Christopher was numbly silent for a long time. “This scares me, Loi. I don’t know if I want to know what’s inside me that could make me do something like this.”
“You scared us.”
“I know,” he said.
Loi studied him. “I’m going upstairs to be with Jessie,” she said finally. “Let me know what you decide.”
“I think she needs to go, too,” he said as she started away.
“You’re not in any position to set conditions,” Loi said pointedly.
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. Get your own house in order, Christopher. Then maybe your opinions on Jessie will matter to me again.”
CHAPTER 13
—UUC—
“… for the silent Earth.”
Eyes closed, Hiroko Sasaki endured the final touch-up of her makeup and powder. The corporation’s image doctor, a round-bellied American named Edgar Donovan, hovered nearby, fretting.
“You have to remember that no matter how much Minor smiles at you, he’s not your friend,” Donovan said. “The smiles don’t go out to the audience. When they cut to him, it’ll be for a raised eyebrow or a frown.”
“I will remember.”
“And don’t be surprised if he tries something to provoke you. You took a lot of power out of his hands by insisting on a live interview. He’s going to try to get that back.”
“I fully expect so.”
“I’m not saying you were wrong, mind you,” Donovan added. “The board’s delighted that you finally agreed to come out of the shadows and stand up for the company. And I’m delighted with the conditions—live, ninety minutes, and here at Prainha. That’s as close as we can get to a level playing field. Which tells us how much RCA wanted this one.”
“Yes,” Sasaki said. The makeup artist stepped back, her work finally complete, and Sasaki opened her eyes. She looked around the inner office until she found Mikhail Dryke, a silent spectator in a window well. “Are you ready?”
“We’re ready,” Dryke said.
Sasaki smiled a brave smile. “Then I will go face the jaguar.”
Except for his eyes, Julian Minor, senior correspondent for RCA Telecasting’s Newstime, looked more like a terrier than a jaguar. Barely 170 centimeters tall, with a round-heeled walk and close-cropped fuzzy beard, he seemed unequal to the attention he received when he entered a room.
But on camera, the walk and the height were irrelevant, and the beard became a mask which served only to focus attention on Minor’s eyes. His eyes unmasked the hunter in him. They could punctuate a comment with an angry flash, puncture a defense with a skeptical smirk. From just a meter or two away, the challenging intensity of his gaze could paralyze thought.
It was a candidate for the Russian presidency who had given Minor his nickname. Emerging from what would be a career-ending interview with Minor, Sterenkov had complained bitterly that to look across into Minor’s eyes was like looking into the tall grass and seeing the gleam of a jaguar’s eyes. In time, Minor’s reputation itself became a weapon; later victims sometimes destroyed their own credibility simply by trying to avoid his gaze.
For all that, Minor enjoyed a reputation for fairness. He was tough, direct, and aggressive; if you were strong, direct, and honest, you could survive, and might even earn a sympathetic hearing.
Or so Donovan promised.
Centered and calm, Hiroko Sasaki sat in the bergere armchair Donovan had chosen for her (“You disappear in a big, soft couch”) and waited for the interview to begin. On a monitor a few meters away and angled toward her, the introductory backgrounder on the Diaspora Project and the Singapore “disaster” was continuing.
Almost certainly, the backgrounder was infuriatingly slanted and misleading. But Sasaki was not watching. She had already succeeded in making herself not see the screen, had drawn in her focus until it and the camera operator and the Skylink engineer disappeared. Once the interview began, there would be no temptation to watch herself.
Minor looked up from his notes and smiled at her. She became a shadow and let the smile pass through her like a breeze.
“One minute,” someone said. Sasaki tugged the sleeves of her red blouse (Donovan again: “Dress international. Let’s not play to latent racism by looking ethnic”) down to her wrists, rested her elbows on the slender wooden armrests, folded her hands in her lap. The next time Minor looked up at her, she met his gaze and answered his smile with a bow of her head.
“Good evening,” he said to his camera. “This is Julian Minor in Prainha, Brazil, the busiest spaceport on the globe. Just five kilometers from where I sit, a launch cannon identical to that blamed in the tragedy in Singapore is busy hurling twenty-ton shells into the sky.
“With me is Hiroko Sasaki, Director of the Diaspora Project, a division of Allied Transcon, which owns and operates this spaceport. Director Sasaki, are we safe here? And how can you be sure?”
“No one is ever perfectly safe, anywhere, anytime, Mr. Minor,” she said smoothly. “But you are safer now than you would be waiting on a railroad platform for a train or crossing a city street. You are safer now than you were when flying from New York, to Belem last night for this interview. Every year, more than two hundred thousand people die worldwide in transportation accidents. Space flight is the safest form of transportation, and the T-ships are the safest form of space flight.”
The eyebrow arched. “Is your answer to the families of the thirty-seven dead in Singapore that they were just unlucky?”
“Mr. Minor, when I heard what happened that day, I wept,” Sasaki said. “It was a terrible moment, and one I deeply wish could have been prevented. But—”
“But you could have prevented it,” Minor pounced. “Isn’t that true? Don’t your own operating rules, Allied’s own documents, anticipate exactly the kind of failure that took place? If you knew it could happen, why didn’t you take steps to prevent it?”
Launch services were the responsibility of Allied’s Starlifter Division; Sasaki and the Diaspora Project were, properly speaking, merely their customers. But Donovan had warned her that there was no point in trying to draw fine distinctions or correct every misstatement.
“But of course, we did,” Sasaki said. “Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a perfect machine.”
“That’s certainly true of your launch cannon,” Minor said. “I have reports here of more than sixty launch failures. It seems to me that the only way you could feel safe here is not to think about it.”
Sasaki frowned. “In thirteen years of operation at Kasigau and thirty-five years here, Allied has launched more than a million pay loads. There have been just sixty-one launch aborts. And only once has an abort resulted in any loss of life. I regret the Singapore accident. But I don’t see where I need apologize for the safety record of the Kare-Kantrowitz launchers or of Allied’s Launch Services Division.”
Minor settled back in his chair. “I notice that you avoid calling these systems ‘launch cannon,’ an expression which is in such widespread colloquial use that it’s in every general lexicon. Why is that?”
“I resist the coinage,” she said. “It’s misleading.”
“Well, now, I’ve heard those launchers at work,” Minor said with a convivial smile. “They sure sound like cannon to me. Isn’t this linguistic legerdemain an attempt on your part to mask the military origins of Allied’s technology, what Jeremiah calls your bloody heritage?”
“I find an interesting irony here,” Sasaki said. “Yes, nationalist tensions drove the technologies that lifted us into space. We use high-energy lasers and tracking systems created for a ballistic missile defense. The first all-points aerospace plane was designed as a bomber-interceptor for the United States Air Force. The first space station was a Russian spy base. The first moon landing was a political power play. The first boosters began as weapons of war.”