Mercury by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova [Bova, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, sf_space
ISBN: 1435294548
Google: 9Y3FoBStR94C
Amazon: 0765343142
Barnesnoble: 0765343142
Goodreads: 768916
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ciudad De Cielo

Elliott Danvers was lonely after Molina left for Australia. He missed their meals together, their adversarial chats, the verbal cut and parry that kept his mind stimulated.

Over the weeks that followed Molina’s departure, Danvers tried to forget his own needs and buried himself in his work. No, he reminded himself time and again. Not my work. God’s work. He felt puzzled that Atlanta had shown no visible reaction to his report that nanotechnology was being used to build the skytower. He had expected some action, or at least an acknowledgement of his intelligence. Nothing. Not a word of thanks or congratulations on a job well done. Well, he told himself, a good conscience is our only sure reward. And he plunged himself deeper into his work. Still, he felt nettled, disappointed, ignored.

He went to Bracknell and asked permission to convert one of the warehouse buildings into a nondenominational chapel. As the sky-tower neared completion, some of the buildings fell into disuse, some of the workers departed for their homes. Danvers noted that there seemed to be fewer Yankee and Latino construction workers in the streets, and more Asian computer and electronics technicians.

“A chapel?” Bracknell looked surprised when Danvers raised the question.

Standing in front of Bracknell’s desk, Danvers nodded. “You have several empty buildings available. I won’t need much in way of—”

“You mean you’ve been working here all this time without a church building?” Bracknell looked genuinely surprised. “Where do you hold your services?”

“Outdoors, mostly. Sometimes in my quarters, for smaller groups.”

Bracknell’s office was far from imposing. Nothing more than a corner room in the corrugated-metal operations building. He sat at a scuffed and dented steel desk. One wall held a smart screen that nearly reached the low ceiling. Another had photos of the tower at various stages of its construction pasted to it. Two windows looked out on the streets and, beyond one of them, the dark trunk of the tower, rising above the distant green hills and into the heavens.

Gesturing to the plain plastic chair in front of his desk, Bracknell said, “I thought we already had a church here, someplace.”

Danvers smiled bitterly as he settled his bulk in the creaking little chair. “You’re not a churchgoer.”

With an almost sheepish grin, Bracknell admitted, “You’ve got me there.”

“Are you a Believer?”

Bracknell thought it over for a moment, his head cocked slightly. “Yes, I think I can truthfully say that I am. Not in any organized religion, understand. But—well, the universe is so blasted orderly. I guess I do believe there’s some kind of presence overseeing everything. Childhood upbringing, I suppose. It’s hard to overcome.”

“You don’t have to apologize about it,” Danvers said, a little testily. He was thinking, Not in any organized religion, the man says. He’s one of those intellectual esthetes who rationalizes everything and thinks that that’s religion. Nothing more than a damnable Deist, at best.

Bracknell called up a map of the city and told his computer to highlight the unused buildings. The wall screen showed four of them in red.

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