When fights broke out among the prisoners in the hold, the captain lowered their air pressure until everyone passed out. Then Bracknell and other crew members crammed the troublemakers into old-fashioned hard-shell spacesuits and tethered them outside the ship until they learned their lesson. It had happened many times, but Bracknell never became inured to it. Always he thought, There but for the grace of god go I.
Then he would ask himself, God? If there is a god he must be as callous and capricious as the most sadistic tyrant in history. At least the Buddha that Addie tells me about doesn’t pretend to control the world; he just sought a way to get out of it.
There is a way, Bracknell would remind himself late at night as he lay in his bunk, afraid to close his eyes and see again in his nightmares the skytower toppling, crushing the life out of so many millions, crushing the life he had once known. I can get out of this, he thought. Slice my wrists, swallow a bottle of pills from Addie’s infirmary, seal myself in an airlock and pop the outer hatch. There are lots of ways to end this existence.
Yet he kept on living. Like a man on an endless treadmill he kept going through the paces of a pointless life, condemning himself for a coward because he lacked the guts to get off the wheel of life and find oblivion.
Except for Addie he had no friends, no companions. The captain tolerated him, even socialized with him now and then, but always kept a clear line of separation between them. The women that occasionally joined the crew hardly appealed to him, except when his needs overcame his reluctance. And even in the throes of sexual passion he thought of Lara.
If I could only see her, he thought. Talk to her. Even if it’s only a few words.
In the midst of his tortured fantasies he remembered the old message from Rev. Danvers, back when he’d just started this miserable banishment. Call me, the minister had said. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be held incommunicado with everyone back on Earth, Danvers had held out that slim hope.
Bracknell was wise enough in the ways of his captain to ask Farad’s permission before attempting to contact Danvers.
The captain snorted disdainfully. “Call somebody Earthside? Won’t do you any good, they won’t put the call through.”
Desperate enough to overcome his fears, Bracknell replied, “You could put the call through for me, sir.”
The captain scowled at him and said nothing. Bracknell returned to his duties, defeated.
Yet the next day, as Bracknell took up his station on the bridge, the captain said, “Take the comm console, Mr. Bracknell.”
Feeling more curiosity than hope, Bracknell relieved the communications officer. The captain told him to put through a call for him to the Reverend Danvers, routing it through New Morality headquarters in Atlanta. His fingers trembling, Bracknell wormed the speaker plug into his ear and got to work.
With more than an hour’s transit time for messages, there was no hope of a normal conversation. It took half his duty shift for Bracknell to get through to the communications program at Atlanta and learn that Danvers was now a bishop serving in Gabon, on Africa’s west coast.
When Danvers’s ruddy face finally came up on Bracknell’s screen, the captain called from his command chair, “Go ahead and see if he’ll talk to you.”
Danvers was sitting at a polished ebony desk, wearing an open-necked black shirt with some sort of insignia pinned to the points of his collar. Behind him a window looked down on the busy streets and buildings of Libreville and, beyond, the blue Atlantic’s white-frothed combers rolling up on a beach. A dark cylindrical form snaked through the greenery beyond the city and disappeared in the frothing surf. Bracknell’s heart clutched inside him: it was the remains of the fallen skytower, still lying there after all these years.
It took more hours of one-way messages and long waits between them before Danvers realized who was calling him.
“Mance!” Surprise opened his eyes wide. “After so many years! I’m delighted to hear from you.” The bishop turned slightly in his high-backed chair. “You can probably see the remains of the skytower. It’s a tourist attraction here. People come from all over Africa to see it.”
Bracknell’s insides smoldered. A tourist attraction.
“The locals have stripped a lot from it. Filthy scavengers. We’ve had to post guards to protect the ruins, but still they sneak in and rip off parts.”
Bracknell closed his eyes, trying to keep his temper under control. No sense getting angry with Danvers; he can’t help the situation. Get to the point, tell him why you’ve contacted him.
He took a breath, then plunged in. “I was wondering, hoping, that you might get a message to Lara Tierney for me,” he said, embarrassed at how much it sounded like begging. “I don’t know where she is now, but I thought perhaps you could find her and give her a message for me.”
Then he waited. His shift on the bridge ended and his replacement arrived at the comm console but the captain silently waved the woman away. Bracknell sat there attending to the ship’s normal communications while his eyes constantly flicked back to the screen where Bishop Danvers’s image sat frozen.
At last the attention light beneath that screen went from orange to green. The bishop’s image shimmered slightly and became animated. But his expression looked doubtful, uncertain.
“Mance, she’s Lara Molina now. She and Victor married more than eighteen months ago. I performed the ceremony.”
Bracknell felt his face redden with sudden anger.
“Under the circumstances,” Bishop Danvers continued, “I don’t think it would be wise for you to contact her. After all, it would be illegal, wouldn’t it? And there’s no sense bringing up old heartaches, opening old wounds. After all, it’s taken her all this time to get you out of her mind and begin her life again. Don’t you agree that it would be better if you—”
Bracknell cut the connection with a vicious stab of his thumb on the keyboard.
Married, his mind echoed. She married Victor. The man who betrayed me. And that pompous idiot performed the ceremony. He betrayed me, too. They’ve all betrayed me!
REVELATION
For weeks Bracknell stormed through his duties aboard Alhambra, raging inwardly at Molina and Danvers. He wanted to be angry with Lara, too; he wanted to be furious with her. Yet he found he couldn’t be. He couldn’t expect her to live out the rest of her life alone. But with Victor? She married that lying, back-stabbing son of a bitch? She doesn’t realize that Victor betrayed me, Bracknell told himself; Lara doesn’t know that Victor lied in his testimony at the trial. But Victor knew, and so did Danvers. Of that Bracknell was certain. They had combined to put him out of the way so that Victor could have Lara for himself.
Bracknell understood it all now. Victor betrayed him because he wanted Lara for himself. Once the skytower collapsed, Victor had the perfect opportunity to get me out of his way forever. And Danvers helped him, of that Bracknell was certain.
Once the skytower collapsed, he repeated to himself. Could they have made the tower collapse? Caused it? Sabotaged it? Bracknell wrestled with that idea for weeks on end. No. How could they? Victor didn’t know enough about the tower’s construction to bring it down. He’s a biologist, not a structural engineer. It would take a team of trained saboteurs, demolition experts. It would take money and planning and a ruthless cold-bloodedness that was frighteningly beyond Victor’s capability. Or Danvers’s. He doubted that even the New Morality at its most fanatical had the viciousness to deliberately bring the tower down. Or the competence.