more than ten years old.'
That was peculiar. And if the Belt stations hadn't spread the news through the solar system,
Anton seemed to jerk himself back to here and now, back to the gray singles regime. 'Am I cramping your style?'
'No problem. Nobody hurries in the Monobloc. If you see someone you like—' My fingers danced over lighted symbols on the rim of the table. 'This gets you a map. Locate where she's sitting, put the cursor on it. That gets you a display… hmm.'
I'd set the cursor on the white-haired lady. I liked the readout. 'Phoebe Garrison, seventy-nine, eleven or twelve years older than you. Straight. Won a Second in the Gray Jumps last year… that's the America's Skiing Matches for seventy and over. She could kick your tail if you don't watch your manners. It says she's smarter than we are, too.
'Point is, she can check you out the same way. Or me. And she probably found this place through the Velvet Net, which is the computer network for unlocked lifestyles.'
'So. Two males sitting together—'
'Anyone who thinks we're bent can check if she cares enough. Bends don't come to the Monobloc anyway. But if we want company, we should move to a bigger table.'
We did that. I caught Phoebe Garrison's companion's eye. They played with their table controls, discussed, and presently wandered over.
Dinner turned into a carouse. Alcohol was involved, but we'd left the Monobloc by then. When we split up, Anton was with Michiko. I went home with Phoebe.
Phoebe had fine legs, as I'd anticipated, though both knees were teflon and plastic. Her face was lovely even in morning sunlight. Wrinkled, of course. She was two weeks short of eighty and wincing in anticipation. She ate with a cross-country skier's appetite. We told of our lives as we ate.
She'd come to Santa Maria to visit her oldest grandson. In her youth she'd done critical work in nanoengineering. The Board had allowed her four children. (I'd known I was outclassed.) All were married, scattered across the Earth, and so were the grandkids.
My two sons had emigrated to the Belt while still in their twenties. I'd visited them once during an investigation, trip paid for by the United Nations—
'You were an ARM? Really? How interesting! Tell me a story… if you can.'
'That's the problem, all right.'
The interesting tales were all classified. The ARM suppresses dangerous technology. What the ARM buries is supposed to stay buried. I remembered a kind of time compressor, and a field that would catalyze combustion, both centuries old. Both were first used for murder. If turned loose or rediscovered, either would generate more interesting tales yet.
I said, 'I don't know anything current. They bounced me out when I got too old. Now I run construction robots at various spaceports.'
'Interesting?'
'Mostly placid.' She wanted a story? Okay. The ARM enforced more than the killer-tech laws, and some of those tales I could tell.
'We don't get many mother hunts these days. This one was wished on us by the Belt—' And I told her of a lunie who's sired two clones. One he'd raised on the Moon and one he'd left in the Saturn Conserve. He'd moved to Earth, where one clone is any normal citizen's entire birthright. When we found him he was arranging to culture a third clone…
I dreamed a bloody dream.
It was one of those: I was able to take control, to defeat what had attacked me. In the black of an early Sunday morning the shreds of the dream dissolved before I could touch them; but the sensations remained. I felt strong, balanced, powerful, victorious.
It took me a few minutes to become suspicious of this particular flavor of wonderful, but I'd had practice. I eased out from under Phoebe's arm and leg and out of bed. I lurched into the medical alcove, linked myself up and fell asleep on the table.
Phoebe found me there in the morning. She asked, 'Couldn't that wait till after breakfast?'
'I've got four years on you and I'm going for infinity. So I'm careful,' I told her. It wasn't quite a lie… and she didn't quite believe me either.
On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the local museums. I went back to work.
In Death Valley a semicircle of twenty lasers points at an axial array of mirrors. Tracks run across the desert to a platform that looks like strands of spun caramel. Every hour or so a spacecraft trundles along the tracks, poses above the mirrors, and rises into the sky on a blinding, searing pillar of light.
Here was where I and three companions and twenty-eight robots worked between emergencies. Emergencies were common enough. From time to time Glenn and Skii and ten or twenty machines had to be shipped off to Outback Field or Baikonur, while I held the fort at Death Valley Field.
All of the equipment was old. The original mirrors had all been slaved to one system, and those had been replaced again and again. Newer mirrors were independently mounted and had their own computers, but even these were up to fifty years old and losing their flexibility. The lasers had to be replaced somewhat more often. Nothing was ready to fall apart, quite.
But the mirrors have to adjust their shapes to match distorting air currents all the way up to vacuum, because the distortions themselves must focus the drive beam. A laser at 99.3 % efficiency is keeping too much energy, getting too hot. At 99.1 % something would melt, lost power would blow the laser into shrapnel, and a cargo would not reach orbit.
My team had been replacing mirrors and lasers long before I came on the scene. This circuit was nearly complete. We had already reconfigured some robots to begin replacing track.
The robots worked alone while we entertained ourselves in the monitor room. If the robots ran into anything unfamiliar, they stopped and beeped. Then a story or songfest or poker game would stop just as abruptly.
Usually the beep meant that the robot had found an acute angle, an uneven surface, a surface not strong enough to bear a loaded robot, a bend in a pipe, a pipe where it shouldn't be… a geometrical problem. The robots couldn't navigate just anywhere. Sometimes we'd have to unload it and move the load to a cart, by hand. Sometimes we had to pick it up with a crane and move it or turn it. Lots of it was muscle work.
Phoebe joined me for dinner Thursday evening.
She'd whipped her grandson at laser tag. They'd gone through the museum at Edward AFB. They'd skied… he needed to get serious about that, and maybe get some surgery too…
I listened and smiled and presently tried to tell her about my work. She nodded; her eyes glazed. I tried to tell her how good it was, how restful, after all those years in the ARM.
The ARM: that got her interest back.
I'd been saving that. It was an embezzling system good enough to ruin the economy. It made Zachariah Henry rich. He might have stayed rich if he'd quit in time… and if his system hadn't been so good, so dangerous, he might have ended in prison. Instead… well, let his tongue whisper secrets to the ears in the organ banks.
I could speak of it because they'd changed the system. I didn't say that it had happened twenty years before I joined the ARM. But I was still running out of declassified stories. I told her, 'If a lot of people know something can be done, somebody'll do it. We can suppress it and suppress it again—'
She pounced. 'Like what?'
'Like… well, the usual example is the first cold fusion system. They did it with palladium and platinum, but half a dozen other metals work. And organic superconductors: the patents listed a wrong ingredient. Various grad students tried it wrong and still got it. If there's a way to do it, there's probably a lot of ways.'
'That was before there was an ARM. Would you have suppressed superconductors?'
