Mercury

“He will be, I assure you.”

“I don’t want assurances. I want results!”

“Sir, please do not alarm yourself. The man is neutralized. He cannot tell anyone of his part in the skytower project without revealing his true identity. If he should dare to do that, we would locate him and deal with him. He is intelligent enough to understand that, so he maintains his silence.”

“Not good enough,” said Nobu. “I will not be held dependent on this fugitive’s decisions.”

“So I understand, sir. We are tracking him down.”

“No one must know why are tracking him!”

“No one does, sir, except you and me.”

Nobuhiko took a deep breath, trying to calm himself.

The old man added, “And once he is found and disposed of, I too will leave this world. Then only you will have the knowledge of the skytower program.”

“You?”

“I have lived long enough. Once this obligation to you is filled, my master, I will join my honorable ancestors.”

Nobu stood on the gravel path and stared at this relic from the ancient past. The chill wind blew the man’s long white hair across his face, hiding his expression from Nobu. Still, Yamagata could see the implacable determination in those unblinking eyes.

BETRAYAL

Months slipped into years. Alhambra plied its slow, silent way through the Belt and then back toward Earth at least once a year. Bracknell saw the blue and white splendor of his home world, close enough almost to touch, bright clouds and sparkling seas and land covered with green. All his life was there, all his hopes and love and dreams. But he never reached it. The captain and other crew members shuttled down to the surface for a few days each time they visited Earth, but Bracknell stayed aboard the ship, knowing that no port of entry would accept an exile, not even for a day or two of ship’s liberty. Nor would Selene or any of the other lunar settlements.

Each time, once Alhambra’s crew unloaded the refined metals it had carried in its hold and taken a few days’ liberty, Captain Farad headed back to the dark silence of the Belt once more.

Like a vision of heaven, Bracknell said to himself as the glowing blue and white sphere dwindled in the distance. It grew blurry as his eyes teared.

He grew a beard, then shaved it off. He had a brief affair with a woman who signed aboard as a crew member to pay for her passage on a one-way trip from Earth to Ceres, feeling almost ashamed of himself whenever he saw Addie. By the time his erstwhile lover left the ship he was glad to be rid of her.

The captain never relaxed his vigilance over his daughter, although he seemed to grow more tolerant of Bracknell holding casual conversations with her. He even invited Bracknell to have dinner with himself and his daughter, at rare intervals. The captain was sensitive enough never to talk about Earth nor to ask Bracknell about his former life.

Addie began to explain Buddhism to him, trying to help him accept the life that had been forced upon him.

“It is only temporary,” she would tell him. “This life will wither away and a new life will begin. The great wheel turns slowly, but it does turn. You must be patient.”

Bracknell listened and watched her animated face as she earnestly explained the path toward enlightenment. He never believed a word of it, but it helped to pass the time.

On some visits to Earth, Alhambra picked up other groups of convicts exiled to the Belt. The captain forbade Bracknell and the other crew members to have anything to do with them beyond what was absolutely necessary.

When fights broke out among the prisoners in the hold, the captain lowered their air pressure until everyone passed out. Then Bracknell and other crew members crammed the troublemakers into old-fashioned hard-shell spacesuits and tethered them outside the ship until they learned their lesson. It had happened many times, but Bracknell never became inured to it. Always he thought, There but for the grace of god go I.

Then he would ask himself, God? If there is a god he must be as callous and capricious as the most sadistic tyrant in history. At least the Buddha that Addie tells me about doesn’t pretend to control the world; he just sought a way to get out of it.

There is a way, Bracknell would remind himself late at night as he lay in his bunk, afraid to close his eyes and see again in his nightmares the skytower toppling, crushing the life out of so many millions, crushing the life he had once known. I can get out of this, he thought. Slice my wrists, swallow a bottle of pills from Addie’s infirmary, seal myself in an airlock and pop the outer hatch. There are lots of ways to end this existence.

Yet he kept on living. Like a man on an endless treadmill he kept going through the paces of a pointless life, condemning himself for a coward because he lacked the guts to get off the wheel of life and find oblivion.

Except for Addie he had no friends, no companions. The captain tolerated him, even socialized with him now and then, but always kept a clear line of separation between them. The women that occasionally joined the crew hardly appealed to him, except when his needs overcame his reluctance. And even in the throes of sexual passion he thought of Lara.

If I could only see her, he thought. Talk to her. Even if it’s only a few words.

In the midst of his tortured fantasies he remembered the old message from Rev. Danvers, back when he’d just started this miserable banishment. Call me, the minister had said. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be held incommunicado with everyone back on Earth, Danvers had held out that slim hope.

Bracknell was wise enough in the ways of his captain to ask Farad’s permission before attempting to contact Danvers.

The captain snorted disdainfully. “Call somebody Earthside? Won’t do you any good, they won’t put the call through.”

Desperate enough to overcome his fears, Bracknell replied, “You could put the call through for me, sir.”

The captain scowled at him and said nothing. Bracknell returned to his duties, defeated.

Yet the next day, as Bracknell took up his station on the bridge, the captain said, “Take the comm console, Mr. Bracknell.”

Feeling more curiosity than hope, Bracknell relieved the communications officer. The captain told him to put through a call for him to the Reverend Danvers, routing it through New Morality headquarters in Atlanta. His fingers trembling, Bracknell wormed the speaker plug into his ear and got to work.

With more than an hour’s transit time for messages, there was no hope of a normal conversation. It took half his duty shift for Bracknell to get through to the communications program at Atlanta and learn that Danvers was now a bishop serving in Gabon, on Africa’s west coast.

When Danvers’s ruddy face finally came up on Bracknell’s screen, the captain called from his command chair, “Go ahead and see if he’ll talk to you.”

Danvers was sitting at a polished ebony desk, wearing an open-necked black shirt with some sort of insignia pinned to the points of his collar. Behind him a window looked down on the busy streets and buildings of Libreville and, beyond, the blue Atlantic’s white-frothed combers rolling up on a beach. A dark cylindrical form snaked through the greenery beyond the city and disappeared in the frothing surf. Bracknell’s heart clutched inside him: it was the remains of the fallen skytower, still lying there after all these years.

It took more hours of one-way messages and long waits between them before Danvers realized who was calling him.

“Mance!” Surprise opened his eyes wide. “After so many years! I’m delighted to hear from you.” The bishop turned slightly in his high-backed chair. “You can probably see the remains of the skytower. It’s a tourist attraction here. People come from all over Africa to see it.”

Bracknell’s insides smoldered. A tourist attraction.

“The locals have stripped a lot from it. Filthy scavengers. We’ve had to post guards to protect the ruins, but