Lara focused again squarely on Alexios. “Are you certain of this information?” she asked. “Absolutely certain?”
Alexios fought down the urge to squirm uncomfortably under her gaze. As smoothly as he could, he replied, “As your husband said, who else would have a motive for doing this to him? The New Morality must have marked Victor years ago, when they learned what he was doing for the skytower.”
“And they’d wait all this time to get back at him?”
Shrugging, Alexios said, “Apparently so. That’s what the evidence suggests.”
Abruptly, Molina bent over the coffee table and snatched the two flimsy sheets. “I’m calling McFergusen. I’ve been the victim of a hoax, a scam. And then I’m calling the news nets. The New Morality is going to pay for this! I’ll expose them for the psalm-singing hypocrites that they are!”
Exactly what I thought you’d do, Alexios said to himself. Aloud, however, he tried to sound more reasonable. “I agree that a call to McFergusen is in order. But a news conference? Do you really want to attack the New Morality?”
“Why not?” Molina snapped. “What do I have to lose?”
Lara got to her feet. “Victor, Mr. Alexios is right. Don’t be too hasty. Talk with McFergusen first. He might be able to salvage something out of this situation.”
“Salvage what? Even if I can prove that I’ve been scammed, I still look like an idiot. Nobody will ever believe me again. My career is finished!”
“But perhaps—”
“Perhaps nothing! They’ve destroyed me; I’m going to do my damnedest to destroy them. And you in particular, Elliott, you goddamned lying bastard!”
Danvers looked up at the astrobiologist, his face white with shock, his eyes filled with tears.
Molina took his wife by the wrist and slammed out of the stateroom, leaving Alexios alone with the bishop.
“I didn’t do it,” Danvers mewed, bewildered. “As God is my witness, I never did any of this.”
Alexios scratched his chin, trying to prevent himself from gloating. “Would you allow me to check your computer? I presume you brought your memory core with you when you came to Mercury.”
Danvers nodded glumly and gestured toward the desk, where the palm-sized computer rested. Alexios spent a half hour fiddling with it while the bishop sat on the sofa in miserable silence. Alexios found the trace of the message he had paid to have planted in the computer’s core. It looked as if it had been erased from the active memory, but still existed deep in the core.
Getting up from the desk at last, Alexios lied, “Well, if it’s in your machine’s memory it would take a better expert than me to find it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Danvers said, his heavy head drooping.
“I should think it would be important.”
His voice deep and low with despair, Danvers said, “You don’t understand. A scandal like this will ruin me. The New Morality doesn’t permit even a suspicion of wrongdoing among its hierarchy. We must all be above evil, above even accusations of evil. This… once Victor tells people about this… I’ll be finished in the New Morality. Finished.”
Alexios took a breath, then replied, “Maybe you can get a position as chaplain on a prison ship, or out in the Asteroid Belt. They could use your consolations there.”
Danvers looked up at him, blinking. He seemed to have aged ten years in the past half hour.
Alexios smiled, thinking, You wouldn’t last a month out there, you fat old fraud. Somebody would strangle you in the middle of your hymns.
OBSERVATION LOUNGE
Alexios fidgeted nervously as he stood in
I should feel triumphant, he thought. Victor’s career is in tatters, and Danvers is in disgrace. All that’s left is Yamagata and I’ll be taking care of him shortly. Yet he felt no delight in his victory over them. No triumph. He was dead inside, cold and numb. Ten years I’ve waited to get even with them and now that I have … so what? So Victor will spend the rest of his life in some obscure university trying to live down his mistake here on Mercury. And Danvers will be defrocked, or whatever they do in the New Morality. What of it? How does that change my life?
Lara, he said to himself. It all depends on Lara. She’s the one I did this for. She’s the one who kept me alive through all those long years out in the Belt. My only glimmer of hope when I was a prisoner, a miserable exile.
As the torch ship rotated, the surface of Mercury slid into view, barren, heat-blasted, pitted with craters and seamed with cracks and fault lines. Like the face of an old, old man, Alexios thought, a man who’s lived too long. He saw a line of cliffs and the worn, tired mountains ringing an ancient crater. He knew where Goethe base was, but he could not see the modest mound of rubble covering its dome from the distance of the ship’s orbit, nor the tracks of the vehicles that churned up the thin layer of dust on the ground down there.
Once we’ve built the mass driver you’ll be able to see it from orbit, he thought. Five kilometers long. We’ll see it, all right.
The door behind him slid open, spilling light from the passageway into the darkened compartment. Alexios’s heart constricted in his chest. He did not dare to turn around, but in the reflection off the glassteel bubble he saw that it was Lara.
He slowly turned toward her as she slid the door shut. The compartment became dim and shadowed again, but he could see her lovely face, see the curiosity in her eyes.
“You asked me to meet you here?” she said, her voice soft and low.
He realized he’d been holding his breath. He nodded, then managed to get out, “It’s one of the few places aboard ship where we can meet privately.”
“You have some further information about my husband?”
“No … not really…” It took all his self-control to keep from reaching out and clasping her in his arms. Surely she could hear his heart thundering.
“I don’t understand,” Lara said with a little frown. “You asked me to see you, to come alone, without Victor.”
“Lara, it’s me,” he blurted. “Mance.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“I know I look different,” he said, the words coming in a rush now. “I had to change my appearance, my background, I came here to Mercury but I had no idea you’d come out here too and now that you’re here I can’t keep up the masquerade any longer, I want to—”
“Mance?” she whispered, unbelieving.
“Yes, it’s me, darling.”
She staggered back several steps, dropped onto the bench running along the compartment’s rear bulkhead. “It can’t be,” she said, her voice hollow.
He went to her, knelt before her, grasped both her hands in his own. “Lara, I’ve gone through hell to find you again. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
She was staring at him, searching for the Mance Bracknell she had known. He could see the play of starlight in her eyes and then the harsh glare reflected from Mercury casting her face into stark light and shadow.
“I know I don’t look the same, Lara. But it really is me, Mance. I have a new identity. I’m a free man now. The old Mance Bracknell is dead, as far as the officials are concerned. But we can begin our lives again, Lara, we can take up where we left off.”
She shuddered, like a woman coming out of a trance. “Begin our lives again?”
“Yes! I love you, dearest. I want to marry you and—”
