“Is it the one with Reese?”
“That’s right. It’s Reese.” Molly crouched beside the desk, putting both hands on the arm of the girl’s chair.“Listen. I know you don’t care much about this kind of stuff. But it’s very important to me and the rest of the grownups here. Okay? If the people from Earth find out what we’re doing up here, they’re going to try to take it away from us. It means people will get hurt, maybe even killed. So I want you to promise you won’t talk to anybody about the transporter, or about the antimatter, or any of that stuff.Will you do that?”
The girl pushed the screen-erase key, and the equations vanished into blackness.
“Please?”
“Is this for Curtis?”Verb said at last. Molly at least she would call “Mom” but her father was always “Curtis.”
“No,” Molly said.“It’s for me.And for your friends. I don’t want the Earth people to hurt your friends.” Christ, Molly thought, this is low. Why not tell her they have long, forked tails and eat babies?
Verb pressed a function key, covering the screen with winking graphics. She stared at the shifting patterns as if she could read meaning in them, refusing to look at Molly.“All right. I won’t break it to anybody. Do we have to come back to the dome?”
“That’s up to you. Reese is probably going to want to see you, sooner or later, but we can work that out.When you do come...”
“Yeah, I get it. Don’t say anything about the cave.”
“Is that okay?”
“Yeah, sure, it’s okay.”
Molly stood up. It was the best she could hope for, really.“I’ll let you talk to the others.You’ll know how to explain it to them.” She worked with three or four of them every day, a boy with an uncanny knack for integrated circuit design, a girl who could think in hexadecimal machine code, but she couldn’t penetrate their rigid, exclusive culture.
“Sure.”As Molly walked away, she could hear the girl’s fingers clicking over the keys again.
She made it outside without any rats or monkeys following her.As she rounded the jut of rock that cut her off from the base, she saw the medics lining up at the south airlocks, stretchers ready.
The mem was a bright flare to the east, coming in out of the sun. She hurried down the slope, taking long, floating strides, and stood next to Blok as the lander made its final descent, lost in billowing dust.
For reese it had started in Mexico. In the dead heat of the afternoon, even the birds had gone quiet. The swimming pool, deep blue and wide as a lake, threw blades of sunlight into Reese’s eyes. He drained the last flat, salty swallow of Bohemia and dropped the bottle in the sand next to the others. The Hotel Casino de la Selva was the end of the earth, the last place Reese ever expected to see. Some mornings he would walk down the Calle Carlos Fuero to the baranca, the steep-sided canyon full of garbage and blooming flowers that separated the eastern third of Cuernavaca from downtown. He could get as far as the narrow bridge, but he couldn’t seem to cross it. In the mornings he drank beer, at night mescal. Once a week he would buy a few magic mushrooms, psilocybe cubensis, from the kid who trucked in fresh vegetables from town.The mushroom changed the decaying pleasure palace into a fairyland, made sense of the vines and wild grasses growing over the jai-alai courts, the crumbling concrete heliports, the circular casino like a stranded alien spacecraft awash with dust and splintered furniture. At night he could see Mars. He was beyond remembering how many nights he’d spent in the hotel, beyond caring about the expense.The money he’d milked out of his days as a public hero was secure, all of it invested in the multinationals that had succeeded the big governments. Enough, he figured, to drink himself to death or to sobriety, and he didn’t particularly care which it turned out to be. Footsteps crunched toward him across the sandbox, the artificial beach that was no more preposterous than any other of the hotel’s excesses. Reese, eyes closed, assumed it was the impassive waiter who seemed to be the only other inhabitant of the hotel. He extended his thumb and little finger in the time-honored Mexican signal for liquor and said, “Otra, por favor.” “Reese?” He forced his eyes open.A young Northamerican stood just out of arm’s reach, wearing a collarless blue shirt, khaki pants, and mirrored sunglasses.The man’s dark hair was razored within a quarter inch of his skull, and he stood with the unconscious tension of the corporate mercenary.
“Jesus Christ,” Reese said, pushing himself to a higher center of gravity.“Kane? Is that you?”
“It’s been a long time, Reese.” The man did not offer his hand or relax his expression.
“Jesus Christ.” Reese felt addled and clownish, unprepared, a little frightened by Kane’s lack of emotion.“What are you doing here? How did you find me?”
Kane shrugged. Smooth, Reese thought, professional.The last time Reese had seen him, Kane had been no more than sixteen, still in high school, full of inarticulate wonder at being inside the restricted areas of nasa.With an effort, Reese came up with other pieces of information, something about Kane’s father dying in a car wreck and Morgan, the boy’s uncle, adopting him.All of it seemed impossibly long ago.
“I’m here on business,” Kane said.“I’ve got a proposition for you, if you want to listen to it.” Reese noticed that Kane had nervously chewed at his lips, leaving dry flecks of skin protruding over raw, red welts.
“Okay,” Reese said.“Just give me a second.” He walked as steadily as he could to the edge of the pool and dove in. He swam the entire oversized length of it, and by the time he started back his lungs burned and his feet thrashed spasmodically at the water. Back at nasa he’d always had trouble with the weight limit because of his big bones and heavy build. Now he was just fat, out of shape.
Swim, he told himself, and he cupped his hands and dug his strokes in deep, put his head down and his ass up and pumped with his legs.When he got back to the edge of the pool, he pushed himself up on his arms and swung his legs out and stood up.
“All right,” he said.“Let’s talk.”
They moved into the bar. Reese had another Bohemia, and Kane ordered Tehuacan water.“You remember Pulsystems,” Kane said.“My uncle’s company.”
“Of course,” Reese said.“I own a block of their stock. I consulted with them when they had the principal contract on the Mars hardware.”
That was only part of it, and he didn’t volunteer the rest. In fact he had worked in Pulsystems’s downtown Houston office for a few months after the collapse of the government, looking for information. He’d used a phony identity to keep from attracting Morgan’s attention; with a full beard and long hair he’d felt reasonably inconspicuous.
Houston had been the obvious step after Washington, where one job after another had disappeared as the government tried desperately to cut itself down to a size that its tiny budget could support. For two years he’d burrowed through the Washington underground, searching for tapes or transcripts or some kind of communication from the colonists that had stayed behind at Frontera.
He’d had no better luck in Houston, and after a few months he’d developed a paranoid fear of Morgan.
During his nasa days he’d thought Morgan a posturing fool, the sort of clown that gravitated to public office to feed his ego on privilege and publicity. He remembered Morgan’s hearty backslapping in the vip lounge at Mission Control in Houston, the load of lapel pins he’d pressured one of the astronauts into taking to Mars and back, his endless posing for photographs with nasa celebrities.
But once inside Morgan’s home ground, Reese had seen another side to the man, a sense of destiny that he kept hidden from the rest of the world. From the moment Reese sat down at a terminal in a corner of the Quality Control department, he was inundated with company propaganda: how Pulsystems fed the unemployed, rebuilt public roads, brought law and order back to the city. In all of it Reese saw a sort of messianic madness that had no regard for individual lives, only for image, cash projections, and the vindication of history.