Orphan's Triumph

TWENTY-ONE

IN MY LIFE, I’ve flown into many cities at night. Into Lhasa glowing under a Himalayan full moon. Into Marinus, its weapons forges painting drifting clouds red, in a two-mooned sky. Into Paris, sprawled like a glittering tapestry across the Seine. There are bigger cities. There are prettier cities. There are certainly friendlier cities. But no city in this galaxy quickens my heart like the boil of lights that is New York.

The tilt-wing banked above the East River ’s silver ribbon, then feathered down onto the pad atop the shoreward tower of the United Nations-Human Union complex.

The old UN Tower’s bustle made it glow like a Wheaties box, but the Human Union Tower stood dark, except for marker lights flashing on its roof pad. A young woman in a powder blue uniform met the tilt-wing and escorted me to ground level.

I scuffed the elevator floor as we rode down. “Carpet’s like new.”

She smiled. “Only the bottom three floors of this tower are occupied.”

The Human Union Tower replicated its United Nations twin in size and in antique, Atomic Age slab architecture.

It sounded inadequate that the diplomatic center of fourteen planets could be as small as the diplomatic center of just one. But most of the union’s populations, descended from Earthborn humans discarded by the Slugs, were preindustrial at best and Neolithic at worst. Earth sugar-daddyed the baby union the way the United States had the United Nations a century ago.

My guide led me across the Human Union Tower ’s lobby, our footsteps echoing on marble, and out onto the plaza that overlooked the East River. Traffic rumbled beneath and around me, and beyond the police barricades that ringed the plaza, crowds buzzed.

My guide pointed at the full moon as a shadow eclipsed it. “You see the holos, but…”

Maybe Ganymede had been brought in at midnight to preserve its visual impact for the next day’s ceremony, but the buzz of the crowds beyond the barricades built like the roar of the monsoon cascading off the Tressel Barrens rainforest. New Yorkers have seen it all, but when they haven’t, they turn out like kids for a circus parade.

I stared up, where my guide pointed, and let my jaw drop. Seeing a cruiser in space provides no sense of scale. Ganymede’s royal drift to Earth marked the first time a cruiser had ever tested its structural strength against Earth-normal gravity, though the shipwrights and physicists had insisted for years that a vessel shielded and strong enough to transit a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point could certainly withstand one puny planet’s gravity.

When Ganymede’s hull fully eclipsed the moon, the assembled thousands gasped. When she dropped below the moon and settled noiselessly above the river, like a reeled-in parade balloon on Thanksgiving morning, they cheered.

Ganymede was a blindingly white cylinder that hovered, oblivious to gravity, like a spidery, disaerodynamic dirigible, so close above the East River ’s chop that water splashed her hull. Yet the observation blister on her nose’s centerline nearly touched the top of the ancient iron suspension tower of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, three hundred fifty feet above the waves. A New Yorker who wanted to travel from Ganymede’s tip to view the Cavorite baffles on her tail booms would have to walk a mile, twenty blocks, from Fifty-ninth Street south to Thirty-ninth Street.

My guide’s mouth hung open. “My. God.”

“Your tax dollars had more to do with it than He did.” According to Maggie Irons, one reason for this extravaganza was to show the public what it had been paying for. And also to demonstrate that moving production to Mousetrap would free up unimaginably large manufacturing capacity on Earth, capacity that could be reconfigured to produce necessities like sports electrics and beach hoverboards.

A City of New York fireboat, spraying water from its nozzles in hundred-foot arcs, skittered out to Ganymede like a roach chasing a bus. Ganymede rolled silently around her axis, until the door of Bay Six out of thirty-six midship bays stabilized ten feet above the river, and then its hatch rolled back up into the hull. An ant jumped from the hundred-foot-wide hatch opening to the fireboat’s deck; then the hatch closed.

My guide asked, “Is that the guy you’re meeting?”

I nodded.

“I hear he’s from Tressel. I’ve never seen a Tressen.”

“He’s not Tressen. He’s Jude Metzger.”

She wrinkled her brow. “I’ve heard that name someplace.”

I sighed. Jude’s father had died saving the human race. Thirty years later, his mother had, too. But to this generation, they might as well have been Millard Fillmore and Clara Barton.

The fireboat glided alongside the riverbank, and Jude jumped to the quay, then climbed the stairs to the moonlit table of the plaza. He was twenty-six now. As lanky as his father, Jude had strawberry-blond hair and his mother’s olive Egyptian complexion.

He stepped onto the plaza in Tressen Class-A uniform, black and tailored.

When he saw me, his eyes widened. “I was expecting to see General Cobb. When they invited me, they said you wouldn’t christen the ship.”

“I wouldn’t. I came to see you.”

Amid the crowd noise, a silence swelled in the space between my godson and me.

My guide swallowed. “Do you need anything else, General?”

I kept staring at Jude. “No, thanks.”

She left the two of us.

I shrugged, said to my godson, “You eat on the way down?”

He shook his head. “But I’m okay.”

“Join me, then?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it.

I stood in the middle of a city of twenty-eight million, as alone as I’ve ever felt.

Then he shrugged back. “Sure.”

I turned and led him to a cab rank beyond the barricades. “We have a lot to talk about.”