Kane dropped into the desk chair and propped his feet on the oversized blotter.“He’s got another office, all steel and glass.That’s where he cultivates the image.”
Reese noticed that the early photographs of Morgan showed him in a somber suit and short hair.“Morgan’s not even from Texas, is he?” he asked.
“That’s right. Born in Detroit.The accent comes and goes, you probably noticed that.All part of the protective coloring.”
Reese sat by the door, trying to reconcile this image of Kane with the others: the eager teenager, the detached mercenary, the makeshift astronaut.“It’s funny,” Reese said.“You look like you belong here.”
“I’m the crown prince,” Kane said, with an irony that Reese couldn’t quite believe in.“I was brought up to do just this. Sit behind this desk.”
“Instead you’re going to Mars.”
“Yeah, well.The crown prince is out of favor at the moment. I could use a few points with the Board. I could use something.” He pushed a button that brought a console up from the desk top. He punched in a complex sequence of numbers and a moment later a large portion of the wall to Reese’s left swung out into the office. “Et voila,” Kane said.
The three inside walls of the vault held three further doors. Kane stood inside the cubicle and entered another combination, opening one of the doors to a thin cloud of steam. Slipping one hand into an insulated mitten, he pulled out a small gray cylinder labeled “Cryogenic Material” in red letters. He put the cylinder into an insulated carrier that looked like an ordinary briefcase, then resealed both doors.
“This’ll keep for a couple of hours,” Kane said.“Can I buy you a beer?”
“Sure.What’s in there?”
“Christ knows. Something Morgan wants. I didn’t even bother to ask him—he would have lied to me anyway.”
They took the elevator down to the basement and followed signs saying “To The Tunnels.” They came out in a tiled, fluorescent-lit underground mall full of travel agencies and boutiques.
Reese had to hurry to keep up with Kane’s natural pace.“Is it safe to be carrying that around?”
“No,” Kane said.
Reese shook his head.“I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”
“It’s simple.This is Morgan’s. If something happens to it, I don’t really care. He should have sent one of his couriers after it if he was that worried. Not me.”
Kane seemed nearly irrational on the subject of Morgan, and Reese decided to let it go. In fact he could see too many similarities between them, from their chameleon qualities to their flat, deadly eyes.
The bar Kane took them to was aboveground, converted from a parking garage.A ramp at one end led to a crude cement patch; the low ceiling and huge floor space made Reese feel disoriented and out of proportion.An autosynth at the far end of the club played neowebern at high volume, the repetitious, atonal phrases adding to his unease. Most of the other customers were young, poor, and faddishly dressed in hiparis or full Arab drag, complete with black-rimmed sunglasses.
Kane ordered sushi and Tsing-Tao beer for both of them, talking easily about the woman who owned the bar and the details of its renovation. Reese watched the tension in Kane’s fingers as he raised his glass, the pressure of his ankle that held the briefcase against a leg of the table.
When the fish came, Reese couldn’t eat it, repelled by the oily sheen of the skin on a piece of tuna belly, the insectile curl of the shrimp. Kane speared the pieces with a recklessness that seemed exaggerated, inappropriate, but it was only when he finished eating, as Kane paid with his plastic Pulsystems id and they stepped outside, that Reese understood.
Night had transformed the city. Here in the heart of the business district there were streetlights, but they only deepened the shadows on the high, tan walls of concrete. People moved in the darkness with carnivorous stealth, and Reese could feel their attention concentrate on the two of them, on the briefcase in Kane’s hand, the potent symbol of affluence and oppression. Reese loosened his shoulders reflexively, clearing his mind and speeding his pulse rate.
Something brushed him, knocking him off balance. He saw Kane spin halfway around, saw a shadow reaching for the briefcase, speared and flung away by a lightening movement of Kane’s knee.Then the briefcase was in Reese’s hands and Kane was using both of his, throwing the broken body of a teenage boy into the wall.The boy hit face first and slowly slid to the ground.
“Kane?” Reese said. He held the briefcase with both hands, expecting another attack, waiting for the flash of gunfire. Instead a blinding spotlight swept over them and stopped, freezing them in position.
“Hands straight up and away from your bodies. Drop that case.”
Reese set the briefcase at his feet and then straightened slowly, still unable to see where the voice came from.
“id?” it said, and Kane took out the same card he’d used in the bar, making careful, broad gestures.
As Reese went for his own nasa id, Kane said,“Don’t bother.” He handed the bit of plastic to a bulky silhouette in the spotlight and said, “Kane. Pulsystems.”
The cop did something with the card, then handed it crisply back. “Very good, sir. I’ll take care of this for you.Are both of you okay?”
“Fine,” Kane said.“Thanks.”
On the elevator to the roof Reese asked,“Doesn’t it scare you?”
“What?”
“The cop. How did he know you weren’t just working over some innocent kid?”
“He didn’t. But he works for us. It’s not his job to ask us a lot of annoying questions.” Kane’s voice was flat, unemotional.
They got in the copter. Kane started the motor, then took his hands off the controls.They were shaking.
“Shit,” he said.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Kane said.“Fine. Shit. I hate this. I asked for it, carrying something valuable around on the streets at night. Begging for trouble because my uncle pissed me off. Now that kid is dead, or worse, and it’s my fault.” He held his hands out in front of him until they were steady again.“It just pisses me off, is all. I’m fine.” He put the rotor in gear and they lifted off.
Reese saw that the entire evening had been meant as a humanizing gesture on Kane’s part, an attempt to bridge some sort of gap between Reese and himself. But the attempted mugging had soured it, and Reese could feel Kane’s disappointment.
But I can’t do it, Reese wanted to tell him. I can’t be your father, I can’t be responsible for what you are or for what you want to be.
For the next two weeks Reese pushed them harder than before. At night, before sleeping, he focused his mind on a memory of Earth from shuttle orbit, 115 miles up, the cities reduced to simple color and geometry.
Kane missed two days in the second week for an “unavoidable” medical checkup. Reese assumed it had something to do with the wound Kane had received in North Africa; his suspicions were borne out by a freshly shaved patch on the back of Kane’s skull when he returned to training.“I’m clean,” was all he would tell Reese about it.“Everything checked out okay.” For a couple of days he seemed sluggish and a bit confused, but Reese didn’t have time to worry about him.
With nine days left until the launch, Reese could feel the tension start to build in his chest, like the pressure inside a rocket engine between ignition and the time they blew the bolts that held it onto the pad. It was shakti, spiritual thrust, and he’d felt it rush out of him every time he’d gone up.
That was the night Walker came to him where he sat under the siv-b, the third stage of the SaturnV booster,now rotting in drydock by the visitor’s parking lot. He’d brought his last bottle of Gusano Rojo mescal, Red Worm brand—though the traditional worm floating near the bottom of the bottle was yellow. He remembered how the mescal could work on the brain’s color map like a psychedelic drug, until the sky and the grass and the inside of his own eyelids turned flaming crimson.