The zenith angle (22 page)

Dottie sampled her glass of white wine, and tucked her cold hand back in the hot water. “Honey, that was too long apart, okay? I don’t wanna be a computer-security widow.”

“We can meet again at that big to-do in Virginia. And after that, Tony has invited me to a Joint Techs conference up here.”

Unhappiness crossed her face. He’d given her the wrong answer. She didn’t want him to just make some dates.

He couldn’t tell her the simple thing that she needed to hear. Even though he knew what that was, more or less. It was something like: “Honey, I missed you just as much as you missed me.” But that wasn’t quite true, and he knew it.

Those months apart had brought him an ugly self-wisdom, Van thought as his floating feet bobbed in the sizzling water. There was something wrong with him as a man, a husband, a father, and a human being. He was the only child of a troubled marriage. He came from a line of people who were way too bright. He had an ability to concentrate and work creatively, and he also had a thorny, geeky isolation. And those were not two different things. They were the very same thing. Beneath his shell, his personal armor, he had a vast, galactic gulf of need. It was huge and ruthless, like an autism. It would never be filled. And that wasn’t her fault at all, for a thousand loving Dotties couldn’t fill it. His heart of hearts lived there in a gulf of darkness, and his love for her was like one single glowing star. If he’d been a poet he could have told her that in some nice way, but Van had never in his life packed a thought like that into words. He might have made a start at saying it—but there was worse. In her absence from his life, in the icy vacuum where her warmth had once consoled him, there was a new and powerful emotion growing inside him. As Van floated there at ease under the big winter sky, looked after, fed, watered, loved, now he could see that feeling, now he could finally put a name to what was going on inside of him. It was rage. He could see that rage within himself as if watching it through a telescope. It was black and hard and dense, like a neutron star.

He was someone who read manuals, wore glasses, and typed on a keyboard. About the most violent thing he ever did in his cyberwarrior life was to look for a buffer overflow. But rage was growing in him, because rage was a native part of his soul. Rage grew there in the entirely natural way that grief would grow in a widower.

Van had nothing to say to her about this. He couldn’t any more wrap his tongue around that than he could lick broken glass.

Dottie looked over his shoulder. Then she found her glasses, put them on, and stared. Van found his specs as well. Two men were approaching their cottage on horseback. The first was a young Chinese servant. Van wanted to think of this Chinese kid as a “staffer,” but Mrs. DeFanti’s Chinese underlings were most definitely “servants.” They were around all the time, thoughtful, watching and attentive, but barely there. They made the most self-effacing British butler seem like a brass band. The second man was also humble and ghostlike, but in a very different way. His padded jacket, his tartan shirt, his felt cowboy hat, they were perched on his quiet flesh like the clothes on a cowboy paper doll.

The two horses plodded by gently, long heads down, on some very private go-round. Van and Dottie sank deep into the hot water. The servant ignored them serenely, as if two naked lovers in a tub were no more than two pinecones. The old man’s gaze fell on them and lingered. He had eyes in a waking dream. They seemed to stare across a thousand light-years.

The horses plodded on and carried their human cargo into the pine trees.

“I should have stood right up and waved,” Dottie said.

Van laughed, startled.

She swam over and wrapped her chunky little body around him.

“We don’t have many illusions about that old man,” she told him, her lips an inch from his neck. “At the Facility, nobody does. When he was between marriages, he used to go to astronomy seminars and hit on all the women. Oh, boy, the stories you used to hear whenever Tom DeFanti was on the prowl.”

“How do you know all that? Aren’t you a little young for that old guy?”

“There aren’t that many women in astronomy, honey. Word always gets around.”

Van gave her a smile. Somehow, it all made sense.

“I got myself one of the cute guys,” she told him, rubbing his collarbone. “Everybody knows.”

Van kept his smile up, but the sight of Tom DeFanti had given him a real turn. Van had met a lot of odd and remarkable people lately. He had met the President of the United States. He’d met the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, and the Attorney General. Once, at an industry junket, he had had a long chat by an elevator with both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who were riding up to the penthouse together to drink beer and play poker. Bill Gates had noticed Van’s name badge. He had said something nice about how “hard-core” Van might get, working at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Maybe if Bill Gates had caught it in the neck from some huge Enron scandal. If Bill Gates had suffered a total mental breakdown. If Bill Gates was shambling around like some kind of snake-bitten ghost. Then maybe Bill Gates would be as scary as Tom DeFanti had just been.

The world’s rich people were all getting spookier. During the Bubble, there had never been so many truly wacky people who were just totally, crazily loaded with cash. Up at the very top, they stopped counting their money and they wanted to act just like governments. George Soros had his agents all over Eastern Europe. Ross Perot wanted to be President, and Ken Lay . . . they’d all lost the idea that there was any kind of limit to what money could do to the world. Even Osama bin Laden was a rich guy. It was like they were all staring straight into the sun.

“Honey,” she said.

“What?”

“Try to relax, okay? I’m Facility staff, I rented this place. We get to do that with Pinecrest, it’s, like, an understanding. They won’t do anything. It’s all just fine here.”

“Right,” he said.

“What do you want to do today, honey? We have our own day just for once, we can do anything we like. Hiking, or horseback riding . . .”

“No.”

“We could go back inside and try out that big waterbed.”

Van finished his beer. The pores had opened up all over him. He was never going to get any cleaner. All the lovemaking had reset Van’s erotic dials to zero. He didn’t want to stay around this place anymore. He was ready to put some clothes on and get something serious accomplished. “I’ve got a great idea,” he told her. “Why don’t we go see your work?”

“Okay. After lunch.”

“Let’s go.”

“Derek, we’re having shrimp bisque at the ranch house. With blackened tuna. Plus sautéed morels in truffle oil.”

Well then. Maybe Dottie’s plans would be pretty much okay.

After a sumptuous meal, while his gut was stuffed, his head was logy, and his temples were thudding with coffee, they returned to the Facility. Dottie took an electric cart up the mountain. It was icy, windy, and the air was impossibly thin, but there was a fantastic view. It was the basic business of observatories to have a fantastic view. This one was colossal.

Sex, food, and coffee had whipped his altitude sickness. With a sidelong grin at Dottie, Van left her and hauled himself hand-over-heel up the broken slope of a granite crag.

He needed to get up there in order to soak it all in. That massive sky. The upended bones of the Rockies were laced with racing clouds and their slope-sliding shadows. Wrinkled peaks dusted with white ice. The long run of green pines. Ancient brown landslides, with old miners’ roads crumbled and vanishing. The blackened scars of small forest fires. From the Observatory, the Facility was entirely lost inside its trees: just an aerial, the crisp white rim of a satellite dish. Hovering above the postcard scene was an airborne silver blob. It was an aerostat, on a long striped mooring line.

Van had noticed the airship at once, and Dottie had told him about it. This shiny ship was NORAD-surplus, some experimental barrage-balloon radar scheme that the military had never successfully put into operation. DeFanti had reworked the blimp scheme, trying to commercialize it, to repurpose satellite communications, just for local neighborhoods.

This wild notion had never caught on in the bigger world outside, but around here in the mountains, a little blimp with telecom aboard did make sense.

Pinecrest Ranch, the Facility, and all the smaller local ranches nearby were isolated. They were in a land of dark skies, in a federal area zoned for radio research since the 1940s. Antennas and cable TV were forbidden. So, if the weather permitted, then they could get some connectivity off a floating baby satellite, a cute little Mylar airship. It was technically sweet. A silvery floating jewel for the twenty-first century. A bold proof-of-concept. It was just the touch that this landscape needed. Van’s shame and despair had left him. In this huge American sky and these mountains, he found himself light-headed with a golden sense of the world’s possibilities. He
did
like it up here, being with Dottie. It was great. If the stupid war would only end, and if he blew off a few personal bad habits, yeah, he could make a go of it, living up here. The mountains of the West would become his home. He could go native. He’d get barrel-chested, and tanned, with boot calluses on his soft hacker feet. His son would grow up as a mountain boy. Ted would be a skier and a climber. He and Ted would be mountain rockhounds together. He’d get a rifle and a fly-fishing rod. He and Ted would hunt and hike and fish every weekend. Tents and campfires at night, maps and compasses. He would look the kid right in the face and tell him wise, fatherly things about the world. He would make up for everything he was failing to do, failing to give.

Dottie waved at him from below the crag, her words to him lost in the keen wind. Van climbed down to rejoin her. Dottie looked strange to him after his reverie. This dainty woman with straight brown hair and unplucked eyebrows, those lips that never wore lipstick. A thick denim shirt and jeans. She was the most precious thing in the world to him.

The telescope’s round barn was big, but smaller than it looked in its publicity. The dome featured clamshell doors that opened to the zenith. The observatory rotated neatly on gimbals to track the moving sky. The structure had a strangely sleek, sporting-shoe look. It was like a gigantic shopping-mall kiosk. Inside it was still and warm, for the walls were very thick, protecting their precious instrument like a foam cooler full of premium beer.

As an astrophysicist’s husband, Van had visited more observatories than any man should ever have to. Van was used to the look of serious scientific instruments. He had never seen a telescope half this pretty. Big professional telescopes always looked frazzled, stuck-together, and one of a kind. Here, though, Van knew at once that he was standing in the presence of an old man’s darling. This telescope was polished and elegant, bejeweled with buttons, plugs, and switches, like a trophy wife at a Nobel Prize party. It—she—was five stories high. A towering complex of struts had delicately tapered arms painted in designer enamel. Her bottom was a great big mirror bowl of glassy blue hexagons in a green plastic case. All the joins and seams were suspiciously perfect. This telescope was like the Hubble’s sexier little sister.

The objective of an “adaptive telescope” was to remove the twinkle from the stars. The instrument did that by reshaping the telescope’s mirrors in real time, computer-corrected, flexing in subtle response, just as the atmosphere moved. This very cool idea had clearly caught DeFanti’s technical fancy. But—Van wondered—was it really necessary to neatly countersink all the bolts? Why was the scope’s outer casing snapped together so seamlessly, like some bride in a posh limousine? Then there was the wiring. This telescope had a haywire Medusa wealth of wiring. She was screaming her torrid romance with the Internet.

In the mighty effort to bring her online, it looked like the local techs had subjected her to major cosmetic surgery, maybe two or three times. Every glass hexagon drooled out a black Niagara of electronic actuators. There were rafts and banks of fiber-optic lambda just lying there, seemingly abandoned. This baby had enough wiring for a Swiss atom-smasher. No wonder they loved her on TV.

“She’s real cute,” Van said aloud. His voice echoed from the vault. They were alone with this towering instrument, two human beings reduced to the size of Rocky Mountain marmots. Just this sleeping Bride of Science, her control consoles, a scattering of office chairs and wire-bound manuals, some dirty coffee cups and sleeping bags. Scientist clutter.

“They had real trouble with the original design,” Dottie admitted. “Architects have such big egos. He didn’t want any bunch of geeks telling him that ugly things work better sometimes.” Dottie spread her hands. “So we’re not Keck II or Mauna Loa, okay? But those materials are top-notch, really built to last. As for our bandwidth, well . . . This will be Internet2’s only live cyber-observatory. Everything streaming in real time right over the NSF backbone. Tom DeFanti wanted every kid in every inner-city school to see the whole universe. If they couldn’t see their sky any more because of all that city glare, well, he’d just give them the universe, free, by the Info Superhighway. And if Al Gore was President now

. . . well, he probably could have got a lot of federal money for doing that.”

“What gives with the bad wire job?”

“Oh, well, we call that our Bhopal problem. See, when the original contractors left, Tony hired all these cut-rate Indian engineers . . . They keep coming in here, running expensive tests, putting it online, taking it down again, and rewiring it . . . Nobody ever tried this before, they’re fiddling with it day and night . . . He’s not the world’s greatest project manager, Tony.”

“I never had Tony figured for that line of work.”

“Getting this thing built, that was Tony’s first big success for Tom DeFanti. It was practically impossible to build any telescope this close to federal parkland with all those regulations and endangered species rules, but . . . well, here it is, Tony arranged all that. Tony always hooks things up in such a clever, Tony-like way.”