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forty-three

Passengers and well-wishers began arriving early the next morning, and by eight o'clock the Aerospaceflot departures hall was filled with people. For the most part they were younger, ambitious professionals, some traveling singly, others with partners, spouses, and families, bound offplanet because that was where the Offworld enterprises needed them and made it worth their while to go. There were scientists and engineers, drawn by what they had read and heard of breathtaking leaps in concept and theory that were already making Earth's contemporary technologies as obso-lete as the stagecoach. There were teachers, eager to go where the creative potential of young minds was regarded as the most precious resource that the universe had to offer; entrepreneurs with an instinct for opportunity still to be uncovered; writers, artists, moviemakers, poets, searching for new elements and inspiration. And there were the restless, the curious, and the adventuresome, unable to resist the lure of challenge and an environment that would be unlike anything they had ever known.

Some sat quietly and stared, lost in thought as they prepared to leave for new worlds. Others milled around in constant agitation, checking and rechecking details needlessly, and talking incessantly in vain efforts to mask their nervousness and excitement.

Samurai arrived disguised, proceeded to the Aerospaceflot ticketing desk to confirm his reservation as Carl Zimmer and pay the outstanding balance. It was too easy: no documentation was required; nobody asked to see any ID.

"How can you people permit this?" he couldn't keep himself from saying as he watched the clerk enter the transaction. "Do you really believe that resources out there are unlimited? You can't simply open up the Moon to the whole world."

The clerk smiled as if he had heard it many times before. "I'm no scientist, but they tell us they're on the verge of being able to turn moonrock into anything you want," he replied. "And nobody's shipping the whole world anywhere. We can only send as many as there are places on the ship."

"But you haven't told me where to stay. Nobody's asked me how long I'll be there. Isn't there any control? Doesn't anyone plan anything?"

"Of course they do. How many designers do you think it took to plan the construction of the ship? We plan the flight schedules, because that's what we do. The hotel and real estate people plan the accommodation, because that's what they do. It all works itself out in the end." The clerk slipped the ticket into a plastic holder and held it out. "Enjoy the flight."

Samurai took the holder and tried to summon a response from all the reasons why he knew it couldn't be so. But as he stood, trying to sort the words out in his head, he found that he could only stare in mute confusion. All of a sudden, something inside him didn't feel right.

The slogans marched through his head like obedient soldiers. But they rang hollow, playing themselves automatically as if from a tape. It was as if he had forgotten what the words meant. He searched in his mind for some significance behind the phrases, some bedrock of conviction that should exist underneath . . . but encountered only emptiness.

Forcing the thought, he repeated to himself that the day would come when all this would collapse under its own contradictions, and the Consolidation would stand strong. But again the fingers of his mind slipped around and away from the words in vain, unable to capture any substance. It was as if his mind were continuing to function as a collection of mechanical parts only, going through their prescribed motions but somehow incapable of attaining any depth of thought. For the first time, the unassailable, -total self-confidence that he had never doubted for a moment was shaken. He seemed to be feeling pieces of his mind beginning to slip apart.

He took the ticket in its holder and moved away from the desk. Several men were standing around in the -vicinity, a couple of whom he recognized as the Americans who had followed Rudi from here the previous evening. They scrutinized all the passengers intently, including Samurai. But they had no idea what appearance he might have adopted. And as foreign agents operating under cover, they had no authority to interfere with passengers boarding a spacecraft in the Kazakh Free State. There was nothing they could do.

Expelling all other considerations from his mind and forcing himself to concentrate only on the mission, Samurai drifted away and around the hall to see if he could spot Ashling among the knots of people. But there was no sign of the scientist. It wasn't especially surprising. After the alarm last night, Ashling could be in disguise also, or was being kept out of sight until the last minute.

He realized that two children were looking up at him, a boy and a girl, both about ten. They looked like twins.

"Our daddy's a famous conductor," the boy informed him. "He's going to start an orchestra on the Moon. Are you coming to live on the Moon too?"

"We're going to have more brothers and sisters, and they'll be born on the Moon," the girl said.

Automatically the words formed in Samurai's mind: And in ten years' time, more hungry mouths will be coming back to Earth, begging to be fed. But another part of him didn't want to believe them. Something about these people was stirring a piece of him somewhere deep inside, but at the same time another piece rebelled and didn't want to be stirred.

"Where are you from?" the boy asked.

Samurai could only stare at them. He could remember fragments of pictures of what he knew was Minneapolis, others that were Denver, and then bits of yet other places again, all of them in conflict. He didn't know where he was from.

He turned and walked away. Concentrate on the -mission. . . .

* * *

Boarding commenced at nine. Since the flight up to the orbiting lunar transporter would be short, the shuttle cabin contained mainly seating, as in a regular airliner. However, since the craft was in the shape of a short, fat cone, the seats, all elaborately sprung and pneumatically contoured, were in a number of boxlike container-cabins set on transverse decks, like the floors of a house—which suited the ship's vertical attitude when on the ground. Once in free-fall, of course, it wouldn't matter which way up they were.

"Thank you for choosing Aerospaceflot today, and welcome aboard our flight LTR-7 to orbit, connecting with LLL's onward service to Luna, Copernicus. For those of you who will be going offplanet for the first time, there are some procedures and safety features that you should be aware of. . . ."

There was no sign of Ashling in the seats on the deck where Samurai was. But that meant little, since there were two other decks above and more below. Samurai checked in his pocket that he still had the piece of paper that he'd found in the hotel room the previous night, giving Professor Ulkanov's whereabouts at Copernicus. So even if he failed to pick up Ashling on disembarkation, he still had Ashling's final destination.

Now that he was aboard the shuttle and settled, Samurai felt more himself again. Perhaps the confusion that he'd experienced outside had been just a passing effect, caused by the accumulated stress and conflict of the last few days. He thought back over all the obstacles that he'd overcome since leaving Pearse and felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

And now he was so close.

Talk around the cabin died away, and the air tensed with expectancy tinged with apprehension for the unknown as the moment for departure approached. But the actual lift-off, when it came, was smoother, though noisier, than the takeoff of an airliner, with no rumbling rush across concrete, sudden pull-up to unstick, or clunkings of landing gear being retracted to reduce drag.

Instead, rapid pulsations throbbed through the structure to mark ignition of the onboard start-up booster, growing quickly to a pounding roar to achieve positive thrust and set the craft into motion. Then the three ground lasers went up to full power to energize the main propellant, and within seconds the shuttle was accelerating fast, then streaking skyward, riding on a controlled, laser-sustained detonation wave, course-corrected by alteration of the beams following it from the ground. Onboard optics redirected the tracking beams to sustain drive for over a thousand miles downrange, by which time the shuttle was up to orbital speed and on a closing trajectory for its onboard auxiliary thrusters to complete rendezvous maneuvers with the transfer satellite where the LLL transporter was waiting.

The transporter was essentially a framework supporting two co-joining spheres that formed the manned section, along with a number of gas, water, and auxiliary propellant tanks, and a nuclear main-propulsion module. One of the spheres contained the crew's quarters, flight deck, and control room, while the other, which was larger, held the passenger lounge-cafeteria, galley and other services, and a playroom-nursery. There was no need for passengers to leave their seats and move through into the lunar transporter when the surface shuttle docked. The box-shaped containers holding the seating cabins slid out of the shuttle as sealed units, into slots in the transporter framework, where they mated with ports connecting to the main passenger module.

There were more announcements, reminding passengers of the effects of free-fall and instructing them to keep seat belts fastened and loose objects secured. During the next two hours, three more shuttles, one from the other end of Siberia, one from Japan, and one from Malaysia, arrived to exchange similar passenger and cargo containers for others inbound from Luna. When preparations were complete, everyone returned to their seats. Then the main drive fired to begin lifting the fully loaded transporter up through higher orbits and speed it onto the escape trajectory that would carry it from Earth.

For a long time the cabin's occupants, for the most part silent, stared from their seats in awed fascination as the full disk of Earth being captured by the rear-pointing imagers came into view on the display screen. The transfer satellite shrank and was lost against the surface detail, and then Earth itself could be seen diminishing gradually against the background starfield.

"I still can't get used to the idea that it's really out there," a woman's voice said from the row behind where Samurai was sitting. "I mean, it isn't just another movie that was sent back. It's right out there, on the other side of the wall."

"Makes this thing feel like an eggshell, doesn't it," a man replied.

After a while the atmosphere relaxed, and such being the adaptability of human nature, what had been new and wondrous only an hour before soon became the norm. Some of the passengers began moving about to stretch their cramped limbs and check out the menu and other facilities available in the communal services module. The nuclear main drive was still sustaining enough thrust to maintain a mild acceleration, so conditions were not entirely weightless. The ship would enter a fully free-fall phase later into the voyage, however.

Confusion and disorientation were beginning to come over Samurai again. Something catastrophic was happening to him, he could sense, but he didn't know what. Splinters of memories came together in his mind and tumbled apart again like the pieces of a kaleidoscope picture, forming patterns of chance associations that hung together for fleeting moments but made no sense. An apartment in Philadelphia; a girl with red hair in Chicago; a room in which soldiers lived; a corridor full of students in a school somewhere. . . . There were guns, all kinds of weapons; two punks lying crumpled on the ground in a dark, narrow street. . . . The red-haired girl again, this time lying naked on a towel by a lake surrounded by trees. A machine surrounding his head. . . . He saw a ship coming into dock in a port, he wasn't sure where. Some part of him thought it was in Germany. Had he ever been to Germany?

He didn't know. Who were these people who came and went through his awareness like fish glimpsed in a turbulent river? Which of it was real, which was fabrication? He couldn't tell.

Perspiration was damp on his forehead, slippery across his palms. A feeling close to panic gripped him. Suddenly the rows of people pressing in on him from every side in the confines of the cabin were asphyxiating. He undid his seat belt, mumbled his way past the people to the nearest aisle, and headed through the connecting port to the services module.

Two catering attendants were dispensing snacks, -sandwiches, hot food, and beverages in closed cups with drinking tubes from a horseshoe counter projecting into an eating area of tables and booths. Samurai selected a plate of fish with potato salad and bread, and a hot tea, and took it over to an empty stool at a side bar where several other people were already sitting.

As he ate, he remembered a woman and a car. She was driving. They were on a road winding between snowy mountains. He didn't know where or when it had been . . . or even if it had ever happened.

But there was something about her that mattered. He tried to think what. She had been different, somehow, and cared about a stranger. Been something that he never could be. . . . And it mattered.

"Apparently we're doing almost fifty thousand kilometers an hour," a voice said nearby. "You'd never believe it." Samurai looked up. A gray-haired man with a short beard was looking at him genially. "Hello. My name is Piotr. It's going to be a long trip, so we might as well make the best of it. Why go out of one's way to be strangers?"

"Oh . . . yes," Samurai responded uncertainly, still half immersed in his reverie.

"I'm a petrologist," Piotr went on. "Rocks and soils, you know. Lots to do out there. They're going to be digging half of Luna up. Copernicus goes down hundreds of meters already." He waited expectantly for a moment, then prompted, "What do you do?"

Samurai looked at him blankly. "I kill people," he replied.

* * *

Back in his seat, Samurai stared unseeingly at the display on the forward wall of the cabin, which was now showing a movie. All around him were creators, builders, producers, discoverers: men and women who belonged to life, who were life; who extended life through the power to forge out of ideas and matter the tools that could transform deserts into gardens, and the lunar waste into cities. He had been programmed only to kill and destroy.

By now he had forgotten what his mission was, and why it mattered. He knew only that it was Ashling who had made him what he was. And that was why Samurai had to kill him.

That was all.

 

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Framed