Empire Builders (3 page)

THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL WAS headquartered in Paris, a city just beginning to brighten once again after the turmoil of the past few decades.

Western Europe had found it much more difficult to digest Eastern Europe than even the most pessimistic economic forecaster had predicted. After more than four decades of stagnation and repression, the peoples of Eastern Europe shouted for democracy and freedom. What they really wanted was the economic well-being of their Western neighbors, the higher standard of living that they saw in the capitalist nations.

But the capitalist idea of working hard was foreign to them. At first they demanded bread and meat and milk for their children. And they got it, for it was impossible for the West to deny humanitarian aid to their impoverished brethren. But quickly they began to demand the toys and trinkets of capitalist societies—without working to produce the wealth that could pay for them.

A whole generation simmered in distrust and bitter animosities as slowly, painfully, the peoples of the formerly socialist world learned that it was the capitalists who truly followed Marx’s original dictum: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his work.”

At last the Poles and Czechs and Romanians and even the Russians learned to work once again, learned to produce the goods and services that paid for their happiness. The Hungarians reasserted their marketing craft. The centuries-old hatreds between ethnic groups were subdued—but not entirely forgotten—in the new rush to obtain expensive gadgets and personal wealth. Now Paris was a happy city once more.

The economic boom was partially fueled from space.

Much of the wealth that allowed Europe and the rest of the world to prosper came from the energy, the raw materials, the manufactured products produced in space. From the Moon came raw materials for space construction and isotopic fuel for Earth’s fusion power generators. From factories in space came new alloys and electronics crystals, medicines and vaccines of incredible purity, solarvoltaic cells cheap and efficient enough to turn a family home’s rooftop into a self-sufficient solar energy generator. And hovering in orbit around the Earth, giant solar power satellites converted unfiltered sunlight into electricity and beamed it to energy-hungry cities and factories cleanly, without polluting the atmosphere.

The economic boom that was just getting started was heavily dependent on this new wealth streaming in from space. Five and a half centuries after Europe began the exploitation of the New World, all of Earth was beginning to benefit from the exploitation of cislunar space—a harsh frontier that was rich in real wealth and entirely unpopulated, except for the ten thousand or so men and women of Earth who went there to find their fortunes.

Slowly the Earth was healing from the wounds inflicted by the Industrial Age. Slowly the smokestacks were being replaced by fusion or solar energy. Slowly the petroleum-burning engines were converting to methane or synfuels. Slowly the burgeoning population of Earth was stabilizing at the twelve-billion level.

Too slowly.

Vasily Malik was not concerned, at this precise moment, with these great questions of wealth and the environment. Head of the Russian Federation’s delegation to the Global Economic Council, Malik was deep in conversation with the woman who had been the chief conciliator at the trial of Willard Mitchell.

“You have all the necessary documentation?” Malik asked.

He studied the conciliator’s face while his words headed toward the Moon at the speed of light. She had a lean, hard face, not easily given to smiling. A spinster’s face, Malik thought, knowing that it was chauvinist of him but thinking he was right just the same.

Vasily Malik was handsome enough to be a video star. He was tall for a Russian, brushing six feet; broad-shouldered and heavily muscled, he kept his body in good trim through a rigid schedule of daily exercise. Once he had worn his golden hair modishly long. Now it was trimmed to an almost military burr. His ice blue eyes could sparkle with laughter, but at this moment they were glittering with hope born of a deep and abiding hatred.

“Yes,” said the chief conciliator. “He talked Mitchell into selling out to him. If we had known that it would be Randolph we were dealing with we would have tripled the fine. Quadrupled it!”

Malik’s broad features eased into a relaxed smile. “You did your best. Randolph is a clever rascal, we must grant him that.”

When his words reached her, she nodded bitterly. “It’s not fair. Mitchell was guilty. He should have been driven out of business. But now Randolph owns his company and he’ll continue to operate.”

Malik made a few sympathetic noises and ended the conversation by asking her to send all the documentation on the trial to him immediately.

Then he leaned back in his imposing leather chair, put his booted feet on his immaculately gleaming desktop, and waited for the fax machine to begin spitting out Dan Randolph’s comeuppance. I only wish it were his death sentence, Vasily Malik said to himself.

Nearly three hours later, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Paris time, the weekly meeting of the Global Economic Council’s executive committee convened in the small conference room down the corridor from Malik’s office.

Muhammed Shariff Sibuti of Malaysia, chairman of the committee for this session, was already seated at the head of the gleaming table when Malik entered the room. A lightweight, in every dimension, thought Malik. Sibuti looked shriveled and old, too small for the chair in which he sat. His starched white high-collared shirt made his wrinkled dark skin look almost as black as the leather of the chair’s padding.

“We must begin,” Sibuti said, in a voice that sounded like rusty hinges groaning. “We have a very long agenda. A very difficult agenda.”

The other committee members were milling around the room, largely ignoring their chairman. Malik saw Jane Scanwell at the long table that had been set out with refreshments and finger foods.

He went to her, under the pretext of pouring himself a glass of hot tea from the silver samovar in the center of the table.

“I have good news from Copernicus,” he said softly.

Jane Scanwell glanced up from the coffee cup she had just filled.

The former President of the United States was a handsome woman, nearly as tall as Malik in her heels. She was wearing a skirted suit of forest green over a pale green silk blouse. Her richly auburn hair was neatly coiffed up off her long graceful neck. She surveyed Malik with the cool green eyes of a Norse goddess.

“What did you say?”

“Good news from Copernicus,” Malik repeated. “Dan Randolph has made one clever move too many. He has fallen into a trap that I concocted for him.”

Jane’s sculptured face gave no hint of emotion. She merely said, “You must tell me about it, after the meeting.”

“I’ll be happy to.”

As the meeting droned on, Malik could barely suppress his eager anticipation. Randolph had bested him in so many ways, over the years. It was Randolph who had broken the Russian monopoly on space industry, after Malik had slaved for a decade to drive all competition out of business. Randolph had married the woman Malik had been engaged to, and even though she had divorced the American eventually and had come back to him, there was no real love in their marriage. Both he and his wife were settling for second best.

But Randolph had been in love with Jane Scanwell, once. Perhaps he still was. Perhaps that was what destroyed his marriage, really, and gave the impetus to his philandering ways. How ironic for this womanizer to desire the Ice Queen, the immovable, unobtainable Jane Scanwell! How delicious that Jane Scanwell will be the instrument of Randolph’s destruction.

The meeting ended at last and Malik followed Scanwell to her office. It was a spacious corner room with a view of the Eiffel Tower, no less. Fit trappings for a former head of state.

Instead of going to her desk, Jane sat in an armchair next to one of the windows.

“Fix yourself a drink,” she said, nodding toward the bar built into the far wall.

Malik said, “Thank you. A good idea after such a long and utterly dry meeting. Can I make something for you?”

“Just a glass of filtered water with a twist of lime, please.”

Malik found the bottled water and a dish of fresh limes in the little refrigerator. And vodka in the freezer compartment. When he took the two drinks back toward her, he saw that Jane was eying him carefully, her long legs crossed, the expression on her face unfathomable.

He handed her the water, then touched his glass of vodka to hers.
“Zah vahsheh zdahrovyeh,”
he murmured.

“Here’s mud in your eye,” Jane replied, with just the ghost of a smile on her lips.

Malik took the armchair on the other side of the window and rolled it next to Jane’s.

“Now what were you telling me about cooking Dan Randolph’s goose?” she asked.

He grinned at her. “You are full of Americanisms this afternoon.”

“I’m an American. What about Randolph?”

“He has just bought out a small competitor of his, a man named Mitchell who owned a mining operation on the Moon.”

“What of it?”

“He bought Mitchell’s company because Mitchell was about to be hit with a stiff fine by the lunar tribunal for exceeding his allotment of ores.”

Jane took another sip of her water, then said, “I see. Dan can afford to pay the fine but Mitchell can’t. So Dan buys him out at a bargain-basement price.”

“Exactly so.”

“So how does that get Dan in trouble?”

Malik’s grin spread into a broad happy smile. “We passed a regulation last spring to the effect that any attempt to subvert or avoid the rulings of the GEC is punishable by confiscation.”

“We did?” She looked surprised.

Malik made an expansive gesture. “Oh, the wording is rather obscure, something about ‘joint and several liability.’ The lawyers worked very hard to phrase it so that no one would notice it. And the regulation was buried among several dozens of other minor changes to existing rules. But the regulation was passed; it exists and it is legally binding.”

Jane’s eyes seemed to focus beyond Malik, as if she were looking at something that was not physically in the room with them.

“Do you mean that you can use that regulation to confiscate Dan’s holdings? All of them? All of Astro Manufacturing and everything else he owns?”

Malik nodded. “He stepped into my trap and I intend to snap it shut on him.”

“Lots of luck.”

“You don’t believe I can do it?”

“I believe that Dan is very resourceful, very powerful, and very stubborn. He won’t give up easily.”

“You can be of great help in this.”

“I can?”

“Yes,” said Malik, pulling his chair even closer to her. “It will be easier to deal with him here on Earth, rather than on the Moon. He has too many friends there, too many places where he can hide himself away while his lawyers try to find loopholes he can escape through.”

“You don’t intend to jail him, do you?” For the first time a hint of emotion showed on Jane’s face. Malik could not decide whether it was fear or anger. Or something else.

“It would be better,” he said slowly, “if he were … under protective custody, let us say. Someplace where he can be held incommunicado—only until the confiscation orders have been processed and carried out, of course.”

“That’s not legal.”

“Not in America, I realize that. But the Global Economic Council’s regulations do not include a Bill of Rights, you know. And there are many nations on Earth where he could be held indefinitely.”

Her face hardened.

“Oh, I don’t mean to put him in a dungeon,” Malik said, smiling easily. “A small island, perhaps. Some tropical paradise where he can have everything he wants: wine, women and song.”

“Everything except his freedom.”

“And his holdings.”

Jane thought a moment, then smiled back at the Russian. “I know just the place: a coral atoll out in the middle of the Pacific. A very romantic spot, as a matter of fact.”

“Excellent!” Malik resisted the urge to rub his hands together gleefully. Instead, he asked, “Is this a place you know from personal experience?”

“My husband and I honeymooned there, a thousand years ago,” said Jane.

That took Malik aback. But only for a moment. “I see. Do you think that you could somehow get him to meet you there?”

She nodded. “I’m sure he’d come if I asked him to.”

Yes, Malik thought. Dan Randolph would come flying to this woman. What hatred she must have for him! To turn the site of her honeymoon into a prison for her former lover. Ah, women! They are far fiercer than men.

“There is no sense getting angry at me,” said Napoleon Bazain, over the muted roar of the plane’s engines. “I am merely a messenger. A middleman.”

Sergio Alvarez stared down his patrician nose at the Frenchman. “You are a parasite.”

Bazain smiled blandly. “No, I work for a parasite.”

“It is all the same to me,” Alvarez muttered.

The twin-engine plane was cruising high above the Madeira River, an hour out of Manaus. Below them, where there had once been pristine forest there now stretched long ugly brown gashes of bare ground, scars left by the timber companies and the landowners who had chased away the native Indians in the vain hope of turning the area into grazing land for cattle.

Up front in the cockpit sat the pilot and the ecologist, a young university graduate who still had stars in his eyes. Back here, sitting on bare bucket seats amid the big tanks of seed and fertilizer, Alvarez faced reality.

“Why be angry?” asked the Frenchman. His smile was still showing, but his eyes looked uneasy, as if he were worried that this hot-blooded Castilian might toss him out of the plane in a fit of righteous anger.