Charles Sheffield - Dark as Day

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?

The signs blared out at Alex on every level as he made the long trip from the depths of the government offices to the near-surface levels where Lena Ligon made her home, and Ligon Industries kept its corporate offices.

He wondered, who was paying for all this Seine-Day publicity? And why? It wasn’t as though you had a choice, and could accept the use of the Seine or opt out of it, just as you chose. In two hours time, the ceremonial “golden spike” would be driven, in the form of a final connection linking the Ganymede, Callisto, Earth, Mars, and Belt main databases. A thousand others would come on-line later in the day, but those first five were the biggest. By this time tomorrow, every shred of data anywhere in the solar system should be available for general use. Unless you had taken measures ahead of time, privacy would be more difficult than ever before.

And maybe impossible, at least during the shake-out period. But along with wider data availability came a massive increase in computational power, and Kate had cursed about Alex’s absence at the very time when they were in a position to run his models with adequate computer resources, Alex had disagreed. “You have a million different systems and databases out there, scientific and financial and personal and institutional. If you expect to be able to join them all together and have everything run correctly the first time, you’re more of an optimist than I am.”

He had phrased that badly. Kate was more of an optimist than he was. She said, “So what will happen when they switch on?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I expect. We’ll see transients through the whole Seine for the first few hours, maybe longer. Any results for a day or so will be suspect.”

Kate had wrinkled her nose. She was a risk-taker. Left to herself she would have run the models at once, even in his absence. But they were Alex’s models. She had agreed to wait until Seine-Day Plus One. But then, she said, they would make the runs no matter what transients were bouncing around the extended Seine network.

A day’s delay sounded about right to Alex. He actually thought that the system would settle down in the first few hours. On the other hand, family meetings could take forever. Kate might then execute runs without him, and he was beginning to understand her personality. If the results showed problems, he didn’t want her fiddling around inside his models, changing parameters she didn’t understand. He wanted to be back to keep an eye on Kate, long before Seine-Day was over.

He glanced at his watch. Like all Jovian timekeeping systems, it kept Standard Decimal Time. SDT had retained the length of the twenty-four-hour Earth day but divided it into ten hours, each of one hundred decimal minutes, each minute a hundred decimal seconds. The decimal second was a little bit shorter than the Earth-second, 100,000 of them in an Earth day, rather than the usual 86,400.

Now it was three-ninety-six. The morning meeting was scheduled for four. Alex had three more ascending levels to go, and he would be a little late. Already the wealth was beginning to show. You could see it in the elegance of the bioluminescent inlays illuminating the corridors with muted blue and white, the custom-designed murals and statues that lined the walls, and the carpets that swallowed up every sound. Alex’s yearly stipend would not cover a month of rent at these levels.

Money, however, was not an issue. If he chose, he could build a complete lab here, with resources that dwarfed everything available to Kate Lonaker’s whole division. His mother was going to pressure him to do that. And, of course, they were all going to push him on the other thing, the matter he had intended to explain to Kate days ago but had evaded yet again.

He didn’t think she would understand — could understand. He had to live with it ail the time, two hundred and fifty years of family tradition and obligation, invisible to anyone but pressing down on Alex’s shoulders far harder than Ganymede’s gravity.

Ligon Industries dated back to Alonzo Ligon, the nineteenth-century tyrant who had built some of the first iron-hulled ships that sailed the oceans of Earth. Alex was a direct descendant, nine generations removed from Alonzo.

And that might not be the worst of it. Since setting off for the meeting, Alex had been cursed with another thought. He had been reviewing in his mind’s eye yesterday’s image of his mother as it had appeared in the display, and thought he could detect some troubling elements.

He came to the bronzed double doors with the discreet brass plate, Ligon industries; by appointment only, and peered into the eye-level camera above the plate. His retinal pattern was recognized, and the great doors swung silently open. The Level Three Fax on duty said, “Welcome, Mr. Alex. The meeting has already begun, and it is in the chamber to your right.”

Alex steeled himself and went straight in. The marble-topped oval table had sixteen positions, each with its own work station. Eleven seats were occupied. Alex stepped quietly across a deep carpet of living purple and green and sat down next to his mother. Lena Ligon nodded a greeting. The man at the end of the table did not nod, or change for a moment his tone of voice.

“That phase of the work is concluded,” he said. “The Starseed is on its way, and a financial accounting must be made. The details are available to anyone here who wishes to examine them, but my summary is simple: Ligon Industries took a calculated risk in accepting a contract to mine helium-three from the atmosphere of Jupiter and deliver it into rendezvous orbit with the Starseed vessel. We also took a bath. At the time, I recommended against signing the contract, and it proves to have been a financial disaster.”

Alex glanced around the table. Prosper Ligon was the ranking family member by virtue of seniority. No matter who was senior, however, Prosper Ligon’s conclusions on questions like this were not likely to be challenged. Alex’s great-uncle was the chief financial analyst and de facto head of the company, a lifelong bachelor and a celibate, slow, deliberate, and precise in thought and deed. Those thoughts and deeds excluded sexual activities of any kind. Although only in his mid-sixties, with his long face and yellowed teeth Prosper was easy to imagine in old age as a skinny and weathered donkey.