life for Waldo. He wanted to settle down, get rich (or at least moderately prosperous), be respectable, and build new things for people.
His life didn’t quite work out that way. There was plenty of work for a bright young engineer, rebuilding the shattered electrical power grid, erecting whole new cities to house the refugees driven from their homes by the greenhouse floods, designing solar power farms in the clear desert skies of the Southwest. But the various jobs took him from one place to another. He was still a nomad; he just stayed in one place a bit longer than his gypsying parents did.
He never got rich, or even very prosperous. Much of the work he did was commissioned by the federal or state government at minimum wage. Often enough he was conscripted by local chapters of the New Morality and he was paid nothing more than room, board, and a pious sermon or two about doing God’s work. He married twice, divorced twice, and then gave up the idea of marriage.
Until a guy named Bracknell came to him with a wild idea and a gleam in his eye. Ralph Waldo Emerson fell in love with the skytower project.
Now that it was nearly finished he almost felt sad. He had spent more years in Ecuador than anywhere else in his whole life. He was becoming fond of Spanish poetry. He no longer got nauseous in zero gravity. He gloried in this monumental piece of architecture, this tower stretching toward heaven. He had even emblazoned his name into one of the outside panels that sheathed the tower up here at the geostationary level, insulating the tower from the tremendous electrical flux of the Van Allen belt. Working in an armored spacesuit and using an electron gun, he laboriously wrote his full name on one of the buckyball panels.
He laughed at his private joke. Someday some maintenance dweeb is going to see it, he thought, and wonder who the hell wrote the name of a poet on this tower’s insulation skin.
Now he stood at the control board in the compact oval chamber that would soon be the geosynch level’s operations center. His feet were ensconced in plastic floor loops so that he wouldn’t float off weightlessly in the zero gravity of the station. Surrounding him were display screens that lined the walls like the multifaceted eyes of some giant insect. Technicians in gray coveralls bobbed in midair as they labored to connect the screens and get them running. One by one, the colored lights on the control board winked on and a new screen lit up. Emerson could see a dozen different sections of the mammoth geostationary structure. There was still a considerable amount of work to do, of course, but it was mostly just a matter of bringing in equipment and setting it up. Furnishing the hotel built into the platform’s upper level. Checking out the radiation shielding and the electrical insulation and the airlocks. Making certain the zero-g toilets worked. Monkey work. Not creative. Not challenging.
There was talk of starting a new skytower in Borneo or central Africa.
“ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” he muttered to himself. “To sail beyond the sunset.”
“Hey, Waldo,” the voice of one of his assistants grated annoyingly in the communication plug in his right ear, “the supply ship is coming in.”
“It’s early,” Emerson said, without needing to look at the digital clock set into the control board.
“Early or late, they’re here and they want a docking port.”
Emerson glanced up at the working screens, then played his fingers across the keyboard on the panel. One of the screens flicked from an interior view of the bare and empty hotel level upstairs to an outside camera view of a conical Masterson Clippership hovering in co-orbit a few hundred meters from the platform. He frowned at the image.
“We were expecting an uncrewed supply module,” he said into his lip mike.
“And we got a nice shiny Clippership,” his assistant replied. “They got our cargo and they want to offload it and go home.”
Shaking his head slightly, Emerson checked the manifest that the Clippership automatically relayed to the platform’s logistics program. It matched what they were expecting.
“Why’d they use a Clipper?” he wondered aloud.
“They said the freight booster had a malf and they swapped out the supply module with the Clippership’s passenger module.”
It didn’t make sense to Emerson, but there was the Clippership waiting to dock and offload its cargo, and the manifest was exactly what they expected.
“Ours not to reason why,” Emerson misquoted. “Hook ’em to docking port three; it’s closest to them.”
“Will do.”
Franklin Zachariah hummed a cheerful tune to himself as he sat shoe-homed into the cramped cockpit of the Clippership. The pilot, a Japanese or Vietnamese or some kind of Asian gook, shot an annoyed glance over his shoulder. Hard to tell his nationality, Zach thought, with those black shades he’s wearing. Like a mask or some macho android out of a banned terminator flick.
Zachariah stopped his humming but continued to play the tune in his head. It helped to pass the boring time. He had expected to get spacesick when the rocket went into orbit, but the medication they’d given him was working fine. Zero gravity didn’t bother him at all. No upchucks, not even dizziness.
Zachariah was an American. He did not belong to the New Morality or the Flower Dragon or any other fundamentalist movement. He did not even follow the religion of his forefathers. He found that he couldn’t believe in a god who made so many mistakes. He himself was a very clever young man—everyone who had ever met him said so. What they didn’t know was that he was also a very destructive fellow.
Although he’d been born in Brooklyn, when he was six years old and the rising sea level caused by the greenhouse warming finally overwhelmed the city’s flood control dams, Zachariah’s family fled to distant cousins in the mountains near Charleston, West Virginia. There young Zach, as everyone called him, learned what it meant to be a Jew. At school, the other young boys alternately beat him up and demanded help with their classwork from him. His father, a professor in New York, had to settle for a job as a bookkeeper for his younger cousin, a jeweler in downtown Charleston who was ultimately shot to death in a holdup.
Zach learned how to avoid beatings by hiring the toughest thugs in school to be his bodyguards. He paid them with money he made from selling illicit drugs that he cooked up in the moldy basement of the house they shared with four other families.
By the time Zach was a teenager he had become a very accomplished computer hacker. Unlike his acne- ridden friends, who delved into illegal pornographic sites or shut down the entire public school system with a computer virus, Zach used his computer finesse in more secretive and lucrative ways. He pilfered bank accounts. He jiggered police records. He even got the oafish schoolmate who’d been his worst tormentor years earlier arrested by the state police for abetting an abortion. The kid went to jail protesting his innocence, but his own computer files proved his guilt. Cool, Zach said to himself as the bewildered lout was hauled off to a New Morality work camp.
Zach disdained college. He was having too much fun tweaking the rest of the world. He was the lone genius behind the smallpox scare that forced the head of the Center for Disease Control to resign. He even reached into the files of a careless White House speechwriter and leaked the contents of a whole sheaf of confidential memos, causing mad panic among the president’s closest advisors. Way cool.
Then he discovered the thrill of true destruction. It happened while he was watching a pirated video of the as-yet-unreleased Hollywood re-re-remake of
Franklin Zachariah learned the sheer beauty, the sexual rush, of real destruction. Using acid to weaken a highway bridge so that it collapsed when the morning’s traffic of overloaded semis rolled over it. Shorting out an airport’s electrical power supply—and its backup emergency generator—in the midst of the evening’s busiest hour. Quietly disconnecting the motors that moved the floodgates along a stretch of the lower Potomac so that the storm surge from the approaching hurricane flooded the capital’s streets and sent those self-important politicians screaming to pin the blame on someone. Coolissimo.
Most of the time he worked alone, living off bank accounts here and there that he nibbled at, electronically. For some of the bigger jobs, like the Potomac floodgates, he needed accomplices, of course. But he always kept his identity a secret, meeting his accomplices only through carefully buffered computer links that could not, he was sure, be traced back to him.
It was a shock, then, when a representative of the Flower Dragon movement contacted him about the
