sat in his powered wheelchair and gazed out across the skyline of Atlanta’s high-rise towers.

“We saved this city,” he grumbled.

“Yes, sir,” said one of the aides standing behind him respectfully. “We surely did.”

“We saved the nation when it was sinking into crime and depravity,” Carnaby added. “Now that the people are growing richer, they’re turning away from God. They’re more interested in buying the latest virtual reality games than in saving their souls.”

“Too true,” said the second aide.

Carnaby pivoted his wheelchair to face them. They were standing before his desk, arms at their sides, eyes focused on the archbishop.

“Sir, about the medical report…”

“I’m not interested in saving my mortal body,” Carnaby said, frowning up at them through his dead-white eyebrows.

“But you must, sir! The Movement needs your guidance, your leadership!”

“I’m ready to meet my Maker whenever He calls me.”

The one aide glanced at the other, obviously seeking support. The two of them were as alike as peas in a pod in their dark suits and starched white shirts. Carnaby wondered if they were twins.

“Sir,” said the other one, his voice slightly deeper than his companion’s, “the physicians are unanimous in their diagnosis. You must accept a heart implant. Otherwise …” He left the conclusion unspoken.

“Put a man-made pump into my chest and remove the heart that God gave me? Never!”

“No, sir, that isn’t it at all. It’s merely a booster pump, an auxiliary device to assist your heart. Your natural heart will be untouched,” the deeper-voiced aide coaxed. “It’s really rather minor surgery, sir. They insert it through an artery in the thigh.”

“They won’t open my chest?”

“No, sir,” both aides said in chorus.

Carnaby huffed. He had accepted other medical devices. One day, he’d been told, he would have to get artificial kidneys. Ninety-two years old, he told himself, and I’ve never taken a rejuvenation treatment. Not many my age can say that. God is watching over me.

“An auxiliary pump, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You need it, sir. With all the burdens of work and the pressures you face every day, it’s a miracle that your heart has lasted this long without assistance.”

Carnaby huffed again to make sure that they understood that he didn’t like the idea. But then he lowered his head and said humbly, “God’s will be done.”

The aides scampered out of his office, delighted that he had acquiesced, and more than a little awed at the archbishop’s willingness to sacrifice his obvious distaste of medical procedures for the good of the Movement.

Alone at his desk, Carnaby called up the latest computer figures on church attendance. The New Morality was officially a nonsectarian organization. The bar graph that sprang up on his smart wall screen showed attendance reports for nearly every denomination in North and South America. The numbers were down—not by much, but the trend was clear. Even the Catholics were falling away from God.

His desktop intercom chimed. “Deacon Gillette calling, Archbishop,” said the phone’s angel-sweet voice. “Urgent.”

“Urgent? What’s so urgent?”

The phone remained silent for a moment, then repeated, “Deacon Gillette calling—”

“All right,” Carnaby interrupted the synthesized voice, irked at its limited abilities. “Put him through.”

Gillette’s face replaced the attendance statistics. He was an African-American, his skin so dark it seemed to shine as if he were perspiring. His deepset brown eyes always looked wary, as if he expected some enemy to spring upon him.

“Deacon,” said Carnaby, by way of greeting.

“Archbishop. I’ve received a disturbing report from our man in Ecuador.”

“We have a man in Ecuador?”

“At the skytower project, sir,” said Gillette.

“Ah, yes. A disturbing report, you say?”

“According to Rev. Danvers, the scientists of the skytower project are using a form of nanotechnology to build their structure.”

“Nanotechnololgy!” Carnaby felt a pang of alarm. “Nanomachines are outlawed, even in South America.”

Gillette closed his heavy-lidded eyes briefly, then explained, “They are not using nanomachines, exactly. Instead, they have developed genetically engineered viruses to work as nanomachines would, assembling the structural components of their tower.”

Carnaby felt the cords at the back of his neck tense and knew he would soon be suffering a headache.

“Tell Danvers to notify the authorities down there.”

“What they’re doing is not illegal, Archbishop. They’re using natural creatures, not artificial machines.”

“But you said these creatures have been genetically engineered, didn’t you?”

“Genetic engineering is not outlawed, sir,” Gillette replied, then quickly added, “Unfortunately.”

Carnaby sucked in a breath. “Then what can we do about it?”

With a sad shake of his head, Gillette answered, “I don’t know, sir. I was hoping that you would think of a solution.”

Fumbling for the oxygen mask in the compartment built into the wheelchair’s side, Carnaby groused, “All right, let me think about it.” He abruptly cut the phone connection and his wall returned to its underlying restful shade of pastel blue.

Carnaby held the plastic mask over his face for several silent moments. The flow of cool oxygen eased the tension that was racking his body.

Sudden thunder shook the building, startling Carnaby so badly that he dropped his oxygen mask. Then he realized it was another of those damnable rockets taking off from the old Hartsfield Airport.

He spun his chair to the window once again and craned his dewlapped neck, but there was nothing to see. No trail of smoke. No pillar of fire. The rockets used some kind of clean fuel: hydrogen, he’d been told. Doesn’t hurt the environment.

He slumped back in his wheelchair, feeling old and tired. I’ve spent my life trying to save their souls. I’ve rescued them from sin and the palpable wrath of God. And what do they do as soon as things begin to go smoothly again? They complain about our strict laws. They want more freedom, more license to grow fat and prosperous and sinful.

Then he looked out at the empty sky again. They’re getting richer because those rockets are bringing in metals and stuff from the asteroids. And they’ve built those infernal solar satellites up in orbit to beam electrical power to the ground.

Those space people. Scientists and engineers. Godless secularists, all of ’em. Poking around on other worlds. Claiming they’ve found living creatures. Contradicting Genesis every chance they get.

And now, Carnaby thought, those space people are building a high-tech Tower of Babel. They’re going to make it easier to get into space, easier to make money out there. And using nanotechnology to do it. Devil’s tools. Evil, through and through.

They’re building their blasphemous tower in South America someplace, right in the middle of all those Catholics.

They’ve got to be stopped, Carnaby told himself, clenching his blue-veined hands into bony fists. But how? How?

RIDING THE ELEVATOR

“How high are we?” Lara asked, her eyes wide with excitement.

Bracknell glanced at the readout screen set next to the elevator’s double doors, where Victor Molina was standing. “Eighty-two kilometers, no, now it’s eighty-three.”

“I don’t feel anything,” she said. “No sense of motion at all.”

For nearly a month Bracknell had resisted Lara’s pleas for a ride in the space elevator. The instant he had told her the first elevator tube had completed all its tests and was officially operational, she had begged him for a ride. Bracknell had temporized, delayed, tried to put her off. To his surprise, he found that he was worried about the elevator’s safety. All these years I’ve drafted the plans, laid out the schematics, overseen the construction, he castigated himself, and when we get right down to it, I don’t trust my own work. Not with Lara’s life. I’m afraid to let her ride the elevator.

That realization stunned him. All the number crunching, all the tests, and I don’t trust my own work. I’m willing to let others ride the elevator, I’m even willing to ride it myself, but when it comes to Lara—I’m afraid. Superstition, pure and simple, he told himself. Yet he found excuses to keep her from his skytower.

The elevator worked fine, day after day, week after week, hauling technicians and cargo up to the stations at the various levels of the tower. Bracknell’s confidence in the system grew, and Lara’s importunings did not abate. If anything, she became even more insistent.

“You’ve been up and down a dozen times,” she whispered to him as they lay together in the shadows of their darkened bedroom, her head on his naked chest. “It’s not fair for you to keep me from going with you. Just once, at least.”

Despite his inner tension, he grinned in the darkness. “It’s not fair? You’re starting to sound like a kid arguing with his parents.”

“Was I whining?” she asked.

“No,” he had to admit. “I’ve never heard you whine.”

She lay silent for several moments. He could feel her breathing slowly, rhythmically, as she lay against him.

“Okay,” he heard himself say. “We’ll go up to the LEO deck,” he conceded.

Lara knew the Low Earth Orbit station was five hundred kilometers up. Her elation was immediately tinged with disappointment.

“Not all the way?” she asked. “Not to the geostationary level?”

Bracknell shook his head. “That’s up on the edge of the Van Allen Belt radiation. The crew hasn’t installed the shielding yet. They work up there in armored suits.”

“But if they—”

“No,” he said firmly, grasping her bare shoulders. “Some day we’re going to have children. I’m not exposing you to a high-radiation environment, even in a shielded spacesuit.”

He sensed her smiling at him. “The ultimate argument,” she said. “It’s for the good of our unborn children.”

“Well, it is.”

“Yes dear,” she teased. Then she kissed him.

They made love slowly, languorously. Afterward, as they lay spent and sticky in their sweaty sheets, Bracknell thought: This is the real test. Do you trust your work enough to risk her life on it?

And Lara understood: He worries about me so. He lets others ride the elevator but he’s worried about me.

The next day was a Sunday, and although a full team of technicians was at work, as usual, Bracknell walked over to the operations office and told the woman on duty there that he and Lara would be riding up to the LEO platform.

The operations chief that Sunday morning was a portly woman who wore her ash-blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a square gold ring on her left middle finger.

“I’ll tell Jakosky,” she said, grinning. “He’s won the lottery.”

“What lottery?” Bracknell asked, surprised.

“We’ve been making book about when you’d let your lady take a ride up,” said the operations chief. “Jackpot’s up to damn near a thousand Yankee dollars.”

Bracknell grinned weakly to cover his surprise and a pang of embarrassment. As he left the building and started back up toward his quarters, he saw Molina coming down the street, heading toward him. Victor’s going to be leaving, Bracknell knew. Going to Australia to start a new career in astrobiology. And he’s sore at me for not letting him publish the work he’s done here.

“Hello, Victor,” he called as the biologist neared. He knew that Molina despised being called Vic.

“Hi, Mance,” Molina replied, without slowing his pace.

Bracknell grasped his arm, stopping him. “Lara and I are riding up to the LEO deck. Want to come with us?”

Molina’s eyes widened. “You’re taking her up?”

“Just to the lowest level.”

“But the safety certification…”

“Came through a week ago. For the LEO platform.”

“Oh.”

“Come with us,” Bracknell urged. “You’re not doing anything vital this morning, are you?”

Molina stiffened. “I’m finishing up my final report.”

“You can do that later. You don’t want to head off to Australia without riding in the tower you helped to build, do you? Come on with us.”

With a shake of his head, Molina said, “No, I’ve got so much to do before I leave…”

Bracknell teased, “You’re not scared, are you?”

“Scared? Hell no!”

“Then come on along. The three of us. Like old times.”

“Like old times,” Molina echoed, his face grim.

Bracknell knew that he himself was frightened, a little. If we bring Victor along I’ll have him to talk to, to keep me from worrying about Lara’s safety. But he knew that was an excuse. Superstition again: nothing bad will happen if it isn’t just Lara and me riding the tube.

Molina, who hadn’t been alone with Lara since he’d confessed that he was in love with her, allowed Bracknell to turn him around and lead him back to their apartment building. What the fuck, he said to himself. This may be the last time I see her.

“It’s like we’re standing still,” Lara said as the elevator rose smoothly past the hundred-kilometer mark.

“Like Einstein’s old thought experiment about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration,” Bracknell said.

The elevator cab was big enough to handle freight and new enough to still look sparkling and shiny. An upholstered bench ran along its rear wall, but Lara and the two men remained standing. The walls and floor of the cab were buckyball sheets, hard as diamond but not as brittle, coated with scuff-resistant epoxy. The ceiling was a grill-work through which Lara could see the shining inner walls of the tube speeding smoothly by.

No cables, she knew. No pulleys or reels like an ordinary elevator. The entire tube was a vertical electric rail gun; the elevator cab was being lifted by electromagnetic forces, like a particle in a physics lab’s accelerator or a payload launched off the Moon by an electric mass driver. Pretty slow for a bullet, Lara thought, but they were accelerating all the way up to the halfway point, where they would start decelerating until the cab braked to a stop at the LEO level.

Molina stayed tensely silent. He hadn’t said more than two words to either of them since Lara had joined them for this brief trip into space.

LEO PLATFORM

“You should have windows,” Lara said as she walked to the bench along the cab’s rear wall and sat down. “It’s boring without a view.”

Bracknell sat beside her and glanced at his wristwatch. “Another twenty minutes.”

Molina had not spoken a word since they’d boarded the elevator, more than a half hour earlier. He remained standing, pecking away at his palmcomp.

“You need a window,” Lara repeated. “The view would be spectacular.”

“If you didn’t get nauseous watching the Earth fall away from you. Some people are afraid of glass elevators in hotels, you know.”

“They wouldn’t have to look,” Lara replied primly. “I think the view would be a marvelous attraction, especially for tourists.”

Conceding her point with a nod, Bracknell said, “We’ll be adding several more elevator tubes. I’ll look into the possibilities of glassing in at least one of them.”

“Are we slowing down?” Lara asked.

“Should be.”

“I get no sensation of movement at all.”

“That’s because we’ve kept the cab’s acceleration down to a minimum. We could go a lot faster if we need to.”

“No,” she said, with a slight shake of her head. “This is fine. I’m not complaining.”

As he sat next to Lara, Bracknell got a sudden urge to take her in his arms and kiss her. But there was Molina standing a few meters away, like a dour-faced duenna, his nose almost touching his handheld’s screen.

“Victor,” he called, “come and sit down. You don’t have to work all the time.”

“Yes, I do,” Molina snapped.

Turning back to Lara, “Tell him to put away that digital taskmaster of his and come over here and join us.”

To his surprise, Lara responded, “Leave Victor alone. He’s doing what he feels he has to do.”

Feeling a little puzzled, Bracknell clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cab’s rear wall. It felt cool and very hard. We ought to put some cushioning along here, he thought, making a mental note to suggest it to the people who were handling interior design. And look into glassing in one of the outer tubes, he added silently.

When the cab finally stopped, a chime sounded and a synthesized female voice announced, “Level one: Low Earth Orbit.”

And all three of them floated slowly upward toward the ceiling.

“We’re in orbit now,” Bracknell said, pushing lightly against the wall to force himself down. “Zero-g. Weightless.”

Lara looked fine, but Molina was pale. Bracknell fished a pillbox out of his trousers pocket. “Here, Victor. Take one of these. It’ll help get your stomach out of your throat.”

The elevator doors slid open and the din of work teams immediately assailed their ears as they floated out of the elevator cab. Bracknell hooked a floor loop with the toe of his boot and pulled Lara down to the floor, then Molina. Standing there anchored to the floor and weaving slightly like a sea anemone, Lara saw a wide expanse of bare decking topped by a dome that looked hazy in the dust-filled air. A drill was screeching annoyingly in the distance and the high-pitched whine of an electrical power generator made her teeth ache: Sparks from welding torches hissed off to her right. The dust-laden air smelled of burnt insulation and stranger odors she could not place. Men and women in coveralls were putting up partitions, most of them working in small groups and tethered to the deck, although she spotted several floating weightlessly along the scaffolding, high above. An electrically powered cart scurried past on a rail fastened to the deck plates, its cargo bed piled high with bouncing sheets of what looked like honeycomb metal. Everyone seemed to be yelling at everyone else:

“Hold it there! That’s it!”

“I need more light up here; it’s darker than a five-star restaurant, fer chrissakes!”

“When the hell were you ever in a five-star restaurant, bozo?”

“I’ve got it. Ease up on your line.”

Bracknell made a sweeping gesture and hollered over the din, “Welcome to level one.”

Molina scowled out at the noisy activity, his face still slightly green. Lara clapped her hands over her ears; the motion made her bob sideways in her floor loops.

Pointing off to their left, Bracknell led them carefully, one set of loops to the next, past a gaggle of workers gathered around a small table that held a large stainless steel urn of coffee. At least, Lara assumed it was coffee. Several of the workers raised their covered plastic squeeze bulbs to Bracknell as he led them past. Mance nodded and grinned at them in return.

“Sippy cups,” Lara said, with a giggle. “Like babies use.”

“You need them in zero g,” Bracknell said.

There were curved partitions in place here, and the noise abated a little. As they walked onward, the partitions became roofed over like an arched tunnel and the din diminished considerably.

“As you can see—and hear,” Bracknell said, “level one is still very much under construction.”

“My ears are ringing,” Lara said.

“They’re a noisy bunch, all right,” Bracknell conceded. “But if they were quiet they wouldn’t be getting any work done.”

Molina gave a half-hearted nod.

Pointing to the curved metal overhead, Bracknell said with a hint of pride in his voice, “These partitions were scavenged from the heavy-lift boosters that brought most of the materials up here.”

Lara grinned at him. “Waste not, want not.”

“In spades. Nothing of the boosters was returned to Earth except their rocket engines.”

She pointed to the floor. “There aren’t any floor loops set into the floor.”

With a nod that sent his whole body bobbing, Bracknell said, “The crew hasn’t gotten this far yet. We swim the rest of the way.”

“Swim?”

“Just push yourself along the wall with your fingertips. It’s easy.” Then Bracknell saw Molina’s grim expression. “Victor, will you be okay?”

“I think so,” Molina said, without much conviction.

As they floated along the bare decking of the corridor, brushing the curving metal wall with their fingers, Bracknell explained, “Back there where we came in, the biggest area will be a preparation center for launching satellites.”

Lara said, “You’ll carry them up here on the elevators and then launch them at this altitude?”

“It’ll be a lot cheaper than launching them from the ground with rockets,” Bracknell said. “All we need is a little kick booster to place the satellite in the orbit its owners want.”

“You’ll launch geostationary satellites from the platform up at that level, right?” Lara asked.

“Right. Again, with a little maneuvering thrust to place them in their proper slots.”

“Masterson Aerospace and the other rocket companies aren’t going to like you,” she said.

“I guess not. The buggywhip makers must have hated Henry Ford.”

Lara laughed.

The noise was far behind them now, still discernable, but down to a background level. They came to a heavy-looking hatch set into a wall. Bracknell tapped out the proper code on the keypad set into the wall and the hatch sighed open. Lara felt a slight whisper of air brush past her from behind.

“You wanted a window?” Bracknell said to her. “Here’s a window for you.”

They stepped through and Lara’s breath caught in her throat. They were in a narrow darkened compartment. One entire wall was transparent. Beyond it curved the gigantic bulk of Earth, sparkling blue oceans gleaming in the sunlight, brilliant white clouds hugging the surface, wrinkles of brown mountains.

“Oh my god,” Lara gasped, gliding to the long window.

Molina hung back.

Bracknell rapped his knuckles against the window. “Glassteel,” he said. “Imported from Selene.”

“It’s so beautiful!” Lara exclaimed. “Look! I think I can see the Panama Canal.”

“That’s Central America, all right,” Bracknell said. Pointing to a wide swirl of clouds, “And that looks like a tropical storm off in the Pacific.”

Molina pushed up behind him and peered at the curling swath of clouds. “Will it affect the tower?”

“Not likely. Tropical storms don’t come down to the equator, and we’re well away from the coast anyway.”

“But still…”

“The tower can take winds of a thousand kilometers per hour, Victor. More than three times the most powerful hurricane on record.”

“I can’t see straight down,” Lara said, almost like a disappointed child. “I can’t see the base of the tower.”

“Look out to the horizon,” said Bracknell. “That’s the Yucatan peninsula, where the ancient Mayas built their temples.”

“And those mountains to our right, they must be the Andes,” she said. The peaks were bare, gray granite, snowless since the greenhouse warming had struck.

“Mance,” said Lara, “you could use glassteel to build a transparent elevator tube.”

He snorted. “Not at the prices Selene charges for the stuff.”

Molina glided back toward the open hatch. “This door is an airtight seal, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Bracknell answered. “If the outside wall of this compartment is punctured and there’s a loss of air pressure, that hatch automatically closes and seals off the leak.”

“And traps anybody in this compartment,” Molina said.

“That’s right,” Bracknell replied gravely.

Lara said, “But you have spacesuits in here so they can save themselves. Don’t you?”

Bracknell shook his head. “It would take too long to get into the suits. Even the new nanofiber soft suits would take too long.”

“What you’re telling us,” Molina said, “is that we’re in danger in here.”

“Only if the outer shell is penetrated.”

“How likely is that?” said Lara.

Smiling tightly, Bracknell said, “The tower’s been dinged by micrometeorites thousands of times. Mostly up at higher altitudes. No penetrations, though.”

“Wasn’t there a satellite collision?” Molina asked.

“Every satellite launch is planned so that the bird’s orbit doesn’t come closer than a hundred kilometers of the tower. The IAA’s been very strict about that.”

“But a satellite actually hit the tower?” Lara looked more curious than afraid.

With a nod, Bracknell replied, “Some damnfool paramilitary outfit launched a spy satellite without clearing it with the IAA. It smacked into the tower on its second orbit.”

“And?”

“Hardly scratched the buckyball cables, but it wrecked the spysat completely. Most of the junk fell down and burned up in the atmosphere. We had to send a team outside to clean off the remaining debris and inspect the area where it hit. The damage was very superficial.”

“When you stop to think about it,” Lara said, “the impact of even a big satellite hitting this tower would be like a mosquito ramming an elephant.”

Bracknell laughed as he turned back toward the open hatch.

“The only way to hurt this beanstalk,” said Molina, “would be to somehow disconnect it up at the geostationary level.”

Bracknell looked over his shoulder at the biologist. “That’s right, Victor. Do that, and the lower half of the tower collapses to the ground, while the upper half goes spinning off into deep space.”

“The tower would collapse?” Lara asked. “It would fall down to the ground?”

Bracknell nodded. “Only if it’s disconnected from the geostationary platform.”

“That would destroy everything?” Lara asked.

“Quite completely,” said Bracknell. “But don’t worry, we’ve built that section with a two-hundred-percent overload capacity. It can’t happen.”

YAMAGATA ESTATE

Nobuhiko Yamagata’s knees ached as he sat on the tatami mat facing this, this … fanatic. There was no other way to describe the leader of the Flower Dragon movement. Like a ninja of old, he thought, this man is a fanatic.

Yoshijiro Umetzu was named after a shamed ancestor, a general who had surrendered his army rather than fight to the death. From earliest childhood his stern father and uncles had drilled into him their expectation that he would grow up to erase this century-old stain on the family’s honor. While upstarts like Saito Yamagata made vast fortunes in business and Japanese scientists earned world recognition for their research work, Umetzu knew that only blood could bring true respect. Respect is based on fear, he was told endlessly. Nothing less.

By the time he was a teenager, the world was racked with terrorism. The poor peoples of the world struck almost blindly against the rich, attempting to destroy the wealth that they themselves could never attain. Japan was the target of many terrorist attacks: poison gas killed thousands in Tokyo; biological weapons slaughtered tens of thousands in Osaka. The nanomachine plague that nearly destroyed the entire island of Kyushu, killing millions, led directly to the international treaty banning nanotechnology everywhere on Earth.

When the greenhouse cliff toppled the world’s climate, coastal cities everywhere were drowned by the suddenly rising seas. But an even worse fate befell Japan: in addition to the devastating floods, earthquakes demolished the home islands.

Out of the ashes, though, rose a new Japan. The century-long experiment in democracy was swept aside and a new government, strong and unyielding, came to power. The true strength of that government was the Flower Dragon movement, a strange mix of religion and zeal, of Buddhist acceptance and disciplined political action. Like other fundamentalist movements elsewhere in the world, the Flower Dragon movement spread beyond its place of origin: Korea, China, Thailand, Indochina. On the vast and miserable Indian subcontinent, decimated by biowar and decades-long droughts brought on by the collapse of the monsoons, followers of the Flower Dragon clashed bloodily with the Sword of Islam.

Now the leader of the Flower Dragon movement sat on the other side of the exquisite tea set from Nobuhiko. Umetzu wore a modern business suit, as did Yamagata. The leader of the Flower Dragon movement had the lean, parched face of an ascetic, his head shaved bald, a thin dark moustache drooping down the corners of his mouth almost to his jawline. The expression on his face was severe, disapproving. Nobuhiko felt distinctly uneasy in his presence, almost ashamed of his well-fed girth.

Yet Nobu understood that Umetzu had come to him. I called and he came, Yamagata told himself. I’m not without power here. The fact that Umetzu was apparently a few years younger than he should have made Nobu feel even more in command of this meeting. But it didn’t.

Umetzu had arrived at the Yamagata family estate in an unmarked helicopter, accompanied by four younger men. Nobu had chosen his family’s home for this meeting so that they would be safe from the prying eyes and news media snoops that were unavoidable in the corporate offices in New Kyoto. Here, on his spacious estate up in the hills, surrounded by servants who had been with the family for generations, he could have airtight security.

They sat in a small room paneled in polished oak, the tea set between them. The wall to Nobu’s right was a sliding shoji screen; to his left a window looked out on a small, enclosed courtyard and raked stone garden. The kimono-clad women who had served the tea had left the room. Umetzu’s aides were being fed in another room, far enough away so that they could not overhear their master’s discussion with Yamagata, close enough so that they could reach him quickly if they had to. Nobu understood without being told that those young men were bodyguards.

“What do you want of me?” Umetzu asked, dropping all pretense of polite conversation. He had not touched the lacquered cup before him.

Nobu took a sip of the hot, soothing tea before answering. “There is a task that must be done in complete secrecy.”

Umetzu said nothing.

“I had thought of negotiating with one of the Islamic groups,” Nobu went on. “They are accustomed to the concept of martyrdom.”

“Yet you have asked to speak with me. In private.”

“It is a very delicate matter.”

Umetzu took in a long, slow breath. “A matter that involves death.”

“Many deaths, most likely.”

“The followers of the Flower Dragon’s way do not fear death. Many of them believe in reincarnation.”

“You do not?” Nobuhiko asked.

“My beliefs are not the subject of this meeting.”

Nobu bowed his head a centimeter or so.

“Just what is it that you require?” asked Umetzu.

Now Nobuhiko hesitated, trying to fathom what lay behind his guest’s hooded eyes. Can I trust him? Is this the best way for me to go? He wished he had his father here to advise him, but the elder Yamagata was still locked away in the Himalayas, playing at being a lama.

“What I require,” Nobu said at last, “must never be traced back to me or to Yamagata Corporation. Is that clear? Never.”

Umetzu almost smiled. “It must be truly horrible, for you to be so afraid.”

“Horrible enough,” said Nobu. “Horrible enough.”

“Then what is it?”

“The skytower. It must be destroyed.”

Umetzu drew in a breath. “I have been informed that the skytower is being built by nanomachines.”

Surprised, Nobuhiko blurted, “Where did you hear that?”

Allowing himself a thin smile, Umetzu replied, “Flower Dragon has contacts in many places, including the New Morality.”

“I did not realize that they are using nanomachines.”

“Of a sort. They are within the law, apparently, but just barely.”

“Perhaps we could stop them legally, through the international courts.”

Umetzu shook his head the barest fraction of a centimeter. “Do not put your faith in the courts. Direct action is better.”

“Then you are willing to help me?” Nobuhiko asked.

“Of course. The skytower must be destroyed.”

“Yes. And it must be destroyed in a manner that will discredit the very idea of building such towers. It must be brought down in a disaster so stunning that no one will ever dare to bring up the idea of building another.”

Nobuhiko felt his cheeks flushing and realized that he was squeezing his miniature teacup so hard its edge was cutting into the flesh of his palm.

Umetzu seemed unmoved. “How do you intend to accomplish this tremendous feat?”

Regaining his self-control, Nobuhiko put the lacquered cup back on its tray as he answered, “My technical people know how to bring it down. They have all the information we require. What I need is men who will do the task.”

“Men who will become martyrs.”

Nobuhiko bowed his head once again.

“That is not terribly difficult,” said Umetzu. “There are those who welcome death, especially if they believe they will accomplish something of worth in their dying.”

“But it must be kept absolutely secret,” Nobuhiko repeated in an urgent hiss. “It must never be traced back to Yamagata Corporation.”

Umetzu closed his eyes briefly. “We can recruit martyrs from elsewhere: even the fat Americans have fanatics among their New Morality groups.”

“Truly?” Nobuhiko asked.

“But what of your own technicians? Will they be martyred also?”

“That will not be necessary.”

“Yet they will have the knowledge that you wish kept secret. Once the tower falls, they will know that you have done it.”

“They will be far from Earth when that happens,” Nobuhiko said. “I have already had them transferred to Yamagata operations in the Asteroid Belt.”

Umetzu considered this for a moment. “I have heard that the Asteroid Belt is a very dangerous place.”

“It can be.”

“Wars have been fought there. Many were killed.”

“I have heard that the Flower Dragon has followers even in the Belt. Loyal followers.”

Umetzu understood Nobu’s unspoken request. This time he did smile thinly. “So your people will not be martyrs. Instead they will fall victims to accidents.”

“As you said,” Nobu replied, “the Belt is a very dangerous place.”

CIUDAD DE CIELO

Elliott Danvers was lonely after Molina left for Australia. He missed their meals together, their adversarial chats, the verbal cut and parry that kept his mind stimulated.

Over the weeks that followed Molina’s departure, Danvers tried to forget his own needs and buried himself in his work. No, he reminded himself time and again. Not my work. God’s work. He felt puzzled that Atlanta had shown no visible reaction to his report that nanotechnology was being used to build the skytower. He had expected some action, or at least an acknowledgement of his intelligence. Nothing. Not a word of thanks or congratulations on a job well done. Well, he told himself, a good conscience is our only sure reward. And he plunged himself deeper into his work. Still, he felt nettled, disappointed, ignored.

He went to Bracknell and asked permission to convert one of the warehouse buildings into a nondenominational chapel. As the sky-tower neared completion, some of the buildings fell into disuse, some of the workers departed for their homes. Danvers noted that there seemed to be fewer Yankee and Latino construction workers in the streets, and more Asian computer and electronics technicians.

“A chapel?” Bracknell looked surprised when Danvers raised the question.

Standing in front of Bracknell’s desk, Danvers nodded. “You have several empty buildings available. I won’t need much in way of—”

“You mean you’ve been working here all this time without a church building?” Bracknell looked genuinely surprised. “Where do you hold your services?”

“Outdoors, mostly. Sometimes in my quarters, for smaller groups.”

Bracknell’s office was far from imposing. Nothing more than a corner room in the corrugated-metal operations building. He sat at a scuffed and dented steel desk. One wall held a smart screen that nearly reached the low ceiling. Another had photos of the tower at various stages of its construction pasted to it. Two windows looked out on the streets and, beyond one of them, the dark trunk of the tower, rising above the distant green hills and into the heavens.

Gesturing to the plain plastic chair in front of his desk, Bracknell said, “I thought we already had a church here, someplace.”

Danvers smiled bitterly as he settled his bulk in the creaking little chair. “You’re not a churchgoer.”

With an almost sheepish grin, Bracknell admitted, “You’ve got me there.”

“Are you a Believer?”

Bracknell thought it over for a moment, his head cocked slightly. “Yes, I think I can truthfully say that I am. Not in any organized religion, understand. But—well, the universe is so blasted orderly. I guess I do believe there’s some kind of presence overseeing everything. Childhood upbringing, I suppose. It’s hard to overcome.”

“You don’t have to apologize about it,” Danvers said, a little testily. He was thinking, Not in any organized religion, the man says. He’s one of those intellectual esthetes who rationalizes everything and thinks that that’s religion. Nothing more than a damnable Deist, at best.

Bracknell called up a map of the city and told his computer to highlight the unused buildings. The wall screen showed four of them in red.

“Take your pick,” he said to Danvers, gesturing to the screen.

Danvers stood up and walked to the map, studying it for several moments. “This one,” he said at last, rapping his knuckles against the screen.

“That’s the smallest one,” said Bracknell.

“My congregations have not been overwhelming. Besides, the location is good, close to the city’s center. More people will see their friends and associates going to services. It’s a proven fact that people tend to follow a crowd.”

“It’s the curious monkey in our genes,” Bracknell said easily.

Danvers tried to erase the frown that immediately came over him.

“Was that too Darwinian for you?”

“We are far more than monkeys,” Danvers said tightly.

“I suppose we are. But we’re mammals; we enjoy the companionship of others. We need it.”

“That’s true enough, I suppose.”

“So why don’t you join Lara and me at dinner tonight? We can talk over the details of your new chapel.”

Danvers was surprised at the invitation. He knew, in his mind, that a man could be a non-Believer and still be a decent human being. But this man Bracknell, he’s leading this nearly blasphemous skytower project. I mustn’t let him lull me into friendship, Danvers told himself. He may be a pleasant enough fellow, but he is the enemy. You either do God’s work or the devil’s. There is no neutrality in the struggle between good and evil.

The restaurant was only half full, Bracknell saw as he came through the wide-open double doors with Lara. A lot of the construction people had already left. Once the geostationary platform was finished, they would shift entirely to operational status.

He saw that Rev. Danvers was already seated at a table, chatting with the restaurant’s owner and host, a tall suave Albanian who towered over his mestizo kitchen staff. As soon as the host saw Bracknell and Lara enter, he left Danvers in midsentence and rushed to them.

“Slow night tonight,” he said by way of greeting.

Bracknell said, “Not for much longer. Lots of people heading here. By this time next year you’ll have to double the size of this place.”

The host smiled and pointed out new paintings, all by local artists, hanging on the corrugated metal walls. Village scenes. Cityscapes of Quito. One showed the mountains and the skytower in Dayglo orange. Bracknell thought they were pretty ordinary and said nothing, while Lara commented cheerfully on their bright colors.

The dinner with Rev. Danvers started off rather awkwardly. For some reason the minister seemed guarded, tight-lipped. But then Lara got him to talking about his childhood, his early days in the slums of Detroit.

’You have no idea of what it was like growing up in that cesspool of sin and violence. If it weren’t for the New Morality, Lord knows where I’d be,” Danvers said over a good-sized ribeye steak. “They worked hard to clean up the streets, get rid of the crooks and drug pushers. They worked hard to clean me up.”

Lara asked lightly, “Were you all that dirty?”

Danvers paled slightly. “I was a prizefighter back then,” he said, his voice sinking low. “People actually paid money to see two men try to hurt each other, try to pound one another into unconsciousness.”

“Really?”

“Women, too. Women fought in the ring and the crowds cheered and screamed, like animals.”

Bracknell saw that Danvers’s hands were trembling. But Lara pushed further, asking, “And the New Morality changed all that?”

“Yes, praise God. Thanks to their workers, cities like Detroit became safer, more orderly. Criminals were jailed.”

“And their lawyers, too, from what I hear,” Bracknell said. He meant it as a joke, but Danvers did not laugh and Lara shot him a disapproving glance.

“Many lawyers went to jail,” Danvers said, totally serious, “or to retraining centers. They were protecting the criminals instead of the innocent victims! They deserved whatever they got.”

“With your size,” Lara said, “I’ll bet you were a very good prizefighter.”

Danvers smiled ruefully. “They could always find someone bigger.”

“But you beat them, didn’t you?”

“No,” he answered truthfully. “Not very many of them.”

“And now you fight for people’s souls,” Lara said.

“Yes.”

“That’s much better, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Bracknell looked around the restaurant. Only about half the tables were taken. “Looks like a slow night,” he said, trying to change the subject.

“Mondays are always slow,” said Lara.

“Not for us,” Bracknell said. “We topped off the LEO platform today. It’s all finished and ready to open for business.”

“Really!” Lara beamed at him. “That’s ahead of schedule, isn’t it?”

Bracknell nodded happily. “Skytower Corporation’s going to make a public announcement about it at their board meeting next month. Big news push. I’m going to be on the nets.”

“That’s wonderful!”

Danvers was less enthusiastic. “Does this mean that you’re ready to launch satellites from the LEO platform?”

“We already have contracts for four launches.”

“But the geostationary platform isn’t finished yet, is it?”

“We’re ahead of schedule there, too.”

“But it’s not finished.”

“Not for another six months,” Bracknell said, feeling almost as if he were admitting a wrongdoing. Somehow Danvers had let the air out of his balloon.

By the time they finished their desserts and coffee, theirs was the only occupied table in the restaurant. The robot waiter was already sweeping the floor and two of the guys from the kitchen were stacking chairs atop tables to give the robot leeway for its chore.

Danvers bade them good night out on the sidewalk and headed for his quarters. Bracknell walked with Lara, arm in arm.

As they passed through the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, Lara said, “Rev. Danvers seems a little uncomfortable with the idea that we’re living in sin.”

Bracknell grinned down at her. “Best place to live, all things considered.”

“Really? Is that what you think?”

Looking up at the glowing lights of the tower that split the night in half, Bracknell murmured, “Urn … Paris is probably better.”

“That’s where the board meeting’s going to be, isn’t it?”

“Right,” said Bracknell. “That’s where Skytower Corporation turns me into a news media star.”

“My handsome hero.”

“Want to come with me?” he asked.

“To Paris?”

“Sure. You can do some clothes shopping there.”

“Are you saying I need new clothes?”

He stopped in the darkness between streetlamps and slipped his arms around her waist. “You’ll need a new dress for the wedding, won’t you?”

“Wedding?” Even in the shadows he could see her eyes go wide with surprise.

Bracknell said, “With the tower almost finished and all this publicity the corporation’s going to generate, I figure I ought to make an honest woman of you.”

“You chauvinist pig!”

“Besides,” he went on, “it’ll make Danvers feel better.”

“You’re serious?” Lara asked. “This isn’t a joke?”

He kissed her lightly. “Dead serious, darling. Will you marry me?”

“In Paris?”

“If that’s what you want.”

Lara flung her arms around his neck and kissed him as hard as she could.

GEOSTATIONARY PLATFORM

“Look on my works, ye mighty,” quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, the chief engineer, “and despair.”

In a moment of whimsy brought on by their joy at his birth, his parents had named him after the poet. Emerson suspected their euphoria was helped along by the recreational drugs they used; certainly he saw enough evidence of that while he was growing up in the caravan city that trundled through the drought-dessicated former wheat belt of Midwestern America.

His father was a mechanic, his mother a nurse: both highly prized skills in the nomadic community. And both of them loved poetry. Hence his name.

Everybody called him Waldo. He learned to love things mechanical from his father and studied mechanical engineering through the computer webs and satellite links that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Once he grew into manhood Emerson left the caravan and entered a real, bricks-and-mortar engineering college. All he wanted was a genuine degree so that he would have real credentials to show prospective employers. No caravan life for Waldo. He wanted to settle down, get rich (or at least moderately prosperous), be respectable, and build new things for people.

His life didn’t quite work out that way. There was plenty of work for a bright young engineer, rebuilding the shattered electrical power grid, erecting whole new cities to house the refugees driven from their homes by the greenhouse floods, designing solar power farms in the clear desert skies of the Southwest. But the various jobs took him from one place to another. He was still a nomad; he just stayed in one place a bit longer than his gypsying parents did.

He never got rich, or even very prosperous. Much of the work he did was commissioned by the federal or state government at minimum wage. Often enough he was conscripted by local chapters of the New Morality and he was paid nothing more than room, board, and a pious sermon or two about doing God’s work. He married twice, divorced twice, and then gave up the idea of marriage.

Until a guy named Bracknell came to him with a wild idea and a gleam in his eye. Ralph Waldo Emerson fell in love with the skytower project.

Now that it was nearly finished he almost felt sad. He had spent more years in Ecuador than anywhere else in his whole life. He was becoming fond of Spanish poetry. He no longer got nauseous in zero gravity. He gloried in this monumental piece of architecture, this tower stretching toward heaven. He had even emblazoned his name into one of the outside panels that sheathed the tower up here at the geostationary level, insulating the tower from the tremendous electrical flux of the Van Allen belt. Working in an armored spacesuit and using an electron gun, he laboriously wrote his full name on one of the buckyball panels.

He laughed at his private joke. Someday some maintenance dweeb is going to see it, he thought, and wonder who the hell wrote the name of a poet on this tower’s insulation skin.

Now he stood at the control board in the compact oval chamber that would soon be the geosynch level’s operations center. His feet were ensconced in plastic floor loops so that he wouldn’t float off weightlessly in the zero gravity of the station. Surrounding him were display screens that lined the walls like the multifaceted eyes of some giant insect. Technicians in gray coveralls bobbed in midair as they labored to connect the screens and get them running. One by one, the colored lights on the control board winked on and a new screen lit up. Emerson could see a dozen different sections of the mammoth geostationary structure. There was still a considerable amount of work to do, of course, but it was mostly just a matter of bringing in equipment and setting it up. Furnishing the hotel built into the platform’s upper level. Checking out the radiation shielding and the electrical insulation and the airlocks. Making certain the zero-g toilets worked. Monkey work. Not creative. Not challenging.

There was talk of starting a new skytower in Borneo or central Africa.

“ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” he muttered to himself. “To sail beyond the sunset.”

“Hey, Waldo,” the voice of one of his assistants grated annoyingly in the communication plug in his right ear, “the supply ship is coming in.”

“It’s early,” Emerson said, without needing to look at the digital clock set into the control board.

“Early or late, they’re here and they want a docking port.”

Emerson glanced up at the working screens, then played his fingers across the keyboard on the panel. One of the screens flicked from an interior view of the bare and empty hotel level upstairs to an outside camera view of a conical Masterson Clippership hovering in co-orbit a few hundred meters from the platform. He frowned at the image.

“We were expecting an uncrewed supply module,” he said into his lip mike.

“And we got a nice shiny Clippership,” his assistant replied. “They got our cargo and they want to offload it and go home.”

Shaking his head slightly, Emerson checked the manifest that the Clippership automatically relayed to the platform’s logistics program. It matched what they were expecting.

“Why’d they use a Clipper?” he wondered aloud.

“They said the freight booster had a malf and they swapped out the supply module with the Clippership’s passenger module.”

It didn’t make sense to Emerson, but there was the Clippership waiting to dock and offload its cargo, and the manifest was exactly what they expected.

“Ours not to reason why,” Emerson misquoted. “Hook ’em to docking port three; it’s closest to them.”

“Will do.”

Franklin Zachariah hummed a cheerful tune to himself as he sat shoe-homed into the cramped cockpit of the Clippership. The pilot, a Japanese or Vietnamese or some kind of Asian gook, shot an annoyed glance over his shoulder. Hard to tell his nationality, Zach thought, with those black shades he’s wearing. Like a mask or some macho android out of a banned terminator flick.

Zachariah stopped his humming but continued to play the tune in his head. It helped to pass the boring time. He had expected to get spacesick when the rocket went into orbit, but the medication they’d given him was working fine. Zero gravity didn’t bother him at all. No upchucks, not even dizziness.

Zachariah was an American. He did not belong to the New Morality or the Flower Dragon or any other fundamentalist movement. He did not even follow the religion of his forefathers. He found that he couldn’t believe in a god who made so many mistakes. He himself was a very clever young man—everyone who had ever met him said so. What they didn’t know was that he was also a very destructive fellow.

Although he’d been born in Brooklyn, when he was six years old and the rising sea level caused by the greenhouse warming finally overwhelmed the city’s flood control dams, Zachariah’s family fled to distant cousins in the mountains near Charleston, West Virginia. There young Zach, as everyone called him, learned what it meant to be a Jew. At school, the other young boys alternately beat him up and demanded help with their classwork from him. His father, a professor in New York, had to settle for a job as a bookkeeper for his younger cousin, a jeweler in downtown Charleston who was ultimately shot to death in a holdup.

Zach learned how to avoid beatings by hiring the toughest thugs in school to be his bodyguards. He paid them with money he made from selling illicit drugs that he cooked up in the moldy basement of the house they shared with four other families.

By the time Zach was a teenager he had become a very accomplished computer hacker. Unlike his acne-ridden friends, who delved into illegal pornographic sites or shut down the entire public school system with a computer virus, Zach used his computer finesse in more secretive and lucrative ways. He pilfered bank accounts. He jiggered police records. He even got the oafish schoolmate who’d been his worst tormentor years earlier arrested by the state police for abetting an abortion. The kid went to jail protesting his innocence, but his own computer files proved his guilt. Cool, Zach said to himself as the bewildered lout was hauled off to a New Morality work camp.

Zach disdained college. He was having too much fun tweaking the rest of the world. He was the lone genius behind the smallpox scare that forced the head of the Center for Disease Control to resign. He even reached into the files of a careless White House speechwriter and leaked the contents of a whole sheaf of confidential memos, causing mad panic among the president’s closest advisors. Way cool.

Then he discovered the thrill of true destruction. It happened while he was watching a pirated video of the as-yet-unreleased Hollywood re-re-remake of Phantom of the Opera. Zach sat in open-mouthed awe as the Phantom sawed through the chain supporting the opera house’s massive chandelier. Cooler than cool! he thought as the ornate collection of crystal crashed into the audience, splattering fat old ladies in their gowns and jewels and fatter old men in black tuxes.

Franklin Zachariah learned the sheer beauty, the sexual rush, of real destruction. Using acid to weaken a highway bridge so that it collapsed when the morning’s traffic of overloaded semis rolled over it. Shorting out an airport’s electrical power supply—and its backup emergency generator—in the midst of the evening’s busiest hour. Quietly disconnecting the motors that moved the floodgates along a stretch of the lower Potomac so that the storm surge from the approaching hurricane flooded the capital’s streets and sent those self-important politicians screaming to pin the blame on someone. Coolissimo.

Most of the time he worked alone, living off bank accounts here and there that he nibbled at, electronically. For some of the bigger jobs, like the Potomac floodgates, he needed accomplices, of course. But he always kept his identity a secret, meeting his accomplices only through carefully buffered computer links that could not, he was sure, be traced back to him.

It was a shock, then, when a representative of the Flower Dragon movement contacted him about the skytower. But Zach got over his shock when they described to him the coolest project of them all. He quickly asked for the detailed schematics of the skytower and began to study hard.

THE APPROACH

Lara and Bracknell were driving one of the project’s electric-powered minivans to the Quito airport. Bracknell planned to attend Skytower Corporation’s board meeting and the news conference at which they would make the announcement that the tower was ready for operations. Then they would stay for a weekend of interviews and publicity events and return to Quito the following Monday.

“You sure you don’t want to get married in Paris?” he asked her, grinning happily as he drove the quiet minivan down the steep, gravel-surfaced road. “We could have the ceremony at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Be kind of symbolic.”

Trucks and buses ground by in the opposite direction, raising clouds of gritty gray dust as they headed uphill toward Sky City.

Lara shook her head. “I tried to get through all the red tape on the computer link, Mance, but it’s hopeless. We’d have to stay two weeks, at least.”

“The French want our tourist dollars.”

“And they want to do their own blood tests, their own searches of our citizenship data. I think they even check Interpol for criminal records.”

“So we’ll get married when we come back,” he said easily.

“And we can invite our families and friends.”

“I’ll ask Victor if he can come back for the occasion and be my best man.”

Lara made no reply.

“Hey! Why don’t we ask Rev. Danvers to perform the ceremony?”

“At his new chapel?”

“Unless you’d rather do it in the cathedral in Quito.”

“No,” Lara said. “Let’s do it at the base of the tower. Rev. Danvers will be fine.”

He wanted to kiss her; he even considered pulling off on the shoulder of the road to do it. Instead, he drove in silence for a while, grinning happily. The road became paved as they neared Quito’s airport.

Traffic built up. Lara turned in her seat and looked out the rear window.

“It’s going to feel strange not seeing the tower in the sky,” she said.

“It’ll be there when we get back,” Bracknell said easily. “For the next few days you’ll just have to settle for the Eiffel Tower.”

“Docking confirmed,” said the Clippership’s copilot. He was wearing dark glasses, too, like the pilot. Zach thought he looked kind of like an Asian, but his accent sounded California or some other part of the States.

“Tell the tower crew they can begin unloading,” the pilot replied.

Zach knew what that meant. The Clipper was attached to the sky-tower now by a docking adaptor, a short piece of insulated tunnel that linked the tower’s airlock to the Clipper’s cargo hatch. A team of technicians from the skytower would come through the adaptor and begin unloading the Clipper’s cargo bay. Zach thought of them as chimps doing stupid monkey tasks.

Unseen by the tower personnel, a dozen men and women recruited from god knows where would exit one of the Clippership’s other airlocks, in spacesuits, of course, carrying the Clipper’s real cargo: fifty tiny capsules of nanomachines, gobblers programmed to tear apart carbon molecules such as buckyballs. Zach had spent months studying the schematics of the skytower that the Flower Dragon people had supplied him, calculating just how to bring the tower down. They had balked at first when he suggested gobblers; nanotechnology was anathema to them. But someone higher up in the organization had overridden their objections and provided the highly dangerous gobblers for Zach’s project of destruction.

Now twelve religious fanatics were out there playing with nanomachines that could kill them if they weren’t careful. Each of the EVA team bore a minicam attached to his or her helmet, so Zach could direct their actions from the safety of the cockpit, securely linked to the outside crew by hair-thin optical fibers that carried his radio commands with no chance that they’d be overheard by the guys in the tower.

Now comes the fun part, Zach thought as he powered up the laptop he would use for communicating with the EVA team.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was also remotely watching the unloading, still wondering why the supply contractor had gone to the expense of hiring a shiny new Clippership instead of sending up another automated freighter.

“In faith, ’twas strange,” he murmured as he stood in the control center, “ ’twas passing strange.”

“You spouting poetry again?” his assistant asked.

Emerson considered yanking the comm plug out of his ear, but knew that would be the wrong thing to do. Instead he asked, “How’s it going?”

“It’s going. Riley and his guys are pushin’ the packages through the hatch and I’m checkin’ ’em off as they come in. Nothing much to it. Just a lot of muscle work. Trained chimps could do this.”

Emerson could see the bored team on one of the working screens, gliding the weightless big crates along through the adaptor tunnel.

“Well just be careful in there,” he said. “Just because we’re in zero-g doesn’t mean those packages don’t have mass. Get caught between a crate and a wall and you’ll get your ribs caved in, just like on Earth.”

“I know that.” His assistant sounded impatient, waspish.

“Just make sure your chimpanzees know it.”

“What? No poetry for the occasion?”

Emerson immediately snapped, “A fool and his ribcage are soon parted.”

Zach was humming tunelessly to himself as he called up the schematics and matched them with the camera views from his EVA team. The connection between the geostationary platform and the tower’s main cables was the crucial point. Sever that link and some thirty-five thousand kilometers of skytower go crashing down to Earth. And the other thirty-five thou, on the other side of the platform, goes spinning off into space, carrying the platform with it.

He suppressed the urge to giggle, knowing it would annoy the sour-faced pilots sitting as immobile as statues an arm’s reach in front of him. I’m going to wipe out the biggest structure anybody’s ever built! Wham! And down it goes.

It’ll probably fall onto Quito, Zach reasoned. Kill a million people, maybe. Like the hammer of god slamming them flat. Like a big boot squishing bugs.

The culmination of my career, Zach thought. But nobody will know that I did it. Nobody really knows who I am. Not anybody who counts. But they will after this. I’m going to stand up and tell the world that I did this. Me. Franklin Zachariah. The terror of terrors. Dr. Destruction.

Lara was wearing open-weave huaraches instead of regular shoes, Bracknell realized as they inched along the line at the airport’s security site. He frowned as he thought that they’d probably want him to take off his boots before going through the metal detector.

Damned foolishness, he said to himself. There hasn’t been a terrorist threat at an airport in more than twenty years but they still go through this goddamned nonsense.

Sure enough, the stocky, stern-faced security guard pointed silently to Bracknell’s boots as Lara sailed unbothered through the metal detector’s arch. Grumbling, Bracknell tugged the boots off and thumped them down on the conveyor belt that ran through the X-ray machine.

He set off the metal detector’s alarm anyway and had to be searched by a pair of grim-looking guards. He had forgotten the handheld computer/phone he was carrying in his shirt pocket.

“No, no,” Zach said sharply into his laptop’s microphone. “Just open the capsule and wedge it into the cable. That’s all you have to do, the nanobugs’ll do the rest.”

The job was taking much longer than he’d expected. Fifty cables, that’s all we have to break, Zach grumbled silently, and these chimps are taking all fucking day to do it.

The underside of the geostationary platform looked like an immense spiderweb to Zach as he peered at it through the cameras of his EVA team. It matched the specs in his files almost exactly; there were always slight deviations between the blueprints and the actual construction. Nobody can build anything this big without straying from the plans here and there, at least a little bit.

Zach knew that the tower’s main support came from these cables, stretched taught by centrifugal force as the whole gigantic assembly swung through space in synchrony with the Earth’s daily spin. Break that connection here at the geostationary level and the stretching force disappears. The tower will collapse to the ground while the equally-long upper section goes spinning out into space.

Fifty cables, he repeated to himself. Let those nanobugs eat through fifty cables and the others won’t have the strength to hold the rig together. Fifty cables.

Emerson’s ear plug chimed softly with the tone he knew came from the safety officer.

“Go ahead,” he said into his lip mike.

“Got something strange goin’ on here.”

“What?”

“That Clipper you’ve got docked. It’s venting gases.”

“Venting?”

“Hydrogen and oxygen, from what the laser spectrometer tells me.”

Emerson thought a moment. “Bleeding a nearly-empty tank, maybe?”

The safety officer’s voice sounded troubled. “This isn’t a bleed. They’re pumpin’ out a lot of gas. Like the propellant they’d be using for their return trip.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Emerson quoted.

Zach licked his lips. The fifty cables were now being eaten away by the gobblers. He had calculated that blowing thirty of the cables would be enough to do the job, but he’d gone for fifty as an extra precaution. Okay, we’ve got fifty and we’re all set.

He looked up at the two Asian pilots, still wearing those cool dark shades. “The nanomachines are in place.”

“Good.”

“All the EVA guys are back inside?”

“That is not your responsibility.”

Zach felt the pilot was being snotty. “Okay,” he said, “if any of them get eaten by the bugs, you write the condolence letters.”

“Start the nanomachines working,” the pilot said, without turning to look at Zach.

“They are working.”

“Very well.”

“Shouldn’t we disconnect from the dock now?”

“No. Not yet.”

THE COLLAPSE

Zach thought it was a little weird to stay connected to the tower’s geostationary docking tunnel while the nanomachines were chewing away at the cables, but he figured the pilot knew what he was doing. The bugs won’t get the chance to damage the Clippership; we’ll disconnect before we’re in any danger, he was pretty certain.

Besides, these two black-goggled pilots aren’t going to kill themselves, Zach further assured himself. Not knowingly.

Outside the ship there was no sound. No vibration. Nothing.

For the first time, the pilot turned in his seat and lifted his glasses to glare directly at Zach. “Well? Have you done it?”

“Yeah,” Zach replied, feeling nettled. “It’s done. Now get us the hell out of here before the upper half of the tower starts spinning off to Alpha Centauri.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said the pilot.

In the geostationary operations center, Emerson felt a slight tremor, a barely sensed vibration, as if a subway train had passed below the floor he stood on.

“What was that?” he wondered aloud.

His assistant’s voice responded, “Yeah, I felt it too.”

Tremors and vibrations were not good. In all the hours he’d spent in the tower at its various levels, it had always been as solid and unmoving as a mountain. What the hell could cause it to shake?

“Whatever it was,” his assistant said, “it stopped.”

But Emerson was busy flicking his fingers along his keyboard, checking the safety program. No leaks, no loss of air pressure. Electrical systems in the green. Power systems functioning normally. Structural integrity—

His eyes goggled at the screen. Red lights cluttered the screen. Forty, no fifty of the one hundred and twenty main cables had been severed. For long moments he could not speak, could hardly breathe. His brain refused to function. Fifty cables. We’re going to die.

As he stared at the screen’s display, another cable tore loose. And another. He could fell the deck beneath his feet shuddering.

“Hey, what’s going on?” one of the technicians yelled from across the chamber.

“Let’s to it, pell mell,” Emerson whispered, more to himself than anyone who might hear him. “If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.”

Bracknell was standing by the ceiling-high window at the Quito airport terminal gate, waiting for the Clippership for Paris to begin boarding. It sat out on its blast-scarred concrete pad, a squat cone constructed of diamond panels, manufactured by lunar nanomachines at Selene. They can use nanomachines up there but we can’t here, Bracknell thought. Well, we’ve gotten around that stupid law. Once we get the patent—

A flash of light caught his eye. It was bright, brilliant even, but so quick that he wasn’t certain if he’d actually seen anything real. Like a bolt of lightning. It seemed to come from the skytower, standing straight and slim, rising from the mountains and through the white clouds that swept over their peaks.

Lara came up beside him, complaining, “They can fly from Quito to Paris in less than an hour, but it takes longer than that to board the Clipper.”

Bracknell smiled at her. “Patience is a virtue, as Rev. Danvers would say.”

“I don’t care. I’m getting—” Her words broke off. She was staring at the skytower. “Mance … look!”

He saw it, too. The tower was no longer a straight line bisecting the sky. It seemed to be rippling, like a rope that is flicked back and forth at one end.

His mind racing, Bracknell stared at the tower. It can’t fall! It can’t! But if it does…

He grabbed Lara around the shoulders and began running, dragging her, away from the big windows. “Get away from the windows!” he bellowed. “Quitarse las ventanas! Run! Vamos!”

“Nothing is happening,” said the pilot accusingly.

“Yes it is,” Zach answered. He was getting tired of the Asian’s stupidity. These guys are supposed to be patient; didn’t anybody ever give them Zen lessons? “Give it a few minutes. Those cables are popping, one by one. The more that snap, the faster the rest of ’em go.”

“I see nothing,” insisted the pilot, pointing toward the cockpit window.

Maybe if you took off those flicking glasses you could see better, creep, Zach grumbled silently. Aloud, he snapped, “You’re gonna see plenty in two-three minutes. Now get us the flick outta here or else we’re gonna go flipping out into deep space!”

“So you say.”

A blinding flash of light seared Zach’s eyes. He heard both pilots shriek. What the fuck was that? Zach wondered, pawing at his eyes. Through burning tears he saw the Clippership’s cockpit, blurred, darkened, everything tinged in red. Rubbing his eyes again Zach squinted down at his laptop. The screen was dark, dead.

Then he realized that both pilots were jabbering in their Asian language.

“What happened?” he screeched.

“Electrical discharge.” The pilot’s voice sounded edgy for the first time. “An enormous electrical discharge.”

“Even though we expected it,” said the copilot, “it was a helluva jolt.”

“Are we okay?” Zach demanded.

“Checking…”

“Get us out of here!” Zach screamed.

“All systems are down,” the copilot said. “Complete power failure.”

“Do something!”

“There is nothing to be done.”

“But we’ll die!”

“Of course.”

Zach began blubbering, babbling incoherently at these two lunatics.

Removing his glasses and rubbing at his burning eyes, the pilot turned to his copilot and said in Japanese, “The American genius doesn’t want to be a martyr.”

The copilot’s lean face was sheened with perspiration. “No one told him he would be.”

“Will that affect his next life, I wonder? Will he be reborn as another human being or something less? A cockroach, perhaps.”

“He doesn’t believe in reincarnation. He doesn’t believe in anything except destruction and his own ego.”

The pilot said, “In that case, he has succeeded admirably. He has destroyed his own ego.”

Neither man laughed. They sat strapped into their seats awaiting their fate with tense resignation while Zach screamed at them to no avail.

The massive electrical discharge released when some of the skytower’s insulating panels were eaten away completed the destruction of the connectors that held the tower’s two segments together at the geostationary level.

Although buckyball fibers are lighter in weight than any material that is even half their tensile strength, a structure of more than thirty-five thousand kilometers’ length weighs millions of metric tons.

The skytower wavered as it tore loose from the geostationary platform, disconnected from the centrifugal force that had pulled it taut. One end suddenly free of its mooring, its other end still tethered to the ground, the lower half of the tower staggered like a prizefighter suddenly struck by a knockout blow, then began its long, slow-motion catastrophic collapse.

The upper end of the tower, equally as long as the lower, was also suddenly released from the force that held it taut. It reacted to the inertia that made it spin around the Earth each twenty-four hours. It continued to spin, but now free of its anchor it swung slowly, inexorably, unstoppably, away from Earth and into the black silent depths of space.

In the geostationary ops center Emerson saw every damned screen suddenly go dark; his control panel went dead. He felt himself sliding out of his foot restraints and sailing in slow motion across the operations center while the technicians who had been working on installing the new equipment were yanked to the ends of their tethers, hanging in midair, more shocked and surprised than frightened.

“What the shit is going on, Waldo?” one of them hollered.

He banged his shoulder painfully against the wall and slid to the floor. Soon enough, he knew, the immense structure would swing around and we’ll all be slung in the opposite direction.

“Waldo, what the fuck’s happening?” He heard panic creeping into their voices now.

We’re dead, he knew. There’s not a thing that anybody can do. Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

“Waldo! What’s goin’ on?”

They were screaming now, horror-struck, aware now that something had gone terribly wrong. Emerson tried to blank out their yammering, demanding, terrified screams.

“Fear death?” he quoted Browning:

And the upper half of the skytower spun out and away from the Earth forever.

The lower half of the skytower slowly, slowly tumbled like a majestic tree suddenly turned to putty. Its base, attached to the rotating Earth, was moving more than a thousand kilometers per hour from west to east. Its enormous length, unsupported now, collapsed westward in a long, long, long plunge to Earth.

The operations crew on duty at Sky City saw their screens glare with baleful red lights. Some of them rushed out into the open, unwilling to believe what their sensors were telling them unless they saw it with their own fear-widened eyes. The skytower was collapsing. They could see it! It was wavering and toppling over like a reed blown by the wind.

People on the streets in Quito looked up and screamed. Villagers in the mountains stared and crossed themselves.

At the Quito airport, Mance Bracknell dragged Lara by the arm as he ran down the terminal’s central corridor, screaming, “Keep away from the windows! Quitarse las ventanas!”

He pulled Lara into the first restroom he saw, a men’s room. Two men, an elderly maintenance worker in wrinkled coveralls and a businessman in a linen suit, stood side by side at urinals. They both looked shocked at the sight of a wild-eyed gringo dragging a woman into this place. They began to object but Mance yelled at them, “Down on the floor! Get down on the floor! There’s going to an explosion! An eruption!”

“Eruption?” asked the old man, hastily zipping his fly.

“Erupción grande!” Mance said. “Temblor de tierra! Earthquake!”

The businessman rushed for the exit while the older man stood there, petrified with sudden fear.

Mance pushed Lara onto the cold tiles and dropped down beside her, his arm wrapped protectively around her.

“Mance, how can—”

“There’s no place to run to,” he hissed in her ear. “If it hits here we’re pulverized.”

Slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing speed, the skytower’s lower half collapsed to the Earth. Its immense bulk smashed into Ciudad de Cielo, the tethers at its base snapping like strings, the shock wave from its impact blowing down those buildings it did not hit directly. The thunder of its fall shattered the air like the blast of every volcano on Earth exploding at once. Seconds later the falling tower smashed down on the northern suburbs of Quito like a gigantic tree crushing an ant hill. The city’s modern high-rise glass and steel towers, built to withstand earthquakes, wavered and shuddered. Their safety-glass facades blew out in showers of pellets. Ordinary windows shattered into razor-sharp shards that slashed to bloody ribbons the people who crowded the streets, screaming in terror. Older buildings were torn from their foundations as if a nuclear explosion had ripped through the city. The old cathedral’s thick masonry walls cracked and its stained glass windows shattered, each and every one of them. Water pipes ruptured and gas mains broke. Fire and flood took up their deadly work where the sheer explosive impact of the collapse left off.

And still the tower fell.

Down the slope that led to the sea, villages and roads and farms and open fields and trees were smashed flat, pulverized, while the shock wave from the impact blew down woodlands and buildings for a hundred kilometers and more in either direction, as if a giant meteor had struck out of the sky. A fishing village fell under the shadow of sudden doom, its inhabitants looking up to see this immense arm of God swinging down on them like the mighty bludgeon of the angel of death.

And still the tower fell.

Its length splashed into the Pacific Ocean with a roar that broke eardrums and ruptured the innards of men, beasts, birds, and fish. Across the coastal shelf it plunged and out beyond into the abyssal depths. Whales migrating hundreds of kilometers out to sea were pulped to jelly by the shock wave that raced through the water. The tsunami it raised washed away shoreline settlements up and down the coast and rushed across the Pacific, flooding the Galapagos Islands, already half-drowned by the greenhouse warming. The Pacific coast of Central America was devastated. Hawaii and Japan were struck before their warning systems could get people to move inland. Samoa and Tahiti were hit by a wall of water nearly fifteen meters high that tore away villages and whole cities. People in Los Angeles and Sydney heard the mighty thunderclap and wondered if it was a sonic boom.

And still the tower fell, splashing all the way across the Pacific, groaning as part of its globe-girdling length sank slowly into the dark abyssal depths. When it hit the spiny tree-covered mountain backbone of Borneo it snapped in two, one part sliding down the rugged slopes, tearing away forests and villages and plantations as it slithered snake-like across the island.

The other part plunged across Sumatra and into the Indian Ocean, narrowly missing the long green finger of Malaysia but sending a tsunami washing across the drowned ruins of Singapore. Along the breadth of equatorial Africa it fell, smashing across Kenya, ploughed into the northern reaches of Lake Victoria, drowning the city of Kampala with a tidal wave, and continued westward, crushing cities and forests alike, igniting mammoth forest fires, driving vast herds of animals into panicked, screaming stampedes. Its upper end, still smoking from the titanic electrical discharge that had severed it, plunged hissing into the Atlantic, sinking deep down into the jagged rift where hot magma from the Earth’s core embraced the man-made structure that had, mere minutes earlier, stood among the stars.

Across the world the once-proud skytower lay amidst a swath of death and desolation and smoking ruin, crushing the life from people, animals, plants, crushing human ambition, human dreams, crushing hope itself.

Lying flat on the tiles of the airport men’s room, Bracknell felt the floor jump as a roll of thunder boomed over them, so loud that his ears rang. Even so, he heard screams and terrified cries.

“Are you all right?” he asked Lara, his voice sounding strange, muffled, inside his head.

She nodded weakly. He saw that her nose was bleeding slightly. Bracknell climbed slowly to his feet. The old man was still lying on the floor, facedown. Bracknell called to him, then nudged his shoulder. The man did not move. Rolling him over, Bracknell saw his soft brown eyes staring out sightlessly.

“He’s dead,” Lara said. Bracknell could barely hear her over the buzzing in his head.

Feeling stunned, thick-witted, Bracknell gazed around the windowless men’s room. One of the tiled walls had cracked. Or had it been that way when they had rushed in here?

“Dead?” he echoed numbly.

“A heart attack, maybe,” Lara said. She clung close to Bracknell. He could feel her trembling.

“He’s lucky,” said Bracknell.

THE RUINS

It took three days before they arrested Bracknell. He had made his way back to the shattered ruins of the Sky City, fighting through the panicked crowd at the airport, holding Lara close to him. The vast parking lot outside the airport seemed undamaged, except for the gritty dust that covered everything and crunched under their feet as they walked, tottering, for what seemed like hours until they found the minivan sitting there where they’d left it. Other people were milling around the parking lot, looking dazed, shocked.

A pall of smoke was rising from the city. Soon enough the looting would begin, Bracknell realized. For the moment they’re too stunned to do much of anything, but that’ll pass and they’ll start looting and stealing. And raping.

The minivan looked as if it had gone a thousand klicks without being washed. Bracknell helped Lara into the right-hand seat, then went around and got in himself. The car started smoothly enough. He used the windshield wipers to clear away enough of the dust so he could see to drive, then started slowly out toward the road that led back up into the hills. A few people waved pathetically to him, seeking a ride. To where? Bracknell asked himself silently as he drove past them, accelerating now. A couple of young men trotted toward the minivan and he pushed the accelerator harder. The toll gate at the exit was unoccupied, its arm raised, so he drove right through. In the rear mirror he saw a uniformed guard or policeman or something waving angrily at him. He drove on.

When they finally reached Ciudad de Cielo, they saw that most of it was flattened. Buildings were crushed beneath the skytower’s fallen bulk or blown flat by the shock wave of its collapse. Trucks overturned, lampposts bent and twisted. Dust hung in the air and the stench of death was everywhere, inescapable.

For three days Bracknell and Lara did nothing but dig bodies out of the collapsed buildings of the base city. The tower lay across the ruins like an immense black worm, dead and still, strangely warm to the touch. It had ripped out of all but one of its base tethers. In a distant corner of his mind Bracknell thought that they had designed the tethers pretty well to stand up even partially to the stress.

He worked blindly, numbly, side by side with the few surviving technicians, clerks, maintenance people, cooks, and others who had once been a proud team of builders. Lara worked alongside him, never complaining, like Bracknell and all the others too tired and shocked and disheartened to do much of anything except scrabble in the debris, eat whatever meager rations they could find, and sleep when they were too tired to stand any longer. Grimy, her face smeared with soot, her fingers bloody from digging, her clothes sodden with perspiration, Lara still worked doggedly at rescuing the few who were still alive and dragging out the mangled bodies of the dead.

The third night they saw torches lining the road from Quito, heading toward them.

“Volunteers?” Lara asked, her voice ragged with exhaustion.

“More likely a lynch mob,” said Bracknell, getting up from the rubble he’d been digging in.

“Can you blame them?” said Danvers who was working beside them. “They’re coming to kill everyone here.”

“No,” Bracknell replied, standing up straighter. “It’s me they want. I’m the one responsible for this.”

Lara, her weariness suddenly forgotten, turned her smudged face to Danvers. “You’re a man of god! Do something! Talk to them! Stop them!”

Danvers looked terrified. “Me?”

“There’s no one else,” Lara insisted.

“I’ll go,” Bracknell said grimly. “I’m the one they want.”

“I’ll… I’ll go with you,” Danvers stammered.

“You stay here,” Bracknell said to Lara.

“The hell I will!”

“This is going to be ugly.”

“I’m going where you go, Mance.”

The three of them walked—tottered, really—down the rubble-strewn street to the main road, where the torch-waving mob was marching toward them. Farther down the road, Bracknell could see the headlights of approaching trucks.

The crowd was mainly young men, all of them looking tired and grimy, clothes torn, faces blackened with soot and dirt. They carried shovels, picks, planks of wood. Christ, they look like us, Bracknell said to himself. They’ve been digging for survivors, too.

Danvers fished a small silver crucifix out of his pocket and held it up. In the flickering torchlight it gleamed fitfully. The mob stopped uncertainly.

“My sons,” he began.

One of the men, taller than the others, his eyes glittering with anger and hatred, spat out a string of rapid Spanish. Bracknell caught his drift: We want the men who killed our families. We want justice.

Danvers raised his voice, “Do any of you speak English?”

“We want justice!” a voice yelled from the crowd.

“Justice is the Lord’s,” Danvers bellowed. “God will avenge.”

The crowd surged forward dangerously. Danvers backed up several steps. Bracknell saw that it was going to be no use. The trucks were inching through the rear of the mob now. Bringing reinforcements, he thought. He stepped forward. “I’m the one you want,” he said in Spanish. “I’m the man responsible.”

An older man scurried up to Bracknell and peered at him. Turning back to the others, he shouted, “This is he! This is the chief of the skytower!”

The mob flowed forward, surrounding Bracknell. Lara screamed as Danvers dragged her back into the shadows, toward safety. The leader of the mob spat in Bracknell’s face and raised his shovel high in the air.

A shot cracked through the night. Everyone froze into immobility. Bracknell could feel his heart pounding against his ribs. Then he saw soldiers pouring out of the trucks, each of them armed with assault rifles. An officer waved a pistol angrily and told the men of the mob to back away.

“This man is under arrest,” the officer announced loudly. “He is going to jail.”

Bracknell’s knees nearly gave way. Jail seemed much better than having his brains splattered with a shovel.

THE TRIAL

As the crisply uniformed soldiers with their polished helmets and loaded guns bundled Bracknell into one of the trucks, he thought, Of course. They need to blame someone for this catastrophe. Who else? I’m the one in charge. I’m the one at fault.

He was treated with careful respect, as if he were a vial of nitroglycerine that might explode if mishandled. They placed him in the prison hospital, where a team of physicians and psychologists diagnosed Bracknell as suffering from physical exhaustion and severe emotional depression. He was dosed with psychotropic drugs for five of the six months between his arrest and his trial. During those five months, he was allowed no visitors, no television, nor any contact with the outside world, although police investigators questioned him for hours each day.

Skytower Corporation declared bankruptcy. Its board of directors issued a statement blaming the tower’s collapse on the technical director who headed the construction project in Ecuador, the American engineer Mance Bracknell. Several of the board members fled to the lunar city of Selene, where Earthly legal jurisdiction could not reach them.

After five months of imprisonment Bracknell’s interrogators flushed his body of the drugs they had used on him and showed him the written record of his confession. He signed it without argument. Only then was he allowed to speak to an attorney whom the government of Ecuador had appointed to represent him. When Lara was at last allowed to visit him, he had only the haziest of notions about what had happened to him since his arrest. Physically he was in good condition, except that he had lost more than five kilos in weight, his deep tan had faded, and his voice had withered to a whisper. Emotionally he was a wreck.

“I’ll get you the best lawyers on Earth,” Lara told him urgently.

Bracknell shrugged listlessly. “What difference does it make?”

The whole world watched his trial, in the high court in what was left of Quito. The court building had escaped major damage, although there were still engineers who had been brought in from Brazil poking around the building’s foundations; most of the court’s high stately windows, blown out by the shock of the tower’s collapse, had been replaced by sheets of clear plastic.

Skytower Corporation dissolved itself in the face of trillions of dollars of damage claims. Bracknell was too guilt-ridden even to attempt to find himself a lawyer other than the government-appointed lackey. Lara coaxed a family friend to help represent him. The old man came out of retirement reluctantly and told Bracknell at their first meeting that his highest hope was to avoid the death penalty.

Lara was shocked. “I thought international law forbids the death penalty.”

“More than four million deaths are being blamed on you,” the old man said, frowning disapprovingly at Bracknell. “Mass murder, they’re calling it. They want to make an example of you.”

“Why not?” Bracknell whispered.

Although the trial took place in Quito, it was held under the international legal regime. Years earlier, Lara’s lawyer had helped to write the international legal regime’s guiding rules. That did not help much. Nor did Bracknell do much to help himself.

“It’s my fault,” he kept repeating. “My fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” Lara insisted.

“The structure failed,” he told Lara and her lawyer, time and again. “I was in charge of the project, so it’s my responsibility.”

“But you’re not to blame,” Lara insisted each time. “You didn’t deliberately destroy the tower.”

“I’m the only one left to blame,” Bracknell pointed out morosely. “All the others were killed in the collapse.”

“No, that’s not true,” said Lara. “Victor is in Melbourne. He’ll help you.”

At Lara’s importuning Molina flew in from Melbourne. Sitting between his two lawyers on the opening day of the trial, dressed in a state-provided suit and a stiffly starched shirt that smelled of detergent, Bracknell felt a flicker of hope when he saw his old friend enter the courtroom and sit directly behind him, beside Lara. But once the trial began, it became clear that nothing on Earth could save him…

The first witness called by the three-judge panel was the Reverend Elliott Danvers.

The prosecuting attorney was a slim, dark-haired Ecuadorian of smoldering intensity, dressed in a white three-piece suit that fit him without a wrinkle. The video cameras loved his handsome face with its dark moustache, and he knew how to play to the vast global audience watching this trial. To Bracknell he looked like a mustachioed avenging angel. He started by establishing Danvers’s position as spiritual advisor to the people of Ciudad de Cielo.

“Most of them are dead now, are they not?” asked the prosecutor. Since the trial was being held under the international legal regime, and being broadcast even to Selene and the mining center at Ceres, it was conducted in English.

Danvers answered with a low “Yes.”

The prosecutor smoothed his moustache as he gazed up at the cracks in the courtroom’s coffered ceiling, preparing dramatically for his next question. “You were troubled by what you learned about this construction projection, were you not?”

Bit by bit, the prosecutor got Danvers to tell the judges that Bracknell had been using genetically engineered microbes as nanomachines to produce the tower’s structural elements.

The state-appointed defense attorney said nothing, but the lawyer that Lara had hired rose slowly to his feet and called in a tired, aged voice, “Objection. There is nothing illegal about employing genetically engineered microbes. And referring to them as ‘nanomachines’ is prejudicial.”

The judges conferred in hurried whispers, then upheld the objection.

The prosecutor smiled thinly and bowed his head, accepting their decision, knowing that the dreaded term would be remembered by everyone.

“Have such genetically engineered microbes been used in any other construction projects?”

Danvers shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I’m not an engineer…”

“To the best of your knowledge.”

“To the best of my knowledge: no, they have not. The project’s biologist, Dr. Molina, seemed quite proud of the originality of his work. He had applied for a patent.”

The prosecutor turned toward Bracknell with a thin smile. “Thank you, Rev. Danvers.”

Bracknell’s defense attorney got to his feet, glanced at the state-appointed attorney, then said, “I have no questions for this witness at this time.”

Lara, sitting behind Bracknell, touched his shoulder. He turned to her, saw the worried look on her face. And said nothing. Molina, sitting beside her, looked impatient, uncomfortable.

“I call Dr. Victor Molina to the stand,” said the prosecutor, with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

Molina got to his feet and walked slowly to the witness chair; he tried to make a smile for Bracknell but grimaced instead.

Once again, the prosecutor spent several minutes establishing Molina’s credentials and his position on the project. Then he asked:

“You left the skytower project before it was completed, did you not?”

“Yes, I did,” said Molina.

“Why is that?”

Molina hesitated a moment, his eyes flicking toward Bracknell and Lara, sitting behind him.

“Personal reasons,” he answered.

“Could you be more specific?”

Again Molina hesitated. Then, drawing in a breath, he replied, “I wasn’t certain that the structures produced by my gengineered microbes were sufficiently strong to stand the stresses imposed by the tower.”

Bracknell blinked and stirred like a man coming out of a coma. “That’s not true,” he whispered, more to himself than to his lawyers.

But Molina was going on, “I wanted more testing, more checking to make sure that the structure would be safe. But the project director wouldn’t do it.”

“The project director was Mr. Mance Bracknell,” asked the prosecuting attorney needlessly. “The accused?”

“Yes,” said Molina. “He insisted that we push ahead before the necessary tests could be done.”

Bracknell said to his attorney, “That’s not true!” Turning to Lara, he said, “That isn’t what happened!”

The chief judge, sitting flanked by his two robed associates at the high banc of polished mahogany, tapped his stylus on the desktop. “The accused will remain silent,” he said sternly. “I will tolerate no disruptions in this court.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor. Then he turned back to Molina, in the witness chair.

“So the accused disregarded your warnings about the safety problems of the tower?”

Molina glanced toward Bracknell, then looked away. “Yes, he did.”

“He’s lying!” Bracknell said to his lawyer. Jumping to his feet, he shouted to Molina, “Victor, why are you lying?”

His lawyer pulled him back down onto his chair while the chief judge leveled an accusatory stare at Bracknell. “I warn you, sir: another such outburst and you will be removed from this courtroom.”

“What difference would that make?” Bracknell snapped. “You’ve convicted me already.”

The judge nodded to the pair of burly soldiers standing to one side of the banc. They pushed past the attorney on Bracknell’s left and grabbed him by his arms, hauling him to his feet.

He turned to glance back at Lara as they dragged him out of the courtroom. She was smiling. Smiling! Bracknell felt his guts churn with sudden hatred.

Lara watched them hustle Mance out of the courtroom, smiling as she thought, At least he’s waking up. He’s not just sitting there and accepting all the blame. He’s starting to defend himself. Or trying to.

THE VERDICT

The trial proceeded swiftly. With Bracknell watching the proceedings on video from a locked and guarded room on the other side of the courthouse, the prosecuting attorney called in a long line of engineers and other technical experts who testified that the skytower was inherently dangerous.

“No matter what safety precautions may or may not have been taken,” declared the somber, gray-haired dean of the technology ethics department of Heidelberg University, “such a structure poses an unacceptable danger to the global environment, as we can all see from this terrible tragedy. Its very existence is a menace to the world.” Bracknell’s attorney called in technical witnesses, also, who testified that all the specifications and engineering details of the skytower showed that the structure had been built well within tolerable limits.

“I personally reviewed the plans before construction ever started,” said the grizzled, square-faced professor of engineering from Caltech. “The plan for that tower was sound.”

“Yet it fell!” snapped the prosecutor, on cross-examination. “It collapsed and killed millions.”

“That shouldn’t have happened,” said the Caltech professor. “It shouldn’t have happened,” the prosecutor repeated, “if the actual construction followed the plans.”

“I’m sure it did,” the professor replied.

“Did the plans call for nanotechnology to be employed in manufacturing the structural elements?”

“No, but—”

“Thank you. I have no further questions.”

As Bracknell sat and seethed in his locked room, the prosecution built its case swiftly and surely. There were hardly any of the skytower crew left alive to testify to the soundness of the tower’s construction. And when they did the prosecutor harped back to the use of nanotechnology.

“Call Victor back to the stand,” Bracknell urged his attorney with white-hot fury. “Cross-examine him. Make him tell the truth!”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” the old man said. “There’s no sense reminding the judges that you used nanomachines.”

“I didn’t! They were natural organisms!”

“Genetically modified.”

“But that doesn’t make any difference!”

The attorney shook his head sadly. “If I put Molina back in the witness stand and he sticks to his story, it will destroy you.”

“If you don’t, I’m destroyed anyway.”

The hardest part of the trial, for Bracknell, was the fact that the judges would not let him see anyone except his attorneys. Every day he sat in that stuffy little isolation room and watched Lara in the courtroom, with Molina now at her side. She would leave with Victor. On the morning that the verdict was to be announced she arrived with Victor.

On that morning, before the proceedings began, the chief judge stepped into Bracknell’s isolation room, flanked by two soldiers armed with heavy black pistols at their hips. After weeks of viewing him only in his black robe up on his high banc, Bracknell was mildly surprised to see that the man was very short and stocky. His skin was light, but he was built like a typical mestizo. His face bore the heavy, sad features of a man about to do something unpleasant.

Bracknell got to his feet as the judge entered the little room.

Without preamble, the judge said in barely accented English, “I am to pass sentence on you this morning. Can you restrain yourself if I allow you back into the courtroom?”

“Yes,” said Bracknell.

“I have your word of honor on that?”

Almost smiling, Bracknell replied, “If you believe that I have any honor, yes, you have my word.”

The judge did not smile back. He nodded wearily. “Very well, then.” Turning, he told the soldiers in rapid Spanish to escort the prisoner into the courtroom.

The courtroom was jammed, Bracknell saw as he came in, escorted by the soldiers. From the video screen in his isolation room he’d been unable to see how many people attended the trial. Now he realized there were reporters and camerapersons from all over the world wedged along both side walls. The benches were packed with people, most of them dour, dark Ecuadorians who stared at him with loathing. Looking for my blood, Bracknell realized.

Lara jumped to her feet as he entered; Molina rose more slowly. Both of Bracknell’s attorneys stood up, too, looking as if they were attending a funeral. They are, Bracknell thought. Once he got to his chair Lara leaned across the mahogany railing separating them and threw her arms around his neck.

“I’m with you, darling,” she whispered into his ear. “No matter what happens, I’m with you.”

Bracknell drank in the warmth of her body, the scent of her. But his eyes bore into Molina’s, who glared back angrily at him.

Why is Victor sore at me? Bracknell asked himself. What’s he got to be pissed about? He betrayed me; I haven’t done anything to him.

“Everyone stand,” called the court announcer.

The judges filed in, their robes looking newer and darker than Bracknell remembered them. Their faces were dark, too.

Once everyone was properly seated, the chief judge picked up a single sheet of paper from the desk before him. Bracknell noted that his hand trembled slightly.

“The prisoner will stand.”

Bracknell got to his feet, feeling as if he were about to face a firing squad.

“It is the judgment of this court that you, Mance Bracknell, are responsible for the deaths of more than four million human souls, and the destruction of many hundreds of billions of dollars in property.”

Bracknell felt nothing. It was as if he were outside his own body, watching this foreordained drama from a far distance.

“Since your crime was not willful murder, the death sentence will not be considered.”

A stir rippled through the packed courtroom. “He killed my whole family!” a woman’s voice screeched in Spanish.

“Silence!” roared the judge, with a power in his voice that stilled the crowd. “This is a court of justice. The law will prevail.”

The courtroom went absolutely silent.

“Mance Bracknell, you have been found guilty of more than four million counts of negligent homicide. It is the decision of this court that you be exiled from this planet Earth forever, so that you can never again threaten the lives of innocent men, women, and children.”

Bracknell’s knees sagged beneath him. He leaned on the tabletop for support.

“This case is closed,” said the judge.