Cold as Ice (6 page)

* * *

Nell Cotter was wrong. But so was Jon Perry.

Even before the war, GOMS had been run on quasi-military lines. That had never changed. The floating bases, scattered across the oceans of the world, still had the attitude and ambience of military field operations. There might be rigid lines of command, some inefficiency, and a good deal of unnecessary or wasted effort, but things got done. Equipment was serviced. Machinery worked. Schedules were met.

By contrast, the Administrative Center of the Global Ocean Monitor System ran like the headquarters of a peacetime army. With no end product, bureaucracy was more important than results. Delay was irrelevant, efficiency had no meaning.

Jon had spent his working life in the world of the floating bases. It was a shock to report to Admin Center by five o'clock and learn that no one knew who he was or had any information about his arrival. Undersecretary Posada was busy and could not be disturbed. There was no Jon Perry on the appointments calendar, today or in the future. Posada's assistants had already left and would not return until nine the next morning. No one was available to authorize a call back to the floating base.

Jon was given—reluctantly—a chit that would allow him to stay overnight at an Admin Center facility. He was warned that any service other than dinner and breakfast would have to be paid for personally. By six-thirty he had arrived at the spartan GOMS dormitory, to find the building packed with people. The manager informed him that with the climate change, Arenas was booming as never before, that every building was full to overflowing for the Midsummer Festival, and that Jon's chit meant nothing. If he could find nowhere else, he might be given a bedroll and a place on the dining-room floor—after all the meals were served, of course, and after the clean-up staff had done its work. Say, about one A.M.

Jon called Nell Cotter, who was staying down by the strait. Her number did not answer. He left a message that he was on the way over, went outside onto the hilly streets, and walked south toward the water.

Some elements of Arenas had not changed with the new prosperity. Every square meter of soil was riotous with summer flowers, and the air was balmy with their evening perfume. At latitude fifty-three south, the December sky would cloud over but not darken for another three or four hours.

After six years of solitude and open ocean, Jon found the flowers and crowded streets as alien as another planet. Even the skuas, petrels, and terns were gone. He searched the sky for them, but they had flown far south for the summer, to reap a rich harvest around the diminishing icecap.

Strangest of all were the children. There were no children on the floating bases, but here they were everywhere, playing games on each street corner, scuttling across sidewalks under his feet, or rolling uncontrolled down the hill on homemade carts and scooters. He avoided them unconsciously, his thoughts far away. It was one thing to be ignored at your home base, where you were free to set your own schedule and work on your own scientific projects. It was another to be dragged fifteen hundred kilometers without explanation and then be treated in a way that made it clear that you were a total nonentity. He became gloomier and more irritated with every step. Something bad was going to happen to him. He knew it. But he could not guess what it might be.

By the time he reached the address that Nell had given him, he was in no mood for dinners of the rich and famous. Not at ten thousand pesos per head, not at any number of pesos.

When he called from the lobby, he was ready to tell her that he had changed his mind, he was not going out for dinner. She offered him no opportunity.

"Great. Sixth floor. Come on up." And she was gone.

She had told him where she was staying, but it was like no hotel he had ever seen. The building was a graceful high-rise structure, far more inviting than the Admin dormitory. There was no guest registration, no sign of porters or staff. The elevators seemed designed only for freight. When he emerged onto the sixth floor, he found himself in a great windowless room divided into square cubicles by waist-high partitions. Some of the cubicles were bright-lit and glassed in from floor to ceiling. Others were dark and held nothing but rows of grey-painted cabinets. People seemed to be hurrying everywhere at random. He stared around in confusion until he caught sight of Nell four partitions away, leaning over a bank of television sets.

She had already changed from the green jump suit she had worn in the
Spindrift
to an off-the-shoulder gown of the same color. She had also done something mysterious to her hair, sweeping it up to reveal the graceful curve of her neck. When he reached her side, she straightened and gave him a head-to-toe instant scrutiny.

"Standard size should do it. Come on."

She took his hand. He allowed himself to be towed along through a chessboard of partitions and on through a pair of double doors.

"There you are." She waved an arm at a score of tall cupboards along one wall. "Just help yourself."

She saw his puzzled expression. "Look, I'm not picky, and what you're wearing right now is fine with me—personally. But we're going to a
formal dinner
, for God's sake. If you don't want to be stopped at the door and asked questions, you have to change. It's dinner jackets and gowns tonight."

"I don't have a dinner jacket, not here or on the base."

"I thought you might not. Why do you think I told you to come over?" She flung open the door of one of the cupboards. "Take your pick. All sizes, colors, and styles. All centuries, too."

It was dawning on Jon. "This is a
studio
."

"Of course it is. My job. Remember, I have a job? They do plays and period pieces here, too. You could go dressed as anything from a twelfth-century Franciscan friar to Peter Pan, but we want you to fade into the background, so we'll match your plumage to the typical ten-thousand-peso-a-dinner millionaire." She reached in and pulled out a hanger. "Better let me help, I think. Why don't you try this for a start?"

It took a long time. Jon would have settled for the first suit picked out, but she insisted that the drape across the shoulders was not quite right. "Rich people
do
wear clothes that don't fit, I know. But hydrothermal-vent specialists
posing
as rich people don't." She adjusted the bow tie and installed a tiny videorecorder in his buttonhole. "The final touch. Camera instead of camellia, so there'll be no doubt as to what you do. Who knows? Maybe you'll get some priceless footage." Nell stepped back and surveyed the result. "How do you feel?"

"Strange." Jon hardly recognized himself in the all-around mirrors. She had done something peculiar to his hair, greying and thickening it around his temples and ears and trimming it at the front.

"You look great. We'll walk over. By the time we get there, you'll be adjusted to your fine feathers. Let's go."

The trek back up the hill in the deepening twilight was a revelation. Other pedestrians gave them one look and moved out of the way. Even the children on the little carts veered aside.

"The protective aura of wealth." Nell had taken his arm and was looking straight ahead, ignoring the people around them. "Even fake wealth."

"I thought this sort of thing was supposed to have ended with the war."

"Spoken like a true scientist. That's one of the lessons of history. It
never
ends, and it never will. Not as long as people are people." She squeezed his arm and stared haughtily down her nose at a man who was slow in getting out of their way.

The meeting hall itself stood on a western slope, facing over the strait and toward the distant ocean. A dozen men in uniform hovered around the entrance. They watched closely until the tickets that Nell produced were verified. Jon stood by, nervously fingering his slick lapels.

"I thought we were in real trouble," he said softly when they were finally admitted. "All those guards."

"Not for us." She squeezed his arm again. "Lighten up, dear."

"For who, then?"

"There's been talk around the studios that Bounders might be coming here in force to cause trouble. An Inner Circle dinner would be one of their natural targets."

"But that's ridiculous. Outward Bound needs the Mobies. Cyrus Mobarak ought to be a Bounder hero."

"He ought to be, and for all I know, he is. But Security doesn't have the sense to understand that, so they're hunting for Bounders behind every garbage can." She tugged at his arm. "Don't go that way, dearie. We're tolerated because they want publicity, and we'll even be fed. But you don't get to sit with the
real
Inner Circle."

The dining room contained ten round tables, each one holding place settings for eight. Nell led the way to a small, bare bench, half-hidden from the main floor and offering a good camera view of the head table on its dais. A man and two women were setting up cameras on the bench. Nell nodded to them, and they gave Jon an incurious glance before they went back to work.

Cyrus Mobarak was already at the head table, chatting with a woman in uniform on his immediate left. Jon Perry studied him as the service of the meal began. He found the examination oddly unsatisfying. Mobarak was in his middle-to-late forties. Seated, he appeared to be short and strongly built, with a thick neck that bulged against the blue-and-white wing collar. His suit was plain grey, lacking medals, decorations, or jewelry. His nose was prominent. He bore a thick shock of greying hair, and his brow ridges overhung pale, vacant-seeming eyes. He ate lightly, pecking at most of the dishes that were served, and he seemed to listen and nod a lot more than he spoke. By contrast with the glittering, bejeweled, and medal-laden audience of Inner Circle members, he was unimpressive.

"Well, what did you expect?" asked Nell when Perry commented on how
normal
Mobarak looked. "A ten-foot giant covered with red hair? It was one of the early discoveries and big disappointments of my career. Great men—and great women—mostly don't look different from anyone else. My job would be a lot easier if they did."

"But
they
—" Jon jerked his head toward the audience.

"—are not great people." Nell was leaning close. "It's heresy to suggest it, especially in this room, but the Inner Circle are only
wealth
, just old wealth and nothing more. The woman next to Cyrus Mobarak has the brain of a clam, and she got her high-level job through family influence. I've never spoken to Mobarak, but I'll bet he isn't here because it's where he'd most like to be. He's here because he needs their
money
for his projects. You'll see Mr. Wizard at work in a few minutes."

The meal was ending. The uniformed woman to Mobarak's left had risen, and the hall fell silent.

"Good evening." She smiled around the room, careful to include the press table for a long moment. "My name is Dolores Gelbman, and I am energy coordinator for the Pacific Rim. My friends, ladies and gentlemen of the Inner Circle, tonight I have been granted an unusual privilege. It will be my pleasure to introduce to you our honored guest, Cyrus Mobarak. But before I ask him to address you, I would first like to say a few words about his work and what it means to all of us." She lifted a couple of sheets of paper and took a glance at them. "Humans were relying on fusion energy long before they knew it. Our sun, that mighty solar furnace, is itself nothing more than a giant fusion reactor, changing hydrogen and deuter-rerum"—she stumbled over the word and dipped her head briefly to consult her hand-held notes—"
deuterium
to helium and oxygen and . . . other things. But it was not until a hundred and fifty years ago that we achieved the first controlled fusion. And it was not until the nineteen fifties that fusion with net energy production became possible."

Jon Perry started and turned to Nell. "That's all wrong!"

"I know." She was smiling. "Somebody as dumb as her wrote it, and she can't even read it properly. She has no idea that it's rubbish. But sssh! Enjoy. If
you
don't like what she's saying, think how Mobarak must feel. Look at him."

Cyrus Mobarak was leaning back in his seat, elbows on the table and hands set fingertip to fingertip as Dolores Gelbman went on with her speech. He seemed perfectly calm, perfectly relaxed, enjoying the occasion. It took a few more minutes before Perry realized what he was doing.

He leaned across to Nell. "He's
counting.
Counting her factual errors, ticking them off on his fingers. See, there's another one, she said
neutrons
and she meant
neutrinos.
That's half a dozen so far. He's going to tear her to pieces when she gets done."

"Like to make a bet? He'd probably love to, but he's far too smart for that. He knows who he has to manipulate, and how to do it. Wait and see."

"—until the end of the war," Dolores Gelbman was saying, "when our industry was destroyed, much of our land rendered uninhabitable, and our energy production devastated. And at that moment of greatest need, riding in to Earth from the Belt like a savior knight in shining armor, came Cyrus Mobarak. Ready to make the secrets of the compact, ultra-efficient fusion devices that he had invented freely available to all who needed them, here or in the Outer System. During the past quarter of a century, the name of Cyrus Mobarak has become
synonymous
with fusion energy. By his efforts, it has been developed to the point where no other power source can compete with it for efficiency, cost, or safety. And so it is my privilege tonight, on behalf of the Inner Circle, to present Earth's highest technology award, for pioneer work in the systematic development of safe fusion power, to Cyrus Mobarak. The man whom I am pleased to dub . . . the
Sun King
."

"Listen to her," hissed Jon. "She says 'Sun King' as though she just made it up. It's been used throughout the solar system for fifteen years!"

But Cyrus Mobarak was rising to shake Gelbman's hand, smiling as though the name she had given him was totally new and surprising.

"Thank you, Coordinator Gelbman, for your kind words. And thank you everyone, for the honor of this award." He nodded toward the wrapped package, half a meter high, on the table in front of him. "And thank you even more for giving me the honor of addressing you tonight."