Cold as Ice Read online

  She saw his puzzled expression. "Look, I'm not picky, and what you're wearing right now is fine with me—personally. But we're going to a formal dinner, for God's sake. If you don't want to be stopped at the door and asked questions, you have to change. It's dinner jackets and gowns tonight."

  "I don't have a dinner jacket, not here or on the base."

  "I thought you might not. Why do you think I told you to come over?" She flung open the door of one of the cupboards. "Take your pick. All sizes, colors, and styles. All centuries, too."

  It was dawning on Jon. "This is a studio."

  "Of course it is. My job. Remember, I have a job? They do plays and period pieces here, too. You could go dressed as anything from a twelfth-century Franciscan friar to Peter Pan, but we want you to fade into the background, so we'll match your plumage to the typical ten-thousand-peso-a-dinner millionaire." She reached in and pulled out a hanger. "Better let me help, I think. Why don't you try this for a start?"

  It took a long time. Jon would have settled for the first suit picked out, but she insisted that the drape across the shoulders was not quite right. "Rich people do wear clothes that don't fit, I know. But hydrothermal-vent specialists posing as rich people don't." She adjusted the bow tie and installed a tiny videorecorder in his buttonhole. "The final touch. Camera instead of camellia, so there'll be no doubt as to what you do. Who knows? Maybe you'll get some priceless footage." Nell stepped back and surveyed the result. "How do you feel?"

  "Strange." Jon hardly recognized himself in the all-around mirrors. She had done something peculiar to his hair, greying and thickening it around his temples and ears and trimming it at the front.

  "You look great. We'll walk over. By the time we get there, you'll be adjusted to your fine feathers. Let's go."

  The trek back up the hill in the deepening twilight was a revelation. Other pedestrians gave them one look and moved out of the way. Even the children on the little carts veered aside.

  "The protective aura of wealth." Nell had taken his arm and was looking straight ahead, ignoring the people around them. "Even fake wealth."

  "I thought this sort of thing was supposed to have ended with the war."

  "Spoken like a true scientist. That's one of the lessons of history. It never ends, and it never will. Not as long as people are people." She squeezed his arm and stared haughtily down her nose at a man who was slow in getting out of their way.

  The meeting hall itself stood on a western slope, facing over the strait and toward the distant ocean. A dozen men in uniform hovered around the entrance. They watched closely until the tickets that Nell produced were verified. Jon stood by, nervously fingering his slick lapels.

  "I thought we were in real trouble," he said softly when they were finally admitted. "All those guards."

  "Not for us." She squeezed his arm again. "Lighten up, dear."

  "For who, then?"

  "There's been talk around the studios that Bounders might be coming here in force to cause trouble. An Inner Circle dinner would be one of their natural targets."

  "But that's ridiculous. Outward Bound needs the Mobies. Cyrus Mobarak ought to be a Bounder hero."

  "He ought to be, and for all I know, he is. But Security doesn't have the sense to understand that, so they're hunting for Bounders behind every garbage can." She tugged at his arm. "Don't go that way, dearie. We're tolerated because they want publicity, and we'll even be fed. But you don't get to sit with the real Inner Circle."

  The dining room contained ten round tables, each one holding place settings for eight. Nell led the way to a small, bare bench, half-hidden from the main floor and offering a good camera view of the head table on its dais. A man and two women were setting up cameras on the bench. Nell nodded to them, and they gave Jon an incurious glance before they went back to work.

  Cyrus Mobarak was already at the head table, chatting with a woman in uniform on his immediate left. Jon Perry studied him as the service of the meal began. He found the examination oddly unsatisfying. Mobarak was in his middle-to-late forties. Seated, he appeared to be short and strongly built, with a thick neck that bulged against the blue-and-white wing collar. His suit was plain grey, lacking medals, decorations, or jewelry. His nose was prominent. He bore a thick shock of greying hair, and his brow ridges overhung pale, vacant-seeming eyes. He ate lightly, pecking at most of the dishes that were served, and he seemed to listen and nod a lot more than he spoke. By contrast with the glittering, bejeweled, and medal-laden audience of Inner Circle members, he was unimpressive.

  "Well, what did you expect?" asked Nell when Perry commented on how normal Mobarak looked. "A ten-foot giant covered with red hair? It was one of the early discoveries and big disappointments of my career. Great men—and great women—mostly don't look different from anyone else. My job would be a lot easier if they did."

  "But they—" Jon jerked his head toward the audience.

  "—are not great people." Nell was leaning close. "It's heresy to suggest it, especially in this room, but the Inner Circle are only wealth, just old wealth and nothing more. The woman next to Cyrus Mobarak has the brain of a clam, and she got her high-level job through family influence. I've never spoken to Mobarak, but I'll bet he isn't here because it's where he'd most like to be. He's here because he needs their money for his projects. You'll see Mr. Wizard at work in a few minutes."

  The meal was ending. The uniformed woman to Mobarak's left had risen, and the hall fell silent.

  "Good evening." She smiled around the room, careful to include the press table for a long moment. "My name is Dolores Gelbman, and I am energy coordinator for the Pacific Rim. My friends, ladies and gentlemen of the Inner Circle, tonight I have been granted an unusual privilege. It will be my pleasure to introduce to you our honored guest, Cyrus Mobarak. But before I ask him to address you, I would first like to say a few words about his work and what it means to all of us." She lifted a couple of sheets of paper and took a glance at them. "Humans were relying on fusion energy long before they knew it. Our sun, that mighty solar furnace, is itself nothing more than a giant fusion reactor, changing hydrogen and deuter-rerum"—she stumbled over the word and dipped her head briefly to consult her hand-held notes—"deuterium to helium and oxygen and . . . other things. But it was not until a hundred and fifty years ago that we achieved the first controlled fusion. And it was not until the nineteen fifties that fusion with net energy production became possible."

  Jon Perry started and turned to Nell. "That's all wrong!"

  "I know." She was smiling. "Somebody as dumb as her wrote it, and she can't even read it properly. She has no idea that it's rubbish. But sssh! Enjoy. If you don't like what she's saying, think how Mobarak must feel. Look at him."

  Cyrus Mobarak was leaning back in his seat, elbows on the table and hands set fingertip to fingertip as Dolores Gelbman went on with her speech. He seemed perfectly calm, perfectly relaxed, enjoying the occasion. It took a few more minutes before Perry realized what he was doing.

  He leaned across to Nell. "He's counting. Counting her factual errors, ticking them off on his fingers. See, there's another one, she said neutrons and she meant neutrinos. That's half a dozen so far. He's going to tear her to pieces when she gets done."

  "Like to make a bet? He'd probably love to, but he's far too smart for that. He knows who he has to manipulate, and how to do it. Wait and see."

  "—until the end of the war," Dolores Gelbman was saying, "when our industry was destroyed, much of our land rendered uninhabitable, and our energy production devastated. And at that moment of greatest need, riding in to Earth from the Belt like a savior knight in shining armor, came Cyrus Mobarak. Ready to make the secrets of the compact, ultra-efficient fusion devices that he had invented freely available to all who needed them, here or in the Outer System. During the past quarter of a century, the name of Cyrus Mobarak has become synonymous with fusion energy. By his efforts, it has been developed to the point where no other power source can com
pete with it for efficiency, cost, or safety. And so it is my privilege tonight, on behalf of the Inner Circle, to present Earth's highest technology award, for pioneer work in the systematic development of safe fusion power, to Cyrus Mobarak. The man whom I am pleased to dub . . . the Sun King."

  "Listen to her," hissed Jon. "She says 'Sun King' as though she just made it up. It's been used throughout the solar system for fifteen years!"

  But Cyrus Mobarak was rising to shake Gelbman's hand, smiling as though the name she had given him was totally new and surprising.

  "Thank you, Coordinator Gelbman, for your kind words. And thank you everyone, for the honor of this award." He nodded toward the wrapped package, half a meter high, on the table in front of him. "And thank you even more for giving me the honor of addressing you tonight."

  "Told you," whispered Nell. "He is a great man, but he's a real smoothie, too. Someday I'm going to catch him with his pants down."

  "You're going to what?"

  "Catch him with an expression on his face that he didn't calculate and plan. Not tonight, though. He'll wrap 'em around his little finger. Watch him."

  Mobarak was shaking his head ruefully. "To my mind, the many honors lavished upon me are unearned. Plasma theory and detailed fusion computations have always been too difficult for me. I've never been more than a tinkerer, playing around and having fun, and now and then finding something that seems to work. So if a group of scientists gives me an award, I feel uncomfortable. I always think of what Charles Babbage said about the British Royal Society: 'An organization that exists to hold elaborate dinners and to give each other gold medals.' But when I am given an award by real people such as yourselves, people who work in the real world and understand its needs and priorities, why, then I am overcome by a sense of well-being and a totally unreasonable feeling of pride. Pride which, I must now confess, is all too likely to come before a fall."

  There were knowing laughs from some of the audience and a few cries of "Never!" and "You can do it!"

  Mobarak paused and stared around the hall. "I gather that despite my best efforts at secrecy, some of you must already have heard of my dream. If that is the case, I hope that some of you may even be interested enough to want to take part in it as direct supporters, when the opportunity presents itself. But I have to warn you, by this time next year there is a good chance that the name of Cyrus Mobarak will be the laughingstock of the whole system. And if that happens, I hope that those of you who have been so nice to me when I have seemed near the top will be just as kind when I am down at the bottom."

  There were more audience calls of "Count me in!" and "You never had a failure yet!"

  "True enough." Mobarak held up a hand. "But there is a first time for everything, including failure. And we are getting ahead of ourselves. Tonight it was never my plan to hold out the promise of a grand new project"—("Except that you'll notice he's done just that," whispered Nell. "He could sign them up now if he wanted to.") —"but rather to thank you for, and to accept—with real gratitude—this award."

  He pulled the tall package across the table toward him and with the help of Dolores Gelbman removed the wrappings. A glittering set of nested cylinders was revealed, surrounding a central torus and an array of helical pipes.

  "Now where have I seen something like this before?" Mobarak was grinning. "For anyone who does not recognize it, here we have a model of the Mobarak AL-3—what most people call the 'Moby Mini.' The smallest, and the most popular, of my fusion plants." He studied it for a moment. "Thirty megawatts of energy, one like this would produce. And this is a beautifully made model. At a reduced scale of—what?—about four to one?"

  "Exactly four to one." Dolores Gelbman turned the model around so that the press table could have a good view of both it and herself.

  "And with all of its parts in proportion." Mobarak was leaning over, peering at the interior. "It's just perfect." He frowned. "Wait a minute, though. It's not perfect. This is a fake—it can't produce energy!"

  There were a few titters from the audience, the self-conscious sound of people laughing at a joke they do not understand.

  "We can't have that, can we? A Moby that doesn't produce energy." Cyrus Mobarak paused, then stooped to reach down under the table. "What we need is something more like this."

  With the help of two uniformed men who appeared from the side of the room, he lifted a package and placed it on the table. With the wrapping removed, it proved to be an oddly distorted version of the Moby Mini, with an out-of-proportion central torus and a set of double helices beyond it. Everyone watched in silence as Mobarak turned a control on the side of the machine. He nodded to another man over by the far wall. The room lights slowly dimmed. As they did so, a vibrating whistle came from the machine on the table, followed by the sputter of an electrical discharge. The last room light faded. The hall was illuminated by a growing blue within the central torus.

  "Ladies and gentlemen." Cyrus Mobarak, dimly visible behind the blue glow, raised his voice. "May I present to you, for the first time to any group, the Moby Midget. The system's first tabletop fusion reactor. Sixty kilos total mass, external dimensions as you see them, energy capacity eight megawatts. And, as you will also see, perfectly safe."

  The glow was still brightening. The blue-lit face and hovering hands above it were those of a magician, drawing power from the air by primordial incantation. The audience gasped as Mobarak's hands, one on each side of the torus, suddenly plunged into the flaring plasma at the center. The glow was instantly quenched, and the lights in the hall just as quickly came back on. Cyrus Mobarak stood behind his tabletop fusion reactor, casual and relaxed. As the members of the Inner Circle rose to their feet, he stepped off the dais and moved down among them, shaking hands and slapping backs.

  "And that, kiddies," said Nell quietly, "concludes our show for this evening. What did I tell you? He didn't put a foot wrong. Now I know why it was so easy to get press tickets. Mobarak wanted this whole thing to receive maximum coverage."

  Jon Perry was sitting in a daze. He lacked Nell's exposure and early immunization to wealth and fame, and most of all, to simple charisma. "He's a genius. An absolute genius. What did he mean when he talked about being laughed at a year from now?"

  "I don't know." Nell's eyes were on Cyrus Mobarak, who every few seconds glanced across to the press table. "But it has to be a monstrous new project, big enough for even the Sun King to talk about being a laughingstock. Don't worry, we'll find out what he's planning. I'll call Glyn Sefaris, and he'll set our staff onto it over in Husvik. Mobarak's home base is there."

  "No one's going to laugh at Mobarak, whatever he does. What makes you so sure that your staff can find out?"

  "Because the Sun King would never have thrown it at us—the press—if he had any real interest in keeping it secret. You'll notice that none of us caught even a sniff of the tabletop fusion reactor before tonight's unveiling. It surprised me as much as it did anybody."

  Nell tucked Jon's arm in hers and began to steer him into the crowd. "Come on, let's see if we can get a word with Mr. Wizard before he's dragged away to better things. I've a feeling that he's very receptive to press attention just now. We're meant to explore and learn what his new project is, so who knows? Maybe if we're lucky enough, or clever enough, we'll find out tonight."

  4

  Starseed

  Nell Cotter and Wilsa Sheer came from different backgrounds. They had never met, or even lived on the same planet. They were a billion kilometers apart. And yet, were Nell transported to Wilsa's side, she would have had no difficulty in recognizing the other woman's feelings. She had experienced them herself, just twenty-four hours earlier.

  Wilsa, pleasurably nervous, sat alone in a small submersible cruising turbulent ocean depths. No glimmer of light penetrated from distant sunlight. The submersible's eyes were a combination of radar and ultrasonics, providing a flat, low-contrast image that faded away to uniform grey a dozen kilometers from the ship.
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br />   The voice of Tristan Morgan was just as grey and flat, sounding far-off and thin, though the words were spoken right into Wilsa's ear. "All right so far, but now you'll have to descend. See that vortex cloud, right ahead? You want to steer clear of it. And you'll have to go down. The upper region has convection currents too strong for the Leda, and the cloud top will extend upward for thousands of kilometers. Set yourself into a thirty-degree down-glide. Aim to the left side of the cloud and hold your heading for fifteen minutes. You'll be moving in the same sense as cloud rotation. Any circulation will speed you up. When you come around and out, there should be three or four Von Neumanns right in front of you."

  "Check." Wilsa's hands felt huge and clumsy, like monstrous gauntlets, as she slowly operated the Leda's control levers. The submersible tilted and began the long slide downward. Another faint voice was chanting numbers, matching a red readout in the upper left corner of the image display. It reported isobaric depth in kilometers: "One-three-one-two. One-three-one-three, One-three-one-four." Thirteen hundred kilometers below the planet's upper cloud layers. The pressure would exceed a hundred standard atmospheres. It was no longer cold. The submersible flew through a helium-hydrogen mixture bubbling at nearly three hundred degrees Celsius. A little deeper and the heat around the ship would melt lead.

  The swirling cloud was towering closer on Wilsa's right. She stared hypnotized into its jagged, broadening helix: orange and umber turbulence, transformed by the synesthetic imaging system to a sickly, mottled yellow, rising up forever. The thunderhead was stately, black-centered, and threatening. Flickers of lightning ran around its perimeter and lit the dark interior of the submersible with random pulses of intense green.

  Wilsa gazed into its deadly heart. As she did so, another voice spoke unbidden from the secret depths of her mind. Its imperative banished every other thought. The broad, royal theme that it proclaimed rose irresistibly from a low E-flat, arching up to take command of her brain.