Our driver swerved and, despite what he had probably been taught, slowed down. The road was blocked ahead. And now there was a second concussion at the back of the convoy, another mine, blasting chunks of pavement into the wetlands and boxing us in with ruthless efficiency.
Wun was awake now, baffled and terrified. His eyes were as big as moons and almost as bright.
Small-arms fire rattled in the near distance. I ducked and pulled Wun down next to me, both of us folded double around our seat belts and prying frantically at the clasps. The driver stopped, pulled a weapon from somewhere under the dash, and rolled out the door.
At the same time a dozen men spilled out of the APC behind us and began to fire into the darkness, trying to establish a perimeter. Plainclothes security men from other vehicles began to converge on our car, looking to protect Wun, but gunfire pinned them before they reached us.
The quick response must have rattled the road pirates. They opened up with heavy weapons. One of them fired what I was later told was a rocket-propelled grenade. All I knew was that I was suddenly deaf and the car was rotating around a complicated axis and the air was full of smoke and pebbled glass.
* * * * *
Then, mysteriously, I was halfway out the rear door, face pressed into the gritty pavement, tasting blood, and Wun was next to me, a few feet ahead, lying on his side. One of his shoes—one of the child-size hiking boots he'd bought for the Canyon—was on fire.
I called his name. He stirred, feebly. Bullets battered the ruin of the car behind us, punching craters in steel. My left leg was numb. I pulled myself closer and used a torn hank of upholstery to smother the burning shoe. Wun groaned and lifted his head.
Our guys returned fire, tracers streaking into the wetlands on each side of the road.
Wun arched his back and rose to his knees. He didn't seem to know where he was. He was bleeding from his nose. His forehead was gashed and raw.
"Don't stand up," I croaked.
But he went on trying to gather his feet under him, the burned boot flopping and stinking.
"For god's sake," I said. I reached out but he scuttled away. "For god's sake, don't stand up!"
But he managed it at last, levered himself up and stood trembling, profiled by the burning wreckage. He looked down and seemed to recognize me.
"Tyler," he said. "What happened?"
Then the bullets found him.
* * * * *
There were plenty of people who had hated Wun Ngo Wen. They distrusted his motives, like E. D. Lawton, or despised him for more complex and less defensible reasons: because they believed he was an enemy of God; because his skin happened to be black; because he espoused the theory of evolution; because he embodied physical evidence of the Spin and disturbing truths about the age of the external universe.
Many of those people had whispered about killing him. Dozens of intercepted threats were recorded in the files of Homeland Security.
But he wasn't killed by a conspiracy. What killed him was a combination of greed, mistaken identity, and Spin-engendered recklessness.
It was an embarrassingly terrestrial death.
Wun's body was cremated (after an autopsy and massive sample-extraction) and he was given a full state funeral. His memorial service in Washington's National Cathedral was attended by dignitaries from all over the planet. President Lomax delivered a lengthy eulogy.
There was talk of sending his ashes into orbit, but nothing ever came of it. According to Jason, the urn was stored in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution pending final disposition.
It's probably still there.
HOME BEFORE DARK
So I spent a few days in a Miami-area hospital, recovering from minor injuries, describing events to federal investigators, and coming to grips with the fact of Wun's death. It was during this time I resolved to leave Perihelion and open a private practice of my own.
But I decided not to announce my intention until after the replicator launch. I didn't want to trouble Jason with it at a critical time.
* * * * *
By comparison with the terraforming effort of previous years, the replicator launch was anticlimactic. Its results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency—a mere handful of rockets, no clever timing required—failed as drama.
President Lomax was keeping this one close to home. In a move that had infuriated the E.U., the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians, Lomax had declined to share replicator technology beyond the must-know circles at NASA and Perihelion, and he had deleted all relevant passages in the publicly released editions of the Martian archives. "Artificial microbes" (in Lomax-speak) were a "high risk" technology. They could be "weaponized." (This was true, as even Wun had admitted.) The U.S. was thus obliged to take "custodial control" of the information in order to prevent "nanotech proliferation and a new and deadly arms race."
The European Union had cried foul and the U.N. was convening an investigatory panel, but in a world with brushfire wars burning on four continents Lomax's argument carried considerable weight. (Even though, as Wun might have countered, the Martians had successfully lived with the same technology for hundreds of years—and the Martians were no more or less human than their terrestrial ancestors.)
For all these reasons, the late-summer launch date at Canaveral drew minimal crowds and almost desultory media attention. Wun Ngo Wen was dead, after all, and the news services had exhausted themselves covering his murder. Now the four heavy Delta rockets set in their offshore gantries looked like little more than a footnote to the memorial service, or worse, a rerun: the seed launches retooled for an age of diminished expectations.
But even if it was a sideshow, it was still a show. Lomax flew in for the occasion. E. D. Lawton had accepted a courtesy invitation and by this time was willing to pledge good behavior. And so, on the morning of the appointed day, I rode with Jason to the V.I.P. bleachers at the eastern shore of Cape Canaveral.
We faced seaward. The old offshore gantries, still functional but gone a little ruddy with saltwater rust, had been built to hold the heaviest lifters of the seed-launch era. The brand-new Deltas were dwarfed by them. Not that we could see much detail from this distance, only four white pillars out at the misty limits of the summer ocean, plus the fretwork of other unused launch platforms, the rail connectors, the tenders and support vessels anchored at a safe perimeter. It was a clear, hot summer morning. The wind was gusty—not strong enough to scrub the launch but more than enough to snap the flag crisply and tousle the coifed hair of President Lomax as he climbed the podium to address the assembled dignitaries and press.
He delivered a speech, mercifully brief. He cited the legacy of Wun Ngo Wen and his faith that the replicator network about to be planted in the icy fringes of the solar system would soon enlighten us about the nature and purpose of the Spin. He said brave things about humanity leaving its mark on the cosmos. ("He means the galaxy," Jason whispered, "not the cosmos. And—leaving our mark? Like a dog peeing on a hydrant? Someone really ought to edit these speeches") Then Lomax quoted a poem by a nineteenth-century Russian poet named F. I. Tiutchev, who couldn't have imagined the Spin but wrote as if he had:
Gone like a vision is the external world
and Man, a homeless orphan, has to face
helpless, naked and alone,
the blackness of immeasurable space.
All life and brightness seem an ancient dream,
while in the substance of the night,
unraveled, alien, he now perceives
a fateful something that is his by right.
Then Lomax departed the stage, and after the prosaic business of backward counting, the first of the rockets rode its column of fire into the unraveling cosmos behind the sky. A fateful something. Ours by right.
While everyone else looked up, Jason closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap.