Bruce Sterling The Zenith Angle (v5.0) (epub)

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.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 escaped his notice.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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