Cold as Ice (29 page)

"Camille!"

But Nell had cut the connection, though she was tempted to linger. The conflict of expressions on David Lammerman's face was still going on. She wanted to know which one would win.

* * *

Camille was alone, lost on the ice plains of Europa. She must be rescued, or she would freeze to a block of organic ice. And David Lammerman was like a block of ice himself as he walked through the long, echoing corridors of Ganymede.

Except that the legs of a block of ice did not tremble with each step. The heart of a block of ice did not pound and flutter and quiver within its chest. The fingers of a block of ice did not shake so much that they had to be curled into tight fists.

David raised one ice gauntlet and stood poised to knock on the door of gunmetal grey. At the last moment he changed his mind, slid both panels to one side, and walked straight in without knocking.

There were three men in the luxuriously appointed room. One of them, seated on a dark-blue sofa, was Cyrus Mobarak. He turned toward the door, annoyance written on his face. David would have turned and run, right then and there, but for two things. When Mobarak saw him, the irritated look was replaced by deep astonishment and David noticed, for the first time ever, a tiny bead of perspiration at Cyrus Mobarak's hairline. It said to David, more clearly than any words, he's
human.
He's having a tough time in here, and for once it shows.

"David?" Mobarak's single word contained many things.
How dare you intrude when you know I'm in the middle of a crucial meeting?
But behind that, stronger,
What happened, David? You've never in your life interrupted me before.
And, one layer deeper yet,
Bad news. It's written all over your face.

David recognized the other two men. They were top wheelers and dealers of the Jovian system, fixits who supposedly held half of the General Assembly in their pockets. They were also men whose single frown could ruin a junior nothing such as David.

They were certainly frowning now.

David realized, in a rush of adrenalin, that he didn't give a damn what they thought or did. Concern for Camille's safety overrode everything, and if he could make it this far, he could keep going all the way. Anyway, his business was with Cyrus Mobarak, not with two overweight crooks.

"It's Camille. She's lost on the surface of Europa. If we don't get help there soon, she'll die."

Mobarak asked not a question. He seemed to understand everything, in the single lightning flash of comprehension that had intimidated David ever since he was a child. He nodded. "Go there yourself, as soon as you can. Take whatever resources you need. You know my personal credit number. Use it. I'll start work here at once, do whatever needs to be done at this end."

"Fuck that for a deal, Mobarak." The shorter and fatter of the men slapped his hand down furiously on the table of grained wood. To David, his red face was that of an outraged pig. "You fucking stay here. You promised us the whole fucking day, and we've hardly fucking started."

David felt a new and alien emotion: sympathy for his father. If this was what you had to put up with, to work with the money suppliers and influence peddlers of the system . . .

"I did promise you." Mobarak had a soft tone in his voice and a look in his eye that David had never encountered before. It would have turned his own heart to stone and his legs to jelly. But it was not, thank God, being directed at him, and the other two men did not seem able to read it.

"And I'm sorry to say that I can't keep that promise," went on Mobarak, just as mildly. "But it must be obvious to both of you gentlemen that this accident could not have been predicted. And if you know me at all, you realize that I'll make up whatever I owe you—and more—as soon as I return."

He turned back to David. "How long?"

David understood the question.
How long before Camille dies if she's not rescued?

"No one knows. And there's no signal from her emergency beacon."

"Then go at once, as soon as you can pull together what you need. I'll make sure you have a Europan entry permit. Call me as soon as you get there. I'll be available, any time."

David nodded. As Mobarak turned back to the two men, David retreated without another word. He had interacted more significantly with his father in the past thirty seconds than in the whole of his previous life. Now he felt . . . what? Nervous? Overwhelmed? Relieved? Exhilarated?

Maybe all of those. More than anything, David felt like he had to throw up.

16
A Voice from the Grave

"Given sufficient ingenuity, no well-defined puzzle is insoluble."

Bat had encouraged himself with that dictum through days and weeks of fruitless analysis. Now perhaps he was about to receive his reward.

It was late, and his head ached with the accumulated toxins of fatigue. But he could not stop working. The end result of his labors might finally lie at his fingertips. He would have admitted to no emotion as he executed the access procedure, yet his body sat rigidly angled over the keyboard. Waiting. In a few more seconds, he would
know.

The search had been time-consuming and hard. Everyone who had worked on the Pallas data banks at the end of the Great War was long dead. Bat had examined every file, every record, every data element, until finally even he could not justify more time for checking and rechecking. When it was over, he felt that he had learned nothing. And yet, a small curiosity about one of the senior computer technicians on Pallas had nagged at Bat's sense of the anomalous. Mordecai Perlman was certainly dead, and he had surely died of natural causes—Bat had seen the records. His body had been cremated, and his ashes sent, at his request, into the sun. His possessions and his credit had been distributed to his relatives, just as his will specified.

And yet not quite all of his credit had been disbursed. There remained a bank account on Ceres, with a modest balance. Every month the interest on that account was used to purchase access to a Ceres computer system. Every month new data were dumped into a certain set of files.

Bat had examined the information that was being entered, and found himself baffled. It was no more than general facts concerning what was happening in the Jovian system, throughout the Belt, and on Earth and Mars—a compressed version of the news of the period, much as it was sent out over the standard services. It was too general to have value within a well-organized data base. So why was it being entered at all?

Bat dug. And dug. And found his answer.

After the war, Mordecai Perlman had been involved in the early development of the Faxes. However, his published papers showed that he disagreed with the usual logic of simulation development. To most people, a Fax was no more than an expert system, a large body of rules and a neural network that allowed a computer, to a greater or lesser extent, to mimic the thought patterns and responses of a particular human being. A low-level Fax would simulate only the simplest of individual thought processes. A high-level Fax would approach the logical complexity of the human.

Wrong approach
, said Mordecai Perlman. A human isn't a set of logical rules. What goes on in a person's subconscious mind and endocrine glands is far more important in deciding what a human being is like than any stupid set of conscious, logical rules.

Perlman had been ignored. Not because he was wrong, but because the pressing need was for simple Faxes, those whose responses to a given situation would always be the same. The last thing that people wanted were Faxes with moods, off days, crying jags, and temper tantrums.

So Mordecai Perlman had lost the fight for general Fax development. Big business, and the conventional approach, had won. But he had not given up. Over the next ten years he had continued to specify the form of a computer model that would produce
his
kind of Fax. It would be far more flexible than the usual computer program, and it would display all of the quirks and illogicalities of a human being.

When Perlman's work had gone as far as he could take it, he gave the final proof that he believed in what he was doing. He implemented his design, constructing a Fax as he felt that it should be done.

He did not call it a Fax, because it was not one. He called it "Mord," because his software mimicked, as closely as he could make it do so, the unique world view, knowledge base, and gut reactions of Mordecai Perlman. And he must have regarded Mord as much more than a program, because he had arranged that after his death it would be kept up to date about system events. The data entries were the equivalent of news programs.

As soon as Bat realized the nature of Mord, he requested that a copy of the program be transferred to the Ganymede directory of Megachirops. His request was refused by the Ceres' computer facility. Mordecai Perlman, quirky as ever even after death, had not wanted himself—or Mord—cloned. The program could not be duplicated.

Bat pondered that refusal, and dug deeper. He learned that Mordecai Perlman had also filed for recognition of his program as a being, with all of the rights of a human. The general filing had been refused, but Mord had been granted certain limited rights. One of those rights was control of its own fate. If Mord
wanted
, the Fax could be copied, transferred to another system, or even totally purged from the program base.

Bat wondered if his own sanity were any greater than Mordecai Perlman's as he sent a request addressed directly to the computer program. Would Mord agree to being copied and sent to Ganymede?

The reply came quickly:
no copies.
Mord also did not want to be cloned. But the software would agree to be
transferred
to Ganymede, provided that the news-service data were transferred, too, and continued news-service inputs were guaranteed.

Bat agreed at once, although he had no interest in Mord's recent data acquisitions. He was seeking Mordecai Perlman's
past.
Everything depended on how much of the man had been fed into his creation.

And at any moment now, Bat was going to be in a position to find out. Program access was complete, and the screen and cameras in front of Bat were alive.

The face that appeared was of a balding, squint-eyed man in late middle age: Mordecai Perlman, presumably as he had been at the time when Mord was implemented.

The eyes narrowed and peered at Bat. "Hi. You the one who asked me to ship to Ganymede? Well, you're certainly a fatty, I'll say that for you."

Bat, used to Faxes, and subconsciously expecting the appearance of something close to one, revised his opinion. "I am indeed Megachirops, the one who brought you here. You are now in the Ganymede data banks."

"Sure am. I can tell. I wasn't sure at first that I wanted to come here, you know. Different planet, different computer systems, different access protocols. Then I changed my mind. I thought, what the hell. You're stuck in a rut, Mord. You been sitting in the same data banks for fifteen years. Get out there, live dangerously. The worst that can happen is they'll screw up and wipe you. And I was curious, too. Why'd you bring me here?"

"I changed my mind," Mord had just said. But a Fax
never
changed its mind. It couldn't. Bat came to an instant conclusion: Mordecai Perlman had been right. The usual way of building a Fax might be satisfactory for low-level behavior, but if you
really
wanted to simulate a human . . .

"I brought you here because I am puzzled by something that happened on Pallas a long time ago—back at the end of the Great War, when Mordecai Perlman was working there. I wonder if you"—Bat hesitated over the next word, but it was the right one—"remember it."

"Try me."

"Do you operate through key-word search and retrieval?"

"Damned if I know. Just
talk
to me, Mega-chops. That's what I'm used to."

It was easier if you ignored the fact that you were dealing with a machine and pretended that Mord was a human at some remote location. Bat settled into his seat, closed his eyes, and laid out the facts that he knew: the departure of the
Pelagic
from Mandrake and its destruction by a Seeker missile, the destruction of Mandrake itself, the subsequent purge from the Pallas data banks of everything about Mandrake.

"All sounds okay to me," said Mord when Bat finally opened his eyes again. "I'm disappointed. Seems you know everything there is to know already."

"I know very little. What was happening on Mandrake, and why was it destroyed? Why did the
Pelagic
have to flee? Why were the Pallas data banks purged? Can you answer any of those questions?"

"I can answer all of 'em. But what's in it for me?"

Ten minutes earlier that question would have thrown Bat; but he was adjusting to Mord. "I will make it worth your while to help me. But what I cannot do is to specify the inducements that you would find attractive. The usual pleasures of the flesh, if you will pardon my saying so, are unlikely to be items of strong prevailment in your case."

"Not like you, eh?" The image on the screen was grinning at Bat. "Mega-chomps is thinking, 'Mord ain't got no mouth, ain't got no dick. He don't eat, he don't drink, he don't screw. So what turns him on?' I'll tell you what.
Information.
You scratch my data bank and I'll scratch yours. But it has to be high-proof stuff, not garbage. Do you have anything that's not in the public files?"

"I have little else."

"Then that's what I want."

"But if it is provided to you, it must go no farther."

" 'Course not. What do you think I am? Knowledge is power, but not if you spread it around."

Bat had his second revelation. Mord was more interesting—and more like Bat himself in many ways—than anyone in the Ganymede Transportation Department. Set aside the gross vulgarisms, which had obviously been imposed on Mord by his creator, and what remained was a kindred spirit. One, moreover, who could never intrude with a physical presence. Bat didn't
want
Mord to go back to Ceres. He liked him here, in Bat Cave. "Mord, I agree completely. We will trade information."