Cold as Ice (18 page)

The most certain element:

• The Great War ended on July 25, 2067. Even Bat was forced to admit that this was as close to a certainty as life was going to produce.

And then, in no particular order of unreliability, since Bat had not yet attached his own probability factors:

• The
Pelagic
had been destroyed by a Seeker missile. The weapons signature of a Seeker was unambiguous, like nothing else in the armaments of the Great War.

• The Seeker missile was used exclusively by the Belt. There were no records of Seeker-missile capture or use by Inner System forces.

• The
Pelagic
was a Belt ship. There were no records that it had been captured by Inner System forces.

• The
Pelagic
had been destroyed, according to the flight recorder, on July 29, 2067. That was
after
the official cease-fire. Bat had never heard of a later casualty; but there had been other postwar deaths, simply because some weapons could not be recalled after launch. The
Pelagic
was unusual only in that it was destroyed four full days after the war's end.

• According to the flight recorder, the
Pelagic
's last departure point had been a small and insignificant asteroid known as Mandrake.

• Mandrake had been devastated during the final days of the Great War. Little remained of the one-time settlement there, and none of its data files had survived.

• The flight recorder showed a manifest of nineteen people on board at the ship's departure from Mandrake, and no cargo other than general supplies.

• The flight recorder also indicated that the
Pelagic
had attempted evasive action from the Seeker, but had run out of fuel well before its destruction.

And, finally, Bat had a handful of statements, or conclusions, that in his mind provided at least some element of mystery:

• The
Pelagic
, a Belt ship, had been destroyed by a Seeker missile. This was the point that had originally aroused his interest, and it remained no less of an oddity.

• The records of the Inner System showed no evidence of any Great War attack on Mandrake. Bat admitted that this was weak proof of anything. A smart Inner System destroyer missile, suitably programmed, could have been the attacker, and itself have been destroyed before its final war activities could be reported.

• A few hours before the Seeker attack, the flight recorder showed a decrease of onboard personnel from nineteen to ten people. It also indicated the launch of nine survival pods.

Was that everything? Bat squatted on his mounded chair, spooned his way through the last of a two-liter container of rum-and-butter ice cream, and frowned over his pittance of information. There was one additional will-o'-the-wisp, an item so vague and subjective that it might never yield to formal analysis. It was no more than this: The world lines of the passengers on the
Pelagic
felt too incomplete. They were mere short segments, blocked off at beginning and end. Bat was unable to learn who the passengers were or what they had been doing
before
they left Mandrake, and the Seeker had annihilated all knowledge of them past the moment of their death.

This was the point where Magrit Knudsen or anyone else on her staff would probably have given up. Bat was just starting. Many of his Great War investigations had begun with much less than this.

The Ceres Museum was the central repository of all wartime Belt data. It should possess a full backup of files from Mandrake, or show where the original Mandrake duplicates were now maintained.

Bat initiated a call sequence to Ceres, then changed his mind. The Ganymede-Ceres communication geometry was bad, and would be bad for the next year because of orbital configuration. He would have to wait almost an hour for a reply. Maybe he could do it locally. Ganymede ought to have at least summary files of the same information.

He set up his linkages. And found, within minutes, that they led nowhere. The Ganymede file showed that all backup data for Mandrake had been stored on Pallas. But the Pallas inventory file revealed in turn that all of those backup records had themselves been purged near the end of the war.

Purged, for undocumented reasons.

Dead end.

Bat grunted. He had reached the point where Magrit
definitely
would have said, "The hell with it," and abandoned the chase. But Bat had a long way to go before he would admit defeat.

He returned to ponder one of his data elements: The
Pelagic
had been out of fuel before the survival pods were launched. The pods would therefore have been ejected ballistically, which in turn meant a low-velocity escape from the ship. A pure ballistic launch, without drive, made sense for other reasons. The Seeker would surely have destroyed any powered craft leaving the
Pelagic.

But a ballistic launch, with its low relative velocity, had other implications. The nine survival pods at the time of their launch must have shared, to a close approximation, the velocity components of the
Pelagic
itself. And the parent vessel's inertial position and speed had been monitored by the flight recorder until the ship's moment of final destruction.

Suppose that the survival pods had not been destroyed? Then they would have continued from their time of release as free-orbiting bodies, moving under the gravitational influence of the major bodies of the solar system. It would be an elementary but computer-intensive task to propagate the spreading locus of those free-fall trajectories forward through time. At any given moment, the possible positions and velocities of the survival pods would occupy a region of phase space, large in everyday terms, but minute compared with the set of all speeds and positions possible for bodies moving within the solar system.

Bat called up the necessary programs and fed in the initial orbital elements from the flight recorder. He asked for an estimated computation time, and grimaced at the result. He could not expect an answer for hours.

There was one other useful thing to do while he waited. Although the Pallas backup records for events on Mandrake had been purged at the end of the war, the decision to make that purge, and its implementation, would not have been made by machine. It must have involved human action. One or more of those humans might still be alive, and able to tell why a data purge had been ordered.

The big problem was in tracking down the people. Wartime personnel records for the Belt were also stored on Ceres. And for them, no summary file existed on Ganymede. Bat would have to go to the source, which meant that he was back to the inevitable hour-long communication delays between the Belt and the Jovian system. He carefully constructed his inquiry, seeking to make it so self-contained that time would not be wasted with return queries from the Belt's retrieval systems.

It took longer than he expected, but it never occurred to Bat to quit. He was enjoying himself. When he heard the sound of the door of Bat Cave sliding open, his only feeling was one of irritation at an uncalled-for disturbance.

He turned, expecting Magrit Knudsen. For the past eight years she had been the only person to visit him without an appointment.

It was not Magrit. A man stood on the threshold, scanning the room as though he had no idea that he was intruding.

Bat scowled at him. "Although your face is not unfamiliar to me, I must point out that these are private quarters. Your presence is uninvited. I ask you to leave. At once."

Cyrus Mobarak nodded affably. "Since you know me, and I obviously know you, introductions do not seem to be called for."

"They are as uncalled-for as your presence. Leave, if you please. Immediately."

"Suppose that Cyrus Mobarak agrees to go—but Torquemada asks if he may remain."

Bat froze. "You purport to be Torquemada?"

"I
am
Torquemada."

"Prove it."

"I can cite twenty years of Super-Puzzle rivalry between Torquemada and Megachirops."

"Meaningless. Anyone could research the leading problem setters and solvers of the Puzzle Network."

"Then how about this: There are fourteen published solutions of Grew's Labyrinth."

"That is no better. I know them all. So do a score of others."

"And if I could show you a fifteenth form, published nowhere?"

That produced a pause.

"Do so . . . if you can." Bat pushed a pad across to Cyrus Mobarak.

"I can, but not on something so small." Mobarak nodded to the wall-size display screen. "Can that be annotated at full resolution?"

"At any preferred scale."

"Do you have the published solutions of Grew's Labyrinth available in storage?"

Rather than answering, Bat bent over his keyboard. After thirty seconds, the display filled with fourteen distinct curvilinear patterns, each one tangled and reentrant. "The known forms."

"Very good. If I might move them around a little . . ."

Bat held out the keyboard. Mobarak took it and was busy for a minute or so, rearranging the position of each figure on the great screen.

"The fourteen," he said. He raised a bushy eyebrow at Bat, who nodded. "And now . . ."

Mobarak drew in seventeen complexly curved lines, running among and joining the fourteen separate figures. "Behold, a fifteenth."

"Ahhh." Bat stared for only a few seconds before he sighed out a long, admiring breath. "A super labyrinth. It contains as subunits all the known forms. Most satisfying. How did you find it?"

Mobarak laughed. Bat's question was an inside joke of the Super-Puzzle Network, the cliché question that all non-puzzlers asked: "How do you come up with those weird solutions?"

"This time I can actually give you an answer," Mobarak said. "There's an analogous situation in the theory of finite groups—a monster group that contains many smaller ones as subgroups."

"And at a less elevated plane of inquiry, how did you find
me
?"

"With
Megachiroptera
as the formal name of the suborder of great bats, Megachirops is a poor choice of identifier for any bat who really seeks to remain hidden."

"Ah." Bat shrugged. "An admitted folly on my part. Such conceits had their appeal to the mind of a fourteen-year-old, but you are right. I should have changed my code name." He gestured to a chair at the other side of the room. "Although I am honored to meet Torquemada, I must admit that I would have preferred you at a distance, as an esteemed rival on the network."

"I understand." Mobarak sat down far away, respecting Bat's need for personal space. "I came here only because I have a problem. One that I cannot discuss over public channels, and one that I don't know how to solve."

"If it defeats Torquemada, why am I likely to do better?"

"Because you have information that I lack about activities in the Jovian system." Cyrus Mobarak leaned back in his seat. He had difficulty in keeping his manner casual, but he sensed that his usual style of intense personal interaction would be a disaster with Rustum Battachariya. "You and I have never met, but I assume that you have heard of me through standard channels. That is not vanity on my part. I am a public figure."

"I know of you . . . or at least I know such parts of the public figure as you choose to make public." Battachariya was sitting perfectly still, his close-cropped head as black, round, and expressionless as a cannonball.

"Then you will not be surprised to learn that although I have done my best to make friends around the system, I have by my actions also made
enemies.
Not because I sought to, but because my inventions have blighted the hopes and plans of others."

"The universe does not guarantee equality, either in talent or in opportunities. You must have a great deal of experience in dealing with such adversaries. Far more experience than I."

"I do indeed.
If I know who they are.
But in this case, I do not know. I have a secret enemy, someone who lives in the Jovian system. I can detect the effects of that animosity, but I am unable to trace its source. But you, with your access to Jovian records, and your skill as a puzzle-solver . . ."

"Spare my blushes." Bat looked as incapable of facial erythema as an obsidian statue. "I assume that you are willing to provide me with the clues that you mention?"

"That is why I am here. But it will take a little while to tell my story."

"The night is young." Bat rose from his seat and went padding across to the kitchen, a great black-shrouded sack of flesh surmounted by a face that frowned now only with pleasurable anticipation. "I rely on you, as Torquemada, not to waste my time with trifles." He began to empty packets of orange jujubes, peppermint bonbons, and chocolates into a large ceramic bowl. "And for a
satisfactory puzzle?
Why, with adequate nourishment for the brain, no time to the end of the universe can be too much."

10
Outward Bound

Time
, thought Nell. Here was the oddest thing about subjective time. When you were running along in the studio-production routine of meetings and splicing and editing, time
shrank.
At the end of the week, you had no idea of where the days had gone. But if you went somewhere new, to a place you had never been before, and worked with a whole different group of people, then—time
stretched.

Like now. She had been on Ganymede for less than a day. Already it felt like forever.

She stared at the watch handed to her the previous evening, and wondered what time it was. The wristwatch showed four-fifty. But Ganymede, like the rest of the Outer System, had changed after the war to SDT: Standard Decimal Time. She would have to drill that timekeeping method into her head until it seemed natural. A twenty-four-hour Earth day was equal to ten standard decimal hours, each of one hundred decimal minutes, each minute of a hundred decimal seconds. So the decimal second was a little bit shorter than the second that Nell was used to. There were 100,000 decimal seconds in an Earth day, rather than the usual 86,400 seconds.

Fine. She herself had never found anything wrong with the old nondecimal twenty-four-hour/sixty-minute/sixty-second system, although the Ganymedeans mocked it as being as old-fashioned as fathoms, feet, fortnights, and furlongs. But meanwhile, just what the hell
was
the time? Her appointment with Hilda Brandt had been made for eleven—but eleven on
Earth
's timekeeping system.