Dark as Day

by Charles Sheffield

  “That’s right.” Janeed glared at Sebastian. Beyond a muttered greeting he had so far said not a word.

  The woman, who had introduced herself as Dr. Valnia Bloom—Dr. Director Valnia Bloom, head of the Department of Scientific Research on Ganymede—said, “Would you care to explain that?”

  “Certainly.” Jan looked at Sebastian, waiting. He said not a word, and finally she went on, “This will take a few minutes.”

  Sebastian said, “It will rain hard in a few minutes.”

  Valnia Bloom seemed skeptical, and looked up at the cloud-barred sky. Janeed wondered, had the woman ever seen rain? It certainly didn’t rain water on Ganymede, or anywhere else in the Outer System. On Venus it rained sulfuric acid, and on Titan it rained droplets of hydrocarbons. On Triton, Janeed had read, there were geysers of liquid nitrogen, but they hardly counted as rain. Sebastian was staring vacantly at Valnia Bloom, who finally said, “We’ll see about the rain. Go ahead. Keep it short.”

  Jan stared daggers at Sebastian. Her look said, Talk! After a long silence, she felt that she had to go on. “Well, most of the onshore fossil fuels of Earth were always in the northern hemisphere, which is still uninhabitable. The coal under the Antarctic ice-cap is inaccessible, too. But the southern hemisphere is booming, and there’s a big need for energy and plastics, and no way to satisfy it.”

  “I thought that Cyrus Mobarak had solved your energy problem, with the Moby Midget fusion reactors.”

  “He did, for anything that can handle eight megawatts and up. But there’s a need all over the developing southern regions for small, portable units that generate only a few kilowatts. That’s what that provides.”

  Jan gestured to the extractor, sticking up from the middle of the GM platform, and the pipeline running away to the southwest. Dr. Bloom stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  “Methane,” Sebastian said, a split-second before Janeed felt she would be obliged to jump in again. Thank God, a word at last! But apparently that one word was all they would get. Jan finally added, “Methane down on the seabed. Trillions and trillions of tons of it.”

  “But methane is lighter than water. In fact”—Valnia Bloom was frowning, in the effort of recollection—“the atmosphere of Earth is mainly oxygen and nitrogen. Methane is a lighter gas than either one of those. It can’t possibly be found down on your ocean floor.”

  “Oh, it’s not. I mean, it is, but it’s not stored in gaseous form. It’s stored as methane clathrates—a structure that has four molecules of methane locked into a stable form with twenty-three molecules of water. At the temperatures of the deep ocean, around four Celsius, methane clathrates are solids. And they’re denser than water, so if they form on the ocean bed they won’t float up to the surface. And everything that sinks down from the surface of the sea decays and rots, and produces methane.”

  Dr. Bloom looked less than thrilled by that vision of universal rot and corruption, a phenomenon unique to Earth. Other worlds, her expression suggested, kept their decay and recycling well away from civilized life; but she nodded and Jan went on, “So with all that methane from decomposition, plus naturally upwelling primordial methane, the seabed contains enormous amounts of it. And of course there’s loads of water. So we have these enormous clathrate beds, hundreds of kilometers across and tens of meters deep. All we do—all that does”—she pointed to the extractor—“is run the spine down to the clathrate beds and warm them up a bit. The methane is released in the higher temperatures, and rises to the surface, and flows away through the pipeline.”

  Their interviewer was pleased. For the first time she was smiling. Dr. Bloom said, “So you’re miners. Yes, I guess that you are.”

  “And you know,” Jan went on, “now that I think of it, I bet the same method would work for the Europan ocean. There’s life, there’s decomposition, there’s plenty of water.”

  That was less of a success. The smile became a fixed and very starchy frown. “I thought that it was well-known, even in the Inner System”—her tone implied, the primitive Inner System—“that Europa is off-limits. Native life was discovered there five years ago. We do not care to have the only other known life form in the Universe contaminated for minor industrial gain.”

  Sebastian opened his mouth. He was going to choose this worst moment to argue with the interviewer, Janeed felt sure of it. That would cancel out any good impression they had made. She could think of no way to cut him off, until like a gift from Heaven she felt two heavy raindrops strike her on the left cheek and square on the nose.

  “Here it comes,” she said, “just the way Sebastian said it would. Let’s get below, before we’re all soaked.”

  And maybe on the way I’ll have a chance to get you to one side, you moon-faced lump, and say that talking about the wrong things is worse than not talking at all.

  * * *

  The best-laid plans …

  Dr. Valnia Bloom stuck to Sebastian, tight as a vacuum seal, all the way below until the three of them were packed into the tiny room that served as the junior crew hideaway.

  Apparently the interviewer had reached a new point on her agenda, because she listened in silence to an internal prompt, opened a file, and pushed it forward.

  “These yours?”

  “Yes.” Janeed recognized her own test answers, to both the standardized question set and the free-form invitation to pick a subject and work it through. She had taken a chance, reviewing the growth of the economy of the Jovian moons since first colonization, then using that to make projections on Saturn and Uranus system development.

  She expected at least a comment, but Dr. Bloom merely grunted, picked up a second file, and laid it in front of Sebastian.

  “And this is yours?”

  He peered, as though he had never seen the file in his life, then nodded. “Yep. That’s mine.”

  Sebastian nodded. Janeed winced, she hoped invisibly. It was the standard question set, and a quick glance was enough to show that at least half had been left blank.

  “How about these?”

  This time it was half a dozen sheets. They showed not writing or numbers but drawings, black-and-white sketches with the unfinished look of something done at high speed. They were—Janeed ought to have guessed it—cloud formations, whorls and bars and herringbone patterns, mixed together with no apparent logic.

  Sebastian took his time, stared, and at last said, “Yep. Didn’t have time to finish this one.” He pointed at a swirl like the image of a moving hurricane, spinning off smaller whorls from its trailing edge.

  “They resemble storms on the face of the planet Saturn. Did you base what you drew on something you had seen?”

  “Yep. There’s a regular vid feed, images from Mars and Jupiter and Saturn. I watch them. Uranus, too, though there’s nothing to see there.”

  “You mean no cloud patterns.”

  “Smooth as a billiard ball.”

  “But you didn’t just copy these from the latest video feed.”

  Sebastian frowned. “No. Didn’t copy them.”

  “So where did you get them? I assume that you took the tests under controlled conditions.”

  “We did.” Jan was not being spoken to, but she couldn’t keep quiet. “No one could come or go, no one could look at what anybody else was doing.”

  Valnia Bloom ignored her. “Where did you get these drawings, Mr. Birch?”

  Sebastian cleared his throat. “Well, I seen Saturn pictures on the vid feed. And these ones, I like dreamed, the way you do when drawing goes good.”

  If Janeed’s wince had been invisible before, she was sure it wasn’t now. Fortunately, Dr. Valnia Bloom seemed to be taking no interest at all in what Janeed did—until she raised her head and speared both Sebastian and Janeed with a single glance.

  “Your application was a rather unusual one. You are both over thirty, much older than our norm. Also, you asked to be considered as a team, but not singly.”

  Jan nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

&n
bsp; “And that is still your position?”

  Jan nodded again and glared at Sebastian, who said, “Yep.”

  “Very well. So be it.” Dr. Bloom collected the files and stood up. “That will be all.”

  “Thank you.” The words stuck in Janeed’s throat, and she had to swallow and start over. “Thank you for letting us try. Will we be allowed to try again?”

  “I think not.” Maybe Dr. Valnia Bloom was a sadist, or maybe she had been trained not to show feelings, because she had an odd little smile on her face. “There will be no second try.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “However, as I understand it, you are both required to give two weeks notice for service with General Minerals. I suggest that you do so immediately. Two and a half weeks from now there will be places reserved for you on a passenger shuttle. Once in a micro-gravity environment you will undergo complete physical examinations, after which a high-acceleration transit vessel will take you to Ganymede. Formal indoctrination will begin there.”

  She was heading up the steep ladder that led back to the main platform. Halfway up, she ducked her head and turned to where Janeed and Sebastian sat stunned at the little table.

  “I should mention one other thing of interest. You took the test three weeks ago. Correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Those sketches that Sebastian made at that time. They closely resemble actual storms on Saturn. But you did not copy them.”

  “No, sir.” Sebastian spoke firmly for the first time. “I mean, no, ma’am. I said already, I didn’t copy them.”

  “My last remark was not a question but a statement. I know that you did not copy images forwarded to Earth, for the best of all possible reasons.” Valnia Bloom was at the top of the stairs when she added, “You could not have. The storm system that you drew did not appear on the face of Saturn until ten days ago.”

  4

  THE BAT CAVE, PANDORA,

  YEAR 2097,

  SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

  At about the time when Dr. Valnia Bloom spread before Sebastian Birch his sketches of Saturnian clouds and asked about their origins, Rustum Battachariya was in a position to take a look at the real thing. All he had to do was walk twenty paces to the end of the Bat Cave. Then he could ride an ascending elevator to an observation chamber on Pandora’s surface, float forward in the negligible gravity of the tidally-locked little moon, and stare down on the vast rings and broad face of Saturn itself.

  Not, of course, that Bat had the least intention of doing any such thing. He never went near the surface, and anyway he was busy. He and his software tools were locked in combat with one of the most formidable intelligences in the Solar System, and if things went well the fight would continue for the next ten or twelve hours. The nearest actual humans were maybe a million kilometers away, observing the Von Neumanns at work on Saturn’s giant moon, Titan. That suited Bat fine. He neither needed help, nor wanted it.

  The decision to move the Bat Cave from Ganymede’s deep interior had not been made lightly. Bat had worked there, productively and misanthropically and generally ignored, for more than fifteen years. Then, four years ago, the worst thing possible had happened: he had made a trip to Europa to resolve a mystery, and in the course of his visit the existence of an alien life form in Europa’s deep ocean had been revealed. It was nothing like the distant intelligences sought by Jack and Philip Beston in their SETI projects, merely a curious aperiodic crystal with the ability to reproduce and with a minimum of internal metabolism. But it was enough. Enough to have Europa placed off-limits for development, and enough for something else. A member of the media—the invasive, intrusive, inquisitive, insatiable, intolerable media—had been present on Europa, and Nell Cotter in her report had fingered Bat as the hero of the whole incident. The name, shaved black cannonball head, and three-hundred-kilo body of Rustum Battachariya became famous throughout the Solar System. All hope of privacy was lost.

  After that, almost daily, some media wretch would employ a combination of bribery and bare-faced lies to discover the location of the Bat Cave. They would then seek out Bat and plead for exclusive interviews.

  Four months of this was more than Bat could stand. He began the search. Where to go?

  At first there was a temptation to move inward. Following the ending of the Great War, Earth had become the Sol-ward limit of human existence. The research station on Mercury and the research domes on Venus had been utterly destroyed. Bat could have gone there. But both Mercury and Venus had substantial surface gravity, and Bat, although tolerant of Ganymede’s weaker pull, wanted less weight rather than more. As bad or worse, as the System steadily recovered, so the urge to rebuild lost resources grew. Scientific pressure was increasing for a station on Venus and Mercury. If that happened, in the whole Inner System there was nowhere else to go. You had four planets and three moons, and no wiggle room.

  Bat turned his analytical eye outward. The habitable Jovian satellites thrummed with life and daily became more crowded. You had to look farther, recognizing that no matter what you did today, at some time in the future you might have to make another change. He expected to live a long time. The lesser satellites of Uranus or even of Neptune were not beyond consideration.

  He made his decision, he made his plans, and when all was ready he resigned his position as head of Passenger Transport Schedules for the Outer System. He revealed where he was going only to his boss, Magrit Knudsen, first obliging her to swear that she would never contact him, visit him, or reveal his whereabouts to any living soul. And then he relented. Magrit Knudsen had provided protective cover for Bat for more than a dozen years. She could, he said, contact him if she was in personal difficulty. Or—an afterthought—if someone came to her with an intellectual problem that she deemed worthy of Bat’s powers. He was still a senior member of the Puzzle Network, and he had no intention of abandoning that activity.

  Bat arranged to move the whole Bat Cave, complete with its unique contents, to a natural chamber deep within one of Saturn’s minor satellites, Pandora. Everything was handled by machines controlled by Bat alone, and when the operation was finished he used his knowledge of the Ganymede computer systems to erase all records. Then it was time for the final step. Bat had to conquer his own agoraphobia enough to suffer the long journey through open space.

  He did it the easy way. He imbibed a carefully mixed combination of hypnagogic drugs, closed his eyes, and opened them to find himself on Pandora.

  The moon was an irregular rock splinter fifty kilometers long and thirty across. Compared with Saturn’s nine major moons it was a flyspeck, skimming along underneath them and orbiting the planet in less than a day. Since it was above the great ring systems and had a downward view partly blocked by them, no one would choose it as a preferred site for planetary surveillance. It had no atmosphere, no mineral resources, no natural water or other volatiles. It should have no interest to anyone.

  For Bat, however, Pandora seemed perfect. He had no desire for a window seat to examine Saturn, and he would bring his own self-contained habitat, together with ample volatiles to last a century. After that, if necessary, he would review his options.

  And so far Pandora had lived up to all of Bat’s expectations. In three full years, he had been plagued by not a single visitor. Magrit Knudsen had contacted him exactly once, when she was faced with a transportation requirement involving an apparently impossible scheduling conflict. Bat embedded the structure within a more general class of problem, provided an algorithm for the whole set, and sent a complete answer to Magrit two days later. He had allowed himself the indulgence of one major gloat before returning to his studies of lost artifacts of the Great War.

  Today, however, gloating and Great War relics were an indulgence that he could not afford. The clock was ticking. In one more day, the Seine would be activated. This must be a final test.

  Bat sat on a specially-made seat at the “thinking” end of the Bat Cave, his black-clad bulk balloonin
g out in a way impossible in higher gravity. He had sent out his software probes, and now he was patiently awaiting their return. The system that he had established was designed to mimic, so far as any entity can mimic something larger than itself, the functions of the whole, quantum-entangled Seine. Bat was on the attack with it, working his way inward past the invisible and dynamic defenses of his antagonist. So far, the probes of his Seine-simulators had been thoroughly balked.

  “Forty minutes since anything happened,” said a rasping voice from close by his side. “Are you stuck?”

  Bat turned. “Let us say that we are temporarily halted. Two firewalls have been negotiated, but the third provides great resistance.” He did not seem surprised by the sudden voice. The image in the display volume at his side showed the face of a balding, squint-eyed man in late middle age. The newcomer seemed to be staring at the screens, too, but Bat knew that was just for show. Mord received all his inputs in real-time. That gave him a definite advantage, because he knew what Bat’s programs were reporting before Bat did.

  “It’s taking longer than ever before.” It was hard to tell from Mord’s tone if he thought that good or bad.

  Bat nodded. “When did you enter?”

  “Right at the beginning. I noticed the changes in resource allocation.” Mord’s eyes narrowed as he peered at the latest outputs. “I was wrong last time, when I thought you’d never get in. Want to go double or quits? I say, this time you definitely won’t break the defenses within twelve hours.”

  Bat closed his eyes and settled back in his chair to ponder the question. He glanced at the clock. Five hours had already elapsed since his first onslaught. His foe’s defenses showed no sign of weakening. But with seven hours to go, and at least one line of attack still held in reserve …