The Zenith Angle Read online

  THE ZENITH ANGLE

  Bruce Sterling

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Adcard

  Copyright

  ZENITH ANGLE:

  a measured angle between the sky directly overhead and any object seen in the sky.

  PROLOGUE

  COLORADO, SEPTEMBER 1999

  The Most Important Man in the World put his pants on one leg at a time. Then he put on his boots and his Stetson.

  He checked the cabin’s rusty mirror. The Most Important Man in the World looked pretty good in his cowboy hat. His haunted burnt-out eyes, his white stubble, and his lined sunken cheeks . . . wearing a cowboy hat changed all those things. In his Stetson, Tom DeFanti looked downright weather-beaten. Rugged. Solid. He was a man of the earth.

  The little cabin was stark, lonely, old, and simple. It lacked running water, wiring, and a toilet. It required this mountain cabin and the 16,812 acres of Pinecrest Ranch to free Tom DeFanti from his monuments. His cable franchises. His newspapers. His Web sites. His news magazine. His Internet fiber-optic backbone. His international charitable foundation. His monuments loomed over him like so many tombstones.

  Then there were his other, less mentionable monuments. They orbited high overhead, watching the globe around the clock.

  DeFanti carefully buttoned his thick flannel shirt. September light was fading in the small glass panes.

  Though he had been raised like an ugly swan by a working-class Italian family, Thomas DeFanti had always wanted and expected to become a very important man. However, DeFanti had never expected to become as incredibly rich as he was in the autumn of 1999. His holdings had blown up like a mushroom cloud, due to the Internet boom. This brought new attention to DeFanti that he didn’t much like. It brought new expectations that he didn’t know how to fulfill. Life for the very rich was always strange, and often dangerous.

  The man who had built this old Colorado cabin had also been a very rich man. DeFanti had studied him closely. He was grateful for the dead man’s useful lessons in how to get by.

  The dead man had once been a very important Chicago banker. In 1911 he’d built the Colorado cabin, a tiny shelter for his astronomical observatory. The cabin was a quiet place, a safe place. The banker’s ghost still hung there under the close black rafters, in a vapor of horse sweat, brandy, and fine cigars. Just like Tom DeFanti, the dead man had slept in that narrow, no-nonsense iron bed, its frame as solid as a torture rack. There was no room in that bed for his fireball society wife. The dead man’s demanding rich kids were also three days away by a good long train ride. As for the dead man’s lawyers, accountants, vice presidents, and stockholders, they might as well be stuck up on the Moon.

  Here in the mountains of Pinecrest, the world had to let a man live. Clear air, elk, forests, red granite, fine fishing, good shooting. And the telescope, of course. Telescopes justified everything, for both Tom DeFanti and his dear friend and mentor, the dead banker. Telescopes brought both of them perspective, and solace, and a true kind of happiness. Telescopes, long nights left alone, and those sweet, dark, endless skies.

  The cabin’s stone hearth held a fragrant tang of pine ashes. In an old cedar chest, the dead banker had carefully hidden the sacred books of his boyhood. They were a boy’s turn-of-the-century reading, adventure stories about industry and engineering, bought for a nickel each from the newsstands of boomtown Chicago. Steam Man of the Plains by “NoName,” and about three dozen others. On overcast nights when the seeing was bad, DeFanti had read the flaking novelettes by lantern light. They were simple, good stories. Lots of manly action.

  DeFanti removed the cowboy hat and splashed at his face from the tin bowl and white pitcher. He yanked open a rustic wooden drawer and thumbed through his private galaxy of pills. What would it be tonight? Prozac yes, aspirin yes, Viagra no thank you. Gingko yes. Valium yes, half a Valium, just to take some of the edge off. Plus yohimbe and vitamin A: they were good for his night vision.

  DeFanti knocked his pills back with sips from a steaming coffee thermos. He gnawed at buffalo jerky to settle the drugs in his gut. DeFanti had discovered bison meat in his pursuit of a heart-healthy diet. Bison meat was the very best meat in America. Tom DeFanti now owned over four thousand bison.

  DeFanti unlatched the cabin’s door and left, carrying his fringed rawhide jacket. There was no sign of civilization, not a glimmer of light, not a telephone pole. One exception: far below in a stony bowl of hills, faint amber glows flicked on at the ranch’s main hacienda. Over at the sprawling Pinecrest headquarters, Wife Number Four and her ranch staff were hosting a happy crowd of German cowboy tourists. The Germans had paid fifteen hundred dollars each to shoot a Pinecrest bull bison with their choice of Colt six-shooters or historical buffalo rifles.

  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 Pac
ific 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. With the Air Force, and with the Space Force, and with the Navy’s FLTSATCOM, and with the National Photographic Interpretation Center. With aerospace engineering labs in Houston. With R&D labs in Northern Virginia. With camera labs in Rochester, New York. With antenna labs in Boulder, Colorado. And with Communists.

  One glorious day during perestroika 1988, Tom DeFanti had found that he was helping American and Soviet space spies to share some very intimate notes. Long before the Hubble Space Telescope had ever appeared to scan the distant galaxies, Cold War spy satellites had carried giant telescopes into orbit. Those orbiting telescopes always looked down.

  Through persistence and competence, Tom DeFanti had become the planet’s go-to guy for “national technical means of verification.” Not because DeFanti himself was a spy, although passing those notes at a disarmament conference certainly made him into one. No: it was because Tom DeFanti was basically running the spy-sat business. He was carrying the technical torch for the world’s most secret industry. A very secret industry, nothing at all like normal astronomy, and not very much like normal computers, but an industry that combined both. It was quite a big, advanced, very high-tech industry. A big, dark, powerful industry. Tom DeFanti was the man within private enterprise who was most advancing that industry. He was building satellite hardware for gigantic spaceborne spy cameras. He was financing analysis software for huge torrents of visual data.

  That made him an important man. Him, Tom DeFanti: a frantic business hustler who had stuck together a Houston aerospace company on a wing, a prayer, and some very quiet yachts packed with bales of Acapulco gold. He’d done some crazy things, for some desperate reasons. But he’d always had one business goal in mind: his own personal charge card for the Deep Black. Because the Deep Black budget for spy satellites was twice the size of the CIA’s budget. And the Congress never ran any audits there.

  The spy-sat community never advertised in Aviation Week. Once you became a trusted Deep Black supplier, though, you were a made man. If you could deliver their hardware on time, quietly, and within specs, you were a miracle for them. You were a major asset and to hell with the so-called budget. Six-thousand-dollar hammers; only to be expected. Ten-thousand-dollar toilet seats; go enjoy yourself.

  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-Com
mie announced. “That was this trip’s high point. That neutrino observatory. Tom, it’s all you said it was, and it’s more. It is insanely great.”

  “So, what, they gave you the lunch tour? Take this hat back.”

  “The name of DeFanti-san opens every door in astronomy! They loved me at Kamiokande. Keep the hat, Tom. The acolyte wears no hat when the Master lacks a hat.” The Dot-Commie tunneled into his plastic windbreaker. It featured a snug little drawstring hood. He yanked the hood over his big egg head and grinned winningly. He looked like a plastic elf.

  “At Kamiokande, they’re underground and galactic at the same time!” the Dot-Commie crowed, dancing in place a little to shake off the cold. “About a billion photon tubes down there. They catch neutrinos inside giant tubs of water. The Japanese are underground, underwater, and observing the galaxy. All at the same time!”

  “That scheme works out for them, does it?”

  “They get major results!” The Dot-Commie dug into his magic black bag and retrieved his gleaming silver laptop. “So, which is bigger, DeFanti-sensei? The universe, or the screen that shows us the universe?”

  “It’s all about the screens now, kid.”

  “You bet, Ascended Master! You are beyond Zen!”

  DeFanti chewed mournfully at his grizzled lower lip. “Quit bragging. It’s more of the same, that’s all. That LINEAR nonsense. And NEAT, and LONEOS, and SPACEWATCH. Shipping astronomy on Internet routers. Why in hell did I ever pay for those things?”

  “They can search every pixel in the sky, Tom.”

  DeFanti ignored him. “Nowadays, an amateur couldn’t spot a fresh comet to save his life! Those stupid scanning machines will always beat him to that. God damn it, I always wanted to bag my own comet. Always. ‘Comet DeFanti’!”

  DeFanti put his twitching eyelid to the chilly rubber eyepiece of his Questar. He knew very well that the sky was being mapped with ruthless digital detail. That wasn’t the part that scared him. No, the scary part was what space telescopes had done to the Earth. Pinecrest Ranch was easily visible from space. Any passing cosmonaut could see the place with the naked eye. The National Reconnaissance Office, as a meaningful gesture to a favorite supplier, had sent DeFanti a digital map of his whole Colorado spread.