Once in her bedroom Pancho made two phone calls: one to the investment firm in New York that she always used to check out potential business partners or rivals; the other was a personal call to Big George Ambrose, in his room in the very same Hotel Luna.
She was surprised when the phone’s synthesized voice told her that George Ambrose had already left Selene; he was returning to Ceres.
“Find him, wherever he is,” Pancho snapped at the phone. “I want to talk to him.”
EARTH: CHOTA MONASTERY, NEPAL
The first thing Nobuhiko Yamagata did once he returned to Earth following Humphries’s party was to visit his revered father, which meant an overnight flight in a corporate jet to Patna, on the Ganges, and then an arduous haul by tilt-rotor halfway up the snowy slopes of the Himalayas.
Saito Yamagata had founded the corporation in the earliest years of the space age and made it into one of the most powerful industrial giants in the world. It had been Saito’s vision that built the first solar power satellites and established factories in Earth orbit. It had been Saito who partnered with Dan Randolph’s Astro Corporation back in those primitive years when the frontier of human endeavor barely reached to the surface of the Moon.
When Nobuhiko was a young man, just starting to learn the intricacies of corporate politics and power, Saito was stricken with an inoperable brain tumor. Instead of stoically accepting his fate, the elder Yamagata had himself frozen, preserved cryonically in liquid nitrogen until medical science advanced enough to remove the tumor without destroying his brain.
Young Nobu, then, was in command of Yamagata Corporation when the greenhouse cliff plunged the world into global disaster. Japan was struck harder than most industrial nations by the sudden floods that inundated coastal cities and the mammoth storms that raged out of the ocean remorselessly. Earthquakes shattered whole cities, and tsunamis swept the Pacific. Many of the nations that sold food to Japan were also devastated by the greenhouse cliff. Croplands died in withering droughts or were carved away by roaring floods. Millions went hungry, and then tens of millions starved.
Still Saito waited in his sarcophagus of liquid nitrogen, legally dead yet waiting to be revived and returned to life.
Under Nobuhiko’s direction, Yamagata Corporation retreated from space and spent every bit of its financial and technical power on rebuilding Japan’s shattered cities. Meanwhile, he learned that he could use nanomachines to safely destroy the tumor in his father’s brain; the virus-sized devices could be programmed to take the tumor apart, molecule by molecule. Nanotechnology was banned on Earth; fearful mobs and acquiescent politicians had driven the world’s experts in nanotech off the Earth altogether. Nobu understood that he could bring his father’s preserved body to Selene and have the nanotherapy done there. But he decided against it.
He did not stay his hand because of the horrendous political pressures that would be brought to bear on Yamagata Corporation for using a technology that was illegal on Earth, nor even because of the moral and religious outcry against such a step—although Nobuhiko publicly blamed those forces for his decision. In truth, Nobu dreaded the thought of his father’s revival, fearing that his father would be displeased with the way he was running the corporation. Saito had never been an easy man to live with; his son was torn between family loyalty and his desire to keep the reins of power in his own hands.
In the end, family loyalty won. On the inevitable day when the corporation’s medical experts told Nobu that his father’s tumor could be safely removed without using nanomachines, Nobu felt he had no choice but to agree to the procedure.
The medical experts had also told him, with some reluctance, that although persons could be physically revived from cryonic suspension, their minds were usually as blank as a newborn baby’s. Long immersion at cryogenic temperature erodes the synaptic connections in the brain’s higher centers. No matter that the person was physically an adult, a cryonic reborn had to be toilet trained, taught to speak, to walk, to be an adult, all over again. And even then, the mind of the reborn would probably be different from the mind of the person who had gone into the cryonic suspension. Subtly different, perhaps, but Nobuhiko was warned not to expect his father to be exactly the same personality he’d been before he had died.