The Ganymede Club (9 page)

"My age is of no possible concern to you." Bat paused. He never met with anyone if he could avoid it, but this was one of the rare moments when he might question his choice of lifestyle. He added grudgingly, "I am sixteen years old."

"So I was right! But you sound like you're sixteen going on a thousand. I'm sure you don't care to know it, but I'm fifteen." Spook Belman was still doing his best to be friendly, but it sounded like an uphill fight. "Look, I had another reason for connecting to you. I was going to do this anyway, even if you hadn't solved my puzzle. I wanted to ask: How come your puzzles involve the war so often?"

He had said the magic word. Bat had been all set to break the connection. Now he said slowly, "It is a special interest of mine—"

"Mine too!"

"—since I believe that it will prove to be the defining event for our century, and for many centuries to come."

"But you lot weren't even
in
it." Spook waved his arm around, including in "you lot" the whole of Ganymede. "You were so far away, how could you possibly know what went on? Did you live in the Inner System before the war started?"

"Certainly not." Bat quivered at the prospect. The thought of an open sky gave him the willies. He would not, without coercion, venture so high as even the outer levels of Ganymede. "There are more rational ways of obtaining information, without blundering around all over the solar system. Only a fool would choose to visit Earth or Mars— still less, choose to live there, even before their destruction."

"You think so, do you?" Spook sneered out of the display. Bat had touched some exposed nerve, and Spook's conciliatory manner was discarded. "Well, that just shows how little you know. I was going to give you some real good stuff about the war, material no one else out here on Ganymede has ever seen or knows exists.
Firsthand
experience. But you think you know everything. You don't want to meet, you don't want to be seen." He paused, as though he were making some difficult decision. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to send you something, a couple of extracts from a data file. You take a look at them, Megachirops, or whatever your real name is. And if after you've seen them, you decide maybe you
don't
know all about everything, then
you
can give
me
a call."

Abruptly, he was gone, his frowning visage fading from the display. Bat puffed out his full cheeks. So much for Ghost Boy.

Good riddance. He surely didn't know anything about the war that Bat had not already discovered for himself. He couldn't possibly. Bat had drained every source of information on Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the Belt, in addition to tapping whatever was available on Ganymede and Callisto. There was nothing more to be found in any of the data banks.

But suppose that Ghost Boy, against all the odds, had managed to locate something that was
not
in the banks . . .

The rest of Ganymede was waking up. Bat was expected to go places and do things. Like studying. But he could not resist.

He queried his access unit. Sure enough, a new file was being transferred to his personal directory. A big one, calling for the use of full derived reality. Bat summoned the file, and calmed himself as he waited for the environment to establish itself.

Against the standard blandishments of men or women, he believed himself invulnerable. There were, however, other forms of beguilement and seduction.

* * *

As elsewhere in life, in derived reality you got what you paid for. Bat had experienced a dozen different environments through the Puzzle Network. In the cheapest of them, only the people felt real (and sometimes not even they did). The rest of the surroundings were grainy and poorly defined, as though you could push your fist right through the furniture. The perspective was usually off, providing lopsided doors and walls. Sometimes you would find a dark patch, where part of the field of view had been omitted entirely from the synthesis.

At the other end of the scale, the best environments were completely self-consistent and perfectly scaled. There was a feeling of
solidity
, a palpable quality to the surroundings that justified the term "derived reality." The synthesizers of such high-quality environments were professionals, and they were good.

But they were never this good.

This was
real
, as real as dinner.

Bat was hurrying along a dark-walled tunnel, dragging someone with him. People were everywhere. Most of them were moving forward, but some sat slumped wearily against the walls. The light was dim and flickering, the air thick and hot and filled with a fine powder that made his eyes water. The ground shook beneath his feet.

His body felt most peculiar. It was terribly heavy, dragged down by a powerful gravitational field. It was also unnaturally shaped. There were organs, interior and exterior, which had no right to be there. He was in a
female
body, which was towing along behind her a small boy, not much more than half her size.

Before he could adapt to that strangeness, the whole environment changed. The woman was no longer underground in a high-gravity world. She was now in free fall. There was no danger that she would float away, because she was wedged in between the same small boy and the hard arm of a seat. Beyond the boy sat a big man, and beyond him, through a viewport, Bat recognized a familiar image. It was Earth's Moon, visible through the ship's port, in the crescent phase—the face of the Moon as seen from Earth, as it had been
before
the war. Most of that face was dark, but on the illuminated limb he recognized the patterns of dark, smooth
maria
and cratered uplands.

And then it changed again.

A bright spark of blue light appeared. It was followed at once by another, then another. A burning line was etching itself into the Moon's shadowed disk.

Bat, himself and yet not himself, felt the hair bristle on the back of his head. He knew exactly what he and his alter ego were seeing. That was the Armageddon Defense Line, exploding along its whole length like a line of firecrackers, as it was attacked by the fusion fires of modified Diabelli Omnivores. He was witnessing the very moment of the Belt's first attack, when the conflict changed from a war of words to a war of deadly weapons. Within the next few minutes, the whole Northern Hemisphere of Earth, together with its nine billion people, would die.

He had read about this a hundred times. But this time he was
here
, in person, an eyewitness. He waited, as the field of view turned, to take in the broad face of Earth, no more than a few thousand kilometers away. A first bright spark glowed on its nightside, grew . . .

And vanished, together with everything else. The data file had ended, derived reality was gone, and Bat was sitting in his chair staring expectantly at nothing.

He ground his teeth in frustration. Spook Belman had done this
deliberately;
Bat knew it. Spook had more, he must have, but he had cut off the file at the very moment when he knew it was most interesting to Bat.

The irritation and the mystery did not end there. A person might be present at the event, as Spook Belman claimed to have been present. He might even record it. But no recording could capture the sensory detail that Bat had just experienced. And it was sensory detail as experienced not by Spook Belman, but by a
woman.

Ghost Boy had some other trick up his sleeve, some way of turning experience into derived reality.

Bat admitted the galling truth: Belman had found his weak spot—Bat's overwhelming curiosity. To satisfy that, he would have to call Spook back and reveal his own identity. It felt like groveling. It
was
groveling. He could imagine Spook now, sitting there complacently waiting for Bat's capitulation.

Bat reached out for the communication pad, then drew back. The temptation was terrible, but he would not give Spook Belman an easy victory. He would resist as long as he possibly could—and hope that before he weakened, Spook would again call him.

* * *

There was no way for Bat to divine that Ghost Boy, still sitting at the other end of the communication line, was feeling far from complacent. In fact, Spook was facing up to the consequences of his own rash action, and he did not like what he saw. When his sister found out what he had shown Megachirops . . .

He had let his pride and anger get the better of him. In sending those data files to Megachirops, he had guaranteed that he would soon be in more trouble than he cared to think about.

6

The sign in the entrance lobby was printed in bold white letters on a red background. It read: YOU ARE IN THE OFFICE OF LOLA BELMAN, LICENSED HALDANE. IF YOU THINK THAT YOU CAN BE HELPED, THEN YOU PROBABLY DON'T BELONG HERE.

The young man who fidgeted in the only chair had been staring at the sign for the past five minutes. Lola, observing him through a small pane of one-way glass, ran a final physical-response correlation, checked the drug levels in her own body, and decided that the time had come. If she didn't get started soon, she would need a booster. She closed the panel and turned her office over to Fourth-Level Fax response. It would handle most things and interrupt the session only for a real emergency.

She went through to the outer office and addressed the visitor for the first time. "Bryce Sonnenberg? I am Lola Belman. You can come with me now."

She read him as apprehensive, but not excessively so—nothing like some of the wretched mental messes who had shivered their way in to see Lola in the past ten months. In fact, most people would pass Bryce Sonnenberg on the street without giving him a second look.

She didn't assign significance to that. External appearances proved nothing. And he had come an awfully long way for a consultation.

"Sit down." Lola smiled and gestured to an easy chair covered in dark-brown suede. "Right there, if you please."

A lot of work had gone into that chair. It was designed to look normal, adjust to any angle, and feel comfortable, but a fortune in psychometric equipment sat concealed within it. The data outputs that came from its back, arms, and seat went into permanent records, while a quick-look version was provided directly to Lola's implant. She was already scanning for extreme values in Sonnenberg's physical parameters. She found nothing. He was a little uneasy, but nothing more.

Unfortunately, that was not necessarily a good sign. The hardest cases were the ones of most subtle deviation.

"I know you've spoken with my fax," said Lola. "And of course I have that record. But if you don't mind I want to go back to the very beginning. I'd like to ask who you are, what you know about me, and who suggested that I might be able to help you."

He seemed suitably doubtful. The sign in the lobby was not kidding. Anyone who came to see Lola Belman, or any other haldane, had exhausted the conventional channels of treatment.

"I'm Bryce Sonnenberg," he replied after a few silent moments. "Though of course you know that already."

"I do. But say anything you like, repeat anything you like." Whatever he said would make little difference. The real message was delivered by the psychometric monitors and models. Lola felt the powerful psychotropic drugs awakening within her, like a giant stirring from sleep. She was coming to the critical point, the very edge of stability, the place where a haldane must operate.

Sonnenberg was nodding, relaxing. "I am twenty-four years old. I was born in the Belt, on Hidalgo, but when I was only three, my mother moved us out to Callisto. I don't know who my father was." He paused and glanced doubtfully at Lola. She confirmed her first impression. Even with the worried frown on his forehead and the uncertainty in his dark eyes, Bryce Sonnenberg was handsome. It made her aware of the fact that she was only three years older than he was—and that she had been a licensed haldane for less than one year. She nodded. "Go on."

"Do you want me to talk about that kind of thing?"

"Anything you like. For the first quarter hour, it won't make much difference. We'll be calibrating the equipment."

"Right. Anyway, my mother, Miriam, is a Von Neumann designer, doing the advanced models that fine-tune the cavern biological balance after main excavation is all finished. I didn't realize, until I was eighteen years old, how good she is at her job, but in her own specialty she's top dog on the totem pole. When I was a kid I had more little Von Neumanns as friends than I did children. Our apartment was full of them. Sure you want to hear all this?"

"It's exactly what I want to hear. Go on; you're doing fine."

"Three years ago, when I reached twenty-one, mother told me that the Von Neumanns could handle the rest of the work on Callisto by themselves. She wanted to head farther out to where the work was more challenging, to Uranus or beyond. The habitat construction on Oberon was just getting started, she said. Did I want to go along? I wasn't sure, but I said I'd think about it. I did that while she was wrapping up her work. Finally she was all done, and ten months ago she was ready to go.

"So then it was up to me. I'd been changing my mind from one week to the next, but when the time came I decided I didn't want to leave Callisto. I was doing something I enjoyed, and I wanted to keep on doing it for at least a couple more years.

"But then, just four months after she left, I started to have . . . well, problems." He paused, and shook his head. "I guess you know."

Uneasiness, and much more pronounced. It was time for Lola to show a little of her hand.

"As a matter of fact, I do know. But not in the way you think. Some idiot has been putting nonsense into your head." Lola allowed a little irritation to show through. "Forget all the simple-minded rubbish you've heard about an Oedipus complex. That was discredited centuries ago. Your problems, whatever they are, have nothing to do with your mother leaving."

"Are you reading my mind?" He was frowning, grimacing. "I've heard it said that a haldane can read people's minds, but I didn't believe it."

Now he was truly uneasy. Lola sighed to herself. It was always the case—you had to blow away the misconceptions and half-truths before you could even begin.