Energized by Edward M. Lerner Page A

is our light coming from?”
    â€œNot light. Not as you mean it, anyway. The bots use lidar.”
    Like radar, only based on laser beams. “So this is all computer-synth imagery?”
    â€œUh-huh.” She stood and stretched. “I feel like coffee. How about you?”
    â€œSure.” He followed her into the kitchen, where a pair of binoculars sat on the counter near the back door. “Wildlife?” he guessed, pointing.
    â€œStargazing.” She finished putting up the pot of coffee and grabbed the binocs. “Come outside.”
    The night was cool and cloudless. After the moon, waxing gibbous as he had remembered, The Space Place, playground of petrocrats, kleptocrats, and the other superrich, was the brightest object in the sky. Only this was a sky unlike any he had seen in a long time. Far from big-city lights, the stars blazed. Thousands of them.
    â€œTry these.” She handed him the binoculars—
    Through which countless more stars shone. And there, aglow in infrared from the residual heat of their last passes through sunlight, tiny shapes: an oval, a rectangle, and, the brightest of the three, a not-quite-round pearl. Phoebe’s sunshield and PS-1, seen at a bit of an angle, and The Space Place. Phoebe itself was too dark and cold to spot even with thermal imaging.
    Her hand was on his back, turning him. “Now look. No, up a little. A little higher.”
    â€œAt what?”
    â€œYou’ll know it when you’re there.”
    The Milky Way looked like spilt milk—with a scattering of diamond chips.
    â€œWow,” he said. “Thanks.” He slowly turned, taking in the grandeur of the night sky. He eventually thought to offer Valerie her binocs. To the naked eye the night now seemed blacker than ever. “It’s very dark out here.”
    â€œOh, crap!”
    Huh? “What’s wrong?”
    â€œYou didn’t plan to drive back tonight, did you? If you think it’s dark here…”
    Think how dark it will be in the forest, crossing the mountains, he completed. “Not a problem. I have a room for the night in the observatory residence hall. You don’t need to chase me off just yet.”
    â€œThat’s good.” A sudden, unexpected peck on the cheek suggested she meant it. “And if you’d like, how about you come by in the morning for breakfast?”
    Turning, slipping his arms around her waist, Marcus said, “I’d like that a lot.”
    Â 
    Monday, May 8
    From the secluded anonymity of a black stretch limo, shared only with a longtime assistant, Yakov Nikolayevich Brodsky watched urban streets slip past.
    He always enjoyed visiting Chicago. With its extensive expatriate community, he dined well here, on everything from blini to borscht to stroganoff. The finest elaborate banquet cost less than a passable snack in Moscow—
    Because few here could have afforded Moscow prices.
    And so, in a very different way he relished the signs of America’s decline. The weed-choked medians. The empty stores and shuttered factories. The would-be day laborers milling about in a 7-Eleven parking lot. Most of all he enjoyed the waiting lines and per-gallon prices as they passed neighborhood gas stations.
    What a difference a decade could make.
    The limo sped downtown amid an escort of blue-and-white Chicago police cruisers. Lights flashing, they crossed under the rickety elevated train tracks that demarcated the Loop.
    â€œWe’re almost there, sir,” the driver announced soon after. “Five minutes.”
    A driver! How quaintly decadent. But doubtless the driver with whom he had been provided also spied on him. “Very well.”
    Yakov savored, too, Chicago’s distinctive architecture. Perhaps his favorite example was the masterpiece that came into view as the motorcade turned onto Jackson Boulevard.
    For decades the Chicago Board of Trade Building had towered over everything else in this