“Forget the double-or-quits offer,” Mord said abruptly. “Bet’s off.”
Bat blinked his eyes open and stared at his banked displays. He could see no change. And then, suddenly, he could. A fixed loop of instructions was being run, hundreds of millions of times a second, and sections of the displays were slowly changing color.
“Ahhhh.” His long exhalation slowly faded. “There is penetration of the third firewall.”
“Is there another one behind it?”
“I am afraid not. Complete access can be only moments away.”
“That’s it, then.” Mord leered out of the display. “All right, fat boy. Back to the drawing board.”
Bat nodded, but his mind was already beginning the curious change needed to move perspective from attacker to defender. He had spent a whole year building what he hoped was an impenetrable series of shields, traps, blind ends, and firewalls designed to thwart something—even a something with the full power of the Seine—from entering his private computer system.
And he had failed. He had just proved that at least one individual in the Solar System, Rustum Battachariya, could mount an external attack able to squirm and worm and drill past that same Rustum Battachariya’s best computer defenses. He had, in a very literal sense, just defeated himself.
Mord added, “Unless you think you’re safe enough with the system the way it is, because you believe nobody else could do what you just did. I mean, you do have the arrogance.”
Bat said mildly, “Mord, this is no time for goading. Nor is such goading necessary. I have sufficient incentive to work further on my defenses, and I will do so. But first, I must have sustenance. Join me if you wish.”
The offer was genuine. Bat would welcome Mord’s company. He rose from his seat and headed along the Bat Cave toward the “eating end” with its elaborate and splendidly furnished kitchen. That kitchen was well-provided with display units, on any of which Mord would be able to appear.
Mord could not, of course, eat, any more than Bat could have tolerated Mord’s insults from any human. Mord, however, was not human. Mordecai Perlman had been; but he had died more than twenty years ago, his body cremated and his ashes sent at his own request into the Sun.
Perlman had been involved in the early development of Faxes, the expert systems that simulated humans and fulfilled many of their simpler functions. You could buy everything from a Level One Fax, which could answer only the simplest questions about you, such as your name, all the way to a Level Five, which managed a fair conversation on your behalf and was smart enough to know when it was out of its depth and call for help.
None of that was enough for Perlman. He was a maverick, an outsider who disagreed with everyone on the way to do simulations. To the others, a Fax was a body of logical rules and a neural network that allowed a computer to mimic the thought patterns and responses of a particular human being.
Wrong approach, declared Mordecai Perlman. That’s all crap. A human isn’t a set of logical rules. A human is a mixture of thoughts and glands and general confusion, and what goes on in a person’s subconscious mind is more important than any A implies B predicate calculus of the conscious mind. We spend half our time trying to produce explanations for the fuck-up messes that our glands lead us into.
Perlman had been ignored. The need was for simple Faxes, ones whose responses to a given situation would always be the same. No one wanted Faxes with moods, passions, senior moments, PMS, or temper tantrums.
No one but Mordecai Perlman. Convinced that he was right, he had set out to produce his kind of Fax. When the work had gone as far as he could take it, he gave the final proof that he believed in what he was doing: he constructed a Fax that mimicked the worldview, knowledge base, and gut reactions of Mordecai Perlman. He did not claim that what lay within the computer was a Fax. It was something new. It was a Mord. The image that appeared on displays was of Mordecai Perlman, as he had been at the time when Mord was implemented.
Bat had discovered Mord hiding away on the Ceres computer system. He was intrigued by what he saw, and asked for a version of his own. Mord had come right back with an answer: no cloning. Would you want to be cloned? But Mord was willing to make a deal: he would agree to being transferred into Bat’s system, and erased on Ceres, in return for certain guarantees. All that Mord wanted was system-wide input data, with access to the news feeds.
Bat had considered, and agreed. For one thing, Mordecai Perlman had lived through the Great War as an inquisitive, observant adult. Mord must be a treasure-house of information about those times, and there was much still to be discovered about the war, particularly the past weapons. The Bat Cave held a unique collection, but Bat always wanted more. The Mother Lode, a complete listing of all Belt weapons developed and intentionally destroyed, might be no more than legend. So might the “ultimate weapon,” the unspecified device that post-war lore insisted would make the whole solar system “dark as day,” whatever that self-contradictory phrase might mean. On the other hand, these things just might be real. So many improbable Great War weapons had turned out to be far from imaginary.
Bat drifted along the length of the Cave, admiring and appreciating its contents. Without the real estate constraints of Ganymede’s interior, he had made the Cave ten times its old size. Its contents were expanding to fill the space available. So, according to Mord, was Bat.
He moved slowly. The aroma of food, an olla podrida that had been cooking all day, drew him on, but at the same time he wished to savor and even touch items of his collection. Women had no aesthetic appeal for Bat, nor had men; but each item arrayed in its case or hung along the wall possessed, to the connoisseur, its own strange beauty.
Here was a rare infrared communications beacon, developed on Pallas and one of only four known copies. Next to it, the little antique Von Neumann was a true original, used in the preliminary mining of the Trojan asteroids before Fishel’s Law and Epitaph—Smart is dumb; it is unwise to put too much intelligence into a self-reproducing machine—became System-wide wisdom. The Von Neumann now sat confined by a magnetic field within a triple-sealed chamber. Without raw materials, it was not dangerous.
Bat loved them all, the brain-gutted Seeker, the mesh-caged Purcell invertor, the Palladian genome stripper.
He might have lingered longer, but Mord’s impatient voice rang out from the kitchen ahead of him. “Hey, Mega-chops, I’m sitting here doing nothing. You gone to sleep out there? Soup’s on.”
Bat moved a little faster. Mord was also a relic of the war, perhaps the oddest one of all. What else could explain why Bat found Mord’s company more congenial than that of any human?
5
SEINE-DAY!
SEINE-DAY! SEINE-DAY! SEINE-DAY!
The signs blared out at Alex on every level as he made the long trip from the depths of the government offices to the near-surface levels where Lena Ligon made her home, and Ligon Industries kept its corporate offices.
He wondered, who was paying for all this Seine-Day publicity? And why? It wasn’t as though you had a choice, and could accept the use of the Seine or opt out of it, just as you chose. In two hours time, the ceremonial “golden spike” would be driven, in the form of a final connection linking the Ganymede, Callisto, Earth, Mars, and Belt main databases. A thousand others would come on-line later in the day, but those first five were the biggest. By this time tomorrow, every shred of data anywhere in the solar system should be available for general use. Unless you had taken measures ahead of time, privacy would be more difficult than ever before.
And maybe impossible, at least during the shake-out period. But along with wider data availability came a massive increase in computational power, and Kate had cursed about Alex’s absence at the very time when they were in a position to run his models with adequate computer resources.
Alex had disagreed. “You have a million different systems and databases out there, scientific and financial and personal and institutional. If you expect to be able to joi
n them all together and have everything run correctly the first time, you’re more of an optimist than I am.”
He had phrased that badly. Kate was more of an optimist than he was. She said, “So what will happen when they switch on?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I expect. We’ll see transients through the whole Seine for the first few hours, maybe longer. Any results for a day or so will be suspect.”
Kate had wrinkled her nose. She was a risk-taker. Left to herself she would have run the models at once, even in his absence. But they were Alex’s models. She had agreed to wait until Seine-Day Plus One. But then, she said, they would make the runs no matter what transients were bouncing around the extended Seine network.
A day’s delay sounded about right to Alex. He actually thought that the system would settle down in the first few hours. On the other hand, family meetings could take forever. Kate might then execute runs without him, and he was beginning to understand her personality. If the results showed problems, he didn’t want her fiddling around inside his models, changing parameters she didn’t understand. He wanted to be back to keep an eye on Kate, long before Seine-Day was over.
He glanced at his watch. Like all Jovian timekeeping systems, it kept Standard Decimal Time. SDT had retained the length of the twenty-four-hour Earth day but divided it into ten hours, each of one hundred decimal minutes, each minute a hundred decimal seconds. The decimal second was a little bit shorter than the Earth-second, 100,000 of them in an Earth day, rather than the usual 86,400.
Now it was three-ninety-six. The morning meeting was scheduled for four. Alex had three more ascending levels to go, and he would be a little late. Already the wealth was beginning to show. You could see it in the elegance of the bioluminescent inlays illuminating the corridors with muted blue and white, the custom-designed murals and statues that lined the walls, and the carpets that swallowed up every sound. Alex’s yearly stipend would not cover a month of rent at these levels.
Money, however, was not an issue. If he chose, he could build a complete lab here, with resources that dwarfed everything available to Kate Lonaker’s whole division. His mother was going to pressure him to do that. And, of course, they were all going to push him on the other thing, the matter he had intended to explain to Kate days ago but had evaded yet again.
He didn’t think she would understand—could understand. He had to live with it all the time, two hundred and fifty years of family tradition and obligation, invisible to anyone but pressing down on Alex’s shoulders far harder than Ganymede’s gravity.
Ligon Industries dated back to Alonzo Ligon, the nineteenth-century tyrant who had built some of the first iron-hulled ships that sailed the oceans of Earth. Alex was a direct descendant, nine generations removed from Alonzo.
And that might not be the worst of it. Since setting off for the meeting, Alex had been cursed with another thought. He had been reviewing in his mind’s eye yesterday’s image of his mother as it had appeared in the display, and thought he could detect some troubling elements.
He came to the bronzed double doors with the discreet brass plate, LIGON INDUSTRIES; BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, and peered into the eye-level camera above the plate. His retinal pattern was recognized, and the great doors swung silently open. The Level Three Fax on duty said, “Welcome, Mr. Alex. The meeting has already begun, and it is in the chamber to your right.”
Alex steeled himself and went straight in. The marble-topped oval table had sixteen positions, each with its own work station. Eleven seats were occupied. Alex stepped quietly across a deep carpet of living purple and green and sat down next to his mother. Lena Ligon nodded a greeting. The man at the end of the table did not nod, or change for a moment his tone of voice.
“That phase of the work is concluded,” he said. “The Starseed is on its way, and a financial accounting must be made. The details are available to anyone here who wishes to examine them, but my summary is simple: Ligon Industries took a calculated risk in accepting a contract to mine helium-three from the atmosphere of Jupiter and deliver it into rendezvous orbit with the Starseed vessel. We also took a bath. At the time, I recommended against signing the contract, and it proves to have been a financial disaster.”
Alex glanced around the table. Prosper Ligon was the ranking family member by virtue of seniority. No matter who was senior, however, Prosper Ligon’s conclusions on questions like this were not likely to be challenged. Alex’s great-uncle was the chief financial analyst and de facto head of the company, a lifelong bachelor and a celibate, slow, deliberate, and precise in thought and deed. Those thoughts and deeds excluded sexual activities of any kind. Although only in his mid-sixties, with his long face and yellowed teeth Prosper was easy to imagine in old age as a skinny and weathered donkey.
His lifestyle and work habits were legendary. Rising at three, he ate a simple breakfast and proceeded at once to his office in a dark corner of the company’s corporate facility. There he sat at a cluttered desk and worked, through the day, through the evening, and on late into the night. No task appeared boring to him when it involved financial elements. Numbers were the donkey’s passion, and apparently numbers alone. It was rumored—and probably no more than rumor—that he disliked computers, and performed his voluminous calculations by hand. When he ate it was infrequently, alone, and in random amounts.
“The contract provides an option,” Prosper went on, “to continue the work and collect the helium-3 needed to fuel Starseed-Two. That leaves us with a difficult decision.”
Alex did his survey of the family members present. Around the table, to his left, were his mother Lena, then the two childless great-aunts, Cora and Agatha, and then Cousin Hector Ligon, with two empty chairs between him and Prosper Ligon. Two more empty seats lay on Prosper’s left. The other four places were occupied by girl cousins Juliana, Rezel, and Tanya, and in the place to Alex’s right Uncle Karolus sat scowling down at the table.
“It’s obvious what we do,” Karolus growled. “We get out now, and cut our losses. We should never have taken that bloody contract. I was against it.”
As Alex recalled, his uncle had been the one who pushed hardest for taking on the Starseed contract. However, Prosper Ligon did not choose to argue. “Perhaps you were opposed,” he said. “So was I. And if, five years ago, we had known about the difficulty of mining Jupiter’s atmosphere, even with the best Von Neumanns available, then everyone at this table would surely have sided with us. That, however, is history. The number of Von Neumanns lost during ascent from Jupiter wrote red all over our balance sheet.”
Cousin Juliana was interested only in certain things, but company finance was one of them. If Uncle Prosper ever retired—or, more likely, his dead body was dragged away from his desk to the knacker’s yard—then she was a logical candidate to take over. She said, “The Von Neumanns are not much better today than they were three years ago. If it was a loss operation then, it will still be one. How much of a disaster?”
Prosper Ligon’s voice did not waver. “We sacrificed approximately twenty percent of Ligon Industries’ total assets.”
Cousin Hector said, “Wow!”
“Wow, indeed.” Prosper Ligon nodded slowly. His head seemed a size too large for his skinny neck. “However, I am in favor of accepting the contract option to provide helium-3 for Starseed-Two.”
Eyebrows were raised all around the table.
Hector had his brow furrowed in obvious thought. He glanced at his cousins, but his comment was directed to his great-uncle. “You’re going to lose all our money!”
“Thank you, Hector, for that acute observation. Such, however, is not my intention.”
Cousin Juliana, as usual, came in on Hector’s behalf. “Do you think that our learning curve on the first contract was steep enough to turn another one profitable?”
“We are certainly more familiar with the Von Neumanns’ performance, and with other risk factors. But the big changes are elsewhere.” At Prosper Ligon’s ge
sture, the lights in the room dimmed. In the display volume behind him appeared an image of Jupiter with its train of satellites.
“Mine Jupiter for helium-3,” he said softly, as though talking to himself in the dim light. “It seemed like the right decision at the time. The isotope is more abundant there than anywhere else in the System. We could construct Hebe Station, for docking of the loaded Von Neumanns and their general service. Ganymede was close enough for overall command and control. We could see acceptable profit margins. There was one great problem, and it was an invisible one.” He swiveled to point at the display. “Jupiter itself. Or rather, Jupiter’s gravity field. The escape velocity from the upper atmosphere is sixty kilometers a second. The Von Neumanns were strained to the limit, and in many cases past the limit. Their loss and the accompanying delays were largely responsible for our financial losses.”
“Hmm.” Karolus snorted from the other end of the table. If Prosper Ligon was a donkey, Karolus was a bull. “The Von Neumanns are no better than they were, you just admitted that. And Jupiter was still the same size, last time I looked. I haven’t noticed any change.”
“Nor have I. But there have been other changes.” Prosper Ligon made some unseen gesture, and the glowing image of the Jovian system vanished. “Every year,” he said in the darkness, “human civilization advances a little farther outward. Every year, the available resources beyond Jupiter increase.”
The room brightened again with light from the display volume, but it had changed. Now it showed another planet, recognizable as Saturn from the flattened disk, complex ring system, and attendant moons.
“The atmosphere of Saturn also contains an abundance of helium-3,” Prosper went on. “The escape velocity is thirty-six kilometers a second—substantial, but little more than half that of Jupiter. This difference creates a vast change in the economics. I have performed a financial assessment. If we switch to Saturn as the source of fuel for Starseed-Two and move the ship itself and our own operations there, we will recoup all the losses suffered on the contract to date.”
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