The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [59]
“Look, you don’t know all that,” Hickok protested, with surprising mildness. He touched his pale blue folder. “You didn’t even look at the evidence here.”
“I don’t need to look at your evidence.”
Hickok’s eyes grew round and mild. “You’re a scientist and you’re saying that to me? Scientists are s’posed to look at the evidence. That’s what I always heard.”
“Well . . .” Van fell silent. He felt pinned down. No option was good in his situation suddenly. “Look, this has got nothing to do with scientific evidence. This folder here, this blue thing, this is a legal trail. I’d have to sign off on it to look at this blue folder. Then your bosses would be all over me. Right away. They’d nail me for it because I was the last guy to touch the hot potato.”
Hickok narrowed his eyes. “Damn. I never thought about it that way. So that’s your big problem, huh? You don’t want your nose in a mousetrap.”
“You bet that’s my problem.”
“That’s right,” Hickok admitted. “They’d do that kind of thing, too.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even an admission. It was a realistic assessment. “But if you really fixed this bird, doc, they wouldn’t have to blame anybody.”
“I’d love to fix your bird,” Van told him. “I’m of a different generation than those guys who built the Space Age. We’ve got much better methods of computer analysis now, and I like to think that maybe I actually could fix the thing, if I had some time and resources. But they don’t want me to fix it. They just want me to touch it.” Van shrugged. “Look, I’m not putting my initials on any of that paper. That’s too much to ask of me.”
“I can get it about all that,” said Hickok. “Everywhere I go in this world, there’s some kind of hell that started long before I was ever born.” Hickok had gone strangely stiff. Suppressed fury, maybe. It might even be shame. “Suppose I left this little blue folder under a bench in the gym.”
Van felt his eyes widen. “That’s crazy. That’s an NKR document. You wouldn’t do that.”
“I take long showers,” Hickok snarled. “You’re a tough guy in the gym, right, Mr. Computer Geek? I’ve seen you in there. Maybe you could skip a couple of your sets on that Nautilus.”
Maybe I would, thought Van, and maybe I wouldn’t. And maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. He jumped from the edge of his worktable. “Why not right now?”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
PINECREST RANCH, COLORADO, JANUARY 2002
Tony Carew spent his afternoon watching his girlfriend performing in the snow. Anjali aimed to become Bollywood’s Heroine Number One, outdoing Aishwarya Rai, Bipasha Basu, and the Kapoor sisters. If flesh and blood could do this, then Anjali had them to give.
Anjali lip-synched to the piercing Hindi soundtrack while whirling, fluttering, bumping, and grinding. Repeatedly, glowingly, beautifully. Take after grueling take, on a sunny midwinter day, at a nine-thousand-foot elevation.
Indian film fans loved romantic mountain scenes. So much so that the Indian movie industry had worn Switzerland out, and Tony Carew was supplying them with Colorado’s mountains, instead. The audience for Bollywood movies was rather peculiar about snow. The core Indian village audience, all billion of them, regarded snow as a mythical, romantic substance, something like fairy dust or cocaine. So Hindi film actresses never wore coats or jackets while dancing in the snow. They had to perform bareheaded and bare-armed in their customary midriff-baring chiffon, brilliantly smiling and bitterly freezing. Between takes, Anjali rushed to the sidelines to drink hot goat’s-milk cocoa and breathe oxygen from a black rubber mask.
Anjali’s co-star, Sanjay, who was also her cousin, was the film’s male lead. Being a man, whenever Sanjay was in snow, he got to wear thick boots, long trousers, and an insulated jacket. Sanjay was big, solid, deft, graceful, and wonderfully handsome. The Bombay film clan of Sanjay and Anjali had been breeding movie stars for a hundred years. In Sanjay the family had produced a huge, beautiful animal.
In Bollywood, actors weren