“I’m wondering what this year’s election will be like. How many people vote the way they do out of spite, do you think?”
May’s face went blank, and she got out her phone and did a search herself. It took a while. Finally she said, “I can’t find any smear ads.”
Toby felt his jaw drop.
“Or panic ads. And that’s with an asteroid coming in…” She checked something else. “… and the turnout at the primaries so far is low. Lower than usual.” She did another check. “Toby, the largest turnout is Libertarian. They don’t vote
at
other people. How did you know?”
He shrugged. “I’m an extrovert. I pay a lot of attention to people. —Behave,” he said as she grinned and opened her mouth.
She closed her phone, then grabbed it out of the air as it suddenly rang and startled her.
“Nice save.”
“Thanks. Good God, it’s Sam Berlioz. —Hi, Sam, how in the world did you get my number?” There was a long wait, then she said, “I guess nobody else is likely to, then. What’s up?” After an even longer wait, she said, “I see. Thanks, Sam. How you doing?” As she listened, her expression went from concerned to pleased, then astonished. Finally she said, “Wow. Keep me posted, will you? I like hearing from you. And thanks again.” She signed off and said, “Samantha did the software for us. Hacker, crypto fanatic, so the phone call’s secure. We hired her out of prison. She says there’s a woman asking questions about me. Sam’s young again, and pregnant. So’s her co-wife. Their husband is chief of engineering at Andes Motors, incredibly smug, and exhausted, as you may imagine.”
Ordinarily Toby would have been deeply and pruriently interested in details of the arrangement described, but at the moment he had higher priorities. “What kind of questions?”
“Questions about what Wyndham Launch had wanted to do next if things hadn’t gone sour. Alice Johnson. Looked Arab but dressed and talked American. Didn’t flash any ID, but she sounded Federal. Sam pointed her at the old Web site, and came on to her when she persisted, and she went away. Said Johnson looked angry when she made the pass, but not angry at Sam. You didn’t even leer when I said her husband was exhausted.”
“He’s running errands for
two
pregnant women. I wasn’t an only child, you know. How’d she get your number?”
“Worked out a list of possibilities for what my new name might be, by remembering everything I’d ever said to her, then went down the list hacking systems until she got a phone number. Her memory was always incredible, but now it must be perfect.”
Toby winced. “I’m not sure I’d want to be a kid in that house. —What am I saying? No kid is ever going to get yelled at for trivial reasons again. Not twice by the same person, anyway.”
May’s eyes widened. “I already thought Connors was playing God. Now I’m not sure he’s playing.”
“I am,” Toby realized. “But he’s not playing God. He’s just playing.”
XVII
And a rock feels no pain.
And an island never cries.
—PAUL SIMON
1
Alice Johnson—she’d had her name changed to antagonize her family—had been mutilated as a little girl, to prevent her from “committing adultery with herself.” It had the effect of making her a fanatically dedicated pursuer of terrorism. It also made her need to take a tranquilizer every time someone came on to her. After questioning Berlioz she meant to return to her hotel, but she decided to look in on the Games first. Her ID got her into the U.S. section of the Village, and persuasion got her to the field as the shooting competition was starting.
It wasn’t what she’d expected, but she did approve: this year, before shooting, the competitor had to assemble a standard bolt-action rifle. That was timed, too.
JNAIT lost its first gold in that event. Their man was the most accurate, but the Switzer got his rifle together a lot faster than anyone else. Another Indian came out to talk with the dismayed man, and after a minute or so they both went over to congratulate the winner, who looked astonished at their doing so. The two shooters went on talking as they went to take the winners’ stand, and the other man came back past Alice. He stopped, turned, and said, “Alice Johnson?”
She jumped slightly. Wishing she was armed, she said, “Have we met?”
“No. I saw your picture on the Al Jazeera site, way back when you had your name changed. I consider you a remarkably cool person. Mycroft Yellowhorse.” He stuck out his hand.
She’d missed the events, but knew the name. “Fastest Man Alive,” she said, shaking it.
He grinned. Perfect teeth. “So far. Chill suits are going to catch on. Are you expecting trouble? Last I checked you were a terrorism analyst.”
“You a spy or something?”
“Nah. I might be a stalker if I could spare the time. I like being around cool people. There’s a question pending.”
“Oh. No, I’m just looking for someone to help with something.”
“In Ecuador? Launch systems. Something to do with the Big Bad Rock, then.”
“You sure you’re not a spy?”
“I don’t take direction that well. May I offer a suggestion?”
She shrugged and nodded. “Can’t promise to take it.”
“Fair enough. Get a budget and make a bid to the next person you talk to about it. The launch business is a
business
. The private sector just wants results. I have another suggestion: while you’re here, take a shower as soon as you get out of bed, even if it’s just a nap. It’s not that hot at this altitude, but equatorial sunshine is brutal. I hope to see you again when you’re feeling better.” He nodded, turned, and continued to the JNAIT benches.
He seemed like a nice guy. Observant, too. Most of how she felt was residual stress from the pass earlier, but sleep and a shower were what she needed for that anyway.
She went back to the hotel room—one of thousands the U.S. government, like most, kept available in major cities all over the world for just such sudden visits—took a pill, watched “news” items about the Big Bad Rock—mostly clips from disaster movies—until she felt drowsy, and slept until the middle of the night.
She awoke ravenous, ordered from room service, stepped into the bathroom for a quick wash, and yelled in amazement when she discovered she was whole again.
2
As Forge finally got around to its final approach to Earth, the supply of oxygen began running low; just about all the rock outside the hot core had been converted. This was as expected. Accelerator tracks had been built to use specks of silicon as reaction mass. The trouble with that was, Earth was surrounded by valuable property, and the specks would go through anything in orbit with terrible effect. Therefore they had chosen a course that would allow them to aim the silicon exhaust outside geosynchronous orbit when they changed drives, keeping a maneuvering reserve of oxygen for rendezvous.
None were concerned that this put them temporarily on a collision course. There would be plenty of time to steer clear.
And there was no reason for anyone on Earth to be worried. Surely it was clear that the entities would not choose to destroy themselves.
XVIII
You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.
—WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST
On Sunday, Toby found out what
Lowdown
was. It wasn’t an altogether awful experience, at least once the segment on the DHS arrests began.
Lowdown
was run in accordance with the finest traditions of broadcast investigative journalism: scrambling the faces and voices of rumormongers to protect them, followed by ambush interviews of overworked desk jockeys, conducted by someone with the kind of voice God would have if God had a bigger ego. It was all Toby could stand to wait it out with the show in a corner of the screen, sound turned low. “
This
is why I don’t check the news,” he told May, as they watched yet another shot of someone running away from the camera.
She didn’t have a direct answer. “Don’t you want to know what Connors is doing about it?”
“I did. Now it feels like I’m slowing down on the way past a wrecked school bus.”
They were silent until the part they wanted came on.
It was called “Chicken Big.”
The title was the politest part of the segment.
Standing before a grim-looking building, anchorman Arthur Fahy sternly informed the world at large, “Attorney General Stephen Wellman has determined to his own satisfaction that the Briareus Project, a nanotechnology-based mission sent out to the asteroid belt twenty-five years ago to bring back enough wealth to make everyone on Earth rich, was actually a terrorist plot. He has ordered agents of the Department of Homeland Security to arrest all the people who were involved in the work—at least, everyone who hasn’t died of old age since then. Most of them are pensioners and can’t afford a lawyer, and were being held incommunicado until we stepped in to provide them with representation. The DHS has described them as uncooperative, but we’ve found all of them to be willing to talk to someone who isn’t threatening them.”
The picture cut to a tiny, elderly Oriental woman with thin white hair. Toby was shocked to recognize Josie Bartlett, who’d done most of the primary work of translating electronic code into rod-and-gear mechanisms. She was sitting at a table in a little room, of the sort immediately recognizable to anyone who watched TV shows involving lawyers. Just past her on the screen was a very large, stern-looking man in a deep gray suit, who might have been brought in to represent her, or might have been casing the place for a covert-ops raid to spring her—or both; he looked like the sort of man who might have a tattoo on him somewhere that said
DISPLAY ADAPTABILITY
. The interviewer was offscreen to the left, and Josie glanced away from him to smile bravely at the camera and raise her hand for a shaky wave at the world.
Josie had once spent half an hour at an office party, before she finally cracked up, convincing Toby that she had come up with a method to allow the nanos to engage in sexual reproduction. This should be good.
Fahy’s voice asked her, “Do you mind telling us about your situation?”
Josie smiled warmly and said, “Honey, I’m seventy years old and I like people. The only problem you might have is getting me to shut up.”
“Do you know why you’ve been arrested?” said Fahy.
“In what sense?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, there’s more than one answer. One way to look at the situation is to just quote the charge the DHS came up with, high-tech terrorism, which basically means building something that they can’t be bothered to understand and wasn’t illegal to build when we made it. Another way is to say I was arrested because somebody in the current administration decided it’d be good for the polls if they looked busy. Both answers have the same origin, though, which is that a bunch of bureaucrats with guns went into a panic and decided to find someone to blame for their hysteria.”
(There was something about Connors that just seemed to rub off on people. Josie had worked with him closely.)
“Have you been well-treated?”
She smiled hesitantly. “I may not be the best person to ask. The body cavity search was the most entertainment I’ve had in ten years.”
The commando lawyer turned his head to stare at her for a moment, then went back to glaring at the guards who were standing by.
“Had you asked for a lawyer before we got here?”
“Every day. Everyone I talked to. Including my cellmates. They’ve given me three different cellmates so far, but they all act like some kind of federal person. They never actually ask what I’m accused of, like a real person would, so they can claim whatever I might say is admissible. I keep getting new ones. I don’t think the ones I’ve had were very healthy. They all look sort of shaky, and it just gets worse as the day goes on. I give them advice about diet, mostly. I’ve had a lot of experience with that sort of thing, too. I let them know about that so they know I’m not just quoting soap operas or something.” Josie started to say something else, and the image jumped to later in the interview. The man seated next to her was slumped a good three inches lower now. He looked sort of shaky.
Both Toby and May missed Fahy’s next question, and part of the answer, which was drowned out by their appalled nervous laughter. The expiration date allowed for by human evolution is well before fertility ends. One consequence of this is that practically anyone past forty or so has at least a few medical stories that are not for the faint of heart. And Josie was seventy.
Josie was saying, “They can link up to deal with more complex stuff on the spot, rather than go back to the main computer for instructions. There’s nothing in their programming that would allow them to destroy themselves, so they’re either doing some kind of navigational maneuver we just haven’t figured out yet, or there’s been some kind of accident that screwed up the basic program in the computer. What we need is to get Toby Glyer in on this.”
“Unfortunately he’s been killed,” said Fahy.
“And you can believe as much of that as you want. Even a government agency wouldn’t be that stupid. It sounds like something someone cooked up to keep people from asking where he is. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s in a Pentagon basement being questioned under drugs. Which is worse than useless, because drugged people aren’t so hot at doing creative work, and that’s what we need here.”
“So you think the government got frustrated and arrested all you folks to put pressure on Glyer?”
“I hardly think it’s the whole government. I’m pretty sure, say, a park ranger would just ask for help. This would have to be just a few people at the top.”
“You think the
president
ordered it?”