The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [1]
DeFanti knocked his pills back with sips from a steaming coffee thermos. He gnawed at buffalo jerky to settle the drugs in his gut. DeFanti had discovered bison meat in his pursuit of a heart-healthy diet. Bison meat was the very best meat in America. Tom DeFanti now owned over four thousand bison.
DeFanti unlatched the cabin’s door and left, carrying his fringed rawhide jacket. There was no sign of civilization, not a glimmer of light, not a telephone pole. One exception: far below in a stony bowl of hills, faint amber glows flicked on at the ranch’s main hacienda. Over at the sprawling Pinecrest headquarters, Wife Number Four and her ranch staff were hosting a happy crowd of German cowboy tourists. The Germans had paid fifteen hundred dollars each to shoot a Pinecrest bull bison with their choice of Colt six-shooters or historical buffalo rifles.
DeFanti’s fourth wife was an energetic young woman from Taipei. She was from a prominent Chinese family, spoke six languages, and had very strong working habits. Wife Number Four never slept in the astronomy cabin’s iron bed. DeFanti did his best to keep her busy.
In the thin chill air of evening, DeFanti quickly missed his felt Stetson. He was too stubborn to climb back downhill for it. Besides, the cold dry breeze had chased off the smoke from the wildfires in the huge federal park to the east. It was the best observing he’d enjoyed all week.
Colorado’s Continental Divide scraped at the fading orange sky. That colossal glow could restore any man’s soul, if he still owned one. A crowd of man-made satellites was busily climbing from the planet’s shadow. And if the zenith angle was exactly right, then the solar panels on a passing satellite might gleam down at the Earth for a few precious instants: a flare five times brighter than Venus.
DeFanti had extremely personal and very complicated feelings about satellites. Especially Iridium satellites, though spy satellites had always been his premier line of work. He had wanted in on the Iridium project so very badly. He had violently hated the engineers and financiers who had somehow launched a major global satellite communications network without him. And then he’d been astounded to see the whole enterprise simply fold up and collapse.
These wonderful Iridium satellites, dozens of high-tech metal birds each the size of a bus, beautifully designed, working perfectly and just as planned, costing more per pound than solid gold: they were glories of technology with no business model. The engineers had built them, and yet no one had come. Earthly cell phones were so much quicker, cheaper, smaller. The bankrupted satellites were doomed to be de-orbited and flung, one by one, into the black, chilly depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
This awful fate made the Iridium satellites very precious to DeFanti. The Most Important Man in the World had known some failures of his own, true agonies of the spirit. He never gloated at the wreckage of anybody else’s grand ambitions. He had learned to watch such things with care, searching for men with drive who had the guts to survive the midnight of the soul. Such men were useful.
A long feathery brushstroke in the west touched his steadily darkening sky. DeFanti scowled. That mark was a jet’s contrail, and by its angle across the heavens, DeFanti knew at once that the jet was headed for the Pinecrest private airstrip.
DeFanti wheeled his heavy spotter’s binoculars on their black metal stand. The intruder, gleaming in fading sunlight high above the Rockies, was a sleek white Boeing Business Jet. It could jump the Pacific in two hops.
The Dot-Commie had returned.
Moments later, the jet roared overhead, shattering his serenity. The Dot-Commie had sent him some e-mail, DeFanti knew that, but the kid and his latest screaming crisis had somehow slipped DeFanti’s mind. The Dot-Commie always had dozens of irons in the fire. No e-biz fad ever