What a wonderful piece of pr I would make for him, Reese had realized. Ex-astronaut brought low, rescued and sustained by the corporate dream.Within a few days of the thought he’d packed his clothes and moved on.
“Right,” Kane said,“of course you know him.Well, when the government went under, Pulsystems was the major creditor against nasa. They bought off the other parties and ended up with the entire Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, two shuttles, launch privileges at the Cape, and certain specific hardware already in orbit.” Kane’s mineral water came and he used it to wash down a small green pill.“That hardware includes a working Mars spacecraft.”
Reese said,“Go on.”
“Pulsystems is going to sponsor a Mars expedition. Chairman Morgan wants you to train the crew and direct the mission from Houston.”
Reese set the beer bottle on the table, pushed it away.“They’re all dead, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“The colonists. Nobody’s heard anything from them in over seven years.”
“He’s not expecting to find them alive.This is just the beginning. If this works out, there’ll be a space program again, with the companies sharing the expense and pooling the results. It could be a new age.”
“Who’s the crew supposed to be?”
“Me, for one.There’s a doctor, and three pilots.”
“So,” Reese said.“After all these years.You finally get your shot. How did you talk Morgan into it?”
“I work for him now. Foreign security.”
In other words, Reese thought, Morgan’s corporate mercenaries. In the last days of the government, the US Army had become a parody, two officers for every enlisted man, obsolete weapons, no morale or fighting experience.The corporations had hired the best strategists and munitions people for their own use, protecting overseas investments from terrorists and rebel governments.
“You were in North Africa, then,” Reese said.
Kane nodded.
Nobody in the States really understood what had happened there—at least no one outside the boards of directors of the companies involved. All anyone knew was that the Red Chinese had moved on the un biotechnology lab in Luxor—Biotek Afrika—and the US government hadn’t been in any shape to stop them. Instead the multinational corporations and zaibatsus had sent their own troops, and when the shooting was over, the corporations were in control, all over the world.
“Tell him it’s no,” Reese said. His stomach was jumping, and his blood ran icy and thin. He forced himself to stand up, draining the rest of his beer for moral support.“I have to go along, or it’s no.Tell him that.”
“Reese.”
He turned back.
“I’ve seen the mission profile.This isn’t nasa.This is a stripped-down, high-risk, low-redundancy mission.Antique hardware, not even our own excursion module.Aerocapture. Do you think you could handle that?”
“Tell him,” Reese said, and walked out.
Outside the sun smoldered and flowers ran riot over the guest cabins.
Reese had never seen so many flowers in his life; Mexico seemed a nation of flowers, obsessed with them, drunk on their color and perfume.
Not like Mars, he thought. On Mars, there were only edible flowers; no trees, no wood, no yards, no swimming pools.
He climbed two steps into his cabin, kicked off his damp bathing suit, and stood under the shower.When he finished, he put on real clothes for the first time in days, black cotton pants and a black pullover shirt. In the mirror he saw jowls and puffy, sunken eyes.
The kid is right, he told himself.You’d never make it.
He took out his I Ching and the envelope with his three coins.They were copper pennies from the year he graduated high school, dark brown and corroded now from the acids in his fingers. He tried to focus his thoughts, failed, threw the coins anyway.
He built hexagram 34, the Power of the Great. Not, as he’d hoped, something obvious and straightfoward, like Sheng, Pushing Upward.The oracle was enigmatic, as always.The judgment, minimal, was merely “Perseverance furthers.” The interpretation tantalized him with bits of relevance:“inner worth mounts with great force and comes to power... one may rely entirely on one’s own power and forget to ask what is right...greatness and justice must be indissolubly united.”
His change line in the third position gave him:“The inferior man works through power.The superior man does not act thus.”
Morgan, Reese thought. It’s trying to warn me about Morgan.And sure as hell, if he’s involved with this, he’s up to something. He put the book away, restless and uncomfortable, and stepped out into the blazing sunlight.
Without conscious thought, his feet took him down the Calle Cuaglia to Carlos Fuera and across the baranca. His diaphragm hurt and his eyes burned, the first physical pain he could remember in weeks. Like the pain, he thought, when the blood starts moving again in a leg that’s gone to sleep.
He crossed over to Avenida Morelos with its long, whitewashed, windowless walls and downhill to the Borda Gardens. Maximillian and Carlotta had used it for a summer retreat in the 1860s, but now it was just another elaborate ruin, a walled maze of garden paths, stagnant ponds, and crumbling outbuildings. For a while the government had charged admission, with a pretense of repairing it, but the charade was dropped when the socialistas took over. Now that pemex was the de facto ruler of the country, there was little interest in the past.
The gardens covered five or six city blocks, but only the immediate area near the entrance had been kept up.Towards the northwest the park disintegrated into dying trees and ruined fountains.
Another message, he thought, this one from my subconscious.A metaphor for Frontera, its gardens and fields and buildings all walled in by the dome. Like this now, gone, crumbling, ruined.
And yet, he thought. Perseverance furthers.“A movement in accord with heaven, producing great power.” He bent his legs into a lotus, straining the shortened muscles. In front of him was a crumbling adobe wall, beyond that the hills of the city, and beyond that the pine-covered mountains. In time his mind began to clear, and he sat for over an hour, feeling the sun move in the sky overhead.
From the gardens he took Lopez Rayon toward the zocalo, his sense of calm evaporating. He wanted to go back to the hotel and see if Kane had talked to Morgan. Instead he forced himself to keep walking, past the dilapidated theater and its endlessly recycled kung fu movies, past the steeply climbing streets and the tiled hotels.
Mirrored glasses winked at him from the shadows of El Portal, an open-fronted restaurant across from the Hotel del Parque. Kane sat calmly at a side table, watching, making no effort to attract Reese’s attention.A clever piece of tradecraft, Reese knew, designed to work on his nerves, impress him with Kane’s omniscience.
He sat down at Kane’s table without speaking.Together they watched a party of Japanese tourists posing for pictures on the steps of the hotel across the street.Without looking at him, Kane said,“I talked to my uncle. He says it’s your ass.You can kill yourself if you want to.Those were his words.”
Reese stood up.
“Reese.”
“Yeah?”
Kane took off his glasses, folded them carefully, and put them in his shirt pocket. His eyes were dark, emotionless. Reese wondered if he could trust someone with eyes as dark as that.
“When I was a kid,” Kane said, and then looked down at the street. “When I was a kid, it meant a lot to me that you did what you did. Showed me around.Talked to me. I used to think what it would have been like if you were my father.”