Crane had maintained a loose contact with her through this period, buying from YOU-LI, at Kate’s insistence, Sumi’s ancestral lands, which he then leased back to her at the price of one dollar per year in perpetuity. Sumi needed—and was granted—a legal divorce from Paul. So strong was his presence that he was even there when the chip was removed. She wasn’t the only one with a problem. Millions had become addicted to Yo-Yu’s chips, and an entire branch of medicine called Personality Replacement had sprung into existence to deal with the fallout.
Sumi Chan spent four years locked away, Yo-Yu doling out billions in hospital and damage payments for addicted chippies, taking enough of a hit that it was forced into a worldwide merger with its struggling rival, the YOU-LI Corp. The Companion Chip went the way of the dinosaur, even as educational chip implants were increasing in popularity. Crane, himself, was ported in ’35 and found the device invaluable for research.
Kate Masters, meanwhile, had been re-elected in ’36 and was now serving out the last two years of her second term. Sumi lived quietly on her ancestral lands in China.
Stoney had died within a year of the Imperial catastrophe.
For Crane, though, the last ten years had been a waking nightmare. Shortly after Talib’s arrest and imprisonment when the story was out about the Imperial Valley Project, public sympathy turned sharply. Quickly, he, Crane, became the villain for daring even to think of detonating nuclear devices … for daring even to believe he could change the very substructure of the Earth or had any right to do so.
His became the voice crying in the wilderness. Over and over again through the long years he tried to warn his countrymen of the terrible catastrophe to come in California. Worse than the insults, worse than the laughter greeting his recorded, written, and live messages was the deafening silence with which his warnings were met. And, finally, he had given up hope.
And he had become more hollow … and more hollow still.
Then the Moon had gone up for sale and he’d felt something down in the pit of his stomach, a spark. He’d pounced on it.
“You’re really going to put in… buildings and stuff up here, huh?” Hill asked.
“Plan to,” Crane said, “I want to build a whole city up here, Burt. A place where people would want to live.”
“You gonna be livin’ up here, too?”
Crane smiled. “No, friend. I think we’re both a little too long in the tooth and cantankerous for this kind of pioneering.”
Hill sat back and sighed heavily. “That’s a relief. I just couldn’t imagine myself in one of those damned helmets all the time. What happens if you gotta sneeze, or blow your nose?”
“We will visit sometimes, though. There’s a lot of work to be done, decisions to be made.” Crane took a sip of the Scotch, watching a crew of construction workers in their muscle exo’s walking into the bar and sitting at a back table. “I don’t like the idea of being dependent upon Earth for my water supply,” he said. “Wonder if we could dredge permafrost on Mars and ship it here ourselves? Whoever controls the water, controls the environment.”
“How many people you want to put out there?”
“A few thousand at least, I’d say.”
“You’ve been all fired up about this project for months. It seems crazy to me. Why do it? What’s the point?”
Crane grimaced, finished his drink. He held up the glass and got the bartender’s attention, the man nodding and going for the Scotch bottle. “It’s all that money Stoney left me,” he said. “I couldn’t find anything worthwhile enough … lasting enough, to spend it on. Then this opened up.”
“Why this?”
“I had an aquarium once … well twice actually, but the one I’m thinking about I had when I was a kid living with my aunt,” Crane said. “I’d saved up for it myself. I had a lot of different kinds of fish in it over the years, but once I put a shrimp in, a delicate, beautiful little thing. I couldn’t find anything to feed it that it wanted to eat. After a while it began eating itself, day after day, a piece at a tune just to stay alive. Eventually it hit a vital organ.”
He turned then and looked at the Earth, huge and blue and cloud-shrouded through the viewports. He pointed to it. “That’s what I think they’re doing, eating themselves alive. They murder in the name of God and blindly destroy the very ecosystem that sustains them.”
“People are people.” Burt shrugged.
“What you’re really saying is that people are animals,” Crane replied. “And I say to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a civilization, a real civilization, built on real understanding of ourselves and our universe. I bought property on the darkside because I don’t want my people seeing the Earth die before their eyes. My … city may be the last best hope for the human race, Burt. That’s why I’m doing it. Is that dream enough for you?”
“You couldn’t save the Earth, so you want to make a new world?”
“I’ll accept that interpretation.”
“What’re you gonna call this place?”
“Charlestown. I’m going to call it Charlestown.”
Burt nodded, his eyes misting. “I think that’s real nice, Doc. Real nice.”
Chapter 21
FIRESTORM
From the air, the Shirahega firebreak was impossible to miss, even in the world’s largest city. It was an apartment building, or rather a length of apartments, designed to cut off the firestorm resulting from a major quake, designed to protect the northernmost districts from the poorer southernmost ones. It was the Great Wall of Tokyo.
Crane and Burt Hill were riding in the passenger section of a Red Cross relief helo, a dozen or so white-garbed medtechs, young people mostly, filling the benches beside and across from them. They didn’t know who Crane was, had no connection to the aging countenance that had once held a world in thrall with his exploits and his tragedies.
The techs were gaping as they looked out the large ship’s bubble ports. The sight of Tokyo spread out beneath them would take anyone’s breath away. The buildings of a major city dominated the landscape, yet it was the surrounding city, the ramshackle dwellings of thirty-three million people, that commanded the attention. Wooden houses jammed together along narrow streets made it look like a patchwork quilt. Millions of wooden houses. More houses than the human mind could truly imagine. Only seeing was believing.
But what was worse were the huge propane tanks sitting beside the dwellings, sometimes dwarfing them. They still used gas here. When the quake started—and it would start soon—the fires would ignite quickly. Within fifteen minutes a third of Tokyo would burn to the ground, a half million buildings destroyed. Crane’s arm hurt.
“You’re a damned fool to come out here,” Hill said, “chasin’ after EQs like you ain’t done since ’28. Somebody ought to get you to a psychiatrist.”
“You are the most disagreeable man I’ve ever known,” Crane said. “Why I put up with you is a mystery to me.”
“You need me, because you’re too much of a baby to look out for yourself. Hell, you’d’a been dead twenty times over if it wasn’t for me. And I’m here to tell you now, that this may be the twenty-first time. I’ll bet you Doc Bowman didn’t give you the okay for this.”
“Didn’t tell him,” Crane said. He hadn’t been able to shake Bowman since his brush with colon cancer the year before. It had been caused by radiation exposure during the fight at Imperial Valley. The cancer was why he was here, wanting to experience a massive earthquake once more. It had been seventeen years since he’d allowed himself to visit a quake site—he was flagellating himself; Burt was right about that—yet as great as his pain and loathing for the Beast, so too was the exultation and excitement. The Beast provoked an exquisite enmity.