Dark as Day (27 page)

“I think that being a Commensal may be dangerous,” he said. “I received some very odd visions about them when I was inside the predictive model.” He decided that was the right way to put it. He had been
inside
the model when it was running, and
visions
was a better word than facts. What he retained after he left the model was a great jumble of impressions, perhaps scrambled in time.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he went on. “After we left Sylva Commensals, Uncle Karolus did a funny little hop-step. ‘They’re in shit up to their necks and they can’t duck,’ he said. ‘We have recordings of the meeting, with Agatha walking like a lame crab and yellow as a banana. I’ll make sure that the pictures are with the media tomorrow—leaked, of course. We’ll insist we have no idea how they got out from Ligon Corporate.’ ”

“Dirty tactics.” Kate refilled Alex’s glass. “What did I tell you? Wherever you encounter gobs of money, you’ll find shady business methods to go with it.”

They were sitting opposite each other at the little table, small enough so that knee contact was inevitable. “All right,” Kate went on. “I don’t want just the high points. Give me details, the whole thing. Every second from the moment you arrived at Ligon Industries until you walked back in that door.”

It was a tall order, but Alex did his best. He ate a fair amount, drank a lot, and talked steadily while Kate sipped wine and listened in silence. She frowned once, when he said he hadn’t denied having sex with Lucy-Maria, or whoever else it might have been, on his disastrous night at the Holy Rollers; but Kate clapped her hands with delight when he told her that he had recalled her advice,
Screw your family. Give them hell
, and described his own outburst.

“Bravo, Alex. Exactly what they deserved.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t do so well later. If it’s approved for me to take a few days leave I’m pretty much committed to trying to see this weirdo who hangs out on Pandora. I don’t want to do it, but I didn’t know how to say no.”

“Don’t give it a second thought. I’ll pass word up the line that your presence here is absolutely vital. Which it is.”

“I’m not sure. Prosper Ligon sounded pretty confident. He usually makes sure of his positions ahead of time.” Alex had another thought. He had covered everything from the time he arrived at Ligon Corporate, but not the period while he was traveling there. “Kate, I saw a news blurb while I was heading up for the meeting, about some sort of alien contact. It made me think of something similar in the predictive model. Have you heard anything about alien messages?”

“There was nothing on the standard channels.”

“There wouldn’t be. This was a Paradigm special.”

“Then it was more than likely garbage. Want me to check it out?”

“If you would.” Alex didn’t say,
if you can
. Kate could network in a way that he would never master. “Not now, though.”

“Certainly not now. Have you finished eating?”

“Yes.”

Kate rested her hand on the top of the bottle. “And drinking?”

“Not quite.” Alex realized that his head no longer ached. He felt good, physically and mentally. He took the bottle from her. “One more, for medicinal purposes. You know the origin of the word ‘whiskey’? It comes from
usquebaugh
, which meant ‘water of life.’ The old-timers back on Earth knew what they were talking about.”

“Just don’t drink too much. You know what another of your old-timers said about alcohol? ‘Liquor increases the desire but ruins the performance.’ ”

Which disposed of any question as to what would happen next. Kate might be worried, but she didn’t need to be. Beneath the table, Alex gripped her knee between his. This had been a long and multiply-horrible day, but the night would be better.

To borrow from more of the old-timers,
all’s well that ends well
. And then there was,
Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?
Not to mention
a lecherous head begets a lecherous tail
.

He didn’t realize that he was speaking aloud until Kate reached out and very firmly removed the bottle from his hand. “When you start babbling quotations, it means you’ve had quite enough.”

“I’m feeling great.”

“That’s all right. Feeling great is allowed.” Kate put the bottle off on a side table and reached out a hand to raise Alex to his feet. “What isn’t allowed is Alex Ligon, tomorrow morning, telling me that he’s not sure who he had sex with tonight.”

18

The buzz was surely Magrit Knudsen, trying to reach him again. It would be about the infernal Ligon family, and Bat’s need to meet with them, but Bat had taken all the irritation he could stand for one day. He set a minimal data-rate line to the outside world, designed to infuriate and frustrate any human caller, and retreated into the safety and solitude of the Keep.

It was time to review the four-sigma list.

The list was prepared automatically by Bat’s own programs in their constant system-wide search for anomalies improbable enough to be flagged. The “four-sigma” designation was, as Bat well knew, misleading. It suggested that he was interested in items with only one chance in more than ten thousand of occurring, which was quite true. But the name also assumed that such events followed a normal distribution, which was surely not true.

Bat was too lazy to invent a better name. He knew what he wanted from the program and in any case the next step was all his, incapable of being quantified in any manner that he could describe. He sought
connections
between items on the four-sigma list, to multiply chances and turn a less than one in ten thousand probability into a one in three hundred million improbability.

It had been a few days since he examined the list, and several new items caught his eye.

* * *

1) Someone was requesting of Transportation Central a high-speed passage between the Jovian L-4 and L-5 points, an event unprecedented in the program’s experience, and in Bat’s also. Argus Station to Odin Station? He marked a query to keep track of the flight.

2) A rapid five percent drop had taken place in the corporate value of Sylva Commensals, coincident with a statement of record high earnings. That was certainly an anomaly, in that it made no apparent sense, but Bat knew better than to spend time wondering about it. While still in his teens he had concluded that the value placed on a corporation by investors was nothing but a random walk modified by inside information.

3) A solar flare of record size had occurred, doubling the intensity of the solar wind through the whole system for four days. Bat ignored that one, too. Certainly, it was an anomalous event, but even at his most paranoid Bat did not suspect the Sun of active involvement in human affairs.

4) Nothing new at the Master level had been posted on the Puzzle Network for the past six days.

That made Bat sit up and take notice. He had been too preoccupied with his own worries to monitor Puzzle Network activity recently, but he had never known such a long interval without at least one new Master-level problem. Something must be going on, and he was quite annoyed that he was not involved. Again, he marked a query to keep track and see when the pattern ended. If it did not, the program would alert him in a day or two.

5) Fewer live human births had been reported for one day of the previous month than at any time in a decade. Bat took a quick look at the numbers on the days before and after, and wiped it off the list. He was seeing a simple consequence of the laws of probability. Statistical maxima and minima had to occur on some day, and only if a pattern were displayed was it worth further study.

* * *

He was all set to strike the next item also—huge Io volcanic activity, surely correlating with the solar flare—when a slow, gurgling voice emerged from the speaker attached to the low-data rate external line.

L—e—t m—e i—n
.

No human could slow a speech rate like that, and remain intelligible. Bat stepped up the data rate on the line. “Mord?”

“Who do you think?” said an acerbic voice. “Come on, give me a decent line rate.”

“Not while I’m in the Keep environment. It will take a minute to close off the Keep, then I’ll bring you in on a Seine connection.”

“Sure, don’t bother to hurry. A second of time at your clock rate only makes me feel like I’m waiting a year.”

“I have little sympathy. You are multi-tasking, and we both know it. Do you have useful information for me?”

“Of course not.” The Keep had closed, the Seine was open, and Mord’s scowling, long-nosed face appeared on the display. “I’m here simply for the pleasure of your company.”

“As I am for yours. Sarcasm does not become you. What have you learned?”

“You go first. What do you have?”

“Concerning Nadeen Selassie and the boy child whom she had with her?”

“You got it. We’re not talking Santa Claus here.”

“I examined orbital geometries, and with a high level of probability their destination when they left the asteroid Heraldic was Mars. The ship that they were on had a planetary landing capability, which is itself significant.
However
”—Bat held up his hand, restraining any possible interruption from Mord—“Mars could have been no more than a stopping-off point. Mars record-keeping returned to normal surprisingly quickly. We can say with certainty that no one corresponding in physical description to Nadeen Selassie was present on that planet, five years after the Great War.”

“So they died on Mars, or they got away. Either option, we lost ’em again.”

“Perhaps not. I took this one step further. Assume that they left Mars at some time during the three-year interval following their departure from Heraldic. What, then, would be their possible destination? We can rule some out, very easily. A return to the Belt, in its devastated condition, would have meant certain death. They could have traveled out to the Jovian system, but their arrival would certainly have been noted. Even if they went to one of the refugee camps on Callisto, their presence and condition would have been remarked. I searched the records, and found no sign of anyone who could have been Nadeen Selassie. Anywhere beyond the Jupiter system, such as one of the Saturn moons, would at the end of the Great War have been unable to permit their survival. All of which seems to leave only one possibility.”

Mord said in a rasping voice, “Earth. Son of a bitch, they went to Earth. She must have been crazy. The damned planet was a heap of rubble.”

“Less crazy, perhaps, than desperate. Again, I examined the orbital mechanics. Earth would have been relatively easy compared with any of the other choices that I have mentioned. Also, Earth did not suffer total devastation. The northern hemisphere was destroyed, but the southern one survived.”

“Except that if they’d landed there, somebody would have made a note of it. Their arrival would be in the records. I’m assuming it wasn’t, or you’d have got to it at once and wouldn’t be stringing me out like this.”

“No such arrival was recorded. That says to me that the ship must have landed in the northern hemisphere.”

“In among all the teratomas that the Belt had dropped in? You’ve gotta be kidding. They’d be worse off there than out on the surface of the Moon.”

“Not so. Survivors were picked up in the northern hemisphere. Not many, and no one who corresponds in age and description to Nadeen Selassie. However, several thousand people were recovered.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Not if we restrict our attention to small children, which at this point we can logically do. I queried the data banks for all below the age of ten who were recovered on the surface of Earth’s northern hemisphere anywhere in the appropriate time period.”

“Bat, I’m impressed. You’ve actually been
working
. And here’s me thinking all this time you were sitting in there playing with yourself.”

“I have, as you say, been working. And now it is your turn to do so, because I am unable to proceed farther.”

“How come?”

“Recalling what you had told me of abnormalities revealed in the autopsy on Heraldic of the girl child, I sought to obtain medical records of all the children rescued after the Great War in Earth’s northern hemisphere. I have their names, but other records were not available to me by any form of direct-access link. They are protected by irritating considerations of personal privacy. You, however, are able to approach the problem from a variety of angles …”

“I got you. I can slither in most places. I’ll see what I can do. Now it’s my turn. When I first arrived here you asked me what I had.”

“And?”

“I took a different tack. You’ve been babbling on for ages about the Mother Lode of weapons. I decided to go off and take a look for it. I knew there was no hope in the old and established databases, because you and the other Great War buffs have gone through them for years. If I was going to find something, the place to look was in all the new, small databases that are coming online with the Seine’s search machines.”

“And did you find it?” Bat’s voice betrayed a rare excitement.

“No such luck. That would be too much to hope for. But I did discover some very odd bits and pieces. For instance, I found Nadeen Selassie in at least a dozen places. Most of them were just personnel lists involving Belt weapons programs. There were two odd exceptions. The first was in a list of something called
planetary weapons
. I’ll leave you the list, so you can make your own decision as to what it represents, but it looks as though the words ‘planetary weapons’ were used to distinguish them from free space weapons. It’s still a funny designation, because most weapons can be used anywhere, either down on the planetary surface, or out in space.”

“Unless a weapon is designed to attack something you don’t find out in space—plants, maybe, or animals. The universal disassemblers down on Mars were like that.”

“Could be. Except that the disassemblers were on a different Belt list, of weapons designed for use against personnel and equipment. But there was something stranger still on another list. According to this one, Nadeen Selassie had a new weapon
fully finished and tested
before the end of the Great War. It was classified as a weapon of planetary destruction. You’d think it would be just the kind of thing that the Belt leaders would have used on Earth or Mars, or even one of the populated moons of Jupiter. So here’s my question: why
didn’t
they use it? If it really was a weapon that could completely destroy a planet, that would have been enough to end the war at once, with the Belt the winner the first time it was used.”