The Precipice (10 page)

Much of the inner courtyard was given to an exquisitely maintained sand garden. There were green vistas at every turn, as
well: gardens and woods and, off in the distance, a glimpse through tall old trees of Lake Biwa, glittering in the late afternoon
sun.

The tiltrotor plane settled down, turbines screeching, in the outer courtyard. Dan pulled off his sanitary mask and unbuckled
his safety belt. He was through the hatch before the pilot was able to stop the rotors. Squinting through the dust kicked
up by the downwash, Dan saw Nobuhiko Yamagata
waiting at the gate to the inner courtyard, wearing a comfortable kimono of deep blue decorated with white herons, the Yamagata
family's emblem.

For an instant Dan thought he was seeing Saito Yamagata, Nobuhiko's father, the man who had been Dan's boss in the old days
when Randolph had been a construction engineer on the first Japanese solar power satellite. Nobo had been ascetically slim
when he was younger, but now his face and body had filled out considerably. He was tall, though, some thirty centimeters taller
than his father had been, even several centimeters taller than Dan himself.

The two men bowed simultaneously, then grasped each other's shoulders.

“By damn, Nobo, it's good to see you.”

“And you,” Nobuhiko replied, smiling broadly. “It's been much too long since you've visited here.” His voice was deep, strong,
assured.

“You're looking well,” Dan said as Yamagata led him past the flowering shrubbery of the inner courtyard, toward the wing of
the old stone and wood house where the family lived.

“I'm too fat and I know it,” Nobo said, patting his belly. ‘Too many hours behind a desk, not enough exercise.”

Dan made a sympathetic noise.

“I'm thinking of taking a trip to Selene for a nanotherapy session.”

“Aw, come on, Nobo,” Dan said, “it's not that bad.”

“My doctors nag me constantly.”

“That's what the double-damned doctors always do. They learn it in medical school. No matter how healthy you are, they always
find something to worry you about.”

They walked along a winding path of stones set across the middle of the carefully-raked sand garden. Dan noticed the miniature
olive tree off in one corner of the garden that he had given Nobo's father many years earlier. It looked green and healthy.
Before the greenhouse cliff had struck, even in
June the tree would have been covered by a heated transparent plastic dome to protect it from the occasional frost. Now the
winters were mild enough to leave the tree in the open all year long.

“What's your father's status?” Dan asked as they removed their shoes at the open door to the main house. Two servants stood
silently just inside the door, both women, both in carnelian-red robes.

Nobuhiko grimaced as they walked down the hallway lined with shoji screens.

“The medical researchers have removed the tumor and cleaned father's body of all traces of cancerous cells. They are ready
to begin the revival sequence.”

“That can be tricky,” Dan said.

Ten years earlier, Saito Yamagata had had himself declared clinically dead and then frozen in liquid nitrogen, preserved cryonically
to await the day when his cancer could be cured and he would be revived.

“Others have been thawed successfully,” Nobo said as they entered a spacious bedroom. It was paneled in teak, with bare floors
of bleached pine, and furnished sparely: a western-style bed, a desk in the opposite corner, two comfortable-looking recliner
chairs. One wall consisted of sliding shoji screens; Dan figured they covered a closet, built-in drawers, and the lavatory.
Dan saw that his one travel bag had already been placed on a folding stand at the foot of the bed.

“Still,” he said, “thawing must be pretty dicey.”

Yamagata turned to face him, and Dan saw Saito's calm brown eyes, the certainty, the power that a long lineage of wealth and
privilege can bring to a man.

“We have followed the research work very thoroughly,” Nobo said. He smiled slightly. “We have sponsored much of the work ourselves,
of course. It seems that Father could be revived.”

“That's great!” Dan blurted. “Sai will be back with us—”

Nobuhiko raised a hand. “Two problems, Dan.”

“What?”

“First, there are very strong political forces opposing revival of any cryonically-preserved person.”

“Opposing… oh, for the love of Peter, Paul, and Peewee Reese. The New Morality strikes again.”

“Here in Japan it's an offshoot of the New Dao movement. They call themselves the Flowers of the Sun.”

“Flowers of crackpots,” Dan grumbled.

“They have a considerable amount of political power. Enough to get nanotechnology banned in Japan, just as your New Morality
people got it banned in the States.”

“And now they're against reviving corpsicles?”

A reluctant grin cracked Yamagata's solemn expression. “Delicately put, Dan. My father is a corpsicle.”

Waving a hand, Dan said, “You know I don't mean any disrespect.”

“I know,” Nobuhiko admitted. “But the unhappy fact is that these Flowers of the Sun are attempting to pass a law through the
Diet that would forbid cryonics altogether and make it a crime to attempt to revive a frozen body.”

“Why, for god's sake? On what grounds?”

Nobuhiko shrugged. “They say the resources should be spent in rebuilding our ravaged cities. They say that we don't need rich
old people to be brought back among us, what we need are healthy young people who can work hard to rebuild Japan.”

“Bullcrap,” Dan muttered. Then he brightened. “Hey, I know how you can get around them! Fly your father up to Selene. They'll
revive him there. They can even use nanomachines if they have to.”

Nobo sat on the bed, his shoulders sagging. “I've thought of that, Dan. I'm tempted to do it, especially before the government
bars removal of frozen bodies from the country.”

“They can't do that!”

“They will, before the next session of the Diet is over.”

“Goddammit to hell and back!” Dan shouted, pounding his fist into his palm. “Has the whole stupid world gone crazy?”

“There's something else,” Nobo said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Something worse.”

“What on earth could be worse?”

“The people who have been revived. Their minds are gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean?”

With a helpless spread of his hands, Nobuhiko repeated, “Gone. The body can be revived, but apparently the freezing process
wipes out the brain's memory system. Those we've revived are mentally like newborns. They even have to be toilet trained all
over again.”

Dan sank into one of the plush recliners. “You mean Sai's mind… his personality… gone?”

“That's what we fear. Apparently the neural connections in the brain break down when the body is frozen. The mind comes out
a virtual
tabula rasa”

“Shit,” Dan muttered.

“We have our research scientists working on the problem, of course, but there's no point to reviving my father until we know
definitely, one way or the other, how his mind has been affected by the freezing.”

Dan hunched forward, forearms on his thighs. “Okay. I understand now. But get Sai's body to Selene. Now! Before these religious
fanatics make it impossible to move him.”

Nobuhiko nodded grimly. “I believe you're right, Dan. I've felt that way myself for some weeks now, but I'm glad that you
agree.”

“I'm heading up to Selene next week,” Dan said. “If you like, I'll take him with me.”

“That's very good of you, but this is a family matter. I'll take care of it.”

Dan nodded. “Okay. But if you need any help—anything at all, just let me know.”

Nobuhiko smiled again, and for the first time there was real warmth in it. “I will, Dan. I certainly will.”

“Good.”

The younger man rubbed at his eyes, then looked up at Dan again. “Very well, I've told you my problem. Now tell me yours.
What brings you here?”

Dan grinned at him. “Oh, nothing much. I just need a couple of billion dollars.”

Nobo's face remained completely impassive for a long moment. Then he said, “Is that all?”

“Yep. Two bill should do it.”

“And what do I get in return for such an investment?”

With a chuckle, Dan replied, “A bunch of rocks.”

P
ancho looked up, bleary-eyed, from her desktop screen. Across the room that she and Amanda were sharing, Mandy sat at her
desk with virtual reality glasses and earphones covering half her face, peering intently at her own screen.

“I'm goin' for a walk,” she said, loudly enough to get through Mandy's earphones.

Amanda nodded without taking off the VR glasses. Pancho squinted at the screen, but it was nothing but a jumble of alphanumerics.
Whatever Mandy was studying was displayed on her glasses, not the computer screen.

Their dorm room opened directly onto the patio. Cripes, it's almost sundown, Pancho saw as she stepped outside. The late afternoon
was still tropically warm, humid, especially after the air-conditioned cool of their quarters.

Pancho stretched her long arms up toward the cloud-flecked sky, trying to work out the knots in her back. Been settin' at
that stupid ol' desk too damned long, she said to
herself. Mandy can sit there and study till hell freezes over. She's like a dog-ass computer, just absorbing data like a friggin'
machine.

Dan Randolph had put them to studying the fusion drive and working with the engineering team that was converting a lunar transfer
buggy into the ship that would carry them out to the Belt. They saw Randolph rarely. The man was jumping all across the world
like a flea on a hot griddle, hardly ever in the same place more than one night. When he was in La Guaira he drove the whole
team hard, and himself hardest of all.

Peculiar place for a corporate headquarters, Pancho thought as she walked from the housing complex out past the swaying, rustling
palm trees, toward the seawall. La Guaira was more suited to being a tourist resort than a major space launching center. Randolph
had settled his Astro Manufacturing headquarters here years ago, partly because its location near the equator gave rockets
a little extra boost from the Earth's spin, partly because he found the government of Venezuela easier to deal with than the
suits in Washington.

Strange, though. Randolph was rumored to have been in love with President Scanwell. There were whispers about their being
lovers* off and on, a stormy romance that only ended when the ex-President lost her life in the big Tennessee Valley earthquake.

It all seemed so far away. Pancho followed the winding path toward the seawall, her softboots crunching on the gravel. The
Sun was just about touching the horizon, turning the* Caribbean reddish gold. Massive clouds were piling up, turning purple
and crimson in the underlighting. With the breeze coming off the sea, making the palms bow gracefully, this was as close to
a tropical paradise as she could imagine.

But the seawall reminded her of a harsher reality. It was shoulder high, an ugly reinforced concrete barrier against the encroaching
waters. It had originally been painted a pastel pink, but the paint had faded in the sun, and the concrete
was crumbling here and there where storm tides had pounded against it. The old beaches were all underwater now, except at
the very lowest tides. The surf broke out there, long combers tumbling and frothing with a steady, ceaseless growling hiss.
And still the sea was rising, a little bit more every year.

“Looks pretty, doesn't it?”

Startled, she turned to see Randolph standing there, looking glumly out to sea. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt and
dark slacks that had gone baggy from long hours of travel.

“Didn't see you coming up the path, boss,” said Pancho. “Come to think of it, I didn't even hear you on the gravel.”

“I walked on the grass,” Randolph said, quite seriously. “Stealth is my middle name.”

Pancho laughed.

But Randolph said gloomily, “When Greenland melts down this will all go under.”

“The whole island?”

“Every damned bit of it. Maybe some of the gantry towers will stick up above the surface. The hilltops. Not much else.”

“Cripes.”

“This used to be part of the mainland, you know. When I first brought the company here, that strait cutting us off from the
hills didn't exist. The sea level's gone up that much in less than twenty years.”

“And it's still goin' up,” Pancho said.

Randolph nodded gloomily, then leaned his arms on the shoulder-high seawall and propped his chin on them.

“How's the job going?” he asked.

“We're workin' at it,” she replied. “It's a lot to learn, all this fusion stuff.”

With a tired nod, he said, “Yeah, but you've got to know every bit of it, Pancho. It anything breaks down out there, you've
got to be able to diagnose it and fix it.”

“We'll have an engineer on board,” she said. “Won't we?”

“Maybe. But whether you do or not,
you've
got to know everything there is to know about the systems.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“And you've got to get the new navigational technique down, too,” he added.

“Point and shoot, yeah. Kinda weird.”

With the thrust and efficiency of the fusion rocket, their spacecraft did not have to travel in an energy-conserving ellipse
from Earth orbit to the Belt. Fusion-driven trajectories were almost straight lines: travel times would be days instead of
months.

“It's a lot to learn, I know,” Randolph said.

She saw the weariness in his eyes, and yet there was something else in them, something more. Hope, she thought. Or maybe just
plain mulish stubbornness. He wants to make this fusion ship work. And he's trusting me to drive it. Me and Mandy.