Mercury (38 page)

Danvers felt immensely grateful. The archbishop is replying to me personally! Even though he knew it would take half an hour, at least, to get a reply back to Earth he automatically started to frame his message of gratitude to the archbishop.

Carnaby was going on, however, “A great American once said that extremism in the defense of our values is no vice. I can appreciate the extreme measures you took to discredit the godless scientists you’ve been battling against. But in our battle against these secularists, the movement must be seen by the general public as being beyond reproach, above suspicion. Your methods, once exposed to the public, will bring suspicion and discredit upon us all.”

But I didn’t do it! Danvers screamed silently at Carnaby’s implacable image. I haven’t done anything discreditable! Lara can prove it!

“Therefore,” the archbishop continued, “I have no choice but to ask you for your resignation from the New Morality. One man must not be allowed to throw doubt upon our entire movement. I know this seems harsh to you, but it is for the higher good. Remember that a man may serve God in many ways, and your way will be to resign your office and your ordination in the movement. If you refuse you will be put on public trial as soon as you return to Earth and found guilty. I’m truly sorry it has to be this way, but you have become a liability to the New Morality and no individual, no matter who he is, can be allowed to threaten our work. May God be merciful to you.”

The screen went blank.

Danvers stared at it for long, wordless minutes. His mind seemed unable to function. His chest felt constricted; it was an effort just to breathe.

At last, blinking with disbelief, lungs rasping painfully, Danvers realized that he had been drummed out of the New Morality movement. Thrown out into the gutter, just as the gamblers had done to him all those long years ago. All my work, all my years of service, they mean nothing, he thought. Lara’s claim to know who actually planted the false evidence won’t move them. I’ve been tainted, and they will be merciless with me.

I’m ruined. Destroyed. I have nowhere to go! No one to turn to. Even if I could prove my innocence they wouldn’t take me back. I’m tainted! Unclean!

My life is over, he told himself.

Lara returned to her compartment, where Victor was still tossing fitfully in their bed. She sat at the desk and sent a message to Victor, Jr., smiling reassuringly for her son and telling him she and his father would be back home in a few weeks.

Then she sat, wide awake, until Victor rose groggily from the roiled bedclothes and blinked sleep-fogged eyes at her.

“You’re up?” he asked dully.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He padded barefoot to the lavatory. She heard him urinate, then wash his face. He came back, hair still tousled, but looking reasonably alert.

“Victor,” Lara heard herself ask him, “at Mance’s trial, did you tell the truth about the skytower’s construction?”

He looked instantly wary. “Why do you ask that?”

“Did you tell the truth?”

“It was so many years ago…”

“Did you deliberately lie to put the blame on Mance?”

Molina stood next to the lavatory doorway, wearing nothing but his wrinkled underpants, staring at his wife.

“I’ve got to know, Victor,” said Lara. “You’ve got to tell me the truth now.”

He shuffled to the bed and sat wearily on it. “The tower collapsed,” Molina said. “There was nothing any of us could do about that. They were going to blame it on Mance anyway—he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting out of that trial alive. I wanted you, Lara! I’ve always wanted you! But as long as Mance was around you wouldn’t even look at me!”

Lara said nothing. She didn’t know what she could say.

“I wanted Mance out of the way,” he admitted, his voice so low she could barely hear him. “I was so crazy in love with you. I still am.”

He burst into tears.

Lara got up from the desk chair and went to the bed. Cradling her husband’s head in her arms she crooned soothingly, “I understand, darling. I understand.”

“I shouldn’t have done it, I know,” Molina blubbered. “I ruined Mance’s life. But I did it for you. For you.”

Lara was quite dry-eyed. “What’s done is done,” she said. “Mance is dead now. We’ve got to live the rest of our lives.”

As she held him, Lara did not think of Mance Bracknell, nor of the strangely vicious man who called himself Dante Alexios. She did not think of Bishop Danvers or her husband, really, or even of herself. She thought of their son. Only Victor, Jr. He was the only one who mattered now.

The rim of the slowly rising Sun was like molten lava pouring heat into the tractor’s little bubble of a cab. Yamagata saw that Alexios was steering directly toward the sunrise and the yawning rift.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

Turning the lumbering vehicle just before it reached the edge of the fault line, Alexios leaned on the brakes. The tractor ground to a halt.

“We get off here,” he said.

“I thought—”

“Let’s stretch our legs a little,” said Alexios, popping the hatch on his side of the glassteel bubble.

Although he felt nothing inside his spacesuit, Yamagata realized that all the air in the cabin immediately rushed into the vacuum outside. Alexios turned back toward him and tapped the keypad on the wrist of his spacesuit. Yamagata heard the man’s voice in his helmet earphones, “We’ll have to use the suit radios to speak to one another now.”

“You intend to kill me, then?” Yamagata asked as he opened the hatch on his side.

“You murdered four million people,” Alexios said, his voice strangely soft, almost amused. “I think executing you is a simple act of justice.”

“I see.” Yamagata clambered slowly down from his seat to the hard, rock-strewn, airless ground. I’m in the hands of a madman, he thought.

“In case you’re wondering,” Alexios said as he walked around the tractor toward Yamagata, “your suit radio won’t reach the base. Not without the tractor’s relay, and I’ve disabled the tractor’s outgoing frequency.”

“I can’t call for help, then,” said Yamagata.

“Neither can I.” With that, Alexios touched a control stud on his suit and the tractor started up again, silently churning up puffs of dust from the ground, and started trundling away from them.

“You’re not going with it?” Yamagata asked, surprised.

“No, I’ll stay here with you. We’ll die together. Back at the base they’ll see the tractor’s beacon and think everything is normal. Until it’s too late.”

Yamagata almost laughed. “This is a simple act of justice?”

“Maybe not so simple, after all,” Alexios agreed. “I’ve been dispensing justice for several days, but I don’t quite seem to have the proper knack for it.”

Alexios stepped closer to him. Yamagata backed away a few steps, then realized the edge of the fault rift was close behind him.

“Dispensing justice?” he asked, stalling for time to think. “What do you mean?”

“Molina and Danvers,” Alexios answered easily. “I’m the one who brought those Martian rocks here. I led Molina to them and he took the bait like the fool that he is.”

“And Danvers?”

“I put the blame on him. Now they’re both heading back to Earth in disgrace.”

“You’ve deliberately ruined their careers.”

“They deserve it. They destroyed my life, the two of them. They took everything I had.”

He’s insane, Yamagata told himself. The tractor was dwindling slowly, lumbering off toward the disturbing close edge of the horizon.

“Message for Mr. Yamagata.” He heard the voice of the base controller in his helmet’s earphones. “From the captain of the freighter
Xenobia.”

Alexios spread his gloved hands. “We can’t reply to them.”

“Then what—”

The controller didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. “Here’s the incoming message, sir.”

Yamagata heard a soft click and then a different voice spoke. “Sir! I apologize for interrupting whatever you are doing, illustrious sir. The captain thought you would want to know that one of the passengers aboard ship has committed suicide. Bishop Danvers slit his throat in the lavatory of his cabin. The place is a bloody mess.”

Yamagata stared hard at Alexios, but only saw his own reflection in the heavily tinted visor of the spacesuit’s helmet.

“Thank you for the information,” he said, in a near whisper.

“They can’t hear you,” Alexios reminded him.

The base controller’s voice returned. “Is there any reply to the message, Mr. Yamagata? Sir? Can you hear me?”

Alexios walked to the rim of the rift. Damn! he said to himself. If they don’t hear anything back they’ll start worrying about us.

“Mr. Yamagata? Mr. Alexios? Reply, please.”

If they send out a rescue team they’ll go after the tractor, Alexios thought. It won’t be until they find that we’re not on it that they’ll start hunting for us.

He gripped the arm of Yamagata’s suit. “Come on, we’re going to take a little walk.”

Yamagata resisted. “Where do you want to take me?”

Pointing with his free hand, Alexios said, “Down there, to the bottom of the rift. With the Sun coming up you’ll be more comfortable sheltered from direct sunlight. It’ll be cooler down there, only a couple of hundred degrees Celsius in the shade.”

“You wish to prolong my execution?”

“I wish to prevent our being rescued,” Alexios replied.

Yamagata stepped to the edge of the rift. Inside the spacesuit it was difficult to see straight down, but the chasm’s slope didn’t seem terribly steep. Rugged, though, he saw. A slip of the foot could send me tumbling down to the bottom. If that didn’t rupture my suit and kill me quickly, it might damage my radiators and life support pack enough to let me boil in my own juices.

He looked back at Alexios, standing implacably next to him. “After you,” Alexios said, gesturing toward the edge of the rift.

Yamagata hesitated. Even with only the slimmest arc of the Sun’s huge disk above the nearby horizon a flood of heat was sweeping across the barren ground. Dust motes sparkled and jumped like fireflies, suddenly electrified by the Sun’s powerful ionizing radiance. Both men stared at the barren dusty ground suddenly turned manic as the particles danced and jittered in the newly risen Sun. Slowly they fell to the ground again, as if exhausted, their electrical charges neutralized at last.

They looked out to the horizon and gazed briefly at the blazing edge of the Sun; even through the deeply tinted visors of their helmets its overpowering brilliance made their eyes water. The Sun’s rim was dancing with flaming prominences that writhed like tortured spirits in hell.

Yamagata heard his spacesuit groan and ping in the surging, all-encompassing heat. He looked down into the chasm again, and the after-image of the Sun burned in his vision. Turning around slowly in the cumbersome suit, he started down the pebbly, cracked slope backwards. Alexios followed him. It was hard, exhausting work. Yamagata’s booted foot slipped on a loose stone and he went skittering down the pebbly slope several meters before grinding to a stop. Alexios came skidding down beside him.

“Are you all right?”

It took Yamagata several panting breaths before he could reply, “What difference does it make?”

Alexios grunted. “You’re all right, then.”

Yamagata nodded inside his helmet. The suit seemed intact; its life support equipment still functioned.

Both men were soaked with perspiration by the time they reached the bottom of the rift. Yamagata looked up and saw that the edge of the chasm was ablaze with harsh light.

“Sunrise,” said Alexios. “You come from the land of the rising sun, don’t you?”

Yamagata decided he wouldn’t dignify that snide remark with a reply. Instead he said, “The message for me was that Bishop Danvers has committed suicide.”

Silence for several heartbeats. Then Alexios said, “I didn’t expect that.”

“He slit his throat. Very bloody, from the description.”

“I imagine it would be.”

“You are responsible for his death.”

Again a long wait before Alexios replied, “I suppose I am, in a way.”

“In a way?” Yamagata jeered. “You planted false evidence and accused him falsely. As a result he killed himself. Murder, it seems to me. Or was that an execution, too?”

“He was a weak man,” Alexios said. His voice sounded tight, brittle, in Yamagata’s earphones.

“Weak or strong, he is dead because of you.”

No reply.

Yamagata decided to twist the knife. “I am not a Christian, of course, but isn’t it true that in your religion killing one man is just as hideous a sin as killing millions?”

Alexios immediately snapped, “I’m not a Christian, either.”

“Ah, no? But do you feel any guilt for the death of Bishop Danvers?”

“He destroyed my life! Him and Molina. He got what he deserved.”

Yamagata nodded inside his helmet. “You feel the guilt, don’t you?”

“No,” Alexios snapped. Then he raised his hand and pointed to the steep wall of the chasm. Yamagata saw that the slim line of glaring sunlight made the rift’s edge look molten, so brilliant that it hurt his eyes to look up there.

“In five or six hours we’ll be in the direct sun. A few hours after that our life support systems will run out of air. Then all the guilts, all the debts, they’ll be paid. For both of us.”

Alexios could not see Yamagata’s face as they stood together in the bottom of the fault rift. I might as well be looking at a statue, he thought. A faceless, silent statue.

But then Yamagata stirred, came to life. He began walking down the rough uneven floor of the chasm, heading in the direction opposite to the path of the unoccupied tractor. Alexios realized he was heading back toward the base.