Milly had said nothing, but Magrit Knudsen caught something from her expression. The older woman smiled at her.
“There are days like this, my dear. You just have to hope that you’ll live to see a lot of them.” Magrit Knudsen turned again to Bat. “One more thing. I know how much you love to collect lost weapons from the Great War. I sympathize with that, and normally I approve of it. Now, I can imagine you saying to yourself, if I could obtain a few nodules that Nadeen Selassie implanted in Sebastian Birch — or even just one — that would be the finest war relic anyone could ever hope to own. And I would enclose them and insulate them and guard them so well in the depths of the Bat Cave, the nodules would never be dangerous to anyone. I couldn’t ever mention to anyone that I had them, but they would still be mine. Well, Bat, I have just one thing to say about that line of thinking. Don’t go there. Even if your devious mind sees a way to get your hands on more nodules, don’t do it.”
“Very well.”
“Is that a real yes? A personal promise, from you to me?”
“I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
Bat was half a meter taller than Magrit and at least four times her mass. She stood, hands on hips, staring up at him in silence as he frowned, pursed his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and gave every appearance of a man in supreme torment.
Finally he reached a hand into the pocket of his rumpled shirt and fumbled around. His hand emerged holding a great mass of detritus. Milly saw papers, an interface coupler, three keys and a tiny electronic lens, all glued together by what appeared to be lumps of hard candy. Bat reached into the middle of the mess with his other hand and delicately removed a capped metal tube a couple of centimeters across. He handed it over.
As he did so he sighed like an expiring whale and said, “There is more than one way to kill a man, Magrit Knudsen. Take this; and with it, you have my solemn promise.”
35
CLOSURE, AND OPENING
Bat floated in the bath, eyes closed and only his face and an island of rounded belly showing above the surface. He had not bothered to remove his clothes. Either the protozoan cleansers would be smart enough to recognize and ignore them, or they would eat them away along with every trace of grime upon his body.
He murmured, “Peace at last. Or at least the temporary illusion of peace, which is all we can hope for.”
He spoke to the ceiling, where Mord frowned down at him. Clean clothes hung draped over rails at the side of the bath. The bathroom, on the lowest occupied level, was otherwise devoid of fixtures. It did not offer the true sanctuary of the Bat Cave, but it was the best that Ganymede had to offer. Until Bat’s departure request for Pandora was approved by Magrit Knudsen, it must serve.
“Temporary,” Bat went on, “because of course all the difficult questions remain. Yesterday’s urgencies swept them out of sight, but they will soon return. Alex Ligon lacks a strong personality, but he possesses intelligence and a persistent temperament. He will continue to explore the erratic behavior of his predictive models. He will quickly come to realize that the Seine itself is the source of variability of his results.
“And then there is the failure of the Seine. It is self-monitoring and self-correcting. How could it cease to operate, totally and System-wide, for a full seven minutes? There is no suggestion that the Seine was somehow turned off during that period. Given that its speed and parallel processing capacity exceeds human comprehension, what task could have engaged the Seine’s attention during that interval of introspection? Also, what can explain the time at which that introspective period occurred?”
He lay silent, until at last Mord said quietly, “I suppose you have answers for all those questions.”
“I have theories, not certainties.” Bat opened his eyes. “As you know, one of my core beliefs is that there is no such thing as certainty. There are just different degrees of uncertainty. However, I am willing to offer speculations.”
“That might be interesting.” Mord was curiously subdued, and his voice lacked its normal sarcastic bite.
“Then I will reveal to you the sequence of my thought processes, fragmented and disconnected as they may seem.” Bat studied Mord’s image, frowned, and went on. “Oddities of all kinds interest me. You know that, and you have contributed much to my four-sigma list. Everything concerning Nadeen Selassie belonged on that list, and led us — belatedly, and thanks to Valnia Bloom irrelevantly — to Sebastian Birch.
“Nadeen Selassie and her weapon became my main focus. I was beguiled by what we may term the fallacy of the single issue. I sought one explanation that could explain every anomaly — this, for a system as complex as the whole of human affairs and solar system operations. However, even in my blindness I noted other peculiarities which could have nothing to do with Nadeen Selassie and her Great War legacy. A surprising number of them revolved around the subject of aliens. Naturally, since the discovery of the Wu-Beston anomaly there has been talk everywhere of intelligent aliens; however, many of the rumors and mutterings and statements without any assigned source preceded the Wu-Beston discovery.
“What was going on? Had some news blurt suddenly developed powers of precognition? I placed that notion at a maximum level of improbability, and I sought — unsuccessfully — some other explanation.
“But aliens were appearing in other places than the news media. Alex Ligon had formulated a predictive model that called upon the full power of the Seine if it were to run in its most detailed mode. He executed the model, many times. The results indicated that humans would become extinct and vanish from the solar system in less than a century. However, when he ran the model in interactive mode, an alien presence revealed itself to him on many high-probability branches of the future. He had — and has — no explanation for this.
“Next, a worker on the Argus Station at Jovian L-4 discovered a radio-frequency signal. Milly Wu’s SETI find was quickly verified by the Jovian L-5 group as being of extrasolar origin. I asked myself, could such an ‘extrasolar’ signal somehow be fabricated? I concluded that it was impossible, unless the effort began as long ago as the Great War.”
Mord said, “Which is hard to swallow. People had other things on their minds.”
“My conclusion exactly. I was therefore eager to examine the SETI signal for myself — eager enough to leave Pandora for Ganymede, and join the Puzzle Network group working on the signal’s possible interpretation.
“But before I left, events took an unexpected and perplexing turn. At a time when access to the Seine was blocked by outside interference, Alex Ligon was meeting with me in the Bat Cave. He ran his predictive model using the Keep computers on Pandora. He expected to see the same behavior as on Ganymede; namely, an unstable human future unless alien intelligence played a role in that future. The model ran successfully on the Keep’s system — but the results indicated that humanity would survive and prosper, with or without aliens.
“Alex Ligon could not explain those results. Nor could I. Upon his return to Ganymede he learned more. A fellow-worker, inspired or deluded by news blurts about aliens, introduced the SETI signal into Ligon’s model. The results miraculously stabilized. The model predicted a bright long-term future for humanity.
“Alex Ligon was baffled. As was I. Before I could pursue that topic, the problem of Sebastian Birch came to a head and pushed aside all other concerns. I realized for the first time the magnitude of the threat that Nadeen Selassie’s handiwork implied. I am normally of a sanguine disposition, but I must confess that when I watched a spacecraft with Sebastian Birch aboard heading for a fatal encounter with Jupiter, I was possessed by terror. My own demise seemed imminent and inevitable, together with that of every human and every human construct throughout the solar system. In those final minutes, my mind refused to function. I faced, for the first time, the threat of immediate personal extinction. I knew that I was about to die.