Still, neither taxpayer outrage up north nor cash starvation in the south would have been enough to drive the world to such a desperate, unlikely confrontation were it not for two added factors — a change in morality and the burgeoning Information Age.
Those were the days of the great arms talks, when mutual, on-site inspection was seen as the only possible way to ensure de-escalation. As each round of weapons reductions raised the verification ante, the international corps of inspectors became sacrosanct. Words like “secrecy” and “concealment” began taking on their modern, obscene connotations.
To increasing numbers of “blackjacks” — or children of century twenty-one — the mere idea of secrecy implied scheming dishonesty. “What’re you hiding, zygote?” went the-now corny phrase. But in those days it conveyed the angry, revolutionary spirit of the times.
That wrath soon turned against the one remaining power center in whom secrecy was paramount and unrepentant. By the time the members of the Brazzaville Consortium gathered to write their final ultimatum, they were no longer in a mood for compromise. Belated conciliatory words, broadcast from Berne and Nassau and Vaduz, were too little and far too late to stifle the new battle cry:… Open the books. All of them. Now!
Would the allies have gone ahead, suspecting what death and horror awaited them?
Knowing what we do now, about what lay buried under the Glarus Alps, most agree their only mistake was not declaring war sooner. In any event, by the second year of fighting, mercy was hardly on anybody’s agenda anymore. Only vengeful modern Catos could be heard, crying from the rooftops of the world—
Helvetia delenda est!
By then it was to the death.
• EXOSPHERE
Pedro insisted they change vehicles three times during their roundabout journey from the Auckland aerodrome. At one point he bought them both new clothes, straight off the rack in a tourist clip joint in Rotorua. Changing at the store, they abandoned their former at-tire on the off chance someone might have planted a tracking device on them.
Teresa went along with these measures stoically, absurd and melodramatic as they seemed. Without appropriate experience or instincts to guide her, she could only hope Manella knew what he was doing.
Strangely, the Aztlan reporter appeared to grow calmer, the closer they neared the arranged rendezvous. He drove the final kilometers of winding forest highway with a peaceful smile, humming atonal compositions of dubious lineage.
Teresa’s contribution was to work away silently at her cuticles and rub a hole in the thin carpet with her right foot each time Pedro tortured the little rental car’s transmission or took a curve too fast. It didn’t help that they still drove on the left in this country, putting the passenger in a position she normally associated with having control. She had never found it easy letting someone else drive — even Jason. She was close to snatching the wheel out of Pedro’s hands by the time bright signs began appearing along the side of the road.
WAITOMO CAVES. JUST AHEAD. COME SEE THE WONDER OF THE WAIKATO.
One of the billboards depicted a family of happy spelunkers, helmet lamps glowing as they pointed at astonishing sights just offstage.
“We’ve entered their security perimeter, by now,” Manella said. To seem more relaxed, he’d have to close his eyes and go to sleep.
“You think so?” Teresa knew he didn’t mean the tourist concessionaires. She frowned at the blur of conifers rushing past her window. Manella glanced at her and smiled. “Don’t fret. Lustig isn’t a violent type.”
“How do you explain what happened in Iquitos then?”
“Well, I admit he is… highly accident prone.” When Teresa laughed bitterly, Pedro shrugged. “That doesn’t release him from responsibility. Au contraire. Unlucky people should exercise special caution, lest their bad luck come to harm others. In Lustig’s case—”
“His message hinted he knew something about the destruction of Erehwon. Maybe he caused it! He might be working with Spivey, for all we know.”
Manella sighed. “A chance we’ll have to take. And now we’re here.”
Signs pointed left to public parking. Pedro swooped down, around, and into a slot with a display of panache Teresa could have lived without. She emerged to a syncopation of crackling vertebrae, feeling more respect than ever for the pioneers of Vostok, Mercury, and Gemini, who first ventured into space crammed into canisters approximately the. same size of the tiny car.
She and her companion crossed the highway to the ticket booth, paid for two admissions, and joined other tourists passing under one of the ubiquitous carved archways that seemed a New Zealand trademark. Teresa glanced at those gathering for the two o’clock tour, a sparse assortment of winter travelers that included hand-holding Asian newly-weds, retirees with Australian accents, and local children in quaint woolen school uniforms. For all she knew, any of them might be agents for the mysterious organization they’d tracked to this place.
The meeting had been set up with delicacy and circumlocution, each side taking precautions against a possible double cross. It all struck Teresa as anachronistic, and hopelessly adolescent.
Unfortunately, adolescents ran the world. Big, irresponsible adolescents like Jason or this Lustig fellow, whose dossier read like the biography of a high-tech Peter Pan. Even worse were serious, bloody-minded types like Colonel Spivey, whose games of national security were played with real multitudes serving as pawns. She recalled how intensely the man had worked during the recent space mission. Spivey was driven, all right. Sometimes that could be a good thing.
It could also make some people dangerous.
“You’re sure these people will keep their word?” she whispered to Manella.
He looked back with amusement. “Of course I’m not sure! Lustig may be nonviolent, but what do we know about his backers?” Again, he shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
Ask a foolish question… Teresa thought.
Their tour guide arrived at last, a dark-haired, dark-skinned young man with broad shoulders and a pleasant smile. The guide cheerfully beckoned them to follow him along a wooden walk that hugged the steep hillside, and soon had them traversing along mist-shrouded waterfalls. Teresa kept close to Manella at the end of the queue.
She caught herself glancing backward to see if anyone was sneaking up behind them, and made herself stop doing it.
The vegetation changed as they passed under a rain forest canopy. Exotic birds flitted under moist foliage that looked so healthy you might never imagine how many other places like this were withering elsewhere on the planet. Here even the smells seemed to convey strength, diversity. This jungle felt as if it were a long way from dying. Inhaling felt like taking a tonic. That calmed her a bit. She took deep breaths.
They turned a corner and suddenly the cave entrance yawned ahead of them. The gap in the mountainside was appropriately dark, foreboding. Steps proceeded downward between slippery metal banisters, with bare bulbs spaced at intervals apparently calculated to maximize eerie shadows, to thrill visitors with an illusion of creaking decrepitude and mystery. ,
Teresa listened idly as the guide recited something having to do with great birds, cousins of the legendary moa, who used to get trapped in caves like these during prehistoric times, leaving their bones to be discovered by astonished explorers many centuries later.