18
Giordano Bruno
2061–2062 Earth-Relative
"REALLY, SANDOZ, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT SULKING WAS BENEATH your dignity," Carlo Giuliani remarked with cool amusement, watching as Nico d’Angeli checked the blood chemistry readouts before adjusting the IV line running into Sandoz’s arm. "It’s your own fault, you know. You were given every opportunity to volunteer. This attitude will get you nothing but bedsores and a bladder infection."
Leaning with elegant composure against the soundproofed bulkhead of the Giordano Bruno’s sick bay, Carlo studied the still, dark face. He saw nothing of coma’s slackness or sleep’s easing. This was sheer obstinance.
"Do you enjoy opera, Sandoz?" Carlo asked curiously when Nico, humming "Nessun dorma," started the sponge bath. "Most Neapolitans are mad for opera. We love the passions, the conflict—life lived on a grand scale." He waited for a moment, watching the man’s closed eyes as Nico lifted the unresisting limbs, wiping down the armpits and groin with gentle efficiency. "Gina never cared for opera," Carlo recalled. "Grandiose nonsense, she called it. A thoroughly boring little housewife, Gina. You should thank me, Sandoz. I have saved you from a stifling fate! You would not have been content for long to sit at home with her, eating pasta together and getting fat. You and I Were meant for greater things."
Finished with the bath, Nico set aside the washcloth and covered Sandoz with the sheet for a few minutes, to let the dampness subside before reapplying the electrodes. In no hurry, Carlo waited until the heart monitor had begun its steady ping before speaking again. "We have a great deal in common, you know—even apart from our use of Gina," he suggested, and smiled with satisfaction at the raggedly quickened tempo of the pinging. "We were both despised by our fathers, for example. Papa used to call me Cio-Cio-San. The allusion is to Madama Butterfly, of course. To call me Cio-Cio-San was to accuse me of flitting from one thing to another, do you see? Since the day of my birth, I have been a bitter disappointment to my father. Like yours, my father saw in my face only evidence of his wife’s infidelity. There, perhaps, our experience differs: my mother was falsely accused. But it has always been easier for Papa to assume that I am not his than to accept that I am not he."
Unable to work without singing, and partial to Bellini, Nico went on to Norma: "Me protegge, me difende…"
"I have always been good at anything I put my hand to," Carlo reported without false modesty. "Every teacher I studied with took an interest in me. Each assumed I’d be a protégé—an engineer or biologist or pilot. When I refused to follow in their footsteps, they blamed my inconstancy and disloyalty, rather than recognize their own disappointed desire for acolytes. But I am no one’s disciple. My life is my own, and I follow no one else’s path."
Nico moved to the foot of the bed to change the urine bag. It was a tight fit in the cramped space at that end of the medical bay, but he was a methodical and careful person who did one thing at a time, in a set order, and he had learned how to accomplish this maneuver with a minimum of disturbance.
"I know what you’re thinking, Sandoz: delusions of grandeur," Carlo continued soberly. "Men like you and my father excel in a narrow field of endeavor. You are intent from your youth on one thing, and achieve a great deal early in your lives, and you scorn those who are not similarly focused. My father, for example, took over Naples before he was thirty—it was quite a remarkable rise to power," Carlo admitted. "By the time he was forty, he controlled businesses accounting for eighteen percent of Italy’s gross national product, with an annual income greater than Fiat. At forty-two, only a year older than I am now, Domenico Giuliani was the head of an empire with tentacles reaching into the whole of Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Americas. An empire larger than Alexander’s—my father would remind me of this at breakfast, nearly every morning."
Carlo fell silent for a time. Then he drew himself up and shrugged. "But true greatness is in part a matching of the man and the times, Sandoz. Versatility can be a virtue! I’d have done well in the Renaissance, for example. A merchant prince! Someone who could write a song and wage war and build a catapult and dance well. Even my father had to admit that launching this venture required talent in many fields. Politics, finance, engineering…"
Finished with his chores and two arias, Nico looked to his padrone. "Well done," Carlo said, on cue. "You may go now, Nico." He waited for Nico to leave before standing and moving to the bedside. "You see, Sandoz? Knowing your frailties as well as your strengths, I have even provided you with a very fine nurse. Not one as delightfully accommodating as Gina, perhaps, but quite adequate to his task."
He glanced at the readouts, but this time Gina’s name provoked no change in the life-sign data now flowing to the monitors. "An extraordinary situation, is it not?" said Carlo Giuliani, looking down at the man who’d very nearly married his own ex-wife. "Unforeseen and unfortunate. You may believe that I have taken you away from Gina out of some romantic Neapolitan fury but I assure you, I was finished with her. The simple fact is that I need you more than she does." He opened the sick-bay door, standing there for a time without leaving. "Don’t worry about Gina, Sandoz. She’ll find someone new, now that you’re gone."
It was not until the sick-bay hatch was shut and locked from the outside that the readouts changed.
CARLO HAD SENT THREE OF THEM FOR HIM. THEY KNEW HE’D BEEN A priest and were, perhaps, complacent in that knowledge. They could see that he was small. They were told he had been sick and that his hands were essentially useless. What they did not know was that he was a veteran of a hundred emetic nightmare reenactments of this very experience. Over and over, he relived it and what came afterward. This time, there was no hesitation, no foolish hope, and he did damage before, inevitably, they overpowered him. For weeks afterward, he would remember with satisfaction the feel of a cheekbone giving way under his heel when a face came within striking distance, would recall with pleasure the nasal cry of the man whose nose he broke when he got an elbow loose.
He marked them. This time, he made himself felt.
He had been beaten before and there was no novelty in it. He rolled with as much as he could, kept tensed and braced for as long as possible, and finally took a savage satisfaction in the silence that would become his principal weapon against them. Unconscious during the trip to the launch site, he was kept under sedation for a time, even after they were on board the Giordano Bruno.
But he had sampled product when he was a kid; familiar with the doped drift between dream and waking, it did not frighten him. Slack and boneless whenever anyone was near, he let them think the dose was enough to put him under, and waited. A chance came while the crew was occupied with the final preparations for leaving high Earth orbit. Ripping the IV line out of his arm with his teeth, he lay motionless until his head cleared a little, watching his blood mix with the saline and glucose and medication from the pumpwell, dispersing evenly throughout the compartment in a pale iridescent haze that suddenly sank to the floor as the engines fired and the ship began to accelerate. He struggled out of the zero-G moorings that had held him in place; stood, wobbling slightly; made his way with the careful balance of a self-conscious drunk to the system access panel in the sick bay. What he could not stop, he could sabotage. A minute error in navigation would be enough to throw them years off course and he meant to change a single number in the navigation calculations.