Voyagers III - Star Brothers (5 page)

JO dropped the two men off at their hotels, then instructed her chauffeur to drive to Washington National Airport. A Vanguard Industries executive jet was waiting for her there, and shortly after midnight she leaned back in an utterly comfortable leather lounge chair and watched the stately monuments of Washington glide past her window as the plane climbed to its cruising altitude. Once above the normal traffic patterns of commercial airliners, the plane’s wings slid back for supersonic flight and the cabin lights dimmed for sleeping.

But Jo had no intention of sleeping. Not yet. Hsen and Kruppmann were threatening her. Now she knew why the board of directors had suddenly insisted on a special meeting to review Vanguard’s participation in the IIA. Hsen was making a power play. The sneaky little bastard must have nearly half the board in his pocket already, in addition to Kruppmann, Jo said to herself. While I’ve been helping Keith he’s been maneuvering to acquire leverage on my board.

She dictated a memo to the computer outlet built into her seat’s armrest: “Check all board members and executive staff to see which of them also sit on the board of Pacific Commerce.” Then she added, “Also, I want a complete list of all Vanguard executives above the level of divisional vice president who have been involved in any transactions whatever with Pacific Commerce.”

What about Kruppmann? Jo decided that the Swiss banker was more bluster than anything else. He never made waves at board meetings. He would loan money to Vanguard no matter who ran the corporation, as long as Vanguard showed profits. Hsen was the dangerous one. Kruppmann made most of the noise, but Hsen was the kind who knifed you in the dark.

She nodded to herself. First rule of business: find out who your enemies are, and then keep them as close as possible—until you’re ready to chop their heads off.

Leaning back in the deep luxurious chair, Jo felt satisfied that she had done all she could do for the moment. She allowed herself to relax and fall asleep.

Her dreams were troubled. She was in the lobby of an exclusive hotel, carrying heavy suitcases in either hand and trying to get into an elevator. But she could not get the suitcases through the elevator doors before they slid shut and left her behind. No one in the hotel lobby offered to help her. She was frantic, because Keith was somewhere on one of those upper floors and she had to find him before he went away and left her all alone.

She awoke to a pert young stewardess smiling over her. “We land in half an hour,” she said.

Jo saw that the sky was aflame with the rising sun. Then, brows knitted, she realized that she had to be looking toward the west. The sun was setting, not rising. Lifting her wrist close to her lips she said softly, “Hawaii.” The watch’s digits quickly shifted from 0328 to 1928. Almost 7:30 p.m., Jo realized.

The drive from Hilo Airport to her sprawling home in the hills above the city was swift. Keith Stoner was at the front door to greet her, tall and safe and smiling warmly. She had loved him since those ancient days when she had been a student and he a former astronaut. They had worked together on the project to make contact with the alien starship that had appeared near the planet Jupiter. When Stoner had flown out to the starship and remained in it, frozen in the cryogenic cold of deep space, Jo had clawed her way to the top of Vanguard Industries to gain the power to reach the distant spacecraft and return the man she loved to Earth and to life.

But he was not the same man that she had known eighteen years earlier. Frozen in the cryogenic cold of space aboard the alien starship, he had somehow been changed. It was strange. Keith seemed more human than he had been earlier, more attuned to life than the self-contained, solitary scientist she had once known. He could open his emotions to her and love her as he had never been able to do before. Yet he was somehow beyond human, endowed with abilities that no human being had ever known, burning with the urgency of a demon-driven fanatic—or a saint.

But he loved her. Loved her as she loved him. For Jo, nothing else mattered.

Now she felt his strong arms around her and relaxed for the first time since she had left their home, four days earlier.

“I thought you’d stay the night in Washington,” he said, smiling down at her.

Jo said, “The party was pretty much of a bore. I decided I’d be much happier at home.”

“I’m much happier, too.”

They walked arm in arm into the house while the chauffeur handed Jo’s overnight bag and briefcase to one of the squat, many-armed household robots.

Stoner stopped at the foot of the stairs that led up to the master bedroom suite. On their right was the spacious living room; straight ahead along the corridor was the kitchen.

“You must be still on Eastern time,” he said. “Do you want some dinner or some breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry at all,” Jo replied.

He pursed his lips slightly. “You know, the best way to adapt to a change in time zones is to go to bed and sleep until you’ve caught up with the local time.”

She grinned up at him. “Sleep?”

“There’s iced champagne waiting in the bedroom.” He grinned back at her.

“How about a nice long shower first?” she suggested as they started up the steps.

“Sounds good to me.”

Hours later Stoner lay on his back gazing up at the stars. Jo was curled next to him on the waterbed, warm and breathing in the slow regular rhythm of sleep. All of Stoner’s childhood friends were in their places in the night sky: Orion and the Twins, the Bull, the glittering cluster of the Pleiades. A slim crescent Moon hung in the darkness like a scimitar, with the red jewel of Mars nearby.

There was no ceiling to their bedroom, only a bubble of energy that kept out the weather and served as a soundproof barrier. Yet it was completely transparent; like having the bedroom outdoors. Flowered hangings both inside and outside the room filled the dark night air with the fragrance of orange blossoms and magnolias, completing the illusion of being out in a sighing, whispering garden.

The energy screens that had ended humankind’s nightmare fear of nuclear holocaust could also serve more romantic purposes, Stoner mused. A gift from the stars. From my star brother.

He felt no need of sleep. Instead, as he watched the stately motion of the stars arcing across the dark sky he murmured the command that turned on the record player, keeping it so low that only he could hear it. The muted, moody opening of Villa-Lobos’s
Bachianas Brasileiras No
. 8 filled the room faintly, violins and cellos dark and sensuous.

The best invention the human race has ever made, Stoner thought. The symphony orchestra. And so typically human: a hundred virtuosos voluntarily submerging their individuality to produce something that no one of them could produce alone.

A meteor flashed across the night sky, silent and bright for the span of an eyeblink. Stoner sank back on his pillows and clasped his hands behind his head, content to lie beside his sleeping wife and wait for the dawn while the orchestra played for him.

Jo murmured drowsily, “Go to sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t think it was loud enough to bother you.”

“Big day tomorrow.”

“I know. My surprise party.”

She bolted up to a sitting position, suddenly wide awake. “Who told you?”

“You did.” He laughed softly. In the shadowy darkness, Jo’s naked body was washed by the pale moonlight, her skin glowing warm. He could not see the expression on her face, so he reached up and pushed back her shining dark hair.

“The household staff has been fussing and making phone calls for a month or more. You cut short your stay in Washington to come home in time for tomorrow. And you just told me tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”

Jo leaned over him. “You’re the only one in this house who knows how to keep a secret.”

“I have no secrets from you, Jo. You know that, don’t you?”

Nodding, she began to tell him of her conversation in the limousine with Hsen and Kruppmann. Stoner listened patiently, quietly until she finished.

“About what I expected,” he said at last. “They’re not interested in the global picture. They only see their own needs.”

“Their own selfish interests.”

“They just don’t understand what’s going on. Maybe they don’t want to understand. They want the power to control events, to keep themselves at the top of the heap. They don’t understand that it’s not a zero-sum game anymore. The world’s economy is completely interlinked; it’s not even just a global economy, not if you consider the Moon and the asteroids and the factories in Earth orbit. If the Third World gets richer, we all get richer. That’s what they don’t see.”

“They’re willing to commit murder,” Jo said.

Stoner gave a bitter little laugh. “If they’re willing to bankroll wars and insurrections, what’s the murder of one man to them?”

“But it’s you they want to kill!”

“They don’t know who I am,” Stoner said, “and it won’t be easy for them to find out. Especially when I have such an excellent Mata Hari in their camp.”

“I can’t protect you forever, Keith. There’s no such thing as absolute security.”

“I’m more concerned about you,” he said. “How serious is their move to take over Vanguard?”

She shrugged her naked shoulders. “I don’t know yet. But they’ll get their guts ripped out if they try to take over
my
corporation.”

Stoner chuckled in the darkness. “That’s my woman! What’d
Business World
call you: ‘The tigress of the corporate jungle.’”

She laughed too, but there was anxiety behind it. “Keith, I can handle the corporate battles. And I can balance Baker and his Third World friends against the corporate interests on the IIA. It’s you I’m frightened about.”

“I’ll be all right.”

In the darkness her voice took on a sharper, harder note. “Don’t you understand? Hsen’s out to kill you! I’m going to strike first, before he gets the chance…”

“And be just like him? What good would that do?”

“It’ll keep you alive, Keith!”

He shook his head. “Hsen is not the enemy. He’s just acting out of fear.”

“Dammit, Keith! Sometimes you carry this sainthood crap too far!”

Startled, “Sainthood?”

Jo was immediately sorry. More softly she said, “Okay, so I’m a tigress. I know you’re not a tiger, Keith. Not a street fighter. But you’ve got to protect yourself, got to let me protect you.”

Stoner countered, “Look. Even if you could kill Hsen someone else would take his place. So there’d be another assassin coming after me, with the added excuse of avenging Hsen’s murder.”

Jo said nothing, but he could feel her body tensing, like a true jungle cat just before it springs.

“Deliberately killing a human being is the worst thing you can do, Jo. Not because there’s a rule against it written in some book, but because it always leads to more killing. Because the human race hasn’t quite learned yet how to deal with its animal instincts. We’re supposed to be working on the side of life, not death. Life is precious. Human life is the most precious of all.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Keith, if there’s one thing we’ve got too much of on this planet, it’s human beings. And most of them aren’t worth the effort it would take to blow them to hell.”

In a near-whisper Stoner replied, “If you only knew how rare life is, truly rare among all those stars.”

But Jo refused to be drawn in that direction. “What happens if Hsen kills you? What do you expect me to do?”

“Jo, we’re in a race against time. You knew that when we started down this road, fifteen years ago.”

“But the closer we get to the end the more dangerous it becomes.”

He nodded abstractedly, as if his mind were really elsewhere. “The biochips are the next step. If the human race can absorb that technology, then we’re almost finished.”

“I’ve got our lab people working as hard as they can go,” Jo said. “Biochips will be an important product for Vanguard.”

“It’s more than that, Jo. Much more,” Stoner said. “Biochips can help us get around the limits on brain size set by the female’s birth channel, the first chance to expand the capacity of the human brain in hundreds of thousands of years, Jo!”

“You’re blaming women for the limits on brain size?”

He laughed. “All the great religions of the world blame women for humankind’s troubles. Didn’t you know that?”

“All the great religions of the world are schemes by men to keep women down!”

“But they’re right, in a way.”

“Really?” Jo’s voice dripped acid.

“Goes back millions of years,” Stoner said lightly. “Most ape females are in estrus only a couple of days a month. Our ancestors’ females were sexually receptive all the time. That’s how we outpopulated the other apes. It led to our dominance of the planet. But now it’s a problem.”

“Well, I know how to solve
that
problem.” Jo pushed away from him slightly.

Stoner reached toward her and she let him put his arms around her easily enough.

“Some solutions are worse than the problems,” he said softly.

“That’s better,” she murmured.

“But the biochips
are
important, Jo. Implanting protein chips in people’s brains will allow them to link themselves directly with any library, any data bank on the planet. And they’ll be able to communicate with each other directly, like…”

Jo interrupted, “I don’t care about that! You’re the only one I’m worried about.”

“And the rest of the human race?”

“Let them all go to hell, what do I care? As long as you and the children are safe.”

Very softly, Stoner said, “None of us will be safe, Jo, unless all of us are.”

“You keep saying that. Is it really true?”

He closed his eyes and saw a different world, a planet that circled a bloated red star that hung in the sky like a huge menacing omen of doom. A world that teemed with delicate birdlike people, human in form except for feathery crests that ran along the tops of their otherwise bald skulls. A world that was dying beneath the weight of its own numbers.

Cities covered almost the entire face of the planet, their soaring towers crammed with people. Harbors were black with boats and rafts where people lived packed literally shoulder to shoulder. What little countryside remained was bare, denuded, while immense factories struggled to produce enough artificial food to feed the ever-growing masses of people. Murder and madness were as commonplace as breathing, and the only parts of the planet that were not covered with people were the waterless deserts that were slowly, inexorably growing larger, and the oceans that were all too quickly becoming polluted.