Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

But the United States and the world had recovered. The bombing was treated as a wake-up call. The years of national introversion were over, and America began to take a lead in the wider program Amin had always envisaged. Barnette now spoke of how the Stewardship drew on deeper traditions of American environmentalism, dating back to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and landmark pieces of environmental-protection legislation like the Endangered Species Act.

And Barnette, speaking quietly but calmly, seemed to summon the ghost of Amin with every word.

“I hear much talk of despair, these days. We are in a Bottleneck, a time of maximum danger. Well, perhaps that’s so. But I don’t counsel despair. For all the ages to come will stand in the shadow of what we do today, and their people will look back on our generation, and they will say, they were heroes. And they will envy us…”

I was distracted. I thought I saw Morag again, out of the corner of my eye, sliding through the group of VIPs as silent as a fish in deep water.

And then everything started to unravel.

Barnette kept talking. But Gea appeared at my feet, a little robot rolling quietly on the green carpet. “Do not be alarmed. Nobody can see me but the project team. We have a problem on the rig.”

I hissed, “What kind of problem?”

She conjured up a VR image. It appeared in a glowing cube at our feet, a box of light like an aquarium. A young man stood on a metal platform. His image, ten centimeters high, was finely detailed; I could see the rivets in the plates beneath his feet, like pinheads. He was holding a cylinder from which wires protruded. The man in the fish tank was nervous; you could see his sweat. He was no more than a kid, I realized, younger even than Tom. We stood around in a circle and peered down at this thing, me, Shelley, John, Tom, Sonia, Vander.

Others were distracted by our behavior. Jack Joy came sidling up from nowhere and joined our group. He was watching us suspiciously, but I was confident he couldn’t see the fish tank. But Barnette kept talking, in bold, bright colors, and kept most people’s attention focused; perhaps she, too, had heard what was going on, and was doing her part in keeping everything together.

Tom whispered, “I don’t get it. What’s that he’s holding?”

“It’s a mole,” I said. “Partially disassembled. It’s lacking its nose cone, the spiral bit.”

Sonia was glaring down, her eyes sharp. “I don’t know anything about the technology, but the setup’s obvious. I’ve had to deal with it a dozen times. You can see it in his posture, his body language. He’s a suicide bomber.”

I think we all knew it, on some deep level. But having Sonia say it out loud in her precise soldier’s tones was something else.

Shelley whispered, “He’s one of our technicians. I suppose we weren’t hard to infiltrate. And you can see how he’s made his bomb. That mole might be lacking its nose, but it still has its Higgs-energy heart.”

I stared at her. “The Higgs pod?” I had been intimately involved in the design of the pods; they were intrinsically safe anyhow, and were laden with security factors. “I can’t imagine how he’s rigged it.”

“Then he’s more imaginative than you, Michael. Say good-bye to innocence.”

Tom asked, “What happens if it goes up?”

“Like a small nuke,” Shelley said.

Sonia glanced around. “How close are we?… Too close, I guess. We ought to think about evacuation.”

“It’s already in hand,” Gea said quietly. And, looking around, I saw that people were quietly being led out of the back of the marquee. Gea said, “The worst may not happen. There are measures in place.”

Sonia didn’t say anything, but she looked dubious.

I felt bemused, battered. I was aware of my heart beating slowly, steadily. It was all happening too quickly for me to take in. I didn’t even seem to be concerned that my son was standing with me here at ground zero. I just stood there, waiting to see what happened next.

John tugged my sleeve, and drew me aside. “You saw her again, didn’t you?” he hissed.

“What?”

“Morag. You saw her. Just before Gea showed up. Listen, Michael.” He was conflicted, I saw, bursting with whatever he had to say, but still hesitant. He glanced back at Tom, to make sure he couldn’t hear. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

I almost laughed. “Now? Can’t it wait?”

“It’s to do with Morag,” he said heavily, painfully. “Michael, if we don’t get through this — or if Morag shows up again, and she tells you herself — Lethe, I can’t believe I’m talking about a fucking ghost —”

His intensity broke through my numbed detachment. “Tell me what, John?”

He took a breath. “About me. Morag and me. Something you never knew. We meant to tell you — we didn’t want to hurt you — but we always waited, waited, and then she died, and I couldn’t bear to hurt you again.”

“You had an affair.” Suddenly I saw it. Of course she had been a friend of John’s first. Even after our marriage they had worked together, she and John, the bio-prospector and the environmental-compensation lawyer, immersed in complex and urgent twenty-first-century issues. “All those times I was working, when travel was just impossible and I had to stay away, when Morag and Tom stayed with you—” In my head the events of those years shivered into fragments, whirled like kaleidoscope pieces, and came down in a different pattern.

“We didn’t mean for it to happen,” John said, more defensive now. “All right? It wasn’t deliberate. But we were thrown together, and you weren’t there. You weren’t there, Michael. And then the baby…”

“The baby who died,” I said stupidly. “The baby whose birth killed my wife. What about the baby?”

But of course I knew the answer. The baby had never been mine.

Tom was looking at us both through the crowd. His face was empty of expression. He knew something was wrong between us, but he didn’t know what.

“I knew I had to tell you sometime,” John said desolately. “I never had the guts. And then Morag showed up. What if that’s why she’s come back, Michael? That’s what I keep asking myself. What if she’s come back to tell you what we did, me and her?”

I don’t remember throwing the punch.

People scattered around us, shocked. Suddenly John was on the floor, blood streaming from his mouth, and my fist felt as if I had slammed it against a wall.

Shelley Magwood grabbed my arm and dragged me away. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on with you two, but we’ve got enough trouble here.”

Around us the flow of VIPs out the back of the marquee was becoming noticeable. Barnette was still talking, but her message was now one of reassurance, admonitions to keep calm. And in the little fish tank, the tiny figure of the bomber was gesticulating, shouting tinnily at unseen negotiators.

John slowly got to his feet. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I said, “All right. I’m calm. Are they getting anywhere with the nut?”

“He’s a suicide bomber,” Shelley said, her voice full of anger and despair. “What do you think?”

“Can’t we just disable his trigger?”

“Not remotely. He’s got it figured out pretty well. And he has a dead man’s switch.” She laughed, hollow. “The kid’s a good engineer. Our only hope is to talk him down. But we can’t even figure out what he wants.”

“He probably wants many things.” Jack Joy stood beside me, sweating harder than ever. “Some even contradictory. But we all act for many reasons, don’t we?”

I stared at him, trying to figure him out. “What the hell do you want?… Can you see this?”