Takeo tilted his head slightly. “Can’t be helped. Normally we go more slowly, but both of us are in a hurry so I’ve given you some pretty heavy dosages.”
“I don’t see any change,” said Bracknell.
“Don’t you?” Takeo smiled condescendingly. “I do.”
“My face is the same.”
Walking over to the desktop phone, Takeo said, “The day-to-day change is minuscule, true enough.” He spoke a command in Japanese to the phone. “But a week’s worth of change is significant.”
Bracknell saw his own image on the phone’s display.
“Take a look in the mirror,” said Takeo.
Bracknell went to the bathroom. He stared, then ducked back into the living room. The difference was subtle, but clear.
Takeo smiled at his handiwork. “In another week not even United Life and Accident Assurance will be able to tell you from the original Dante Alexios.”
“It’s painful,” Bracknell said.
“Having your bones remolded involves some discomfort,” Takeo replied, unconcerned. “But you’re getting a side benefit: you’ll never have to shave again. I’ve eliminated the hair follicles on your face.”
“It still hurts like hell.”
Takeo shrugged. “That’s the price you must pay.”
Another week, thought Bracknell. I can put up with this for another week.
DANTE ALEXIOS
Marvin Pratt frowned at the dark-haired man sitting in front of his desk. The expression on the stranger’s face was utterly serious, determined.
“You’re not the man I saw in the hospital,” he said.
“I am Dante Alexios,” said Bracknell. “I’ve come to claim my money as the sole beneficiary of the
“Then who was the man in the hospital?” Pratt demanded.
Alexios shrugged his shoulders. They were slimmer than Bracknell’s had been. “Some derelict, I suppose.”
“He disappeared,” Pratt said, suspicion etched onto his face. “Walked out of the hospital and disappeared.”
“As I said, a derelict. I understand there’s an underground community of sorts here in Selene. Criminals, homeless people, all sorts of oddballs hiding away in the tunnels.”
Pratt leaned back in his swivel chair and let air whistle softly between his teeth as he compared the face of the man sitting before him with the image of Dante Alexios on his desktop screen. Both had pale skin and dark hair; the image on the screen had a shadow of stubble along his jaw while the man facing him was perfectly clean- shaven. His face seemed just a trifle out of kilter, as if the two halves of it did not quite match. His smile seemed forced, twisted. But the retinal patterns of his dark brown eyes matched those on file in the computer. So did his fingerprints and the convolutions of his ears.
“How did you survive the explosion?” Pratt asked, trying to keep his tone neutral, nonaccusative.
Smoothly, Alexios replied, “I was outside doing routine maintenance on the attitude thrusters when the two ships blew up. I went spinning off into space for several days. I nearly died.”
“Someone picked you up?”
“Another freighter, the
Pratt looked as if he didn’t believe a word of it, but he went through the motions of checking Alexios’s story. Alexios had paid the captains of the two vessels handsomely for their little lies, using Takeo’s money on the promise that he’d repay the physician once he got the insurance payout into his hands.
“This other man, the amnesiac,” said Pratt warily. “He was rescued from the
Smoothly, Bracknell answered, “Then he must have been a convict. Captain Farad had the pleasant little trick of putting troublemakers outside, in spacesuits, until they learned to behave themselves.”
“I see.” At last Pratt said, “You’re a very fortunate man, Mr. Alexios.”
“Don’t I know it!”
With a look of utter distaste, Pratt commanded his phone to authorize payment to Dante Alexios.
Alexios asked, “May I ask, how much is the, uh, benefit?”
Pratt glanced at his display screen. “Twelve point seven million New International Dollars.”
Alexios’s brows lifted. “That much?”
“What do you intend to do with your money?”
Taking a deep breath, Alexios said, “Well, there are some debts I have to pay. After that… I don’t know … I just might start my own engineering firm.”
He surprised Takeo by paying the physician’s normal fee for a cosmetic remake. Then Dante Alexios opened a small consulting engineering office in Selene. He started by taking on charity work and performing community services, such as designing a new water processing plant for Selene’s growing population of retirees from Earth. His first paying assignment was as a consultant on the new mass driver being built out on Mare Nubium to catapult cargos of lunar helium three to the hungry fusion power plants on Earth. He began to learn how to use nanotechnology. With a derisive grin he would tell himself, Damned useful, these little nanomachines.
In two years he was well known in Selene for his community services. In four he was wealthy in his own right, with enough contracts to hire a small but growing staff of engineers and office personnel. Often he thought about returning to Earth and looking up Lara, but he resisted the temptation. That part of his life was finished. Even his hatred of Victor and Danvers had abated. There was nothing to be done. The desire for vengeance cooled, although he still felt angry whenever he thought of their betrayal.
Instead of traveling to Earth, Dante Alexios won a contract to build a complete research station on Mars, a new base in the giant circular basin in the southern hemisphere called Hellas. He flew to Mars to personally supervise the construction.
He lived at the construction site, surrounded by nanotech engineers and some of the scientists who would live and work at the base once it was finished. He walked the iron sands of the red planet and watched the distant, pale Sun set in the cloudless caramel-colored sky. He felt the peace and harmony of this empty world, with its craggy mountains and rugged canyons and winding ancient river beds.
We haven’t corrupted this world, Alexios told himself. There are only a handful of humans here, not enough to tear the place apart and rebuild it the way we’ve done to Earth, the way we’re doing to the Moon.
Yet he knew he was a part of that process; he had helped to extend human habitation across the dead and battered face of the Moon. Mars was different, though. Life dwelled here. Once, a race of intelligent creatures built their homes and temples into the high crevasses in the cliffs. Alexios got permission from the scientists running the exploration effort to visit the ruins of their cliff dwellings.
Gone. Whoever built these villages, whoever farmed those valleys, they were all wiped out by an impersonal planetwide catastrophe that snuffed out virtually all life on the red planet, blew away most of its atmosphere, flash-froze this world into a dusty, dry global desert. The scientists thought the plain of Hellas held the key to the disaster that sterilized Mars sixty-five million years ago, the same disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs and half of all living species on Earth.
Alexios felt very humble when he stared through his spacesuit visor at the crumbling ruins of a Martian cliff dwelling. Life can be snuffed out so easily. Like a skytower falling, crushing the life out of millions, ending a lifetime of hope and work with a snap of destiny’s fingers.
He was mulling his own destiny when he returned to the base nearing completion at Hellas. As the rocket glider that carried him soared over the vast circular depression, Alexios looked through the thick quartz window
