Dark as Day

4 THE BAT CAVE, PANDORA, YEAR 2097, SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

At about the time when Dr. Valnia Bloom spread before Sebastian Birch his sketches of Saturnian clouds and asked about their origins, Rustum Battachariya was in a position to take a look at the real thing. All he had to do was walk twenty paces to the end of the Bat Cave. Then he could ride an ascending elevator to an observation chamber on Pandora’s surface, float forward in the negligible gravity of the tidally-locked little moon, and stare down on the vast rings and broad face of Saturn itself.

Not, of course, that Bat had the least intention of doing any such thing. He never went near the surface, and anyway he was busy. He and his software tools were locked in combat with one of the most formidable intelligences in the Solar System, and if things went well the fight would continue for the next ten or twelve hours. The nearest actual humans were maybe a million kilometers away, observing the Von Neumanns at work on Saturn’s giant moon, Titan. That suited Bat fine. He neither needed help, nor wanted it.

The decision to move the Bat Cave from Ganymede’s deep interior had not been made lightly. Bat had worked there, productively and misanthropically and generally ignored, for more than fifteen years. Then, four years ago, the worst thing possible had happened: he had made a trip to Europa to resolve a mystery, and in the course of his visit the existence of an alien life form in Europa’s deep ocean had been revealed. It was nothing like the distant intelligences sought by Jack and Philip Beston in their SETI projects, merely a curious aperiodic crystal with the ability to reproduce and with a minimum of internal metabolism. But it was enough. Enough to have Europa placed off-limits for development, and enough for something else. A member of the media — the invasive, intrusive, inquisitive, insatiable, intolerable media — had been present on Europa, and Nell Cotter in her report had fingered Bat as the hero of the whole incident. The name, shaved black cannonball head, and three-hundred-kilo body of Rustum Battachariya became famous throughout the Solar System. Ail hope of privacy was lost.

After that, almost daily, some media wretch would employ a combination of bribery and bare-faced lies to discover the location of the Bat Cave. They would then seek out Bat and plead for exclusive interviews.

Four months of this was more than Bat could stand. He began the search. Where to go?

At first there was a temptation to move inward. Following the ending of the Great War, Earth had become the Sol-ward limit of human existence. The research station on Mercury and the research domes on Venus had been utterly destroyed. Bat could have gone there. But both Mercury and Venus had substantial surface gravity, and Bat, although tolerant of Ganymede’s weaker pull, wanted less weight rather than more. As bad or worse, as the System steadily recovered, so the urge to rebuild lost resources grew. Scientific pressure was increasing for a station on Venus and Mercury. If that happened, in the whole Inner System there was nowhere else to go. You had four planets and three moons, and no wiggle room.

Bat turned his analytical eye outward. The habitable Jovian satellites thrummed with life and daily became more crowded. You had to look farther, recognizing that no matter what you did today, at some time in the future you might have to make another change. He expected to live a long time. The lesser satellites of Uranus or even of Neptune were not beyond consideration.

He made his decision, he made his plans, and when all was ready he resigned his position as head of Passenger Transport Schedules for the Outer System. He revealed where he was going only to his boss, Magrit Knudsen, first obliging her to swear that she would never contact him, visit him, or reveal his whereabouts to any living soul. And then he relented. Magrit Knudsen had provided protective cover for Bat for more than a dozen years. She could, he said, contact him if she was in personal difficulty. Or — an afterthought — if someone came to her with an intellectual problem that she deemed worthy of Bat’s powers. He was still a senior member of the Puzzle Network, and he had no intention of abandoning that activity.

Bat arranged to move the whole Bat Cave, complete with its unique contents, to a natural chamber deep within one of Saturn’s minor satellites, Pandora. Everything was handled by machines controlled by Bat alone, and when the operation was finished he used his knowledge of the Ganymede computer systems to erase all records. Then it was time for the final step. Bat had to conquer his own agoraphobia enough to suffer the long journey through open space.

He did it the easy way. He imbibed a carefully mixed combination of hypnagogic drugs, closed his eyes, and opened them to find himself on Pandora.

The moon was an irregular rock splinter fifty kilometers long and thirty across. Compared with Saturn’s nine major moons it was a flyspeck, skimming along underneath them and orbiting the planet in less than a day. Since it was above the great ring systems and had a downward view partly blocked by them, no one would choose it as a preferred site for planetary surveillance. It had no atmosphere, no mineral resources, no natural water or other volatiles. It should have no interest to anyone.

For Bat, however, Pandora seemed perfect. He had no desire for a window seat to examine Saturn, and he would bring his own self-contained habitat, together with ample volatiles to last a century. After that, if necessary, he would review his options.

And so far Pandora had lived up to all of Bat’s expectations. In three full years, he had been plagued by not a single visitor. Magrit Knudsen had contacted him exactly once, when she was faced with a transportation requirement involving an apparently impossible scheduling conflict. Bat embedded the structure within a more general class of problem, provided an algorithm for the whole set, and sent a complete answer to Magrit two days later. He had allowed himself the indulgence of one major gloat before returning to his studies of lost artifacts of the Great War.

Today, however, gloating and Great War relics were an indulgence that he could not afford. The clock was ticking. In one more day, the Seine would be activated. This must be a final test.

Bat sat on a specially-made seat at the “thinking” end of the Bat Cave, his black-clad bulk ballooning out in a way impossible in higher gravity. He had sent out his software probes, and now he was patiently awaiting their return. The system that he had established was designed to mimic, so far as any entity can mimic something larger than itself, the functions of the whole, quantum-entangled Seine. Bat was on the attack with it, working his way inward past the invisible and dynamic defenses of his antagonist. So far, the probes of his Seine-simulators had been thoroughly balked.

“Forty minutes since anything happened,” said a rasping voice from close by his side. “Are you stuck?”

Bat turned. “Let us say that we are temporarily halted. Two firewalls have been negotiated, but the third provides great resistance.” He did not seem surprised by the sudden voice. The image in the display volume at his side showed the face of a balding, squint-eyed man in late middle age. The newcomer seemed to be staring at the screens, too, but Bat knew that was just for show. Mord received all his inputs in realtime. That gave him a definite advantage, because he knew what Bat’s programs were reporting before Bat did.

“It’s taking longer than ever before.” It was hard to tell from Mord’s tone if he thought that good or bad.

Bat nodded. “When did you enter?”

“Right at the beginning. I noticed the changes in resource allocation.” Mord’s eyes narrowed as he peered at the latest outputs. “I was wrong last time, when I thought you’d never get in. Want to go double or quits? I say, this time you definitely won’t break the defenses within twelve hours.”

Bat closed his eyes and settled back in his chair to ponder the question. He glanced at the clock. Five hours had already elapsed since his first onslaught. His foe’s defenses showed no sign of weakening. But with seven hours to go, and at least one line of attack still held in reserve…

“Forget the double-or-quits offer,” Mord said abruptly. “Bet’s off.”

Bat blinked his eyes open and stared at his banked displays. He could see no change. And then, suddenly, he could. A fixed loop of instructions was being run, hundreds of millions of times a second, and sections of the displays were slowly changing color.

“Ahhhh.” His long exhalation slowly faded. “There is penetration of the third firewall.”

“Is there another one behind it?”

“I am afraid not. Complete access can be only moments away.”

“That’s it, then.” Mord leered out of the display. “All right, fat boy. Back to the drawing board.”

Bat nodded, but his mind was already beginning the curious change needed to move perspective from attacker to defender. He had spent a whole year building what he hoped was an impenetrable series of shields, traps, blind ends, and firewalls designed to thwart something — even a something with the full power of the Seine — from entering his private computer system.

And he had failed. He had just proved that at least one individual in the Solar System, Rustum Battachariya, could mount an external attack able to squirm and worm and drill past that same Rustum Battachariya’s best computer defenses. He had, in a very literal sense, just defeated himself.

Mord added, “Unless you think you’re safe enough with the system the way it is, because you believe nobody else could do what you just did. I mean, you do have the arrogance.”

Bat said mildly, “Mord, this is no time for goading. Nor is such goading necessary. I have sufficient incentive to work further on my defenses, and I will do so. But first, I must have sustenance. Join me if you wish.”

The offer was genuine. Bat would welcome Mord’s company. He rose from his seat and headed along the Bat Cave toward the “eating end” with its elaborate and splendidly furnished kitchen. That kitchen was well-provided with display units, on any of which Mord would be able to appear.

Mord could not, of course, eat, any more than Bat could have tolerated Mord’s insults from any human. Mord, however, was not human. Mordecai Perlman had been; but he had died more than twenty years ago, his body cremated and his ashes sent at his own request into the Sun.

Perlman had been involved in the early development of Faxes, the expert systems that simulated humans and fulfilled many of their simpler functions. You could buy everything from a Level One Fax, which could answer only the simplest questions about you, such as your name, all the way to a Level Five, which managed a fair conversation on your behalf and was smart enough to know when it was out of its depth and call for help.

None of that was enough for Perlman. He was a maverick, an outsider who disagreed with everyone on the way to do simulations. To the others, a Fax was a body of logical rules and a neural network that allowed a computer to mimic the thought patterns and responses of a particular human being.

Wrong approach, declared Mordecai Perlman. That’s all crap. A human isn’t a set of logical rules. A human is a mixture of thoughts and glands and general confusion, and what goes on in a person’s subconscious mind is more important than any A implies B predicate calculus of the conscious mind. We spend half our time trying to produce explanations for the fuck-up messes that our glands lead us into.

Perlman had been ignored. The need was for simple Faxes, ones whose responses to a given situation would always be the same. No one wanted Faxes with moods, passions, senior moments, PMS, or temper tantrums.

No one but Mordecai Perlman. Convinced that he was right, he had set out to produce his kind of Fax. When the work had gone as far as he could take it, he gave the final proof that he believed in what he was doing: he constructed a Fax that mimicked the worldview, knowledge base, and gut reactions of Mordecai Perlman. He did not claim that what lay within the computer was a Fax. It was something new. It was a Mord. The image that appeared on displays was of Mordecai Perlman, as he had been at the time when Mord was implemented.

Bat had discovered Mord hiding away on the Ceres computer system. He was intrigued by what he saw, and asked for a version of his own. Mord had come right back with an answer no cloning. Would you want to be cloned? But Mord was willing to make a deal: he would agree to being transferred into Bat’s system, and erased on Ceres, in return for certain guarantees. All that Mord wanted was system-wide input data, with access to the news feeds.

Bat had considered, and agreed. For one thing, Mordecai Perlman had lived through the Great War as an inquisitive, observant adult. Mord must be a treasure-house of information about those times, and there was much still to be discovered about the war, particularly the past weapons. The Bat Cave held a unique collection, but Bat always wanted more. The Mother Lode, a complete listing of all Belt weapons developed and intentionally destroyed, might be no more than legend. So might the “ultimate weapon,” the unspecified device that post-war lore insisted would make the whole solar system “dark as day,” whatever that self-contradictory phrase might mean. On the other hand, these things just might be real. So many improbable Great War weapons had turned out to be far from imaginary.

Bat drifted along the length of the Cave, admiring and appreciating its contents. Without the real estate constraints of Ganymede’s interior, he had made the Cave ten times its old size. Its contents were expanding to fill the space available. So, according to Mord, was Bat.

He moved slowly. The aroma of food, an olla podrida that had been cooking all day, drew him on, but at the same time he wished to savor and even touch items of his collection. Women had no aesthetic appeal for Bat, nor had men; but each item arrayed in its case or hung along the wall possessed, to the connoisseur, its own strange beauty.

Here was a rare infrared communications beacon, developed on Pallas and one of only four known copies. Next to it, the little antique Von Neumann was a true original, used in the preliminary mining of the Trojan asteroids before Fishel’s Law and Epitaph — Smart is dumb; it is unwise to put too much intelligence into a self-reproducing machine — because System-wide wisdom. The Von Neumann now sat confined by a magnetic field within a triple-sealed chamber. Without raw materials, it was not dangerous.

Bat loved them all, the brain-gutted Seeker, the mesh-caged Purcell invertor, the Palladian genome stripper.

He might have lingered longer, but Mord’s impatient voice rang out from the kitchen ahead of him. “Hey, Mega-chops, I’m sitting here doing nothing. You gone to sleep out there? Soup’s on.”

Bat moved a little faster. Mord was also a relic of the war, perhaps the oddest one of all. What else could explain why Bat found Mord’s company more congenial than that of any human?