“Dear God, Prosper, are you blind? You can see she’s a Commensal from just one look at her. She’s older than sin, and nobody her age can stay that fresh and bright and blooming without help. She’s not blooming anymore, though. They dragged her away feet-first, all on live video. And the camera kept going back to the big fat maggoty thing, blind and white and wrinkled. It looked like a giant floppy dick, slithering around on the table.”
“A schistosome,” said Alex. “One of the big mature forms that live inside all Commensals. Maybe the one over the liver. Somehow it found its way into the lungs or intestines, then all the way out of her body.”
“I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t much care. It’s where it went that matters. Right splat on the table.” Karolus smacked his hand down hard. “I’m telling you, showing that fat wriggler on live video will knock the bottom out of Sylva. They always show the benefits, but never the risks or what goes on inside a Commensal. I’ll bet you a thousand that today they’ll get zero sign-ups for the service.”
Alex said, “My mother—” and Prosper added, “—and Agatha.”
“You bet. Juliana, too.” Karolus snorted with laughter, then said, “Oh, come on. You can stop the long face, Alex. I saw all three of them, right after they watched the show. You don’t need to worry — they were more scared white than they were yellow, and no monster dick-slugs were crawling out of any holes that I could see. What they were mainly was well and truly pissed. They were heading straight over to the Sylva offices. I mean, we’re not just talking money-back guarantees here. We’re talking major lawsuits. Lanara Pinchbeck alone will sue for public humiliation and private anguish and loss of audience market share, and fifty other things you can’t even imagine.”
“That accounts for the absence of three family members.” Prosper Ligon seemed not at all inclined to dance and cheer on the table, as Karolus had suggested. “There are other people missing. Do you know anything of the whereabouts of Cora?”
“She went with Agatha — supposedly to offer moral support. Actually, Agatha did look a bit out of it. But my guess is that Cora wanted to have a good laugh and see what came next.”
“And Rezel and Tanya?”
“Dunno. They struck out so bad with the Pandora deal, I think maybe they’re afraid to show their faces.”
“With some reason. And speaking of the Pandora situation…”
Prosper Ligon turned to Alex. But before Alex could speak — this was going to be his big moment — Karolus jumped in.
“Yes, how about that? I’ve said bad things about Hector often enough, maybe I’ll have to change my tune. He’s not here for a good reason — he’s under arrest for attacking Pandora and ‘attempting to intimidate the leaseholder.’ That’s what the charge is. But, you know what? It seems like it worked.”
“Wait a minute.” Alex couldn’t believe this. “Hector pulled a pointless stunt out at Pandora. He could easily have screwed things up for me.”
“Seems to me Hector did some good. Isn’t it true that the leaseholder, Rustum what’s-his-name, is thinking of leaving Pandora and coming to Ganymede? That’s what I heard through the company information net.”
“Well, that may be true. But it had nothing to do with Hector.”
“That’s not the way it’s being reported — and Lucy-Maria Mobarak apparently sees things the same way I do. She’s convinced that Hector did the whole thing for her sake, to ‘prove that he is worthy of her,’ she says. She’s on her way now, taking a special flight out to where he’s being held. I’m telling you, this is a great day for the family. Sylva Commensals right down the tubes, a good shot at Pandora, and Ligon merging with Mobarak. Lucy-Maria doesn’t seem to mind that Hector isn’t too swift. Tell the truth, I’ve got the same feeling about her. She could trade her brain in for tripes and have a bargain. But if they suit each other, that’s enough for me. We’ve got everything but the wedding bells. I say we scrap this meeting right now, and go off some place to celebrate.” Karolus turned to Alex. “Unless there’s something else that you feel you need to tell us?”
“Yes, there is. It’s about the visit of Rustum Battachariya to Ganymede. I’m going to arrange it so he—”
“All in good time. He’s not even on the way yet. Plenty of opportunity to talk about that when it happens. Me, I’m out of here.”
Karolus swept from the room. Prosper Ligon glared at Alex. “I am not inclined to celebrate, despite Karolus’s excessive enthusiasm. However, it is clear to me that little purpose is served by holding a family assembly which is unattended by the family. This meeting is adjourned.”
He stood up. Ten seconds later, Alex was sitting alone at the long conference table.
Hector. Hector as hero. God, if you didn’t laugh at that, you had to cry. Alex could see one consolation. For the time being, the whole of the family was off his back. His mother would be far more concerned about the possibility of giant slugs crawling from one of her body orifices than about anything to do with Alex.
For the next few days he would be free to concentrate his thoughts on a rather larger issue: the future of the solar system.
Alex worried a little on the way down to the Advanced Planning offices. Perhaps he ought to have told Kate when he expected to arrive home, because she too would want to know everything that had happened on his trip.
It turned out not to matter. Kate was there, working at a terminal in her own office. She was too preoccupied to do more than give Alex a nod and say, “Thank Heaven, I can use a clearer head than mine. We have problems. Sit down.”
Alex sat. On the display in front of Kate was what looked suspiciously like outputs of his own predictive model. He said, “What’s going on?”
“I wish I knew.” Kate pushed her blonde hair back from her forehead and swung in her chair to face him. “You know that Magrit Knudsen told Ole Pedersen to learn all he could about your model, and how it works?”
“Of course I know. I was the one who had to provide him with program copies, remember?”
“Well, he took them, and the first thing he did was run them.”
The same thing I would have done myself — you want to be sure that whatever you’ve been given will work.”
“Right.” Kate’s eyes, usually so clear and bright, were bloodshot. She must have been up for days. “And the programs did work, just the way they had for us. He used the same input parameters, and the results predicted the collapse of the solar system with all humans dying out.”
Alex wanted to tell Kate about the anomalous run results on the Keep computers, when civilization was predicted to blossom and bloom for more than a century into the future.
He opened his mouth to speak, but she ran right over him. “By the time Pedersen did his final set of runs, he had dug into the theory in your papers. I’ve never denied that he’s smart, even if he is an insecure asshole. He worked on this night and day — I think he was hoping for a basic error in what you’ve done — but he found what he didn’t expect to find. Your theory is airtight. Last week, while you were away on Pandora, he came over to my office to say that he was a convert. He believes in your model.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“You might think so. But Pedersen’s as worried now as I am, because he did one other thing. He gave a copy of your program to Macanelly.”
“He’s must be out of his mind. Everybody says you might as well give programs to a trained ape as to Loring Macanelly.”
“Pedersen knows that, better than anyone. Seems he did it more to keep Macanelly occupied and out of Pedersen’s hair than anything else. So Macanelly ran the programs, too.”
“And he found different results?”
“No. He got exactly the same as us, and the same as Ole Pedersen. But Macanelly follows the news outlets, especially the dumb-dumb blurts. He’d been hearing about a SETI signal, something that came in from the stars.”