“Do you have the reference code?”

“Does Rustum Battachariya eat chocolate? Of course I have the reference code. You can see for yourself when we’re through. But I’ll tell you what caught my attention. After the war was over, but well before the colonists gave up and left, three refugees from the Belt arrived at Heraldic: a woman and her two little children, in a beat-up ship with planetary landing capability. One of the kids, the baby boy, seemed all right, but the little girl was going to die no matter what. Her lungs were a mess of dissolving tissue. The woman had a chance, provided she received immediate medical treatment. She damn near died anyway, what with seared lungs, skin burns, and a broken back. They couldn’t do too great a job on her, because their medical supplies had run low and they didn’t have a good treatment center to start with. But they tried. Before they were finished with the treatment, while the woman was still a wreck, the baby girl died. After her daughter’s cremation — she insisted on that rather than space burial — the woman upped and left, taking the baby boy.”

“For what destination?”

“You tell me. The record’s blank. She said they’d come from Ceres and were going back there, but that was almost certainly a lie. The orbital geometry was all wrong, with Ceres on the other side of the Sun when she arrived and when she left. The people on Heraldic didn’t much care. They had their own worries. She also said her name was Pearl Landrix, but my guess is that was false, too.”

“Mord, I am a patient man.” Bat ignored the snort from the display. “However, so far you have offered me not one scintilla of evidence to suggest that the woman who arrived on Heraldic was anything other than she claimed to be, a poor and disabled war refugee and her injured children. Certainly, you have no reason to associate her with the presumably-deceased Nadeen Selassie.”

“No reason, except for a couple of things that if you’d shut up for a minute I’ll tell you. They put her under when they operated on her back, and beforehand while they were prepping her they did the usual tests to see if she was allergic to any of the drugs they’d be using. As part of that, they did a routine genome map. They discovered an unusual corrected trisomy of one of the chromosomes. Whoever did the test made a note: the only cases in their records of that kind of corrected trisomy came from Mandrake.” Mord paused. “You don’t look any too pleased.”

“I am filled with contempt and disdain — for myself. Since this data bank is online, I should have searched for references to Mandrake. I failed to do so. Nadeen Selassie was born on Mandrake, and she did all her work there. However, if this is your evidence, it is anticlimactic. It offers no linkage of the woman calling herself Pearl Landrix to Nadeen Selassie. The type of genetic abnormality that you describe was not rare on Mandrake. It was in fact rather common among the colonists, and just as commonly corrected. It was merely rare in other parts of the System.”

“I’m not done. The baby girl died and was cremated. But when they first arrived, and before the colonists realized they could do nothing to save the girl, as a matter of routine they did a genome scan and performed a general physical on her. The genome scan proved conclusively that the woman and the baby girl were not related.”

“In times of war and disaster, adoptions are common.”

“Don’t fight it, Bat. You’ve got that gleam in your eye. You believe there’s something there. And I’m still not done. Before the cremation — again as a matter of routine — the girl’s body was subjected to examination. It wasn’t a full autopsy, but whoever did it thought the results were odd enough to include in the data file. The baby had abnormalities that had nothing to do with her injuries. It looked like there had been pre-birth tampering, in the brain and in some of the organs. So you tell me: was Nadeen Selassie a biologist?”

In moments of high excitement, Bat turned to food. He had stuffed his mouth so full with candied orange peel that it was a few seconds before he could chew and swallow enough to answer Mord’s question.

“Even after thirty years and considerable research, Nadeen Selassie remains a figure shrouded in mystery. She was, in terms of weaponry, the Grand Designer for the most exotic forms that were ever found or ever lost. I am forced to rely on rumor and hearsay, but by all accounts she was unique. Her talents embraced biology, chemistry, and physics. If it is possible that she is still alive…”

“No. Not even assuming that Pearl Landrix was Nadeen Selassie. Her medical record at the time of her operation and after is still in the data file on Heraldic. When she left, they told her to go to the best treatment center she could find. If she did that, and soon, she might live as long as ten years. If she didn’t get treatment, she would die within five. But either way, that was thirty years ago. Calm down, Bat. She’s gone.”

“You are undoubtedly right.” Bat had moved rapidly from skeptic to believer. “And the legacy of her work, the ultimate weapon…”

“That’s gone, too. If we’re lucky.”

“Perhaps.” Bat turned to look around the Bat Cave, as though seeking a suitable open spot for yet another Great War relic. “One cannot help but speculate on what it might have been.” He stood up, which in the micro-gravity of Pandora looked rather like an act of levitation. “Even before you called, a variety of incidents today had already made it impossible for me to think straight. I beg your indulgence. I must go now and seek circumstances which will permit me to regain my mental equilibrium.”

“You mean you’re going to gorge. That’s enough for me. I’m out of here.”

Mord’s image vanished. As always, Bat wondered just what it was that had vanished. Mord was no more than a different form of Fax, a set of logical operators embodied as an evanescent swirl of electrons. Today, however, the puzzle of Mord’s incorporeal existence was no more than a fleeting thought. Something more urgent was on Bat’s mind.

Rather than heading for the other end of the Bat Cave and the pleasures of the kitchen, he sank slowly back down onto the padded chair. He said, aloud, “Something more deadly than a Seeker missile. Something more surprising than the super-adapted humans whom we learned about during the incident on Europa. And yet they survived to the present. Why not this? Mord feels it, too. Something is stirring within the System, something big and mysterious. The ultimate weapon? Or the ultimate shared illusion?”

This was why a person needed solitude. This was why a man could not afford to be interrupted by the constant clamor of mailings and messages and media. Magrit — his recent conversation with her already felt old and distant — had stated it succinctly and correctly. He was the smart one.

And he was baffled.

He set the sidereal clock back more than thirty years, and queried the astronomy programs for solar system positions and velocities of a select group of bodies.

Mandrake — Heraldic — Ceres. Mord had been right. Transit from Mandrake to Heraldic would have been easy in the closing days of the Great War. But movement from there to Ceres? That would be a lengthy and energy-expensive trip.

What about other destinations? Bat called in the ones he saw as most likely, given the starting point of Heraldic, and asked for evaluation.

One of them at once jumped out of the pack. Mars. If Pearl Landrix, perhaps aka Nadeen Selassie, wanted to go anywhere in her little ship, Mars would be the destination of choice. But Mars had itself been hideously battered during the Great War. It represented a first destination, but surely not a final one.

Where? If Nadeen Selassie was indeed carrying with her a doomsday weapon to make the solar system “dark as day,” where would she have taken it — or, if she were dying as Mord insisted, have sent it?