The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [3]
To launder his Deep Black money, to try to make his own taxes make sense, DeFanti had started a cable company, and then a microwave phone network. He’d never guessed that cable TV would spread like crabgrass, or that cell phones would web Planet Earth with their white roadside antennas.
Time passed. Tom DeFanti grew older in his boardrooms. The wives cycled through his bedrooms, and his kids grew up and left. The Space Age gently faded into the yellowing pages of Life magazine. By the 1990s, aerospace jobs were fading away by double-digit percentages, while the Cyberspace Age exploded in the NASDAQ and a million Web sites. Business and the profit motive ruled the heavens and the earth.
But now, breaking his thoughts, here came the ugly racket of a trail bike. It was, of course, the Dot-Commie. The Dot-Commie was making a beeline for DeFanti’s hidden cabin. He must have ridden the motorbike straight down his jet’s embarkation stairs.
The Dot-Commie waved cheerfully as his bike veered wildly up the stony, darkening slope. The Dot-Commie wore a tartan shirt, jeans, boots, and an Australian outback hat. He looked both rugged and tidy. Jet lag never bothered the Dot-Commie. He ate like a weasel and he slept like a tomcat.
The Dot-Commie pulled up with a squeal of brand-new brakes. He hunted for the off switch on his spotless Japanese toy. Despite his fondness for fancy transportation, the Dot-Commie was no man of action. He tended toward pallor and plumpness. He would have shuddered at a horse.
The kid leaned the spotless bike against the gray wooden hulk of the dead man’s abandoned observatory. The dead banker’s old telescope had long since gone blind. His doors to the zenith had rusted shut on their iron pulleys and chains. The place had been used as a hay barn for decades. DeFanti had never altered the dead man’s observatory, he had always just let it be. Now that the red Kawasaki trail bike leaned against its patient sides, he realized how much he loved that old building. What an affront that was.
“Komban-wa, Chairman-san!” said the Dot-Commie.
The Dot-Commie had a nice tapered chin and a smooth, tall genius forehead. He was the ladies’ man version of a geek. Determined to avoid the kid’s eager handshake, DeFanti absently patted the barrel of his faithful old Questar. The gingko was hitting his brain with a hot quiet rush now. The Dot-Commie had something big on his mind, and it would be complicated. It would be way too complicated. The Dot-Commie’s personal schemes always included lots of extra gears and switches, just for their geeky coolness.
“So, kid, how’d it go across the big water?”
“Oh, Tom, in Tokyo, they are So Over. They just don’t Get It.” The Dot-Commie removed his Australian hat. His hair looked like a nice toupee on a solid stone egg. He flipped the hat and tossed it over. “This is for you, Tom.”
DeFanti caught the hat, startled. “I don’t need this,” he lied.
“I bought it for you in Sydney. It’s brand-new. It’s fully adjustable, see? You just pull that little tab in the back.”
DeFanti groaned in disbelief. Then he settled the kid’s body-heated hatband around his own chilled scalp. The hat felt pretty good, really. The hat felt great. DeFanti always wore a hat when observing. Mountain nights were bitterly cold.
“Cell phones, the Japanese get,” said the Dot-Commie. He opened his black laptop bag. “Cameras and faxes and stereos, the Japanese get. E-commerce, that stuff the Japanese never get.” From an interior pocket of the bag he removed a two-ounce plastic windbreaker. He peeled it open with the delicacy of a man folding an origami crane.
“I saw the Super-Kamiokande,” the Dot-Commie announced. “That was this trip’s high point. That neutrino observatory. Tom, it’s all you said it was,