Umetzu understood Nobu’s unspoken request. This time he did smile thinly. “So your people will not be martyrs. Instead they will fall victims to accidents.”
“As you said,” Nobu replied, “the Belt is a very dangerous place.”
CIUDAD DE CIELO
Elliott Danvers was lonely after Molina left for Australia. He missed their meals together, their adversarial chats, the verbal cut and parry that kept his mind stimulated.
Over the weeks that followed Molina’s departure, Danvers tried to forget his own needs and buried himself in his work. No, he reminded himself time and again. Not my work. God’s work. He felt puzzled that Atlanta had shown no visible reaction to his report that nanotechnology was being used to build the skytower. He had expected some action, or at least an acknowledgement of his intelligence. Nothing. Not a word of thanks or congratulations on a job well done. Well, he told himself, a good conscience is our only sure reward. And he plunged himself deeper into his work. Still, he felt nettled, disappointed, ignored.
He went to Bracknell and asked permission to convert one of the warehouse buildings into a nondenominational chapel. As the sky-tower neared completion, some of the buildings fell into disuse, some of the workers departed for their homes. Danvers noted that there seemed to be fewer Yankee and Latino construction workers in the streets, and more Asian computer and electronics technicians.
“A chapel?” Bracknell looked surprised when Danvers raised the question.
Standing in front of Bracknell’s desk, Danvers nodded. “You have several empty buildings available. I won’t need much in way of—”
“You mean you’ve been working here all this time without a church building?” Bracknell looked genuinely surprised. “Where do you hold your services?”
“Outdoors, mostly. Sometimes in my quarters, for smaller groups.”
Bracknell’s office was far from imposing. Nothing more than a corner room in the corrugated-metal operations building. He sat at a scuffed and dented steel desk. One wall held a smart screen that nearly reached the low ceiling. Another had photos of the tower at various stages of its construction pasted to it. Two windows looked out on the streets and, beyond one of them, the dark trunk of the tower, rising above the distant green hills and into the heavens.
Gesturing to the plain plastic chair in front of his desk, Bracknell said, “I thought we already had a church here, someplace.”
Danvers smiled bitterly as he settled his bulk in the creaking little chair. “You’re not a churchgoer.”
With an almost sheepish grin, Bracknell admitted, “You’ve got me there.”
“Are you a Believer?”
Bracknell thought it over for a moment, his head cocked slightly. “Yes, I think I can truthfully say that I am. Not in any organized religion, understand. But—well, the universe is so blasted orderly. I guess I do believe there’s some kind of presence overseeing everything. Childhood upbringing, I suppose. It’s hard to overcome.”
“You don’t have to apologize about it,” Danvers said, a little testily. He was thinking, Not in any organized religion, the man says. He’s one of those intellectual esthetes who rationalizes everything and thinks that that’s religion. Nothing more than a damnable Deist, at best.
Bracknell called up a map of the city and told his computer to highlight the unused buildings. The wall screen showed four of them in red.
“Take your pick,” he said to Danvers, gesturing to the screen.
Danvers stood up and walked to the map, studying it for several moments. “This one,” he said at last, rapping his knuckles against the screen.
“That’s the smallest one,” said Bracknell.
“My congregations have not been overwhelming. Besides, the location is good, close to the city’s center. More people will see their friends and associates going to services. It’s a proven fact that people tend to follow a crowd.”
“It’s the curious monkey in our genes,” Bracknell said easily.
Danvers tried to erase the frown that immediately came over him.
“Was that too Darwinian for you?”
“We are far more than monkeys,” Danvers said tightly.
“I suppose we are. But we’re mammals; we enjoy the companionship of others. We need it.”
“That’s true enough, I suppose.”
“So why don’t you join Lara and me at dinner tonight? We can talk over the details of your new chapel.”
Danvers was surprised at the invitation. He knew, in his mind, that a man could be a non-Believer and still be a decent human being. But this man Bracknell, he’s leading this nearly blasphemous skytower project. I mustn’t let him lull me into friendship, Danvers told himself. He may be a pleasant enough fellow, but he is the enemy. You either do God’s work or the devil’s. There is no neutrality in the struggle between good and evil.
The restaurant was only half full, Bracknell saw as he came through the wide-open double doors with Lara. A lot of the construction people had already left. Once the geostationary platform was finished, they would shift entirely to operational status.
He saw that Rev. Danvers was already seated at a table, chatting with the restaurant’s owner and host, a tall suave Albanian who towered over his mestizo kitchen staff. As soon as the host saw Bracknell and Lara enter, he left Danvers in midsentence and rushed to them.
“Slow night tonight,” he said by way of greeting.
Bracknell said, “Not for much longer. Lots of people heading here. By this time next year you’ll have to double the size of this place.”
The host smiled and pointed out new paintings, all by local artists, hanging on the corrugated metal walls. Village scenes. Cityscapes of Quito. One showed the mountains and the skytower in Dayglo orange. Bracknell thought they were pretty ordinary and said nothing, while Lara commented cheerfully on their bright colors.
The dinner with Rev. Danvers started off rather awkwardly. For some reason the minister seemed guarded, tight-lipped. But then Lara got him to talking about his childhood, his early days in the slums of Detroit.
’You have no idea of what it was like growing up in that cesspool of sin and violence. If it weren’t for the New Morality, Lord knows where I’d be,” Danvers said over a good-sized ribeye steak. “They worked hard to clean up the streets, get rid of the crooks and drug pushers. They worked hard to clean me up.”
Lara asked lightly, “Were you all that dirty?”
Danvers paled slightly. “I was a prizefighter back then,” he said, his voice sinking low. “People actually paid money to see two men try to hurt each other, try to pound one another into unconsciousness.”
“Really?”
“Women, too. Women fought in the ring and the crowds cheered and screamed, like animals.”
Bracknell saw that Danvers’s hands were trembling. But Lara pushed further, asking, “And the New Morality changed all that?”
“Yes, praise God. Thanks to their workers, cities like Detroit became safer, more orderly. Criminals were jailed.”
“And their lawyers, too, from what I hear,” Bracknell said. He meant it as a joke, but Danvers did not laugh and Lara shot him a disapproving glance.
“Many lawyers went to jail,” Danvers said, totally serious, “or to retraining centers. They were protecting the criminals instead of the innocent victims! They deserved whatever they got.”
“With your size,” Lara said, “I’ll bet you were a very good prizefighter.”
Danvers smiled ruefully. “They could always find someone bigger.”
“But you beat them, didn’t you?”
“No,” he answered truthfully. “Not very many of them.”