Mercury

SELENE HOSPITAL

After a bland meal, Bracknell pushed his tray aside and got out of the hospital bed. The floor tiles felt comfortably warm to his bare feet. He seemed strong enough, no wobbles or shakes. The cubicle was barely large enough to hold his bed. Portable plastic partitions, he saw. No closet. Not even a lavatory. And this damned IV hooked into my arm.

He cracked the accordion door a centimeter and peeped out. The same nurse was striding down the corridor in his direction.

Bracknell hopped back into the bed and pulled the sheet over his naked body.

She pushed the door back and gave him an accusing look. “I saw you peeking out the door. Feeling better, huh?”

“Yes,” said Bracknell.

“Long as you’re taking solid food we can disconnect this drip,” she said, gripping his arm and gently pulling the IV tube out of him. Even so, Bracknell winced.

As she sprayed a bandage over his punctured arm, Nurse Norris said happily, “You’re going to have a pair of visitors, Mr. X.”

“Visitors?” He felt immediately alarmed.

“Yep. Psychotechnician to talk to you about your amnesia, and some suit from the corporate world. Don’t know what he wants.”

“Can I get some clothes?” Bracknell asked. “It’s kind of awkward like this.”

Norris looked at one of the monitors on the wall behind the bed and fiddled with her handheld remote. “The coveralls you came in with were pretty raw. I sent ’em to the laundry. I’ll see if I can find them for you. Otherwise it’s hospital issue.”

“Before the visitors arrive?”

She gave him that unhappy look again. “For a charity case you make a lot of demands.”

Before he could answer, though, she ducked back outside and slid the partition closed.

Once I get my clothes back I can make a run for it, Bracknell said to himself. I can’t let them scan me; I’ve got to get out of here before they find out who I am.

And go where? I’m in Selene, on the Moon. As soon as they find out who I am they’ll slap me into another ship and send me back to the Belt. Where can I hide?

He thought about escaping back to Earth, to Lara. But he knew that was ridiculous. How can I get to Earth from here? Besides, she’s Victor’s wife now. Even if she wanted to hide me, she wouldn’t be able to. Then he realized that he hadn’t the faintest idea of where on Earth Lara might be. Shaking his head morosely, he decided that going back to Earth would be impossible.

Toshikazu said he had a brother, he remembered. What was his name? Takeo. Takeo Koga. And he’s here, on the Moon. Somewhere in the Hell Crater complex. Maybe I can get to him. Maybe—

The partition slid open again and somebody, he couldn’t see who, tossed a flapping pair of gray coveralls at him. In the soft lunar gravity they arched languidly through the air and landed softly on his bed. By then the door had slid shut again. A new set of underwear was tucked into one of his coverall sleeves.

He was sealing the Velcro seam up his torso when someone rapped politely on his door frame. They can see me, Bracknell realized, looking up toward the ceiling. They must have a camera in here somewhere.

He sat on the bed and swung his legs up onto the sheet. “Come in,” he called. Then he realized that his feet were bare. They hadn’t brought any shoes.

Two men entered his cubicle as Bracknell touched the control stud that raised the bed to a sitting position. One of the men wore a white hospital smock over what looked like a sports shirt and corduroy slacks. He was round-faced and a little pudgy, but his eyes seemed aware and alert. The other was in a gray business suit and white turtle-neck, hawk-nosed, his baggy-eyed expression morose.

“I’m Dr. DaSilva,” said the medic. “I understand you’re having a little trouble remembering things.”

Bracknell nodded warily.

“My name is Pratt,” said the suit. “I represent United Life and Accident Assurance, Limited.” His accent sounded vaguely British.

“Insurance?” Bracknell asked.

DaSilva grinned. “Well, you remember insurance, at least.”

Bracknell fell back on a pretense of confusion. “I don’t understand …”

Pratt said, “We have an awkward situation here. Like many ship’s crews, the crew of Alhambra was covered by a shared-beneficiary accident policy.”

“Shared beneficiary?”

“It’s rather like an old-fashioned tontine. In case of a fatal accident, the policy’s principal is paid to the survivors among the crew—after the deceaseds’ beneficiaries have been paid, of course.”

“What does that mean?” Bracknell asked, feeling nervous at being under DaSilva’s penetrating gaze.

“It means, sir,” said Pratt, “that as the sole survivor of Alhambra’s fatal accident, you are the secondary beneficiary of each member of the crew; you stand to gain in excess of ten million New International Dollars.”

Bracknell gasped. “Ten million?”

“Yes,” Pratt replied, quite matter-of-factly. “Of course, we must pay out to the families of the deceased; they are the primary beneficiaries. But there will still be some ten million or so remaining in the policy’s fund.”

“And it goes to me?”

Pratt cleared his throat before answering, “It goes to you, providing you can identify yourself. The company has a regulation against paying to anonymous persons or John Does. International laws are involved, you know.”

“I… don’t remember … very much,” Bracknell temporized.

“Perhaps I can help,” said DaSilva.

“I hope so,” Bracknell said.

“Before we start scanning your brain to see if there’s any physical trauma, let me try a simple test.”

“What is it?”

DaSilva pulled a handheld from the breast pocket of his smock. Smiling cheerfully, he said, “This is what I call the ring-a-bell test. I’m going to read off the names of Alhambra’s crew and you tell me if any of them ring a bell.”

Bracknell nodded, thinking furiously. Ten million dollars! If I can get my hands on that money—

“Wallace Farad,” DaSilva called out.

Bracknell blinked at him. “The captain’s name was Farad.”

“Good! Your memory isn’t a total blank.”

“You couldn’t forget the captain,” said Bracknell fervently. Then he remembered that the captain was dead. And Addie. And all the rest of them. Dead. Killed by Yamagata.

“I’ll skip the women’s names,” DaSilva was saying. “I don’t think you had a sex-change procedure before they picked you up.”

Pratt chuckled politely. Bracknell thought of Addie and said nothing.

DaSilva read off several more names of the crew while Bracknell tried to figure out what he should do.

Finally DaSilva said, “… and Dante Alexios. That’s the last of them.”

Dante Alexios had been the vessel’s second mate, Bracknell knew. He didn’t know much about him except that he wasn’t a convict and he didn’t have a wife or children.

“Dante Alexios,” he repeated. “Dante Alexios.”

“Ring a bell?” DaSilva asked hopefully.

Bracknell looked up at the psychotechnician. “Dante Alexios! That’s who I am!”

Pratt looked less than pleased. “All well and good. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to prove your identity before I can allow the release of the policy’s payout.”

HELL CRATER

Catch-22, Bracknell thought as he sat on his bed. I can get ten million dollars if I can prove I’m Dante Alexios, so I need to let them scan my body. But as soon as they do they’ll find out I’m Mance Bracknell and ship me back out to the Belt as a convict.

A different nurse breezed into his cubicle and shoved a data tablet onto his lap. “Press your right thumb on the square at the bottom,” she said.

Bracknell looked up at her. She was young, with frizzy red hair, rather pretty.

“What’s this?” he asked, almost growling.

“Standard permission form for a full-spectrum body scan. We need your thumbprint.”

I don’t want a scan, Bracknell said to himself, and I don’t want to give them a thumbprint; they could compare it with Alexios’s real print.

He handed the tablet back to the nurse. “No.”

She looked stunned. “Whattaya mean, no? You’ve got to do it or we can’t do the scan on you.”

“I don’t want a scan. Not yet.”

“You’ve got to have a body scan,” the nurse said, somewhere between confused and angry at his refusal. “It says so in your chart.”

“Not now,” Bracknell said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“They can make you take a scan, whether you want to or not.”

“The hell they can!” Bracknell snapped. The nurse flinched back half a step. “I’m not some criminal or lunatic. I’m a free citizen and I won’t be coerced into doing something I don’t want to do.”

She stared at him, bewildered. “But it’s for your own good.”

“I’ll decide what’s good for me, thank you.” And Bracknell felt a surge of satisfaction well up in him. He hadn’t asserted himself for years, he realized. I used to be an important man, he told himself. I gave orders and people hopped to follow them. I’m not some convict or pervert. I didn’t kill all those people. Yamagata did.

The redheaded nurse was fidgeting uncertainly by his bed, shifting the tablet from one hand to the other.

“Listen,” Bracknell said, more gently, “I’ve been through a lot. I’m not up to getting poked and prodded—”

“The scan is completely nonintrusive,” the nurse said hopefully.

“Okay, tell you what. Find me a pair of shoes and let me walk around a bit, stretch my legs. Then tomorrow morning I’ll sign for the scan. Okay?”

She seemed relieved, but doubtful. “I’ll hafta ask my supervisor.”

“Do that. But first, get some shoes for me.”

Less than half an hour later Mance Bracknell walked out of Selene Hospital’s busy lobby, wearing his old gray coveralls and a crinkled pair of hospital-issue paper shoes. No one tried to stop him. No one even noticed him. There was only one guard in the lobby, and when Bracknell brazenly waved at him the guard gave him a halfhearted wave in return. He wasn’t in hospital-issue clothes; as far as the guard was concerned, Bracknell was a visitor leaving the hospital. Or maybe one of the maintenance crew going home.

Most of Selene was underground, and the hospital was two levels down. Bracknell’s first move was to call up a map on the information screen across the corridor from the hospital’s entrance. He found the transportation center, up in the Main Plaza, and headed for it.

I’m free! he marveled as he strode along the spacious corridor, passing people walking the other way. Not a thing in my pockets and the hospital authorities might call Selene’s security people to search for me, but for the moment I’m free to go where I want to.

The place he wanted to go to was Hell Crater.

He located a powered stairway and rode it up to Selene’s Main Plaza, built on the surface of the great crater Alphonsus. Its concrete dome projected out from the ringwall mountains and onto the crater floor. Bracknell saw that the Plaza was green with grass and shrubbery; there were even trees planted along the winding walkways. An Olympic-sized swimming pool. A bandshell and stage for performances. Shops and little bistros where people sat and chatted and sipped drinks. Music and laughter floated through the air. Tourists flitted overhead, flying on their own muscle power with colorful rented plastic wings. Bracknell smelled flowers and the aroma of sizzling food.

It’s marvelous, he thought as he headed for the transportation center. This is what they cut me off from: real life, real people enjoying themselves. Freedom. Then he realized that he had neither cash nor credit. How can I get to Hell Crater? Freedom doesn’t mean much when you are penniless.

As he approached the transportation center, an eager-looking young man in a splashy sports shirt and a sparkling smile fell in step beside him. “Going to Hell?” he asked brightly.

Bracknell looked him over. Blond crew cut, smile plastered in place, perfect teeth. A glad-handing salesman, he realized.

“I’m thinking about it,” Bracknell said.

“Don’t miss Sam Gunn’s Inferno Casino,” said the smiling young man. “It’s got the best action.”

“Action?” Bracknell played naive.

“Roulette, blackjack, low-grav craps tables, championship karate competition.” The smile grew even wider. “Beautiful women and free champagne. Dirty minds in clean bodies. What more could you ask for?”

Bracknell looked up at the transportation center’s huge display of departures and arrivals.

The young pitchman gripped his arm. “Don’t worry about that! There’s an Inferno Special leaving in fifteen minutes. Direct to the casino! You’ll be there in less than two hours and they’ll even serve you a meal in transit!”

“The fare must be—”

“It’s free!” the blond proclaimed. “And your first hundred dollars’ worth of chips is on the house!”

“Really?”

“As long as you buy a thousand dollars’ worth. That’s a ten percent discount, right off the bat.”

Bracknell allowed himself to be chivvied into a cable car painted with lurid red flames across its silver body. Fourteen other men and women were already sitting inside, most of them middle-aged and looking impatient.

As he took the empty seat up front, by the forward window, one of the dowdyish women called out, “When are we leaving? We’ve been waiting here almost an hour!”

The blond gave her the full wattage of his smile. “I’m supposed to fill up the bus before I let it go, but since you’ve been so patient, I’ll send you off just as soon as I get one more passenger.”

It took another quarter hour, but at last the car was sealed up. It rode on an overhead cable to the massive airlock built into the side of the Main Plaza’s dome. Within minutes they were climbing across Alphonsus’s worn old ringwall mountains and then down onto the plain of Mare Nubium. The cable car rocked slightly as it whizzed twenty meters above the bleak, pockmarked regolith. It smelled old and used; too many bodies have been riding in this bucket for too long, Bracknell thought. But he smiled to himself as the car raced along and the overhead speakers gave an automated lecture about the scenic wonders they were rushing past.

There was no pilot or crew in the cable car; everything was automated. The free meal consisted of a thin sandwich and a bottle of “genuine lunar water” obtained from the vending machine at the rear of the car. Bracknell chewed contentedly and watched the Straight Wall flash by.

True to the blond pitchman’s word, the cable car went directly inside the Inferno Casino. The other passengers hurried out, eager to spend their money. Bracknell left the car last, looking for the nearest exit from the casino. It wasn’t easy to find; all he could see was an ocean of people lapping up against islands of gaming tables, looking either frenzied or grim as they gambled away their money. Raucous music poured from overhead speakers, drowning out any laughter or conversation. No exits in sight; the casino management wanted their customers to stay at the gaming tables or restaurants. There were plenty of sexy young women sauntering around, too, many in spray-paint costumes, but none of them gave Bracknell more than a cursory glance: in his gray coveralls he looked more like a maintenance man than a high roller.

When he finally found the casino’s main entrance, Bracknell saw that the entire Hell Crater complex of casinos, hotels, restaurants, and shops was built inside one massive dome. Like Selene, the complex’s living quarters and offices were tunneled underground. Bracknell studied a map display, then headed on foot to the rejuvenation clinic of Takeo Koga. It was one of six such clinics in the complex.

Down two levels and then a ten-minute walk along the softly lit, thickly carpeted corridor to Koga’s clinic. It was blessedly quiet down here, and there were only a few other people in sight. No one paid attention to Bracknell, for which he was thankful. It meant that there was no alarm yet from the hospital about his absence.

The sign on the door was tastefully small, yet Bracknell found it almost ludicrously boastful: ideal renewal center. koga takeo, M.D., D.C.S.

Hoping he didn’t look too disreputable, Bracknell opened the door and stepped into the small waiting room. Two brittle-looking women sitting in comfortable armchairs looked up at him briefly, then turned their attention back to the screen on the far wall, which was showing some sort of documentary about wild animals. Silky music purred from hidden speakers. There were two empty armchairs and a low table with another screen built into its surface. The table’s screen glowed softly.

Bracknell went to the table and bent over it slightly.

“Welcome to Ideal Renewal Center,” said a woman’s pleasant voice. “How may I help you?”

“I need to see Dr. Koga.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“This is about his brother, Toshikazu,” Bracknell replied.

A moment’s hesitation, then a different voice said, “Please take a seat. Someone will be with you in a moment.”

K0GA CLINIC

A young Asian woman opened the door on the far end of the waiting room and crooked a finger at Bracknell. Wordlessly she led him to a small examination room, gestured to the chair next to the examination table, and softly closed the door behind her as she left.

Bracknell suddenly felt uncomfortable. What if they’re calling security? But no, how would they know who I am? Still, he felt trapped in this tiny, utterly quiet room.

He stood up and reached for the door just as it swung open and a stocky, grim-faced Asian stepped in. He looked young, but his handsome face did not seem to go with his chunky build. His cheekbones were sculptured, his jawline firm, his throat slim and unlined. He wore a trim, dark moustache, and his hair was cut short and combed straight back off his forehead.

“I am Toshikazu’s brother, Takeo,” he said as he firmly closed the door behind him. Takeo looked suspicious, almost angry. He took in Bracknell’s unimpressive coveralls and paper shoes at a glance. He must be a good diagnostician, Bracknell thought.

“Well, what’s he done now?”

Bracknell took in a breath, then said, “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

Takeo’s eyes widened. He tottered to the examination couch and sagged against it. “Dead? How did it happen?”

“He died in an explosion aboard the freighter Alhambra. He was a convict, being shipped out to the Belt.”

“They finally got him, then.”

“You know about it,” Bracknell said.

Rubbing at his eyes, Takeo replied, “Only that he was running from something, someone. He was frightened for his life. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about; he said then I’d be marked for murder, too.”

Bracknell sat in the chair in the corner. “Did he ever mention Yamagata to you?”

“No,” Takeo answered, so sharply that Bracknell knew it was a lie. “He never told me anything about why he was being pursued. I only knew that he was in desperate trouble. I changed his appearance, his whole identity, twice.”

“And they still found him.”

“Poor Toshi.” Takeo’s chin sank to his chest.

“He told me about your ability to change people’s identities,” said Bracknell.

Takeo’s head snapped up. He glared at Bracknell.

“I need my identity changed.”

“You said Toshi was a convict? You’re one also, eh?”

Bracknell almost smiled. “The less you know, the safer you are.”

Shaking his head, Takeo said, “I helped my brother because he’s my brother. I’m not going to stick my neck out for you.”

“You’ve helped other people who wanted to start new lives. Toshikazu told me about your work.”

“Those people could afford my fees. Can you?”

With a rueful grin, Bracknell admitted, “I don’t have a penny.”

“Then why should I help you?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell you your brother’s whole story. Who was after him, and why. Then you’ll know, and then I’ll let Yamagata’s people know that you know. The people who killed him will come here to kill you.”

Takeo was silent for several long moments. He stared into Bracknell’s eyes, obviously trying to calculate just how desperate or determined this stranger was.

At last he said, “You want a complete makeover, then?”

“I want to become a certain individual, a man named Dante Alexios.”

“I presume this Alexios is dead. It would be embarrassing if he showed up after you claim his identity.”

“He died in the same explosion your brother did.”

Takeo nodded. “I’ll need his complete medical records.”

“They should be available from the International Astronautical Authority. They keep duplicates of all ship’s crews.”

“And they keep those records private.”

“You’ve done this sort of thing before,” said Bracknell.

“For people who provided me with what I needed.”

“You’re a doctor. Tell the IAA you’ve got to identify a body for United Life and Accident Assurance, Limited. They carried the policy for Alhambra.”

Takeo said, “I don’t like getting involved in this.”

“You’ve done worse, from what Toshikazu told me. Besides, you don’t have much of a choice.”

“You’re blackmailing me!”

Bracknell sighed theatrically. “I’m afraid I am.”

The makeover took weeks, and it wasn’t anything like what Bracknell had expected. Takeo obtained Alexios’s medical files from the IAA easily enough; a little money was transferred electronically and he received the dead man’s body scans in less than a day. Then began the hard, painful work.

Takeo kept Bracknell in one of the small but luxuriously appointed suites behind his medical offices. For the first ten days he didn’t see Takeo, except through the intercom phone. Bracknell grew increasingly impatient, increasingly fearful. Any moment he expected security guards to burst into the little suite and drag him back to a ship headed outward to the Belt.

He paced the suite: sitting room, bedroom, a closet-sized kitchen in which he prepared bland microwaved meals from the fully stocked pantry. No liquor, no drugs, no visitors. His only entertainment was video, and he constantly scanned the news nets from Selene and Earth for any hint that he was being hunted. Nothing. He wanted to phone the Selene hospital to see what their files showed about him, but found that he could not place outgoing calls. He was a prisoner again. His jail cell was comfortable, even plush, but still he felt penned in.

When he complained to Takeo, the physician’s artificially handsome image on the phone screen smiled at him. “You’re free to leave whenever you want.”

“You haven’t even started my treatment yet!”

“Yes I have.”

Bracknell stared at the face on the screen.

“The most difficult part of this process,” Takeo explained, with illconcealed annoyance, “is programming the nanomachines. They’ve got to alter your face, your skin, your bone structure. Once I’ve got them programmed, the rest is easy.”

It wasn’t easy.

One ordinary morning, as Bracknell flicked from one news channel to another, thinking that even being arrested again would be better than this utter boredom, a young Asian nurse entered his sitting room bearing a silver tray with a single glass of what looked like orange juice.

“This is your first treatment, sir.”

“This?” Bracknell asked dubiously as he picked up the glass.

“You should go to bed for a nap as soon as you drink it,” the nurse said. “It contains a sedative.”

“And nanomachines?”

She nodded solemnly. “Oh, yes, sir. Many nanomachines. Hundreds of millions of them.”

“Good,” said Bracknell. He drained the glass, then put it back on her tray with a clink.

“You should go to bed now, sir.”

Bracknell thought of asking her if she would accompany him, but decided against it. She left the suite and he walked into his bedroom. The bed was still unmade from the previous night’s sleep.

This is ridiculous, he thought. I’m not sleepy and there’s no—

A wave of giddiness made his knees sag. He plopped onto the bed, heart thumping. His face tingled, itched. He felt as if something was crawling under his skin. It’s only psychosomatic, he told himself. But as he stretched out on the rumpled bed he felt as if some alien parasites had invaded his body. He wanted to scratch his face, his ribs, everywhere. He writhed on the bed, filled with blind dread, moaning in his terror. He squeezed his eyes shut and hoped that sleep would come before he began screaming like a lunatic.

Each morning for six days, the same nurse brought him a glass filled with fruit juice. And nanomachines. For six mornings Bracknell took it with a trembling hand, then went to bed and waited for the sedative to knock him out while his body twitched and writhed. Each day the pain grew sharper, deeper. It was as if his bones were being sawn apart, the flesh of his face and body flayed by a sadistic torturer. He thought of insects infected with the eggs of parasitic wasps that ate out their host’s insides. He lived in writhing agony and horror as the nanomachines did their work inside his body.

But he saw no difference in his face. Every morning he staggered to the lavatory and studied himself in the mirror above the sink. He looked the same, except that his beard did not grow. After three days of the nanotherapy he stopped shaving altogether. There was no need. Besides, his frightened hands shook too much.

He phoned Takeo every day, and received only a computer’s synthesized, “Dr. Koga will return your call at the appropriate time.”

Maybe he’s killing me, Bracknell thought. Using nanomachines to eat out my guts and get rid of me. Still, despite his fears each morning he swallowed down the juice and the invisible devices swarming in it. And suffered the agonies of hell until he passed thankfully into unconsciousness.

One week to the day after Bracknell had started taking the nanotherapy, Koga showed up in his suite.

“How do you feel?” the physician asked, peering at Bracknell intently.

“Like I’m being eaten inside,” Bracknell snapped.

Takeo tilted his head slightly. “Can’t be helped. Normally we go more slowly, but both of us are in a hurry so I’ve given you some pretty heavy dosages.”

“I don’t see any change,” said Bracknell.

“Don’t you?” Takeo smiled condescendingly. “I do.”

“My face is the same.”

Walking over to the desktop phone, Takeo said, “The day-to-day change is minuscule, true enough.” He spoke a command in Japanese to the phone. “But a week’s worth of change is significant.”

Bracknell saw his own image on the phone’s display.

“Take a look in the mirror,” said Takeo.

Bracknell went to the bathroom. He stared, then ducked back into the living room. The difference was subtle, but clear.

Takeo smiled at his handiwork. “In another week not even United Life and Accident Assurance will be able to tell you from the original Dante Alexios.”

“It’s painful,” Bracknell said.

“Having your bones remolded involves some discomfort,” Takeo replied, unconcerned. “But you’re getting a side benefit: you’ll never have to shave again. I’ve eliminated the hair follicles on your face.”

“It still hurts like hell.”

Takeo shrugged. “That’s the price you must pay.”

Another week, thought Bracknell. I can put up with this for another week.

DANTE ALEXIOS

Marvin Pratt frowned at the dark-haired man sitting in front of his desk. The expression on the stranger’s face was utterly serious, determined.

“You’re not the man I saw in the hospital,” he said.

“I am Dante Alexios,” said Bracknell. “I’ve come to claim my money as the sole beneficiary of the Alhambra’s accident policy.”

“Then who was the man in the hospital?” Pratt demanded.

Alexios shrugged his shoulders. They were slimmer than Bracknell’s had been. “Some derelict, I suppose.”

“He disappeared,” Pratt said, suspicion etched onto his face. “Walked out of the hospital and disappeared.”

“As I said, a derelict. I understand there’s an underground community of sorts here in Selene. Criminals, homeless people, all sorts of oddballs hiding away in the tunnels.”

Pratt leaned back in his swivel chair and let air whistle softly between his teeth as he compared the face of the man sitting before him with the image of Dante Alexios on his desktop screen. Both had pale skin and dark hair; the image on the screen had a shadow of stubble along his jaw while the man facing him was perfectly clean-shaven. His face seemed just a trifle out of kilter, as if the two halves of it did not quite match. His smile seemed forced, twisted. But the retinal patterns of his dark brown eyes matched those on file in the computer. So did his fingerprints and the convolutions of his ears.

“How did you survive the explosion?” Pratt asked, trying to keep his tone neutral, nonaccusative.

Smoothly, Alexios replied, “I was outside doing routine maintenance on the attitude thrusters when the two ships blew up. I went spinning off into space for several days. I nearly died.”

“Someone picked you up?”

“Another freighter, the Dubai, outbound for the Belt. After eight days they transferred me to an inbound ship, the Seitz, and I arrived here in Selene yesterday. That’s when I called your office.”

Pratt looked as if he didn’t believe a word of it, but he went through the motions of checking Alexios’s story. Alexios had paid the captains of the two vessels handsomely for their little lies, using Takeo’s money on the promise that he’d repay the physician once he got the insurance payout into his hands.

“This other man, the amnesiac,” said Pratt warily. “He was rescued from the Alhambra also.”

Smoothly, Bracknell answered, “Then he must have been a convict. Captain Farad had the pleasant little trick of putting troublemakers outside, in spacesuits, until they learned to behave themselves.”

“I see.” At last Pratt said, “You’re a very fortunate man, Mr. Alexios.”

“Don’t I know it!”

With a look of utter distaste, Pratt commanded his phone to authorize payment to Dante Alexios.

Alexios asked, “May I ask, how much is the, uh, benefit?”

Pratt glanced at his display screen. “Twelve point seven million New International Dollars.”

Alexios’s brows lifted. “That much?”

“What do you intend to do with your money?”

Taking a deep breath, Alexios said, “Well, there are some debts I have to pay. After that… I don’t know … I just might start my own engineering firm.”

He surprised Takeo by paying the physician’s normal fee for a cosmetic remake. Then Dante Alexios opened a small consulting engineering office in Selene. He started by taking on charity work and performing community services, such as designing a new water processing plant for Selene’s growing population of retirees from Earth. His first paying assignment was as a consultant on the new mass driver being built out on Mare Nubium to catapult cargos of lunar helium three to the hungry fusion power plants on Earth. He began to learn how to use nanotechnology. With a derisive grin he would tell himself, Damned useful, these little nanomachines.

In two years he was well known in Selene for his community services. In four he was wealthy in his own right, with enough contracts to hire a small but growing staff of engineers and office personnel. Often he thought about returning to Earth and looking up Lara, but he resisted the temptation. That part of his life was finished. Even his hatred of Victor and Danvers had abated. There was nothing to be done. The desire for vengeance cooled, although he still felt angry whenever he thought of their betrayal.

Instead of traveling to Earth, Dante Alexios won a contract to build a complete research station on Mars, a new base in the giant circular basin in the southern hemisphere called Hellas. He flew to Mars to personally supervise the construction.

He lived at the construction site, surrounded by nanotech engineers and some of the scientists who would live and work at the base once it was finished. He walked the iron sands of the red planet and watched the distant, pale Sun set in the cloudless caramel-colored sky. He felt the peace and harmony of this empty world, with its craggy mountains and rugged canyons and winding ancient river beds.

We haven’t corrupted this world, Alexios told himself. There are only a handful of humans here, not enough to tear the place apart and rebuild it the way we’ve done to Earth, the way we’re doing to the Moon.

Yet he knew he was a part of that process; he had helped to extend human habitation across the dead and battered face of the Moon. Mars was different, though. Life dwelled here. Once, a race of intelligent creatures built their homes and temples into the high crevasses in the cliffs. Alexios got permission from the scientists running the exploration effort to visit the ruins of their cliff dwellings.

Gone. Whoever built these villages, whoever farmed those valleys, they were all wiped out by an impersonal planetwide catastrophe that snuffed out virtually all life on the red planet, blew away most of its atmosphere, flash-froze this world into a dusty, dry global desert. The scientists thought the plain of Hellas held the key to the disaster that sterilized Mars sixty-five million years ago, the same disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs and half of all living species on Earth.

Alexios felt very humble when he stared through his spacesuit visor at the crumbling ruins of a Martian cliff dwelling. Life can be snuffed out so easily. Like a skytower falling, crushing the life out of millions, ending a lifetime of hope and work with a snap of destiny’s fingers.

He was mulling his own destiny when he returned to the base nearing completion at Hellas. As the rocket glider that carried him soared over the vast circular depression, Alexios looked through the thick quartz window with some pride. The base spread across several square kilometers of the immense crater’s floor, domes and tunnels and the tangled tracks of many vehicles. The work of my mind, he said to himself. The base is almost finished, and I did it. I created it. With a little help from my nanofriends. Like the skytower, taunted a voice in his mind.

That night, he lay in his bunk and watched the Earthside news broadcasts while the Martian wind moaned softly past the plastic dome that housed the construction crew. Then he saw an item that made him sit straight up in bed.

Saito Yamagata was going to start a project to build solar power satellites in orbit around the planet Mercury.

Yamagata! He’s come out of his so-called retreat in Tibet and he’s heading for Mercury.

Without a moment’s hesitation, without a heartbeat of reflection, Alexios decided he would go to Mercury, too. He owed Yamagata a death. And as he sat in his darkened bedroom, the flickering light from the video screen playing across his transformed features, he realized that he could pay back both Victor and Danvers, too.

All the old hatred, all the old fury, all the old seething acid boiled up anew in his guts. Alexios felt his teeth grinding together. I’ll make them pay, he promised himself. I had almost forgotten about them, about what they did to me and all those millions of others. Almost forgotten Addie and her father and the others aboard Alhambra. How easy it is to let a comfortable life swallow you up. How easy to let the blade’s edge go dull.

He threw back the bed covers and strode naked to his desktop phone. Yamagata. Molina. Danvers. I’ll get all three of them on that hellhole of a world, Mercury.

GOETHE BASE

Sitting in his bare little office, Dante Alexios smiled bitterly to himself as the memories of his ten lost years came flooding back to him. He finished reading the report issued by McFergusen and his ICU committee and leaned back in his desk chair. They’ve worded it very diplomatically, Alexios thought as he read the final paragraph, but their meaning is clear.

The aforementioned tests unequivocally show that the rocks in question originated on Mars. While there is a vanishingly small chance that they were deposited on Mercury’s surface by natural processes, the overwhelming likelihood is that they were transported to Mercury by human hands. The discovery of biomarkers in these samples by V. Molina is not, therefore, indicative of biological activity on the planet Mercury.

Victor is wiped out, Alexios said to himself, with satisfaction. McFergusen won’t come right out and say it, but the implication is crystal clear: either Victor planted those rocks here himself, or he fell dupe to some prankster who did it. Either way, Victor’s reputation as a scientist is permanently demolished.

Laughing out loud, Alexios thought, Now it’s your turn, Danvers.

He put in a call to Molina, to start the process of destroying Bishop Elliott Danvers.

As he strode down the central corridor of the orbiting Himawari, heading toward Molina’s quarters, Alexios began to feel nervous. Lara will be there, he knew. She lives with him. Sleeps with him. They have an eight-year-old son. He worried that sooner or later she would see through his nanotherapy and recognize Mance Bracknell. Then he realized that even if she did it wouldn’t change anything.

Still, he hesitated once he arrived at the door to their stateroom, his fist in midair poised to knock. What will I do if she does recognize me? he asked himself. What will you do if she doesn’t? replied the scornful voice in his head.

He took a breath, then knocked. Lara opened the door immediately, as if she had been standing behind it waiting anxiously for him.

He had to swallow before he could say, “Hello, Mrs. Molina.”

“Mr. Alexios.” Her voice was hushed, apprehensive. “Won’t you come in?”

Feeling every fiber of his body quivering nervously, Alexios stepped into their compartment. Victor was sitting on the two-place sofa set against the far bulkhead, his head in his hands. The bed was neatly made up; everything in the stateroom seemed in fastidious order. Except for Molina: he looked a wreck, hair mussed, face ashen, a two-day stubble on his jaw, dark rings under his eyes.

Alexios relaxed somewhat. This isn’t going to be difficult at all. He’s ready to clutch at any straw I can offer.

Lara asked, “Can I get you something, Mr. Alexios?”

“Dante,” he said. “Please call me Dante.”

With a nod, she said, “Very well, Dante. A drink, maybe?”

His memory flashed a picture of all the times he and Lara had drunk together. She’d been partial to margaritas in the old days; Mance Bracknell had a taste for wine.

“Just some water, please,” he said.

“Fruit juice?” she suggested.

He almost shuddered with the recollection of the nanomachine-laden juice he had drunk in Koga’s clinic. “Water will be fine, thank you.”

Lara went to the kitchenette built behind a short bar next to the sofa. Alexios pulled up one of the plush chairs and sat across the coffee table from Molina.

“As I said on the phone, Dr. Molina, I’m here to help you in any way I can.”

Molina shook his head. “There isn’t anything you can do,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“Someone set you up for this,” Alexios said gently. “If we can find out who did it, that would show everyone that you’re not at fault.”

Lara placed a tray of glasses on the coffee table and sat next to her husband. “That’s what I’ve been telling him. We can’t just take this lying down. We’ve got to find out who’s responsible for this.”

“What can you do?” Molina asked morosely.

Alexios tilted his head slightly, as if thinking about the problem. “Well… you said you received an anonymous call about the rocks.”

“Yes. Somebody left a message for me at my office on campus. No name. No return address.”

“And on the strength of that one call you came out here to Mercury?”

Anger flared in Molina’s eyes. “Don’t you start, too! Yes, I came here on the strength of that one call. It sounded too good to be ignored.”

Lara laid a placating hand on his knee. “Victor, he’s trying to help you,” she said soothingly.

Molina visibly choked back his anger. “I figured that if it’s a blind alley I could be back home in a couple of weeks. But if it is was real, it would be a terrific discovery.”

“But it was a deliberate hoax,” Alexios said, as sympathetically as he could manage.

“That’s right. And they all think I did it. They think I’m a fraud, a cheat, a—”

“The thing to do,” Alexios said, cutting through Molina’s rising bitterness, “is to track down who made that call.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Whoever it was had access to Martian rocks,” Alexios went on. “And he probably knew you.”

“What makes you think that?” Lara asked, surprise showing clearly in her amber eyes.

With a small shrug, Alexios replied, “He called you, no one else. He wanted you, specifically you, to come here and be his victim.”

“Who would do such a thing?” Lara wondered. “And why?”

“That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

EVIDENCE

Alexios knew he had to work fast, because Lara and Victor were due to leave Mercury in a few days. Yet he couldn’t be too swift; that might show his hand to them. Besides, now that the IAA’s interdict on his work on the planet’s surface was lifted, he had plenty of tasks to accomplish: resume scooping raw materials from the regolith, hire a nanotech team and bring them to Mercury, lay out plans for building a mass driver and the components for solar power satellites that would be catapulted into orbit and assembled in space.

He waited for two days. Then he rode the shuttle back to Himawari with the evidence in his tunic pocket.

Lara and Victor eagerly greeted him at the airlock. They hurried down the passageway together toward the Molinas’ stateroom, Victor in a sweat to see what Alexios had uncovered, Lara just as eager but more controlled.

As soon as the stateroom door closed Molina demanded, “Well? What did you find?”

“Quite a bit,” said Alexios. “Is McFergusen still here? He should see—”

“He left two days ago,” Molina snapped. “What did you find out?” Alexios pulled two thin sheets of plastic from his tunic and unfolded them on the coffee table as Molina and his wife sat together on the little sofa. He tapped the one on top.

“Is this the anonymous message you received?” he asked Molina.

The astrobiologist scanned it. “Yes, that’s it.”

Alexios knew it was. He had sent it. He turned that sheet over to show the one beneath it.

“What’s this?” Lara asked.

“A copy of a requisition from the International Consortium of Universities, selling eleven Martian rocks to a private research facility on Earth.”

“My rocks!” Molina blurted.

“How did they get from Earth to Mercury?” Lara asked.

Alexios knew perfectly well, but he said, “That part of it we’ll have to deduce from the available evidence.”

“Who sent this message to me?” Molina demanded, tapping the first sheet.

“It wasn’t easy tracking down the sender. He was very careful to cover his tracks.”

“Who was it?”

“And he had a large, well-financed organization behind him, as well,” Alexios added.

“Who was it?” Molina fairly screamed.

Alexios glanced at Lara. She was obviously on tenterhooks, her lips parted slightly, her eyes wide with anticipation.

“Bishop Danvers,” said Alexios.

“Elliott?” Molina gasped.

“I can’t believe it,” said Lara. “He’s a man of god—he wouldn’t stoop to such chicanery.”

“He’s my friend,” Molina said, looking bewildered. “At least, I thought he was.”

Alexios said, “The New Morality hates the discoveries you astrobiologists have made, you know that. What better way to discredit the entire field than by showing a prominent astrobiologist to be a fraud, a liar?”

Molina sank back in the sofa. “Elliott did this? To me?”

“What proof do you have?” Lara asked.

Alexios looked into her gold-flecked eyes. “The people who traced this message used highly irregular methods—”

“Illegal, you mean,” she said flatly.

“Extralegal,” Alexios countered.

“Then this so-called evidence won’t hold up in a court of law.”

“No, but there must be a record of this message in Danvers’s computer files. Even if he erased the message, a scan of his memory core might find a trace of it.”

Lara stared hard at him. “The bishop could claim that someone planted the message in his computer.”

Alexios knew she was perfectly correct. But he said, “And why would anyone do that?”

Impatiently, Molina argued, “We can’t examine Elliott’s computer files without his permission. And if he really did this he won’t give permission. So where are we?”

“You’re forgetting this invoice,” said Alexios. “It can be traced to the New Morality school in Gabon, in west Africa.”

Lara looked at her husband. “Elliott was stationed in Libreville.”

“For almost ten years,” Molina said.

She turned back to Alexios. “You’re certain of all this?”

He nodded and lied, “Absolutely. I paid a good deal of money to obtain this information.”

“Elliott?” Molina was still finding it difficult to accept the idea. “Elliott deliberately tried to destroy me?”

“I’m afraid he has destroyed you,” Alexios said grimly. “Your reputation is permanently tainted.”

Molina nodded ruefully. Then his expression changed, hardened. “Then I’m taking that pompous sonofabitch down with me!”

CONFRONTATION

“It’s utterly ridiculous!” cried Bishop Danvers.

Molina was standing in Danvers’s stateroom, too furious to sit down. He paced the little room like a prowling animal. Lara sat on one of the upholstered chairs, Alexios on the other one. Danvers was on the sofa between them, staring bewilderedly at the two flimsy sheets that Alexios had brought.

“We have the proof,” Molina said, jabbing a finger toward the message and the invoice.

“It’s not true, Victor,” said Danvers. “Believe me, it’s not true.”

“You deliberately ruined me, Elliott.”

“No, I—”

“Why?” Molina shouted. “Why did you do this to me?”

“I didn’t!” Danvers howled back, his face reddening. “It’s a pack of lies.” Desperately, he turned to Lara. “Lara, you believe me, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t have done this. I couldn’t have!”

Lara’s eyes flicked from her husband to the bishop and back again.

“Someone has deliberately ruined Victor’s reputation,” she said evenly, fixing her gaze on Alexios. “No matter who did this, Victor’s career is destroyed.”

“But it wasn’t me!” Danvers pleaded.

“Wasn’t it?” Molina snapped. “When I think of all the talks we’ve had, over the years, all the arguments—”

“Discussions!” Danvers corrected. “Philosophical discussions.”

“You’ve had it in for me ever since you found out that I was using those gengineered viruses to help build the skytower,” Molina accused. “You and your kind hate everything that science stands for, don’t you?”

“No, it’s not true.” Danvers seemed almost in tears.

Molina stopped his pacing to face the bishop. “When I told you about what I was doing at the skytower, you reported it to your New Morality superiors, didn’t you?”

“Of course. It was important information.”

“You were a spy back in Ecuador. You were sent to the skytower project to snoop, not to pray for people’s souls.”

“Victor, please believe me—”

“And now they’ve sent you here to Mercury to destroy my work, my career. You’ve ruined my life, Elliott! You might as well have taken a knife and stabbed me through the heart!”

Danvers sank his face in his hands and started blubbering. Lara stared at him, her own eyes growing misty. Then she looked up at her husband.

“Victor, I don’t think he did this,” she said calmly.

“Then who did?” Molina demanded. “Who would have any reason to?”

Lara focused again squarely on Alexios. “Are you certain of this information?” she asked. “Absolutely certain?”

Alexios fought down the urge to squirm uncomfortably under her gaze. As smoothly as he could, he replied, “As your husband said, who else would have a motive for doing this to him? The New Morality must have marked Victor years ago, when they learned what he was doing for the skytower.”

“And they’d wait all this time to get back at him?”

Shrugging, Alexios said, “Apparently so. That’s what the evidence suggests.”

Abruptly, Molina bent over the coffee table and snatched the two flimsy sheets. “I’m calling McFergusen. I’ve been the victim of a hoax, a scam. And then I’m calling the news nets. The New Morality is going to pay for this! I’ll expose them for the psalm-singing hypocrites that they are!”

Exactly what I thought you’d do, Alexios said to himself. Aloud, however, he tried to sound more reasonable. “I agree that a call to McFergusen is in order. But a news conference? Do you really want to attack the New Morality?”

“Why not?” Molina snapped. “What do I have to lose?”

Lara got to her feet. “Victor, Mr. Alexios is right. Don’t be too hasty. Talk with McFergusen first. He might be able to salvage something out of this situation.”

“Salvage what? Even if I can prove that I’ve been scammed, I still look like an idiot. Nobody will ever believe me again. My career is finished!”

“But perhaps—”

“Perhaps nothing! They’ve destroyed me; I’m going to do my damnedest to destroy them. And you in particular, Elliott, you goddamned lying bastard!”

Danvers looked up at the astrobiologist, his face white with shock, his eyes filled with tears.

Molina took his wife by the wrist and slammed out of the stateroom, leaving Alexios alone with the bishop.

“I didn’t do it,” Danvers mewed, bewildered. “As God is my witness, I never did any of this.”

Alexios scratched his chin, trying to prevent himself from gloating. “Would you allow me to check your computer? I presume you brought your memory core with you when you came to Mercury.”

Danvers nodded glumly and gestured toward the desk, where the palm-sized computer rested. Alexios spent a half hour fiddling with it while the bishop sat on the sofa in miserable silence. Alexios found the trace of the message he had paid to have planted in the computer’s core. It looked as if it had been erased from the active memory, but still existed deep in the core.

Getting up from the desk at last, Alexios lied, “Well, if it’s in your machine’s memory it would take a better expert than me to find it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Danvers said, his heavy head drooping.

“I should think it would be important.”

His voice deep and low with despair, Danvers said, “You don’t understand. A scandal like this will ruin me. The New Morality doesn’t permit even a suspicion of wrongdoing among its hierarchy. We must all be above evil, above even accusations of evil. This… once Victor tells people about this… I’ll be finished in the New Morality. Finished.”

Alexios took a breath, then replied, “Maybe you can get a position as chaplain on a prison ship, or out in the Asteroid Belt. They could use your consolations there.”

Danvers looked up at him, blinking. He seemed to have aged ten years in the past half hour.

Alexios smiled, thinking, You wouldn’t last a month out there, you fat old fraud. Somebody would strangle you in the middle of your hymns.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

Alexios fidgeted nervously as he stood in Himawari’s dimmed observation lounge, gazing through the glassteel blister as the star-flecked depths of infinite space spun slowly, inexorably past his altered eyes. The eyes of heaven, he said to himself, half-remembering a poem from his school days. The army of unalterable law, that’s what the poet called the stars.

I should feel triumphant, he thought. Victor’s career is in tatters, and Danvers is in disgrace. All that’s left is Yamagata and I’ll be taking care of him shortly. Yet he felt no delight in his victory over them. No triumph. He was dead inside, cold and numb. Ten years I’ve waited to get even with them and now that I have … so what? So Victor will spend the rest of his life in some obscure university trying to live down his mistake here on Mercury. And Danvers will be defrocked, or whatever they do in the New Morality. What of it? How does that change my life?

Lara, he said to himself. It all depends on Lara. She’s the one I did this for. She’s the one who kept me alive through all those long years out in the Belt. My only glimmer of hope when I was a prisoner, a miserable exile.

As the torch ship rotated, the surface of Mercury slid into view, barren, heat-blasted, pitted with craters and seamed with cracks and fault lines. Like the face of an old, old man, Alexios thought, a man who’s lived too long. He saw a line of cliffs and the worn, tired mountains ringing an ancient crater. He knew where Goethe base was, but he could not see the modest mound of rubble covering its dome from the distance of the ship’s orbit, nor the tracks of the vehicles that churned up the thin layer of dust on the ground down there.

Once we’ve built the mass driver you’ll be able to see it from orbit, he thought. Five kilometers long. We’ll see it, all right.

The door behind him slid open, spilling light from the passageway into the darkened compartment. Alexios’s heart constricted in his chest. He did not dare to turn around, but in the reflection off the glassteel bubble he saw that it was Lara.

He slowly turned toward her as she slid the door shut. The compartment became dim and shadowed again, but he could see her lovely face, see the curiosity in her eyes.

“You asked me to meet you here?” she said, her voice soft and low.

He realized he’d been holding his breath. He nodded, then managed to get out, “It’s one of the few places aboard ship where we can meet privately.”

“You have some further information about my husband?”

“No … not really…” It took all his self-control to keep from reaching out and clasping her in his arms. Surely she could hear his heart thundering.

“I don’t understand,” Lara said with a little frown. “You asked me to see you, to come alone, without Victor.”

“Lara, it’s me,” he blurted. “Mance.”

Her mouth dropped open.

“I know I look different,” he said, the words coming in a rush now. “I had to change my appearance, my background, I came here to Mercury but I had no idea you’d come out here too and now that you’re here I can’t keep up the masquerade any longer, I want to—”

“Mance?” she whispered, unbelieving.

“Yes, it’s me, darling.”

She staggered back several steps, dropped onto the bench running along the compartment’s rear bulkhead. “It can’t be,” she said, her voice hollow.

He went to her, knelt before her, grasped both her hands in his own. “Lara, I’ve gone through hell to find you again. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

She was staring at him, searching for the Mance Bracknell she had known. He could see the play of starlight in her eyes and then the harsh glare reflected from Mercury casting her face into stark light and shadow.

“I know I don’t look the same, Lara. But it really is me, Mance. I have a new identity. I’m a free man now. The old Mance Bracknell is dead, as far as the officials are concerned. But we can begin our lives again, Lara, we can take up where we left off.”

She shuddered, like a woman coming out of a trance. “Begin our lives again?”

“Yes! I love you, dearest. I want to marry you and—”

“I’m already married. I have an eight-year-old son. Victor’s son.”

“You can divorce Victor. Nobody will blame you for leaving him.”

Recognition lit her eyes. “You did this to Victor! It wasn’t Elliott, it was you!”

“I did it for you,” he said.

“You destroyed my husband’s career and ruined Elliott.”

“Because I love you.”

“What kind of love is that?”

Alexios saw the disgust in her eyes. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They destroyed me. Victor deliberately lied at my trial. He wanted me out of the way so he could have you. He stole you from me. He stole my entire life!”

“And now you’ve stolen his.”

“Yes! And I want you back. You’re the reason I’ve done all this.”

“Oh, my god,” she moaned.

“You loved me, you know you did. You said you wanted to be with me. Well, now we can—”

“And Elliott, too? What do you have against him?”

Anger rising inside him, Alexios said, “He’s the one who started the scheme to destroy the skytower. Him and his New Morality hatred for nanotechnology or anything else that they can’t find in the Old Testament.”

“Destroy the skytower?”

“It was sabotaged. Deliberately knocked down. They didn’t care how many people they killed, they just wanted the tower destroyed. And me with it.”

She stared at him. “You’re saying that Victor helped to bring the tower down?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. But he lied at my trial. He was perfectly willing to lie so that the blame would all be dumped on me. So that I’d be sent off Earth and he’d have you to himself.”

Lara shook her head, just the slightest of movements, as she said, “I can’t believe that. I don’t believe any of this!”

“But it’s true! It’s all true! Victor is a lying thief and Danvers helped him.”

She sagged back on the padded bulkhead. Alexios climbed to his feet and sat beside her.

“I know it’s a lot to accept all at once. But I really am Mance Bracknell. At least I was, once. Now I’m Dante Alexios. I’m fairly prosperous; I can offer you a fine life back on Earth. Victor stole you from me. I want you back.”

“He’s my husband,” Lara repeated weakly.

He looked directly into her eyes. In the dim lighting of the compartment he could not see any tears in them.

“Lara, you can’t tell me that you love Victor the way you loved me.”

She said nothing.

“We were perfect for each other,” he said. “The minute I first saw you, back in that dull statistics class with the Chinese T.A. who could barely speak English, I fell hopelessly in love with you.”

For long moments she remained silent. Then, “You certainly didn’t show it.”

“I was too shy. It didn’t seem possible that anyone as wonderful as you would have the slightest interest in me.”

Lara smiled faintly.

“We belong together, Lara. They’ve separated us for so many years, but we can be together again now.”

Again that slight shake of her head. “So many years have gone by.”

“But we can start again,” he urged.

“It’s not that simple.”

“It can be, if you want it to be. Victor got what’s coming to him. He’s finished, out of the picture.”

“He’s my husband,” she said, still again.

“He stole you from me!”

She looked away for a moment, then turned back to him. “Look, Mance or Alexios or whoever you are. I am married to Victor Molina. He’s the father of my child. You’ve tried to ruin him—”

“Nothing less than he deserves,” Alexios growled, feeling his anger simmering inside him again. “In fact, he deserves a lot worse.”

“What you’ve told me might save him,” Lara said.

Alexios was thunderstruck. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him. “You’d take him over me?”

“Mance Bracknell is dead,” Lara said, her voice flat and cold. “So be it. We could never recapture what we had all those years ago. Do you think I could leave Victor and go with you, knowing what you’ve done to him?”

“But he deserves it!”

“No, he doesn’t. And even if he did, his wife should be by his side, protecting and supporting him. For the sake of our child, if for no other reason.”

“You belong with me!”

“No. My place is with my husband and son, no matter what happened in the past.”

“That’s…” Alexios ran out of words. This has gone all wrong, he said to himself. All wrong.

Lara got to her feet. “I’m going to tell Victor about this, and then McFergusen. I won’t mention Mance Bracknell. I’ll simply tell them that you confessed to me that you planted the false evidence.”

“They’ll find out who I am!” Alexios pleaded. “They’ll send me back to the Belt!”

“Not if you can prove that the skytower was sabotaged. Not if you can lead the authorities to the people who are really responsible for all those deaths.”

He stood up beside her, his knees unsteady, and watched as she abruptly turned away from him and left the observation lounge. He stood frozen, watching as the door slid closed. Then he felt the glare from Mercury’s surface blaze through the heavily tinted blister of glassteel. It felt like the hot breath of doom.

GOETHE BASE

It’s all gone wrong, Alexios said to himself as he sat miserably alone in his sparely furnished office at the construction base. Horribly wrong.

Lara, Victor, and Danvers had left for Earth on the ship that had shepherded the six new power satellites from Selene. She must be telling Victor everything, Alexios thought. It’s only a matter of time before the IAA or some other group sends investigators here to check me out. If they suspect I’m not who I say I am, they’ll want to do DNA scans on me. If I refuse they’ll get a court order.

It’s finished, he told himself. Over. She’s not the same Lara I knew. The years have changed her.

He stood up and studied his reflection in the blank wall screen. They’ve changed me, too, he realized. He paced across the little office, thinking that he was still all alone in the universe. Lara doesn’t love me anymore. No one in the entire solar system cares about me. There’s only one thing left to do. Get Yamagata down here and finish the job. Make him pay before they come after me. After that, it doesn’t matter what happens.

Yet he hesitated. When the investigators come I could tell them the whole story, tell them how Yamagata sabotaged the skytower, how he’s the one who’s really responsible for all those deaths.

But the mocking voice in his head sneered, And they’ll believe you? Against Yamagata? Where’s your evidence? He’s murdered everyone connected with the sabotage. Toshikazu was the last one, and his assassins even killed themselves so there’d be no possible witnesses remaining.

Alexios knew the severed end of the skytower lay more than four thousand meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic, near the fracture zone where hot magma wells up from deep beneath the Earth’s crust. No one would send an expedition to search for the remains of nanomachines that had probably been dissolved by now, he knew.

He also knew that Saito Yamagata maintained the convenient fiction that his son ran Yamagata Corporation. He was in a lamasery in Tibet when the skytower went down, Alexios remembered. Yes, of course, the voice in his mind taunted. He pulled all the strings for this vast murderous conspiracy from his retreat in the Himalayas. Try getting the authorities to buy that.

Alexios shook his head slowly. No, I’m not going to try to get the authorities to do anything. I’m going to take care of Yamagata myself. I’m going to end this thing once and for all.

He told the phone to call Saito Yamagata.

Yamagata was clearly uncomfortable about being out on the surface; Alexios could see the unhappy frown on his face through the visor of his helmet. Don’t worry, he said silently, you won’t be out here long. Only for the rest of your life.

The two men were riding a slow, bumping tractor across the bleak surface of Mercury, dipping down into shallow craters and then laboring up the other side, moving farther and farther from the base. It was night; the Sun would not rise for another hour, but the glow of starlight and the pale glitter of the zodiacal light bathed the bleak landscape in a cold, silvery radiance.

Despite all the months he’d been on Mercury, Alexios still could not get accustomed to the little planet’s short horizon. It was like the brink of a cliff looming too close; the edge of the world. In the airless vacuum the horizon was sharp and clear, no blurring or softening with distance, a knife edge: the solid world ended and the black infinity of space lay beyond.

“You’ll be out of camera range in two more minutes,” the base controller’s calm flat voice said in Alexios’s helmet earphones.

“You have a satellite track on us, don’t you?” he asked.

“Affirmative. Two of ’em, as a matter of fact.”

“Our beacon’s coming through all right?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Good enough.”

Even though the tractor’s glassteel cabin was pressurized, both Yamagata and Alexios were wearing full spacesuits, their helmet visors closed and sealed. Safety regulations, Alexios had told Yamagata when the older man had grumbled about getting into the uncomfortable suit.

“How far are we going to go?” Yamagata asked as the tractor slewed around a house-sized boulder.

Taking one gloved hand off the steering controls to point out toward the horizon, Alexios said, “We’ve got to get to the other side of that fault line. Then we’ll double back.”

Yamagata grunted, and the frown on his face relaxed, but only slightly.

It had been easy enough to get him down to the planet’s surface.

“I’d like to show you the site we’re considering for the mass driver,” Alexios had told Yamagata. “Naturally, we can’t make the final decision. That’s up to you.”

Yamagata’s image in Alexios’s wall screen had turned thoughtful. “Is it necessary for me to inspect this location personally?”

Choosing his words carefully, Alexios had replied, “I understand, sir, that it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable to come down here to the surface. Even a little dangerous, to be truthful.”

Yamagata had stiffened at that. Drawing himself up to his full height, he’d told Alexios, “I will come to the base tomorrow. My transportation coordinator will inform you of when you may expect me.”

Alexios had smiled. Touch the man on his Japanese brand of machismo and you’ve got him. The old samurai tradition. He doesn’t want to lose face in front of his employees.

“I received a report from my son’s technical experts in Japan,” Yamagata said, staring straight ahead as he sat alongside Alexios in the lumbering tractor. “They believe your numbers on the solar cell degradation problem are exaggerated.”

Alexios knew perfectly well that they were. “Exaggerated?” he asked.

“Overstated,” said Yamagata, his voice muffled slightly by the spacesuit helmet.

It was impossible to shrug inside the heavy suit. Alexios said smoothly, “I admit that I showed you the worst-case numbers. I thought it best that way.”

Yamagata grunted. “We may not have to harden the power satellites after all.”

“That’s good news, then,” Alexios replied. It didn’t matter now, he thought. None of it mattered any more.

Yamagata was silent for several kilometers. Then, “What makes you think this is the best site for the catapult launcher?” he demanded. “If it takes this long to get there, why is this site so preferable?”

Alexios smiled behind his visor. “It’s that blasted fault line. If you approve the site, we’ll bridge over it. But right now we have to go all the way around it. Won’t be long now, though.”

Yamagata nodded and seemed to settle down inside his suit.

It won’t be long now, Alexios repeated silently.

FREIGHTER XENOBIA

Lara Tierney Molina could not sleep. Victor lay beside her, dead to the world on the sedatives and tranquilizers he’d been taking ever since boarding the creaking old freighter, coasting now on a four-month trajectory back to Selene.

The clock’s digits glowing in the darkness read 12:53. She slipped out of bed, groped in the shadows of the darkened stateroom for the first dress she could find in her travel bag, and pulled it on. Victor would sleep for hours more, she knew. She tiptoed to the door, opened it as softly as she could, and stepped out into the passageway. As she slid the door closed and heard the faint click of its lock, she wondered which way led to the galley.

I have to think, she told herself as she walked slowly along the passageway. Its plastic walls were scuffed and dulled from long use, the floor tiles even worse. Xenobia had ferried a set of solar power satellites to Mercury for Yamagata’s project; now its only cargo was a disgraced New Morality bishop, a humiliated astrobiologist, and herself. The IAA was paying Victor’s fare and her own. The New Morality had refused to pay for Danvers’s return; Saito Yamagata had graciously taken care of it.

Victor had demanded a hearing before the IAA’s disciplinary board. McFergusen will chair that meeting, Lara thought. I’ll have to tell them what Mance confessed to me. No, not Mance. He’s a different man, this Dante Alexios. He’s no longer Mance Bracknell.

Deep inside her she wondered why she hadn’t told Victor about Alexios’s confession. Victor was dazed and thick-witted from the tranquilizers that Yamagata’s medical people had dosed him with, but she knew that wasn’t the reason. Could she believe this Alexios person? Is he really Mance? How else would he know about how we met? He must be Mance. But that makes it even worse, even more complicated. Mance deliberately ruined Victor, revenged himself on poor Victor like some savage out of the dark ages. I’ll have to tell Victor, I can’t keep this from him. It might save his career, save his life.

Yet she hesitated, wondering, uncertain of herself or anything. Victor had lied at Mance’s trial? Perjured himself to get rid of Mance? For me? How can I believe that? How can I believe any of this?

She saw a phone screen on the passageway wall and called up a schematic of the ship’s interior layout. She’d been heading in the wrong direction, she saw. Turning, she started more confidently toward the galley. No one else was in the passageway at this time of night. There’s probably a crew on duty in the bridge, Lara thought. Otherwise they’re all sleeping.

All but me. I can save Victor. I’ll go to the meeting and tell them that he was deliberately duped by false evidence planted by Dante Alexios. I can clear Victor’s name. Elliott’s, too.

And what happens to Dante Alexios? she asked herself. She thought she knew. McFergusen and his committee would not take her unsupported word. They’d want corroboration. They would send investigators to Mercury to question Mance-Alexios. And what if he claims innocence? What if he tells them my story is a total fabrication, a desperate attempt to save my husband?

The galley was empty. Nothing more than a small metal table and four swivel chairs bolted to the deck, with a row of food and drink dispensers lining one wall. Lara poured herself a mug of tepid coffee and sat wearily in one of the chairs.

I’ll have to tell them that Alexios is really Mance Bracknell, she realized. They’ll run tests on him to settle his identity. Once they find that he’s Mance they’ll send him back to the Belt, back to exile.

Can I do that to him? He said Victor stole me from him, said that he still loves me and wants me. Can I reward him by sending him back into exile? She wanted to cry. It would be such a relief to simply dissolve into tears and wait for someone else to solve this problem for her.

But there is no one else, she told herself. Except Victor, Jr. That made her sit up straighter. Her son. Hers and Victor’s. He has a stake in this, too. I can’t allow McFergusen or Mance or anyone else to ruin little Victor’s future. He needs my protection.

A shadow fell across her and she turned to see Elliott Danvers’s hulking form filling the hatchway.

“You couldn’t sleep either?” Danvers said, going to the coffee dispenser.

“No.”

Danvers settled his bulk in the chair opposite Lara. It groaned as he sat on it, and the bishop sighed heavily.

“I’ve sent half a dozen messages to my superiors in Atlanta and they haven’t seen fit to reply to any of them.”

Lara saw that his fleshy face was pale, creased with lines she’d never noticed before. “What will happen to you once we get back to Earth?” she asked.

Danvers shrugged his massive shoulders. “I wish I knew. A reassignment, at least. They’ll want to strip me of my title, I’m sure. Perhaps they’ll throw me out altogether.”

“I know you didn’t do it,” Lara said.

Danvers’s eyes flared briefly. Then he murmured, “Thank you.”

“I’m not merely being kind, Elliott. I know who actually duped Victor and planted the evidence that puts the blame on you.”

Now his eyes stayed wide. “You … you do?”

“But if I tell who it really is, it will ruin his life.”

“But he’s trying to ruin my life!”

“I don’t know what I should do,” Lara said plaintively.

“Yes, you do,” said the bishop. “You must do what is right. You can’t cover up a lie. Forget about me—your husband’s career is at stake.”

“I know,” said Lara.

“And what about your son? This affects him, too.”

“I know,” she repeated.

Danvers stared at her as if trying to pry the information out of her by sheer willpower. At last he asked, “Why wouldn’t you name the wrongdoer?”

“Because it will hurt him. Because he’s been terribly hurt already and I’m not sure that I can do this to him, hurt him again.”

“But… your husband! Your son! Me!”

Lara gripped her cup with both hands and stared down into it. “Maybe if I simply tell the committee that the man told me he did it, that he cleared you entirely, maybe that would be enough.”

“Without naming him, so they can check? They’d think you’re nothing but a wife who’s willing to lie to protect her husband.”

She nodded dejectedly. “I can’t help one without hurting the other.”

The bishop waited a heartbeat, then reached across the table to take her hands in his massive paws. “Lara, morality doesn’t come in shades of gray. It’s black and white. You either do the right thing or you do the wrong thing. There’s no middle ground.”

She looked into his soft gray eyes, red with sleeplessness, and thought that morality was simple when doing the right thing would save your own neck.

“It’s more complicated than that,” she said quietly.

“Then think of this,” Danvers said, almost gently. “What is the greatest good for the greatest number of people? You have your husband and son to think of, as opposed to this mysterious wrongdoer.”

She nodded. “My husband and son—and you.”

BOREALIS PLANITIA

Wrapped in their cumbersome spacesuits, Alexios and Yamagata sat side by side in the tractor’s transparent cab as it slowly trundled along the pitted, rock-strewn landscape.

“Borealis Planitia,” Yamagata muttered. “The northern plain.”

He sounded slightly nervous to Alexios, a little edgy. Inside the pressurized glassteel cabin they could hear one another without using the suits’ radios, although their voices were muffled by the heavy helmets.

“This region is an ancient lava flow,” Yamagata went on, as much to himself as to his companion. “Planetologists claim that this entire area was once a lake of molten lava, billions of years ago.”

Alexios contented himself with steering the tractor through the maze of boulders that lay scattered across the ground. Now and again he rolled right over a smaller rock, making the tractor pitch and sway. To their right, the yawning crack of the fault line was narrowing. They would reach the end of it soon, Alexios knew.

Yamagata continued, “From orbit you can see the outlines of even older craters, ghost craters, drowned by the lava when it flowed across this region.”

Alexios nodded inside his helmet. The man’s talking just to hear himself talk, he thought. Trying to hide his fear at being out here. Grimly, Alexios added, He has a lot to be afraid of.

They drove on in silence. The time stretched. Alexios could feel in his bones the vibrating hum of the tractor’s electric motors, hear his own breathing inside the helmet. He drove like an automaton; there seemed to be no emotion left inside him.

“You are very quiet,” Yamagata said at last.

“Yes,” replied Alexios.

“What are you thinking about?”

Alexios turned his head inside the fishbowl helmet to look squarely at the older man. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about the skytower.”

“The skytower?” Yamagata looked surprised. “That was years ago.”

“Many years. Many lives.”

“Technological hubris,” said Yamagata. “The people who built it paid no attention to the danger it might pose.”

“Part of it is still spinning outward, in deep space.”

“Carrying the bodies of dozens of dead men and women.”

“Murdered men and women,” said Alexios.

Yamagata grunted. “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”

“The tower was sabotaged. All those who died were murdered.”

“Sabotaged?”

“By agents of Yamagata Corporation.”

Yamagata’s jaw dropped open. “That’s not true! It’s impossible!”

Without taking his gloved hands from the steering controls, Alexios said, “We both know that it is possible and it did happen.”

“Paranoid fantasy,” Yamagata snapped.

“Is it? I was told the full story by the last surviving member of the plot. Just before your hired killers closed his mouth forever.”

“My hired killers?” Yamagata scoffed. “I was in Chota Lamasery in the Himalayas when the skytower fell. We didn’t even hear about it until a week or more after the tragedy.”

“Yes, I know. That’s your cover story.”

Yamagata stared at this coldly intent man sitting beside him. He’s insane, he thought. Alexios’s eyes glittered with something beyond anger, beyond fury. For the first time since he’d been diagnosed with brain cancer, back in his first life, Yamagata felt fear gripping his innards.

“I was the director of the skytower project,” Alexios told him, all the while wondering at the glacial calm that had settled upon him, as if he were sheathed in ice.

“The director of the skytower project was exiled,” said Yamagata.

Alexios made a wan smile. “Like you, I’ve led more than one life.”

“I had nothing to do with the skytower,” Yamagata insisted.

“It was sabotaged by Yamagata Corporation people, using nanomachines to snap the tower at its most vulnerable point. The man who produced the nanobugs for you told me the entire story just before your assassins caught up with him.”

“And you believed him?”

“He was terrified for his life,” said Alexios. “Your assassins got him. They also blew up the ship we were in, to make sure that anyone he talked to would be killed, too.”

“But you survived.”

“I survived. To seek justice for all those you killed. To gain vengeance for having my own life destroyed.”

“But I—” Yamagata caught himself and shut his mouth. He’s a madman, he told himself. I had nothing to do with this; I was in the lamasery. Nobuhiko was running the corporation, just as he is now.

Suddenly his pulse began thudding in his ears. Nobu! If Yamagata Corporation was involved in destroying the skytower, it was under Nobu’s direction!

No, that couldn’t be, Yamagata said to himself. Shaking his head, he thought, Nobu wouldn’t do such a thing. He couldn’t be that ruthless, that… murderous.

Or could he? Yamagata recalled those years when his advice to his son had led to the slaughters of the second Asteroid War, the massacre of the Chrysalis habitat. Nobu learned to be ruthless from me, he realized. The blood drained from his face. I have turned my son into a monster.

Alexios misread the ashen expression on Yamagata’s face. “You admit it, then? You admit that the skytower was destroyed on your orders. Four million men, women, and children murdered—by you.”

Yamagata realized there was nothing else to do. If I tell him that it was Nobuhiko’s doing this madman will want to kill Nobu. Better to let him think it was me. Nobu is my son, my responsibility. Whatever he has done is my fault as much as his. Better for me to take the blame and the punishment. Let my son live.

“Well?” Alexios demanded.

Yamagata seemed to draw himself up straighter inside the bulky spacesuit. “I accept full responsibility,” he said, his voice flat, lifeless.

“Good,” said Alexios. He turned the steering wheel and the tractor veered slowly toward the yawning fault line, grinding slowly but inexorably toward the rift in Mercury’s bleak ground as the first blazing edge of the Sun peeped above the horizon.

FREIGHTER XENOBIA

Bishop Danvers’s mind was churning as he made his way back to his compartment. Is Lara telling the truth? he asked him self. She must be. She must be! She wouldn’t make up a story like that, she couldn’t. But the other side of his mind argued, Why wouldn’t she? She’s desperate to save her husband and protect her son. She might say anything if she thought it would help Victor.

As he slid back the door to his compartment he saw that the phone’s yellow message light was blinking in the darkness. A message! His heart began thumping. From Atlanta. It must be an answer to my calls to Atlanta. Flicking on the ceiling lights, Danvers rushed to the compartment’s flimsy little desk and told the phone to display the message.

It was indeed from Atlanta. From the archbishop himself!

Carnaby’s wrinkled, bald, gnomish features took form in the phone’s small display screen. He was unsmiling, his eyes flinty.

“Bishop Danvers, I am replying to your messages personally because your case is one of extreme importance to the New Morality movement.”

Danvers felt immensely grateful. The archbishop is replying to me personally! Even though he knew it would take half an hour, at least, to get a reply back to Earth he automatically started to frame his message of gratitude to the archbishop.

Carnaby was going on, however, “A great American once said that extremism in the defense of our values is no vice. I can appreciate the extreme measures you took to discredit the godless scientists you’ve been battling against. But in our battle against these secularists, the movement must be seen by the general public as being beyond reproach, above suspicion. Your methods, once exposed to the public, will bring suspicion and discredit upon us all.”

But I didn’t do it! Danvers screamed silently at Carnaby’s implacable image. I haven’t done anything discreditable! Lara can prove it!

“Therefore,” the archbishop continued, “I have no choice but to ask you for your resignation from the New Morality. One man must not be allowed to throw doubt upon our entire movement. I know this seems harsh to you, but it is for the higher good. Remember that a man may serve God in many ways, and your way will be to resign your office and your ordination in the movement. If you refuse you will be put on public trial as soon as you return to Earth and found guilty. I’m truly sorry it has to be this way, but you have become a liability to the New Morality and no individual, no matter who he is, can be allowed to threaten our work. May God be merciful to you.”

The screen went blank.

Danvers stared at it for long, wordless minutes. His mind seemed unable to function. His chest felt constricted; it was an effort just to breathe.

At last, blinking with disbelief, lungs rasping painfully, Danvers realized that he had been drummed out of the New Morality movement. Thrown out into the gutter, just as the gamblers had done to him all those long years ago. All my work, all my years of service, they mean nothing, he thought. Lara’s claim to know who actually planted the false evidence won’t move them. I’ve been tainted, and they will be merciless with me.

I’m ruined. Destroyed. I have nowhere to go! No one to turn to. Even if I could prove my innocence they wouldn’t take me back. I’m tainted! Unclean!

My life is over, he told himself.

Lara returned to her compartment, where Victor was still tossing fitfully in their bed. She sat at the desk and sent a message to Victor, Jr., smiling reassuringly for her son and telling him she and his father would be back home in a few weeks.

Then she sat, wide awake, until Victor rose groggily from the roiled bedclothes and blinked sleep-fogged eyes at her.

“You’re up?” he asked dully.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He padded barefoot to the lavatory. She heard him urinate, then wash his face. He came back, hair still tousled, but looking reasonably alert.

“Victor,” Lara heard herself ask him, “at Mance’s trial, did you tell the truth about the skytower’s construction?”

He looked instantly wary. “Why do you ask that?”

“Did you tell the truth?”

“It was so many years ago…”

“Did you deliberately lie to put the blame on Mance?”

Molina stood next to the lavatory doorway, wearing nothing but his wrinkled underpants, staring at his wife.

“I’ve got to know, Victor,” said Lara. “You’ve got to tell me the truth now.”

He shuffled to the bed and sat wearily on it. “The tower collapsed,” Molina said. “There was nothing any of us could do about that. They were going to blame it on Mance anyway—he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting out of that trial alive. I wanted you, Lara! I’ve always wanted you! But as long as Mance was around you wouldn’t even look at me!”

Lara said nothing. She didn’t know what she could say.

“I wanted Mance out of the way,” he admitted, his voice so low she could barely hear him. “I was so crazy in love with you. I still am.”

He burst into tears.

Lara got up from the desk chair and went to the bed. Cradling her husband’s head in her arms she crooned soothingly, “I understand, darling. I understand.”

“I shouldn’t have done it, I know,” Molina blubbered. “I ruined Mance’s life. But I did it for you. For you.”

Lara was quite dry-eyed. “What’s done is done,” she said. “Mance is dead now. We’ve got to live the rest of our lives.”

As she held him, Lara did not think of Mance Bracknell, nor of the strangely vicious man who called himself Dante Alexios. She did not think of Bishop Danvers or her husband, really, or even of herself. She thought of their son. Only Victor, Jr. He was the only one who mattered now.

SUNRISE

The rim of the slowly rising Sun was like molten lava pouring heat into the tractor’s little bubble of a cab. Yamagata saw that Alexios was steering directly toward the sunrise and the yawning rift.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

Turning the lumbering vehicle just before it reached the edge of the fault line, Alexios leaned on the brakes. The tractor ground to a halt.

“We get off here,” he said.

“I thought—”

“Let’s stretch our legs a little,” said Alexios, popping the hatch on his side of the glassteel bubble.

Although he felt nothing inside his spacesuit, Yamagata realized that all the air in the cabin immediately rushed into the vacuum outside. Alexios turned back toward him and tapped the keypad on the wrist of his spacesuit. Yamagata heard the man’s voice in his helmet earphones, “We’ll have to use the suit radios to speak to one another now.”

“You intend to kill me, then?” Yamagata asked as he opened the hatch on his side.

“You murdered four million people,” Alexios said, his voice strangely soft, almost amused. “I think executing you is a simple act of justice.”

“I see.” Yamagata clambered slowly down from his seat to the hard, rock-strewn, airless ground. I’m in the hands of a madman, he thought.

“In case you’re wondering,” Alexios said as he walked around the tractor toward Yamagata, “your suit radio won’t reach the base. Not without the tractor’s relay, and I’ve disabled the tractor’s outgoing frequency.”

“I can’t call for help, then,” said Yamagata.

“Neither can I.” With that, Alexios touched a control stud on his suit and the tractor started up again, silently churning up puffs of dust from the ground, and started trundling away from them.

“You’re not going with it?” Yamagata asked, surprised.

“No, I’ll stay here with you. We’ll die together. Back at the base they’ll see the tractor’s beacon and think everything is normal. Until it’s too late.”

Yamagata almost laughed. “This is a simple act of justice?”

“Maybe not so simple, after all,” Alexios agreed. “I’ve been dispensing justice for several days, but I don’t quite seem to have the proper knack for it.”

Alexios stepped closer to him. Yamagata backed away a few steps, then realized the edge of the fault rift was close behind him.

“Dispensing justice?” he asked, stalling for time to think. “What do you mean?”

“Molina and Danvers,” Alexios answered easily. “I’m the one who brought those Martian rocks here. I led Molina to them and he took the bait like the fool that he is.”

“And Danvers?”

“I put the blame on him. Now they’re both heading back to Earth in disgrace.”

“You’ve deliberately ruined their careers.”

“They deserve it. They destroyed my life, the two of them. They took everything I had.”

He’s insane, Yamagata told himself. The tractor was dwindling slowly, lumbering off toward the disturbing close edge of the horizon.

“Message for Mr. Yamagata.” He heard the voice of the base controller in his helmet’s earphones. “From the captain of the freighter Xenobia.”

Alexios spread his gloved hands. “We can’t reply to them.”

“Then what—”

The controller didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. “Here’s the incoming message, sir.”

Yamagata heard a soft click and then a different voice spoke. “Sir! I apologize for interrupting whatever you are doing, illustrious sir. The captain thought you would want to know that one of the passengers aboard ship has committed suicide. Bishop Danvers slit his throat in the lavatory of his cabin. The place is a bloody mess.”

Yamagata stared hard at Alexios, but only saw his own reflection in the heavily tinted visor of the spacesuit’s helmet.

“Thank you for the information,” he said, in a near whisper.

“They can’t hear you,” Alexios reminded him.

The base controller’s voice returned. “Is there any reply to the message, Mr. Yamagata? Sir? Can you hear me?”

Alexios walked to the rim of the rift. Damn! he said to himself. If they don’t hear anything back they’ll start worrying about us.

“Mr. Yamagata? Mr. Alexios? Reply, please.”

If they send out a rescue team they’ll go after the tractor, Alexios thought. It won’t be until they find that we’re not on it that they’ll start hunting for us.

He gripped the arm of Yamagata’s suit. “Come on, we’re going to take a little walk.”

Yamagata resisted. “Where do you want to take me?”

Pointing with his free hand, Alexios said, “Down there, to the bottom of the rift. With the Sun coming up you’ll be more comfortable sheltered from direct sunlight. It’ll be cooler down there, only a couple of hundred degrees Celsius in the shade.”

“You wish to prolong my execution?”

“I wish to prevent our being rescued,” Alexios replied.

Yamagata stepped to the edge of the rift. Inside the spacesuit it was difficult to see straight down, but the chasm’s slope didn’t seem terribly steep. Rugged, though, he saw. A slip of the foot could send me tumbling down to the bottom. If that didn’t rupture my suit and kill me quickly, it might damage my radiators and life support pack enough to let me boil in my own juices.

He looked back at Alexios, standing implacably next to him. “After you,” Alexios said, gesturing toward the edge of the rift.

Yamagata hesitated. Even with only the slimmest arc of the Sun’s huge disk above the nearby horizon a flood of heat was sweeping across the barren ground. Dust motes sparkled and jumped like fireflies, suddenly electrified by the Sun’s powerful ionizing radiance. Both men stared at the barren dusty ground suddenly turned manic as the particles danced and jittered in the newly risen Sun. Slowly they fell to the ground again, as if exhausted, their electrical charges neutralized at last.

They looked out to the horizon and gazed briefly at the blazing edge of the Sun; even through the deeply tinted visors of their helmets its overpowering brilliance made their eyes water. The Sun’s rim was dancing with flaming prominences that writhed like tortured spirits in hell.

Yamagata heard his spacesuit groan and ping in the surging, all-encompassing heat. He looked down into the chasm again, and the after-image of the Sun burned in his vision. Turning around slowly in the cumbersome suit, he started down the pebbly, cracked slope backwards. Alexios followed him. It was hard, exhausting work. Yamagata’s booted foot slipped on a loose stone and he went skittering down the pebbly slope several meters before grinding to a stop. Alexios came skidding down beside him.

“Are you all right?”

It took Yamagata several panting breaths before he could reply, “What difference does it make?”

Alexios grunted. “You’re all right, then.”

Yamagata nodded inside his helmet. The suit seemed intact; its life support equipment still functioned.

Both men were soaked with perspiration by the time they reached the bottom of the rift. Yamagata looked up and saw that the edge of the chasm was ablaze with harsh light.

“Sunrise,” said Alexios. “You come from the land of the rising sun, don’t you?”

Yamagata decided he wouldn’t dignify that snide remark with a reply. Instead he said, “The message for me was that Bishop Danvers has committed suicide.”

Silence for several heartbeats. Then Alexios said, “I didn’t expect that.”

“He slit his throat. Very bloody, from the description.”

“I imagine it would be.”

“You are responsible for his death.”

Again a long wait before Alexios replied, “I suppose I am, in a way.”

“In a way?” Yamagata jeered. “You planted false evidence and accused him falsely. As a result he killed himself. Murder, it seems to me. Or was that an execution, too?”

“He was a weak man,” Alexios said. His voice sounded tight, brittle, in Yamagata’s earphones.

“Weak or strong, he is dead because of you.”

No reply.

Yamagata decided to twist the knife. “I am not a Christian, of course, but isn’t it true that in your religion killing one man is just as hideous a sin as killing millions?”

Alexios immediately snapped, “I’m not a Christian, either.”

“Ah, no? But do you feel any guilt for the death of Bishop Danvers?”

“He destroyed my life! Him and Molina. He got what he deserved.”

Yamagata nodded inside his helmet. “You feel the guilt, don’t you?”

“No,” Alexios snapped. Then he raised his hand and pointed to the steep wall of the chasm. Yamagata saw that the slim line of glaring sunlight made the rift’s edge look molten, so brilliant that it hurt his eyes to look up there.

“In five or six hours we’ll be in the direct sun. A few hours after that our life support systems will run out of air. Then all the guilts, all the debts, they’ll be paid. For both of us.”

VALLEY OF DEATH

Alexios could not see Yamagata’s face as they stood together in the bottom of the fault rift. I might as well be looking at a statue, he thought. A faceless, silent statue.

But then Yamagata stirred, came to life. He began walking down the rough uneven floor of the chasm, heading in the direction opposite to the path of the unoccupied tractor. Alexios realized he was heading back toward the base.

“You’ll never make it,” he said. “The base is more than thirty klicks from here. You’ll run out of air long before then.”

“Perhaps so,” Yamagata replied, sounding almost cheerful in Alexios’s helmet earphones. “However, I find it easier on my nerves to be active, rather than standing by passively waiting to die.”

Despite himself, Alexios started after him. “You don’t expect to be rescued, I hope.”

“When I was in Chota Lamasery the lamas tried to teach me to accept my fate. I was a great disappointment to them.”

“I imagine you were.”

They walked along the broken, stony ground for several minutes. The walls of the rift rose steeply on both sides higher than their heads, higher even than the fins of the radiators that projected from their life support packs. The ground was hard, cracked here and there. Pebbles and larger rocks were strewn along the bottom, although not as plentifully as they were up on the surface. The planetologists would have a field day here, Alexios thought. Then he grinned at his inadvertent pun.

Yamagata stumbled up ahead of him and Alexios automatically grabbed him in both gloved hands, steadying him.

“Thank you,” said Yamagata.

Alexios muttered, “De nada.” Sweat dripped into his eyes, stinging. He felt perspiration dripping along his ribs. “I forgot to put on a sweatband,” he said, wishing he could rub his eyes, mop his brow.

Yamagata made no reply, but Alexios could hear the man’s steady breathing through the suit radio.

“I think the lamas made some impression on you,” Alexios said, after almost half an hour of silent, steady, sweaty walking.

“Ah so?”

“You’re taking this all very stoically.”

“Not at all,” Yamagata replied. “I am walking toward the base. I am doing what I can to get myself rescued. I have no intention of dying without a struggle.”

“It won’t do you any good.”

“Perhaps not. But still, one must try. You didn’t accept your fate when you were exiled, did you?”

That brought a flash of anger back from Alexios’s memory. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Yet now you are committing suicide,” Yamagata said. “You could have thrown me out of the tractor and returned to the base alone. Why give up your own life?”

“I have nothing left to live for.”

“Nonsense! You are still a young man. You have many productive years ahead of you.”

Thinking of Lara, of the skytower, of Danvers lying slumped in a ship’s lavatory splattered with his own blood, Alexios repeated, “I have nothing left to live for.”

“Not even the stars?” Yamagata asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The reason I came to Mercury, the real purpose behind building these power satellites, is to use them to propel a starship. Perhaps many starships.”

Without a heartbeat’s pause Alexios countered, “The reason I lived, the real purpose behind my life, was to build a tower that gave the human race cheap and easy access to space. You destroyed that. Finished it forever. They’ll never build another skytower. They’re too frightened of what happened to the first one.”

“And for this you would deny the stars to humankind?”

“I’m not interested in humankind anymore. The stars will still be there a hundred years from now. A thousand.”

“But we could do it now!” Yamagata insisted. “In a few years!”

“We could have been riding the skytower to orbit for pennies per pound by now.”

Yamagata grunted. “I believe you have a saying about two wrongs?”

“You’re a murderer.”

“So are you.”

“No, I’m an executioner,” Alexios insisted.

“A convenient excuse.” Yamagata wondered what Alexios would say if he revealed that Nobuhiko had destroyed the skytower. He shook his head inside the bubble helmet. Never, he told himself. Nobu must be protected at all costs. Even at the cost of my own life. My son has done a great wrong, but killing him will not make things right.

On they walked. With each step it seemed to grow hotter. Down at the bottom of the fault rift they were in shadow, yet the Sun’s glaring brilliance crept inexorably down the chasm’s wall, as slow and inescapable as fate. They could see the glaring line of sunlit rock inching down toward them; it made the rock face look almost molten hot. The heat increased steadily, boiling the juices out of them. Alexios heard his suit fans notch up to a higher pitch, and then a few minutes later go still higher. Even so he was drenched with perspiration, blinking constantly to keep the stinging sweat out of his eyes. He licked his lips and tasted salt. Wish I had a margarita, he thought. Then he realized how foolish that was. Maybe I’m getting delirious.

Yamagata kept moving doggedly along.

“Let’s rest a couple of minutes,” Alexios said to him.

“You rest, if you wish. I’m not tired.”

Not tired? Alexios thought that Yamagata was simply being macho, unwilling or perhaps unable to show weakness to a man he took to be an inferior. He’s older than I am, Alexios told himself. A lot older. Of course, he must have had all sorts of rejuve therapies. Or maybe he’s just too damned stubborn to admit he’s tired, too.

The heat was getting bad. Despite the suit’s insulation and internal air conditioning, Alexios was sloshing. His legs felt shaky, his vision blurred from the damned sweat. He could feel the Sun’s heat pressing him down, like the breath of a blast furnace, like a torrent of molten steel pouring over him. Still Yamagata plowed ahead steadily, as if nothing at all was bothering him. Blast it all, Alexios thought. If he can do it, so can I. And he trudged along behind the older man.

Until, hours later, the harsh unfiltered rays of the Sun reached the fins of his suit’s radiator.

DEATH WISHES

Yamagata stumbled, up ahead of him. Alexios reached for the spacesuited figure but he was too slow. Yamagata pitched forward and, in the dreamlike slow-motion of Mercury’s low gravity, hit the ground: knees first, then his outstretched hands, finally his body and helmeted head.

Alexios heard him grunt as if he’d been hit by a body blow. The rift was narrow here; there was barely room for him to step beside the fallen man without scraping his radiator fins on the steep rocky wall of the chasm.

“Are you all right?”

“If I were all right I’d be on my feet,” Yamagata retorted, “instead of lying here on my belly.”

The bottom of the rift was half in sunlight now, the huge rim of the Sun peering down at them now like a giant unblinking eye, like the mouth of a red-hot oven. Alexios was so hot inside his suit that he felt giddy, weak. Blinking away sweat, he peered at Yamagata’s backpack. It looked okay. Radiator fins undamaged. No loose hoses.

“I can’t seem to move my legs,” Yamagata said.

“I’ll help you up.”

It was difficult to bend in the hard-shell suit. Alexios tried to reach down and grasp Yamagata by the arm.

“Put your hands beneath you and push up,” he said. “I’ll help.”

They both tried, grunting, moaning with strain. After several minutes Yamagata was still on his belly and Alexios sank down to a sitting position beside him, exhausted, totally drained.

“It’s… not going to … work,” he panted.

Yamagata said. “My nose is bleeding. I must have bumped it on the visor when I fell.”

“Let’s rest a few minutes, then try again.”

“I have no strength left.”

Alexios turned his head slightly and sucked on the water nipple inside his helmet. Nothing. Either it was blocked or he’d drunk the last of his suit’s water supply. It’s all coming out as sweat, he said to himself.

“There ought to be some way to recondense our sweat and recycle it back into drinkable water,” he mused.

“An engineer’s mind never stops working,” said Yamagata.

“Fat lot of good it does us.”

“You should record the idea, however,” said Yamagata, “so that whoever finds us will be able to act on it.”

“A tycoon’s mind never stops working,” Alexios muttered.

“This tycoon’s mind will stop soon enough.”

Alexios was too hot and tired to argue the point. We’re being baked alive, he thought. The suits’ life support systems are running down.

“What do you think will kill us,” Yamagata asked, “dehydration or suffocation, when our air runs out?”

Squeezing his eyes shut to block out the stinging sweat, Alexios replied, “I think we’ll be parboiled by this blasted heat.”

Yamagata was silent for a few moments. Then, “Do you think the base has sent out a search team?”

“Probably, by now. They’ll follow the tractor’s beacon, though.”

“But when they find the tractor is empty…?”

Alexios desperately wanted to lean back against the rock wall, but was afraid it would damage his radiators. “Then they’ll start looking for us. They’ll have to do that on foot, or in tractors. We’ll be dead by the time they find us.”

“Hmm,” Yamagata murmured. “Don’t you think they could hear our suit radios?”

“Down in this rift? Not likely.”

“Then we will die here.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

After several silent minutes Yamagata asked, “Is your sense of justice satisfied?”

Alexios thought it over briefly. “All I really feel right now is hot. And tired. Bone tired. Tired of everything, tired of it all.”

“I too.”

“Vengeance isn’t much consolation for a man,” Alexios admitted.

“Better to have built the starship.”

“Better to have built the skytower.”

“Yes,” said Yamagata. “It is better to create than destroy.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

Yamagata chuckled weakly. “A bottle of good champagne would be very fine right now.”

“Well chilled.”

“Yes, ice cold and sparkling with bubbles.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“No, I fear not.”

“Maybe we should just open the suits and get it over with. I’m broiling in here.”

Yamagata said, “First I want to record my last will and testament, but I can’t reach the keypad on my wrist. Can you assist me?”

Alexios let out a weary breath, then slowly rolled over onto all fours and crawled over the gritty ground to Yamagata’s extended left hand. It took all his strength to move less than two meters. At last he reached his outstretched arm and pressed the record tab on the wrist keypad. In his earphones he heard a faint click and then a deadness as Yamagata’s suit-to-suit frequency shut off.

Lying there on his own belly now, head to helmeted head with Yamagata, Alexios thought, Last will and testament. Not a bad idea. With his last iota of strength, he turned his own suit radio to the recording frequency and began speaking, slowly, his throat dry, his voice rasping, offering his final words to the woman he had loved.

When the rescue team finally found them, some twelve hours later, Alexios and Yamagata were still lying head to head. Their gloved hands were clasped, Alexios’s right with Yamagata’s left. It was impossible to tell if their hands were locked in a final grasp of friendship or a last, desperate grip of struggle. Some of the rescuers thought the former, some the latter.

The team argued about it as they tenderly carried their space-suited bodies back to Goethe base. From there they were flown up to Himawari, still in orbit around Mercury. The medical team there determined that both men had died of dehydration. They were only five kilometers from Goethe base when they died.

The recording found on Yamagata’s suit radio was sent to his son, Nobuhiko, in New Kyoto. Alexios’s recording was sent to Lara Tierney Molina, in her family’s home in Colorado.