32
THE FLYER SPED LOW OVER THE SURFACE OF TITAN, GUIDED through the darkness by
forward-scanning radars that felt the landscape with their electronic fingers
and translated its contours into binary number-streams that the flight-control
computers could understand. In the right-hand side of the cockpit, his thick
mustache transformed into a gaping slash across a face thrown into eerie
reverse-relief by the subdued glow from the instrument panel, Otto Abaquaan
stared silently out at the blackness, absorbed in his own thoughts.
Over twenty years had passed since the serendipitous courses that he and
Zambendorf had been following through life happened to collide in Frankfurt,
West Germany. Abaquaan had been working a stocks-and-bonds swindle at the time.
Overconfident and careless after a three-month run of easy pickings from wealthy
dowagers along the French Riviera, he hadn’t bothered to check up on Zambendorf
thoroughly enough before selling him a portfolio of phony certificates, and it
wasn’t until his contact-man was arrested and Abaquaan was forced to flee the
country hours ahead of the police that he discovered Zambendorf had paid for
them with phony money. Soon afterward, Zambendorf had managed to track him down
again—apparently without too much difficulty—not to moralize or crow over the
lesson Abaquaan had been taught, but to express interest in the scheme and
compliment Abaquaan on his style. A partnership had developed, and the rest of
the team had appeared one by one in various circumstances over the years since.
During those years with Zambendorf he had wound up in some unexpected places,
been mixed up with some strange people, and found himself involved in all kinds
of bizarre affairs, including being paid a quarter of a million dollars by a
Chinese industrialist for communicating with several generations of honorable
ancestors; setting up an ESP-based military espionage system for a West African
government; selling information from an almanac to a fashionable Italian
horoscope writer at exorbitant rates; and prospecting for strategic metals over
the estates of a Brazilian landowner. And now to top it all, they were on one of
Saturn’s moons, of all places, stage-managing a mechanical Jesus Christ and
starting a new religion among a race of intelligent robots. And what was strange
was that nothing about the situation really struck Abaquaan as being so strange
at all. He was a long time past that. Nothing that involved Zambendorf was
capable of seeming strange anymore.
After consulting with Joe Fellburg and Andy Schwartz, the captain of the surface
lander on unofficial loan from NASO, Zambendorf had accepted that parachuting
down over the built-up area of Padua would be a risky enough business for
anyone, let alone untrained Taloids, and had therefore abandoned his original
plan to repeat the performance that had played so successfully before Henry’s
army in the desert. Instead, Clarissa and Abaquaan had flown Moses to a point
just outside the city, from which he would make his way into the metropolis on
foot and begin to preach the Revelation during the busiest trading period in the
central marketplace. On receipt of a radio signal from Moses’ transmitter, the
lander would make a dramatic descent into the heart of the city, accompanied by
lights, voices, and special effects, and disembark a specially rehearsed
celestial troupe consisting of Lord Nelson and a supporting act of Druids. The
result would be instant conversions of Paduans by the drove, Zambendorf had
predicted confidently; Henry would be deposed; Genoa would be saved; the
Taloids’ future would be assured; and the war against unscrupulous Terran
business tycoons and politicians would be won. It was one of Zambendorf’s
strengths as a leader—and a source of some of the biggest problems that came
from working with him—that he always made everything sound too easy.
The most recent developments, however, were causing Abaquaan misgivings. First,
twenty-four hours or so before, Massey had called from the Orion to advise that
Caspar Lang would probably use a ruse to warn Zambendorf off from any intention
he might have of reproducing his desert spectacular over Padua city.
Sure enough Lang had come through a couple of hours later and issued a solemnly
worded warning containing all the points that Massey had predicted. Zambendorf
had put on an impressive act of trying desperately but not quite successfully to