Dark as Day (13 page)

And then someone
was
at his side, and shouting at him. It was a short blonde girl. He felt a touch on his foot, and looked down. She was wearing a scanty halter top, long pants of faded blue, and what seemed to be heavy boots. But those boots had to be fake, because the touch on the top of his own stockinged foot was soft and light.

“Hot socks!” She had to stand on tiptoe to get her mouth close to his ear. “I saw you arrive at the same time as Lucy Mondeo. Does she have your starting handle?”

Don’t speak. Just shake your head
. Alex could have used more guidance.

He leaned down and shouted, “I came here with Lucy Mobarak.”

“Lucky Lucy.” She took his hand in both of hers and put her mouth so close to his left ear that her lips brushed it as she spoke. “What’s your name?”

“Alex Ligon.”

“Ligon?” She frowned. “I don’t know that one. Are you one of the custom-builts?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but went on, “I’m Suky Studebaker, except outside when I’m Suky Sylva. Wait and see how the Mondeo works out. If it doesn’t, look me up.”

She plunged into a knot of people in front of Alex, but he didn’t have much time to ponder what that had been all about, because Lucy was at his side again.

“Didn’t I tell you not to talk to anyone while I was gone?
Especially
Suky Stu. She’s Lagondas’ hottest tailpipe, and she claims she’s done more laps than anyone. What did she say to you?”

“She asked me my name, and I said Alex Ligon.”

“That’s all right, but you’ll need another one. Let me think. You can be Alex Lotus, I don’t think that’s in use. And here, take this.”

Lucy was holding two tall glasses shaped like vertical trumpet horns with round balls at the lower end. She thrust one into Alex’s hand. It was filled with a pale pink liquid. Alex sniffed at it suspiciously. Bubbles rose lazily through the drink in response to Ganymede’s low gravity and burst to tickle his nose.

She laughed at him. “You don’t need to worry, I wouldn’t start us on high octane. Perfectly safe. Here’s to Ligons and Mobaraks.”

She raised her glass and took a long drink. Alex, more cautiously, did the same. The flavor was pleasant and he tasted no intoxicants or fizzes.

“What’s in this?”

Lucy shrugged. “Who bothers to ask? It’s called a Sebring Special, and it tastes right. That’s all I need to know. Like it?”

“It’s very good.” Alex took a second gulp, and bubbles tickled his mouth and throat. “Really good.”

“One of these, and maybe a Daytona Swizzle, then I’ll introduce you to a couple of friends. Do you dance?”

“I can.” One of the miseries of Alex’s youth had been dance lessons.
For formal occasions, Alex, any Ligon must be able to give an adequate account of himself on a dance floor.
“I’m not very good.”

“Nor am I. You don’t have to be.” Lucy gestured to the swaying groups of people. “You can do that, can’t you?”

“I guess I can.” Alex wouldn’t have called it dancing. There was everything from close body contact to couples gesturing to each other from two or three meters apart.

He followed Lucy’s lead and tilted his glass up again. This time the level was low enough for liquid to flow from the round ball at the lower end. He felt a tingle start on his tongue and follow the drink all the way down to his stomach. And suddenly the glass was empty.

Lucy was laughing at him. “Afterburner.” She drained her own glass. “Time to fill the tank. That’s Deirdre de Soto and her brother over by the ninety-one octane. We’ll go there, I’ll show you how to work a pump, then if you like we can all dance.”

Alex followed her around the perimeter of the octagonal room. He was becoming used to the noise, but the lurid colors of clothes and walls seemed to be brightening. He stood beside Lucy, waiting their turn at the pump. The shouted introductions to Deirdre and Dafyd de Soto were unintelligible, but Deirdre touched his foot with hers, which seemed to be some sort of custom in this place, and Lucy shouted at her, “Go easy. This is his first circuit, and he’s not ready for the pole position,” which made even less sense.

Deirdre, like Lucy, was barefoot. It seemed to Alex that she was close to bare-everything. She wore a thin halter and a miniskirt, and had a ruby set in her navel. She touched that stone, put her finger on one of the studs of Alex’s shirt, and said, “Snap!” Everyone around the pump except Alex burst out laughing.

The front of the square column contained a complex menu of options. Dafyd de Soto pressed a series of commands that charged his glass with fluid that changed color as the ball was filled, then showed Alex how to do the same thing. Apparently Alex did not get the combination exactly right, because the other three laughed again and Deirdre called out, “Hi-test already! Lucy, are you
sure
it’s his first circuit?”

Alex tasted what he had produced. It was different from the Sebring Special, slightly less sweet and with a subtle, bitter aftertaste. He preferred it. He moved along the room with the other three, listening but not saying anything. If they noticed that he was quiet, no one commented on it.

They came to the edge of the dance area. No one mentioned dancing, but Deirdre de Soto stood in front of Alex and began to sway in time to the music. He looked, fascinated, because no matter how she moved her body the level of the drink in her glass remained exactly level. He tried to match her movements, and slopped liquid onto his own hand. Before he could do anything Deirdre had dipped her head forward and licked it off.

Lucy said, “You did that on purpose!” But whether she was accusing him or Deirdre, he could not tell. Now Lucy and Dafyd were also moving, following the pulse of the background music. He felt an increasing urge to do the same, but that would spill the drink that he was holding.

There was an obvious solution to that problem. Alex drained the remaining three-quarters of the drink in one long gulp, then walked across to one of the counters to set down the glass. He stared up at the mural beyond the counter. Four brightly-colored race cars hurtled along a straight track toward a tight corner. He heard the whine of engines as the drivers changed down to lower gears and accelerated into the banked curve. He could actually see the cars moving, jockeying for position. In the foreground, a car that had spun out of control on the curve was facing the wrong way and lying on its side. Black smoke rose from its engine. Alex could see that it was about to burst into flames. The driver was already out of his cramped seat and rolling clear on the grass.

Hands took Alex and turned him. Lucy was on his right, Deirdre de Soto on his left. “A couple of dances here, then over to Bugattis where we can sit down,” one of them said. Which one? Alex was not sure. He was back on the dance floor, and either he was dancing or doing some close enough equivalent. He looked around, but everything more than three meters away was a blur. Lucy, two meters away, was dancing with Dafyd de Soto and so close to him that she might as well be surgically attached.

Deirdre moved to stand and sway right in front of Alex, blocking his view of Lucy and Dafyd. As he watched, Deirdre magically grew taller and taller, until the ruby in her navel glimmered hypnotically at eye-level. After a few moments Alex realized that he was somehow on his knees, his hands grasping Deirdre’s bare thighs.

She reached down and helped him to stand up. Alex wanted to apologize, but before he could do it she draped his arms around her neck and then grabbed him at the waist. “Makes it easier to stand up.” She was nuzzling his neck. “Are you going to be all right?”

It sounded to Alex like a rhetorical question, and he decided not to answer. He danced with Deirdre, and then he danced with Lucy, and when someone put another drink into his hand, he drank it. When Deirdre tugged at Lucy, and said, “Bugattis?” he drifted along with them, out through one shimmering door and into another. It was cooler here, quiet and darkness and private rooms instead of bright lights, public drinks, and a crowded dance floor.

Was this Bugattis? It must be. Alex found himself sitting on a long, wide couch. He was chewing on a square of something sweet and tangy. A soft thigh pressed against his. He liked Bugattis. He liked it even better than Lagondas.

Alex closed his eyes. He felt great.

* * *

Alex opened his eyes. He felt great, but instead of sitting on a couch he was lying in bed. Judging from the ceiling and the piece of the wall that he could see, it was his own bed.

A voice from a few feet away said, “Good evening, Alex. Welcome to the real world.”

It was Kate. She was sitting on a chair by the far wall of his cramped bedroom, staring at him intently.

He sat up. “What happened?”

“I was rather hoping you might tell me that.” Her voice would freeze methane. “I’ll take it from where I became involved. At three o’clock this morning I was called by Wholeworld Services to take delivery of a package. They tried the office, using an ID in the pocket of your pants, and fortunately for you I was still there. The package was you. You were unconscious. When I saw you, I became worried. I ran a medical scan, and found that you had imbibed at least twenty units of tanadril.”

“That’s a lot.” Alex by this time had noticed his bare chest. “Are you sure? That much tanadril ought to make me feel terrible, and I don’t.”

“Because we put you under and flushed your whole system, then kept you under.”

“What time is it now?”

“After six.”

“You let me sleep all day?”

“I did. And I won’t tell you how much self-control that took. You told me you were going to a family meeting.”

“That’s where I went.”

“Right. A family meeting way down on Level two-twenty, at the Holy Rollers Club. That’s where Wholeworld Services picked you up. A family meeting where you have sex with people.”

“I don’t think I did.” But Alex had a hazy memory of fumblings and the intimate touch of warm, bare bodies.

“You’d better hope you did. There was semen on the front of your pants, and it was either yours or that of a dear friend of yours.”

Alex looked under the cover. He was naked.

“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.