“He suspects something,” said his second-in-command, a whipcord-lean Scandinavian with hair so light she seemed almost to have no eyebrows. She had a knack for stating the obvious.
Wishing he were alone, instead of saddled with this useless crew of mercenaries, Harbin muttered, “Apparently.”
The crew wasn’t useless, exactly. Merely superfluous. Harbin preferred to work alone. With automated systems he had run his old ship, Shanidar, by himself perfectly well. He could go for months alone, deep in solitude, killing when the time came, finding solace in his drugged dreaming.
But now he had a dozen men and women under his command, his responsibility, night and day. Diane had told him that Humphries insisted on placing troops in his decoy ships; he wanted trained mercenaries who would be able to board Fuchs’s ship and carry back his dead body.
“I tried to talk him out of it,” Diane whispered during their last night together, “but he won’t have it any other way. He wants to see Fuchs’s dead body. I think he might have it stuffed and mounted as a trophy.”
Harbin shook his head in wonder that a man with such obsessions could direct a deadly, silent war out here among the asteroids. Well, he thought, perhaps only a man who is obsessed can direct a war. Yes, he answered himself, but what about the men who do the fighting? And the women? Are we obsessed, too?
What difference? What difference does any of it make? How did Kayyam put it?
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty face Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.
What difference do our own obsessions make? They turn to ashes or prosper. Then they melt like snow upon the desert. What difference? What difference?
He heard his second-in-command asking, “So what are we going to do? He’s getting away.”
He said calmly, “Obviously, he doesn’t believe that we’re carrying ores back to Earth. If we turn around and chase him we’ll simply be proving the point.”
“Then what do we do?” the Scandinavian asked. The expression on her bony, pale face plainly showed that she wanted to go after the other ship.
“We continue to behave as if we are an ore-carrier. No change in course.”
“But he’ll get away!”
“Or come after us, once we’ve convinced him that we’re what we pretend to be.”
She was clearly suspicious of his logic, but murmured, “We play cat and mouse, then?”
“Yes,” said Harbin, glad to have satisfied her. It didn’t seem to matter to her which one of the two ships was the cat and which the mouse.
In Selene, Douglas Stavenger stood by his office window, watching the kids out in the Grand Plaza soaring past on their plastic wings. It was one of the thrills that could only be had on the Moon, and only in an enclosed space as large as the Grand Plaza that was filled with breathable air at normal Earthly pressure. Thanks to the light gravity, a person could strap wings onto her arms and take off to fly like a bird on nothing more than her own muscle power. How long has it been since I’ve done that? Stavenger asked himself. The answer came to him immediately: too blasted long. He chided himself, For a retired man, you don’t seem to have much fun.
Someone was prodding the council to allow him to build a golf course out on the floor of Alphonsus. Stavenger laughed at the idea, playing golf in space suits, but several council members seemed to be considering it quite seriously.
His desk phone chimed, and the synthesized voice announced, “Ms. Pahang is here.”
Stavenger turned to his desk and touched the button that opened his door. Jatar Pahang stepped through, smiling radiantly.
She was the world’s most popular video star, “The Flower of Malaya,” a tiny, delicate, exotic woman with lustrous dark eyes and long, flowing, midnight-black hair that cascaded over her bare shoulders. Her dress shimmered in the glareless overhead lights of Stavenger’s office as she walked delicately toward him.
Stavenger came around his desk and extended his hand to her. “Ms. Pahang, welcome to Selene.”
“Thank you,” she said in a voice that sounded like tiny silver bells.
“You’re even more beautiful than your images on-screen,” Stavenger said as he led her to one of the armchairs grouped around a small circular table in the corner of his office.
“You are very gracious, Mr. Stavenger,” she said as she sat in the chair. Her graceful frame made the chair seem far too large for her.
“My friends call me Doug.”
“Very well. And you must call me Jatar.”
“Thank you,” he said, sitting beside her. “All of Selene is at your feet. Our people are very excited to have you visit us.”
“This is my first time off Earth,” she said. “Except for two vids we made in the New China space station.”
“I’ve seen those videos,” Stavenger said, grinning.
“Ah. I hope you enjoyed them.”
“Very much,” he said. Then, pulling his chair a bit closer to hers, he asked, “What can I do, personally, to make your visit more… productive?”
She glanced at the ceiling. “We are alone?”
“Yes,” Stavenger assured her. “No listening devices here. No bugs of any kind.”
She nodded, her smile gone. “Good. The message I carry is for your ears alone.”
“I understand,” said Stavenger, also fully serious.
Jatar Pahang was not only the world’s most popular video star; she was also the mistress of Xu Xianqing, chairman of the world government’s inner council, and his secret envoy to Stavenger and the government of Selene.
CHAPTER 45
The art of governing, thought Xu Xianqing, is much like the art of playing the piano: never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
It had been a long, treacherous road to the leadership of the world government. Xianqing had left many friends, even members of his own family, by the wayside as he climbed to the shaky pinnacle of political power. The precepts of K’ung Fu-Tzu had been his nominal moral guide; the writings of Machiavelli his actual handbook. During his years of struggle and upward striving, more than once he marveled inwardly that he—or anyone—bothered even to try. Why am I driven to climb higher and higher? he asked himself. Why do I take on such pains, such risks, such unending toil?
He never found a satisfactory answer. A religious man might have concluded that he had been chosen for this service, but Xianqing was not a man of faith. Instead, he considered himself a fatalist, and reasoned that the blind forces of history had somehow pushed him to his present pinnacle of authority and power.
And responsibility. Perhaps that was the true, ultimate answer. Xianqing understood that with the power and authority came responsibility. The planet Earth was suffering a cataclysm unmatched in all of human history. The climate was changing so severely that no one could cope with the sudden, disastrous floods and droughts. Earthquakes raged. Cities were drowned by rising waters. Farmlands were parched by shifting rainfall patterns, then washed away by savage storms. Millions had already died, and hundreds of millions more were starving and homeless.
In many lands the bewildered, desperate people turned to fundamentalist faiths for help and strength. They traded their individual liberties for order and safety. And food.
Yet, Xianqing knew, the human communities on the Moon and in the Asteroid Belt lived as if the travails of their brethren on Earth meant nothing to them. They controlled untold wealth: energy that Earth’s peoples desperately needed, and natural resources beyond all that Mother Earth could provide its wretched and despairing children.