High Justice

"Hello, Laurie Jo."

She moved toward him, and he hoped she would come to him; yet he prayed that she wouldn't-not again. It was long forgotten, and better so. "You wanted me Dona Hansen?"

"I've always wanted you with me, Aeneas. I thought this time you'd burned so many bridges you'd have to come."

"And you were right. I've no place left."

"You should have stayed with me. What have you accomplished with your crusades?" She saw the pain in his eyes. "No. I didn't mean that. Will you believe me when I say that I wish I'd been wrong? I've always wished I'd been wrong about Greg Tolland." She turned and swept a hand around the paneled room. "I'm forgetting my ma

So she remembered that too. That was how he'd stood the last time; but it hadn't been in an ornately paneled room with deep carpets, only the cheap student apartment in Los Angeles that they'd shared. And how does she remember those days, when she wasn't Dona Laura Hansen, and we sang and made love and hitchhiked around the country?… "What did you have in mind, Laurie Jo? What does Hansen Enterprises have for me?"

"Anything, Aeneas. Anything you'll take."

And she meant it, he knew. But the offer wasn't as generous as it seemed: she wouldn't attach any strings, but his daemon would. It was the only public story about him that was completely true: Aeneas MacKenzie, the man who never accepted a job he wouldn't do, the single-minded robot who'd sacrifice everything to duty…

"If you don't want a drink, we should be leaving." she said. "We're due in Cabo San Lucas in three hours, and that's two hundred kilometers… but you know that."

"I know that."

It was all changed. There had been a paved road south from La Paz to Cabo San Lucas for as long as Aeneas could remember, but it had been the only one in lower Baja; now there were dozens. The city of Todos Santos was sending out tentacles onto the surrounding hills, and there were no longer burros on dirt roads; now, huge trucks loaded with agricultural products roared past.

"But there are still horses," Laurie Jo told him. "Horses with great leather saddles and silver trim, and the vaqueros ride them proudly… Remember when we thought how grand it would be if every rancher had a fine horse and saddle? Now they all do."

"And you did that."

"And I did that."

But at what a cost, Aeneas said silently. What price a proud and honest culture? A way of life? But it was a way of life that included disease and early death, children carrying well water in buckets because there wasn't enough money for piping and pumps, and the withe and mud houses with palm thatch roofs were very quaint and kind to the ecology, but they didn't keep the bugs from gnawing the children at night…

Now those were gone. Concrete block, poured concrete, aluminum roofs, floors of concrete and not dirt, screen doors-they had come to Baja. And the children sang in schoolyards, and they were healthy, and the land was dying as land always dies when desert is irrigated.

"They're mining the soil, Laurie Jo. It can't last, and you know it."

She nodded. They drove smoothly on black pavement past straight green furrows of cotton and soybeans; once they had come here in a Jeep, and the land had been chaparral and sentinel cactus and incredibly thin cattle whose bones jutted out as if they were dying, but they weren't, they were a hardy breed who could live on the scrub brush… "It can't last, but something can. We've brought hope and progress, and we'll see that-" but she couldn't finish and he knew why. There was no cure for dead soil but time; and these people's grandchildren would live among strangers. Not even Hansen Enterprises could keep Baja fertile for more than a few generations.

"Remember this grade?" she asked. Miguel drove the big Cadillac smoothly so that it hardly faltered; but they had babied the Jeep up that rocky hill with its interminable switchbacks, some so narrow that the rear of the car hung far out over the edge as they reversed to ease around the sharp turns.

At the top of the rise they saw the end of Baja laid out like a map: the grey Pacific to their right, and beyond land's end a sharp line where the Pacific waters met the bright blue of the Sea of Cortez . Hills along the shore, and the red tile and palm trees of resort hotels everywhere, green oases on the sandy beaches.

The town of Cabo San Lucas was at the very tip of the peninsula: just beyond it were high, rocky hills, and over them the stormy Pacific. The hills curled around a bay that had once been so lovely Aeneas had cried when he saw it.

He could cry again: the bay was choked with ships, and the pueblo was gone, replaced by rows of town houses, high-bay industrial sheds, a city with the heart and soul of Los Angeles in its days of frantic expansion. And north of Cabo, along the Pacific shore, where the water came in cool and clear, were the reactors: domes fifty meters high, twelve of them, each with its attendant blockhouses and power plants and sea-water ponds where the chemicals of the sea were extracted. There was a vast jungle of insulators and spidery cube towers and fi

Laurie Jo moved her head in a sidewise jerk, a peculiar tic to her left ear. She'd done that before, and she saw Aeneas looking at her curiously. "Implant," she said. "I was asking for the time. Miguel, take us to the observation tower."

" Si, Dona Laura."

"I hadn't known," said Aeneas. "But I should have guessed. How do you ask questions?"

"I merely think them." She indicated a little console in her purse, and a panel at her side in the car. The panel swung down to reveal a computer input console. "My implant is keyed to these, and there's a data link from the car to any of my plants. I've asked them when the next scheduled launchings are, and we're just in time. You've never seen one, have you?"

"Not live," He wanted to think about what she'd told him. The implants weren't common-at over a million dollars each, they wouldn't be. A little transceiver, wired directly into the nervous system, a short-range computer link. Provided that she had access to a transmitter- the one in her purse was very small and could be manipulated without anyone seeing it-Laurie Jo could know everything known to the largest computer net on earth.

She could ask it to solve any equation, look up any dossier, find the commercial strength of any company, and hear the output directly and silently. "That must be useful at board meetings," said Aeneas.

"Yes, Most of my colleagues don't know about it. Will you keep my secret?"

"Of course."

"And my other secrets? If I show you everything, will-will you use it again? Or are your crusades against me ended?" Her eyes were very blue and she was very close; and Aeneas knew what she was doing. She had deliberately driven him over a route they'd taken seventeen years ago, and she'd done her hair the way she had then. The linen suit she now wore wasn't like the jeans and chambray shirts of years past, and she'd never again have the eyes that Laurie Jo Preston had; Laurie Jo Hansen had seen too much. But she could try.

"What would be the point?" Aeneas asked. "I won my crusade. We liberated Jerusalem." And it had been as it must have been for a true knight of the Middle Ages: how could he rejoice when he saw his comrades wade in blood to the altar of the Prince of Peace? When he saw the Chivalry of the West grubbing for lands in the Kingdom of Jersualem? "I no longer have weapons to fight you with."

"It's not enough. Aeneas, I want you to look at what I've done. I want you to see the choices I have. The real choices, not the theoretical ones. And when you've seen all that, I want you to join me. But I can't even try to convince you unless-Aeneas, I owe it to my colleagues not to bring a spy into their councils."