Page 2 of Colliding Galaxies

Designs

  Introduction

  I first wrote this story in 1979. I had long been fascinated by how the job of an architect might translate into space…instead of designing buildings, an architect of the future might design planets…or at least planetoids. Thinking that, I realized designing whole worlds or worldlets would likely bring its own challenges. What effects would new worlds have on gravity around the solar system? If architects built dozens or hundreds of new places in space—think back to the days of L5 and Gerard O’Neill’s colony structures—how might they be organized? By ethnic group? By location…that could be easily enough changed? By economic model? Culture? Fashion or fads? I began to believe that terrestas---the name I gave to these worldlets—would explode like mushrooms after a summer rain. And they’d be organized in as many different ways as the people who built them could imagine.

  The main character in this story, Phillipe Dugay, is tired. Tired of success and adoration, tired of fighting bureaucracies, tired of running from a scandal, just tired of life. Yet he gets a second wind when he runs into a long-lost love named Kate Lind and takes on the challenge of building the one thing he’s never had in his life…an enduring relationship with a strong woman. Maybe it’s the challenge of the idea. Maybe it’s the way she taunts him, telling him how he’s washed up. Like the mythical phoenix, Dugay can’t stop trying to rise from the ashes of a once-illustrious but now stunted career. Professional athletes and entertainers face the same question: when is it time to quit? For some, it’s never. For others, like Dugay, it’s when you finally achieve a goal you never knew you had.

  Read on and find out how this happens….

  1.

  He brought the palomino to a skidding halt on the stone of the Mansion’s courtyard and left it in the hands of a faceless CyberMate. The gallop across the plains of his estate had left him exhilarated and breathless. Philippe Dugay enjoyed the classes he taught at the Institute (my Institute, he told himself—they come from all over the System) and sometimes wondered how things would have turned out had he taken such training. Pointless fantasy; his glory days were behind him and he knew it.

  Dugay wandered inside, through the rotunda of the house. He’d modeled it on a Florentine palazzo, with apologies to Brunelleschi. A marvelous copy, too, but he’d come to despise it. He despised a lot these days; ten years’ time had dulled him to the beauty of the place. If he had another chance—but what was the point? Architects were born to create and for the last decade, he had managed to create only misery for himself.

  A female cyberMate popped out of nowhere and handed him his usual stiff of gin. He started to tipple, then stopped. The Mate hadn’t droned off on another chore, like she was programmed to. A raised eyebrow got him an answer.

  “You have a visitor, Monsieur Dugay,” she said, in an overly lush, recorded Parisian lilt.

  “Where, dear?”

  “Your penthouse study. That’s where you always go after your bath and rubdown.”

  Was that a smirk he detected? “I’ll pass on the lust and depravity for now. Who is it?”

  The cyberMate replied coldly, “His name is Lorenzo Jenkins.”

  Dugay was already half into the lift when the name stopped him. “Lorenzo Jenkins? The Jenkins? Hmmm.” He waved the Mate off and took the lift up to his study.

  It was Lorenzo all right, never a doubt about that. Jenkins ran the asteroid metropolis of Big-Venice-in-the Belt, the most popular vegas in the entire System, with every diversion and sin an ore driver or scoop pilot could want. The bald orb had already made himself comfortable, so Dugay dispensed with formalities.

  “Enjoying yourself?”

  “Wickedly,” Jenkins replied. He cocked his head and squinted as Dugay found a seat behind his desk. “Quite a cottage you’ve got here. They don’t make terretas like this anymore.”

  “Never did,” said Dugay. “It’s an original.”

  “Along with a few thousand others. How’d you happen on the name terreta anyway?”

  “’Small Earth.’ We light up the night with orbiting mirrors and they call those solettas or lunettas. So—terretas. A city in a bottle. Clever, no?”

  “Clever, yes. Terretas made the Inner Ring possible. Civilization in space without them? Fah, who could imagine it? No room for luxuries in a makeshift fuel tank, which is what my great-grandfather called home out there. You opened space to the masses, Dugay. Every time they turn out another terreta, it’s got your name on it.”

  “Along with Shepard and Kangyo’s. So how’s business?”

  Jenkins smiled as Dugay polished off the drink and poured them both another. “Booming. You ought to pay a visit. I hear you never leave this place anymore?”

  Dugay handed him a goblet. You had to be wary of Jenkins. The man was wired like a machine and spent hours plugged into Big Venice through implanted tabs. The tales had it that he was so sensitive to the subtle electrical fields of that city that he could pick up the micro-currents of another man’s nervous system and decipher his impulses before they ever reached his brain.

  “I live in the past,” he admitted. “I’ve done enough for one man. Besides, there’s the Institute. The kids’ll take terraforming farther than ever.” He hoped that sounded sincere enough.

  “They’ll have to go some to beat your act. Giving the moon an atmosphere was quite a stunt.”

  “It was no stunt,” said Dugay. “Within a year after I’d crossed Tranquility in a sailboat, Selenopolis had doubled in population and the Amber Shores resort was almost finished. I turned the Moon into real estate.”

  Jenkins tried to smother a smile at the success of his own tactic. “And Venus. Mars. Delambre too. All the terretas. Any one of them would make you a name to reckon with in this pantheon of greats, right up there with Wren, Sullivan, Wright, Le Corbusier.”

  “All right, so I like to be flattered.”

  Jenkins turned serious for a moment. “I can do more than that, Philippe. I need you and I’m offering the biggest commission you’ve ever heard of.”

  “A commission? Now?” Dugay forced a laugh that wasn’t as contemptuous as he intended. “I’ve been out of circulation for ten years. Techniques have changed. Styles are different.”

  “You run an academy for the terraforming arts. And who says genius is ever obsolete? Your name and reputation are powerful magic anywhere in the System. Just listen for a minute.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I’m a Belt man, pure and simple. My business is ninety per cent scoopers and ore drivers and their families. With the Inner Ring and the Belt states competing against each other, it won’t be long before all the asteroids are picked clean. We’re running into limits but there’s still a lot of momentum behind our expansion. That kind of squeeze makes things expensive, so we have to look outward.”

  “The gas giants.”

  “Exactly. The biggest terraforming project there is. I’ve got the backing of a lot of investors from Canto del Aria to Rock City. We’re going after the big worlds. And we want you in charge.”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  Jenkins didn’t blink. “Dismantling Jupiter.”

  “And?”

  “And constructing another Ring of terretas, just beyond the Belt. An Outer Ring, financed by this consortium I’ve put together. With ready-made worlds of your design, the Belt would attract hordes of new settlers.”

  Dugay took a deep breath. “You got any idea how long it would take to dismantle Jupiter?”

  “Eight years, one hundred and ten days and a handful of hours, by my calculations. Wrap the planet in a spool of electric cable, pump current into it and speed up the rotation to once an hour. The King of Planets would unravel at the equator like a ball of thread.”

  “It’s an intriguing plan,” said Dugay. “I’m highly impressed. I’m also old and tired, with too many responsibilities.” He flinched reachin
g for his gin. “I can’t even go a day without a massage. What about my students?”

  “Bring ‘em with you. They couldn’t have a better education.”

  “I don’t know—“

  “Think of it this way: everywhere you go in the Inner Ring, Philippe, you see nothing but structures you’ve designed and built. Monuments with your name on them. Isn’t that discouraging? Out beyond the Belt is virgin space, unbuilt, just waiting for the distinctive imprint of a genius. You could be that genius. Unless you’re afraid of the challenge.”

  Dugay stiffened at that. “I’m not in the habit of refusing commissions. What if I asked for enough material to construct a small planet of my own, purely for aesthetic purposes?”

  “Done,” said Jenkins. “Whatever you want. I was able to attract so many investors because I offered them Philippe Dugay. Don’t make me swallow my promises. Do we have an agreement?”

  There was a brief knock on the door and it burst open before Dugay could open his mouth. Jean Dugay walked in, heedless of his father’s privacy and, seeing Jenkins, introduced himself. He was a lanky fellow, like his mother Alix, poor dear, with a shock of dark brown hair and the haughty face of a Dugay. My prize pupil, Dugay thought. But no favorites in the classroom, not in the Dugay Institute for Terraforming Arts. A steady hand molds the talent.

  “Jean, we were having a conversation.”

  “I know, Father, but there’s news you should hear. Kate Lind is making another tour of the Inner Ring and she’s stopping here at Patagonia tomorrow. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Kate? Coming here?” Dugay glanced at Jenkins, who wore a frown. How many years had it been?

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Jean asked. “She’s making a special trip.”

  Jenkins snorted. “I’m thrilled to death. That woman’s got more tentacles than a jellyfish. And a sting to match.”

  “She’s not coming to see you,” Jean said.

  “Just as—“

  “Never mind that,” Dugay interrupted. He lurched up out of his seat and draped an arm around Jean’s shoulder. “Go down to the commissary and tell Helga to think up something original. Kate likes seafood, as I recall; maybe a sole Venus.”

  Jean left and Jenkins muttered, “The Linds aren’t worth flattering. Give her a fillet of barnacle.”

  “The Dugays and the Linds go back two hundred years,” said Dugay. “We have this little sport of trying to outdo each other. Harmless displays of extravagance.”

  “The arrogance of power. You know Katerine Lind well?”

  Dugay nodded ruefully. “A little too well. I still remember the silly games we played at Balmoral. She always chased me at jet-tag. I guess nothing ever changes.”

  “This commission is yours,” said Jenkins. “We won’t consider anyone else.”

  Dugay stopped beside the desk and picked up a scale model of Patagonia. He turned the cylinder end for end, admiring the proportions. “Kate’s coming back,” he said, almost to himself. And one love is enough. He thought of the Institute and what it meant to him. Fifty years of work, reshaping the Solar System and now a brood of bright-eyed kids, absorbing every word like a biblical truth. Lord, don’t the memories cling? She still had the power to shatter a lifetime of atonement. How else do you bury the faces a terraformer’s mistake can conjure? “No,” he said, a little more forcefully than he wanted. “I’ll make a decision in a few days.”

  Jenkins didn’t like it. He’d seen what Jean’s words had done. “Influence like that is a poison. You won’t reconsider and say yes now?”

  Dugay shook his head. “I need time.”

  Jenkins rose to leave. “Brother, you need more than that. Take a trip to the Belt, if you like. Ask around. Get away from that all-seeing eye of the Linds. You’re welcome to anything Big Venice has to offer.”

  “Thanks.” They shook hands and Dugay escorted Jenkins down to the front terrace of the Mansion. “I may do that. If I can.”

  “You can,” said Jenkins. “And my offer stands. You’re needed out there, Philippe. Your vision’s worth all the ore in the Belt any day. Don’t live in the past. You’ve still got some genius left in that old body and you’re the only custodian that matters. Save the goods for the right customer and give me a call when you’re ready, okay?”

  “Promise,” said Dugay. He thanked Jenkins for a few kind lies and saw him away in the flyer. The machine sped for Patagonia’s port and was only a black dot when he went back inside.

  Maybe it was time to make a little call. Dugay went to his office.

  2.

  The trouble was that everything had been done. For ten years, Dugay had lived in seclusion at Patagonia, content to believe his reputation was secure, hoping that History would judge his errors kindly. What the public didn’t know was that his own conscience wasn’t so sympathetic.

  Strict ordinances forbade new buildings on Earth. With the advent of biological architecture, cultivating structures like plants, new buildings were not only unnecessary, they were a menace. There were no architects on Earth anymore, only gardeners.

  The inner planets had long since been terraformed into habitable worlds for Man and already the settlements there had passed immigration laws, less than half a century after the first real estate agents had swooped in and made teeming suburbs out of his work.

  Even the Moon was settled now and Dugay took great pride in that achievement. It was so simple an idea that people laughed when it was explained to them, even today. Bake out the oxygen in the soil for a few years with a couple dozen solar concentrators to get the atmosphere and then slam a few iceberg asteroids into it to provide some volatiles—carbon, nitrogen, water and the like. The design was easy. The execution wasn’t but then you never could get decent help. He had managed anyway and then sailed the lunar seas for promotion.

  Even that had grown old after a while. Living space was soon at a premium so he had collaborated with several other designers—Kurt Klamath being the most notable-- to create a mass-producible artificial habitat, the most ubiquitous architectural form of the modern era. Terretas they were called—a stunning example of simple utility that rivaled the Pyramids, the cathedrals and the skyscrapers in the impact it had. For a while, that took the pressure off, as Man’s numbers swelled to fill the new worlds.

  Expanding population, competition for the rich lodes of the Asteroid Belt, shipping monopolies, it all added up to one thing, one inevitable result where men were concerned. Dugay’s father had gained fame as a diplomat in the Ice Wars and maybe he should be thankful for that. Fame was a sort of power. Yet the resulting cleavage of the inhabited System into two grand bickering alliances, plus a few score stragglers, was not something to be proud of. Dugay knew his father had dreamed of uniting all solar space someday but it was only a dream. The Dugays were good at that.

  Now there were two, the Inner Ring and the Belt. For his efforts, the elder Dugay had been awarded a high position in the government of the Ring and money sufficient to build the family estate, the terreta Patagonia. Here, he had raised Philippe and taught him the value of ambition. His mother, Janice Holberg, dead now almost sixty years from the time of the sabotage-disaster of the Olympian Empress, had taught him the value of beauty. Ever since, he had fought skirmishes with his own nature, split as it was between the ancient Gallic arrogance of his father and the pragmatism of his mother. All his life, Philippe had served three masters: France, America and himself.

  After the lunar atmosphere and the terretas, came the grandest project at all, the chance every architect dreamed of.

  The Inner Ring needed a capital city. They were in competition with the cities of the Belt, not only for resources but for prestige. At stake were the outer planets—Jupiter to Pluto—and the iceballs further out, and the infinity of wealth each of these giants represented. Hydrogen, helium, carbon, silicon and aluminum, enough to power civi
lization for centuries.

  It was to be a grand city, worthy of the magnificent capitals of the past. Money was no object and time was plentiful. What was lacking was imagination, the inspiration to do something never done before. They called on Philippe Dugay.

  It was finished in twenty-two years and was known as Delambre. It was almost beyond description, not because it was beautiful—some called it an abomination—but because of its scale. A small planetary core was fused from fragments scooped in the Belt. The worldlet supported a grid of smaller fused cores, connected by cylinders, sprouting globes, spinning wheels and cones, every imaginable geometric shape was employed at least once and the eye could not encompass it all, even at a considerable distance. It stretched five thousand kilometers in any direction and was home to thirty million people. At a quarter million kilometers away, it resembled an unearthly spider web.

  The acclaim that followed hadn’t been seen in generations. Not since Wren had rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666 and Sullivan had transformed Chicago with the first skyscraper, had one man put his imprint so firmly on a single city.

  The name Dugay came to rival that of Lind, the solar-power family who had dominated inner System commerce for two centuries. The two words were spoken with equal reverence in the Chamber of Deputies at Delambre. Philippe was granted privileges of council, even though he was not a member. And his private terreta, Patagonia, was redone into the kind of home from which legends were made.

  But it was not enough. No one had granted him the ability to forget. All the acclaim in the System couldn’t erase the memory of his very first commission and Kate Lind knew that. It was a memory called Athalonia.

  Arthur Lind had given him the idea and the money. It was the sort of plan men of great wealth thought up—bold, extravagant, symbolic, foolish and a hundred other things. Nothing like it had ever been done or even attempted before. But he’d accepted because you didn’t refuse a man like Lind. Not when you were fresh out of design school and eager for a place in the history of man usually reserved for saints, saviors and empire-builders.

  Lind invited him to the family estate in the terreta Balmoral and showed him a map of Earth. He pointed to the Atlantic Ocean.

  “See that gap there between Europe and the Americas?” he asked. “That’s where Plato put Atlantis. The trouble with Earth is that every continent’s already accounted for, politically affiliated. They need a new continent down there, a place where misfits and malcontents can roam without laws. A place like no other—tropical, prairie, mountains, everything a pioneer could want. I want to make a gift to the groundlanders, for letting me sell them the Sun.” He took Dugay by the shoulder. “Your father Raymonde’s a good man, so I know you can do it, Philippe. Build me a new continent, right there in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

  Why not?

  How it came to be called Athalonia, Dugay could not recall. Every other continent save one began with an A. But no matter. He had a chance to make his mark and, with Lind backing, quite a mark it would be. A passport to history.

  All you had to do was juice up the mid-Atlantic rift. The open seam that split the ocean basin was always bubbling up new matter from deep inside the Earth’s crust. Ready-made building materials. He studied tectonics, volcanology and geomorphology and went to work.

  But the problem was that no one really understood how the rift worked. The floor of the ocean kept spreading apart but the mechanism wasn’t fully understood. This didn’t overly bother Dugay; it was enough that it worked at all.

  Then disaster struck. Athalonia was an intruder, built up too quickly for the ocean to compensate. By the time the first scattered island peaks had emerged south of the Azores, floods and tidal waves had wrecked America’s East Coast, from Maine to Miami. For months, hundreds, then thousands died as a new archipelago appeared where once the Sargasso Sea had been. Havoc spread around the Atlantic basin. London and Lisbon, Rio and Lagos, every coastal city was hit and devastated. Governments fell and anger swelled. Commissions were formed to investigate and when it was learned that Arthur Lind was behind the idea, the fury couldn’t be contained. How, the people asked, could something like this be permitted, when no one knew just how the rift worked? They screamed for a scapegoat.

  That’s when Philippe Dugay left Earth for good, disguised as a French immigrant to the Inner Ring.

  Arthur Lind wasn’t a vindictive man, just puzzled. People were such ingrates; they never understood why men of wealth gave gifts. He was magnanimous too, sympathetic to Dugay’s plight.

  “Not to worry, old chum. You’ll be safe from the mobs. I’ve seen to it that another man, a fellow named Preston Sawyer, takes the blame. No one will ever know you were associated with Athalonia.”

  Dugay was both relieved and ashamed. “That isn’t really fair. I just want to explain some things—“

  “Tut, tut. I’ll hear no more of it. We can’t have Dugays locked up like criminals, now can we? What would your father think of me? No, Arthur Lind is a generous man. We’ll save your reputation for something else. You’re young, plenty of time to make your own blunders.”

  He met Katerine shortly thereafter.

  It took years for the furor over Athalonia to die down. Dugay spent them hiding at Balmoral, brooding. Long walks through the estate’s re-created historical scenes could not take his mind off the disaster. Even a few days spent as Lord Wellington in the Waterloo memory drama didn’t help. He made occasional trips back to Patagonia, once for the sad duty of burying his father. But for the most part, he thought it wiser to conceal himself in the vast bosom of the Lind empire, at least until he was sure it was safe.

  Katerine was a small woman, of alabaster skin, almost delicate, with remarkable bearing for her young age. She seemed frail and vulnerable at times, but Dugay soon found out differently. She was outwardly a woman and, though she would take it as a compliment, she was that in name only. As a child of the Lind name, she was purely a creature of power, naturally at ease in the center of the webs of intrigue her family had been spinning since the first sunsat beamed its microwaves at the Earth two centuries ago.

  Kate wasn’t a spoiled child, not in the usual sense of too much love or attention. Dugay learned quickly enough the kind of upbringing she would have: exhausting years at the family college, Lindhall, at Balmoral; long years as the manager of a lonely solsat inside Mercury’s orbit, when the Inner Grid was being established. She had learned about men there. When she returned to Balmoral after Arthur Lind’s fatal airpolo accident, she wasn’t the same person Dugay had first known. She was hardened, toughened, cynical and ruthless. Very much in the Lind tradition. She had clawed her way to the Delambrian Plutarchy in no time.

  She developed an intense fascination for Dugay. She admired ambition and because he was built of ambition and pride and a thirst for adventure, she indulged him. By the time of her own mother’s death, Kate had been effectively running Balmoral for years. The huge Lind combine was her toy and she used it to finance every dream Philippe could think of. She enjoyed his success and as the Dugay star climbed in the firmament, she basked in the light of his fame.

  At first, Dugay was cautious in her company. She was the oldest of the surviving Linds and she alone knew the truth about Athalonia. He was careful to avoid the subject, though guilt wracked him relentlessly, and Kate seldom brought it up. She was by turns affectionate and cunning, sensitive and cold. He respected her at first, wary of the power she had over him, the weapon she wielded by her knowledge. But she did nothing, seemingly content to nourish his career with transfusions of Lind money.

  Making up for Athalonia became the most important thing in his life. He accepted her designs on him because the commissions she offered made it possible. Each project was grander than the last, another brick in the wall he tried to build around his own memory. He founded an institute of terraforming arts, to give back what he’d
learned and ensure that the professions would be free of charlatans; mistakes were too costly with whole worlds at stake. The institute became a passion as Dugay labored to perfect the field he had nearly destroyed.

  He and Kate lived together at Balmoral until Delambre was finished. By normal standards, it wasn’t love that kept them together. It started as respect, then slowly graduated to fond courtesy, with occasional excursions into admiration and sympathy and once, fleetingly, a frightening descent into tenderness. But never love.

  They sometimes shared a bed but it was more common for them to live apart, sometimes in different mansions, since Balmoral had seven. Kate insisted on it, saying that she liked to imagine she was seeing him for the first time, every morning, when they often strolled through the lush foliage of the terreta’s garden districts. When the demands of the Plutarchy became too great and required her to spend weeks on end away from Balmoral, he began to miss her and felt silly when he realized it.

  Feeling neglected, he eventually returned to Patagonia.

  Years passed before she paid a visit and even then, it was some official excursion through the Ring that brought her. They never kissed at these infrequent reunions. Just a smile, a cocked head, a few words. The intimacy of conspirators, Dugay imagined it. When she was away and silent, he drifted on a sea of anxiety, never knowing for sure what she was up to. When she was around Patagonia, it was different, the weapon was sheathed. He never knew whether he had liked her because he had to or because he wanted to.

  But time has a way of wasting people and distance wore thin the feelings that once existed. Dugay knew that he had been used by the Linds. A simple rule had governed his career: work for the Linds, build whatever they ask and in return, get lifelong immunity from the jaws of Athalonia. A fair exchange, Kate had termed it. Your talent for our silence. Quid pro quo. In the comfortable and familiar luxuries of Patagonia, he had learned to hate himself.

  The liaison with Kate had finally lapsed into dust and Dugay spent a decade in seclusion, steeped in all the honor and adulation an amazed solar system would bestow. The name was legend and eager students flocked to DITA to stare agog and soak up the wisdom of the man who had suburbanized space. He married, had a son, lost a wife, and almost managed to forget that out there beyond Patagonia’s well-tended fields of wheat and grass and poppies, lurked another name.

  Almost.

  3.

  Patagonia’s sunward endcap was a miniature paradise. Dugay had redesigned it in the years he had spent tending the estate. Foaming cataracts drifted lazily in the low gravity, a scaled down replica of Victoria Falls. Clouds of spray swirled in precisely calculated patterns, encouraging the exuberant growth of tropical flora. Wiry pandanus swayed on thin stilt-like trunks; palm trees coiled in bizarre helicals and thick bush matted the floor of the forest preserve. Low-g did that to plants.

  Kate splashed across the pool to the rock wall and hoisted herself up on her elbows, half out of the water.

  “Are you going to tell me or do I have to torture it out of you? That was Lorenzo Jenkins’ ship I saw docked here, wasn’t it?”

  “You’ve got awfully big eyes,” Dugay replied. He lay on his back on a marble bench, a few meters away, staring up at the mirrored blaze of the Sun.

  “Ears too. I hear rumors.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Philippe Dugay may be coming out of seclusion.”

  Dugay sat up abruptly. “Who told you that?”

  Kate smiled. “Come off it, Philippe. There’s not a treaty signed or a bribe taken that I don’t know about. My father once told me that Dugays are like old stars dying, going nova. Expanding, heating up everything around them, blowing off tremendous energy until they trigger themselves to flash.” She paused long enough to force his curiosity. “Then, they detonate, destroying everything nearby.”

  Dugay forced a wan smile. “Arthur Lind never could speak metaphorically.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it? I can feel it. You’ve been quiet for ten years and something’s got you agitated now. You haven’t stared at the sky like that in ages.”

  Dugay slipped into the pool and cupped some water over his face. “Lorenzo offered me a commission. A big one.” He let the admission lay there.

  “Come on,” Kate chided, kicking him. “Tell me before you wet your pants.”

  “Since you’re so interested, I will. He’s setting up a project to dismantle Jupiter and use the material to build an Outer Ring, beyond the Belt. I’m supposed to design the technique and supervise it. Not only that—he’s giving me full control of the results. I can create anything I want: terretas, small planetoids, whatever.”

  Kate made an affecting moue of her face. “You sound convinced. What did you say?”

  Dugay glided across the pool on his back. “I said I’d think on it. The whole project would take years, maybe decades. Who knows? I might not even live to see the end of it.”

  “You’ll live, if it means that much to you. But what about me?”

  He hadn’t heard her. Dugay stood up and let the falls sluice over his head, shaking himself like a dog as the water thundered down from a rock ledge. Kate watched him. He was a puzzle and she’d never found the pattern. Too much thinking gives Kate a big head. Did he even suspect how much she needed him now? Life as a Lind—now there was a puzzle. The family phobia, right? Don’t you dare die without doing something to credit your name. No wonder he’d finally left for Patagonia.

  Kate sloshed through the water and joined him. She had to yell.

  “I won’t let go of you that easily, mister!”

  They left the pool and dried off under a tree that breathed warm, scented air over them. Jean appeared, leading a parade of cyberMates. The three of them dined on sole Venus and Soleil de Rothschilde ’21, under a shady bower.

  She could see how much Jean meant to him. You lost your big chance, sweetie, when Alix came along. They were alike in so many ways—the same aquiline nose, the same slice of mouth. She figured she’d done a fine job hiding the jealousy. But seeing Jean, that was a slap in the face. Jean was a symptom of what had gone wrong between them and the perquisites of the Plutarchy could never quite compensate for the loss.

  They chatted amicably enough, with Kate alert to every glance Jean stole from her. When they had finished, she lightly suggested they go mountain climbing, but Dugay nixed that. Instead, Jean whistled down a Mate and had her fetch a pair of horses, bred for low-g riding. The next hour was agony but she inwardly applauded her own graciousness. She said nothing as she glared at the two riders, cutting figure-8’s and spirals in the high grass of Patagonia’s plains.

  Tired but laughing, Dugay rode back to the arbor and hoisted her up on the saddle behind him. “The grand tour,” he told her and the pinto neighed softly. “I’ve redone my Babylon again. Moved it across the river.”

  “I’ll go too,” said Jean but his father had other ideas.

  “You’ll go study, pal. You’ve got a dissertation coming up soon. I want to see all of you slaving away when I get back to the Mansion. Old Man Dugay runs a tight Institute, so get.”

  Disappointed, Jean said good-bye and charged off into the grass, his horse leaping hills at full gallop. Dugay nudged his own mount into an easy trot across the field and they made the river in good time.

  He led the pinto carefully along the rocky river bed as it splashed to the other side. An arc of slowly falling water spray followed them across.

  “Why did you come back, Kate? After so long, I mean.”

  She nestled her chin against his back and said, “I know this isn’t Balmoral. I know we’re not in our twenties anymore but I need you, Philippe. I had to come back.”

  “Oh, come off it. I don’t con that easily anymore. Time paints things in different colors. Life was bright and sharp at Balmoral. Now it’s mostly grays. Tell me the truth.”

  She choked him pla
yfully but he shook her hands off. “I don’t want you to take that commission. It’s a mistake.”

  “What’s it to you? You afraid I’m not your little play toy anymore?”

  “It was never that way, Philippe.”

  “Wasn’t it? I was your prisoner at Balmoral. Your father sheltered me from the Athalonia investigations. God, I was one scared guy back then. It was so horrible and I was so anxious, don’t you see? I owed him. So when his little girl developed an appetite for scared and foolish young architects, what could I do? Leave?”

  “You could have left. Nobody chained you to Balmoral. Or me.”

  “So I chained myself.” They vaulted up onto the opposite bank and shivered as the horse shook himself dry. “It’s—I really can’t explain it, Kate. The groundlanders had to have somebody to blame and I ran because it would have been me. I’m sorry if you think that was cowardice. Maybe it was. But I’ve had to live with that for nearly fifty years.”

  “It was human,” said Kate. “And it’s over. You made up for it. No man’s done more to change the face of the solar system than you.”

  Dugay shook his head bitterly. “I’m the one who needed you. To get my career out of the flames.”

  Ahead of them, a full-scale replica of Babylon loomed. Dugay reined in the horse at the edge of the processional way. A huge arching gate beckoned them, glittering with glazed tiles of ceremonial bulls and dragons. Dugay had spent years reconstructing the city, right down to the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens. Their steps echoed as they walked across the stone.

  “Look,” said Kate, grabbing his arm. “No architect ever built anything worthwhile that didn’t have a powerful backer behind it. There’s no shame in that. I really came here to start over.”

  “You came here to talk me out of this commission.”

  She released him and walked a few steps away, stopping at the feet of a marble lion. “I had other reasons, Philippe, but yes. I want you to turn Lorenzo Jenkins down.”

  “Nothing changes, does it? You always loved power more than anything, more than me. You still do. It’s an aphrodisiac to you. The trouble is that the System’s not just populated by Dugays. Other people don’t have to play pet the way I did.”

  Kate turned on him. The soft glow of her face had hardened now, as if she were wearing a changeable mask. She was colder in this one.

  “The gas giants are our future, Philippe. You know that. We can’t rely on the Belt for raw materials much longer. The supply’s giving out and the price is going up. Jupiter and the rest of the outer planets are the only source of hydrogen, carbon, water-ice and other volatiles left. If Jenkins or another Belt state gets to them first, the Inner Ring will be paying extortion prices in no time, if we can get the stuff at all. I’m not of a mind to let that happen.”

  “So you thought you’d drop by and break my arm if I refused to quit.”

  “I thought,” said Kate, “that I could count on your memory to help me. Everything you’ve done in your career was commissioned by my family. Ever hear of loyalty?”

  “I spell it a different way, Kate. This one is too big to pass up.”

  “I thought you were through playing Mr. Famous Architect but if it’s a challenging assignment you want, allow me to open up the family bank vaults. I’m sure I could bribe the Chamber into funding an expedition to Jupiter. Or would it gall you to work for me again?”

  “You’re getting very warm.”

  “Philippe, look,” she was trying on another mask, “I came here for two reasons. One, political and one, personal. Forget the politics for a moment.”

  “I will if you will.”

  “Please,” she glared at him, “just listen. I know what it’s been like for you. I’m not stupid. I can see.” She let her hands drop to her side, then sat on the front paws of the lion. “I’m not some ogre, you know, despite what you think. I’m a Lind and that means I have to do things, I’m expected to do big, important things. Each of us has to earn the name, every generation, over and over again, by doing something noteworthy, something that eclipses what past Linds have done. You can’t imagine what it’s like, the weight of all that tradition. I feel so vulnerable; it’s like all the stars of the galaxy were the eyes of my ancestors, staring at me, waiting for me to make my mark. I haven’t yet, Philippe. I haven’t done anything.”

  Dugay smothered a smile. It was rare to glimpse any feeling in her. “What utter bullshit. You’ll have to do better than that.”

  She stood up. “What I’m trying to say, Philippe, is that I need you because I don’t feel so…exposed, when you’re around. It’s that simple. I guess that’s the main reason I was so anxious to finance every project you could think of. Through you, I could live up to my name. You bet your scoops I used you. And I’m not through with you yet. If I let you do work for Lorenzo Jenkins, the bond between us broken. I want history to write our names together: Kate Lind made Philippe Dugay possible. Our fates are inseparable and that’s all there is to it. If you won’t do it for my sake, do it for yours. Refuse this commission.”

  “I’ve done too much for your sake already, Kate,” said Dugay. He wandered along the wall, running his hands over a menagerie of mosaic beasts. A falcon in flight caught his eye. “I am doing this for my sake. This is probably my last project and I’ll never have a better chance to prove I don’t need you. Besides that, what would Jean and my students think of me if I turned down this chance? I’m a god to them, Kate: they idolize me. I owe it to them to show what terraforming can do—how far the field as advanced and what their responsibilities are. You could come to Jupiter with me, you know.”

  “Impossible. The Plutarch can’t just leave her duties like that. And you do need me, whether you know it or not. We need each other. You’ve done enough for one man, haven’t you? You mentioned students. Step aside and give them a chance. Give your swollen ego a rest.”

  Dugay shook his head. “I haven’t done this. How can I pass up an opportunity like this, Kate? The outer worlds are an open frontier, just crying to be developed. Someone’s going to benefit—why shouldn’t it be me?”

  “I’m really surprised you could forget so quickly. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but Christ, Philippe, ten years is nothing.” She started to approach him but Dugay turned so abruptly that she stopped dead. “I believe I understand now. You’ve gone Belt—I can’t explain it any other way. All the commissions I gave you—hell, I made you what you are!—now this. I loved you, I financed you, I covered up for you—how can you be so selfish and ungrateful? What did Jenkins offer you—a home in heaven?”

  “Kate, it isn’t the end of—“

  “You don’t have to say anything else,” she blurted. Her eyes were moist but her face was steel. “I understand perfectly well.” She bit her lip and tried to hide it. You haven’t lost him yet, girl. Use what you have. Fight back like a Lind. “You’re too important to give up, Philippe.” Stop shaking. “You’re a valuable resource to the Inner Ring and I can’t let you take this commission. We won’t concede any one of the gas worlds to the Belt, not a one of them.” Not you either, chum. “I see this project as a direct threat and I mean to stop it.”

  “What’s cooking in that little mind of yours? Some kind of devious plot, I’ll bet.”

  “Smirk if you want to but it’s rather simple, actually. If you accept the Jupiter commission, the whole System will know who was really behind Athalonia inside of a day. I’ll see to it myself.”

  The threat stung despite his forced show of calm. Dugay hovered on the edge of fear, until he willed himself to react. Take it easy and think, don’t panic. She wants panic.

  “This is a pretty serious threat, Kate. Better think of the repercussions first. It was Arthur Lind who conceived Athalonia.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The design and execution were yours and that can be documented. How will you explain your
self to the System then—all those deaths, the flooding and everything? Groundlanders ought to find it very interesting. So will your students at the Institute, when they find out their hero is a monster.”

  He was appalled and couldn’t hide it. “Kate, you aren’t serious about this.”

  “I am. Quite serious. If I can’t have you, no one will.”

  “I must say blackmail’s quite becoming to you. And real love is alien. But I’m a big boy now and threats like this don’t bother me.”

  Her eyes blazed. “Was it ever love?”

  Dugay shrugged and unhitched the horse from the gate. “I’d call it calculated charm. We loved using each other. But those days are gone, Kate. You can’t grow roses in a bed of ashes.”

  She stiffened but her eyes betrayed a flare of hope. She wanted to say something but thought better of it. Pride, Dugay thought. She’s drowning in it. When she blinked again, it was gone. Extinguished by a tear.

  “There’s nothing more to say, Philippe.” She flinched at the thought. “I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

  “Me too.” There was a tactful pause. “Need a ride back?”

  “I’ll walk.” And before another tear could fall, she clattered across the marble plaza and ran through the gate.

  Dugay steadied the pinto and hauled himself up. It was a long ride back to the Mansion and he played with the idea of calling a flyer. No, better take the long way. Give her a chance to leave gracefully. What did she think I would do, after all these years—jump into her arms? He kicked the horse to a gallop.

  And what if I had?

  4.

  For several days, the Brasilia drifted through the urban clutter of the Inner Ring. Dugay had arranged this little field trip for the benefit of his students: his private cruiser served admirably as a traveling classroom. There was no better way to display what terraforming could achieve than by showing them at close range what he had spent his life doing.

  He assembled them on the ship’s observation deck and gave them some background. Jean was there, along with a cute blond waif he hadn’t noticed before. Probably new, he thought.

  “We’ll start with the Moon. That was the first major terraforming project.”

  The waif had a voice and used it. “Mr. Dugay, weren’t there experiments done on Earth before that?’ She seemed harmless enough but the question rattled him.

  Dugay replied, “True but they were small-scale, proving out basic theories on tectonic control. Not really useful on inert worlds like the Moon.” She seemed satisfied but he wondered and kept an eye on her throughout the lecture.

  The Brasilia assumed a low orbit about the Moon and the students watched silently as the hazy blue of the lunar atmosphere slid under them. The little devils are flabbergasted, Dugay told himself. But you needn’t gloat so—they’re all young and impressionable. Except for her.

  Dugay pointed through a porthole to a figure-8 shaped ocean partly hidden under a bank of gray clouds.

  “The far shore, to the right. See that island there?” He waited until the others acknowledged. “That’s Mitika Peak, nearly five thousand meters from the floor of the sea.”

  “What’s that wake behind it?” someone asked. “Some kind of current?”

  “It’s called the Swirl. That’s my name. When I sailed from Vitruvius to the Rocks of Apollo, I nearly sank in those waters. Perpetual whirlpool, caused by gas venting on the floor of the mare basin.”

  They seemed properly impressed. All but the waif, that is. She was watching him, not the Moon.

  “I liked it better when it was an airless desert. Now it’s not so bright, what with all that air and forest land. Pretty dull place, like most worlds made habitable by Man.”

  And that was well before your time, dear. Who is this girl anyway?

  They were crossing the barren hills of the Apennines, now an archipelago of dome-like islands, with scores of cottages and bungalows shining brightly in the dusklight.

  “The weather was better back then, too,” someone cracked. Forced laughter filled the deck.

  Dugay smiled and resumed the lecture, as the dark gray-blue of the Sea of Rains filled the view. They soon passed around the Moon and admired the rugged terrain of Farside, even spotting a few skiers from their faint trails in the powder and a hikers’ camp from its campfire. Dugay talked until the balmy shores of the Sea of Crises came up on them, then fell silent as the ship moved on to other sights.

  The field trip took them by each of the inner planets, for a short course in planetary engineering. The rings of Mercury were in view when he listed the standard techniques terraforming had perfected over the years, in its search for the lever by which a world could be altered.

  You could change a planet with biology, he told them. The right kind of fast-growing, specially-engineered organisms could affect a planet’s atmosphere and break down harmful components.

  You could introduce needed lighter elements by diverting ice asteroids or water comets onto the surface. If the mass were great enough, you could change a planet’s length of day, as he had done with Venus, when he’d bought a few score asteroids from the Belt and crashed them onto the Venusian surface. That gave the planet a lower temperature and more water as well as an Earth-like day.

  You could manipulate planetary climates, with oil slicks to control ocean evaporation or with huge mats of minute particles to control dust storms, as he’d tried with Mars. Dugay briefly described how he’d managed to darken the Martian ice caps with material mined from Phobos, thus trapping more sunlight and tilting the Red Planet into a warmer, rainier cycle. The process had been aided by triggering the volcanoes that covered much of the surface, releasing more water and volatile gases than the poles themselves contained.

  Or you could take Mercury. They skirted the rings just close enough for everyone to see that they consisted of trillions of overlapping chunks of rock, a sort of parasol in the sky that had been necessary to shield the surface from the searing breath of the Sun. “Once we had the cycle broken,” Dugay explained, “it was a simple matter of adding the right elements from ice asteroids. The first hotels came a decade later. Notice that because the rings overlap, fully half of Mercury’s surface is always in shadow. Anyone for Sun sailing?”

  He let them gape for a while and fielded a few questions. Occasionally, he challenged them to think of alternatives to his own methods. He was surprised by the answers; it was a bright group. But he couldn’t help beaming whenever Jean responded. No doubt about it—his own son was the class celebrity.

  Patagonia was several days away, so Dugay took them on an extensive tour of the Inner Ring. Though he had seen and visited virtually every city around the Ring, and indeed, had designed and built many of them, Dugay couldn’t pass by without scrutinizing them as only an architect could. He’d been proud of his accomplishments here once, a long time ago. He smiled inwardly, thinking perhaps Lorenzo Jenkins was right after all. The Inner Ring was indelibly stamped with his own personality. Dugay was written everywhere—in the spider web grids of Delambre, in the flowery pod structures of Gloriana, in the severe but always expanding Bauhaus cubes of Hochstadt, one kilometer after another of terretas of every imaginable shape: cylinders, horns, spheres, wheels, shapes based on obscure mathematical equations; even the ubiquitous ball-and-beam construction of the Ring’s dismal factory belts. All of them signatures in steel and synthalloy of Philippe Dugay.

  To pass the time, he posed hypothetical questions for the class.

  “You’re a terraforming engineer and you’re dissatisfied with the look of the solar system. All those terretas littering up space—you want to change the arrangement a bit, give the System more variety. Let’s play God and say you want to build an entirely new planet, just because some people like natural surfaces, mountains, oceans and whatnot. How do you go about it?”

  They rose to the occasion and peppered him with suggest
ions. Scoop up all the asteroids and allow their common gravity to bring them together.

  “Not enough material left to make a good-sized moon,” Dugay answered.

  Melt Ganymede or some other Jovian satellite by moving it sunward, then apply an atmosphere and let the weather re-sculpt the surface. That was the waif’s idea.

  Dugay shook his finger at her. “Ah, you’re a clever one, but that’s cheating. Has to be from scratch.”

  Disintegrate one of the gas worlds and use the heavier elements for building blocks. His own son smiled at him.

  “You’re getting warm, Jean.” You’re also a showoff, since you know about Jenkins’ idea. But I’ll make it tougher. “Give me specifics.”

  Jean bushed hair from his eyes and frowned. “Jupiter’s the best choice. It’s got enough material in elemental form for forty earths. Twelve percent of its mass is oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon and aluminum, with sizeable amounts of iron and other heavy elements in the form of rocks and ices.”

  Good boy—that’s why I make you do your homework. “And how would you get at this material?”

  “You could speed up its rotation. Centrifugal effects would throw off material from the equator, if it was moving fast enough.”

  “How?”

  That one stumped them. Dugay let the arguments fly for a few minutes, then solved the problem for them.

  “What I would do is wrap the planet with metallic, current-carrying grids—you could power them with orbiting solsats. If we choose the right latitude, we could make Jupiter like an armature in an electric motor. Most of the planet is liquid, by the way, with a small core of solid hydrogen and several thousand kilometers of atmosphere. Part of that liquid is in a metal phase and it’s a highly conducting fluid. Pump that stuff full of energy and electrical stresses would start it moving faster and faster, until the planet began throwing off matter from its equator, like a spool of thread unwinding.”

  They liked the idea and Dugay soaked up the admiration for a few minutes, until the inevitable joker with a question spoke up. One of Jean’s friends.

  “You’d have to collect it somehow, wouldn’t you? Volatiles like hydrogen would never survive a trip sunward in their elemental state.”

  Dugay sighed, then shot back, “Exactly right. Good for you. How could that problem be solved?”

  He spied the waif just in time. She was all smirk.

  “I’m sure you’ll enlighten us.”

  Damn right I will, lady. Dugay examined several concepts and traded them back and forth with the class. He enjoyed the exchange immensely, thinking here was the future of the profession and he’d better make them see what powers they would be commanding. To them, every word was law, every sentence a commandment. God, I’d do anything for this bunch.

  “Suppose we had a special vehicle, a scoopship to collect the matter as it comes off. The ship would have a bank of fusion reactors to transmute the hydrogen and helium and other lighter elements to heavier ones, like iron and nickel, then compact it into balls about ten meters in diameter. Once compacted, the ship could fire these ironballs anywhere in the Solar System, in a long continuous chain, to be picked up by mass catchers and assembled wherever we need them. A nice, busy little pipeline.”

  Even the waif had to approve and in spite of himself, Dugay was excited by the idea. The scale of it appealed to him, and he was sure Jenkins knew that. That was his signature, after all—the big job no one else would tackle. Kate must be out of her mind to think I could ignore this.

  He’d almost talked himself into accepting the commission when his reverie was punctured by a verbal dart. The waif was the culprit. She stared at him in the oddest way, screwing up her face as though she were trying to remember something.

  “Would you mind repeating your name?” Dugay asked her. A knot of students were mumbling at something in the porthole and Dugay went over to inspect the sight.

  “Maris Leigh-Sawyer,” she replied.

  The name meant nothing to him until he took a look at the object of curiosity. It was Earth herself, gliding by. The fat blue slash of the Atlantic faced them and, underneath a few ribbons of cloud, the craggy remnants of the Athalonian chain were barely visible.

  Maris Leigh-Sawyer?

  She was there beside him and supplied an explanation.

  “My father died for that. Suicide, you see. I was saying isn’t it odd how one terraforming project can be such a big success, like the Moon, and yet another one can be such a catastrophic failure, like Athalonia? I find that strange. Maybe terraforming’s gotten too bold.”

  Dugay’s face went pale and he fought back a hard swallow. She was looking at him so—but it couldn’t be. Coincidence at best. The Linds had kept the lid on too tight for any other answer.

  “Men use the tools available to them,” he replied. “You know about Athalonia?”

  She nodded. “More than you’ve said in class. My father was Preston Sawyer. He was part of the design staff for the project. He wasn’t the chief architect, just one of many that filled in all the details. After the floods, though, the chief architect vanished and his staff had to take the blame. He was never heard from again.”

  “You’d make a great historian.”

  Maris shrugged. “It’s not hard when it’s personal.” She studied him for a second and Dugay was conscious of a slight tremble in his hands. “The media tried and convicted them all. My father could never get any work after that; he became so depressed, he shot himself out of orbit around Mars. They found the wreckage on the slopes of Olympus Mons.”

  Dugay was afraid to breathe. “Did he ever say who the chief architect was?”

  Maris shook her head. “He wanted to. He knew who it was but he was afraid. He never said exactly but I think the Linds threatened him. He and the other designers. They refused to say anything about it.” She clenched her fists bitterly. “Arthur Lind was a ruthless tyrant.”

  Thank God for tyrants, thought Dugay. She accused him with silence and he hated himself all over again. If he took on the Jupiter commission, would Kate spill the news? If she did, could he face Maris with the truth? If he didn’t take the job, could he make Jean understand? Dugay added up the ifs and didn’t like the answer.

  “Why’d you choose this profession?” he asked her. “If you’ve got so many doubts about it.”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I guess to finish what my father started.”

  “In that case, you’d better remember one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This business isn’t for the weak of heart or the dim of brain. We’re dealing with whole worlds here, entire climates and sometimes ecologies. Mistakes happen because we’re human, not machines. But they can be overcome, believe me. You don’t throw away the hammer just because you hit your thumb with it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Dugay. When I meet the man who should have taken the blame, I’ll certainly need that hammer.”

  They said no more but Dugay felt ill. He’d almost managed to bury the doubts, almost sealed off that part of his memory. Until Lorenzo Jenkins. Now the whole thing was unraveling and he knew what would be coming. Sleepless nights full of voices, the funeral dirge he knew by heart, the buzzard eating away inside. Months, maybe years, of wondering; had he fed the maws of guilt enough? And all of it for a pointless project he didn’t need. Damn it, I shouldn’t feel this way. I’ve made up for it, haven’t I? He wanted to ask Maris that question but he couldn’t. He was afraid of the answer.

  No more lectures for today. Dugay ordered the ship back to Patagonia. He needed time to think.

  He spent the next day sailing in the weightless regions of the estate. Along the axis of the cylinder, the centrifugal forces were effectively zero and the gentlest breeze could propel him for hours. He floated serenely for nearly a day, in and out of cloud patches, while the world turned around him. Only a messag
e from Jean ruined the idyll.

  Lorenzo Jenkins had called.

  Dugay bled off some altitude for a little speed and banked the flyer left, catching a weak thermal. He looked down and saw a low range of hills, snow-covered and winding between a pair of glassy lakes on one side and a thickly forested plateau on the other. A thin stream meandered along through the forest, glinting occasionally from reflected sunlight, which poured in from above through long, mirrored panels. It was a peaceful panorama, with a few wisps of clouds obscuring part of the landscape. He followed a slow, descending spiral and headed for a cluster of buildings on a low ridge a few kilometers away. A plume of smoke twisting lazily in the air identified the Mansion.

  Jenkins was impatient. He’d asked Jean to press his father for a decision. It was urgent, Jenkins had told him, that the project get underway as soon as possible. Billions were tied up in the undertaking; every day’s delay was costly.

  A cyberMate brought them whiskey and cake. Jean chewed thoughtfully, watching his father down the drink.

  “You are going to accept Jenkins’ offer, aren’t you, Father? You know you want to—you don’t hide it well at all. What’s stopping you from putting a call to Big Venice right now?”

  “What’s stopping me?” Dugay waved for another drink, then grabbed the bottle away from the Mate and dismissed her abruptly. “Too much thinking, that’s what.”

  “I don’t understand,”

  Be glad you don’t. He tilted the bottle up and let the fire scorch his tongue. “Kate would be hurt…if I accepted. I’ve been toying with no for an answer.”

  “You’re not serious, Father. You can’t mean it. This is a great opportunity for you. You’ve been doing nothing for ten years, wishing there was something you could do. This is exactly what you need.”

  Dugay closed his eyes. He wanted to say it, tell Jean everything, all about Athalonia, the lies, the hiding, everything. But it would crush him, the truth. What would he think? All my life, I’ve tried to be a model to him. It’s better he doesn’t know. Or is the truth that I want to escape the past by going to Jupiter?

  Jean’s face was a mosaic of looks. “How can you hesitate? I’d have climbed the first—“

  “Jean, that’s enough. Stop telling me what I need.” He got up and went looking for a Mate. A moment later, Jean followed and found him in his study, stretched out for rubdown. The Mate kneaded the taut cords of his neck gently.

  “Kate would understand, Father. I know she would.”

  “Kate doesn’t understand. She’s a lonely, cantankerous old woman. I should stay here to be with her.”

  “You always said architects were born to create. That’s what you tell the class too—that Man’s a builder by nature. You’re saying that’s wrong?”

  Dugay wanted to strangle him but he was too comfortable. The boy had a talent for turning your own words against you. “What do you want me to say, son?”

  “That you’ll do it.”

  “Naturally.” Yet he was right, in a way. He’d be a better example to the kids by showing them how it was done. It was easy to teach by talking—all you needed was a mouth. Terraforming demanded more than that. It might be fun showing them that Philippe Dugay still had the flair. But how could he face Maris knowing he was responsible for her father’s blame? How could be face Jean with the truth? How could he face any of them? They all saw terraforming as a way of improving lives, not taking them. He’d told Maris that mistakes could be overcome but he wasn’t sure he believed that. All their idealism and visions about the field would crumble when they found out what he was.

  “Well?”

  “Impertinent little scold, aren’t you? Just like Kate. Honestly, Jean, I just don’t know. There are some risks here?”

  “Father, you love risks.”

  “But I’m old, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ve got people to look out for.”

  “You’re not feeble. Look, you want to do this, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” It slipped out before he could catch it.

  “And you’re not sure if you can handle Jupiter and Kate at the same time, right?”

  “Yes.” Precocious twerp. At least, he got it from me.

  “Then, think of it like this: relationships between people are like buildings, like terretas or any structure. They have to be built up, worked on, added to and repaired. You didn’t put up Delambre in a day. What makes you think you can know Kate Lind in a day? It takes time and patience.”

  Dugay raised up and brushed the cyberMate away. He stared at his son.

  “Did you see that on a vid, by any chance?”

  Jean looked confused. “No, Father. I thought it was obvious.”

  Well it was, but it took a skinny, silk-faced adolescent to realize it. Dugay didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or both. Jean could handle Kate better than he could. He was plenty strong enough to weather any bad news. Dugay knew he would sooner die than give Jean a reason to think less of him.

  He placed a call to Lorenzo Jenkins and quickly accepted the commission.

  5.

  Six months, eight days and a handful of hours later, Lorenzo Jenkins was standing on the observation deck of the Brasilia. They were well beyond the Outer Fringe of the Belt now, in trans-Jovian space, and Jupiter itself lay directly ahead, swollen to a readily discernible disk.

  It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles.

  For several days, Brasilia and her brood of scoopships, cableships, jumpships and tenders coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Dugay passed the word to the other ships and then Brasilia dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor.

  The entire fleet settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Several of the crew came by the crew’s mess, watching the scenery below for hours at a time. Evan Metcalf found himself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. He could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes.

  The cableships set to work laying down the grid that would feed current directly into the conducting layers of the atmosphere. With their billowing shroud lines and enormous dirigible bags full of heated hydrogen, they were ungainly craft. Cablers were not without propulsion, but engines were almost worthless in the maelstroms of Jupiter. Each one had a crush depth of five thousand kilometers below the topmost cloud layers and the tension in Brasilia’s command center increased to an unbearable silence as the ships found and settled into their cruising altitudes.

  Jenkins rubbed his bald head and muttered, “This is going to be tricky. Any lower and those ships’ll crumple like paper.”

  “I just hope the winds don’t stress the pressure skin too greatly,” Dugay replied. They looked at each other, saying nothing. Dugay studied the monitors from each ship, finding the views much the same. He picked one and switched it to the big viewer behind them.

  The cabler had reached its operating altitude and for the moment was cruising in the clear. Resolution wasn’t sharp at this depth; instead
of everything being bathed in a pale yellow-white, the dominant colors tended toward a deeper reddish-brown. There were no lazy twisting columns of gas here either. Winds were stronger, more directional. For several hours, they drifted through cataracts of blood-red, until the ship found its position.

  Abruptly, the scene shifted to another view, looking aft. At first, nothing seemed different. The same sinuous filaments of clouds streamed behind, undulating tubes of red, brown, orange and scarlet. An occasional wispy patch floated by the imager. Then, something foreign inched its way into the picture, staring at the bottom.

  It was the cable. Long, thin, copper-gold in the dim light, it snaked its way from the bottom of the picture slowly toward the center, whipping leisurely from one side to the other as it receded into the distance and was soon lost. To a casual observer, it seemed as though the imager had grown a tail and was dragging it across the cloudscape. The winds twisted the cable about and set up standing waves. Dugay watched the oscillations carefully.

  By the end of the third month, the operation was substantially complete. Minor mishaps had occurred, such as when a cabler had veered too close to a small red spot and had been sucked into the vortex before the cable could be severed. The boiling oval of wind and ammonia rain had given the crew quite a thrilling ride before they managed to pull loose. Beyond that, the expedition had been fortunate. The trickiest part was over and no lives had been lost.

  Dugay found the work immensely satisfying. He’d nearly atrophied at Patagonia since the days of Delambre and it felt great to be out among the planets again, making things happen. He was rejuvenated and happy, itching to shape a world with his own hands.

  He remembered how it had been with Delambre—that seemed ages ago now. Hordes of spectators and tourists had flitted by in their private jumpships, marveling at the spectacle, sometimes orbiting for days on end. It had been the same when Mars was awakened and Venus too. He needed that admiration; it was food to him and he thrived on it.

  People liked to see things grow. Whether a plant or a flower, a city or an atmosphere for the Moon, a new planet or even a failed continent like Athalonia, people were always thrilled at the sight of something new being built. Man the toolmaker triumphs again, bringing order and beauty to an ignorant cosmos. It was a spiritual thing, this feeling, a sense of pride that men could still mold the elements to their wills. They felt it when fire was tamed, when the first huts were strung up—it was sheer ego. Men were vain. What they built with their tools were reflections of themselves. Tools were simply different kinds of arms, only now they were more powerful, now they could shape worlds. And there would come a time when they would make stars too.

  There was only one flaw in his happiness. He tried to lose himself in his work but always the gnawing fear of what Kate Lind would do plagued him. He knew she could ruin everything with a few simple words.

  Dugay called her occasionally and begged her to stay silent, or at least, wait until the project was through before speaking out. Better yet, he told her, why don’t you come out here and be with me? He tried to make his voice as alluring as he could—he even promised to build a small world for them to retire to. He gave the idea a great deal of attention, describing it in lavish detail for her. Just a pocket-sized planet, he admitted, and was soon buried in the design.

  Shaping the basic landforms was the key. He’d have to keep an eye on the tiniest of features. “It’s a study in gravitational physics, Kate. I’ll explain it to you someday.” He’d studied the topography of Earth for years and concluded it was simply an aesthetic disaster. Too unbalanced. All the continents up there in the northern hemisphere, all the oceans in the southern. “Our world will be a lot more pleasing to the eye.” With the right touch at the right time, he could evolve continents shaped like necklaces—long, sinuous arcs of islands girding the equator. A few larger islands in the temperate zones and they’d have any kind of terrain and climate they could want. “Honestly, you’ll love it, Kate. I know you will. But give me a chance, okay? My reputation’s still important to me—it’s all I’ve got now. Please don’t take that away from me.”

  Each time, her reply was noncommittal. Dugay thought he could detect a steady weakening of her resolve. She said less with each transmission. The time delay bothered him too; the half hour or so it took for signals to cross space between the Brasilia and Delambre made him wonder. Was he imagining the feeling? Like any Lind, loyalty was important to her and he knew she wouldn’t leave the Plutarchy easily. What would she do?

  He was annoyed that he couldn’t answer that question. He didn’t know Kate well enough to be sure. Years of separation had dulled his judgment and guessing wasn’t good enough. He liked precision .

  So he tried to concentrate on the job of taking Jupiter apart.

  For the first few months or so, little change could be detected in the planet’s appearance. The same girdle of bands and stripes twisted their way across the Jovian cloudscape, dotted with the same red blotches and yellow-white loops.

  But soon after that, there appeared a barely discernible ripple along the equator, as the grid pumped electrical current into the atmosphere. Vivid white veins of lightning crackled back and forth. The first faint, nearly invisible streamers of gas had already spun away from Jupiter’s grasp and the fleet of scoops went to work immediately taking them up. A short while later, the first balls of transmuted matter were streaking toward factory terretas in the Outer Fringe.

  By the end of the year, Jupiter had grown a long, luminous thread, unwinding at the equator. The filament was nearly eight thousand kilometers long at the scoop end and the ships flew countless sorties into the stuff every day. From gas to solid, Jupiter’s innards were being transmuted into compact balls of iron and nickel. She was a lode of fabulous wealth; everything was mined and used—hydrogen, helium, oxygen. For a single terreta, Dugay wouldn’t need much but the volatiles they were scooping were so scarce in the Inner Ring that billions could be made in the export trade just on the scraps alone.

  Brasilia cruised the Jovian system for months at a time, while Dugay supervised the operation. He made occasional forays to Big Venice-in-the Belt to fill Jenkins in on their progress. But he preferred to stay away from the populated areas. News of Jupiter’s demise had flooded the System for quite a while and there wasn’t much point in adding to the wound. He was well aware of the consternation the project had caused in the Chamber. In a way, he felt sorry for Kate; the job of explaining it would fall to her. She could more than hold her own there—what delegate wouldn’t think twice before attacking a Lind by name?—and he was sure she would have her hands full with excuses, but all the same, the Inner Ring had been desperate for a shot at the resources of the gas worlds. With the proven success of his centrifugal method for breaking down a planet, the Belt would have a big head start in the race.

  There was nothing to do but wait—and hope. He knew he hadn’t spent the years wisely. There were certain traditions between the Linds and the Dugays, traditions going back to the days of the first human settlements in space. He’d always been expected to use his talents in the service of the ancient alliance, to cement the concordance and friendship of the families. But he had ignored that duty. He’d saved his art and imagination for other things and now he regretted it. What difference did it make that he could build worlds and destroy them when the art of loving someone took years to master.

  That was the most sublime and complex design of all.

  6.

  A full year passed before Dugay was satisfied that enough matter had been extracted to make a good start with the new Ring. Jupiter would keep spinning for a few more years but already the title of King of the Planets had fallen to Saturn. The planet would slough off matter for a while longer, then turn colder and more inert than she had ever been before. But that wouldn’t last long. He had proven the feasibility of extracting building materials by pumping a wo
rld full of current. Other expeditions would follow and he had little doubt Jupiter would be picked clean in half a century at most.

  He’d found the work stimulating, after a decade’s hiatus, though not in the ways he imagined. Scores of new terretas had been built and many were already being towed to new orbits beyond the Belt. Civilization in space expanded by concentric rings like a tree, and Dugay had already visited the System’s newest vegas, a dingy realm of casinos, cathouses and tinglerooms called Lustre-of-Gold. Even a few Delambrian Chamber deputies had secretly made trips there.

  He’d even taken on a few commissions from wealthy Belt traders for small private planets. Nothing elaborate—Moon-sized worlds were popular and tropical paradises were all the rage. But Dugay knew that fashions changed and in his spare time, he worked up plans for desert planets, ocean planets (really a big drop of water, several thousand kilometers wide), jungle planets and any other design for which there seemed to a demand. It kept him busy for a while but not busy enough to wonder.

  There had been no news from Delambre for over a year, since his last talk with Kate. The silence made him anxious and he invented things to worry about. He realized that he missed Kate—he missed her needling and heckling. He felt numb without it. It just wasn’t like her to remain quiet and do nothing for so long.

  He toured the new Ring, watching from Brasilia as terretas were spun out of spider webs of beams, ironballs were smelted and fused into planetoids. Construction was feverish and, like any frontier, fortunes could be made or lost in a single day. He should have been gratified that he had made it all possible but he wasn’t. He was still unsatisfied. Something was missing.

  He cared about Kate and he couldn’t hide it any longer. She wouldn’t have come to Patagonia if she hadn’t felt the same way. He understood the mechanics of stress and why terretas were so pleasing to the eye. He understood aesthetic proportions and how to build a planet from scratch. He knew how to mine gas worlds and change climates. But people eluded him. People and their feelings—that was the one challenge he’d failed to master.

  He was brooding in Brasilia’s stateroom when Lorenzo Jenkins called.

  “Don’t be such a recluse, Dugay. Come to Big Venice and join the human race. I’m hosting a party—nothing much but every Belt merchant worth his name will be there. You’re the guest of honor.”

  Dugay was staring blankly at a vid on his desktop, idly putting his private planet through cycles of continent formation, glaciation, and a dozen other hypothetical processes. He mumbled his reply.

  “It’s all for nothing. You know that, Jenkins? Nothing. I thought this was what I was restless for but it wasn’t. Ten years I spent in splendid seclusion, planning my big return. This was going to be it.” He frowned, switched off the vid. “But it isn’t. It’s still not enough. I’m rich beyond measure and famous beyond belief. I’ve got powers and privileges most men can’t even dream of. Yet I’m still not satisfied. What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re a congenital overachiever.”

  “It’s more than that. It’s my punishment for Athalonia.”

  Jenkins was perplexed. “Athalonia? What are you talking about? That was before your time.”

  “You’re a generous man.”

  “Look,” said Jenkins, “if it’s work you want, it’s work you’ll get. I’ve got another project in mind. Saturn, this time. Ring-mining will be feasible before you know it and I want to be the first.”

  Dugay shook his head. “Saturn’s one of the greatest pleasures in the System. Why tinker with it? Some things should be left alone.”

  Jenkins squinted into the screen. “Your last transmission was garbled, Philippe. I thought you said some things should be left alone.”

  “I did.”

  “I was afraid of that.” He held his stomach. “Let me digest this for a minute. What if I commissioned you to do another Saturn, only better? Say a halo of ringed worlds all around the Sun. Hell, we could even have another Sun, make the Solar System a binary arrangement. Fusion techniques have come a long way, you know.”

  “It’s no good,” Dugay replied. “Let other architects do it. Terraforming’s a stunt and I’m through performing. There’s something else I want to do.”

  “What could be more momentous than redesigning the Solar System?”

  “Learning how to love.”

  “Sentimental tripe. That’s nothing to what I’m offering.”

  “It’s everything,” Dugay said. “Terraforming’s a science now. The techniques don’t change that much from one planet to the next. But love is different. It’s an art and a hard one, with no rules to follow. Look at me, Jenkins—what do you see?”

  “I see the most famous and successful terraforming architect in the history of the Universe, that’s what. A living, breathing monument.”

  “Exactly. But I don’t want to be a monument. I just want to be needed. I may be the most highly skilled, thoroughly trained, brilliantly inspired artist in history when it comes to terraforming. But where people are concerned, I know less than my students. Less even than my own son. I can’t explain that but it’s true.”

  Jenkins sighed. “This sounds serious. Sure you haven’t been baked silly by solar wind?”

  “I’m quitting the project, Jenkins. I don’t need it anymore. I’m going back to the Inner Ring to see Kate Lind.”

  “Then you’d better stop by Big Venice on your way. I’ve just agreed to a council with the Plutarch of Delambre. She’s coming to Big Venice the day after tomorrow.”

  “Kate’s coming there? Why—how?”

  Jenkins chuckled. “Slow down. It’s a parley, between the Inner Ring and the Belt states. Commercial agreements are the main agenda. They want our volatiles and they think it’s about time to talk terms. Why don’t you drop in and we’ll talk about this quitting of yours?”

  “I’m on my way right now,” Dugay said.

  Brasilia detached herself from the fleet, leaving a man Farumah in charge and took a high-risk path through the crowded Jewelpack region of the Belt. Big Venice lay near the center of the Outer Fringe, a week’s journey by the normal routes of the ore drive. But Dugay ignored standard procedure and plunged through the course of a major ironball stream, to make Big Venice in a few days. It was like drifting through a shooting gallery.

  He roamed the ship impatiently, thinking about Kate. A convocation at Big Venice? Commercial treaties? Not Kate, he laughed. She doesn’t give up that easily. That’s one persistent woman.

  But why the silence on Athalonia? He stuck a nemocap on his head and extracted the memory, replaying it over and over again. No doubt about it—she had been serious about the threat. But something had happened in the last year. He found the memory painfully fresh and put it aside. I’ve changed too. That was another being back there, bitching about roses. Funny how time makes puppets out of people.

  Brasilia made rendezvous in record time.

  Big Venice-in-the-Belt was an architect’s nightmare. The settlement (you could hardly call it a city) clung to a small potato of an asteroid like an ugly parasite. From just above the landing fields, buried in a crater basin at the “south pole,” Dugay could take in the surface layout of the complex, which wasn’t much. Most of the fun lay burrowed deep inside, as much as three kilometers underground, indeed all the way to the core. Underneath the dusty gray badlands, Big Venice had been tunneled out until it looked like a rat’s maze to the novice visitor. Up on top, cargo tubes sneaked up from the south, looking a great deal like some silvery-white moss had taken root and spread its stems around the asteroid.

  Inside though, Big Venice was a scooper’s heaven. The place was laid out so that a casual stroll was impossible. The unwary visitor was bedeviled at every turn in the plunging, vertiginous corridors of the asteroid. There were cathouses and tinglerooms, bars and saloons, dingy holes and well-lighted pubs. Games and cha
ses and fights spilled out into the passageways and time after time, Dugay was dragged into dark caverns which could change in an instant from cabarets to stadiums to brothels and back again. He made tedious progress toward the center of the world, sucked along by a tide of revelry that wouldn’t quit.

  The heart was the casino, an eerie, half-lit realm of low-gravity where hordes of leaden-eyed bettors followed the trajectories of slowly spinning dice from one cyber-croupier to the next. Dugay squeezed through a miasma of foul breath and hallucinogenic smoke and wandered back and forth, looking for Jenkins. The click of dice and the slow pirouette of roulette balls in their three-dimensional tumble cubes were all that animated the room. Everything else seemed hypnotized, or dead.

  An arm reached out and held him fast. He turned and saw a cyber-guard, its synthflesh face smeared into a permanent half-smile. With painful force, the unit directed him toward a room above the ceiling, behind a row of TRICKSTER panels. An oval of dim red light shown down from above. At the guard’s urging, Dugay pulled himself up a pole.

  He poked through the oval and found himself in a chamber full of floating spheres. The room itself was round and quite large, though deceptive. Other globes studded the walls and ceiling, some drifting freely, each one a telemonitor showing several perspectives of every niche and hole in the city. In among the scenes of vice and corruption was yet another globe, this one the smiling, now laughing form of Lorenzo Jenkins, drifting like a weightless Buddha.

  “Come in, come in, welcome to my office. Sit anywhere.” He swept his arms in a wide circle. “A drink, perhaps? No? Ah, well, then perhaps we can chat. Excuse me.” Jenkins’ eye shifted quickly to a globe on his right, where a white dot was flashing in the lower left-hand corner. Jenkins stared for a moment and the light blipped out. “A customer who thought he could beat the house. No problem. I jammed his gizmo for good. Now, let’s talk about bribing you to stay on.”

  “I’m nearly incorruptible,” Dugay told him. “Has Kate arrived yet?”

  “You’re the first,” Jenkins replied. “She’s on her way, I’m told. There was a little delay. Care to meet some Belt-side delegates?”

  “Who’s represented?”

  “Anybody with money. Lustre-of-Gold, Corsica, Eden Gardens, Pittsburgh, you name it, they’re here. I could score a lot of points by showing you off.”

  “Maybe so but your number one prize thoroughbred genius is tired. Kindly have one of your lovely cyber-Mates escort me to my suite. And send up a cyber-masseur while you’re at it. My back needs major surgery.”

  Jenkins put up his guest in the Plutarch’s Suite, on the house. He had a fine view of the landing fields, where he hoped to spy on the arrival of the Delambrian ship, but the rubdown made him drowsy and the wine and soy-veal put him to sleep. He had vague recollections of nude dancers in the room and an embarrassing dream about taking part in estredo, a fertility ballet for which Big Venice was famous. But no ships came and the dream soon vanished into oblivion.

  Dugay was still groggy when the trilling of the message alarm aroused him. He groaned and punched it on, blinking furiously at the round shape on the screen.

  Jenkins’ voice cut through the fog. “There’s been an accident, Philippe. The Delambrian ship’s in trouble. We picked up an auto-distress signal a few minutes ago.”

  “Auto-distress…” Dugay mumbled, wiping sleep crystals from his eyes. “Kate—is she…okay…?”

  “I don’t know. Evidently, there was an explosion on board. We’re scanning a cloud of debris about twenty million klicks from here now. Could be an ore driver’s slag dump; we’ll know for sure in a few hours. Our orbit’ll take us within ten million klicks.”

  Dugay was fully awake and frowning. “Do you have the ship at all? What kind of vehicle was it?”

  “Scan shows nothing but debris, however that’s not necessarily bad news. There are several rockbodies in the vicinity they could have gotten to. It was a Nomad II, New Texas make, registered to the Delambrian Chamber of Deputies, according to the signal we received. Bearing an official delegation too—parts of the message were encoded. I’m afraid it’s them all right.”

  Dugay felt hollow. I shouldn’t have left Patagonia. It’s my fault. “We have to do something, Jenkins. You said there were rockbodies in the vicinity.”

  “A few dozen. Mostly garbage dumps, or mined-out asteroids. None over ten klicks in diameter.” Jenkins weighed his next words carefully. “We’ve only got one certified recovery ship and it’s over at Sierra being renovated.” He shrugged sheepishly. “We don’t invest much in ships around here. No point in it with so many ore drivers and shippers around.”

  Dugay was already pulling on some clothes. “Any scoopers or trucks nearby?”

  Jenkins shook his head. “We’re off track for the next few weeks. Tycho Industries is working an iceberg with a whole fleet of scoops though.”

  “How close?”

  “Two weeks behind us, I’m afraid. There’s nobody else.”

  “Then it’s got to be us.”

  “With what? We’re still ten days from closet approach. If anybody’s made it to those rockbodies, they’d be dead by the time we got there.”

  “You’re a fountain of optimism, Jenkins. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, anything is possible when you’re determined enough. You got jumpships?”

  “Three but you’ll never—“

  “Never say never. Meet me up top, at the landing field. Better yet, send a cyberMate to show me the way. A body could get lost around here.”

  He made it to the port of Big Venice by stuffing himself inside a supply pod and shooting through the cargo tubes, avoiding the gauntlet of diversions the Mate was programmed to steer him toward. Jenkins was already there, fidgeting like a puppy. They spent three hours rigging a jumpship with supplies and extra gas.

  “It only holds two people,” Jenkins said. “What if you do find someone alive?”

  “Those supply pods are pressurized, aren’t they? They’d have to be since the transit tubes are open to space. We’ll fill a few of them with food and water and tow ‘em along behind us. They’ll do very nicely as rescue spheres.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  The jumpship was pretty much a big metal egg, with a wraparound canopy on top, a couple of body slings inside in place of seats and a small rocket at the bottom. Manipulator arms were tucked against the side like a bird’s wings; jumpers were little more than tugs, sometimes used to help a scooper nestle his craft safely into Big Venice’s cradles.

  Dugay stowed emergency supplies inside, made sure the supply/rescue pods were securely lashed to the davits and suited up.

  “Come on, Jenkins. The fresh air will do you good.”

  Jenkins eyed him dubiously. “Me in that thing? You have a marvelous sense of humor. I’m bigger than it is.”

  Dugay picked a suit size labeled XXX-LARGE off the rack and threw it at him. “Wiggle into that. You won’t weigh a thing once we leave.”

  The Plutarch swore but didn’t resist as a trio of Mates stretched the garment over him. He snorted impatiently until he was packed inside nice and snug.

  “I can’t breathe in this straitjacket.”

  Dugay helped him in through the hatch. “We have oxygen on board. You can breathe later.”

  They settled into the cramped cockpit and settled down. Jumpships were spring-launched since the asteroid had a low escape velocity. The coils gave them a strong kick and soon afterward, Big Venice was no more than a medium-sized gray boulder, dwindling rapidly behind. A few hours later, it was a mere dust mote, nearly invisible against the star field.

  For a day, they tracked the auto-distress signal and passed the time taking turns trying to spot the source. It was emanating from somewhere among a batch of oblong rockbodies; the enhanced view showed hundreds of separate fragments, all of them potentially big enough to shel
ter survivors. Dugay used the motor sparingly. He knew he would have to conserve enough fuel to make a good search and save some for the return trip.

  The supply pods dangled behind them like balloons. They could only hope that they’d brought enough food, water and oxygen to go around. The pods could hold one person comfortably, two in a pinch. But if there were more than four or five survivors, it could be nasty.

  After a two-day ride that seemed like a year, the jumper passed the first of the smaller asteroids and, as they had suspected, it was a dump. Even without the scopes, they could see the low hills of slag and junked equipment, glittering like a gold vein in the sunlight. Someday, Dugay thought, archaeologists will fight each other over the right to sift through all that trash. They’ll write learned dissertations on the meaning of it all.

  They drifted through a small constellation of half-lit rock clumps, too small to worry about. They were tumbling rapidly, probably the ejections of some ore truck’s slag jet. The signal weakened during the passage, scattered by the debris, so Dugay nudged them above it and resumed tracking.

  They found the first piece of wreckage drifting silently behind a larger asteroid, a blackened, fused orb of twisted metal that still scanned hot.

  “Looks like an explosion of some kind,” said Dugay. His heart sank at the thought. The chances for survivors were narrowing. “That’s an engine thrust chamber, by the shape of it.”

  More wreckage followed: sheared-off beams, a portion of a dish antenna, a chair still intact, a mangled mess of tubing, a ruptured spherical vessel. The scraps were too closely bunched to be anything but a recent catastrophe.

  “Let’s plot the trajectories of the biggest pieces and get an average. Maybe we can extrapolate where it happened.”

  Dugay fed the computer what it wanted and it soon gave them a course to follow. He put the jumper into an intersecting orbit and dreaded what they would find.

  Kate—I love you wherever you are. He tried the words out in his mind. It wasn’t fair, not having the chance to use them. She’s a tough old bitch—she just can’t be gone now. Not now.

  “There it is!” Jenkins cried out. He grunted trying to maneuver himself for a better view. “Allah be damned—will you look at that.”

  Dugay did and it was sickening. Nomad class cruisers were supposed to look like big bread loaves, tapered at both ends with a girdle of radiation panels amidships to bleed heat into space from the pulse engines. The Delambrian vessel looked like a celery stick.

  The engine pods had been wracked by a terrific explosion. That end of the cruiser looked like a giant hand had squeezed it too hard. It was crumpled, bunched and twisted, and still surrounded by a hail of spinning junk. There should have been an intense sheath of radiation in the area but measurements proved otherwise. Dugay was puzzled.

  “It’s almost like it imploded. The radiation is confined very neatly to a small band around the back of the ship. It looks deliberate.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t see how anyone could have survived that. What’s happened to the signal?”

  “It was stronger than ever until we closed with the cruiser. Then it just stopped.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “See for yourself.”

  It was true. Dugay backed off and the signal resumed. It had to be nearby. The auto-distress transmitter was contained in a little capsule that could either be ejected from a ship in trouble or taken off by the crew to mark their location. A steady pulse filled the cockpit.

  “It’s coming from that rock over there,” said Jenkins. “The big one.”

  Dugay approached the asteroid—it looked like a barbell, tumbling slowly about its long axis. He ventured as close as he dared, while Jenkins trained the scope on it. The crust was fissured at several points and peppered with craters of all sizes. Plenty of places to ride out an emergency.

  “Anything?” Dugay asked.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “What—“

  “Take a look.”

  Dugay grabbed the instrument and swung it into position. He peered in.

  The terrain was a forbidding chaos of cracks, craters and caves. A fine patina of gray-brown dust dulled what little light there was. He panned the scope a bit and saw it: a blinking light…red/white, red/white. The computer confirmed it. The light was the source of the signal.

  Dugay let out a whoop of joy, then told the computer to amplify the ambient light, filtering out the beacon. He wanted a better look at the camp.

  The scene was incredible. Three parallel rows of portahuts lay off to one side of the beacon. The camp had been set up with obvious care and lacked any resemblance to emergency shelter at all. A solar cell array had been erected on a hill above the plateau where the huts were situated. It could have been a prospectors’ camp, hunting for valuable ores, except for the wreckage of the cruiser above them. Dugay didn’t know what to make of it.

  He knew they were being baited but he moved the jumper as near to the asteroid as he could. Its gravity was weak but measurable, so he had to settle for an orbit about two kilometers above the surface. Too far to jump.

  “How are you going to get down there?” Jenkins asked. “We didn’t bring any scooter packs.”

  Dugay thought for a moment. “Maybe I can ride one of those supply pods down. Those tow lines are about a kilometer long, aren’t they?”

  “About that, yes.”

  “Suppose we do this: I button up my suit and hang onto the pod, while you give us just enough thrust to approach the rock at a steady rate. When you get about a kilometer or so from the surface, stop thrusting and hold where you are. If I’m right, inertia will rotate the pod right on down to the ground, or at least close enough for me to jump.”

  “That’s the craziest stunt I ever heard of.”

  “At least I’m resourceful. Just make sure you don’t go any closer than a kilometer. I don’t want to be smashed by the pod when I hit the ground.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t but that never stopped me before. Did I ever tell you that Athalonia was all my fault?”

  “No and I don’t want to hear about it. Take it easy out there.”

  Dugay exited the cabin and pulled himself hand over hand to the end of the tow line. He found a good purchase on top of the pod, where the line fastened to a ring. Jenkins started his descent.

  It worked so well that Dugay almost laughed out loud. When the jumper halted and stabilized itself a kilometer above a deep canyon, Dugay got himself ready to fly. For a terrifying moment, he was certain that the arc of the pod’s swing would throw him right into the far wall of the canyon. But Jenkins saw the problem in time and lifted the jumper a few hundred meters with a brief spurt on the rockets. He cleared the gorge and saw a patch of open plain.

  Then, he jumped.

  The free fall took several minutes so he had plenty of time to gauge his point of impact. The craters made for pleasant scenery but Dugay had other ideas. That little wedge of ground between them would do very nicely.

  He was surprised at the give of the rock. It was porous and crumbled easily when he struck the ground and bounced up a few meters from the squat. That explained why the asteroid had been passed by. No minerals here—just a big dirt clod.

  The bright and regular flash of the beacon showed him the way to go. Dugay took off, loping like a kangaroo over hill and crater, sometimes thirty meters to a bound. He leaped to the plateau in a single motion and stopped.

  This is quite a little settlement, he realized. Somebody came prepared for a long stay. It seemed like a silly place for a resort, unless Jenkins had expansion plans of some kind. Dugay studied the huts for a moment. Each one was a short, fat hexagon, rounded on top to deflect meteoric dust. Very much like the shacks he’d used on the Moon in the latter stages of the atmosphere project. Almost a bungalow
. He and Kate had stayed in one at Tranquility Beach once.

  He was mystified and searched out the entrance hatch. It was right where it should be and he covered the distance in two giant strides.

  He rapped on the metal and it opened a few minutes later. A suited figure with a dark helmet visor greeted him. Dugay hand signaled his radio frequency but got no response. Instead, his host closed the hatch behind them and pressurized the airlock. There was something familiar about the way he was standing.

  An audible hiss told them it was safe. Dugay hurriedly removed his helmet and waited for his host to do likewise. But he didn’t. He shoved open the door and motioned Dugay to step through.

  A half a dozen people were inside the hut, lounging around tables and sofas, all quite comfortable. The furnishings were Delambrian without a doubt—right down to the glitterglobes hovering in mid-air. Several women watched him with scarcely concealed grins. In spite of himself, Dugay smiled back at them; it seemed like the thing to do. They were the strangest bunch of castaways he’d ever encountered.

  His host started to remove his own helmet but had trouble with a latch. Dugay turned around and offered to help but he backed away, insisting on doing it himself. With a clumsy yank and a loud oath, the helmet came off.

  Dugay’s mouth dropped open.

  It was Kate Lind. And it wasn’t Kate Lind. It was—Dugay blinked and stared and squinted all at once. It was Kate Lind. Only she’d changed her appearance.

  “What in the name of Odin happened to you?” He grabbed her shoulders and hugged her, then stepped back for a better look. “What have you done?”

  Kate laughed and handed him the balky helmet. She whirled around for him. “Do you like it? I’m surprised you even recognized me. The doctors worked for months on the alteration.”

  Dugay gaped at the changes. She’d lost thirty years in her face. Her eyes were larger, further apart, giving her a less mischievous, less elfin look. Her nose was flatter, cheeks higher, making her face an oval with a keen edge for a chin. She seemed taller, even stronger. No more the sly pretense of vulnerability. She’d have to wear her new bearing with more dignity.

  “I don’t understand,” Dugay said.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Kate scolded him. She wriggled out of her suit and Dugay saw even more changes. Her entire body was new—leaner, firmer. She was naked and he approved. She let herself be held and he realized her skin was more supple and textured than ever, it was a tight, glistening new coat, darker than before. He questioned her with his eyebrows. “It’s called regenerative surgery. The best possible disguise.”

  “Disguise? Why?”

  She poked him in the ribs. “To be with you, stupid.” She took him by the arm and led him through a hatch and into another chamber. There was a hammock suspended from the ceiling. The bed swayed with the air currents. “You don’t think I could get away with abdicating otherwise, do you?”

  “Abdicating? You?”

  She started undressing him. “Sure. Oh, Philippe, I couldn’t. I mean—“ She helped him out of the suit and tossed the undergarments to a girl by the hatch. “—I would have. You hurt me, you know. Badly. I wanted to kill you for the things you said at Patagonia that day. I couldn’t make you see at all. You can’t know what it’s like at Delambre. It’s a prison—I’m expected to be strong and impartial and resolute, because of my name. But I’m not.” She fastened his arms around her waist. “I can’t be my father anymore. I need to be held, like a woman. Both of us are victims, in a way. We’ve both got to shed our old skins and live as different people now.”

  The girl at the hatch coughed quietly and said, “Anything else, ma’am?”

  Kate said, “No, Deela. That’s all for now. Oh, would you turn off the beacon and the distress signal? We don’t need it anymore.” She grinned at him, as Deela pulled the door to.

  “A trick?”

  Her grin broadened. “Sort of. Don’t you get it? I could never appear to abdicate the Plutarchy. That would never do for a Lind; there would have been chaos. My brothers and sisters would have been murdered in a week. If I’d just quit the job and left, we’d have Ice Wars all over again, with each state trying to command the volatiles trade in the Inner Ring. Nobody could control that bunch of hotheads.”

  “So you staged an accident.”

  “You’re so clever, Philippe. The Chamber has procedures to deal with the death of the Plutarch. Grief guarantees a fairly orderly transition. My sister Kinelly will succeed me, in all likelihood, and she can use my ‘tragic demise’ as a test of loyalty. So far as they know, Kate Lind and her entire court perished in a cruiser explosion in the Belt. My ties are cut and, for the first time in my life, I’m free.”

  “That explains the surgery.”

  “And the silence. I was all ready to tell the System about you, Philippe. Our little secret would have turned Delambre inside out.” She pulled out of his arms and went to the hatch, where she brushed aside a curtain over the porthole. She watched Deela and the others for a moment. “But I couldn’t, damn it. I just couldn’t. I needed you too much.”

  “Kate, you—“

  “No,” she said. “I want to say this. I have to say it. I went through all this subterfuge because I’m selfish. I can’t help what I am. I wanted to preserve my family’s name and influence in the Chamber but I wanted to have you too. That’s why I came back to Patagonia after all those years—to try again. I’m not sure why—I just had to. I think the Linds and the Dugays are just meant for each other. Fate and history binds us together.”

  Dugay came over and kissed her lightly on the forehead. They didn’t touch.

  “I’ve forgotten how to love, Kate. If I ever knew. I was afraid of you when I lived at Balmoral, afraid of what you knew and what you could do. And when you came to Patagonia and threatened me with—well, hell, I was just plain scared. All I’d done, you could have undone.”

  “Yet you went ahead?”

  Dugay nodded and coaxed her back into his arms. “Like you, I had to. I had to see if I still had the touch. I needed to know, Kate—it was important for me to get away and see just once if I could do something without you supporting me.”

  “Male pride…did you learn what you wanted?”

  “More than I wanted,” he admitted. “I was restive and impatient at Patagonia those years I did no work. I thought it was because the gas worlds were still undeveloped. But it wasn’t. There was something else I hadn’t done.”

  They surveyed each other for a second, then tumbled lazily down to the floor in each other’s arms, laughing. Kate mussed his hair.

  “You’re impossible. Really. I don’t know if I believe a word you say.”

  Dugay clasped her tightly, scratching her back. “You jealous witch. Why should I care what happens to you?”

  She slapped him playfully and the impact sent him sprawling through the air. “Because you love me, you dolt. Now get into that bed.”

  Dugay sprang up. “Wait a minute. I forgot about Jenkins. He’s out there in a jumpship full of emergency supplies.” There was an exterior porthole just above the bed and Dugay bounded up to it. He looked out. “Kate, come here. You should see this.”

  She leaped into the hammock and joined him, kneeling on the edge. Dugay moved aside and pushed her up to the glass.

  Outside, a glittering river of lights sparkled by the asteroid, speeding by overhead and then disappearing below the hills behind the camp. Each droplet seemed to shimmer like a meteor.

  “What are they?”

  “Ironballs from Jupiter,” Dugay told her. “Heading for factory terretas in the Belt. Sunlight makes them glint like that.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Kate murmured. “Let’s make a wish.”

  “All right, but you asked for it.” He thought for a moment. “What about this: I wish I knew the design for the most perfect love th
ere is.”

  Kate beamed at him and pulled the shade down over the porthole. “Now there’s a wish I think I can grant.”

  END