The Ganymede Club (8 page)

"I want to try the Puzzle Network. Ganymede is supposed to have some real hot-shot juniors." Spook had been quiet so far—a first for him, in Lola's experience. But then he had never been to space before. She knew that feeling. During free fall he must have wondered what his stomach was doing.

"Bit young for that, aren't you?" Audie Coline spoke to Spook but winked at Lola, with an expression that said he was more interested in her than he was in her brother. "What are you, ten, eleven?"

"But he's a genius." Lola grinned back. "He'll tell you so himself."

"Quit that!" Spook, wedged between the other two, sat straighter and stuck out his chin. "I've seen the Ganymede problem sets. They're tough, but I can handle them."

"Hardest in the system, I've heard. And the best, if you believe their publicity. But they say they're best in everything." Coline sniffed. "Listen to the Jovian moons, and you'd think Earth, Luna, and Mars are washed up and nothing but old history." He casually reached over and fastened a belt across Lola and Spook. " 'How I spent my Ganymede vacation.' I aced the Puzzle Network. What about you, miss? Any idea what you'll be doing?"

Lola hesitated. She knew what she wanted to do, but was she willing to admit it? Even her parents did not know, but the images had been locked in since the time of her earliest memories: Uncle Wilber, grinning at nothing, frightened of everything, forever on the brink of self-destruction. And his madness had been an
unnecessary
madness.

"I want to check out the schools," Lola said at last. "I've heard that they have a reputation for—for being good at what I'm interested in."

"And what might that be?"

She had to say it now: "I want to train as a haldane."

That certainly got his attention. "A
haldane?
" he said. "Do you, indeed. Well, remind me to be careful what I say to
you
from now on."

It seemed to be the universal reaction—and Audie Coline was being kind. The usual comments were much harsher: "Only someone who is crazy to start with wants to work with crazy people." Or: "You want to be a haldane? How long have you been off your head?" She had better learn to get used to it, or change her career plans.

"But I might not make it." Lola could see the Earth's dark bulk, with the Moon on the horizon beyond it. The ship must have turned on its axis during the ascent. "It's supposed to be really tough. I'll need another five years of training, even if I pass the rest of the entry tests. And after that—"

She paused. A bright spark of blue light had appeared, not on the Moon's illuminated crescent, but over on the other limb where the disk was supposed to be dark.

"After that?" prompted Coline.

Lola did not reply. She pointed. Two more flecks of flame had sprung into view, close to the first one. Even as she watched, there were others. The Moon was suddenly ablaze, a line of flame spreading rapidly across its dark face like a windblown fire.

Audie Coline had turned casually to follow Lola's gesture. He jerked upright, pushing Spook to one side. "The line!" he exclaimed. "My God, this is impossible. That's the Armageddon defense line!"

His tone and the horror on his face said a lot more to Lola than his words. The scene behind him told even more. The Moon was on fire. A great swath on the lunar surface was burning with the ghastly blue light of nuclear fusion. In the foreground, a matching spark glowed suddenly on Earth's nightside. It was followed by another two, both in the Northern Hemisphere. They grew rapidly, ever brighter. A dozen others appeared—a score, a hundred. The atmosphere itself was beginning to glow in orange-red streaks.

"Is it?"
asked Spook.

Lola did not answer—did not want to answer. Because it
was.
It was war, the unthinkable war between Earth and the Belt that everyone had talked about forever, but that no one had believed could really happen. The Moon was on fire, Earth was on fire. The world was ending.

She and Spook might have a chance to escape. Ganymede was not involved in the Earth/Belt dispute, so a ship heading for Ganymede might be spared. But Mother and Father . . ., they were down there, on the flaming ruin that a few minutes ago had been the peaceful Earth.

She reached out and grasped Spook's hand, hard enough to hurt him. Her mother's instructions had been specific:
"Until we arrive, you're in charge. Look after Spook. Don't let him get into trouble. "

He was in trouble. They were all in trouble. Earth and the Moon and the Belt and Mars, now and for years or decades to come. But that did not relieve her of her responsibility.

She was in charge.

Lola stared at Spook's frightened face, and past it to the flaming sky outside the port. She felt the last of her childhood disappear, bleeding away into the harsh emptiness beyond the ship.

THE SOLAR SYSTEM BEFORE AND AFTER THE GREAT WAR (2067 A.D.)

PREWAR

Mercury:
Research station for solar studies, occasional science staff.
Venus:
Three surface domes, plus research stations and an experimental biosphere: investigations into meteorology, planetology, ecosystems. Permanent staff.
Earth:
Population eleven billion.
Luna:
Population seven million, plus automated factories.
Mars:
Self-sufficient colony, population seventeen million.
Asteroid Belt:
Self-sufficient colonies on Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Hidalgo, and twenty-seven smaller planetoids. Total population one hundred and seven million.
Jupiter:
Interdependent colonies on Ganymede and Callisto, research stations on Europa and Io, unmanned collection vessels in Jovian atmosphere; combined population, Jovian system: eighty-three million.
Saturn:
Ganymede-based exploring parties to rings and all major moons. Von Neumanns working on Dione and Titan. No colonies.
Uranus:
Smart probes to all major moons; research station proposed for Oberon. No colonies.

POSTWAR

Mercury:
Research station lost, no survivors.
Venus:
Surface domes lost, no survivors.
Earth:
Population two billion in Southern Hemisphere and tropics; Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable.
Luna:
Population zero, no production capability.
Mars:
Population eight million, self-sufficiency maintained.
Asteroid Belt:
Colonies on Ceres, Pallas, Juno. Population nine million, no longer self-sufficient.
Jupiter:
Relatively unaffected, except by rapid prewar immigration. Interdependent colonies on Ganymede and Callisto, research stations on Europa and Io, unmanned collection vessels in Jovian atmosphere; combined population, Jovian system: eighty-seven million.
Saturn:
Unaffected by war. Ganymede-based exploring parties to rings and all major moons. Von Neumanns working on Dione and Titan. No colonies.
Uranus:
Unaffected by war. Smart probes to all major moons, research station proposed for Oberon. No colonies.

5

Ganymede: 2072 A.D.

The Great War was over. It ended just four months after it had begun, in a final cataclysm that shattered the solar system and reshaped it into a new form. Its aftermath would reverberate down the centuries. It was the war to end wars.

Except that wars still went on. This particular one was fought without armies, without hardware, without bloodshed, without reinforcements or mercy or remorse. Its warriors would probably never meet. They were unlikely to know their adversaries' real names, since the Puzzle Network permitted—and encouraged—anonymity.

But the Masters of the Net did not need names. They knew each other very well, at the profound mental level where battles were engaged.

Bat, just two years in the Masters' division, was learning fast. He had advanced to the point where he could recognize a puzzle designed by Claudius, a five-time champion, as surely as if she (he was convinced that Claudius was a woman) had signed her name. She took a unique delight in misdirection, layer after layer of it. Four weeks earlier, Bat had set his own trap, hoping to exploit that misdirection and turn it into a weakness. He was convinced that he had caught her—until she sent back the correct solution, with an added note, "Old age and treachery will defeat youth and skill. Keep trying."

He would. Most of the other Masters fell far short of Claudius, and all of them had their own strange quirks. He would recognize Attoboy, Simple Simon, Gaslight Tattoo, Pack Rat, James the Rose, and Sneak Attack, no matter where or how they appeared, or under what name.

But the Puzzle Network could still offer surprises. One was appearing now, filling his display with four complicated three-dimensional sets of interlocking donuts. The accompanying text read, "Specify connectivity: simply connected or multiply connected?" It was signed
Ghost Boy.

The name was unfamiliar, but that meant nothing. Claudius, when she was in an unusually vicious mood, was likely to sign on as
Xantippe.
Bat normally signed on as
Megachirops
, but presented his word puzzles as
Thersites.
The puzzle, not the name, was the thing, the only thing; and this one was a major oddity. The structures were so clearly multiply connected that no one with any self-respect would offer this as a problem at the Masters' level. That suggested two things: First, the puzzle was not what it seemed; and second, a new and distinctive personality had been added to the game.

Rule number one of the Puzzle Network:
Use all of the information available to you.
Rule number two:
There is no such thing as cheating.
Bat had his own Rule number three:
Know thy enemy.
He had a trick that he suspected might be his alone.

First, he checked the response time for Ghost Boy's net access. As he had hoped, it was only a few milliseconds. Therefore, Ghost Boy was somewhere on Ganymede, rather than being an off-world entry. Bat knew the style of the dozen Ganymede Masters. It was unthinkable that Ghost Boy could emerge as a new Master, without years of experience on the Puzzle Network.

And that led to only one possible conclusion: Ghost Boy had been in the net for some time, but he had been promoted recently to the Senior League.

Bat took the next logical step. He did what no self-respecting Master would ever do. He went slumming, dropping down to the Journeyman level in the network and scanning back in time over the past two years.

No sign of Ghost Boy as either a proposer or solver of any puzzles. Which left only the Journeyman puzzles themselves, hundreds and hundreds of them.

Sorting through them was going to take some time. Bat raided his own Bat Cave sweetmeat hoard for orange jujubes, peppermint bonbons, and chocolates, returned to his terminal, and settled happily down to work. It was the middle of the night. No one was going to disturb him. Given a good puzzle like this, with its promise of yet another puzzle if he solved it, the idea of boredom or fatigue was unthinkable.

* * *

Five hours later, he had it. A dozen Journeyman puzzles involved odd topological elements similar to those of Ghost Boy's problem. They were hard to solve, and it was even more difficult to imagine how someone of the Journeyman class had managed to dream them up in the first place. But each puzzle had been proposed by a player named
The Snark
, and the most recent came three months ago.

Obviously, The Snark and Ghost Boy were one and the same. He had changed his name when he moved to the Masters' level. And just as obviously, the earlier puzzles were going to tell Bat enough about the workings of Ghost Boy's mind to solve the most recent one.

But not easily. It was another two hours before Bat groaned, raised his eyes to stare at the ceiling, and whispered a single word: "Dimensionality!"

The Snark was devising his puzzles in spaces of a higher dimension, the fourth or fifth or higher, and then projecting down to three dimensions. The way to solve them was to reverse the process, imagining Ghost Boy's sets of interlocking figures as cross sections of some higher-dimensional structure.

It still wasn't easy to solve this latest one, but now it was possible. Bat stared at nothing until he was sure that the entire puzzle construct, viewed in four dimensions, had no holes or reentry features. Finally, he wrote that the puzzle was "simply connected in 4-D," signed his solution
Megachirops
, and sent it off.

He didn't expect a reply. For one thing, it was many hours into the standard Ganymede sleep cycle; for another, Puzzle Network protocol did not call for answers.

It was a shock for him to find a message popping into his display area, just a couple of minutes later. It read: "Hey! You're not supposed to solve me that fast!" And then, an even bigger surprise, a smiling face appeared above the message.

"Hi," the face said. "I'm Ghost Boy."

"So I deduced." There was a silence, while Bat stared in astonishment at the display. It was not a surprise to find that a Master on the Puzzle Network was young—the mental agility of youth was an asset—but this was ridiculous. Ghost Boy was a
kid.
He was thin and gawky, with freckles and a big nose, and he had no sign of facial hair. He looked even younger than Bat! And Bat knew that he himself was a rare prodigy.

"My name's Spook Belman," Ghost Boy said. "You see how it goes, I'm
Ghost Boy
now and I used to be
The Snark
."

Didn't Belman know anything at all about Puzzle Network manners? He was not only intruding, but also
explaining.
Bat tried to make allowances for the gaucherie of a newcomer. "I know," he said. "I caught both allusions from your name, thank you."

"Well?" The kid's grin faded, and he frowned. "Aren't you going to return the compliment?"

"What compliment?"

"
Your
name. Tell me your real name. And turn on the visuals, so I can take a look at you."

Unbelievable.
"I prefer not to."

"Well, you're a real sourpuss, aren't you." Spook Belman glared out from the display. "I guessed you were pretty young, from your style, and I thought maybe the two of us could get together and compare notes on the old fogies. But you sound like one of the old fogies yourself. That puzzle I set was supposed to stop anyone on the Network for a few days. Seems I was wrong, about it and about you. How old are you, anyway?"