Another turn, behind glossy dark leaves as big as the elephant ears they were named for, but stiffer, like dead, dried leather. Yet another turn among the knees of a sprawling banyan, its roots like veils of pale wood as smooth and thin as travertine stone. Suddenly she came upon the awesome waterfall, which descended in soundless torrents into the glistening gorge below. Behind her, Blake was still coming—but hesitantly now.
The true thunder of the waterfall was muted, but realistic mist drifted from sprinklers high in the walls, invisible behind the holographic projection. A vista point with a rustic bamboo railing, presently deserted, was perched on the edge of the vast, illusory gorge into which the water careened.
Sparta crouched against a tree trunk, wondering what to do. She had hoped to leave Blake Redfield behind her in the movie-set rain forest, but he was not to be shaken so easily. She took the risk of losing track of his whereabouts in order to tune her hearing to the high-frequency hum of the Kodak hologram’s projection system. The depth-offocus circuitry was mounted somewhere on the wall a few feet in front of her. The shape of the electric pulses gave her a crude approximation of its program, but she had no physical access to the control center— —then an unsettling sensation came over her, spreading from her midsection up through her chest to her arms.
Her belly began to burn. The sensation was strange and familiar at the same time. When studying her own scans, months ago, she had seen the sheetlike structures under her diaphragm and suspected she knew what they were, powerful polymer batteries, but she could not remember how to utilize them, or even what they were for. Suddenly, responding to her unconscious demand, that memory returned.
She stretched out her arms and hands and curved them into the arc of a microwave-length antenna. Her facial mask set in concentration. Data cascaded through her frontal lobes; she beamed a single burst of instructions into the heart of the projection control processor.
The hologram leaped forward. Tons of water descended upon her— —and she was staring at the old railroad station’s polished marble wall. She lowered her arms and relaxed her trance. She walked to the fake bamboo railing of the vista point, which stood on the floor less than three feet from the wall. Above her an array of hologram projectors twinkled yellow, cyan, and magenta. She turned back and looked at the jungle trees. She could see nothing of the animated hologram from inside the projection, but if her beamed instructions had worked, the apparent edge of that deep gorge should now be at the end of the path, just in front of the trees. . . .
Blake emerged from the jungle, took two steps toward her and stopped, staring past her head at torrents of cascading water. His eyes followed the water down into the gorge.
Her back was to the railing. In a step she could have reached out and touched his handsome, friendly, freckled face. A crumpled chewing gum pack lay on the floor between them, where he saw canyons of mist. The light on him was just that which the conservatory’s skylights and the projected whitewater of the hologram spilled on him.
There was nothing at all between them except the chewing gum pack and that insubstantial light.
She was reminded how much she had liked him, once, although at that age she wasn’t much interested in younger kids—she was a sophisticated seventeen and he was only a gawky sixteen, after all—and she probably hadn’t been much good at communicating simple feelings anyway.
Now, simply by knowing that she existed, he could destroy her. Blake ran a hand through his auburn hair, then turned away, bemused, into the jungle. Sparta ducked under the rail. She walked along the smooth marble wall, emerged from behind the waterfall, and disappeared into a crowded passage that led toward Madison Avenue.
Blake Redfield paused in the trees and looked back at the tumbling water. He was a product of the early SPARTA, the pure SPARTA, before it had been disbanded.
There had been no tinkering with his physical nature, only with the conditions of his education. He had no zoom-lens eyes or tunable ears, no enhanced RAM in his skull or PIN spines under his fingernails, no batteries in his belly or antennas wrapped around his bones.
But he was multiply intelligent too, bright enough to have recognized Linda immediately, bright enough to have realized immediately that she did not wish to be recognized.
And he was curious enough to wonder why. After all, he’d half-suspected she was dead. . . .
So he’d followed her until she disappeared. He wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed that, but he knew it was deliberate.
He had long wondered what became of her. Now he wondered just how hard it would be to find out.
PART TWO
THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
V
In the last part of the 21st century the sky had grown ever more crowded, from ground level right on up into space, until little Earth was ringed like giant Saturn—with machines and vehicles, not with innocent snowballs. There were bright power stations collecting sunlight and beaming microwaves to antenna farms in Arabia and Mongolia and Angola and Brazil. There were refineries, using sunlight to smelt metal from moon sand and captured asteroids, distilling hydrocarbons from carbonaceous chondrites and mining diamonds from meteoroids. There were factories that used these materials to cast the perfect ball bearing, to brew the perfect antibiotic, to extrude the perfect polymer. There were luxury terminals to serve the great interplanetary liners and entertain their wealthy passengers, and there were orbiting dockyards for the working freighters. There were a dozen shipyards, two dozen scientific stations, a hundred weather satellites, five hundred communications satellites, a thousand spy-eyes twinkling among the night stars, measuring the Earth, seeking out the last of its resources, gauging the flow of its precious and dwindling fresh water, watching and listening to the constantly shifting alliances, the occasional flare-ups of battle on the surface of the world below—like the vicious tank and helicopter engagement presently raging in south central Asia. By intricate international treaty, all weapons with a range of over one kilometer were barred from space, including rockets, railguns, beam projectors, every sort of directed-energy device, and even exploding satellites, whose debris would spread unchecked, but excluding satellites themselves. So another few thousand objects orbiting the Earth were essentially inert, little more than bags of moon rocks, mischievous threats by one power bloc against another to destroy orbiting facilities by simple collision, although implicit was the ability to destroy whole cities on Earth by guided artificial meteorite.
Yet most of the whirling planet, wondrously, maintained an awkward peace. The North Continental Treaty Alliance, consisting of the Russians, Europeans, Canadians, and Americans, usually called the Euro-Americans, had been on good terms for many years with the Azure Dragon Mutual Prosperity Sphere, usually known as the Nippon-Sino-Arabs. Together the industrial conglomerates had cooperated to build stations on or around the inner planets and in the Mainbelt. The Latin-Africans and the Indo-Asians had stations of their own, and had founded tenuous settlements on two of Jupiter’s moons. The lure of solar system colonization had both sharpened and, paradoxically, attenuated Earthly rivalries: the rivalry was real, but no group wanted to risk its lines of communication.
Space travel had never been inexpensive, but early in the century an economic watershed had been crossed, like a saddle in low hills that nevertheless marks a continental divide. Nuclear technology moved into its most appropriate sphere, outer space; the principles were sufficiently simple and the techniques sufficiently easy to master that private companies could afford to enter the interplanetary shipping market. With the shippers came the yards, the drydocks, the outfitters.
The Falaron shipyards, one of the originals, orbited Earth two hundred and fifty miles up. Presently the only vessel in the yards was an old atomic freighter, getting an overhaul and a face lift—a new reactor core, new main engine nozzles, refurbished life-support systems, new paint inside and out. When all the work was done the ship was to be recommissioned and given a new, rather grand, name: Star Queen.
The huge atomic engines had been mounted and tested.
Spacesuited workers wielding plasma torches were fitting new holds, big cylinders that fastened to the thin central shaft of the ship below the spherical crew module.
The flicker and glare of the torches cast planes of shadow through the windows of the outfitter’s office. In the odd light young Nikos Pavlakis’s bristling mustache sprouted horns of black shadow, rendering his appearance demonic. “Curse you for a liar and a thief, Dimitrios. Repeatedly you assured us everything was on schedule, everything was under control. No problem, no problem, you told me! Now you say we will be a month late unless I am prepared to bear the cost of overtime!”