Trying to place the man’s accent, Bracknell asked, “You’re British?”
Frowning, the man replied, “Boston Irish. My name’s Fennelly.”
Bracknell extended his hand. “I’m—”
“I know who you are. You’re the screamer.”
Feeling embarrassed, Bracknell admitted, “I have nightmares.”
“I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Maybe that’s why they put us in together.”
“Maybe,” Bracknell said.
“You’re the guy from the skytower, ain’tcha.”
“That’s right.”
“They arrested me for lewd and lascivious behavior,” said Fennelly, with an exaggerated wink. “I’m gay.”
“Homosexual?”
“That’s right, kiddo. Watch your ass!” And Fennelly cackled as he walked to the lavatory, nearly stumbling in the light gravity.
In the top bunk with the lights out and the faintly glowing ceiling a bare meter above his head, Bracknell suddenly realized the ludicrousness of it all. Fennelly’s down there wondering if I’m going to keep him up all night with my nightmares and I’m up here worried that he might try to make a pass at me. It was almost laughable.
If he did dream, Bracknell remembered nothing of it in the morning. They were awakened by a synthesized voice calling through the intercom, “Breakfast in thirty minutes in the cafeteria. Directions are posted on the display screens in the corridor.”
The scrambled eggs were mediocre, but better than the fare they had gotten on the Alhambra. After breakfast the same quartet of guards took the convicts, one by one, to job interviews. Bracknell watched them leave the cafeteria until he was the only person left sitting at the long tables.
No one wants to take me on, he thought. I’m a pariah. Sitting alone with nothing to do, his mind drifted back to the skytower and its collapse, and the mockery of a trial that had condemned him to a life of exile. And Victor’s betrayal. It was Victor’s testimony that convicted me, he thought. Then he told himself, No, you were judged and sentenced before the first minute of the trial. But Victor did betray you, insisted a voice in his mind. He sat there and lied. Deliberately.
Why? Why? He was my friend. Why did he turn on me?
And Danvers. He reported to his New Morality superiors that we were using nanotechnology. In league with the devil, as far as he’s concerned. Did the New Morality have something to do with the tower’s collapse? Did they sabotage the skytower? No, they couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have. But somebody did. Suddenly Bracknell was convinced of it. Somebody deliberately sabotaged the tower! It couldn’t have collapsed by itself. The construction was sound. Somebody sabotaged it.
One of the guards reappeared at the cafeteria’s double doors and crooked a finger at him. Bracknell got to his feet and followed the guard down another corridor—or maybe it was merely an extension of the passageway he’d gone through earlier. It was impossible to get a feeling for the size or scope of this habitat from the inside, and he and his fellow convicts had not been allowed an outside view.
There were other people moving along this corridor, men in shirts and trousers, women wearing skirted dresses or blouses and slacks. He saw only a few in coveralls. They all looked as if they had someplace to go, some task to accomplish. That’s what I must have looked like, back before the accident, Bracknell thought. Back when I had a life.
But it wasn’t an accident, whispered a voice in his head. It wasn’t your fault. The tower was deliberately destroyed.
He saw names on the doors lining both sides of the corridors. Some of the doors were open, revealing offices or conference rooms. This is where they run this habitat, he realized. Why is this guard bringing me here?
They stopped at a door marked chief administrator. The guard opened it without knocking. Inside was a sizable office: several desks with young men and women busily whispering into lip mikes. Their display screens showed charts and graphs in vivid colors. They glanced up at him and the guard, then quickly returned their attention to their work.
Gesturing for him to follow, the guard led Bracknell past their desks and to an inner door. No name on it. Again the guard opened it without knocking. It was obviously an anteroom. A matronly looking woman with short-cropped silver hair sat at the only desk, holding a conversation in low tones with another woman’s image in her display screen. Beyond her desk was still another door, also unmarked.
She looked up and, without missing a beat of her conversation, touched a button on her phone console. The inner door popped open a few centimeters. The guard shooed Bracknell to it.
Pushing the door all the way open, Bracknell saw George Ambrose sitting behind a desk that looked too small for his bulk, like a man sitting at a child’s play desk. He was speaking to his desktop screen.
“Come on in and sit down,” Ambrose said. “Be with you in a sec.” Turning his gaze to his desktop screen he said, “Save file. Clear screen.”
The display went dark as Bracknell took the contoured chair in front of the desk. It gave slightly under his weight. Ambrose swiveled his high-backed chair to face Bracknell squarely.
“I’ve got a message for you,” Ambrose said.
“From Lara?”
Shaking his shaggy head, Ambrose said, “Convicts aren’t allowed messages from Earthside, normally. But this one is from some New Morality bloke, the Reverend Elliott Danvers.”
“Oh.” The surge of hope that Bracknell felt faded away.
“D’you want to see it in privacy?”
“No, it doesn’t matter.”
Pointing to the wall on Bracknell’s right, Ambrose said, “Okay, then, here it is.”
Danvers’ slightly bloated, slightly flushed face appeared on the wall screen. Bracknell felt his innards tighten.
“Mance—if you don’t mind me calling you by your first name—I hope this message finds you well and healthy after your long journey to Ceres. I know this is a time of turmoil and anguish for you, but I want you to realize that you are not alone, not forgotten. In your hour of need, you may call on me. Whenever you feel the need of council, or prayer, or even just the need to hear a familiar voice, call me. The New Morality will pay the charges. Call me whenever you wish.”
Danvers’s image disappeared, replaced by the cross-and-scroll logo of the New Morality.
Bracknell stared at the screen for a few heartbeats, then turned back to Ambrose. “That’s the entire message?”
Nodding, “Looks it. I di’n’t open it till you got here.”
Bracknell said nothing.
“D’you want to send an answer? It’ll take about an hour to reach Earth.”
“No. No answer.”
“You sure?”
“That man’s testimony helped convict me.”
Ambrose shook his red-maned head. “Way it looks to me, you were convicted before the trial even started. They needed a scapegoat. Can’t have four million deaths and chalk it up as an act of god.”
Bracknell stared at the man. It was difficult to tell the color of his eyes beneath those bushy red brows.
“Well, anyway,” Ambrose said more cheerfully, “I got a job offer for you.”
“A job offer?”
“Only one. You’re not a really popular fella, y’know.”
“That means I’ll have to take the job whether I want to or not.”
“ ’Fraid so.”
Taking in a breath, Bracknell asked, “What is it?”
“Skipper of the ship you came in on. Says he needs a new third mate.”
Blinking with surprise, Bracknell said, “I don’t know much about spacecraft.”
“You’ll learn on the job. It’s a good offer, a lot better than spendin’ half your life in a suit runnin’ nanobugs on some chunk o’ rock.”