Mercury Read online

  “So was the Spanish Inquisition,” Molina murmured.

  Despite their differences, they remained friends of a sort. Bantering, challenging friends. Danvers knew quite well that the only other man in Sky City that Molina regarded as a friend was the project director, Mance Bracknell. But something had come between them. No, not something, Danvers thought. Someone. Lara Tierney.

  Molina invited Danvers to have dinner with him from time to time. Once, they joined Bracknell and Lara on a quick jaunt to Quito and dined in the best restaurant Danvers had ever seen. It didn’t take long for Danvers to understand Molina’s problem. Before the main courses were served he realized that Molina was in love with her, but she loved Bracknell. The eternal triangle, Danvers thought. It has caused the ruin of many a dream.

  For himself, Danvers treasured Molina’s company. Despite his atheistic barbs, Molina was the only close friend Danvers had made in this city of godless technicians and dark-skinned mestizos who worshipped their old blood-soaked gods in secret.

  Yet the question nagged at him. Why is Molina here? What can a biologist do for this mammoth project?

  After many weeks of asking everyone he knew, even men and women he had barely been introduced to, the path to understanding suddenly came to him, like a revelation from on high.

  The woman. Lara Tierney. She is the key to Molina’s presence here. To get him to tell the truth, Danvers realized, to open up his inner secrets, I must use his love for this woman. That’s his vulnerable spot. Still, he wavered, reluctant to cause the pain that he knew Molina would feel. Danvers prayed long hours kneeling by his bedside, seeking guidance. Do I have the right to do this? he asked. The only answer he received was a memory of his mentor’s words: Remember that you are doing God’s work.

  And then the revelation came to him. The way to promotion, the path to advancement within the New Morality, was by stopping this godless project. That’s why they sent me here, he realized. To see if I can prevent these secularists from succeeding in their blasphemous project. That’s how they’re testing me.

  Danvers rose from his knees, his heart filled with determination. The hour was late, but he told the phone to call Molina. He got the man’s answering machine, of course, but made a date with him for dinner the following night. Not lunch. What he had to do would take more time than a lunch break. Better to do it after the working day is finished, in the dark of night. Be hard, he advised himself. Show no mercy. Drive out all doubts, all qualms. Be a man of steel.

  Dinner wasn’t much, and afterward Danvers and Molina walked slowly up the gently rising street toward the building where they both were quartered. The skytower was outlined by safety lights, flashing on and off like fireflies, trailing upward until they disappeared into the starry sky. A sliver of a Moon was riding over the mountains to the east. The sky was clear, hardly a cloud in sight, the night air crisp and chill.

  All through dinner Danvers had avoided starting this probe into his friend’s heart. But as they approached their building, he realized he could delay no longer.

  “Victor,” he began softly, “you and Bracknell and Ms. Tierney seem to be old friends.”

  “We all went to university together,” Molina replied evenly.

  The lamps along the street were spaced fairly widely, far apart enough for the two men to stroll through pools of shadow as they walked along. Danvers saw that Molina kept his eyes down, watching where he was stepping rather than gazing up at the skytower looming above them.

  “You studied biology there?”

  “Yes,” said Molina. “Mance bounced around from one department to another in the school of engineering.”

  “And Ms. Tierney?”

  Through the shadows he could hear Molina’s sudden intake of breath. “Lara? She started out in sociology, I think. But then she switched to engineering. Aerospace engineering, can you believe it?”

  “That was after she’d met Bracknell.”

  “Yeah, right. After she met Mance. She went so goofy over him that she switched her major just to be closer to him.”

  “You were attracted to her yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Fucking lot of good it did me once she met Mance.”

  Danvers walked on for a few steps in silence. He heard the bitterness in Molina’s voice, and now that he had touched on the sore spot he had to open up that wound again.

  “Did you love her then?” he asked.

  Molina did not answer.

  “You still love her, don’t you?”

  “That’s none of your damned business, Elliott.”

  “I think it is, Victor. You’re my friend, and I want to help you.”

  “How the hell can you help me? You want to pray for a miracle, maybe?”

  “Prayer has its powers.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Danvers nodded in the darkness. Victor’s in pain, no doubt of it. My task is to use his pain, channel it into a productive course.

  “Why did you come here, then? If you knew that Bracknell was heading this project, didn’t you expect her to show up, sooner or later?”

  “I suppose I did, subconsciously. Maybe I thought she wouldn’t, that they were finished. I don’t know!”

  “But you came here, to this project. Did you volunteer or did Bracknell ask to come?”

  “Mance called me when he got the go-ahead for the project. All excited. Said he needed me to make it work.”

  “He needed you?”

  “Like an idiot I agreed to take a look at his plans. Next thing I knew I was on a plane to Quito.”

  “Why did he need you?”

  “I didn’t think Lara would come down here,” Molina went on, ignoring the question. “I figured Mance would be so fucking busy with this crazy scheme of his that he wouldn’t have time for her. Maybe he’d even forgotten her. Damned fool me.”

  “But why did he need you?” Danvers insisted.

  “To make the buckyball fibers,” Molina snapped, “what the fuck do you think?”

  Ignoring Molina’s deliberate crudities, Danvers pressed, “A biologist to build the fibers?”

  “A biologist, yeah. Somebody who can engineer viruses to assemble buckyballs for you. You need a damned smart biologist to work down at the nanometer scale.”

  Danvers sucked in his breath. “Nanomachines?”

  They were under a streetlamp now and Danvers could see the pain and anguish in Molina’s face. For several long moments the biologist struggled for self-control. At last he said calmly, coldly:

  “Not nanomachines, Elliott. Viruses. Living creatures. Is this what you’re after? Trying to find out if we’re using nanoteeh so you can turn us in to the authorities?”

  “No, Victor, not at all,” Danvers half-lied. “I’m trying to find out what’s troubling you. I want to help you, I truly do.”

  “Great. You want to help me? Find some way to get Mance out of the picture. Get him away from Lara. That’s the kind of help I need.”

  Atlanta

  The headquarters building of the New Morality was not as large as the capital of a secular government, nor as ornate as a cathedral. But it was, in fact, the seat of a power that stretched across all of the North American continent north of the Rio Grande and extended its influence into Mexico and Central America.

  In the days before the greenhouse floods, the New Morality was little more than a fundamentalist Christian sect, sterner than most others, that concentrated its work in the rundown cores of cities such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other urban blights. It did good works: rescuing lost souls, driving drug dealers out of slum neighborhoods, rebuilding decaying houses, making certain that children learned to read and write in the schools it had installed in abandoned storefronts. In return for these good works, the New Morality insisted on iron discipline and obedience. Above all, obedience.

  Then the Earth’s climate tumbled over the greenhouse cliff. After half a century of warnings from climatologists that were ignored by temporizing p
oliticians and ridiculed by disbelieving pundits, the global climate abruptly switched from postglacial to the kind of semi-tropical environment that had ruled the Earth in earlier eons. Icecaps melted. Sea levels rose by twenty meters over a few years. Coastal cities everywhere were flooded. The electrical power grid that sustained modern civilization collapsed. Killer storms raged while farmlands eroded into dust. Hundreds of millions of men, women, and children were driven from their homes, their jobs, their lives, all of them hungry, frightened, desperate.

  The New Morality rejoiced. “This is the wrath of God that has been called down upon us!” thundered the Reverend Harold Carnaby. “This is our just punishment for generations of sinful licentiousness.”

  Governments across the world turned authoritarian, backed by fundamentalist organizations such as the Holy Disciples in Europe and the Flower Dragon in the Far East. Even the fractious Moslems came together under the banner of the Sword of Islam once Israel was obliterated.

  After decades of authoritarian rule, however, people all across the Earth were growing restive. The climate had stabilized, although once again scientists were issuing dire warnings, this time of a coming Ice Age. They were ignored once again as the average family moved toward economic well-being and a better life. Prosperity was creeping across the world once more. Church attendance was slipping.

  Carnaby, now a self-appointed archbishop, mulled these factors in his mind as he sat in his powered wheelchair and gazed out across the skyline of Atlanta’s high-rise towers.

  “We saved this city,” he grumbled.

  “Yes, sir,” said one of the aides standing behind him respectfully. “We surely did.”

  “We saved the nation when it was sinking into crime and depravity,” Carnaby added. “Now that the people are growing richer, they’re turning away from God. They’re more interested in buying the latest virtual reality games than in saving their souls.”

  “Too true,” said the second aide.

  Carnaby pivoted his wheelchair to face them. They were standing before his desk, arms at their sides, eyes focused on the archbishop.

  “Sir, about the medical report…”

  “I’m not interested in saving my mortal body,” Carnaby said, frowning up at them through his dead-white eyebrows.

  “But you must, sir! The Movement needs your guidance, your leadership!”

  “I’m ready to meet my Maker whenever He calls me.”

  The one aide glanced at the other, obviously seeking support. The two of them were as alike as peas in a pod in their dark suits and starched white shirts. Carnaby wondered if they were twins.

  “Sir,” said the other one, his voice slightly deeper than his companion’s, “the physicians are unanimous in their diagnosis. You must accept a heart implant. Otherwise …” He left the conclusion unspoken.

  “Put a man-made pump into my chest and remove the heart that God gave me? Never!”

  “No, sir, that isn’t it at all. It’s merely a booster pump, an auxiliary device to assist your heart. Your natural heart will be untouched,” the deeper-voiced aide coaxed. “It’s really rather minor surgery, sir. They insert it through an artery in the thigh.”

  “They won’t open my chest?”

  “No, sir,” both aides said in chorus.

  Carnaby huffed. He had accepted other medical devices. One day, he’d been told, he would have to get artificial kidneys. Ninety-two years old, he told himself, and I’ve never taken a rejuvenation treatment. Not many my age can say that. God is watching over me.

  “An auxiliary pump, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You need it, sir. With all the burdens of work and the pressures you face every day, it’s a miracle that your heart has lasted this long without assistance.”

  Carnaby huffed again to make sure that they understood that he didn’t like the idea. But then he lowered his head and said humbly, “God’s will be done.”

  The aides scampered out of his office, delighted that he had acquiesced, and more than a little awed at the archbishop’s willingness to sacrifice his obvious distaste of medical procedures for the good of the Movement.

  Alone at his desk, Carnaby called up the latest computer figures on church attendance. The New Morality was officially a nonsectarian organization. The bar graph that sprang up on his smart wall screen showed attendance reports for nearly every denomination in North and South America. The numbers were down—not by much, but the trend was clear. Even the Catholics were falling away from God.

  His desktop intercom chimed. “Deacon Gillette calling, Archbishop,” said the phone’s angel-sweet voice. “Urgent.”

  “Urgent? What’s so urgent?”

  The phone remained silent for a moment, then repeated, “Deacon Gillette calling—”

  “All right,” Carnaby interrupted the synthesized voice, irked at its limited abilities. “Put him through.”

  Gillette’s face replaced the attendance statistics. He was an African-American, his skin so dark it seemed to shine as if he were perspiring. His deepset brown eyes always looked wary, as if he expected some enemy to spring upon him.

  “Deacon,” said Carnaby, by way of greeting.

  “Archbishop. I’ve received a disturbing report from our man in Ecuador.”

  “We have a man in Ecuador?”

  “At the skytower project, sir,” said Gillette.

  “Ah, yes. A disturbing report, you say?”

  “According to Rev. Danvers, the scientists of the skytower project are using a form of nanotechnology to build their structure.”

  “Nanotechnololgy!” Carnaby felt a pang of alarm. “Nanomachines are outlawed, even in South America.”

  Gillette closed his heavy-lidded eyes briefly, then explained, “They are not using nanomachines, exactly. Instead, they have developed genetically engineered viruses to work as nanomachines would, assembling the structural components of their tower.”

  Carnaby felt the cords at the back of his neck tense and knew he would soon be suffering a headache.

  “Tell Danvers to notify the authorities down there.”

  “What they’re doing is not illegal, Archbishop. They’re using natural creatures, not artificial machines.”

  “But you said these creatures have been genetically engineered, didn’t you?”

  “Genetic engineering is not outlawed, sir,” Gillette replied, then quickly added, “Unfortunately.”

  Carnaby sucked in a breath. “Then what can we do about it?”

  With a sad shake of his head, Gillette answered, “I don’t know, sir. I was hoping that you would think of a solution.”

  Fumbling for the oxygen mask in the compartment built into the wheelchair’s side, Carnaby groused, “All right, let me think about it.” He abruptly cut the phone connection and his wall returned to its underlying restful shade of pastel blue.

  Carnaby held the plastic mask over his face for several silent moments. The flow of cool oxygen eased the tension that was racking his body.

  Sudden thunder shook the building, startling Carnaby so badly that he dropped his oxygen mask. Then he realized it was another of those damnable rockets taking off from the old Hartsfield Airport.

  He spun his chair to the window once again and craned his dewlapped neck, but there was nothing to see. No trail of smoke. No pillar of fire. The rockets used some kind of clean fuel: hydrogen, he’d been told. Doesn’t hurt the environment.

  He slumped back in his wheelchair, feeling old and tired. I’ve spent my life trying to save their souls. I’ve rescued them from sin and the palpable wrath of God. And what do they do as soon as things begin to go smoothly again? They complain about our strict laws. They want more freedom, more license to grow fat and prosperous and sinful.

  Then he looked out at the empty sky again. They’re getting richer because those rockets are bringing in metals and stuff from the asteroids. And they’ve built those infernal solar satellites up in orbit to beam electrical power to the ground.<
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  Those space people. Scientists and engineers. Godless secularists, all of ’em. Poking around on other worlds. Claiming they’ve found living creatures. Contradicting Genesis every chance they get.

  And now, Carnaby thought, those space people are building a high-tech Tower of Babel. They’re going to make it easier to get into space, easier to make money out there. And using nanotechnology to do it. Devil’s tools. Evil, through and through.

  They’re building their blasphemous tower in South America someplace, right in the middle of all those Catholics.

  They’ve got to be stopped, Carnaby told himself, clenching his blue-veined hands into bony fists. But how? How?

  Riding The Elevator

  “How high are we?” Lara asked, her eyes wide with excitement.

  Bracknell glanced at the readout screen set next to the elevator’s double doors, where Victor Molina was standing. “Eighty-two kilometers, no, now it’s eighty-three.”

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “No sense of motion at all.”

  For nearly a month Bracknell had resisted Lara’s pleas for a ride in the space elevator. The instant he had told her the first elevator tube had completed all its tests and was officially operational, she had begged him for a ride. Bracknell had temporized, delayed, tried to put her off. To his surprise, he found that he was worried about the elevator’s safety. All these years I’ve drafted the plans, laid out the schematics, overseen the construction, he castigated himself, and when we get right down to it, I don’t trust my own work. Not with Lara’s life. I’m afraid to let her ride the elevator.

  That realization stunned him. All the number crunching, all the tests, and I don’t trust my own work. I’m willing to let others ride the elevator, I’m even willing to ride it myself, but when it comes to Lara—I’m afraid. Superstition, pure and simple, he told himself. Yet he found excuses to keep her from his skytower.

  The elevator worked fine, day after day, week after week, hauling technicians and cargo up to the stations at the various levels of the tower. Bracknell’s confidence in the system grew, and Lara’s importunings did not abate. If anything, she became even more insistent.