"The lateral translation maneuver is the loudest!" Gray said in a voice roused over the violence. "We put sound insulation in all the island's homes and buildings so we can run twenty-four-hour space operations!"
When the rocket was centered directly above the concrete pad and about at eye level with Gray and Laura — its flat sides now lit by large spotlights from the ground — it began to sink in a straight line toward the earth. All was linear, precise, machinelike — clearly the work of a computer. Laura looked up at Gray's face. It was lit in the faint white fire that glinted also in his eyes. There was an expression on his face — contentment, she guessed. She turned back to the pad, thinking, How can I ever know what he thinks or feels? But she would have to learn. That was her job.
The flames beat at the center of the concrete base beside the gantry and spread ever wider as they pounded the earth. White clouds billowed out of the launch pad toward the sea on one side and the wide brown road on the other, boiling furiously like in a time-lapse film of a developing thundercloud. The jungle and ocean around the pad was well lit by tame spotlights. But the fire from the rocket's engines turned night into day and shone brightly on the nearby assembly building, and on a massive slab of concrete that shared the open field with its more impressive neighbor.
The distinct shadows cast across the lawn by the rocket's blaze grew long, and the rocket's descent slowed almost to a complete stop just above the pad. The engines suddenly shut off, and Laura's heart skipped a beat in the surprising silence as she anticipated the stunning explosion from a calamitous failure. But the rocket sat firmly in its place on the pad, the night again enveloping the brief artificial day of its chemical burn.
She looked back up at Gray. He had a smile of satisfaction on his face, which he tried to hide by turning away. "This is a volcanic island," he said in a voice he no longer needed to raise. "The crater was where the Village is now. This whole face of the mountain" — he motioned at the roughly semicircular wall along the middle of [garbled], perched his house—"was the inside of the crater wall. My geologists tell me the opposite wall blew out in a major eruption about two thousand years ago."
Laura imagined a continuation of the walls to form a circle and saw that the island had once been little more than the tip of a volcano protruding from the sea.
"Erosion had leveled most of what was left," Gray continued "although we had more than a year of earth-moving before we ever began construction. The center of the island down there" — he pointed toward the twinkling lights of the Village—"was a small lake that we had to drain. It was a miserable place, thick with mosquitoes."
"Was it inhabited before you bought it?"
"It's rented. I've got a ninety-nine-year lease. I'm the governor general under Fijian law." He had a wry grin on his face when he said it. "And no. No one could live here. There was no fresh water. I built a desalinization plant over there." He pointed into the darkness by the coast — the captain standing on his bridge. He lifted his hand, and where he pointed there sprouted creations of unimagined ingenuity.
The creator. The wellspring. Always "I," the professional in her noted.
Laura raised her hands to rub her upper arms and hug herself to ward off the chill. "Shall we go inside?" Gray asked. He had been watching her out of the corner of his eye.
Gray held the door for her. On the table was an enormous portion of chocolate mousse cake, swirls of dark chocolate forming intricate patterns on the plate around the luscious dessert. Gray walked past his seat without noticing.
"Ready to get started?" he asked.
Laura held the napkin she'd found neatly folded over the arm of her chair but quickly dropped it into the empty seat. "All right," Laura replied in her most assertive tone. "Let's get to it." On Gray's frenetic lead, dinner had taken less than fifteen minutes, but Laura was determined to gain the upper hand once she began the analysis.
There was no other way to guide him gently toward whatever subjects she would find important. "Where would you be most comfortable?" Laura asked.
"Pardon me?"
"Well, analysis can be a fairly grueling process. There really is no shortcut. You'd be surprised how physically draining some patients seem to find it — depending, of course, on the… on the nature of the problem."
Gray's mouth was wide-open in surprise. A grin spread across his face and filled his eyes with its sparkle. He burst out laughing.
"So you think…?" he began, but the question was cut short by still more laughter. Laura tilted her head and knitted her brow in confusion. "I'm sorry," Gray said. "I should've guessed. We haven't really discussed your job. I was going to wait until after dinner, which I guess is now." He cleared his throat, regaining his composure.
"I'm afraid there has been some misunderstanding. I'm not the one in need of your counseling, Dr. Aldridge."
She shook her head and shrugged, then swiped away the wisp of hair that had fallen loose across her cheek. "Who is it, then?" Gray had followed the movements of her hand as if studying her. He now stood there, staring at her intently. The smile faded.
"Mr. Gray?"
He turned away, and she waited as the last drop of humor drained from the man.
"Who is my patient, Mr. Gray?" she pressed, his behavior disconcerting.
Gray straightened, and as if with effort faced her full-on. "It's the computer," he said, his eyes tracing the line of her hair before darting away.
9
"Computer center, please," Gray said as he settled into the seat beside Laura in the front of the driverless car.
"You can just, like, talk to it?" Laura asked, fumbling with her seatbelt.
"Just tell it where you want to go," he answered as if it were the most mundane feature of his island world. The moment Laura's buckle clacked together, the car began its acceleration. "Voice recognition and synthesis are consumer functions, and they require a surprisingly large amount of processing capacity. But the computer is able to parse sound waves accurately enough to recognize rudimentary commands if spoken clearly and in English." The car picked up speed as it headed out of the courtyard and turned left at the gate.
Laura sat in what would have been the driver's seat of an American car. Her pulse quickened in time with the increasing speed of the vehicle, and she gasped and grabbed the empty dashboard as it sped into the black opening of the tunnel. She leaned toward Gray to peer around the gentle curve for the approaching head lamps with which — she imagined — they would at any moment collide.
"It's okay," Gray said quietly. The gentle tone of his voice — the intimacy it suggested — drew her gaze to his. Their faces were close and Laura shrunk back into her seat. "We've never, not even once had an accident with these cars. Never."
Laura tried to relax, but she could barely avoid cringing again when they burst from the tunnel. Her heart thumped against her ribcage, and she was alert now to two things — the increasing speed of the car as they began their descent from the mountain and the physical proximity of Gray.
"We've… had some problems. With the computer." Laura was too distracted by her fear of the unknown technology to which her life was now entrusted to concentrate fully on what he was saying. "It's been experiencing unexplained errors for months now. The rate of failure has been growing… exponentially. The way things are going, in a week, maybe less…"
Laura was unable to pry her eyes off the streaking blur of the jungle's edge, which was illuminated in the narrow beams of the headlights, but she managed to ask, "In a week, what?"