The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [2]
DeFanti had five adult children. He got it about the nineties generation, as far as anyone did. But the Dot-Commie was special even by those weird standards, he was like . . . DeFanti rubbed his grizzled chin. The yohimbe was coming on, with a ticklish mental itch.
DeFanti knew that the Dot-Commie, for better or worse, was his spiritual heir. DeFanti’s two sons wanted nothing to do with their father’s empire. And properly so, because his sons, like their mothers, just didn’t have what that took. The Dot-Commie took after DeFanti, though. The Dot-Commie always took plenty.
The Dot-Commie was entirely at home with DeFanti’s many holdings. The cable, the cell phones, the Taiwanese chip fabricators, the Houston aerospace companies, the federally subsidized fiber-optic Internet supercomputers . . . Not only was the Dot-Commie at ease with all this high technology, he was downright nostalgic about it.
The jet slid behind a sharp ridge of pines. It missed the approach on DeFanti’s short mountain runway, roared up gushing smoke, then circled and tried again. So much for clear skies. Was the kid letting his latest girlfriend pilot the thing? Why had DeFanti ever agreed to have a runway installed here in the first place?
Surely it would take the Dot-Commie a good long while to find him, up here in the cabin. Maybe Wife Number Four would politely force the kid to shower, shave, eat, and possibly even sleep. Maybe the German tourists would force him to drink a round of German beers.
DeFanti opened his laptop and checked its heavy-duty battery. He loaded the latest orbits for passing spacecraft. Tom DeFanti had always been very keen about the role of computers in outer space. He had shared those professional interests with the NORAD Space Defense Operations Center, and the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. With the CIA Office of Imagery Analysis. With the Consolidated Space Operations Center, at Colorado Springs. With the Air Force, and with the Space Force, and with the Navy’s FLTSATCOM, and with the National Photographic Interpretation Center. With aerospace engineering labs in Houston. With R&D labs in Northern Virginia. With camera labs in Rochester, New York. With antenna labs in Boulder, Colorado. And with Communists.
One glorious day during perestroika 1988, Tom DeFanti had found that he was helping American and Soviet space spies to share some very intimate notes. Long before the Hubble Space Telescope had ever appeared to scan the distant galaxies, Cold War spy satellites had carried giant telescopes into orbit. Those orbiting telescopes always looked down.
Through persistence and competence, Tom DeFanti had become the planet’s go-to guy for “national technical means of verification.” Not because DeFanti himself was a spy, although passing those notes at a disarmament conference certainly made him into one. No: it was because Tom DeFanti was basically running the spy-sat business. He was carrying the technical torch for the world’s most secret industry. A very secret industry, nothing at all like normal astronomy, and not very much like normal computers, but an industry that combined both. It was quite a big, advanced, very high-tech industry. A big, dark, powerful industry. Tom DeFanti was the man within private enterprise who was most advancing that industry. He was building satellite hardware for gigantic spaceborne spy cameras. He was financing analysis software for huge torrents of visual data.
That made him an important man. Him, Tom DeFanti: a frantic business hustler who had stuck together a Houston aerospace company on a wing, a prayer, and some very quiet yachts packed with bales of Acapulco gold. He’d done some crazy things, for some desperate reasons. But he’d always had one business goal in mind: his own personal charge card for the Deep Black. Because the Deep Black budget for spy satellites was twice the size of the CIA’s budget. And the Congress never ran any audits there.
The spy-sat community never advertised in Aviation Week. Once you became a trusted