Dark as Day

by Charles Sheffield

  “That’s right,” Kate went on. “I took them off and I sent them for analysis. Pathogen analysis. I don’t want you diseased and sick.”

  “Thanks, Kate.”

  “Not for the reason you’re thinking, you self-centered imbecile. If you imagine that I care what specimens, sexes, or even species you choose to screw, or how many of them, there’re other organs of yours that need inspection worse than your genitals. Why do you think I was still at the office at three o’clock this morning? What do you think I was doing while you were using your dipstick at the Holy Rollers Club?—yes, I found out all about that place while you were asleep. And I still haven’t slept. I’ve been working all day, right until I came here ten minutes ago to see if you were awake yet.”

  Alex examined Kate more closely. He had noticed that she was pale, and assumed that it was anger. Now he could see the tight mouth and dark-smudged eyes of exhaustion.

  “You’ve been working right through, from yesterday morning until tonight?”

  “I have. And guess what I’ve been working on? Your damned model.”

  “Has it been failing?”

  “No. It’s been working. That’s the trouble. I must have made over a hundred runs. Nothing blew up, nothing went out of range.”

  The model was working! Alex started to climb out of bed, then paused when he realized that he was naked.

  “Oh, don’t be a fool.” Kate’s laugh emerged as a bitter and humorless snort. “Do you think you’ve got something there that I haven’t seen and touched—along with plenty of other people, I guess. The models didn’t fail, not in the way that they had been failing. They work. We have just one problem.”

  Alex, one leg into his pants, paused and glanced up at Kate’s change of tone.

  Kate went on, “You and I have to brief Mischa Glaub and the review committee on our status, later today. I suppose that slipped your mind, you were having so much fun.”

  It had. “I don’t mind briefing them, or anyone else. I know the model cold.”

  “Maybe.” She was sitting, blonde head bowed. “What you don’t know are the results. I tried every variation I could think of, and each time human civilization expanded steadily through the solar system for about fifty years. It was beautiful. But then, no matter what I did, things started to fall apart. According to your model, long before the year 2200 the population of every world in the System will fall to zero.

  “What are you going to tell Mischa, Alex? That humans are going to become extinct? Or that your precious infallible model is all screwed up.”

  9

  Bat had made himself clear to the point of rudeness: “In or out. You make a choice right now.”

  And Mord, no stranger to rudeness, made his decision and replied in an instant. “Then it’s gotta be out. There could be all sorts of goodies in the Seine that no one’s ever looked at. We’re talking about access to a million separate databases, everything from gigabyte tiddlers on rocks in the Belt to the Great White Whale at Earth Data Central. And nobody’s ever looked at most of the little ’uns—they were uploaded from their original source location by automatic data scanner. Adios, amigo. I’m going a-wandering.”

  And Mord vanished, disappearing into the tangled maze of the Seine.

  Bat checked that Mord was nowhere inside the Keep. It would be quite like Mord to pretend to be outside, then pop up somewhere within when Bat was least expecting it. However, a complete scan of the Keep’s components indicated that Mord was nowhere to be found.

  Bat grunted, reached out with one fat finger, and delicately tapped a key. That severed the final link. Now he had access on Pandora to two powerful computer systems. One was a Seine-link, coupling him to the dispersed and infinitely interconnected set of information processors that stretched through and served the whole System and in their whole comprised the Seine; the other was the Keep, existing on Pandora alone and under Bat’s absolute control. Unless Bat had erred badly, the separation of the two was complete. Nothing in the Seine had access to anything in the Keep, and the Keep in turn depended on nothing from the Seine that had not been filtered through Bat personally.

  Bat examined the results of a suite of test programs, and nodded his approval. The Keep, although it was just one system in a single location, could out-perform almost every pre-Seine processor. As it should. Large amounts of Bat’s personal time and assets had gone into it. Only food, isolation, and Great War relics were as important as computer power.

  As for the Seine …

  Bat swiveled his great chair to face the other console. He was impressed by the validity of Mord’s last words to him. The Seine was indeed a wondrous new resource, and he had every intention of probing it to the full; he just didn’t want it probing him by invading his private data banks.

  First he examined the console for new incoming messages. He found four of them and scanned the sources rather than the messages themselves. The senders were all well-known to him. Pack Rat, Ghost Boy, The Joker and Attoboy were each at the Master level in the Puzzle Network. There was no hurry reading those messages. A good challenge could take anything from a week to forever to solve. Bat had once spent a month trying to crack a puzzle from Claudius, a woman (Bat was convinced that it was a woman, in spite of the name), until finally he realized that he was dealing with a transformed version of the most famous unproven conjecture in mathematics.

  On the Puzzle Network, that was quite legitimate. The puzzle was solved when you caught on to what Claudius had done. Of course, there was also the possibility that some puzzle master would actually prove (or disprove) the Riemann conjecture—and thereby become a major name in the history of mathematics.

  Instead of reading the waiting messages, Bat began his own exploration of the Seine. It was something he had been itching to do since Seine Day, but he had deferred action until he was sure that the Keep was as secure as he could possibly make it.

  Within minutes, he knew that his and Mord’s instincts had been correct. Data banks were now available that had been lost or hidden since the time of the Great War. They might point to treasures of long-gone weaponry that he had never suspected existed. But he had to be careful. His lines of communication had been set in place years ago, making him the master spider at the center of his own information web. Without stirring from the Bat Cave, he could in the past be sensitive to every trend and initiative within the System.

  Not anymore. The Seine was a new factor whose effects he could not begin to calculate. He suspected that it was powerful enough to destroy his web and the work of many years.

  Slowly, warily, Bat allowed selected programs to reach into the depths of the Seine. As a first exercise he asked for a listing of all Great War databases available today but unknown or unavailable one month ago. He hoped for at least a handful. Within minutes he knew that he had been too conservative. The count was over seventy and showed no signs of slowing when his attention was distracted by a communications alert. A message was coming in: a real-time message, with someone waiting at the other end.

  One great side benefit, or if you were Bat one great possible side nuisance, of the Seine was instant access to the whole solar system. In the past, light-speed signals from Pandora to Ganymede or anywhere else of significance took many minutes, even with optimal orbital geometry. Now the Seine contained fully entangled quantum computers scattered all across the solar system. Messages and video could be digitized, sent computer-to-computer in no time at all, and reconstructed at their destination. Which meant, of course, that any fool in the System could try to reach you and demand real-time response.

  The trick was not to let any fool in the System know of your existence or whereabouts.

  So who was calling?

  Bat glanced at the ID, and closed his eyes in resignation. The caller was Magrit Knudsen, one of the few people outside the Puzzle Network with permission to contact Bat. And Magrit’s message was simple and information-free: “Bat, are you there? If you are, please come on-line.”
Magrit never called with trivia. Either she was in trouble, or she had run across a mystery sufficiently odd to intrigue him.

  He glanced around the Bat Cave. The level of messiness of the floor was tolerable—Magrit would nag him if it were not. He looked down at himself. He had washed and changed clothing in the not-too-distant past.

  He triggered the video link.

  Magrit Knudsen appeared at once, her expression anxious.

  This was a bad sign. Bat, who abhorred all human confrontations, knew that Magrit thrived on conflict. If she was anxious, then he was worried.

  * * *

  Magrit had put this off for as long as she could. Conversations with Rustum Battachariya were never easy, and this one promised to be a stinker.

  “Bat.” She didn’t try for her usual smile of greeting. “Are you alone? Of course you are, what a stupid question. Bat, we’ve got problems. And I don’t mean any of your puzzle stuff.”

  The face that stared at her from the display remained expressionless. Bat, if Magrit were any judge, had added at least fifty pounds since she had last seen him. He sat like a giant Buddha on his special chair, arms folded across his chest. As usual, his black clothes were three sizes too small.

  The round head nodded, and Bat finally spoke. “I hear you. However, unless the difficulty that you face is of a purely intellectual nature, it seems unlikely that I will be able to assist you.”

  “You heard me, but you didn’t hear me right. When I said that we’ve got problems, actually I meant that you do. I had a call four hours ago. Somebody found out that I have access to you. They said they want a meeting.”

  “Which you, I trust, told them was out of the question.”

  “I said I would get back to them. Bat, it’s not that simple.”

  “I do not see how it could be simpler. I have no need to meet with anyone. I have no desire to meet with anyone. And I most certainly have no desire to travel in order to meet with anyone.”

  Magrit had been Bat’s immediate superior for more than a decade. Looking back, she sometimes wondered how she had stood it for so long.

  “Bat, they don’t want a meeting just for the hell of it, or to admire your sunny smile. They want a meeting to persuade you to share your lease on Pandora.”

  “Then they are certifiably insane. Four years ago I made a major investment in money and effort to conform elements of this planetoid to my needs.”

  “I don’t think money is an issue. They can pay anything you ask.”

  “You are correct. Money is not an issue, since no matter what they offer I will refuse. I also, as I am sure you recall, paid in full and in advance for a long-term lease on Pandora, approved by the Outer Planet Authority. That lease has ninety-six years to run.”

  “I know that. It makes no difference.” Magrit stared at Bat’s black and impassive face. No one she knew was as smart and as stubborn—or in some ways as innocent. “Let me put it this way. When I became your supervisor, it took me a little while to realize how valuable and talented you were. But after that, I shielded you from all the crap that was thrown at you. And there was plenty.”

  “This is well known to me. Your protection was, and is, much appreciated.”

  “Then you understand that I wouldn’t bother to call you at all if it was something as simple as pointing out to a caller that you have a lease on Pandora. They checked that out long before they contacted me.”

  “Then they must also have learned that it is a valid lease.”

  “Bat, we aren’t playing in a league where ‘valid’ means much. The call to me came from Ligon Industries. They are one of the top five industrial powerhouses in the System.”

  “Not so. They are currently number nine in total revenues.”

  “You’re splitting hairs. Let’s just say they’re big. You know the saying, there’s no such thing as an unbreakable contract. Well, with the clout that they have, there’s no such thing as a guaranteed lease, either. You are an individual. They are a quarter of a million employees, a hundred lobbyists, and a thousand attorneys.”

  Bat did not move, but Magrit knew from experience that he heard, understood, and evaluated every word spoken to him. At last he said, “Why Pandora?”

  “I asked the Ligon representatives the same question. Sorting through the bullshit, it’s not hard to understand. Ligon won’t admit it, but they lost a fortune on the initial Starseed contract because the Jupiter gravity well was too much for the Von Neumanns. They’ve accepted the Phase Two option, but they intend to mine helium-three for Starseed-Two from Saturn. For that, they need a base of operations. You can imagine how their thinking went. The nine major moons all play roles in general Outer System development. Not even Ligon has the clout to over-rule that, and anyway all those moons are inconveniently far from Saturn. They need a base outside the rings, but not too far out.

  “So they said to themselves, what about the lesser satellites? There are five attractive possibilities: Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus, and Janus. The last two are already locked up by Ex-Im Mining, who have as much money and influence as Ligon. Ex-Im also has a lease on Prometheus and all the co-orbiters. That leaves just Atlas and Pandora. But Atlas serves as a government-controlled Saturn observation and weather station, and the red tape to do anything to change that would take years. So we are down to Pandora. All they need to do there is put enough pressure on one defenseless and small—I use the term figuratively—individual.”

  Bat shrugged. “Assume that I stand firm. What can they do?”

  “Let’s begin with the legal options. They can try to persuade Outer System authorities that Pandora access is essential to the success of Starseed-Two, and that Starseed-Two is at the highest priority level for the human expansion imperative.”

  “Could they succeed?”

  “They might. There’s centuries of legal precedent for that sort of thing. It’s called eminent domain. Using it, authorities back on Earth were permitted to make forced purchase of properties that happened to be in the way of a planned road or airport. But we’re just getting started. They could make personal attacks on your character and competence. They would argue that no one of sound mind would choose to live alone on Pandora, avoiding all human contact.”

  “The attack ad hominem was tried against me many years ago. You will recall that the team of psychologists engaged to probe my rationality was utterly routed.”

  “It doesn’t mean it can’t be tried again; and last time, no one was angling the case toward a judge who could be bribed.”

  “This is intolerable.” Bat sat up and inflated his chest, so that the fabric of his too-small shirt stretched balloon-tight. “Are you telling me that such tactics might succeed?”

  “Those tactics, or others.” Magrit knew her man. Bluster and threat would never work with Bat. Logic would never fail. “I said I would start with the legal methods they might use. But the Ligon people have a reputation for playing hard-ball. They’ll get impatient pretty quick if you won’t cooperate. Forget leases, here’s another fact of life: there’s no such thing as an unbreakable head. Maybe they’ll decide that it’s easier and cheaper to kill you. You know from past experience that paid assassins are not hard to find. And you are even easier to find, because you never go anywhere. You would only be safe if you went into hiding.”

  Magrit watched the fat cheeks puff out. Finally Bat nodded. “Let me summarize what you have told me. Ligon Industries want access to Pandora, badly enough to do whatever they decide is necessary. In order for them to have my home, in any negotiation with them I must agree to leave Pandora. On the other hand, if I refuse to deal with them, my life will be in danger. In order to enjoy any measure of safety it would be necessary for me to hide away. Which means I would have to leave Pandora. Since either cooperation or defiance involves my leaving here, the former is clearly the preferred option. This, I assume, is the deduction toward which you have carefully been leading me.”

  “Maybe. Do you see any other
options?”

  “No. On the other hand, I have had scant opportunity to seek them. What promises did you make to the person who contacted you from Ligon?”

  “Persons. There were two of them. I promised only to get back to them. I said I could not make a decision for you.”

  “Very well. Tell them that you have spoken with me, and that I have authorized you to open negotiations on my behalf.”

  Magrit couldn’t believe agreement had come so easily. “You just want me to make the best deal I can, and you’ll sign off on it?”

  “If you choose to think of it that way. I have only one other request, and then I must attend to important work which cannot be delayed.” Bat’s dark eyes almost closed, so that Magrit could read no expression there. “I know that you have both the talent and the temperament for hard negotiation. Make this a tough one.”

  “Bat, do you think it’s just you who hates people pushing you around? Come take a look at the color of my guts. I hate these bastards, and I don’t even know them. Trust me, I’ll give them a tough negotiation. And if you can find anything to give me leverage, don’t wait. I’ll have your call as top priority.”

  * * *

  Bat’s early employment evaluations had been replete with terms such as “dirty,” “gluttonous,” “arrogant,” “slovenly,” “disobedient,” and “indolent.” Bat regarded those evaluations as unjust and scurrilous. He was not indolent.

  As soon as Magrit was gone, he went through to the kitchen stores and returned with loaded dishes of peppermint candy, orange jujubes, marzipan, and Turkish delight. This was sure to be a long session.

  He set parameters, provided the authorization for unlimited expenditures, and initiated a search of the Seine.

  Before a man could fight back, he needed weapons. Long before Magrit concluded any negotiation, Bat intended to know more about Ligon Industries than any other human in the solar system. A large organization, like any other large structure, possessed a weakest point. Bat intended to find that point for Ligon Industries.