Dark as Day

by Charles Sheffield

  “Did you catch it?” he said. “Isn’t it the greatest—worth a thousand price-fixing scandals.”

  “Karolus, a family meeting is being conducted here—or was supposed to be.” Prosper Ligon waved to Uncle Karolus to sit down. “Please treat the occasion with the dignity it deserves.”

  “You didn’t see it, did you?” Karolus dropped into his usual chair. “I’m telling you, Prosper, it’s a great day for the Ligons. We won’t be Number Nine anymore. If we’re not up to Number Eight by close of business today, I’ll give my ass and hat to charity.”

  “Karolus!”

  “Listen to me, Prosper. You should be standing on the table, cheering and dancing. Sylva Commensals is in deep shit. It happened live on the most popular news outlet—Lanara Pinchbeck’s morning edition. She was sitting there talking some half-assed talk about Callisto rough-style fashions, when all of a sudden she stopped. She coughed a bit, like there was a tickle in the back of her throat. Then she opened her mouth wide and just sat there. We had a view of her tongue and tonsils for at least twenty seconds of dead air-time—that has to be some sort of record. Then she choked, and this fat white maggoty thing, bigger than my thumb, came sliding out of her mouth and dropped onto the table in front of her. It was squirming around, and she started coughing up blood.”

  “You mean that Lanara Pinchbeck is a Commensal?”

  “Dear God, Prosper, are you blind? You can see she’s a Commensal from just one look at her. She’s older than sin, and nobody her age can stay that fresh and bright and blooming without help. She’s not blooming anymore, though. They dragged her away feet-first, all on live video. And the camera kept going back to the big fat maggoty thing, blind and white and wrinkled. It looked like a giant floppy dick, slithering around on the table.”

  “A schistosome,” said Alex. “One of the big mature forms that live inside all Commensals. Maybe the one over the liver. Somehow it found its way into the lungs or intestines, then all the way out of her body.”

  “I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t much care. It’s where it went that matters. Right splat on the table.” Karolus smacked his hand down hard. “I’m telling you, showing that fat wriggler on live video will knock the bottom out of Sylva. They always show the benefits, but never the risks or what goes on inside a Commensal. I’ll bet you a thousand that today they’ll get zero sign-ups for the service.”

  Alex said, “My mother—” and Prosper added, “—and Agatha.”

  “You bet. Juliana, too.” Karolus snorted with laughter, then said, “Oh, come on. You can stop the long face, Alex. I saw all three of them, right after they watched the show. You don’t need to worry—they were more scared white than they were yellow, and no monster dick-slugs were crawling out of any holes that I could see. What they were mainly was well and truly pissed. They were heading straight over to the Sylva offices. I mean, we’re not just talking money-back guarantees here. We’re talking major lawsuits. Lanara Pinchbeck alone will sue for public humiliation and private anguish and loss of audience market share, and fifty other things you can’t even imagine.”

  “That accounts for the absence of three family members.” Prosper Ligon seemed not at all inclined to dance and cheer on the table, as Karolus had suggested. “There are other people missing. Do you know anything of the whereabouts of Cora?”

  “She went with Agatha—supposedly to offer moral support. Actually, Agatha did look a bit out of it. But my guess is that Cora wanted to have a good laugh and see what came next.”

  “And Rezel and Tanya?”

  “Dunno. They struck out so bad with the Pandora deal, I think maybe they’re afraid to show their faces.”

  “With some reason. And speaking of the Pandora situation …”

  Prosper Ligon turned to Alex. But before Alex could speak—this was going to be his big moment—Karolus jumped in.

  “Yes, how about that? I’ve said bad things about Hector often enough, maybe I’ll have to change my tune. He’s not here for a good reason—he’s under arrest for attacking Pandora and ‘attempting to intimidate the leaseholder.’ That’s what the charge is. But, you know what? It seems like it worked.”

  “Wait a minute.” Alex couldn’t believe this. “Hector pulled a pointless stunt out at Pandora. He could easily have screwed things up for me.”

  “Seems to me Hector did some good. Isn’t it true that the leaseholder, Rustum what’s-his-name, is thinking of leaving Pandora and coming to Ganymede? That’s what I heard through the company information net.”

  “Well, that may be true. But it had nothing to do with Hector.”

  “That’s not the way it’s being reported—and Lucy-Maria Mobarak apparently sees things the same way I do. She’s convinced that Hector did the whole thing for her sake, to ‘prove that he is worthy of her,’ she says. She’s on her way now, taking a special flight out to where he’s being held. I’m telling you, this is a great day for the family. Sylva Commensals right down the tubes, a good shot at Pandora, and Ligon merging with Mobarak. Lucy-Maria doesn’t seem to mind that Hector isn’t too swift. Tell the truth, I’ve got the same feeling about her. She could trade her brain in for tripes and have a bargain. But if they suit each other, that’s enough for me. We’ve got everything but the wedding bells. I say we scrap this meeting right now, and go off some place to celebrate.” Karolus turned to Alex. “Unless there’s something else that you feel you need to tell us?”

  “Yes, there is. It’s about the visit of Rustum Battachariya to Ganymede. I’m going to arrange it so he—”

  “All in good time. He’s not even on the way yet. Plenty of opportunity to talk about that when it happens. Me, I’m out of here.”

  Karolus swept from the room. Prosper Ligon glared at Alex. “I am not inclined to celebrate, despite Karolus’s excessive enthusiasm. However, it is clear to me that little purpose is served by holding a family assembly which is unattended by the family. This meeting is adjourned.”

  He stood up. Ten seconds later, Alex was sitting alone at the long conference table.

  Hector. Hector as hero. God, if you didn’t laugh at that, you had to cry. Alex could see one consolation. For the time being, the whole of the family was off his back. His mother would be far more concerned about the possibility of giant slugs crawling from one of her body orifices than about anything to do with Alex.

  For the next few days he would be free to concentrate his thoughts on a rather larger issue: the future of the solar system.

  * * *

  Alex worried a little on the way down to the Advanced Planning offices. Perhaps he ought to have told Kate when he expected to arrive home, because she too would want to know everything that had happened on his trip.

  It turned out not to matter. Kate was there, working at a terminal in her own office. She was too preoccupied to do more than give Alex a nod and say, “Thank Heaven, I can use a clearer head than mine. We have problems. Sit down.”

  Alex sat. On the display in front of Kate was what looked suspiciously like outputs of his own predictive model. He said, “What’s going on?”

  “I wish I knew.” Kate pushed her blonde hair back from her forehead and swung in her chair to face him. “You know that Magrit Knudsen told Ole Pedersen to learn all he could about your model, and how it works?”

  “Of course I know. I was the one who had to provide him with program copies, remember?”

  “Well, he took them, and the first thing he did was run them.”

  “The same thing I would have done myself—you want to be sure that whatever you’ve been given will work.”

  “Right.” Kate’s eyes, usually so clear and bright, were bloodshot. She must have been up for days. “And the programs did work, just the way they had for us. He used the same input parameters, and the results predicted the collapse of the solar system with all humans dying out.”

  Alex wanted to tell Kate about the anomalous run results on the Keep computers, when civilization was pred
icted to blossom and bloom for more than a century into the future.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she ran right over him. “By the time Pedersen did his final set of runs, he had dug into the theory in your papers. I’ve never denied that he’s smart, even if he is an insecure asshole. He worked on this night and day—I think he was hoping for a basic error in what you’ve done—but he found what he didn’t expect to find. Your theory is airtight. Last week, while you were away on Pandora, he came over to my office to say that he was a convert. He believes in your model.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “You might think so. But Pedersen’s as worried now as I am, because he did one other thing. He gave a copy of your program to Macanelly.”

  “He’s must be out of his mind. Everybody says you might as well give programs to a trained ape as to Loring Macanelly.”

  “Pedersen knows that, better than anyone. Seems he did it more to keep Macanelly occupied and out of Pedersen’s hair than anything else. So Macanelly ran the programs, too.”

  “And he found different results?”

  “No. He got exactly the same as us, and the same as Ole Pedersen. But Macanelly follows the news outlets, especially the dumb-dumb blurts. He’d been hearing about a SETI signal, something that came in from the stars.”

  “The Wu-Beston anomaly. It looks like it may be the real thing.”

  “Real or not, it rang a bell somewhere in the jungle of Macanelly’s brain. He’d heard that aliens had cropped up in one of the predicted futures.”

  “That’s my fault. I included a line in one of my reports saying that they showed on one of the abandoned high-probability projections. But I never said a word about a SETI signal.”

  “With somebody like Macanelly, you don’t need to. He’s dumb, but he’s persistent. Or maybe he’s less dumb than we think. He did something I’d never have thought of doing, ever. He went to the Seine, and asked to have the complete SETI sequence—all twenty-one billion bits of it, from what I gather—provided as available inputs to your predictive model.”

  “That’s totally crazy. The SETI sequence isn’t a database. No one has the slightest idea if there is a real signal buried away in there. If there is, no one knows how to read it.”

  “Exactly. Totally crazy. So now listen for something crazier. When Loring Macanelly ran your predictive model, with not a single change other than the model’s access to the SETI sequence, he obtained totally different results. Instead of civilization collapsing and dying out half a century from now, everything stayed in bounds and coasted along as reasonable as you could hope to see.”

  Kate’s laugh at Alex’s expression was too high-pitched for comfort. “That’s right, sweetheart. Loring Macanelly found the magic trick that stabilizes your model. And Macanelly, as we’re all so fond of telling each other, is a total idiot. What do you think of that, Alex? Welcome home, and come join the madhouse.”

  25

  Jan felt that she had been fighting to protect Sebastian all her life. There had been a brief vacation, the magical couple of weeks with Paul Marr on the flight out from Earth; then the OSL Achilles made its swoop through the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, and suddenly Jan was back to her old job.

  “Why did you do it, Sebastian?”

  It was the hundredth or the thousandth time that she had asked the question—inside her head, where there was no chance of an answer. She didn’t expect more satisfying results now, but she didn’t know what else to do.

  They were still on Ganymede, in a section just four levels below the moon’s outer surface. It was labeled as a quarantine and science research facility, but so far as Jan was concerned it was a prison for Sebastian. He was not allowed to leave. It was not clear that he would ever be allowed to leave.

  Jan was housed separately. Paul had urged her to come with him, to have dinner together at The Belly of the Whale restaurant and then go sightseeing in the salt-ocean caverns of Ganymede. He pointed out that no one had criticized her behavior in any way, and until a decision was made as to whether or not to proceed to the Saturn weather station, she was free to do what she liked and wander wherever she pleased. He had a week and a half free before the Achilles left on its next run to the inner system. Why not spend the time together? They would have fun and get to know each other better.

  She wanted to, but she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She explained that until she knew what was wrong with Sebastian and understood why he had tried to open the hatch, she would be unable to enjoy anything.

  She thought that Paul might try to talk her out of that and was relieved when he didn’t. But she knew, although neither of them said it, that if she left now their affair was over.

  When she had told him that she was heading over to the facility where Sebastian was being held, Paul sat silent for a moment. Then he took her hands in his. “I understand, Jan. Do what you have to do. But don’t forget that you are entitled to a life, too. You are too rare and precious to throw yourself away.”

  Entitled to a life. Would she ever have one? She had left Paul at a run, hurrying away before he could offer a farewell kiss, before she could change her mind.

  And now, with Sebastian, she could finally ask the question directly. “Why did you do it, Sebastian? Why were you trying to open the hatch?”

  He stared at her, a dreamy expression on his round face. “I don’t know, Jan. I don’t remember. I suppose I wanted to see clouds.”

  “But you could have seen those through any of the observation ports. If you had opened the hatch, you would have died. Others might have died, too.”

  “I know. But Jan, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  It was true. He had never knowingly hurt anyone, and never would. But the old fear consumed her. Sebastian had major problems, and onboard the Achilles they had come horribly close to being fatal.

  “We have all the medical records here.” Valnia Bloom was sitting at Jan’s side. She looked more like an anorexic corpse than ever. “Dr. Christa Matloff, who did your testing at the Earth orbital facility, sent an entire duplicate set. Sebastian, we are going to repeat every one of the tests that were done there, plus a battery of others. Is that all right with you?”

  “Of course.” He seemed surprised at the question. “Anything you want to do is all right.”

  Valnia Bloom flashed a sideways glance at Jan. “The tests will be both physical and mental. They will not be painful, but they may take a long time.”

  “I’ll stay.” Jan answered the unspoken question. To her relief, no one was asking about the wisdom of allowing her and Sebastian to leave Earth in the first place.

  What was wrong with him? Was it related to the odd neurotransmitter functions within his brain? That was possible, but it might also have something to do with the tiny inorganic nodules that had been found in the white blood cells of his body. And did both of those peculiarities relate to Sebastian’s earliest days, when as small children they had each wandered alone among the wild teratomas and devastated landscape of Earth’s northern hemisphere?

  To Jan’s surprise, Valnia Bloom reached out and patted her hand. “Have faith,” she said. “We will find out. Believe me, I have as much interest in resolving this as you or Sebastian.”

  * * *

  Dr. Bloom spoke with confidence, but after three days Jan’s own faith faded. With nothing else to do, she haunted the lab where Sebastian was being tested. Valnia Bloom must have spoken to the technicians, because Jan was allowed to examine any of the results and records.

  Most of those were brain traces and scans, highly complicated images that meant nothing to anyone except a specialist. The most tangible evidence of abnormality was the curious dark nodules within the body cells. Jan read a batch of reports. Although they were inorganic and had no apparent function, they were never excreted from the body. When the cell in which they lived died, the tiny spheres were somehow reabsorbed into the body and in due course took up residence in a new cell. Whoever wrote this particula
r report had suggested that the nodules might have been present in Sebastian’s body, unchanged in form and number, since childhood.

  The report also asked, why had these anomalies not been discovered long ago? Jan could answer that. When she and Sebastian had been rescued and shipped to the displaced persons’ camp in Husvik, the inhabitants of battered Earth had other things on their minds; things like survival.

  In addition to a chemical analysis, a few specimens of the anomalous bodies had been carefully sheared in two. Jan took one of the high-powered microscopes and peered at the cross-section of one nodule. It formed a perfect sphere, and the spherical nature continued right through the interior. Concentric shells of material glittering prismatically under the microscope’s strong illumination, flashing in different colors like tiny rings of gemstones.

  Jan could not understand most of the technical comments on the specimens that she was examining, but in one of Valnia Bloom’s reports her concluding remarks had been unusually concise and direct: The structure of each nodule is identical, simple, and well-defined. They are spheres, penetrated radially by narrow apertures that run all the way to the center. The chemical composition has been analyzed and is known absolutely. The possible functions remain a mystery.

  Jan had been staring so long and hard into the microscope that her vision began to blur. She raised her head, squeezed her eyes shut, and began to rub them vigorously.

  She was still doing so when she felt a touch on her shoulder. She spun around, pulse suddenly racing, sure that it was Paul.

  It was Valnia Bloom. The gaunt doctor saw Jan’s expression and shook her head. “I’m sorry. Would you like me to go away?”

  “No. It’s all right. I thought that you were—someone else.” Jan knew that her eyes must be bloodshot from the rubbing. “I’m all right,” she went on. “It’s just that I’ve spent too long staring into the microscope. At the little sphere things.”