Exile-and Glory (45 page)

"THERE IS A MESSAGE FROM CERES," the voice said.

"IS SHE SAFE?" Aeneas thought. It was a ridiculous question; not even the base central computer had been given enough data to know who he meant.

"CANCEL THAT QUESTION. HOW IS THE MESSAGE SIGNED?"

"HOT LIPS."

Thank God, Aeneas thought. He was careful not to think that into the computer. His prayers were not meant for a machine, "I WANT THE FULL TEXT AS A PRINTOUT," he ordered. It would take a little longer, but he would rather read it than hear it. "DECODE AND PRINT. KEEP NO COPY IN MEMORY."

"ACKNOWLEDGED."

"ASK LAURIE JO TO COME TO ME."

—Pause—"DONE."

And now there was nothing to do but wait. He leaned back in the chair, smoothing his shock of white-gray hair with slender fingers. Even in Luna's low gravity he felt his years. He had been forty when he came to the Moon, and even though Lunar gravity did not age men as much as Earth's did, there had been little rest in the last quarter century. Not for Aeneas MacKenzie. Presently he began to doze. Images formed in his mind.

Economists once thought there could never be a period of both inflation and high unemployment. They were wrong. In the last third of the Twentieth Century both were normal conditions. With millions out of work, governments tried to buy their way to prosperity through deficit financing. They printed bonds and certificates and paper money and more paper money, and soon they were all worthless. Wages and prices spiraled. People who had saved all their lives found their savings worth nothing, less than nothing, and simply to live had to turn for aid to governments that had ruined them in the first place. The governments had to find more and more money, and the printing presses were cheap. The results were predictable, but no less disastrous for being so.

The long struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union ended with complete western victory, but the United States, wealthy beyond the dreams of most of humanity, thought itself exhausted. Before 1940 Washington was a sleepy border town, of no great importance. From 1940 to the end of the century Washington expanded, in size and influence, until all roads led there, and all decisions were made there. The result was paralysis just when energy was needed.

All other Earth governments took in money and spent it on what seemed best to government planners; and all over the Earth there was stagnation, regulation, want in the midst of plenty. We all meant well, Aeneas thought. I meant well, and Greg did, at least at first, and everything we did was wrong. We did more harm than good. But we meant well. . . .

All the nations of Earth faced an impossible dilemma. There wasn't enough money to fund both technological research and welfare programs. Technological research was expensive and directly employed comparatively few people. Soon the science and research and space programs were cut back, cut again, cut once more. Meanwhile the anti-technology movements gained recruits. "Only One Earth." "Alternate Technology." "Ecology." Those slogans and a dozen like them became watchwords, and space programs, energy research, electronics research, all began to die.

For a while private industries continued research programs, but soon the governments, desperate for more funds to spend on popular programs, raised taxes so high that there was nothing left for risk investment. The companies cut back as had the governments; especially so as the consumer advocates forced the corporations to accept consumer representatives on their boards of directors, and the consumer representatives were almost universally dedicated against technology and technological "fixes."

Then the United States was rocked by a series of scandals. Watergate began it, but the scars from that had not healed before another scandal emerged, and another after that. The People's Alliance rose to displace the traditional political parties, and swept into Washington as an irresistible reform movement. Its leader, Greg Tolland, and his manager, Aeneas MacKenzie, were the most popular political figures of the century; but then MacKenzie, as Solicitor General of the United States, found the tentacles of the Equity Trust reached even into Greg Tolland's office, and MacKenzie was both implacable and incorruptible. The result was more loss of confidence, more disgust with democracy, more disillusionment among voters who now believed that the citizens could never control their government.

While the United States was paralyzed by scandals, and what had been the Soviet Union was rocked by nationalistic movements and civil wars within the former empire, a few international corporations banded together to create the first industrial satellites and the first laser-launching system. The heiress Laurie Jo Hansen built the
Heimdall
industrial satellite, and that proved so profitable that other companies first joined with Hansen Enterprises, then set up competing space industries. Based in Zurich and Singapore and Hong Kong and other places of refuge from taxation, the international corporations moved into space even as governments found themselves unable to do so.

Governments looked with envy on the high profits and great potential of space industries. Tolland's lieutenant, Aeneas MacKenzie, led the fight for U.S. takeover of the Hansen empire, ensnarling Hansen Enterprises in a web of legal problems, taxes, regulations, complexities; he might have ended with Hansen nationalized by the United States had not he found corruption in Tolland's staff, and been forced from his office by the President he had created. MacKenzie had to flee for his life, and he had no place to go but to his enemies. From Tolland's Washington MacKenzie went to Laurie Jo Hansen; and because he had known Laurie Jo many years before, and because she with the whole world knew that Aeneas MacKenzie's pledged word was worth more than his life, he became first her consort, then her prime minister, finally her partner.

Yet Tolland and the People's Alliance never forgot who had ruined Tolland's dreams of a country remade by whatever means he thought were needed; his agents had been relentless in pursuit, until Laurie Jo sold out most of her empire to found Diana Station, and took her minister-consort to the Moon. Not even the President of the United States could follow them there.

And by now no one is interested in killing us, Aeneas thought. Except Greg, and he has no real power. The People's Alliance protected him from the scandals, but the real leadership doesn't trust him. Not anymore.

The office door opened without warning and he swiveled quickly. After more than twenty years he loved the sight of her. He suspected the red hair was dyed now, but he had never asked and never would; and despite all the temptations of low gravity, she had kept her figure. Her smile lit the office.

"She's safe," Laurie Jo said.

"For a while."

"Can't you ever simply be happy without worrying about the future?" She did not wait for an answer. Instead she crossed the office quickly and sat in his lap. They kissed with the affection that comes only from long friendship and love. Then Aeneas opened a desk drawer, took out papers from the computer printer concealed there and began to read.

Although she desperately wanted to know what the message said, she did not read over his shoulder, but waited until he had finished the first sheet. He handed it to her without looking up and read the next. There were only two. Then he waited until she had finished.

"They're on Ceres," Laurie Jo said. "With the cargo safe."

"And someone tried to kill her. At least twice. Someone knows," Aeneas said. He cursed, softly. "I'm a fool. I underestimated the danger."

"She knew the risks," Laurie Jo said. "And who else could we trust with something this important?"

"It was a stupid plan. I should never have let her go."

Laurie Jo laughed. "Could you have stopped her?" she demanded. "No one could control
us
at her age, and she believes in this. You could not have stopped me when I was her age."

"God knows I couldn't."

It had been so long ago. She'd been Laurie Jo Preston then, an orphan girl living alone under the guardianship of bankers and supported by trust funds. They'd met at UCLA when Aeneas was political manager for Greg Tolland. No one had ever heard of Greg Tolland then. The young Congressman, just beginning his meteoric career, was one of the founders of the tiny movement that would one day be the People's Alliance, but then it was nothing more than a dream shared by Tolland and Aeneas.

Aeneas and Laurie Jo Preston had two years. They lived together and hitchhiked across the nation, through Mexico and Baja. They sang and drank and made love and were happy with their dreams until her bankers came to tell her that her name was Hansen, not Preston, and that she had inherited one of the largest fortunes on Earth; then everything changed. "I couldn't control you, and I almost lost you forever," Aeneas said.

"Hush." She put a finger gently on his lips, then bent to kiss him again.

"I miss her," Aeneas said.

"I have missed her terribly from the day she decided to go to Earth," Laurie Jo said. "But I'm proud of her."

"And so am I. Laurie Jo, I feel so helpless! Someone knows. If they tried to kill her once, they'll try again. Before she even left Earth! And she didn't tell us."

"Because we would have stopped her."

"It doesn't make sense," Aeneas said. "They tried to kill her before she ever got to the ship. And they tried to stop the ship from landing on Ceres. That makes no sense at all! We hadn't expected trouble before she got to Ceres. They need that cargo as much as we do—"

"My darling husband," Laurie Jo said. "Use your brains. You're letting this be too personal—"

"How could it be otherwise?"

"—and you're making mistakes because of that. Someone wants to stop the ship from landing. They tried. Perhaps it was Pacifico—have you asked for his dossier?"

"Presently. Not yet."

"More likely someone else," Laurie Jo said. "But whoever it was didn't want
Wayfarer
to land at all. We hadn't expected that."

"No." Aeneas leaned back in his high-backed chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together. His eyes half closed, and his hands pressed gently together, drew apart, pressed together again.

Laurie Jo smiled as she watched him. This was more to her liking. This was the man who had brought down a President.

"So there's another group working in the Belt," Aeneas said.

"You don't sound surprised."

"With billions at stake, I would not be surprised if everyone in the Belt were corrupt," Aeneas said. "How many can resist that kind of temptation? When it is quite feasible to offer bribes in the millions and still make fabulous profits? I expect this was done by the Africans. They don't fancy competition from asteroid mines."

"I don't much blame them," Laurie Jo said. There was sadness in her voice. "They don't have anything to sell except their minerals, and we're driving the price down and down."

Aeneas nodded. They'd discussed all this before. Ruin for the African bloc meant prosperity for the rest of the world; cheap iron and steel and copper and aluminum, the basic stuff of industrial civilization, would let billions live well who now had no hope at all. Eventually it would mean prosperity for the Africans themselves, but not soon, and not for those who now controlled the African bloc.

"So we are facing two sets of enemies," Laurie Jo said.

"Probably more. At least two. One group wishes to stop the shipments altogether. I doubt they have finished. They'll keep trying, but they won't have many allies in the Belt. It's the others I worry about—and George Lange is dead. She won't have his help." Aeneas leaned back again, his hands moving slowly and gently.

Laurie Jo waited. "VALKYRIE STATUS REPORT." The words formed in her head with no accent, but she always knew when she heard Aeneas speak to the computer, although she could not have told how that was different from hearing the computer report to her.

"READY FOR DEPARTURE IN FIVE HUNDRED HOURS," the computer told them.

"EARLIEST POSSIBLE ARRIVAL TIME ON CERES?"

"ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DAYS FROM PRESENT TIME."

"With Lange dead, we'll have to send someone else," Aeneas said.

"Who? There's no one we can trust with something this important. And neither of us can go. Nothing has changed, Aeneas. We're needed here. If we lose control now, there's no point to any of this. We'll lose everything we've worked hard for."

"I know. We can only trust ourselves. Or the boy. Or we could give it all up."

"Neither of us will."

"No. Neither of us will."

She didn't care for the tone he had used, and she looked at him sternly. He was leaning back again, his fingers moving in the familiar pattern that she knew meant he was lost in thought; and she was frightened even before he spoke again.

"There's a better way," he said. "The boy's more valuable here."

"
No
." Her voice rose. "I lost you for sixteen years once! And then almost lost you again, when we'd just found each other. I will not be separated from you again. I will not."

"Laurie Jo." His voice was very calm now. "You can manage the finances. You're better at it than I am, and you
must
stay here; but I've outgrown my usefulness."

"That's not true, you're the base commander—"

"A function that Kit Penrose can fill as well as I can," Aeneas said. "And Kit can train young Aeneas, who will be far more useful here than floundering around out in the Belt. He's not ready for this, Laurie Jo. I don't think our daughter was ready either, but I know our son isn't. He can help you, yes. He understands boardroom tactics, and he's becoming a better engineer than Kit, but he does not know intrigue and corruption. Not yet."

"Nor do you!" she shouted.

"Now really, Laurie Jo—"

"Aeneas, it has been twenty years since you were Solicitor General—"

"Laurie Jo." His voice was quiet and his tone calm.

"And I won't lose you again—"

"I am still a very careful man," Aeneas said. "There is not much risk to me—and I am less valuable than our son. We cannot risk both heirs. If it is a choice between myself and young Aeneas, there is no choice at all, nor would I be—" He stopped, because her face had changed.