is performed, we’ll know it. I told Bengt Suomi that Bat is expecting some spectacular result, and you know Bengt. He can’t wait to get started.”
“I believe that.” Karolus sniffed. “I’ll give Suomi the go-ahead tonight. Then the trouble will be stopping him. I never met a scientist yet who didn’t want to do just one more experiment.”
Alex was still holding the little cylinder, and he moved it around so that the contents swirled up the rounded sides. “Are you sure that these samples were taken from the man I told you about, in science research quarantine?”
“Either they were taken from Sebastian Birch, which is what I was told, or somebody in science research quarantine is going to suffer a greatly reduced life expectancy.”
“How did you get them?”
“You don’t know.” Karolus reached out and took the container from Alex’s hand. “And you don’t want to know. I’ll tell you this, though. Gram for gram, the gray mess in this bottle is the most expensive material in the solar system. It had better be worth the price.”
“Bat is convinced that it will be.”
“Do you have any idea why he’s so hot for this? — not that it’s any of our damned business.”
“He’s convinced that it’s somehow connected to a weapon, and a woman who died at the end of the Great War.”
“The war?” Karolus scowled. “My God, the war was over thirty years ago. Battachariya must be off his head.”
Alex recalled Bat in the kitchen of the Bat Cave, peering into a steaming cauldron of bouillabaisse, muttering, tasting, and adding a single grain of cumin. “I wouldn’t say that. He is a little eccentric. But he cooks and serves better food than I’ve ever had from the Ligon chefs or anyone else.”
“Really?” Karolus raised his bushy eyebrows. “That’s quite a claim. I wouldn’t mind tasting some myself. Good luck to him. I’m not a man to deny another his little pleasures — whatever they are. Which is my cue to leave and wake up Bengt Suomi, and yours to go back in there and service your extremely attractive friend.”
Karolus stood up and pulled the black hood over his head. “Make sure Battachariya knows we are keeping our part of the deal.”
“I will.”
“I tell you, young Alex, these past few weeks have left me much encouraged. Hector honking Lucy Mobarak, you honking your own boss, no less, and the pair of you locking in the deal for Pandora. Meanwhile Great-aunt Agatha, that ghastly old hag, is heading for the bone yard. There’s hope for the family yet.”
He bulled his way out. Alex locked the door behind him, reflecting that there would not be much hope for the Ligon family until Uncle Karolus joined Great-aunt Agatha.
It was not reassuring to return to the bedroom and hear Kate, sitting cross-legged on the bed, say, “So that was the dreaded Karolus. You keep telling me that he’s terrible, but you know, I though he was rather fascinating. He introduced himself to me most politely.”
“Right. Most polite. As he was leaving he told me to get back in there and service my extremely attractive friend.”
“Did he really? Extremely attractive? Polite, and a man of discernment, too. But not again, not tonight. Come to bed. Tomorrow we go three more rounds on your predictive model with Ole Pedersen. We need sleep.”
As if she needed to remind him. Alex, once again comfortably in bed with Kate nestled into his back, felt a sudden attack of the midnight blues. Hector was going to receive the credit for the Mobarak merger and for the deal with Bat. Ole Pedersen, or, even worse, moronic Macanelly, would be given credit for success with the predictive model — alien influence and all, which was no longer wild speculation since the news blurts were full of the Wu- Beston anomaly and the current work on signal deciphering.
And Alex?
A mere anonymous courier, running between Bengt Suomi’s lab and Rustum Battachariya, relaying other people’s wish lists and results, all to be forgotten a year from now? Or, just as bad, the creator of a predictive model which consumed large amounts of the Seine’s computer resources and produced nothing more than a bad example of mistaken concepts that would be recorded as part of the long history of modeling?
Alex fell asleep trying to decide which was better. Would you rather be forgotten, or blamed?
29
Sluiced. Until Jan heard that word, she had not been sure of her own plans. Now she knew. The idea that Sebastian’s body would be invaded and taken over by self-replicating tiny machines, producing changes that no one could predict, filled her with horror. Even if no one else worried about the experiment — it was no better than an experiment, no matter what Valnia Bloom might say — she had to stick close to Sebastian and keep an eye on him.
He seemed more stolid and indifferent than ever. He didn’t seem to know or care what was done to him. It was Jan or Valnia Bloom who, day by day, checked progress in the nano development. The chief technician, Hal Launius, insisted that the job was a simple one, with no chance of going wrong. He was confident and almost as casual in manner as Sebastian. It was left to Jan to do the worrying. She knew that never in human history had anyone developed a system incapable of failure.
She made sure that she was present when the completed product was delivered. She sat and watched as Hal Launius displayed the spray syringe. It was tiny, more like a toy than a medical instrument. The tube held a few drops of misty gray-blue liquid, innocuous in appearance; but Jan could not repress a shiver when Launius applied the syringe’s tip to Sebastian’s bared upper arm. The liquid vanished instantly, absorbed through the skin.
“Feeling all right?” Valnia Bloom, to judge from her voice, was more concerned than she would admit.
“Yeah.” Sebastian sat dull-eyed. “Fine.”
Jan wasn’t. “What happens next?”
“For a few hours, nothing at all.” Hal Launius examined the empty syringe and nodded in satisfaction. “After that, the nanos will have multiplied enough to make themselves felt. Sebastian, you will run a fever — no more than a degree or two, I expect — and then you’ll need to pee a lot. That’s how the nodules will be excreted. Make sure that you drink plenty of fluids to help your kidneys.”
“When will it end?” Valnia Bloom asked. “Before we began, you suggested four or five days would be enough.”
“I was being conservative. Safer to play it that way.” Launius packed away the syringe in its little carrying case. “But if this isn’t all over and done with in three days or less, I owe you dinner.”
He left. Valnia Bloom followed him a few minutes later, after advising Sebastian that his temperature and pulse would be monitored remotely and reminding him that water would help to flush out his system. Jan watched him closely. For all the notice he took of Valnia Bloom’s words, she might as well have saved her breath.
Then Jan and Sebastian were alone. It was no novelty, they had been alone together most of their lives. But since leaving Earth, things had changed. Perhaps it was Sebastian, perhaps it was Jan, but what had once been easy companionship was now awkward. Sebastian never started a conversation. His replies were only a few words. He seemed preoccupied, far off in some private world.
Jan stuck it out for three hours. At last she told Sebastian that she needed to go outside for “a breath of air” — a notion utterly alien to a Ganymede native. He simply nodded. She left the research quarantine facility and headed upward. The surface itself lay only four habitat layers above their heads.
Jan had made no conscious plan as to what she would do next. It seemed like random impulse when she looked for and located a surface access point, donned one of the protective suits with its superconducting fine mesh, and proceeded upward one more layer and out through multiple locks onto the naked surface of Ganymede.
Close to the lock, the ground, worn down by the passage of many people and vehicles, had taken on the texture of fine sand. Flecks of ice and mica at Jan’s feet glittered in the light of the distant Sun. Farther off, to her left, she saw sunglint on jagged ridges and icy pinnacles. She knew their name — those were the Sabine Hills — but she felt no desire to explore them. A brief pang of homesickness for the soft and rounded contours of Earth came
