punish us, or whatever -- I suppose I am taking money from the other guy. Well, at least it shows balance." Frank put his arm around her -- he had to reach up to do it -- and guided her out of his office. "Xenia, this witch doctor isn't going to be with us for long. And, believe me, a priest is going to be a lot easier for you to entertain than some of the fat cats we have to put up with."
"Me? Frank, if you knew how much I resent the implication that my time isn't valuable--"
"Bring her to the lecture. That will eat up a couple of hours."
"What lecture?"
He frowned. "I thought you knew. Reid Malenfant, on the philosophy of extraterrestrial life."
She had to retrieve the name from deep memory. "The dried-up old coot from the talk shows?"
"Reid Malenfant, the ex-astronaut. Reid Malenfant, the codiscoverer of alien life five years back. Reid Malenfant, modern icon, come to give our grease monkeys a pep talk." He grinned. "Lighten up, Xenia. Maybe it will be interesting."
"Are you going?"
"Of course I am." And, gently, he had closed the door.
Xenia and Dorothy were SmartDriven around Baikonur, the standard-issue corporate tour.
Baikonur, the Soviet Union's long-hidden space city, had been pretty much a derelict by the time Frank Paulis took it over and began renovation. Stranded at the heart of a chill, treeless steppe, connected to the Russian border by a single antique rail line, it was like a run-down military base, dotted with hangars and launch pads and fuel tanks. Even after years of work by Bootstrap here, there were still piles of rusty junk strewn over the more remote corners of the base -- some of it said to be the last relics of Russia's never-successful Moon rockets.
But Dorothy's attention was diverted, away from Xenia's sound bites on the history and the engineering and the mission of Bootstrap, by the folks Frank Paulis referred to as the Sports Fans: adherents of one view or another about the Gaijin, seemingly attracted here irresistibly.
The Sports Fans lived at the fringe of the launch complex in semi-permanent camps, contained by tough link fences. They spent their time chanting, costume wearing, leafleting, performing protests of one baffling kind or another, right up against the fences, carefully watched over by Bootstrap security staff and drone robots. They were funded, presumably, by savings, or sponsors, or by whatever they could sell of their experiences and their witness on the data nets, and they were a fat, easy revenue source for the local Kazakhs -- which was why they were tolerated here.
Xenia tried to guide Dorothy away from all this, but Dorothy demurred. And so they began a slow drive around the fences, as Dorothy peered out, and Xenia struggled to contain her impatience.
Public reaction to the Gaijin -- as it had developed over the five years since the announcement of the discovery by Nemoto and Malenfant -- had bifurcated. There were two broad schools of thought. The technical terms among psychologists and sociologists, Xenia had learned, were "millennialists" and "catastrophists."
The millennialists, taking their lead from thinkers like Carl Sagan -- not to mention Gene Roddenberry -- believed that no star-spanning culture could possibly be hostile to a more primitive species like humanity, and the Gaijin must therefore be on their way to educate us or uplift us or save us from ourselves. The more intellectual millennialists had at least produced some useful, if slanted, material: careful studies of parallels with intercultural contact in Earth's past, ranging from the dreadful fall-out of Western colonialism through to the essentially benevolent impact of the transmission of learning from Arabian and ancient Greek cultures to the medieval West.
But some millennialists were more direct. Various giant, elaborate structures -- featuring the peace sigil, the yin and yang, the Christian cross, a human hand -- had been cut or burned or painted on Earth's surface. Giant
"Me? Frank, if you knew how much I resent the implication that my time isn't valuable--"
"Bring her to the lecture. That will eat up a couple of hours."
"What lecture?"
He frowned. "I thought you knew. Reid Malenfant, on the philosophy of extraterrestrial life."
She had to retrieve the name from deep memory. "The dried-up old coot from the talk shows?"
"Reid Malenfant, the ex-astronaut. Reid Malenfant, the codiscoverer of alien life five years back. Reid Malenfant, modern icon, come to give our grease monkeys a pep talk." He grinned. "Lighten up, Xenia. Maybe it will be interesting."
"Are you going?"
"Of course I am." And, gently, he had closed the door.
Xenia and Dorothy were SmartDriven around Baikonur, the standard-issue corporate tour.
Baikonur, the Soviet Union's long-hidden space city, had been pretty much a derelict by the time Frank Paulis took it over and began renovation. Stranded at the heart of a chill, treeless steppe, connected to the Russian border by a single antique rail line, it was like a run-down military base, dotted with hangars and launch pads and fuel tanks. Even after years of work by Bootstrap here, there were still piles of rusty junk strewn over the more remote corners of the base -- some of it said to be the last relics of Russia's never-successful Moon rockets.
But Dorothy's attention was diverted, away from Xenia's sound bites on the history and the engineering and the mission of Bootstrap, by the folks Frank Paulis referred to as the Sports Fans: adherents of one view or another about the Gaijin, seemingly attracted here irresistibly.
The Sports Fans lived at the fringe of the launch complex in semi-permanent camps, contained by tough link fences. They spent their time chanting, costume wearing, leafleting, performing protests of one baffling kind or another, right up against the fences, carefully watched over by Bootstrap security staff and drone robots. They were funded, presumably, by savings, or sponsors, or by whatever they could sell of their experiences and their witness on the data nets, and they were a fat, easy revenue source for the local Kazakhs -- which was why they were tolerated here.
Xenia tried to guide Dorothy away from all this, but Dorothy demurred. And so they began a slow drive around the fences, as Dorothy peered out, and Xenia struggled to contain her impatience.
Public reaction to the Gaijin -- as it had developed over the five years since the announcement of the discovery by Nemoto and Malenfant -- had bifurcated. There were two broad schools of thought. The technical terms among psychologists and sociologists, Xenia had learned, were "millennialists" and "catastrophists."
The millennialists, taking their lead from thinkers like Carl Sagan -- not to mention Gene Roddenberry -- believed that no star-spanning culture could possibly be hostile to a more primitive species like humanity, and the Gaijin must therefore be on their way to educate us or uplift us or save us from ourselves. The more intellectual millennialists had at least produced some useful, if slanted, material: careful studies of parallels with intercultural contact in Earth's past, ranging from the dreadful fall-out of Western colonialism through to the essentially benevolent impact of the transmission of learning from Arabian and ancient Greek cultures to the medieval West.
But some millennialists were more direct. Various giant, elaborate structures -- featuring the peace sigil, the yin and yang, the Christian cross, a human hand -- had been cut or burned or painted on Earth's surface. Giant
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