“The snack bar?”
“The videogame arcade. Whole point of the Olympics is to show what your people can do in war. Thanks to the Japanese we’ve raised three generations of kids who can knock down a flight of nuclear missiles with their thumbs. It’s certain to make a difference. —Now, as to your question: I sent a program to your bots. You were already saturated with them, like everyone else on the planet. Interesting that you figured out it was me.”
“Post hoc reasoning,” she said. “It was a miracle. You’ve been doing miracles.”
He nodded. “Post hoc does work sometimes. —I had them leave your finger and retina prints alone.”
“Good,” she said nervously. “—Wait, you say everyone has them?”
“Goat Flu. It was a bot. Used virus shells for raw materials. Now nobody’s getting colds, herpes, AIDS, cancer, or any other viral infection. Plus, no more hay fever, and insects that bite you die. The bots also eat pollen and chitin. They don’t last long if they dry out or get into the wrong pH, but they spread well enough by skin contact, and anybody with a cold or the flu sprayed them all over the place. I spent a few weeks at airport departure lines, shaking hands now and then with somebody who had the sniffles. Worked great.”
“Do the bots have anything to do with why I’m so calm about this?” she said with sudden suspicion.
He shrugged. “Not directly. The fact that you’re talking to a funny-looking, mostly white man, in his nineties, who was crippled from birth, but who is now a handsome Indian, a champion athlete, and young, may have had some influence on your thinking.” He put on an expression of polite inquiry. “Could it be that your willing suspension of disbelief has been melted to slag?”
She had to laugh at that.
She thought hard about asking him a question, but decided to ask what she’d originally intended. “Can you get me in touch with May Wyndham?”
“Interesting you should think so. Tell me why you do.”
“Nanotechnology. You must have known Toby Glyer, and he knew her.”
“Not bad. —I believe I could, but it would probably upset her. What do you need?”
“Something that can go up to that rock.”
“By next month?”
“She was the best there ever was,” Alice said.
Yellowhorse—Connors—looked at her for a long moment, then smiled in pure joy. “She was. I’ll find out.”
“What do I call you?” Alice said. “I mean, the different names—”
“Mycroft.” He smiled again. “Mike.”
“No, I like Mycroft. I’m Alice,” she said, and gave the back of his hand a brief pat.
She almost fell out of the chair. For the instant of contact, she was filled with a sense of vibrant health and serene patience, both sensations far beyond anything she had ever imagined. He braced her arm and pushed her upright, a fistful of napkins between his hand and her skin. “You okay?”
“What just happened?” she said.
“In certain circumstances, a woman with a bot network can feel what someone she touches is feeling. I was sick for almost seventy years. Not being sick was a tremendous contrast, and the difference was very hard to get used to. Sometimes it recurs.”
“It can pick up
states of mind
?”
“If I work at it, it can pick up whether or not you like your best friend’s middle name. I’ve gone into someone else’s head a total of twice. I regret both times. People have stuff they deserve to keep private, no matter how awful the people may be. Fortunately nobody else has that kind of control over the bots.”
“What if someone learns?”
“They can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to tell you. I designed them to prevent someone from turning the human race into willing slaves. Whoever controls a communicable, linkable bot can do that. I’m the only person who I
know,
for a certainty, never would.”
She got her head straightened out—mostly; giving up all of that calm assurance was like swearing off hot baths—and said, “Only women?”
He looked self-conscious. “Um. Yeah.”
She felt her ears getting hot. She had a notion what those “certain circumstances” were. All at once she was amused and indignant. “So you just make women get horny whenever you want.”
His face lost all expression. “Agent Johnson, I was sentenced to death for killing two serial rapists. Anybody can make one mistake. Don’t call me a rapist again. Fair enough?”
“I never said you forced anyone,” she said, startled.
“You said I compelled consent.” He stood, took a step back, and said, “That’s two. Initially it was nice meeting you. Good day.”
“It’s still consent,” she protested.
He looked down at her, inhaled and exhaled through his nose, and said, in a low, even voice, “Try to listen just as you would if you didn’t already know everything. It. Is rape. If the check. Bounces. Good day.” He strode out past the counter, speaking to the cashier as he went by. She had to go around the table, and then collided with the kid bringing her ice cream. By the time she got up he was out of sight.
Just so the forces of destiny could screw with her gloomy mood, the ice cream was wonderful.
XX
The business of America is business.
—CALVIN COOLIDGE
1
Toby was enjoying the women’s bicycle races, but on a few past occasions in the course of her work, May had genuinely found more interesting material while watching paint dry. She checked her old e-mail account, read a surprising message, Lilithed the sender, thought it over, and linked up to the system at their house. She’d downloaded her laptop files into it when they’d moved in.
Toby noticed. “Why so busy?”
“Sh.”
Business. He nodded and watched the race in progress.
A good deal later, May said, “Someone from the DHS wants to put up something that can meet the rock, and is offering to pay for help. I’m having our system burn a disc of some plans I made, back in the day. The Rukh assembly line is mostly automated, and if they haven’t changed the core programs it should be able to turn out the parts for our spaceplane in about a week. Another week to assemble, and they can make the fuel while that’s happening. The ship’s all modules. —So who won?”
“I didn’t notice. —Oh, stop grinning!”
May was saved from having to reply by the text light going on. It was from Connors, and said:
Alice Johnson from DHS says they need a spaceplane. She is in Quito, and her personality defects do not include insincerity. Address is Hotel High Incal, room 429.
“The nanos let him judge
character
?” she exclaimed.
Toby shook his head. “He could always do that. Littlemeade had some trouble with pilfering before he came to work for us. Really smooth job. He pointed Security at two people, they got caught. He never could explain how it worked. I think it may have just been that he pays complete attention to people.”
2
At least she was out of the bathtub when she got the call. Alice wrapped herself in the hotel robe and tapped the Picture button, and the night manager said, “Ms. Johnson, there’s someone here with a parcel. Are you expecting a delivery?”
He’d done it anyway. Fast, too. “Yes, send it up.”
“She says she needs a signature.”
“I’ll be at the door.”
She opened at the bell a couple of minutes later, and saw a hotel guard next to a pretty Indian girl in an ACME Delivery uniform. (She seemed to see pretty Indian girls wherever she turned lately.) The girl said, “Ms. Johnson? Signature here.”
She signed and accepted a flat package, thanked her, closed the door, and had the seal open before it occurred to her that most, if not all, of those girls must be working for Yellowhorse. After all,
he
hadn’t always been an Indian.
Or young. She wondered briefly just how old that “girl” really was.
Inside the package was a disc, with a note:
Aero Transcielo can follow the program, and they still pay me licensing fees. Just build the damn thing. Your problem is parasite control. Anyone wants his own improvements on it gets a bullet in the back of the head.
—Wyndham
Alice smiled. Now she really wanted to meet that woman.
She started her laptop and put the disc in.
Two minutes later she called Keith Danton, who she’d left in charge at home.
“—Yes, it’s my boss, I do have to take this. —Yeah, Chief?”
“Wyndham’s sent me a disc with a plan on it. It’s a spaceplane. More cargo than both Shuttles put together, and there’s a factory down here already set up to follow the blueprints.”
“Holy geez, what’d you do, sacrifice a goat?” he said. “That’s terrific! —So now what?”
“So now I phone the Director of Homeland Security and explain that getting someone to the asteroid will salvage the president’s chance of reelection.”
“You might not want to put it just that way. China launched something small this morning, and they’ve announced that they’re going to put up more, assemble a ship in orbit, and turn the asteroid aside ‘for the good of mankind.’”
Alice ran her entire vocabulary of bad words through her head and found none that were adequate. “And if they happen to drop it on India by mistake, ‘oops,’ right?”
“I was more concerned that they’ll be able to get the rock into orbit, under their control—for a consideration. And my Mandarin’s a little rusty.”
Alice grimaced. Not conspicuously better for India, and a lot worse for everyone else. “Then we need to move fast. Talk to you later.”
“Bye.”
Alice disconnected, then used a phone number she was allowed to call exactly once.
XXI
By the work one knows the workman.
—JEAN DE LA FONTAINE
Emanuel Torres had been born on a farm uphill from Ibarra, at a time when everyone in the north end of South America had far too keen a consciousness of the concept of Lebensraum. Every day held the concern of looking northeast and seeing Venezuelan tanks rolling down the highway. Of course, they would have had to come through Colombia, but the television had made it clear that every Colombian who knew how to shoot was living in Los Angeles.
Then the miracles began.
The tanks had never come. The dictator had died of some minor ailment, which went untreated because he was certain that all doctors secretly worked for Israeli Intelligence, and Venezuela turned from militarization to exports of plastics and fertilizer. Those were cheap, and the farms all did better, and a trade school was built near Emanuel’s home. Children were sent there to learn how to fix farm equipment. Emanuel turned out to have a talent with machines. He could fix anything that had ever worked.
And one day a tall blond angel from Heaven had come and asked him if he’d like to build spaceships.
He only had to work eight hours a day, and they fed him when he arrived, and he learned English, and there were the most marvelous things to read in English, and he built spaceships all week, and they
paid
him for all that!
They had paid him for that for almost thirty years now. He had learned more than he had imagined there was to learn, and he understood laminar flow and how a Coanda-Stine ambient athodyd worked, and why Gordon Wyndham had built the largest plane in history: half of its job was to make the liquid oxygen that went into the hybrid orbiters. Wyndham Launch had been bought by its employees and become Aero Transcielo, and when Emanuel suggested handing out astronaut wings for the tourist trade he’d gotten a raise and an office. He still spent most of his time on the line, but now he spent it teaching. He’d seen all the mistakes it was possible to make.
He did have to spend some time in the office every day. Once he had calculated that if all the documents he had had to deal with over the years were printed out on paper, a Rukh loaded with them would barely be able to take off. And that had been a couple of years back.
It was a rare day when he enjoyed spending time in the office.
* * *
He looked in on the Olympics while he was eating his lunch. The Indios had won some more gold medals, and once again everyone was acting like it was remarkable. It had never surprised Emanuel from the start. The Europeans had spent hundreds of years killing every Indio who was weak, slow, or careless.
Emanuel had also learned about evolution. By now some of the Indios were probably bulletproof.
That they had united and gotten rich made sense too. The disorganized ones and the poor bargainers had starved.
He finished eating, sighed, and checked his in-box.
The company had accepted contracts for two special orders. Both were manned orbiters. One was for the USA, and it was a design he’d seen when he’d been learning about the Rukh: a ship that could maneuver in space, land on the Moon, take off from there, and land anywhere on Earth that had a runway—or any long, reasonably flat patch. They also wanted a Rukh, so they could launch it themselves.
The other was for the Indios, and it was the same, but improved. Not by much. There wasn’t a lot to improve. They’d paid in advance for triple shifts, and would be paying A-T to launch it for them.
The designs were in attached files, and they were in the line’s programming format.
Emanuel left his office smiling. Today was a rare day indeed.
The angel was back.
XXII
One for all, or all for one we gage.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Alice was assigned as Official Nagging Pest—“liaison”—to the factory, since a) she was already here, and b) Largo didn’t want a routine-disturber like her
there
.