Randolph was disentangling himself from Duncan and getting to his feet. Brushing dirt from his windbreaker, grinning hugely, he walked over to Amanda and Pancho while Duncan scampered toward the shed. “It works!” Randolph said. “You’ve just witnessed history, ladies. The first actual flight of a fusion-powered vehicle.”
“Fusion?” Pancho gaped at him. “You mean that little bird had a fusion engine on her?”
Amanda said, “But I thought fusion generators were great immense things, like power stations.”
Duncan raced back to them, waving a dark bottle in one hand. The rest of the crew gathered around. Pancho wondered why no one went to the poor little aircraft, smashed and crumpled on the grass.
Someone produced paper cups and Duncan began to splash liquor into them. At first Pancho thought it was champagne, but the bottle wasn’t the right shape. Scotch, she realized. Scotland’s gift to the world.
“Hey,” said Randolph, “I need some ice with this.”
Duncan actually shuddered. “Ice? With good whisky? You Americans!”
Pancho took a sip of hers, neat. “Wow!” she managed to gasp.
“To the Duncan Drive,” Randolph toasted, lifting his paper cup. “To the stars!” Duncan countered. “We’ll ride this engine to Alpha Centauri one day!”
Randolph laughed. “The Asteroid Belt will be far enough, for now.” A couple of the men quaffed their drinks down in one gulp, then trotted out toward the wrecked cruise missile. Others headed for the shed. “Check the cameras, too,” Duncan called after them.
Pancho asked Randolph again, “That little ship has a fusion engine in it?”
Nodding, Randolph replied, “In place of its warhead.”
“The engine’s that small?”
“It’s only a wee test engine,” said Duncan. “Just to prove that it can provide controllable thrust.”
“Now we can build one big enough to carry a real payload to the Belt,” Randolph said.
“Once you raise the money,” added Duncan.
With a glance at Amanda, Pancho asked Randolph, “But why did you bring Mandy and me out here? Just to have a couple more witnesses?” His grin growing even wider, Randolph answered, “Hell no. I wanted you to see this because you two are gong to pilot the first fusion rocket to the Asteroid Belt.”
NEW KYOTO
The Yamagata family estate was set on a rugged hillside high above the office towers and apartment blocks of New Kyoto. Built like a medieval Japanese fortress, the solid yet graceful buildings always made Dan think of poetry frozen into shapes of wood and stone. It had suffered extensive damage in the earthquakes, Dan knew, but he could see no sign of it. The repairs had flawlessly matched the original structures.
Much of the inner courtyard was given to an exquisitely maintained sand garden. There were green vistas at every turn, as well: gardens and woods and, off in the distance, a glimpse through tall old trees of Lake Biwa, glittering in the late afternoon sun.
The tiltrotor plane settled down, turbines screeching, in the outer courtyard. Dan pulled off his sanitary mask and unbuckled his safety belt. He was through the hatch before the pilot was able to stop the rotors. Squinting through the dust kicked up by the downwash, Dan saw Nobuhiko Yamagata waiting at the gate to the inner courtyard, wearing a comfortable kimono of deep blue decorated with white herons, the Yamagata family’s emblem.
For an instant Dan thought he was seeing Saito Yamagata, Nobuhiko’s father, the man who had been Dan’s boss in the old days when Randolph had been a construction engineer on the first Japanese solar power satellite. Nobo had been ascetically slim when he was younger, but now his face and body had filled out considerably. He was tall, though, some thirty centimeters taller than his father had been, even several centimeters taller than Dan himself. The two men bowed simultaneously, then grasped each other’s shoulders.
“By damn, Nobo, it’s good to see you.”
“And you,” Nobuhiko replied, smiling broadly. “It’s been much too long since you’ve visited here.” His voice was deep, strong, assured. “You’re looking well,” Dan said as Yamagata led him past the flowering shrubbery of the inner courtyard, toward the wing of the old stone and wood house where the family lived.
“I’m too fat and I know it,” Nobo said, patting his belly. “Too many hours behind a desk, not enough exercise.”
Dan made a sympathetic noise.
“I’m thinking of taking a trip to Selene for a nanotherapy session.”
“Aw, come on, Nobo,” Dan said, “it’s not that bad.”
“My doctors nag me constantly.”
“That’s what the double-damned doctors always do. They learn it in medical school. No matter how healthy you are, they always find something to worry you about.”
They walked along a winding path of stones set across the middle of the carefullyraked sand garden. Dan noticed the miniature olive tree off in one corner of the garden that he had given Nobo’s father many years earlier. It looked green and healthy. Before the greenhouse cliff had struck, even in June the tree would have been covered by a heated transparent plastic dome to protect it from the occasional frost. Now the winters were mild enough to leave the tree in the open all year long.
“What’s your father’s status?” Dan asked as they removed their shoes at the open door to the main house. Two servants stood silently just inside the door, both women, both in carnelian-red robes.
Nobuhiko grimaced as they walked down the hallway lined with shoji screens. “The medical researchers have removed the tumor and cleaned father’s body of all traces of cancerous cells. They are ready to begin the revival sequence.”
“That can be tricky,” Dan said.
Ten years earlier, Saito Yamagata had had himself declared clinically dead and then frozen in liquid nitrogen, preserved cryonically to await the day when his cancer could be cured and he would be revived.
“Others have been thawed successfully,” Nobo said as they entered a spacious bedroom. It was paneled in teak, with bare floors of bleached pine, and furnished sparely: a western-style bed, a desk in the opposite corner, two comfortablelooking recliner chairs. One wall consisted of sliding shoji screens; Dan figured they covered a closet, built-in drawers, and the lavatory. Dan saw that his one travel bag had already been placed on a folding stand at the foot of the bed. “Still,” he said, “thawing must be pretty dicey.”
Yamagata turned to face him, and Dan saw Saito’s calm brown eyes, the certainty, the power that a long lineage of wealth and privilege can bring to a man. “We have followed the research work very thoroughly,” Nobo said. He smiled slightly. “We have sponsored much of the work ourselves, of course. It seems that Father could be revived.”
“That’s great!” Dan blurted. “Sai will be back with us-” Nobuhiko raised a hand. “Two problems, Dan.”
“What?”
“First, there are very strong political forces opposing revival of any cryonicallypreserved person.”
“Opposing… oh, for the love of Peter, Paul, and Peewee Reese. The New Morality strikes again.”
“Here in Japan it’s an offshoot of the New Dao movement. They call themselves the Flowers of the Sun.”
“Flowers of crackpots,” Dan grumbled.
“They have a considerable amount of political power. Enough to get nanotechnology banned in Japan, just as your New Morality people got it banned in the States.”
“And now they’re against reviving corpsicles?”
A reluctant grin cracked Yamagata’s solemn expression. “Delicately put, Dan. My father is a corpsicle.”
Waving a hand, Dan said, “You know I don’t mean any disrespect.”
“I know,” Nobuhiko admitted. “But the unhappy fact is that these Flowers of the Sun are attempting to pass a law through the Diet that would forbid cryonics altogether and make it a crime to attempt to revive a frozen body.”