be a career-ending interview with Minor, Sterenkov had complained bitterly that to look across into Minor’s eyes was like looking into the tall grass and seeing the gleam of a jaguar’s eyes. In time, Minor’s reputation itself became a weapon; later victims sometimes destroyed their own credibility simply by trying to avoid his gaze.
For all that, Minor enjoyed a reputation for fairness. He was tough, direct, and aggressive; if you were strong, direct, and honest, you could survive, and might even earn a sympathetic hearing.
Or so Donovan promised.
Centered and calm, Hiroko Sasaki sat in the bergere armchair Donovan had chosen for her (“You disappear in a big, soft couch”) and waited for the interview to begin. On a monitor a few meters away and angled toward her, the introductory backgrounder on the Diaspora Project and the Singapore “disaster” was continuing.
Almost certainly, the backgrounder was infuriatingly slanted and misleading. But Sasaki was not watching. She had already succeeded in making herself not see the screen, had drawn in her focus until it and the camera operator and the Skylink engineer disappeared. Once the interview began, there would be no temptation to watch herself.
Minor looked up from his notes and smiled at her. She became a shadow and let the smile pass through her like a breeze.
“One minute,” someone said. Sasaki tugged the sleeves of her red blouse (Donovan again: “Dress international. Let’s not play to latent racism by looking ethnic”) down to her wrists, rested her elbows on the slender wooden armrests, folded her hands in her lap. The next time Minor looked up at her, she met his gaze and answered his smile with a bow of her head.
“Good evening,” he said to his camera. “This is Julian Minor in Prainha, Brazil, the busiest spaceport on the globe. Just five kilometers from where I sit, a launch cannon identical to that blamed in the tragedy in Singapore is busy hurling twenty-ton shells into the sky.
“With me is Hiroko Sasaki, Director of the Diaspora Project, a division of Allied Transcon, which owns and operates this spaceport. Director Sasaki, are we safe here? And how can you be sure?”
“No one is ever perfectly safe, anywhere, anytime, Mr. Minor,” she said smoothly. “But you are safer now than you would be waiting on a railroad platform for a train or crossing a city street. You are safer now than you were when flying from New York, to Belem last night for this interview. Every year, more than two hundred thousand people die worldwide in transportation accidents. Space flight is the safest form of transportation, and the T-ships are the safest form of space flight.”
The eyebrow arched. “Is your answer to the families of the thirty-seven dead in Singapore that they were just unlucky?”
“Mr. Minor, when I heard what happened that day, I wept,” Sasaki said. “It was a terrible moment, and one I deeply wish could have been prevented. But—”
“But you could have prevented it,” Minor pounced. “Isn’t that true? Don’t your own operating rules, Allied’s own documents, anticipate exactly the kind of failure that took place? If you knew it could happen, why didn’t you take steps to prevent it?”
Launch services were the responsibility of Allied’s Starlifter Division; Sasaki and the Diaspora Project were, properly speaking, merely their customers. But Donovan had warned her that there was no point in trying to draw fine distinctions or correct every misstatement.
“But of course, we did,” Sasaki said. “Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a perfect machine.”
“That’s certainly true of your launch cannon,” Minor said. “I have reports here of more than sixty launch failures. It seems to me that the only way you could feel safe here is not to think about it.”
Sasaki frowned. “In thirteen years of operation at Kasigau and thirty-five years here, Allied has launched more than a million pay loads. There have been just sixty-one launch aborts. And only once has an abort resulted in any loss of life. I regret the Singapore accident. But I don’t see where I need apologize for the safety record of the Kare-Kantrowitz launchers or of Allied’s Launch Services Division.”
Minor settled back in his chair. “I notice that you avoid calling these systems ‘launch cannon,’ an expression which is in such widespread colloquial use that it’s in every general lexicon. Why is that?”
“I resist the coinage,” she said. “It’s misleading.”
“Well, now, I’ve heard those launchers at work,” Minor said with a convivial smile. “They sure sound like cannon to me. Isn’t this linguistic legerdemain an attempt on your part to mask the military origins of Allied’s technology, what Jeremiah calls your bloody heritage?”
“I find an interesting irony here,” Sasaki said. “Yes, nationalist tensions drove the technologies that lifted us into space. We use high-energy lasers and tracking systems created for a ballistic missile defense. The first all- points aerospace plane was designed as a bomber-interceptor for the United States Air Force. The first space station was a Russian spy base. The first moon landing was a political power play. The first boosters began as weapons of war.”
“Then you admit—”
She did not pause. “I am prompted to wonder at times where we would be if we humans hadn’t been fighting each other tooth and nail. I am not ashamed of the pedigree of our tools. On the contrary, I think that in many cases we have redeemed the creators of those tools by finding better uses for them than those for which they were originally intended.”
“I hear in that answer exactly the kind of arrogance of which Allied stands accused—”
“Stands accused by whom, Mr. Minor?”
“By Homeworld. By public opinion. Isn’t arrogance implicit in the fact that within an hour of the Singapore tragedy, the Kasigau cannon was back in operation?”
“What’s implicit is necessity,” she said calmly. “Prainha and Kasigau are lifelines for the orbital communities —for Technica and Horizon and Aurora. All of the aerospace vehicles owned by all of the planet’s governments and corporations could not make up the shortfall if Prainha and Kasigau shut down—”
Donovan and Dryke had been monitoring the broadcast from Sasaki’s private inner office, using the center four cells of the display wall. While Donovan sat self-evidently at ease, lounging back in Sasaki’s Swendon club chair, Dryke stood, sometimes pacing by the windows, sometimes standing close enough to the display that its changing patterns of light played on his face.
“Come on, come on,” Dryke muttered to himself.
“She’s doing wonderfully,” Donovan said. “She’s absolutely fine.”
“I wasn’t talking to Hiroko,” Dryke said.
“Director Sasaki, how much has
“How much does a city cost?” Sasaki replied.
“Excuse me?”
“Before I answer, I want to know that you’ll have something appropriate to compare it to. How much is invested in a modern community of ten or fifteen or twenty thousand? Draw a circle around one and tell me. How much in their roads, their businesses, their homes? How much in their play yards and factories? Don’t draw the circle too small—”
Attagirl,” Donovan said, sitting forward and beaming.
“—don’t leave out the land that grows their food, the quarries and mines and wells that supply their stone and water and steel. How much for the endless maintenance to keep what you’ve built whole? How do you value the man-years of unpriced labor? How much did it cost to bring it all together? How much has it cost to keep it alive?”
“Not a billion dollars a person.”
“That’s your figure, not mine,” Sasaki said. “How much, Mr. Minor? Everything that goes into
If she said more, neither Donovan nor Dryke heard it. There was a buzzing sound, which Dryke later decided sounded like electric butterfly wings. The four-cell display seemed to collapse toward its center, then stabilized with a new image: a red-haired, bearded man perhaps forty years old.
“Of course you know what
“Yes,” Dryke said approvingly. “There you are.”
