3
The Sun King
By the time that he was twenty years old, Jon Perry had become convinced of two great truths: Life in the water world of the deep oceans made sense; it was logical and predictable and calm. And life in the world of air, on the surface or above it, was none of those things; it was random, baffling, and bizarre.
Now he had new proofs of that. One of them walked half a dozen paces in front of him. He stared at the back of Nell Cotter's red-dyed head, gleaming in the benign December sun, and puzzled over the mystery of her presence. She had no right to be there. Not after what had happened in the deeps of the Pacific Antarctic Ridge.
As the Spindrift had returned to the surface, neither of them had found more than a few words for the other. He was worried and perplexed by the sudden order to return to surface base without explanation, while she had been badly shaken by the shock of the seaquake, two kilometers down. She did not have Jon's confidence in the Spindrift, or in his powers as pilot and navigator. To him, the episode of the seafloor eruption was clear in memory but already remote in feeling, an experience seen through a glass that screened emotion. To Nell Cotter, the episode had been direct, new, and terrifying. Her euphoria when she realized that she was not going to die in the depths only emphasized that point.
At the surface she had insisted that she had recorded everything that she needed. The taping of the video show was complete. When they parted at the jetty of the floating base, there had been no expectation on Jon's part that he would see her again. He had gone forward to make his report. And there he had encountered a typical piece of Admin irrationality. He was told that he was to head at once for Arenas, and the office of the undersecretary.
Why? No one in the administrative offices of the base would or could say. That was baffling and disturbing enough.
And the undersecretary? What did a high-level politician have to do with Jon Perry, with hydrothermal vents and the study of benthic life forms? Absolutely nothing, according to the pinhead lieutenant who had given him his flight papers. But the man could provide no more information.
Jon had slowly walked the length of the thousand-meter floating deck to the short, sloping runway and the waiting aircraft. And there, mystifyingly, Nell Cotter had appeared ten yards ahead of him. She was strolling along in the middle of a group of four mid-level staff members, laughing an easy, swinging laugh as relaxed as her walk. There was no sign that she had been through anything traumatic. Her ability to bounce back—or to fake it—was amazing. But she certainly had no right to be heading for the aircraft. It belonged to the Global Ocean Monitor System, and only GOMS staff members were permitted aboard. He knew for certain that she had no connection with the group.
But five minutes later they were flying east at Mach six, and Nell Cotter was walking along the aisle to sit next to him.
She laughed at his question. "I didn't exactly invite myself. I just talked a little about the show. Then I showed them this"—she tapped the midget videocamera—"and explained that the work's not finished while the cameras are still rolling."
"You told people you had to travel to Arenas with me to do your show? But that's a lie. The taping is over. You can't use me as an excuse to board."
She reached across and placed a hand on his arm. "Hey, don't get excited." Whatever happened to the Ice Man? "I'm due in Stanley tomorrow to meet the show's producer. If I'd gone commercial, it would have taken eighteen hours by surface skimmer and I'd have been a wreck when I got there. Who needs that? And it's not as though I'm squeezing somebody out of a place." She waved at the aircraft's interior, where half of the forty seats were unoccupied, then leaned forward so she could turn and look into his eyes. "Come on, Dr. Perry—or may I call you Jon? All I've done is hitch a ride. Lighten up and let me buy you a drink."
"Alcohol is forbidden on GOMS installations. As are all other drugs."
"Then I'll buy you one in Arenas."
"I'm sorry." Jon turned his head from her direct gaze and stared out of the window, to where the afternoon sun was transforming the krill farms to a golden lacework on the southern horizon. "I won't have time for anything like that. Upon arrival I have an immediate appointment with Undersecretary Posada." He felt ashamed the moment he said it. It was true enough, but he was hiding from her behind a meeting that he had not expected, did not understand, and did not want to attend.
If he had hoped to rebuff her, the effort was a failure. She was leaning closer and he could smell a faint, flowery perfume.
"After you've seen him, then, I'll buy you a drink. From what I've heard of Manuel Posada, you'll need one if you spend more than two minutes with him." Her face was inches from his, her right hand still resting on his forearm. "Actually, I've got a much better idea. Before I was given this assignment, I had expected to cover another event today—in Arenas. We're going to be there in time, so we could go to it together. It's a posh Inner Circle dinner to honor Cyrus Mobarak, ten thousand pesos a head."
"I don't have ten thousand pesos . . . I don't have one thousand. And I'm to report at once to the undersecretary as soon as we land."
"He'll never know the difference if you show up tomorrow instead of today. And don't worry about paying. I'll get press tickets. Two of them."
"They wouldn't let me in. I'm not the press."
Sweetheart, where have you been all your life? Two kilometers down? (And that's probably not far from the truth.) "Jon, they'll never know who you are unless you tell 'em. You'll be with me, I'll do the talking. And I owe you an evening out, don't I, for your putting up with me all day, and saving my life like that?"
Jon stared into her innocent brown eyes and wondered how she did it. She proposed implausible sequences of events but made them seem perfectly natural. He was summoned to the capital for a meeting, one that sounded ominous at best. So Nell Cotter blithely suggested that he ignore an order from his boss's boss's boss and trot off for a fun evening on the town. He shuddered, and at the same time, he was fascinated. He had never in his life encountered anyone remotely like Nell. He wanted to go to dinner with her, desperately, and for reasons that went far beyond the idea of hearing Cyrus Mobarak: the Sun King, the legend. Jon took a deep breath.
"I can't do that, Miss Cotter." I'm crazy. I'm throwing away the chance of a lifetime.
"Nell. People who've sweated and shivered together can't be formal." Except that you didn't sweat or shiver, when I was ready to scream. Don't say no to me, Jon Perry. I won't take that for an answer. "You have to call me Nell. And you have to come."
"I can't do it. Nell. The dinner, I mean. Word will have been sent to the undersecretary's office that I'm on the way. They'll be expecting me. Otherwise . . . well, otherwise I'd like to go with you. Love to go. And I'd like to hear Cyrus Mobarak. Do you believe the stories about them?—the Inner Circle, I mean."
"Not all. But what I do believe are quite sufficient. There'll still be time, you know, after you see Posada. The dinner isn't until eight. We'll be landing at four."
"You're assuming that he'll see me as soon as I call. But it doesn't work that way. I have to be fitted into his schedule, not the other way around."
"So I'll cross my fingers for you." She leaned contentedly back in the seat, crossing not her fingers, but her legs. "It always works. You'll see. You'll have your meeting with him and be a free man again before eight. And then we'll go to the Inner Circle dinner and have some fun."
* * *
Nell Cotter was wrong. But so was Jon Perry.
Even before the war, GOMS had been run on quasi-military lines. That had never changed. The floating bases, scattered across the oceans of the world, still had the attitude and ambience of military field operations. There might be rigid lines of command, some inefficiency, and a good deal of unnecessary or wasted effort, but things got done. Equipment was serviced. Machinery worked. Schedules were met.
By contrast, the Administrative Center of the Global Ocean Monitor System ran like the headquarters of a peacetime army. With no end product, bureaucracy was more important than results. Delay was irrelevant, efficiency had no meaning.
Jon had spent his working life in the world of the floating bases. It was a shock to report to Admin Center by five o'clock and learn that no one knew who he was or had any information about his arrival. Undersecretary Posada was busy and could not be disturbed. There was no Jon Perry on the appointments calendar, today or in the future. Posada's assistants had already left and would not return until nine the next morning. No one was available to authorize a call back to the floating base.
Jon was given—reluctantly—a chit that would allow him to stay overnight at an Admin Center facility. He was warned that any service other than dinner and breakfast would have to be paid for personally. By six-thirty he had arrived at the spartan GOMS dormitory, to find the building packed with people. The manager informed him that with the climate change, Arenas was booming as never before, that every building was full to overflowing for the Midsummer Festival, and that Jon's chit meant nothing. If he could find nowhere else, he might be given a bedroll and a place on the dining-room floor—after all the meals were served, of course, and after the clean-up staff had done its work. Say, about one A.M.
Jon called Nell Cotter, who was staying down by the strait. Her number did not answer. He left a message that he was on the way over, went outside onto the hilly streets, and walked south toward the water.
Some elements of Arenas had not changed with the new prosperity. Every square meter of soil was riotous with summer flowers, and the air was balmy with their evening perfume. At latitude fifty-three south, the December sky would cloud over but not darken for another three or four hours.
After six years of solitude and open ocean, Jon found the flowers and crowded streets as alien as another planet. Even the skuas, petrels, and terns were gone. He searched the sky for them, but they had flown far south for the summer, to reap a rich harvest around the diminishing icecap.
Strangest of all were the children. There were no children on the floating bases, but here they were everywhere, playing games on each street corner, scuttling across sidewalks under his feet, or rolling uncontrolled down the hill on homemade carts and scooters. He avoided them unconsciously, his thoughts far away. It was one thing to be ignored at your home base, where you were free to set your own schedule and work on your own scientific projects. It was another to be dragged fifteen hundred kilometers without explanation and then be treated in a way that made it clear that you were a total nonentity. He became gloomier and more irritated with every step. Something bad was going to happen to him. He knew it. But he could not guess what it might be.
By the time he reached the address that Nell had given him, he was in no mood for dinners of the rich and famous. Not at ten thousand pesos per head, not at any number of pesos.
When he called from the lobby, he was ready to tell her that he had changed his mind, he was not going out for dinner. She offered him no opportunity.
"Great. Sixth floor. Come on up." And she was gone.
She had told him where she was staying, but it was like no hotel he had ever seen. The building was a graceful high-rise structure, far more inviting than the Admin dormitory. There was no guest registration, no sign of porters or staff. The elevators seemed designed only for freight. When he emerged onto the sixth floor, he found himself in a great windowless room divided into square cubicles by waist-high partitions. Some of the cubicles were bright-lit and glassed in from floor to ceiling. Others were dark and held nothing but rows of grey-painted cabinets. People seemed to be hurrying everywhere at random. He stared around in confusion until he caught sight of Nell four partitions away, leaning over a bank of television sets.
She had already changed from the green jump suit she had worn in the Spindrift to an off-the-shoulder gown of the same color. She had also done something mysterious to her hair, sweeping it up to reveal the graceful curve of her neck. When he reached her side, she straightened and gave him a head-to-toe instant scrutiny.
"Standard size should do it. Come on."
She took his hand. He allowed himself to be towed along through a chessboard of partitions and on through a pair of double doors.
"There you are." She waved an arm at a score of tall cupboards along one wall. "Just help yourself."
She saw his puzzled expression. "Look, I'm not picky, and what you're wearing right now is fine with me—personally. But we're going to a formal dinner, for God's sake. If you don't want to be stopped at the door and asked questions, you have to change. It's dinner jackets and gowns tonight."
"I don't have a dinner jacket, not here or on the base."
"I thought you might not. Why do you think I told you to come over?" She flung open the door of one of the cupboards. "Take your pick. All sizes, colors, and styles. All centuries, too."
It was dawning on Jon. "This is a studio."
"Of course it is. My job. Remember, I have a job? They do plays and period pieces here, too. You could go dressed as anything from a twelfth-century Franciscan friar to Peter Pan, but we want you to fade into the background, so we'll match your plumage to the typical ten-thousand-peso-a-dinner millionaire." She reached in and pulled out a hanger. "Better let me help, I think. Why don't you try this for a start?"
It took a long time. Jon would have settled for the first suit picked out, but she insisted that the drape across the shoulders was not quite right. "Rich people do wear clothes that don't fit, I know. But hydrothermal-vent specialists posing as rich people don't." She adjusted the bow tie and installed a tiny videorecorder in his buttonhole. "The final touch. Camera instead of camellia, so there'll be no doubt as to what you do. Who knows? Maybe you'll get some priceless footage." Nell stepped back and surveyed the result. "How do you feel?"
"Strange." Jon hardly recognized himself in the all-around mirrors. She had done something peculiar to his hair, greying and thickening it around his temples and ears and trimming it at the front.
"You look great. We'll walk over. By the time we get there, you'll be adjusted to your fine feathers. Let's go."
The trek back up the hill in the deepening twilight was a revelation. Other pedestrians gave them one look and moved out of the way. Even the children on the little carts veered aside.
"The protective aura of wealth." Nell had taken his arm and was looking straight ahead, ignoring the people around them. "Even fake wealth."
"I thought this sort of thing was supposed to have ended with the war."
"Spoken like a true scientist. That's one of the lessons of history. It never ends, and it never will. Not as long as people are people." She squeezed his arm and stared haughtily down her nose at a man who was slow in getting out of their way.
The meeting hall itself stood on a western slope, facing over the strait and toward the distant ocean. A dozen men in uniform hovered around the entrance. They watched closely until the tickets that Nell produced were verified. Jon stood by, nervously fingering his slick lapels.
"I thought we were in real trouble," he said softly when they were finally admitted. "All those guards."
"Not for us." She squeezed his arm again. "Lighten up, dear."
"For who, then?"
"There's been talk around the studios that Bounders might be coming here in force to cause trouble. An Inner Circle dinner would be one of their natural targets."
"But that's ridiculous. Outward Bound needs the Mobies. Cyrus Mobarak ought to be a Bounder hero."
"He ought to be, and for all I know, he is. But Security doesn't have the sense to understand that, so they're hunting for Bounders behind every garbage can." She tugged at his arm. "Don't go that way, dearie. We're tolerated because they want publicity, and we'll even be fed. But you don't get to sit with the real Inner Circle."
The dining room contained ten round tables, each one holding place settings for eight. Nell led the way to a small, bare bench, half-hidden from the main floor and offering a good camera view of the head table on its dais. A man and two women were setting up cameras on the bench. Nell nodded to them, and they gave Jon an incurious glance before they went back to work.
Cyrus Mobarak was already at the head table, chatting with a woman in uniform on his immediate left. Jon Perry studied him as the service of the meal began. He found the examination oddly unsatisfying. Mobarak was in his middle-to-late forties. Seated, he appeared to be short and strongly built, with a thick neck that bulged against the blue-and-white wing collar. His suit was plain grey, lacking medals, decorations, or jewelry. His nose was prominent. He bore a thick shock of greying hair, and his brow ridges overhung pale, vacant-seeming eyes. He ate lightly, pecking at most of the dishes that were served, and he seemed to listen and nod a lot more than he spoke. By contrast with the glittering, bejeweled, and medal-laden audience of Inner Circle members, he was unimpressive.
"Well, what did you expect?" asked Nell when Perry commented on how normal Mobarak looked. "A ten-foot giant covered with red hair? It was one of the early discoveries and big disappointments of my career. Great men—and great women—mostly don't look different from anyone else. My job would be a lot easier if they did."
"But they—" Jon jerked his head toward the audience.
"—are not great people." Nell was leaning close. "It's heresy to suggest it, especially in this room, but the Inner Circle are only wealth, just old wealth and nothing more. The woman next to Cyrus Mobarak has the brain of a clam, and she got her high-level job through family influence. I've never spoken to Mobarak, but I'll bet he isn't here because it's where he'd most like to be. He's here because he needs their money for his projects. You'll see Mr. Wizard at work in a few minutes."
The meal was ending. The uniformed woman to Mobarak's left had risen, and the hall fell silent.
"Good evening." She smiled around the room, careful to include the press table for a long moment. "My name is Dolores Gelbman, and I am energy coordinator for the Pacific Rim. My friends, ladies and gentlemen of the Inner Circle, tonight I have been granted an unusual privilege. It will be my pleasure to introduce to you our honored guest, Cyrus Mobarak. But before I ask him to address you, I would first like to say a few words about his work and what it means to all of us." She lifted a couple of sheets of paper and took a glance at them. "Humans were relying on fusion energy long before they knew it. Our sun, that mighty solar furnace, is itself nothing more than a giant fusion reactor, changing hydrogen and deuter-rerum"—she stumbled over the word and dipped her head briefly to consult her hand-held notes—"deuterium to helium and oxygen and . . . other things. But it was not until a hundred and fifty years ago that we achieved the first controlled fusion. And it was not until the nineteen fifties that fusion with net energy production became possible."
Jon Perry started and turned to Nell. "That's all wrong!"
"I know." She was smiling. "Somebody as dumb as her wrote it, and she can't even read it properly. She has no idea that it's rubbish. But sssh! Enjoy. If you don't like what she's saying, think how Mobarak must feel. Look at him."
Cyrus Mobarak was leaning back in his seat, elbows on the table and hands set fingertip to fingertip as Dolores Gelbman went on with her speech. He seemed perfectly calm, perfectly relaxed, enjoying the occasion. It took a few more minutes before Perry realized what he was doing.
He leaned across to Nell. "He's counting. Counting her factual errors, ticking them off on his fingers. See, there's another one, she said neutrons and she meant neutrinos. That's half a dozen so far. He's going to tear her to pieces when she gets done."
"Like to make a bet? He'd probably love to, but he's far too smart for that. He knows who he has to manipulate, and how to do it. Wait and see."
"—until the end of the war," Dolores Gelbman was saying, "when our industry was destroyed, much of our land rendered uninhabitable, and our energy production devastated. And at that moment of greatest need, riding in to Earth from the Belt like a savior knight in shining armor, came Cyrus Mobarak. Ready to make the secrets of the compact, ultra-efficient fusion devices that he had invented freely available to all who needed them, here or in the Outer System. During the past quarter of a century, the name of Cyrus Mobarak has become synonymous with fusion energy. By his efforts, it has been developed to the point where no other power source can compete with it for efficiency, cost, or safety. And so it is my privilege tonight, on behalf of the Inner Circle, to present Earth's highest technology award, for pioneer work in the systematic development of safe fusion power, to Cyrus Mobarak. The man whom I am pleased to dub . . . the Sun King."
"Listen to her," hissed Jon. "She says 'Sun King' as though she just made it up. It's been used throughout the solar system for fifteen years!"
But Cyrus Mobarak was rising to shake Gelbman's hand, smiling as though the name she had given him was totally new and surprising.
"Thank you, Coordinator Gelbman, for your kind words. And thank you everyone, for the honor of this award." He nodded toward the wrapped package, half a meter high, on the table in front of him. "And thank you even more for giving me the honor of addressing you tonight."
"Told you," whispered Nell. "He is a great man, but he's a real smoothie, too. Someday I'm going to catch him with his pants down."
"You're going to what?"
"Catch him with an expression on his face that he didn't calculate and plan. Not tonight, though. He'll wrap 'em around his little finger. Watch him."
Mobarak was shaking his head ruefully. "To my mind, the many honors lavished upon me are unearned. Plasma theory and detailed fusion computations have always been too difficult for me. I've never been more than a tinkerer, playing around and having fun, and now and then finding something that seems to work. So if a group of scientists gives me an award, I feel uncomfortable. I always think of what Charles Babbage said about the British Royal Society: 'An organization that exists to hold elaborate dinners and to give each other gold medals.' But when I am given an award by real people such as yourselves, people who work in the real world and understand its needs and priorities, why, then I am overcome by a sense of well-being and a totally unreasonable feeling of pride. Pride which, I must now confess, is all too likely to come before a fall."
There were knowing laughs from some of the audience and a few cries of "Never!" and "You can do it!"
Mobarak paused and stared around the hall. "I gather that despite my best efforts at secrecy, some of you must already have heard of my dream. If that is the case, I hope that some of you may even be interested enough to want to take part in it as direct supporters, when the opportunity presents itself. But I have to warn you, by this time next year there is a good chance that the name of Cyrus Mobarak will be the laughingstock of the whole system. And if that happens, I hope that those of you who have been so nice to me when I have seemed near the top will be just as kind when I am down at the bottom."
There were more audience calls of "Count me in!" and "You never had a failure yet!"
"True enough." Mobarak held up a hand. "But there is a first time for everything, including failure. And we are getting ahead of ourselves. Tonight it was never my plan to hold out the promise of a grand new project"—("Except that you'll notice he's done just that," whispered Nell. "He could sign them up now if he wanted to.") —"but rather to thank you for, and to accept—with real gratitude—this award."
He pulled the tall package across the table toward him and with the help of Dolores Gelbman removed the wrappings. A glittering set of nested cylinders was revealed, surrounding a central torus and an array of helical pipes.
"Now where have I seen something like this before?" Mobarak was grinning. "For anyone who does not recognize it, here we have a model of the Mobarak AL-3—what most people call the 'Moby Mini.' The smallest, and the most popular, of my fusion plants." He studied it for a moment. "Thirty megawatts of energy, one like this would produce. And this is a beautifully made model. At a reduced scale of—what?—about four to one?"
"Exactly four to one." Dolores Gelbman turned the model around so that the press table could have a good view of both it and herself.
"And with all of its parts in proportion." Mobarak was leaning over, peering at the interior. "It's just perfect." He frowned. "Wait a minute, though. It's not perfect. This is a fake—it can't produce energy!"
There were a few titters from the audience, the self-conscious sound of people laughing at a joke they do not understand.
"We can't have that, can we? A Moby that doesn't produce energy." Cyrus Mobarak paused, then stooped to reach down under the table. "What we need is something more like this."
With the help of two uniformed men who appeared from the side of the room, he lifted a package and placed it on the table. With the wrapping removed, it proved to be an oddly distorted version of the Moby Mini, with an out-of-proportion central torus and a set of double helices beyond it. Everyone watched in silence as Mobarak turned a control on the side of the machine. He nodded to another man over by the far wall. The room lights slowly dimmed. As they did so, a vibrating whistle came from the machine on the table, followed by the sputter of an electrical discharge. The last room light faded. The hall was illuminated by a growing blue within the central torus.
"Ladies and gentlemen." Cyrus Mobarak, dimly visible behind the blue glow, raised his voice. "May I present to you, for the first time to any group, the Moby Midget. The system's first tabletop fusion reactor. Sixty kilos total mass, external dimensions as you see them, energy capacity eight megawatts. And, as you will also see, perfectly safe."
The glow was still brightening. The blue-lit face and hovering hands above it were those of a magician, drawing power from the air by primordial incantation. The audience gasped as Mobarak's hands, one on each side of the torus, suddenly plunged into the flaring plasma at the center. The glow was instantly quenched, and the lights in the hall just as quickly came back on. Cyrus Mobarak stood behind his tabletop fusion reactor, casual and relaxed. As the members of the Inner Circle rose to their feet, he stepped off the dais and moved down among them, shaking hands and slapping backs.
"And that, kiddies," said Nell quietly, "concludes our show for this evening. What did I tell you? He didn't put a foot wrong. Now I know why it was so easy to get press tickets. Mobarak wanted this whole thing to receive maximum coverage."
Jon Perry was sitting in a daze. He lacked Nell's exposure and early immunization to wealth and fame, and most of all, to simple charisma. "He's a genius. An absolute genius. What did he mean when he talked about being laughed at a year from now?"
"I don't know." Nell's eyes were on Cyrus Mobarak, who every few seconds glanced across to the press table. "But it has to be a monstrous new project, big enough for even the Sun King to talk about being a laughingstock. Don't worry, we'll find out what he's planning. I'll call Glyn Sefaris, and he'll set our staff onto it over in Husvik. Mobarak's home base is there."
"No one's going to laugh at Mobarak, whatever he does. What makes you so sure that your staff can find out?"
"Because the Sun King would never have thrown it at us—the press—if he had any real interest in keeping it secret. You'll notice that none of us caught even a sniff of the tabletop fusion reactor before tonight's unveiling. It surprised me as much as it did anybody."
Nell tucked Jon's arm in hers and began to steer him into the crowd. "Come on, let's see if we can get a word with Mr. Wizard before he's dragged away to better things. I've a feeling that he's very receptive to press attention just now. We're meant to explore and learn what his new project is, so who knows? Maybe if we're lucky enough, or clever enough, we'll find out tonight."