“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.

Bat examined the results of a suite of test programs, and nodded his approval. The Keep, although it was just one system in a single location, could out-perform almost every pre-Seine processor. As it should. Large amounts of Bat’s personal time and assets had gone into it. Only food, isolation, and Great War relics were as, important as computer power.

As for the Seine…

Bat swiveled his great chair to face the other console. He was impressed by the validity of Mord’s last words to him. The Seine was indeed a wondrous new resource, and he had every intention of probing it to the full; he just didn’t want it probing him by invading his private data banks.

First he examined the console for new incoming messages. He found four of them and scanned the sources rather than the messages themselves. The senders were all well-known to him. Pack Rat, Ghost Boy, The Joker and Attoboy were each at the Master level in the Puzzle Network. There was no hurry reading those messages. A good challenge could take anything from a week to forever to solve. Bat had once spent a month trying to crack a puzzle from Claudius, a woman (Bat was convinced that it was a woman, in spite of the name), until finally he realized that he was dealing with a transformed version of the most famous unproven conjecture in mathematics.

On the Puzzle Network, that was quite legitimate. The puzzle was solved when you caught on to what Claudius had done. Of course, there was also the possibility that some puzzle master would actually prove (or disprove) the Riemann conjecture — and thereby become a major name in the history of mathematics.

Instead of reading the waiting messages, Bat began his own exploration of the Seine. It was something he had been itching to do since Seine Day, but he had deferred action until he was sure that the Keep was as secure as he could possibly make it.

Within minutes, he knew that his and Mord’s instincts had been correct. Data banks were now available that had been lost or hidden since the time of the Great War. They might point to treasures of long-gone weaponry that he had never suspected existed. But he had to be careful. His lines of communication had been set in place years ago, making him the master spider at the center of his own information web. Without stirring from the Bat Cave, he could in the past be sensitive to every trend and initiative within the System.

Not anymore. The Seine was a new factor whose effects he could not begin to calculate. He suspected that it was powerful enough to destroy his web and the work of many years.

Slowly, warily, Bat allowed selected programs to reach into the depths of the Seine. As a first exercise he asked for a listing of all Great War databases available today but unknown or unavailable one month ago. He hoped for at least a handful. Within minutes he knew that he had been too conservative. The count was over seventy and showed no signs of slowing when his attention was distracted by a communications alert.

A message was coming in: a real-time message, with someone waiting at the other end.

One great side benefit, or if you were Bat one great possible side nuisance, of the Seine was instant access to the whole solar system. In the past, light-speed signals from Pandora to Ganymede or anywhere else of significance took many minutes, even with optimal orbital geometry. Now the Seine contained fully entangled quantum computers scattered all across the solar system. Messages and video could be digitized, sent computer-to-computer in no time at all, and reconstructed at their destination. Which meant, of course, that any fool in the System could try to reach you and demand real-time response.

The trick was not to let any fool in the System know of your existence or whereabouts.