For the next four years Sherry and I worked hard, both at getting and deserving our spots on the Chaser, with the blessings not only of Yanci and their parents but also of Yolinda and all the Piñeras. And of two of my remaining three grandparents. All the other Bologneses, including of course Mom, sided with Dad.
After winning another term as European President, Dad had made himself the primary proponent of the Siege of Titan. With the support of his old friend Abdul Akbar Guebuza, the new Earth President, he was now urging the colony to mothball the Chaser until it could be used for some “rational purpose”—clearly, heading off toward Sirius wasn’t rational! No one on either Titan or Earth willingly admitted to being influenced by the trade restrictions, but both sides were more than willing to point out how much their opponents were paying for their stubbornness.
The best estimates were that Earth’s sanctions against Titan Colony had shaved about a full point off annual economic growth for each of them every year. Which, as more than one pro-Titan journalogger pointed out, hurt Earth’s poor—the alleged beneficiaries of the original policy. (Earth’s foolish restrictions on HX tech obviously hurt its planetary economy even more, and didn’t help Titan any, but there was little consensus on those numbers.)
It also meant that whenever the HX Chaser needed specialty materials from Earth their delivery had been even slower, by weeks or months, than for other projects. And that Earth firms daring to do specialty design work for the ship could expect visits from humorless agents in ultraconservative clothing with rigid ideas of what “loyalty to the home planet” by “decent citizens” entailed. A side effect of that last phenomenon was the emigration from Earth of a number of excellent designers.
Of course the Chaser was the real reason why Earth remained hostile in general, and in particular there was no end in sight for the Parliamentary Ad-Hoc Committee to Investigate Corruption in the Titan Colony Support Infrastructure. That, and the fact that every time the committee leaked some juicy tidbit, it was either rapidly debunked, matched by two or three instances of corruption in Earth’s infrastructure that were at least as bad, or both.
Dad being on Earth with me on Titan made problems for us both. His xenophobe and HX technophobe enemies ridiculed the Earth Firster who couldn’t even call his own son home from Titan.
And Yanci had had the devil of a time getting me on as a junior member of his Technology Board. Admittedly, it wasn’t just my being Beast Bolognese’s son; there were plenty on the team with the attitude that the impact of HX tech discoveries was the rest of the world’s worry, not the Chaser planners’.
Which meant I had to work my tail off not just contributing to the committee but schmoozing, politicking, and otherwise selling fragments of my dignity without losing too much respect … or self-respect. And without neglecting RightInStone. I was so successful that within three years I was elected committee vice-chair by a landslide against the incumbent.
Of course after that I got interviewed frequently about the Chaser, and every time I had to field at least one question about my relationship with Dad: Are you estranged from your father? (No, we communicate a few times a year, as often as when I was at Hubble. And I visit my family whenever I’m on Earth.) Do you think your father is evil, misguided, or what? (He is a good, sincere man with whom I’ve long had political differences.) Did your father beat you when you were a kid? (No, and in case you’re wondering, I don’t sock reporters who ask idiotic and insulting questions about people I love. Not usually.)
That last answer led to a sensational headline that attracted a lot of links: “Chaser Official Loves the Beast.” I was embarrassed but delighted. Sherry ended every message to her parents with “Love you!” It must have been Grandpa Winthrop’s cold English blood coming out in me, but I just could never make myself do the same. So I was happy that Dad would see my spontaneous public declaration that I loved him.
During those years RightInStone also prospered. I needed to hire a few people and buy a few ’bots to handle our work, which now targeted diverse groups and individuals besides the forgotten ‘movers and shakers’ we still specialized in, and had expanded to other colonies, once even to an Earth company. I’d handled that last one personally, with my side trip to see my folks again in Perugia as a very welcome perk.
* * *
What kept the Earth–Titan controversy from becoming even more expensive and angrier than it did were the majority of Earthers and the strong minority of Titaners who didn’t care whether or not the Chaser was built but would turn against their government unless it stayed minimally civil to the other side.
In 2558 the civility was shattered. Someone got a nuclear device onto the Chaser construction site and detonated it, killing more than 40 people outright. Another 150 got hospitalized for radiation poisoning, and I think one of those may have died.
For over a century after the atom was first split, ominous images of mushroom clouds—and to a lesser extent, the surreal shadows on the wall at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had made even instant death from a nuclear explosion somehow more terrible than a similarly quick death from, say, a car crash. That attitude, and the danger posed by their waste, left nuclear power plants a stunted stepchild. But as disposal into the Sun’s inexhaustible nuclear furnace became ever more practicable, and the continued burning of fossil fuels ever less so, the industry took off.
Nevertheless, Earth feelings toward nuclear death remained fossilized. But with nuclear-powered rockets transporting them and nuclear power plants maintaining their environment, nearly all colonists lost that mind-set. Off-Earth, it’s dying from environmental sabotage that makes people cringe. Insane villains in Colonial soap operas choose from a wide variety of fiendish sabotage threats, where Earther scriptwriters usually prefer a nuclear explosion rather than poisoning a water reservoir, crashing the Greenland furnaces’ software, setting fire to the city center, or other devices that seem more horrible to Colonials.
So a nuclear device used for sabotage made the HX Chaser incident electrifying System-wide.
Earthers felt that Titan’s continued stubborn insistence on building the Chaser despite overwhelming political and economic pressure to stop had made the extremists desperate enough to use forbidden weapons. Colonials felt that official manipulation of public opinion against the ship had made exporting the Earther Plague—sabotage—inevitable.
Both sides were convinced that, in light of the incident, the other side would finally change its Chaser policy. And of course both sides’ positions merely hardened.
To cite two prominent examples:
On Earth there were calls to implement hugely expensive security policies, such as storing all nuclear engines in government-built and -certified security warehouses when not actually in operation.
On Titan a proposal circulated to find and send back to Earth every unstable person in the colonies; one estimate was that “only” one to two percent of the Colonial population would be found eligible, a huge disruption to social and economic stability. In group solidarity, most artists, writers, and other creative types fiercely resisted the proposal, but more than a few merely wanted to amend the criterion to “potentially violent”, not “unstable”.
* * *
“Whoever conducted this atrocity was amateurish in the extreme.”
That was Pauline Hountondji, three weeks after the Chaser nuking, introducing the official preliminary government report. I listened while I cleaned my teeth after breakfast. Sherry had already left for work.
“The HX Chaser is designed with eightfold redundancy. These barbarians killed or maimed hundreds of innocent people, but knocked out only one of eight centers, leaving the ship with sevenfold redundancy instead of eightfold.”
She leaned into the vidcam. “The sabotage has had no other effect. We will launch on schedule, and in-flight upgrades will not be affected. The saboteurs in particular may be interested to know that by the time the Chaser reaches the HX, ninefold redundancy will be achieved.”
It was the classic stiff-upper-lip response that every government leader, from millennia before Gilgamesh, has given to bandit attacks that were big enough to scare them but not strong enough to unseat them. Unfortunately, the CEO’s speech would do nothing to calm the combatants or to stop the huge spending and social scarring that Titan Colony and Earth governments were threatening to bring down on their respective communities.
But I suddenly had an idea.
I recognized the situation as a Moment of Chaos, a time when small changes in events and policies could lead to later historic upheavals. And though it seemed incredible, inconceivable, it was just possible I could be the butterfly whose wing-flap countered the hurricane winds, to the benefit of mankind’s history.
I finished with the sonobrush, put on a shirt, and sat down in front of my vidcam to send Dad a message.
“Hi, Dad. Mr. President.
“I’ve got an idea that may help us, you and me, defuse this Chaser nuke situation! If you’re willing to do some expediting.
“I know Earth First claims no responsibility for the atrocity, and I’m fully confident that’s true. Nevertheless, there’s a more than reasonable chance that whoever pulled the trigger, or helped the trigger-puller build the bomb, or helped them move the bomb, or more than one of those, had some connection with Earth First at some point.
“You know that every day my team and I use the RightInStone software and our skills to identify people of certain sorts in corporate archives. I believe that, given access to Earth First archives, I can identify one or more suspects that the authorities might not otherwise recognize.
“I’m hoping that you can send me the pointers that give us access to the party’s own archives. We’ll sign anything the planetary party officials want, to ensure that we don’t use them against the party’s interests, and I’ll give my word to you, which I know you’ll consider more binding.
“Bye for now.”
But my finger still hovered over the stop key.
“Oh, and Sherry and Yanci and Yolinda send their best, of course. I know they’ve sent you pictures of baby Catarina, but here’s the one that the proud uncle carries around in his gear-bag to show everybody.” I’d dragged it out and was holding it up to the camera.
“Sorry, I’m wasting transmit time on personal stuff. But it’s good to talk with you.”
“Share as much of this with Mom as you want.” Then I hit stop and send.
I paid to send it as a vid, partly to emphasize its importance but mostly so he could “read” me right. I bought high priority, but even with that pricey coding, it would be at minimum four hours before he saw the message and another four before I saw his response, even if he sent it immediately. I couldn’t do anything about the fact that both governments would spend time looking for hidden meanings, agendas, and viruses before they let it through. As a courtesy to Dad, and in hopes of his seeing it personally sooner, I was using his private address, but Titan intelligence would recognize it as his as easily as Earth would.
I marked for immediate notification of response, even during sleep time, and set Earth’s planetary anthem as the ring tone.
While waiting to hear from my father, I started my ’bots and my people, including me, working over all the Earth First membership and activity data that was publicly available in Titan Colony. I was mildly surprised at how much that was.
I was even more pleasantly surprised when within a work day we’d generated a short list of highly plausible suspects. RightInStone’s style of analysis hadn’t even existed five years before, and still wasn’t well known, so no one had thought to cover their tracks against it. Our staff psycho—sorry, psychologist, but even Angel sometimes called himself that!—figured it could take up to ten years for a radical to drift from wild talk to a suitcase nuke. With what looked like 20-20 hindsight, we singled out fourteen hotheads who had been some of Earth First’s more enthusiastic members back ten years or less, and were among the over a thousand previously enthusiastic people who had left the party because it wasn’t activist enough.
So even if Dad said no on sharing archives from Earth to keep up appearances, I could get his blessing on the project, and find out what if anything he could tell me about the fourteen, including two in particular who seemed to have had contact with him.
Next morning, in spite of myself, I was getting impatient. I’d never expected to hear in the minimum eight hours, but it was now past twenty-four. With the incident already three weeks in the past, my head said that a day’s delay, even several days, was no big deal and Patience was a virtue. But my gut insisted that Patience was a ninja assassin and the Moment of Chaos was passing, never to return.
So I decided that if I still hadn’t heard from Dad by the end of the second work day, I’d take whatever we had to the Titan authorities and let them deal with it. Having made my decision, I tried to stop worrying while we firmed up our analysis.
At twenty-eight hours forty-two minutes after I had transmitted, we’d reduced the short list to eight, still including the two whom Dad might have known personally. And I got a high-priority contact from Earth’s embassy on Titan!
“Mr. Giovanni Bolognese,” the crisp young secretary said, “I recognize your face from the reference threedie. Will you please state your birth date so that I may confirm the ID by voice analysis?”
“Of course,” I said, and complied.
“Thank you, Mr. Bolognese. I have a high-priority personal message from European President Bolognese that will decode as soon as it reaches this number. Are you prepared to receive it in private?”
“Sure. I’ll take it in my office. … I’m closing the door now, sir, and sitting down. Please transmit!”
Boy, was I relieved! No matter what my brain and gut had said, my heart hadn’t wanted to act without hearing from my Dad. My fingers trembled a bit as I opened the message.
It was hard to read the look on his face. It wasn’t one I’d seen before. His voice had a peculiar ring, too.
“Son, it was good to hear from you … for so many reasons.
“I apologize for this getting back to you with such a delay. Judging from the time stamp, as you may have anticipated plenty of people on Titan saw your message before I did. And way too many of my people here. To minimize delay on the return I’m sending this through the embassy. And putting you on the streamline list for access to me. I apologize for not doing that before, but it always seemed self-indulgent.
“Oh, and be sure to use the embassy to send any message back to me. Titan will still intercept and examine it, but they won’t dare delay it for more than a few minutes.
“Now: Your message was not a complete surprise to me. I’m your father, and even if we don’t get together every weekend, I’m still very interested in what you do. And I have access to some of the System’s best intelligence people, so I know even more about your career than you may think I do.
“Believe it or not, I understood what RightInStone could do days before you did. And what’s kept me awake at nights is deciding what I should do when you realized it, or if I should point it out to you.
“You see, despite their horribly misguided method, those people’s heads and hearts were in the right place. They were trying to save the whole Solar System. They were afraid, as I am, that those HX aliens would decide to follow our ship back and enslave humanity or wipe us out. Measured against any possible quantity and quality of HX treasures, that’s not worth it!
“But you’ve heard those arguments before … from me, among others. And … damn it, these are trying times!”
I thought his face was becoming even more of a cipher even as he exclaimed. But then it hit me. His face was saying he’d changed his mind about something!
“If we weren’t in such a rush. … Anyway, I’ve decided that what’s most important is that we humans work together. So … however much I sympathize with their motivations, those people were fools and murderers, not soldiers who deserve my backing.
“So I’ll support your effort to identify them. And I’ll also try to see that Earth First condemns them formally by name, not just disavows them. And that they’re brought to justice.
“I’m attaching the pointers you asked for.
“If there’s a silver lining in this disaster, I hope it’s that you and I can get closer in the future.
“Bye for now … son.”
And that was the end.
But I could tell from the look on his face, and his speech pacing, that something more was in Dad’s future: As soon as he’d fulfilled his promises, he would leave Earth First. The organization he’d spent forty years passionately supporting, half of his world—his family was the other half—had become too radical for him. That would mean he’d have to resign as President, but he’d do it.
I had now seen what the historians meant about civil strife pitting brother against brother and father against son. What they neglected to mention was that it pitted people against themselves.
My father was one.