Asimov's SF, September 2010 (24 page)

There were two girls there, who Miranda Delacroix introduced as their two children. They were quiet, attempting to disappear into the background, smiling brightly but with their heads bowed, looking up at me through lowered eyelashes when they were brought out to be introduced. After the adults’ attention had turned away from them, I noticed both surreptitiously studying me. A day ago I wouldn't even have noticed.

"Now, either come and sit nicely and talk, or else go do your chores,” Miranda told them. “I'm sure the outworlder is quite bored with your buzzing in and out."

They both giggled and shook their heads and then disappeared into another room, although from time to time one or the other head would silently pop out to look at me, disappearing instantly if I turned to look.

We sat down at a low table that seemed to be made of oak. Miranda's husband brought in some coffee and then left us alone. The coffee was made in the Thai style, in a clear cup, in layers with thick sweet milk.

"So you are Dr. Hamakawa's friend,” she said. “I've heard a lot about you. Do you mind my asking, what exactly is your relationship with Dr. Hamakawa?"

"I would like to see her,” I said.

She frowned. “So?"

"And I can't."

She raised an eyebrow.

"He has these woman, these bodyguards—"

Miranda Delacroix laughed. “Ah, I see! Oh, my little Carli is just too precious for words. I can't believe he's jealous. I do think that this time he's really infatuated.” She tapped on the tabletop with her fingers for a moment, and I realized that the oak tabletop was another one of the embedded computer systems. “Goodness, Carli is not yet the owner of everything, and I don't see why you shouldn't see whoever you like. I've sent a message to Dr. Hamakawa that you would like to see her."

"Thank you."

She waved her hand.

It occurred to me that Carlos Fernando was about the same age as her daughters, perhaps even a classmate of theirs. She must have known him since he was a baby. It did seem a little unfair to him—if they were married, she would have all the advantage, and for a moment I understood his dilemma. Then something she had said struck me.

"'He's not yet owner of everything,’ “ I repeated. “I don't understand your customs, Mrs. Delacroix. Please enlighten me. What do you mean, yet?"

"Well, you know that he doesn't come into his majority until he's married,” she said.

The picture was beginning to make sense. Carlos Fernando desperately wanted to control things, I thought. And he needed to be married to do it. “And once he's married?"

"Then he comes into his inheritance, of course,” she said. “But since he'll be married, the braid will be in control of the fortune. You wouldn't want a twenty-one-year-old kid in charge of the entire Nordwald-Gruenbaum holdings. That would be ruinous. The first Nordwald knew that. That's why he married his son into the la Jolla braid. That's the way it's always been done."

"I see,” I said. If Miranda Delacroix married Carlos Fernando, she—not he—would control the Nordwald-Gruenbaum fortune. She had the years of experience, she knew the politics, how the system worked. He would be the child in the relationship. He would always be the child in the relationship.

Miranda Delacroix had every reason to want to make sure Leah Hamakawa didn't marry Carlos Fernando. She was my natural ally.

And also, she—and her husband—had every reason to want to kill Leah Hamakawa.

Suddenly the guards that followed Carlos Fernando seemed somewhat less of an affectation. Just how good were the bodyguards? And then I had another thought. Had she or her husband hired the pirates to shoot down my kayak? The pirates clearly had been after Leah, not me. They had known that Leah was flying a kayak; somebody must have been feeding them information. If it hadn't been her, then who?

I looked at her with new suspicions. She was looking back at me with a steady gaze. “Of course, if your Dr. Leah Hamakawa intends to accept the proposal, the two of them will be starting a new braid. She would nominally be the senior, of course, but I wonder—"

"But would she be allowed to?” I interrupted. “If she decided to marry Carlos Fernando, wouldn't somebody stop her?"

She laughed. “No, I'm afraid that little Carli made his plan well. He's the child of a Gruenbaum, all right. There are no legal grounds for the families to object; she may be an outworlder, but he's made an end run around all the possible objections."

"And you?"

"Do you think I have choices? If he decides to ask me for advice, I'll tell him it's not a good idea. But I'm halfway tempted to just see what he does."

And give up her chance to be the richest woman in the known universe? I had my doubts.

"Do you think you can talk her out of it?” she said. “Do you think you have something to offer her? As I understand it, you don't own anything. You're hired help, a gypsy of the solar system. Is there a single thing that Carli is offering her that you can match?"

"Companionship,” I said. It sounded feeble, even to me.

"Companionship?” she echoed, sarcastically. “Is that all? I would have thought most outworlder men would promise love. You are honest, at least, I'll give you that."

"Yes, love,” I said, miserable. “I'd offer her love."

"Love,” she said. “Well, how about that. Yes, that's what outworlders marry for; I've read about it. You don't seem to know, do you? This isn't about love. It's not even about sex, although there will be plenty of that, I can assure you, more than enough to turn my little Carlos inside out and make him think he's learning something about love.

"This is about business, Mr. Tinkerman. You don't seem to have noticed that. Not love, not sex, not family. It's business."

Miranda Telios Delacroix's message had gotten through to Leah, and she called me up to her quarters. The woman guards did not seem happy about this, but they had apparently been instructed to obey her direct orders, and two red-clad guardswomen led me to her rooms.

"What happened to you? What happened to your face?” she said, when she saw me.

I reached up and touched my face. It didn't hurt, but the acid burns had left behind red splotches and patches of peeling skin. I filled her in on the wreck of the kayak and the rescue, or kidnapping, by pirates. And then I told her about Carlos. “Take another look at that book he gave you. I don't know where he got it, and I don't want to guess what it cost, but I'll say it's a sure bet it's no facsimile."

"Yes, of course.” she said. “He did tell me, eventually."

"Don't you know it's a proposition?"

"Yes; the egg, the book, and the rock,” she said. “Very traditional here. I know you like to think I have my head in the air all the time, but I do pay some attention to what's going on around me. Carli is a sweet kid."

"He's serious, Leah. You can't ignore him."

She waved me off. “I can make my own decisions, but thanks for the warnings."

"It's worse than that,” I told her. “Have you met Miranda Telios Delacroix?"

"Of course,” she said.

"I think she's trying to kill you.” I told her about my suspicion that the pirates had been hired to shoot me down, thinking I was her.

"I believe you may be reading too much into things, Tinkerman,” she said. “Carli told me about the pirates. They're a small group, disaffected; they bother shipping and such, from time to time, but he says that they're nothing to worry about. When he gets his inheritance, he says he will take care of them."

"Take care of them? How?"

She shrugged. “He didn't say."

But that was exactly what the pirates—rebels—had told me: that Carlos had a plan, and they didn't know what it was. “So he has some plans he isn't telling,” I said.

"He's been asking me about terraforming,” Leah said. “But it doesn't make sense to do that on Venus. I don't understand what he's thinking. He could split the carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen and carbon; I know he has the technology to do that."

"He does?"

"Yes, I think you were there when he mentioned it. The molecular still. It's solar-powered micromachines. But what would be the point?"

"So he's serious?"

"Seriously thinking about it, anyway. But it doesn't make any sense. Nearly pure oxygen at the surface, at sixty or seventy bars? That atmosphere would be even more deadly than the carbon dioxide. And it wouldn't even solve the greenhouse effect; with that thick an atmosphere, even oxygen is a greenhouse gas."

"You explained that to him?"

"He already knew it. And the floating cities wouldn't float any more. They rely on the gas inside—breathing air—being lighter than the Venusian air. Turn the Venus carbon dioxide to pure O2, the cities fall out of the sky."

"But?"

"But he didn't seem to care."

"So terraforming would make Venus uninhabitable and he knows it. So what's he planning?"

She shrugged. “I don't know."

"I do,” I said. “And I think we'd better see your friend Carlos Fernando."

Carlos Fernando was in his playroom.

The room was immense. His family's quarters were built on the edge of the upcity, right against the bubble-wall, and one whole side of his playroom looked out across the cloudscape. The room was littered with stuff: sets of interlocking toy blocks with electronic modules inside that could be put together into elaborate buildings; models of spacecraft and various lighter-than-air aircraft, no doubt vehicles used on Venus; a contraption of transparent vessels connected by tubes that seemed to be a half-completed science project; a unicycle that sat in a corner, silently balancing on its gyros. Between the toys were pieces of light, transparent furniture. I picked up a chair, and it was no heavier than a feather, barely there at all. I knew what it was now, diamond fibers that had been engineered into a foamed, fractal structure. Diamond was their chief working material; it was something that they could make directly out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere, with no imported raw materials. They were experts in diamond, and it frightened me.

When the guards brought us to the playroom, Carlos Fernando was at the end of the room farthest from the enormous window, his back to the window and to us. He'd known we were coming, of course, but when the guards announced our arrival he didn't turn around, but called behind him, “It's okay—I'll be with them in a second."

The two guards left us.

He was gyrating and waving his hands in front of a large screen. On the screen, colorful spaceships flew in three-dimensional projection through the complicated maze of a city that had apparently been designed by Escher, with towers connected by bridges and buttresses. The viewpoint swooped around, chasing some of the spaceships, hiding from others. From time to time bursts of red dots shot forward, blowing the ships out of the sky with colorful explosions as Carlos Fernando shouted “Gotcha!” and “In your eye, dog!"

He was dancing with his whole body; apparently the game had some kind of full-body input. As far as I could tell, he seemed to have forgotten entirely that we were there.

I looked around.

Sitting on a padded platform no more than two meters from where we had entered, a lion looked back at me with golden eyes. He was bigger than I was. Next to him, with her head resting on her paws, lay a lioness, and she was watching me as well, her eyes half open. Her tail twitched once, twice. The lion's mane was so huge that it must have been shampooed and blow-dried.

He opened his mouth and yawned, then rolled onto his side, still watching me.

"They're harmless,” Leah said. “Bad-Boy and Knickers. Pets."

Knickers—the female, I assumed—stretched over and grabbed the male lion by the neck. Then she put one paw on the back of his head and began to groom his fur with her tongue.

I was beginning to get a feel for just how different Carlos Fernando's life was from anything I knew.

On the walls closer to where Carlos Fernando was playing his game were several other screens. The one to my left looked like it had a homework problem partially worked out. Calculus, I noted. He was doing a chain-rule differentiation and had left it half-completed where he'd gotten stuck or bored. Next to it was a visualization of the structure of the atmosphere of Venus. Homework? I looked at it more carefully. If it was homework, he was much more interested in atmospheric science than in math; the map was covered with notes and had half a dozen open windows with details. I stepped forward to read it more closely.

The screen went black.

I turned around, and Carlos Fernando was there, a petulant expression on his face. “That's my stuff,” he said. His voice squeaked on the word “stuff.” “I don't want you looking at my stuff unless I ask you to, okay?"

He turned to Leah, and his expression changed to something I couldn't quite read. He wanted to kick me out of his room, I thought, but didn't want to make Leah angry; he wanted to keep her approval. “What's he doing here?” he asked her.

She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

I wish I knew myself, I thought, but I was in it far enough that I had better say something.

I walked over to the enormous window and looked out across the clouds. I could see another city, blue with distance, a toy balloon against the golden horizon.

"The environment of Venus is unique,” I said. “And to think, your ancestor Udo Nordwald put all this together."

"Thanks,” he said. “I mean, I guess I mean thanks. I'm glad you like our city."

"All of the cities,” I said. “It's a staggering accomplishment. The genius it must have taken to envision it all, to put together the first floating city; to think of this planet as a haven, a place where millions can live. Or billions—the skies are nowhere near full. Someday even trillions, maybe."

"Yeah,” he said. “Really something, I guess."

"Spectacular.” I turned around and looked him directly in the eye. “So why do you want to destroy it?"

"What?” Leah said.

Carlos Fernando had his mouth open, and started to say something, but then closed his mouth again. He looked down, and then off to his left, and then to the right. He said, “I . . . I . . .” but then trailed off.