Exile-and Glory (13 page)

The town of Cabo San Lucas was at the very tip of the peninsula: just beyond it were high, rocky hills, and over them the stormy Pacific. The hills curled around a bay that had once been so lovely Aeneas had cried when he saw it.

He could cry again: the bay was choked with ships, and the pueblo was gone, replaced by rows of town houses, high-bay industrial sheds, a city with the heart and soul of Los Angeles in its days of frantic expansion. And north of Cabo, along the Pacific shore, where the water came in cool and clear, were the reactors: domes fifty meters high, twelve of them, each with its attendant blockhouses and power plants and sea-water ponds where the chemicals of the sea were extracted. There was a vast jungle of insulators and spidery cube towers and finned transformers spewing forth a web of thick cables leading to a line of transmission towers marching inland and northward toward La Paz and ultimately the whole 1600 kilometers to the energy-starved United States.

Laurie Jo moved her head in a sidewise jerk, a peculiar tic to her left ear. She'd done that before, and she saw Aeneas looking at her curiously. "Implant," she said. "I was asking for the time. Miguel, take us to the observation tower."

"Si, Doña
Laura."

"I hadn't known," said Aeneas. "But I should have guessed. How do you ask questions?"

"I merely think them." She indicated a little console in her purse, and a panel at her side in the car. The panel swung down to reveal a computer input console. "My implant is keyed to these, and there's a data link from the car to any of my plants. I've asked them when the next scheduled launchings are, and we're just in time. You've never seen one, have you?"

"Not live." He wanted to think about what she'd told him. The implants weren't common—at over a million dollars each, they wouldn't be. A little transceiver, wired directly into the nervous system, a short-range computer link. Provided that she had access to a transmitter—the one in her purse was very small and could be manipulated without anyone seeing it—Laurie Jo could know everything known to the largest computer net on earth.

She could ask it to solve any equation, look up any dossier, find the commercial strength of any company, and hear the output directly and silently. "That must be useful at board meetings," said Aeneas.

"Yes. Most of my colleagues don't know about it. Will you keep my secret?"

"Of course."

"And my other secrets? If I show you everything, will—will you use it again? Or are your crusades against me ended?" Her eyes were very blue and she was very close; and Aeneas knew what she was doing. She had deliberately driven him over a route they'd taken seventeen years ago, and she'd done her hair the way she had then. The linen suit she now wore wasn't like the jeans and chambray shirts of years past, and she'd never again have the eyes that Laurie Jo Preston had; Laurie Jo Hansen had seen too much. But she could try.

"What would be the point?" Aeneas asked. "I won my crusade. We liberated Jerusalem." And it had been as it must have been for a true knight of the Middle Ages: how could he rejoice when he saw his comrades wade in blood to the altar of the Prince of Peace? When he saw the Chivalry of the West grubbing for lands in the Kingdom of Jerusalem? "I no longer have weapons to fight you with."

"It's not enough. Aeneas, I want you to look at what I've done. I want you to see the choices I have. The
real
choices, not the theoretical ones. And when you've seen all that, I want you to join me. But I can't even try to convince you unless—Aeneas, I owe it to my colleagues not to bring a spy into their councils."

"I see." And he did see. She had always been as certain that she was right as he'd been convinced that her way was wrong; and his way had fallen. He had no duties. The thought broke over him like one of the great grey curling rollers from the Pacific.
I have no duties.
It made him feel alone and uneasy. "I promise. Your secrets are safe."

"No matter what you see? And no matter what you decide?"

"Yes." And that was that, as they both knew. Aeneas cursed himself for allowing his emotions to betray him . . . but she was Laurie Jo, and she couldn't have changed that much. She couldn't.

God, let me be able to join her. Let it always be like this. Because the last two hours have been the happiest I've had in sixteen years.

The tower overlooked a valley ringed by low hills. A forest of
cardones,
the great sentinel cactus, marched down the sides of the hills to the leveled plain below. Rail lines and huge electric cables snaked through at either end; the plain was filled with concrete blockhouses where the power cables terminated. At the end of each blockhouse was a flat mirror a meter in diameter, and they all pointed toward the installation below them where streamlined cylinders squatted on railroad cars.

The spacecraft were two meters in diameter and five times that tall, and as they waited in neat lines for their turn they reminded Aeneas of machine gun ammunition grown swollen and pregnant; but their progeny was not war.

Everyone in the tower had been politely respectful, but harried; now they had no time for visitors. Hansen Enterprises carried no dead weight. There were no explainers, not even when the owner came to watch the operations; perhaps especially when Laurie Jo Hansen was present. Aeneas and Laurie Jo were alone in a small, glass-enclosed room, while below a dozen hard-eyed young men sat at consoles.

A clock ticked off the seconds. "We have to be very precise," she told him. "The MHD engines give us half the power we need, but we have to draw the rest directly from the line. There'll be dimouts all over Baja."

"And it costs," Aeneas said.

"Yes. Three thousand megawatts for an hour. At twenty cents a kilowatt hour."

"But you get part of the power directly."

"From burning hydrogen in old rocket engines and sending it through an MHD system. Yes. But the hydrogen and oxygen have to be made. That part of the operation is less efficient than just taking the power from the line, but we have to do it. We can't take everything off the line when we launch." She looked fondly at the capsules below. "We get a lot for my six hundred thousand dollars, Aeneas. Eighty tons go into orbit in the next hour."

The first of the capsules moved over the embankment enclosing the launch area. A roar from beyond the low hills signaled the beginning of the rocket engines: giant engines, but they lay on their sides, their exhaust directed down ceramic tubes protecting copper coils that drew power directly from the hot gasses.

Aeneas couldn't see the launching mirror below the capsule, but suddenly the spacecraft rose and there was a blinding green beam, a solid rod of light over a meter thick extending from the capsule to the ground. The sound rolled past: two hundred and fifty explosions each second as the laser expanded the air in the parabolic chamber below the capsule, and the air rushed out to propel it upward. The two hundred and fifty-cycle note was oddly musical, but very loud at first, then dying away. The spacecraft soon vanished, but the light stayed on for half a minute, tracking the capsule; then it vanished as well.

The mirrors at each blockhouse pivoted slightly, and a second capsule rose from another launch station. The green light tore through roiled air, and there was a humming roar that vibrated the glass of the observation room until the spacecraft was gone and there was only the silent power of the green light. In the half minute that the second capsule absorbed power, a new spacecraft had been placed on the first launch station. The mirrors pivoted again, and it rose; then another, and another.

The laser launchings had been impressive on TV; live they were unbelievable. The long lines of capsules moved toward the earth and concrete emplacements protecting the launching mirror; they reached them; and seconds later, each capsule vanished at 300 gees, shoved upward by a meter-thick column that was nothing more than light, but which looked like a great green growing plant.

"About a thousand kilograms each?" Aeneas asked.

"Exactly a thousand kilos total weight," she said. "We lose fifty kilos of ablating material. The rest goes into orbit, and that's all payload. Any mass is payload. That's what we need up there, Aeneas, mass, any mass—metal, fuel, gases, tankage, even human wastes. We can convert and modify if we have something to start with."

"And you can launch eighty thousand kilos in one hour . . ."

"Yes. We lose some. Each one of those capsules has to be picked up, somehow. That costs mass. We guide some into rendezvous with
Heimdall,
but they have to go after most. Still it's cheaper this way—once we start launching, the power scheduling's such that it's better to go on for a full hour."

The lines of capsules had ended; now new ones were brought up. These were longer and slimmer than the others; and when they took their places over the launching mirrors, they rose more slowly.

"Ten gees," she said. "Crew capsules. Ten gees for a minute and a half."

"Isn't that close to human tolerance?"

"Not really." Her voice was cold and distant. "I took it. And if I can—"

He finished the thought for her. "Hansen Enterprises employees will damn well have to. Or starve."

"I want no one who goes only for the money."

They watched the three personnel capsules rise; then the trains brought up more of the unmanned thirty-g cargo capsules, and the pregnant machine gun began again. "And this was what it was all for. Your crusade," he said.

Her smile was wistful, full of triumph and regret. "Yes. I'm not proud of all I've done, Aeneas. You've seen La Paz. Todos Santos. Cabo. Ugly, changed, not what they were when we—not what they were. But the men in Cabo don't go to the mainland looking for work while their families starve. I've done that."

"Yes. You've done that."

"But it was all only fallout, Aeneas.
This
is what it was for.
Heimdall.
The rainbow bridge to the stars! And by God it was worth it! You haven't seen the station, Aeneas. And I want you to."

He said nothing, but he looked out at the launching field. The lasers were off now. The great crippled rocket engines were silent. The power from the reactors was back on line, fed to the Baja industries, to Southern California; to the pumps even now cooling the laser installations. To the water-makers that made Baja fertile, for a while. But all that was incidental, because she hadn't lost the dream they'd shared, a dream she'd learned from him in his anger when America retreated from adventure . . . .

She hadn't lost it. He thought he had, once. Not entirely; but he'd been willing to sacrifice it to a larger dream.

Yet what dream was larger than a bridge to the stars?

"And now what?" he asked.

"You've seen what I've done. You don't know what I do to keep it."

"And?"

"And when you do—when you know everything that's happened in the last sixteen years—we'll talk. Not until then." And her eyes were on his, and he saw the hunger and the loneliness, and he prayed to a God he'd half forgotten that it wasn't just a reflection of his own.

They flew high over the Pacific. There were no luxuries in this aircraft; Aeneas and Laurie Jo sat uncomfortably in bucket seats over the wing, and Miguel sat far behind them. Neither the pilot nor the air crew paid them any attention. The pilot was not pleased to have them aboard, no matter that the plane belonged to Laurie Jo Hansen.

Two armed jets flew high above them. They bore the markings of Hansen Enterprises and were registered in Mexico; and the bribes required to keep permission for a private air force were as staggering as the cost of operating them.

"Why?" Aeneas asked, pointing to the slim black delta shapes above.

"Pirates," she said. "Each capsule holds a thousand kilos of cargo." She took papers from her briefcase and handed them to him. "Computer chips, four thousand dollars a kilo. Water-maker membranes, six thousand dollars a kilo if we'd sell them. We won't until we've enough for ourselves. Concentrated vitamins, forty-five hundred dollars a kilo. And other things. Chemicals, vaccines. Some not for sale at any price."

The value of each capsule in the current drop was nearly seven million dollars. Even in these inflated times that was enough money to make a man wealthy for life. And there would be no problem selling the cargo . . . .

"But how would pirates find them?" he asked. "You can bring them down anywhere in the world."

"They can be tracked. So can my recovery planes. The NORAD radar system watches us very closely."

"But they don't give information to pirates! Not anymore! I put a stop to that sort of thing!"

"Did you, Aeneas? For a while, after Greg became President, the losses stopped; but they started again. Do you want proof?"

"No." She'd never lied to him. "How long have you had proof? Why didn't you tell someone?"

"Who'd listen? Greg Tolland is President of the United States."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

She was silent for a long time. There was only the thunder of the jet, and the chatter of the crew as they watched for the cargo capsules to parachute down from orbit. Finally: "What would I have been to you if I'd given you the proof about Greg, Aeneas? If I'd done that, I'd have lost you forever."

And the White House itself had become the abattoir of his dreams . . . . "We fought you, Laurie Jo. I fought you. I think it gave Greg a perverted satisfaction to have me as his general against you. But—was he right? Laurie Jo, should power like yours exist?"

"Without power, none of this would happen. You can't do anything without power."

"Yes." They'd been through it before, endlessly. "But it must be responsible power! It must be directed for—"

"For what, Aeneas? Something trite, like 'the betterment of mankind'? Who chooses the goals? And how do you see the choice is kept, once made? Responsible, Aeneas? To the people? You tried that."

And that was the new thing in their eternal argument. Before, there had always been Greg Tolland and his People's Alliance. There had been the hope that power would be controlled. Could be controlled.