The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [83]
That was where he’d blown it with the General. He hadn’t come to that man with a warrior’s air of command-and-control. “The aura of inevitability.”
Van closed his burning eyes. Tomorrow, just for once, he had nothing to do but to be together with his wife and child. Why should that seem like such a fantastic privilege to him now? Because he had volunteered for all this. He had willingly turned himself into a weapon.
Van hovered at the brink of sleep, his chest heaving at the thin air. The shining image of his grandfather’s gun occurred to him. The gun pressed against his mind’s eye, heavy with dream-importance. The ray gun had run out of solder as he worked on his doomed KH-13 presentation. That’s when he had opened it up, removing four tiny steel screws, and discovered that the engineers of the Skunk Works had built a fake jet engine inside there. When he’d popped off the butt of the ray gun, he was looking right up the round model rocket rump of an SR-71 Blackbird. To make the gun work, you had to shove solder wire up the jet’s exhaust, round as a gun barrel. That was true geek humor. Very crew cut and bow tie, very 1960s styling. No wonder his grandfather had always treasured the thing.
Wine and weariness came down on him and pressed him flat.
At 3:00 A.M. the baby’s screams woke them. “Oh, Derek,” she said, muddled and confused, “I always let Ted sleep in here with me.”
There was nothing for it but to jam lonely Ted into the bed with the two of them. The sleepy and irritable Ted wriggled like a flannel otter, wedging his body between his parents and hacking for space with knees and heels. Van, who had been hovering at the edge of altitude suffocation, came wide awake.
Van climbed out of the bed, then put all his clothes on, because the room was icy. He wrapped his shoulders in Ted’s abandoned blanket, sat at the desk, and woke Dottie’s laptop from its sleep.
Dottie’s room might be neater than a convent, but he had never seen Dottie’s computer in such an awful mess. It horrified him to realize that Dottie Vandeveer, his very own wife, was using Windows Outlook Express on broadband without any security enhancements. She’d customized all her icons, too. They were not her usual dainty stars and comets, but icons that a Goth chick would have gone for: bats, UFO aliens, witches’ cauldrons. Important files were scattered all over her screen, most of them named with doubled exclamation points!! and shouting CAPITAL LETTERS. Van was staring straight into an X ray of his wife’s unconscious mind. The news here was not good.
Van had finally reached some kind of peak event in his marriage: he was sending his wife e-mail from her own machine.
Dear Dottie, I never told you how hard this new life would be for both of us
No, that wasn’t it at all, that way was just no good. His words vanished into the left-moving vacuum of her DELETE key.
Dearest Dottie, I can’t tell you why this hasn’t worked out as I hoped
Dottie, I’m not allowed to say just what
Dear Dorothy
There was a sudden electric snapping. Power failure. All the lights went out.
Van groped his way back toward the bed in pitch-blackness, and he lay down fully clothed.
CHAPTER
TEN
PINECREST RANCH, COLORADO, FEBRUARY 2002
Dottie prodded him flirtatiously with her bare toes. “Well, hero, now you know what you were fighting for!”
Van nodded, breathing hot steam. He balanced his cold German beer on the edge of the hot tub. To judge by his surroundings, he was fighting for the right of eccentric rich guys to buy the whole planet.
Thomas DeFanti’s “cottage” had once been a pioneer Colorado farmstead, all hard rock and tough gray timber. Then some pet architect had transformed the place into a billionaire’s secret love nest. It was all done-up inside in black-and-chrome, high 1980s style. It was like Hugh Hefner seducing The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Pinecrest Ranch, to judge by what Van had seen of it, was a mix of Hong Kong and Hollywood