Mercury (37 page)

The clock’s digits glowing in the darkness read 12:53. She slipped out of bed, groped in the shadows of the darkened stateroom for the first dress she could find in her travel bag, and pulled it on. Victor would sleep for hours more, she knew. She tiptoed to the door, opened it as softly as she could, and stepped out into the passageway. As she slid the door closed and heard the faint click of its lock, she wondered which way led to the galley.

I have to think, she told herself as she walked slowly along the passageway. Its plastic walls were scuffed and dulled from long use, the floor tiles even worse.
Xenobia
had ferried a set of solar power satellites to Mercury for Yamagata’s project; now its only cargo was a disgraced New Morality bishop, a humiliated astrobiologist, and herself. The IAA was paying Victor’s fare and her own. The New Morality had refused to pay for Danvers’s return; Saito Yamagata had graciously taken care of it.

Victor had demanded a hearing before the IAA’s disciplinary board. McFergusen will chair that meeting, Lara thought. I’ll have to tell them what Mance confessed to me. No, not Mance. He’s a different man, this Dante Alexios. He’s no longer Mance Bracknell.

Deep inside her she wondered why she hadn’t told Victor about Alexios’s confession. Victor was dazed and thick-witted from the tranquilizers that Yamagata’s medical people had dosed him with, but she knew that wasn’t the reason. Could she believe this Alexios person? Is he really Mance? How else would he know about how we met? He must be Mance. But that makes it even worse, even more complicated. Mance deliberately ruined Victor, revenged himself on poor Victor like some savage out of the dark ages. I’ll
have
to tell Victor, I can’t keep this from him. It might save his career, save his life.

Yet she hesitated, wondering, uncertain of herself or anything. Victor had lied at Mance’s trial? Perjured himself to get rid of Mance? For me? How can I believe that? How can I believe any of this?

She saw a phone screen on the passageway wall and called up a schematic of the ship’s interior layout. She’d been heading in the wrong direction, she saw. Turning, she started more confidently toward the galley. No one else was in the passageway at this time of night. There’s probably a crew on duty in the bridge, Lara thought. Otherwise they’re all sleeping.

All but me. I can save Victor. I’ll go to the meeting and tell them that he was deliberately duped by false evidence planted by Dante Alexios. I can clear Victor’s name. Elliott’s, too.

And what happens to Dante Alexios? she asked herself. She thought she knew. McFergusen and his committee would not take her unsupported word. They’d want corroboration. They would send investigators to Mercury to question Mance-Alexios. And what if he claims innocence? What if he tells them my story is a total fabrication, a desperate attempt to save my husband?

The galley was empty. Nothing more than a small metal table and four swivel chairs bolted to the deck, with a row of food and drink dispensers lining one wall. Lara poured herself a mug of tepid coffee and sat wearily in one of the chairs.

I’ll have to tell them that Alexios is really Mance Bracknell, she realized. They’ll run tests on him to settle his identity. Once they find that he’s Mance they’ll send him back to the Belt, back to exile.

Can I do that to him? He said Victor stole me from him, said that he still loves me and wants me. Can I reward him by sending him back into exile? She wanted to cry. It would be such a relief to simply dissolve into tears and wait for someone else to solve this problem for her.

But there is no one else, she told herself. Except Victor, Jr. That made her sit up straighter. Her son. Hers and Victor’s. He has a stake in this, too. I can’t allow McFergusen or Mance or anyone else to ruin little Victor’s future. He needs my protection.

A shadow fell across her and she turned to see Elliott Danvers’s hulking form filling the hatchway.

“You couldn’t sleep either?” Danvers said, going to the coffee dispenser.

“No.”

Danvers settled his bulk in the chair opposite Lara. It groaned as he sat on it, and the bishop sighed heavily.

“I’ve sent half a dozen messages to my superiors in Atlanta and they haven’t seen fit to reply to any of them.”

Lara saw that his fleshy face was pale, creased with lines she’d never noticed before. “What will happen to you once we get back to Earth?” she asked.

Danvers shrugged his massive shoulders. “I wish I knew. A reassignment, at least. They’ll want to strip me of my title, I’m sure. Perhaps they’ll throw me out altogether.”

“I know you didn’t do it,” Lara said.

Danvers’s eyes flared briefly. Then he murmured, “Thank you.”

“I’m not merely being kind, Elliott. I know who actually duped Victor and planted the evidence that puts the blame on you.”

Now his eyes stayed wide. “You … you do?”

“But if I tell who it really is, it will ruin his life.”

“But he’s trying to ruin my life!”

“I don’t know what I should do,” Lara said plaintively.

“Yes, you do,” said the bishop. “You must do what is right. You can’t cover up a lie. Forget about me—your husband’s career is at stake.”

“I know,” said Lara.

“And what about your son? This affects him, too.”

“I know,” she repeated.

Danvers stared at her as if trying to pry the information out of her by sheer willpower. At last he asked, “Why wouldn’t you name the wrongdoer?”

“Because it will hurt him. Because he’s been terribly hurt already and I’m not sure that I can do this to him, hurt him again.”

“But… your husband! Your son! Me!”

Lara gripped her cup with both hands and stared down into it. “Maybe if I simply tell the committee that the man told me he did it, that he cleared you entirely, maybe that would be enough.”

“Without naming him, so they can check? They’d think you’re nothing but a wife who’s willing to lie to protect her husband.”

She nodded dejectedly. “I can’t help one without hurting the other.”

The bishop waited a heartbeat, then reached across the table to take her hands in his massive paws. “Lara, morality doesn’t come in shades of gray. It’s black and white. You either do the right thing or you do the wrong thing. There’s no middle ground.”

She looked into his soft gray eyes, red with sleeplessness, and thought that morality was simple when doing the right thing would save your own neck.

“It’s more complicated than that,” she said quietly.

“Then think of this,” Danvers said, almost gently. “What is the greatest good for the greatest number of people? You have your husband and son to think of, as opposed to this mysterious wrongdoer.”

She nodded. “My husband and son—and you.”

Wrapped in their cumbersome spacesuits, Alexios and Yamagata sat side by side in the tractor’s transparent cab as it slowly trundled along the pitted, rock-strewn landscape.

“Borealis Planitia,” Yamagata muttered. “The northern plain.”

He sounded slightly nervous to Alexios, a little edgy. Inside the pressurized glassteel cabin they could hear one another without using the suits’ radios, although their voices were muffled by the heavy helmets.

“This region is an ancient lava flow,” Yamagata went on, as much to himself as to his companion. “Planetologists claim that this entire area was once a lake of molten lava, billions of years ago.”

Alexios contented himself with steering the tractor through the maze of boulders that lay scattered across the ground. Now and again he rolled right over a smaller rock, making the tractor pitch and sway. To their right, the yawning crack of the fault line was narrowing. They would reach the end of it soon, Alexios knew.

Yamagata continued, “From orbit you can see the outlines of even older craters, ghost craters, drowned by the lava when it flowed across this region.”

Alexios nodded inside his helmet. The man’s talking just to hear himself talk, he thought. Trying to hide his fear at being out here. Grimly, Alexios added, He has a lot to be afraid of.

They drove on in silence. The time stretched. Alexios could feel in his bones the vibrating hum of the tractor’s electric motors, hear his own breathing inside the helmet. He drove like an automaton; there seemed to be no emotion left inside him.

“You are very quiet,” Yamagata said at last.

“Yes,” replied Alexios.

“What are you thinking about?”

Alexios turned his head inside the fishbowl helmet to look squarely at the older man. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about the skytower.”

“The skytower?” Yamagata looked surprised. “That was years ago.”

“Many years. Many lives.”

“Technological hubris,” said Yamagata. “The people who built it paid no attention to the danger it might pose.”

“Part of it is still spinning outward, in deep space.”

“Carrying the bodies of dozens of dead men and women.”

“Murdered men and women,” said Alexios.

Yamagata grunted. “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”

“The tower was sabotaged. All those who died were murdered.”

“Sabotaged?”

“By agents of Yamagata Corporation.”

Yamagata’s jaw dropped open. “That’s not true! It’s impossible!”

Without taking his gloved hands from the steering controls, Alexios said, “We both know that it
is
possible and it did happen.”

“Paranoid fantasy,” Yamagata snapped.

“Is it? I was told the full story by the last surviving member of the plot. Just before your hired killers closed his mouth forever.”

“My hired killers?” Yamagata scoffed. “I was in Chota Lamasery in the Himalayas when the skytower fell. We didn’t even hear about it until a week or more after the tragedy.”

“Yes, I know. That’s your cover story.”

Yamagata stared at this coldly intent man sitting beside him. He’s insane, he thought. Alexios’s eyes glittered with something beyond anger, beyond fury. For the first time since he’d been diagnosed with brain cancer, back in his first life, Yamagata felt fear gripping his innards.

“I was the director of the skytower project,” Alexios told him, all the while wondering at the glacial calm that had settled upon him, as if he were sheathed in ice.

“The director of the skytower project was exiled,” said Yamagata.

Alexios made a wan smile. “Like you, I’ve led more than one life.”

“I had nothing to do with the skytower,” Yamagata insisted.

“It was sabotaged by Yamagata Corporation people, using nanomachines to snap the tower at its most vulnerable point. The man who produced the nanobugs for you told me the entire story just before your assassins caught up with him.”

“And you believed him?”

“He was terrified for his life,” said Alexios. “Your assassins got him. They also blew up the ship we were in, to make sure that anyone he talked to would be killed, too.”

“But you survived.”

“I survived. To seek justice for all those you killed. To gain vengeance for having my own life destroyed.”

“But I—” Yamagata caught himself and shut his mouth. He’s a madman, he told himself. I had nothing to do with this; I was in the lamasery. Nobuhiko was running the corporation, just as he is now.

Suddenly his pulse began thudding in his ears. Nobu! If Yamagata Corporation was involved in destroying the skytower, it was under Nobu’s direction!

No, that couldn’t be, Yamagata said to himself. Shaking his head, he thought, Nobu wouldn’t do such a thing. He couldn’t be that ruthless, that… murderous.

Or could he? Yamagata recalled those years when his advice to his son had led to the slaughters of the second Asteroid War, the massacre of the
Chrysalis
habitat. Nobu learned to be ruthless from me, he realized. The blood drained from his face. I have turned my son into a monster.

Alexios misread the ashen expression on Yamagata’s face. “You admit it, then? You admit that the skytower was destroyed on your orders. Four million men, women, and children murdered—by you.”

Yamagata realized there was nothing else to do. If I tell him that it was Nobuhiko’s doing this madman will want to kill Nobu. Better to let him think it was me. Nobu is my son, my responsibility. Whatever he has done is my fault as much as his. Better for me to take the blame and the punishment. Let my son live.

“Well?” Alexios demanded.

Yamagata seemed to draw himself up straighter inside the bulky spacesuit. “I accept full responsibility,” he said, his voice flat, lifeless.

“Good,” said Alexios. He turned the steering wheel and the tractor veered slowly toward the yawning fault line, grinding slowly but inexorably toward the rift in Mercury’s bleak ground as the first blazing edge of the Sun peeped above the horizon.

Bishop Danvers’s mind was churning as he made his way back to his compartment. Is Lara telling the truth? he asked him self. She must be. She
must
be! She wouldn’t make up a story like that, she couldn’t. But the other side of his mind argued, Why wouldn’t she? She’s desperate to save her husband and protect her son. She might say anything if she thought it would help Victor.

As he slid back the door to his compartment he saw that the phone’s yellow message light was blinking in the darkness. A message! His heart began thumping. From Atlanta. It must be an answer to my calls to Atlanta. Flicking on the ceiling lights, Danvers rushed to the compartment’s flimsy little desk and told the phone to display the message.

It was indeed from Atlanta. From the archbishop himself!

Carnaby’s wrinkled, bald, gnomish features took form in the phone’s small display screen. He was unsmiling, his eyes flinty.

“Bishop Danvers, I am replying to your messages personally because your case is one of extreme importance to the New Morality movement.”