Dark as Day

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 highspeed 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.”

“Perhaps a full-scale version was never produced. You say only that it was tested.”

“No. Apparently a production version was ready for use, complete with a delivery system.”

Bat closed his eyes and sat in silence for a long time, so long that Mord finally said, “Hey, are you going to sleep on me?”

“By no means.” Bat opened his eyes. “I am as lacking for an explanation as you are. A weapon, capable of destruction on a planetary scale, finished, tested, and ready for use. And yet, not used. It might be tempting to argue that the Belt leaders refrained from employing so terrible a weapon for humanitarian reasons, but everything we know of the Great War tells us that no such charitable motive can be ascribed to the leaders of the Belt war effort. They would have killed every human on the inner planets and all through the Jovian system, if it allowed them to win the war.”

“So you agree with me. We got us a mystery.”

“A mystery, indeed, and one that would be of high abstract interest, were it not for my suspicion — my conviction, even — that this weapon was not destroyed. It left the belt with Nadeen Selassie, traveled with her to the asteroid Heraldic, and is now — where?”

“You got me. I’ll let you wrap your head around that one while I see if I can crack the data on Earth’s medical records. Anything else? Otherwise, I’m out of here.”

“I will only repeat my earlier warning. Take care. The whole computing and communication profile of the System has changed since the Seine came into operation. I can detect a substantial difference, without being able to define or quantify it.”

“Same here, but more so. I used to move around freely, now it’s look before you leap. I never relocate or access a new data file without checking everything beforehand. Look for me back here in a week or less. If I’m not, you’ll know that something got me. Trouble is, you won’t know what.”

Mord’s squint-eyed image vanished from the display, leaving Bat oddly worried. Mord was only a program; far more sophisticated than most programs, true, but still no more than a few million lines of logic and code.

On the other hand, could you say much more than that about human consciousness? The loss of Mord would be mourned, as much as the loss of any human. And the blank display, doorway to the Seine, suddenly seemed dark and ominous.