Cold as Ice (44 page)

"Very good so far, and very simple. But I was missing one key piece of information:
Who?
Who could have worked on Mandrake during the war, and twenty-five years later have been instrumental in bringing those three here at this time?

"I had one prime candidate:
you
."

This time Bat actually smiled at Mobarak's rising eyebrows. "That's right. Cyrus Mobarak, the Sun King himself. Who else? Consider the facts. You were in the Belt at the end of the Great War, a young man in your twenties. You have since become an individual of great wealth and influence, well able to pull wires behind the scenes on Earth. You could and did have Jon Perry sent to Europa. You could and did reorder DOS priorities, so that Camille Hamilton and David Lammerman had little choice but to come here and work for you. You could and did bring Wilsa Sheer to the Jovian system. All it took was substantial concert funding, with a fat commission for a major new work. You had enough money to make the offer irresistible. Her agent would do the rest.

"And then my beautiful, logical structure crumbled apart. Because it was not logical at all.

"If you were eager to see the present condition of your long-ago experiments, why not send Camille Hamilton and Wilsa Sheer to
Earth
, where you and Jon Perry were already located? That was surely easier than a rendezvous at Jupiter. Just as fatal for my argument, I learned that you had other, very plausible reasons for wanting Jon Perry on Europa. The 'native' Europan life forms that you had planted needed to be exposed for what they are,
designed
forms imported from Earth, in order to destroy the opposition to your Europan fusion project. You needed Camille for much the same reason, to help your plans for Europan development.

"Finally, my friend Mord delivered the death blow: You had worked with Mordecai Perlman himself on Pallas at the end of the war. You were madly developing your new fusion ideas. Mord swore that you could not also have worked on the biological projects on Mandrake.

"That was the end. A nice theory, ruined by facts. But as any Puzzle Network enthusiast knows, even wrong theories can lead to new insights. I no longer had a
name
, for that of Cyrus Mobarak would not do. But I did have a
place:
Europa. Everything converged here. Even Wilsa Sheer, for no reason obvious to me, had come to Europa. And in Europan affairs, there is just one dominant figure. I could find no suspicious elements in Hilda Brandt's past—I think that she could give both of us lessons in concealment—but she had spent the war in the Belt, coming here only long after it was over. She had also requested that Jon Perry be sent to Europa, to examine supposed native life.

"Yet Hilda Brandt would not do, either. She has great influence in the Jovian system, and she might well have performed secret wartime work in the Belt. If so, she surely would have longed to see how that work turned out, so long after. But her power did not extend, as Cyrus Mobarak's does, to the Inner System.
She
could not have directed Camille Hamilton here from DOS, nor guaranteed that it was Jon Perry, and not some other submersible expert, who came from Earth. Could not—
unless she were given assistance.

"Finally, the pieces fit. Not one name.
Two.
And two people, each manipulating the other, each
using
the other, to achieve their separate objectives."

"My esteemed adversary, I am disappointed." Mobarak was shaking his head. "You and I have explored each other's minds for twenty years. Yet you suspected that I might stoop to murder?"

"No, I did not. I felt—right or wrong—that I understood the mind of Torquemada. What I did not know was the mind and nature of Hilda Brandt. And I could not trust you to know it, either. Might she be a person who would examine her experiments, evaluate their present status, and then cold-bloodedly destroy them to serve other objectives of her own? I could not take that risk."

"You ought to have consulted me. Hilda Brandt isn't that sort of person. But she asked the right question before she left: What are you going to do about all this?"

"About Brandt's past, and her experiments? I personally will do nothing. It is not my prerogative or my concern. But what they"—Bat gestured to Wilsa and the others—"may choose to do is another matter. Most of the events that we are talking about occurred a quarter of a century ago, and although there is no statute of limitation for war crimes, there is certainly a statute of limitation for
interest
in war crimes. Particularly ones that were arguably never committed. I doubt that anyone not in this room cares one jot about what happened on Mandrake."

Bat turned to Nell. "Do they, Miss Cotter? I feel sure that you are recording everything, as always. But is there really a
public
interest in any of this?"

I wonder if he knows about the subvocal, too.
Nell shook her head and managed to avoid glancing at her hidden camera. "People care only if it makes an interesting show. They will love to see the Moby burning down into Blowhole, and then the submersible rescue. That's exciting, and visual, and near real-time. But you'd have to
pay
them to make them watch a program about a twenty-five-year-old crime that maybe didn't happen."

"And the results of the experiments?"

"People won't believe there's anything different about Jon and the others unless they can
see
it. And they can't. Video audiences believe
pictures
, not statements."

"A sound philosophy. I can only applaud its wisdom."

Bat began to lift himself laboriously from his narrow seat. As well-padded as he was, he could feel the ribbed seams of the chair's narrow sides cutting into tender flesh. "So Hilda Brandt was right. The universe is not ending, and the story of the
Pelagic
will again fade into history. But there is a lesson to be learned from this, for all of us." Bat rubbed at his sore behind. He was weary and hungry and feeling dangerously pontifical. It was time to go home. He turned to Cyrus Mobarak.

"Winners and losers, as Hilda Brandt said. You manipulated events and people, and won the fight for the development of Europa. But everyone, saint or sinner, pursues his or her personal objectives, and those are rarely the same for any two people, no matter how much they pretend collaboration. Before you feel too much satisfaction in your victory, remember that you were
yourself
manipulated for Hilda Brandt's benefit. You brought her the three individuals whom she wanted—and you never realized that you were doing so.

"It is time for the two of us to recognize that not every subtle mind of the solar system moves within the circle of the Puzzle Network. Hilda Brandt proved the master of us both. You won this time, but perhaps you will not always win."

"No, he
didn't
." The voice was Wilsa Sheer's, breaking in unexpectedly on Bat's ruminations. He looked at her in annoyance. He had not finished.

"Didn't win, I mean." She ignored Bat's glare. "Can we show them, Jon? I know you want to wait for confirmation, but this is important."

"You want me to do it
twice
? I thought that once in a lifetime was more than enough." But Jon Perry was standing up, walking across to the data station and peering at the back of it. "All right. Anyone know how to work this thing?"

"I do." Tristan was already out of his seat. "Let me." He grabbed the data unit from Jon's hand. "Which segment?"

"There's only one. Don't look for sound, it's just video." Jon turned back to face the others while Tristan was mounting the unit. "I hate to stick my neck out again. So the only thing I'll say is that this recording was made less than three days ago, that you'll be looking at the deep ocean floor of Europa—one hundred and eighteen kilometers below the ice—and that the ambient temperature is nine degrees above freezing."

The light in the little room dimmed. The data-station screen flickered and steadied to the black-and-white, low-contrast presentation of a typical ultrasonics image. The sensor was scanning across the seabed from the far horizon. There was nothing to see but a uniform, soft-edged floor laid down by a billion years of faint tidal motion.

Tristan opened his mouth—and before he could speak, a set of sawtoothed structures jumped into view, as straight as ruled lines. Greater detail emerged as the submersible steadily descended; each furrow changed from its sharp-edged outline to reveal a dividing set of sandwich wafers.

"And here's where we added visible wavelengths to the ultrasonics." Jon Perry was commenting in spite of himself. A free-swimmer could be seen, moving ahead of the
Danae.
The picture on the screen was sharper, and in glowing false color. A glittering line of faceted beads was revealed along the edge of each sandwich.

"Just silicon and ferrite crystals, most people would say. But I wanted to take a better look. Watch now, as we send the swimmer in."

The light source was no more than a couple of feet from one of the edged ridges. As it came closer yet and the beam increased in intensity, the ridge
moved.
It began flattening out, flowing downward, sluggishly heading away from the light.

"Photophobic, or heat-sensitive. We'll know which when we've had a chance to examine what's in the
Danae
's hold. We had lots of time down there, so I stowed away plenty of samples. But even without that analysis, it's easy to make some guesses. You are looking at a stable structure that repairs itself and replicates itself—you'll see that happening on the edges of the wafers if you watch for a while. The structures also operate at a higher temperature than the ambient seabed, and they use chemical energy to make that possible. You've already seen them avoiding stimuli that might do them harm."

Tristan had stayed close to the data unit, and he was staring at the screen from just a few centimeters away. "Those things are
alive
."

"If you accept most definitions of alive. The furrows are acting as only living things are supposed to be able to act. They even seem to be evolving as they spread. But I was burned once before. This time I'd rather not say too much until I'm
sure
."

But Jon is sure. He just doesn't want to come right out and say it.
Nell glanced across at Cyrus Mobarak.
And he's sure, too. Look at his face. Winners and losers. He's under tight control again, but he knows he didn't win at all. These are the
real
native life forms. With them, Europa is protected. It won't be developed for a long time.

"How do you know these weren't brought from Earth, too, and planted here?" Tristan was still squinting at the screen.

"Because they're not DNA-based, like every living thing on Earth. They're aperiodic crystal structures in
clays
—but still, they can reproduce. We've wondered about this sort of thing for a long time. Cairns-Smith suggested the idea over a century ago, but it's the first time we've encountered it."

"But couldn't these have been made
artificially
, like the other ones you found and said were native Europan?"

Jon grimaced. "Don't remind me. But I'm sure that these are not constructs. Even if it could be done—which I don't believe—it wouldn't make any sense. Wilsa and I visited a place on the Europan seabed where no one had ever been. No one would normally go there. Why put something where the chances are it wouldn't be found for decades?"

Cyrus Mobarak stood up suddenly. "Outmaneuvered—by Nature. Winners and losers, eh? Damnation. Was it Margaret Fuller who said, 'I accept the universe'? Well, so do I."

Nell looked at him and marveled at the resilience of the man. It would be easy to believe that Cyrus Mobarak was blessed naturally with the super nervous system that Hilda Brandt had sought to create. In the past hour he had seen years of planning apparently succeed and then, in just a few minutes, seen it thwarted—by the very person he himself had brought to Europa to help him win.

Yet already Mobarak was recovering. There was no sign on his face of defeat or resignation. Like Hilda Brandt, he would take endless shocks and still come up for another round.

"I think we must assume that the Europan fusion project will have to be put on hold," Mobarak went on briskly. "That affects you, Camille, and you too, David, at least as much as it affects me. Naturally, I hope that both of you will go on working with me. But if you want to accept other positions—"

"I want to go back to DOS," Camille blurted. "I want you to arrange it and get me observing time."

She could see that Mobarak was surprised and David was hurt. And she wasn't really ready, either, but Mobarak himself had said that it was the time for revelations. If Jon Perry were willing to stick his neck out, so was she.

Camille waved a puny slip of printout. It was all she had to show. "This is from my DOS experiment—the one I left running in background mode when we came to the Jovian system. Results started to come in just before I left Abacus. But I couldn't understand them, and I didn't have my computer models available. Now, after Blowhole and the Moby, that doesn't seem to matter so much. I think I know what I'm seeing, even without my computer to confirm it. But I still need the best images that DOS can give me . . . because if I'm right, seven billion light-years out, halfway to infinite red shift, there's a uniform thermally radiating surface bigger than a galaxy."

Her words had no effect on Cyrus Mobarak, she could see that. But they certainly did on David.

"My God. A Stapledon! You think you're seeing evidence of a Stapledon-Dyson construct?" He turned to Mobarak. "Camille's saying that DOS has located an artificial structure, a monstrous one, surrounding a whole galaxy to capture its energy. That can only mean an intelligent civilization."

Still it produced no reaction from Mobarak. "Seven billion light-years," he said slowly. "So whatever you saw, it happened seven billion years ago. Before the solar system even existed. If it was there, it must be long gone by now. Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't strike me as being very important—not compared with modifying the surface of Europa, or sending Tristan off on
Starseed
to explore the Oort Cloud." He paused, until Bat prompted him with a curious throat-clearing sound. "But maybe I'm wrong. David, you understand this better than I do. And I trust your judgment. If you tell me that you want to leave here and go back to DOS with Camille, and follow up on what she's found . . . I'll find a way to arrange it."