Dark as Day

by Charles Sheffield

  “Hey, I know all that. You told me, so I remember. I’m not some dumb-ass human. But did she? I mean, did she die? Are you sure?”

  “The whole of Mandrake was heated to more than three thousand degrees by a direct hit from a teraton bomb. It became a ball of bubbling magma. I have myself seen those images.” Bat paused. “May I anticipate your next question? You are going to ask me, am I sure that Nadeen Selassie was on Mandrake at the time.”

  “You got it.”

  “I have no direct evidence for that fact. Nor, however, do I see reason to doubt it.”

  “Well, sit tight, Fat Boy, because I’m going to give you a reason. I’ve been wandering the new data banks, the places nobody else bothers to go. There’s thousands of them, little stashes of information that were totally isolated before the Seine. I located a bank from one of the Amor class of asteroids, the ones that cross the orbits of both Earth and Mars. This asteroid was—and is—called Heraldic, and it had a little colony on it at the time of the Great War. Although it belonged to the Belt it wasn’t important enough for Earth to hit, so it wasn’t touched by any weapons at all. That didn’t do much for the people living there, because they weren’t self-supporting and afterwards the supply systems got totally screwed up. Everyone was starving to death. So they all took off.”

  “To go where?”

  “Not clear. According to the files left behind on Heraldic they were headed for the Callisto rehab camps, but I found no evidence they ever made it. If they did, they never wrote home. The Heraldic data bank sat abandoned and ignored until the Seine remotes went in a few months ago, set up the connectors, and hooked it into the general base.”

  “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?

  Bat sat alone in darkness for many hours, brooding on unanswerable questions. He had the feeling that forces he sensed only dimly were gradually coming closer.

  15

  ABOARD THE OSL ACHILLES

  Mars, for Janeed at least, promised to be at best an anticlimax. At worst it might turn out to be a disaster. For starters, no one aboard the Achilles would be allowed to land. The ship would go no closer to the planet than synchronous orbit, seventeen thousand kilometers above the surface, and sit there and wait for a couple of days. They had detoured to Mars, so far as Jan could tell, for three unrelated reasons: to permit an official inspection of the engines; to collect another eight passengers outward bound for the Jovian system; and, the one that worried Jan, to pick up Dr. Bloom.

  Why did Valnia Bloom want more meetings with Sebastian? You would think that with all the examinations, mental and physical, performed down on Earth and in orbit around Earth, everything that could be tested had been tested. Also, what did Dr. Bloom want with her? Jan had learned, only a couple of hours ago, that she too was scheduled for another session with the head of the Ganymede department of scientific research.

  From that moment Jan had been in hold mode. Now she was staring down at the surface of the planet and simply waiting. The exhilaration that she had felt since leaving Earth was draining away, minute by minute. Valnia Bloom had boarded, and Sebastian was already meeting with her. Was there any way that, having come so far, Jan and Sebastian might be rejected and returned to Earth? She had wandered the ship, hoping to see Paul Marr and perhaps receive some reassurance that acceptance aboard the Achilles meant final approval for outbound colonists. He was nowhere to be found. She assumed that he was with the inspection engineers behind the bulkhead with its red-lettered NO PASSENGERS sign.

  The view of Mars offered no relief. The planet was enduring one of its periodic months-long dust storms, clouding the ruddy face almost to the poles. It was mid-morning down there, and Jan could make out—or imagine that she made out—the great crack of Valles Marineris. That was all. Mars had struggled back close to its prewar population of seventeen million people, but no one, seeing the world from Jan’s vantage point, would discern any evidence of their existence.

  Suddenly, after waiting for what seemed like forever, she felt a touch on her elbow. It was Sebastian, moving, as usual, as silently as a cat. He dismissed the view from the port with a summary glance—No clouds!—and said, “Your turn.”

  “With Dr. Bloom? What did she say to you? What did she want? How did everything go?”

  “It was fine.” Sebastian smiled. “It was good.”

  That was probably the best that Jan could get. She nodded, turned, and headed at maximum speed for the cabin where Valnia Bloom had set up a temporary office. When she came to the door, she hesitated. She didn’t want to seem worried or nervous. She smoothed her hair, waited for five seconds, then knocked and went in.

  Valnia Bloom seemed as intense and anorexic as ever. She nodded to Jan, waved her to a chair, and said, “This shouldn’t take long.”

  Probably she thought she was being reassuring. Her expression was anything but. Her next words were worse. “Janeed Jannex, you said in our earlier meeting that you had known Sebastian Birch for more than thirty years, since you were small children. To your knowledge, was he ever placed for any reason in an institution?”

  “No!” The word burst out of Jan. All her life she had defended Sebastian, arguing that he was normal, covering for him when he did something especially weird, explaining away his lack of interest in conventional learning. And now, just when she thought all that was past, here it came again.

  “He’s a little slow to catch on, that’s all,” she said. “But once he understands an idea, he has it forever.”

  “I can very well believe that.” Valnia Bloom was studying a display, but it was tilted so that Jan could not see what was on it. “Did he ever have any form of brain surgery?”

  “No.” Jan’s mind instantly popped up tumor. “He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “Physically, he is in very good shape. He would otherwise not be here on this ship. His brain scans, however, are unusual and show very lopsided mental activities. In addition to the odd neurotransmitter activity noted by Christa Matloff, there is extra tissue in one of the sulci. The functions of that tissue remain a mystery. And so far as his mental abilities are concerned, they too are unusual. There are elements of the classical idiot savant, although he does not fit easily into that category. His innate understanding of the complex dynamics of weather systems is, so far as I can tell, unprecedented. He says he can see, inside his head, how storms on Jupiter and Saturn are born and develop. More so, oddly enough, than the weather patterns on Earth.”

  She frowned at the display for a long time, while Jan shivered inside and wondered, Why is she telling me all this?

  “Nothing like an epileptic fit?” Valnia Bloom said at last. “No loss of physical control, or violent outbursts?”

  “Never.” Jan wanted to laugh, the idea of violence from Sebastian was so preposterous. “He’s the best-natured man you’ll ever meet.”

  “He is certainly the most phlegmatic.” Valnia Bloom was nodding, more to herself than to Jan. “I wanted to be sure that you were not in some way shielding Sebastian in ways that you preferred not to mention. I have a reason why this is important. I know that the two of you insist on being considered as a team, which is very unusual in people who are not sexual partners.”

  “We’re not.”

  “I know that.”

  “We never have been. He’s like my brother.”

  “Which is why I wanted to meet with you before taking any action. You came as a team. I understand and appreciate that. But would you accept it if I were to, so to speak, take Sebastian under my wing for awhile?”

  “You mean—what do you mean?”

  “I would like to work with him, and try to understand why he is different from other people. He would become one of my personal research projects. Oh, you two would still be together as much as you like, and see each other whenever you want. But you might not—almost certainly would not—be working side by side on a day-by-day basis. You would no longer be a team. I want to know, is this acceptable to you?”

  It was, in a way, Jan’s oldest and dearest dream: a Sebastian who was valued for what he could do, rather than needing protection for what was strange or incomprehensible to him. But because Jan had filled her role for so long, she had to ask. “If ever Sebastian seems to be having difficulties—”

  “You will be the first to know, and the first person called upon to help.”

  “Then, yes. It sounds like a wonderful opportunity. Dr. Blo
om, when you get to know him you’ll find that he’s the sweetest, most uncomplaining person on Earth—not just Earth, anywhere. I’m absolutely thrilled for Sebastian that this is happening. And thank you for what you are doing.”

  Jan wanted to lean over and hug the stern, narrow-shouldered woman sitting across from her. She didn’t think that was likely to be appreciated. Instead, she had to be content with a smile that probably reached her ears.

  “Don’t thank me.” Valnia Bloom reached forward and with an air of finality stabbed with one thin digit a key on the hidden display. Then she looked up, and actually smiled an answering smile. “Before you leave, Janeed Jannex, I want you to know that I am doing this not because, unlike Sebastian, I am the sweetest person on Earth, or anywhere in the System. I am doing this for my own selfish motives. I am as keen to study Sebastian Birch as you are to make sure that no one harms him. That is all.”

  The dreaded meeting was over! The Achilles was in a stable orbit and the ship’s interior formed a micro-gravity environment, but Jan felt that it would have made no difference had she been back on Earth. As she left the room she would still have floated, borne up by sheer euphoria.

  She headed forward, seeking Sebastian to give him the good news. He was lying on his narrow bed, staring at nothing—or at, according to Valnia Bloom, the evolving storm systems that he and he alone in the whole System was able to visualize.

  “I had my meeting with Dr. Bloom.” She stood at the end of his cot, grinning down at him. “Everything is all right.”

  His round face took on a perplexed expression. He said, “Of course.” And then, with hardly a pause, “I feel hungry. Can we go to dinner?”

  Maybe Valnia Bloom had been trying to tell Jan something. She was in many ways still shielding and directing Sebastian, although to anyone else’s eye he was not a child or a youth but a full-grown and physically mature man. Maybe in trying to help him, she had become part of the problem.