"Not special for you." Hilda Brandt was looking at the three fondly. "Just impossible for anyone else—until there are more people like you. And there will be—my God, what now?"
Brandt's question was not to Camille and the other two, but to Buzz Sandstrom, who had come barreling through the door as though he were trying to knock it down.
"It's Ganymede. Bad news." Sandstrom had been recovering his cockiness after Jon and Wilsa's rescue, but now he seemed out of his depth again. "We got a call from our staff there. It's all over the news media. They say the life forms in the ocean here aren't native! Somebody leaked that they're Earth forms, changed and imported."
"Hmm. I wonder who might have done that." Hilda Brandt stared at Bat, who shook his head. "All right, I believe you. What did you tell them, Buzz?"
"Nothing."
"Why not?"
"I'd nothing to say. Anyway, they won't talk to me. They say they'll only talk to you."
"They're feeling insecure. Go and assure them that I'm on my way." Hilda Brandt sighed and stood up, but she did not leave the room. Instead she turned to Battachariya. "Do you know what upsets me more than anything else about all this?"
"I do. It is the fear that your children may now be regarded by the ignorant as monsters and freaks."
"My children. They are not . . ." Brandt paused. "Well, we learn something every day. You are a phenomenon, Rustum Battachariya, did you know that? You deny emotion, yet at understanding emotion . . ."
She turned to Jon, Wilsa, and Camille. "He is right, of course. That is exactly how I think of you. You are my children, in an emotional if not in a genetic sense. I would never do anything to harm you."
And again to Bat. "You see, that's what hurts and upsets me, more than anything. That you, an intelligent man whom Magrit Knudsen describes as sensitive and perceptive, could be convinced that I would kill to protect the Europan environment. So convinced that you had to come rushing here to stop me from killing not a stranger, but someone whom I had known since birth—since before birth. What sort of animal do you think I am?"
"I was in error. I have already admitted that. I had not interacted with you sufficiently at the time. Also, I could not forget the assault on Yarrow Gobel."
"Which was never intended, and you should have known it!" Hilda Brandt chided Bat, like a teacher disappointed by a slow pupil. "When someone of body mass less than sixty kilos, like Inspector-General Gobel, intercepts a dose designed for someone of body mass of . . . two hundred and fifty kilos?"
"Two hundred and ninety."
"You see my point. Your memory loss would have been temporary and partial. It would have applied only to events of recent months, and you would have been back to normal long ago."
She finally went to the open door. "However, that is no excuse. I accept full responsibility for Yarrow Gobel's mishap. As I accept full responsibility for all of my actions. When I return, you will tell me what you propose to do about it. But first I must reassure the members of my staff. They think that the universe is ending. Which, of course, it is not."
She turned to Cyrus Mobarak. "It may be impossible to preserve Europa, now that word is out that our ocean is contaminated with Earth forms. So you win, Cyrus, and I lose. But winners and losers often switch. I won't give up. And I have won, too, in other ways."
She was gone before Mobarak or anyone else could comment.
25
Winners and Losers
Nell Cotter had been trained to hold her mind and her camera on the main action. When Hilda Brandt left the room, that wasn't easy. Nell sensed a change in group focus, but she was not sure of the new center.
Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer were sitting between Nell and Tristan. Just beyond Tristan was Camille, and next to her, David Lammerman. The six were eyeing each other uneasily, ignoring Battachariya and Mobarak, who sat facing them. Nell felt Jon Perry inch away from her a fraction as she turned to look along the line of people.
She split the camera field to record the facial expressions of the three refugees from the Pelagic, and sought to guess their thoughts. Together at birth, even before birth, raised for the first year or two as a unit, breathing in each other's sight and sounds and smells. No wonder Jon and Wilsa responded so strongly and immediately to each other. Then thrown out as babies into open space, alone and abandoned, to live or to die.
Six had not survived. The other three had been found one by one in the post-war chaos and raised in the totally different environments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt. They had followed separate careers, unaware of each other's existence until Hilda Brandt brought them together. But now they would begin to see themselves as like each other—and as unlike any other human beings who ever lived.
And how will others see them? Nell realized that she had already started to think differently about Jon Perry. Would she dare a close relationship with a man who had an absolute and unnatural control over his mind and body? She recalled the report from Arenas of Jon's impossibly fast run after the carnival float. Now it was believable.
And then she felt fascination, anger at herself, and a strong affection. Jon was still Jon. He hadn't changed, if she had not.
Hilda Brandt is right, we are all human beings.
She forced herself to reach out and grip Jon's thigh. The muscle trembled and tightened beneath her touch, then slowly relaxed. He leaned toward her, placing his hand on hers.
No Ice Man here. I'll believe absolute body control when I feel it for myself. And if it's real, I'll bet it can be a load of fun.
But how typical am I?
Nell glanced along the line to Tristan Morgan. For perhaps the first time in his life, he was not fidgeting in his seat. He had taken Wilsa's hand in his, and he was talking quietly into her ear. She wore a lonely, wistful smile. But at least it was a smile. Camille and David, at the far end, were staring back at Nell, observing her and Jon as calmly as she was observing them. Perhaps one side effect of a modified nervous system was an ability to resist shocks that would stupefy ordinary people. And maybe it was catching. Nell felt fine.
She turned her attention to her camera, which was covering Cyrus Mobarak and Rustum Battachariya. For the past half hour Mobarak had said little. He was less on-stage than Nell had ever seen him. But with Hilda Brandt out of the room he was coming to life.
"Well, then. This is apparently a time for general revelation and confession." Mobarak's tone to Bat was conversational, even casual. If he were shocked or ruffled, no one would ever know it. "All secrets are to be revealed—and you never did tell me how you decided that Hilda Brandt and I had been working together. Are you willing to discuss it? Or does that remain privileged information?"
Out of the corner of her eye, Nell saw Tristan Morgan jerk forward. But she had no time to look at him, because Battachariya was already answering.
"Not at all privileged. And I fear that there was no deep insight, only a rather pedestrian chain of logic." Nell thought she detected a trace of satisfaction on Bat's face, the first that she had seen since he had joined the group at Blowhole. But he continued serenely. "After several false starts, I at last came up with identifiers for the three children of the Pelagic who had been found in survival pods and revived: Jon Perry, Wilsa Sheer, and Camille Hamilton. Those names shocked me beyond belief—because I learned that each of them, now grown to adulthood, was presently in the Jovian system. More than that, each had recently appeared here for the first time, from widely separated locations.
"By then I also suspected that all three had been the subject of biological experiments at the end of the Great War. So it was natural to conclude that someone else, a full year before me, had read the message in the Pelagic's flight recorder and been led to those same three names. The most logical person was surely one who had been involved in the original experiments.
"Very good so far, and very simple. But I was missing one key piece of information: Who? Who could have worked on Mandrake during the war, and twenty-five years later have
been instrumental in bringing those three here at this time?
"I had one prime candidate: you."
This time Bat actually smiled at Mobarak's rising eyebrows. "That's right. Cyrus Mobarak, the Sun King himself. Who else? Consider the facts. You were in the Belt at the end of the Great War, a young man in your twenties. You have since become an individual of great wealth and influence, well able to pull wires behind the scenes on Earth. You could and did have Jon Perry sent to Europa. You could and did reorder DOS priorities, so that Camille Hamilton and David Lammerman had little choice but to come here and work for you. You could and did bring Wilsa Sheer to the Jovian system. All it took was substantial concert funding, with a fat commission for a major new work. You had enough money to make the offer irresistible. Her agent would do the rest.
"And then my beautiful, logical structure crumbled apart. Because it was not logical at all.
"If you were eager to see the present condition of your long-ago experiments, why not send Camille Hamilton and Wilsa Sheer to Earth, where you and Jon Perry were already located? That was surely easier than a rendezvous at Jupiter. Just as fatal for my argument, I learned that you had other, very plausible reasons for wanting Jon Perry on Europa. The 'native' Europan life forms that you had planted needed to be exposed for what they are, designed forms imported from Earth, in order to destroy the opposition to your Europan fusion project. You needed Camille for much the same reason, to help your plans for Europan development.
"Finally, my friend Mord delivered the death blow: You had worked with Mordecai Perlman himself on Pallas at the end of the war. You were madly developing your new fusion ideas. Mord swore that you could not also have worked on the biological projects on Mandrake.
"That was the end. A nice theory, ruined by facts. But as any Puzzle Network enthusiast knows, even wrong theories can lead to new insights. I no longer had a name, for that of Cyrus Mobarak would not do. But I did have a place: Europa. Everything converged here. Even Wilsa Sheer, for no reason obvious to me, had come to Europa. And in Europan affairs, there is just one dominant figure. I could find no suspicious elements in Hilda Brandt's past—I think that she could give both of us lessons in concealment—but she had spent the war in the Belt, coming here only long after it was over. She had also requested that Jon Perry be sent to Europa, to examine supposed native life.
"Yet Hilda Brandt would not do, either. She has great influence in the Jovian system, and she might well have performed secret wartime work in the Belt. If so, she surely would have longed to see how that work turned out, so long after. But her power did not extend, as Cyrus Mobarak's does, to the Inner System. She could not have directed Camille Hamilton here from DOS, nor guaranteed that it was Jon Perry, and not some other submersible expert, who came from Earth. Could not—unless she were given assistance.
"Finally, the pieces fit. Not one name. Two. And two people, each manipulating the other, each using the other, to achieve their separate objectives."
"My esteemed adversary, I am disappointed." Mobarak was shaking his head. "You and I have explored each other's minds for twenty years. Yet you suspected that I might stoop to murder?"
"No, I did not. I felt—right or wrong—that I understood the mind of Torquemada. What I did not know was the mind and nature of Hilda Brandt. And I could not trust you to know it, either. Might she be a person who would examine her experiments, evaluate their present status, and then cold-bloodedly destroy them to serve other objectives of her own? I could not take that risk."
"You ought to have consulted me. Hilda Brandt isn't that sort of person. But she asked the right question before she left: What are you going to do about all this?"
"About Brandt's past, and her experiments? I personally will do nothing. It is not my prerogative or my concern. But what they"—Bat gestured to Wilsa and the others—"may choose to do is another matter. Most of the events that we are talking about occurred a quarter of a century ago, and although there is no statute of limitation for war crimes, there is certainly a statute of limitation for interest in war crimes. Particularly ones that were arguably never committed. I doubt that anyone not in this room cares one jot about what happened on Mandrake."
Bat turned to Nell. "Do they, Miss Cotter? I feel sure that you are recording everything, as always. But is there really a public interest in any of this?"
I wonder if he knows about the subvocal, too. Nell shook her head and managed to avoid glancing at her hidden camera. "People care only if it makes an interesting show. They will love to see the Moby burning down into Blowhole, and then the submersible rescue. That's exciting, and visual, and near real-time. But you'd have to pay them to make them watch a program about a twenty-five-year-old crime that maybe didn't happen."
"And the results of the experiments?"
"People won't believe there's anything different about Jon and the others unless they can see it. And they can't. Video audiences believe pictures, not statements."
"A sound philosophy. I can only applaud its wisdom."
Bat began to lift himself laboriously from his narrow seat. As well-padded as he was, he could feel the ribbed seams of the chair's narrow sides cutting into tender flesh. "So Hilda Brandt was right. The universe is not ending, and the story of the Pelagic will again fade into history. But there is a lesson to be learned from this, for all of us." Bat rubbed at his sore behind. He was weary and hungry and feeling dangerously pontifical. It was time to go home. He turned to Cyrus Mobarak.
"Winners and losers, as Hilda Brandt said. You manipulated events and people, and won the fight for the development of Europa. But everyone, saint or sinner, pursues his or her personal objectives, and those are rarely the same for any two people, no matter how much they pretend collaboration. Before you feel too much satisfaction in your victory, remember that you were yourself manipulated for Hilda Brandt's benefit. You brought her the three individuals whom she wanted—and you never realized that you were doing so.
"It is time for the two of us to recognize that not every subtle mind of the solar system moves within the circle of the Puzzle Network. Hilda Brandt proved the master of us both. You won this time, but perhaps you will not always win."
"No, he didn't." The voice was Wilsa Sheer's, breaking in unexpectedly on Bat's ruminations. He looked at her in annoyance. He had not finished.
"Didn't win, I mean." She ignored Bat's glare. "Can we show them, Jon? I know you want to wait for confirmation, but this is important."
"You want me to do it twice? I thought that once in a lifetime was more than enough." But Jon Perry was standing up, walking across to the data station and peering at the back of it. "All right. Anyone know how to work this thing?"
"I do." Tristan was already out of his seat. "Let me." He grabbed the data unit from Jon's hand. "Which segment?"
"There's only one. Don't look for sound, it's just video." Jon turned back to face the others while Tristan was mounting the unit. "I hate to stick my neck out again. So the only thing I'll say is that this recording was made less than three days ago, that you'll be looking at the deep ocean floor of Europa—one hundred and eighteen kilometers below the ice—and that the ambient temperature is nine degrees above freezing."
The light in the little room dimmed. The data-station screen flickered and steadied to the black-and-white, low-contrast presentation of a typical ultrasonics image. The sensor was scanning across the seabed from the far horizon. There was nothing to see but a uniform, soft-edged floor laid down by a billion years of faint tidal motion.
Tristan opened his mouth—and before he could speak, a set of sawtoothed structures jumped into view, as straight as ruled lines. Greater detail emerged as the submersible steadily descended; each furrow changed from its sharp-edged outline to reveal a dividing set of sandwich wafers.
"And here's where we added visible wavelengths to the ultrasonics." Jon Perry was commenting in spite of himself. A free-swimmer could be seen, moving ahead of the Danae. The picture on the scree
n was sharper, and in glowing false color. A glittering line of faceted beads was revealed along the edge of each sandwich.
"Just silicon and ferrite crystals, most people would say. But I wanted to take a better look. Watch now, as we send the swimmer in."
The light source was no more than a couple of feet from one of the edged ridges. As it came closer yet and the beam increased in intensity, the ridge moved. It began flattening out, flowing downward, sluggishly heading away from the light.
"Photophobic, or heat-sensitive. We'll know which when we've had a chance to examine what's in the Danae's hold. We had lots of time down there, so I stowed away plenty of samples. But even without that analysis, it's easy to make some guesses. You are looking at a stable structure that repairs itself and replicates itself—you'll see that happening on the edges of the wafers if you watch for a while. The structures also operate at a higher temperature than the ambient seabed, and they use chemical energy to make that possible. You've already seen them avoiding stimuli that might do them harm."
Tristan had stayed close to the data unit, and he was staring at the screen from just a few centimeters away. "Those things are alive."
"If you accept most definitions of alive. The furrows are acting as only living things are supposed to be able to act. They even seem to be evolving as they spread. But I was burned once before. This time I'd rather not say too much until I'm sure."
But Jon is sure. He just doesn't want to come right out and say it. Nell glanced across at Cyrus Mobarak. And he's sure, too. Look at his face. Winners and losers. He's under tight control again, but he knows he didn't win at all. These are the real native life forms. With them, Europa is protected. It won't be developed for a long time.
"How do you know these weren't brought from Earth, too, and planted here?" Tristan was still squinting at the screen.
"Because they're not DNA-based, like every living thing on Earth. They're aperiodic crystal structures in clays—but still, they can reproduce. We've wondered about this sort of thing for a long time. Cairns-Smith suggested the idea over a century ago, but it's the first time we've encountered it."
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