Ligons. The whole damned day seemed packed with Ligons, although she had to admit that Alex Ligon had made an unexpectedly favorable first impression. Kate Lonaker swore that he was a genius, and today he had stood up for his work without any guff or false modesty. Unfortunately, Alex seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. The imperial word from Prosper Ligon, delivered to Magrit from the dizzy heights of Council Headquarters, displayed the contempt that only established wealth and power could afford: Magrit was to contact Rezel and Tanya Ligon as soon as possible, and arrange for them to meet immediately with the owner of the lease on Pandora.
“Contact” could mean anything. When dealing with someone powerful, Magrit infinitely preferred a face-to-face in her own office. That way they couldn’t be calling on huge external resources without you knowing about it.
This time she’d have to settle for half. Rezel and Tanya Ligon would meet with her in person, but she must go over to a Ligon corporate center to do it. She stood up and headed for the door, then hesitated. She came back to her desk, pulled out an image cube, and stuck it into her pocket. If Bat’s information were reliable — it had never in the past been anything but — this might be needed.
On the fifteen-minute trip via Ganymede’s high-speed elevators and rapid slideways, Magrit wondered if she was about to make a mistake. Supposing that she and Bat did not have to deal with Rezel and Tanya Ligon, then who else in the family might they propose? It was going to be another balancing act to get what she wanted.
Magrit arrived at the corporate center and identified herself to a Level Three Fax in the outer chamber. The Fax politely invited her to take a seat and told her that the news of her arrival was being passed on to the appropriate parties. Magrit sat down on an angular and uncomfortable chair, opposite expensive murals of the baleen management team and huge krill harvesters with which the second rise in Ligon fortunes had begun. She noted that she was exactly on time.
Thirty minutes later she was still sitting in the same place. The Fax, which had the form of a handsome young man, was apologetic. It could, it said, unfortunately do nothing to speed things up. When younger, Magrit would have been either intimidated or seething. Now she recognized the tactic. Important guests would never be kept waiting. This was an attempt, and a rather crude one, to show Magrit where she stood in the Ligon perceived order of things.
Magrit checked her mobile message unit. As she suspected, it would not operate. For security reasons, the interior of the Ligon corporate center was shielded against both incoming and outgoing signals. No matter. It was nice to be inaccessible to other problems for an hour, and she had plenty to do. Bat, in their most recent conversation about the Ligon family and its demands, had volunteered his additional concern that “something new and major” was going on in the System.
What sort of something? Bat, crouched black-cowled and scowling on his over-sized chair, had admitted that he didn’t know. It might be an effect of the Seine, now fully activated. Possibly it was some unrelated development. It was far harder for Bat’s highly logical and organized mind to admit his own uncertainty than it was for Magrit to accept it. At the moment he could offer no more than a visceral discomfort, a feeling, he said, as though some giant wasp had become accidentally entangled in his delicate spider’s web of information retrieval. He promised to work to make his worries specific and tangible. Meanwhile, would Magrit remain alert for anything new under the Sun, anywhere from the Vulcan Nexus to the Oort Cloud?
She had promised to do so. And lo and behold, sitting in the incoming message queue in her office had been a candidate for Bat’s “something new” claim. She pulled out the quick-print she had made in her office, sat it on her lap, and read through it three times.
To the Ganymede Central Council, special restricted report. On 10/10/97, at 4:16:44, the Argus Station at Jovian L-4 noted a signal of apparent extra-solar origin. The identifier, recorded here for the purpose of recognition of priority, is AT-66-JB-2214. Signal frequency, duration, and direction will be reported later, assuming that confirmation tests prove satisfactory. Following accepted protocol, the signal has been named as the Wu-Beston anomaly. General detection tests have been passed, and we are proceeding to verification before attempting interpretation. This message is being tight-beamed to two and only two locations, namely, the Ganymede Cabinet Records Office and the Odin Station at Jovian L-5.
Signed, Jack Beston,
Argus Station Project Director.
This was certainly something new. What it signified was another matter. Over the years Magrit had heard rumors of a dozen contacts with alien intelligence. Each one had fizzled out after a few weeks, explained as natural radio sources, within-System human signals, or an over-optimistic assessment of some natural data run masquerading as a statistically significant sequence. It was hard to believe that this one would prove to be different, but when she next spoke to Bat she would point it out to him. This was a restricted access message, to named individuals only, but chances were that Bat had already seen and evaluated it. He had an insatiable curiosity for things he was not supposed to know, and he possessed personal probes that could crack almost any message cipher in the system. Coded signals were like dark chocolate with truffles, they had Bat smacking his blubbery lips.
That conversation would have to wait. Finally, the reception Fax was waving for Magrit’s attention. The door beyond the ante-chamber stood open, and Magrit walked through to face the inquisition.
Two people were in the room, both standing. Rezel and Tanya Ligon she recognized easily from the data on the Ligon family that Bat had provided. They were close enough look-alikes to be twins, although Magrit knew that they were in fact sisters two years apart. Each was a tall, busty blonde with hair cut to conform to Ganymede’s latest fashion, fringed across the forehead and curved around the cheeks. Each wore a dress of electric blue, cinched tight around a narrow waist and short enough to show off long, slim, and perfect legs.
Magrit had been too rushed to freshen up after her improvised lunch. She was still wearing the white skirt and floral blouse of her morning meeting. Back on government levels those were considered slightly daring, at the edge of permissible dress codes for office work, but comparing herself now with the Ligon cousins, Magrit felt frumpy, dumpy, and unkempt.
She dismissed those thoughts. This was not a beauty contest. Nor was it a social encounter, a fact made clear when the woman on the left — Rezel, Magrit thought, a fraction taller and heavier than her sister — said abruptly, “Knudsen? Sit down, and let’s get this over with. We can’t spare much time.”
But it was your man, Prosper Ligon, who insisted that I meet with you. Magrit smiled pleasantly, took a seat across the table from them as indicated, and waited.
After a long pause, the woman went on, “I am Rezel Ligon. We didn’t really want to meet with you at all. We want to meet with the man, the Bat or whatever his name is, who holds the lease on Pandora.”
The man. The Ligons had been doing their own homework. To Magrit’s certain knowledge, the gender of the leaseholder for Pandora was nowhere provided on any of the legal documents. Bat was identified only by the name he used on the Puzzle Network, Megachirops, while Magrit was named as the point of contact. But among other things, money bought information.
Magrit said mildly, “I have full authority to negotiate on Bat’s behalf. What do you propose?”