“It’s taking longer than ever before.” It was hard to tell from Mord’s tone if he thought that good or bad.

Bat nodded. “When did you enter?”

“Right at the beginning. I noticed the changes in resource allocation.” Mord’s eyes narrowed as he peered at the latest outputs. “I was wrong last time, when I thought you’d never get in. Want to go double or quits? I say, this time you definitely won’t break the defenses within twelve hours.”

Bat closed his eyes and settled back in his chair to ponder the question. He glanced at the clock. Five hours had already elapsed since his first onslaught. His foe’s defenses showed no sign of weakening. But with seven hours to go, and at least one line of attack still held in reserve…

“Forget the double-or-quits offer,” Mord said abruptly. “Bet’s off.”

Bat blinked his eyes open and stared at his banked displays. He could see no change. And then, suddenly, he could. A fixed loop of instructions was being run, hundreds of millions of times a second, and sections of the displays were slowly changing color.

“Ahhhh.” His long exhalation slowly faded. “There is penetration of the third firewall.”

“Is there another one behind it?”

“I am afraid not. Complete access can be only moments away.”

“That’s it, then.” Mord leered out of the display. “All right, fat boy. Back to the drawing board.”

Bat nodded, but his mind was already beginning the curious change needed to move perspective from attacker to defender. He had spent a whole year building what he hoped was an impenetrable series of shields, traps, blind ends, and firewalls designed to thwart something — even a something with the full power of the Seine — from entering his private computer system.

And he had failed. He had just proved that at least one individual in the Solar System, Rustum Battachariya, could mount an external attack able to squirm and worm and drill past that same Rustum Battachariya’s best computer defenses. He had, in a very literal sense, just defeated himself.

Mord added, “Unless you think you’re safe enough with the system the way it is, because you believe nobody else could do what you just did. I mean, you do have the arrogance.”

Bat said mildly, “Mord, this is no time for goading. Nor is such goading necessary. I have sufficient incentive to work further on my defenses, and I will do so. But first, I must have sustenance. Join me if you wish.”

The offer was genuine. Bat would welcome Mord’s company. He rose from his seat and headed along the Bat Cave toward the “eating end” with its elaborate and splendidly furnished kitchen. That kitchen was well-provided with display units, on any of which Mord would be able to appear.

Mord could not, of course, eat, any more than Bat could have tolerated Mord’s insults from any human. Mord, however, was not human. Mordecai Perlman had been; but he had died more than twenty years ago, his body cremated and his ashes sent at his own request into the Sun.

Perlman had been involved in the early development of Faxes, the expert systems that simulated humans and fulfilled many of their simpler functions. You could buy everything from a Level One Fax, which could answer only the simplest questions about you, such as your name, all the way to a Level Five, which managed a fair conversation on your behalf and was smart enough to know when it was out of its depth and call for help.

None of that was enough for Perlman. He was a maverick, an outsider who disagreed with everyone on the way to do simulations. To the others, a Fax was a body of logical rules and a neural network that allowed a computer to mimic the thought patterns and responses of a particular human being.

Wrong approach, declared Mordecai Perlman. That’s all crap. A human isn’t a set of logical rules. A human is a mixture of thoughts and glands and general confusion, and what goes on in a person’s subconscious mind is more important than any A implies B predicate calculus of the conscious mind. We spend half our time trying to produce explanations for the fuck-up messes that our glands lead us into.

Perlman had been ignored. The need was for simple Faxes, ones whose responses to a given situation would always be the same. No one wanted Faxes with moods, passions, senior moments, PMS, or temper tantrums.

No one but Mordecai Perlman. Convinced that he was right, he had set out to produce his kind of Fax. When the work had gone as far as he could take it, he gave the final proof that he believed in what he was doing: he constructed a Fax that mimicked the worldview, knowledge base, and gut reactions of Mordecai Perlman. He did not claim that what lay within the computer was a Fax. It was something new. It was a Mord. The image that appeared on displays was of Mordecai Perlman, as he had been at the time when Mord was implemented.

Bat had discovered Mord hiding away on the Ceres computer system. He was intrigued by what he saw, and asked for a version of his own. Mord had come right back with an answer no cloning. Would you want to be cloned? But Mord was willing to make a deal: he would agree to being transferred into Bat’s system, and erased on Ceres, in return for certain guarantees. All that Mord wanted was system-wide input data, with access to the news feeds.

Bat had considered, and agreed. For one thing, Mordecai Perlman had lived through the Great War as an inquisitive, observant adult. Mord must be a treasure-house of information about those times, and there was much still to be discovered about the war, particularly the past weapons. The Bat Cave held a unique collection, but Bat always wanted more. The Mother Lode, a complete listing of all Belt weapons developed and intentionally destroyed, might be no more than legend. So might the “ultimate weapon,” the unspecified device that post-war lore insisted would make the whole solar system “dark as day,” whatever that self-contradictory phrase might mean. On the other hand, these things just might be real. So many improbable Great War weapons had turned out to be far from imaginary.

Bat drifted along the length of the Cave, admiring and appreciating its contents. Without the real estate constraints of Ganymede’s interior, he had made the Cave ten times its old size. Its contents were expanding to fill the space available. So, according to Mord, was Bat.

He moved slowly. The aroma of food, an olla podrida that had been cooking all day, drew him on, but at the same time he wished to savor and even touch items of his collection. Women had no aesthetic appeal for Bat, nor had men; but each item arrayed in its case or hung along the wall possessed, to the connoisseur, its own strange beauty.

Here was a rare infrared communications beacon, developed on Pallas and one of only four known copies. Next to it, the little antique Von Neumann was a true original, used in the preliminary mining of the Trojan asteroids before Fishel’s Law and Epitaph — Smart is dumb; it is unwise to put too much intelligence into a self-reproducing machine — because System-wide wisdom. The Von Neumann now sat confined by a magnetic field within a triple-sealed chamber. Without raw materials, it was not dangerous.

Bat loved them all, the brain-gutted Seeker, the mesh-caged Purcell invertor, the Palladian genome stripper.

He might have lingered longer, but Mord’s impatient voice rang out from the kitchen ahead of him. “Hey, Mega-chops, I’m sitting here doing nothing. You gone to sleep out there? Soup’s on.”

Bat moved a little faster. Mord was also a relic of the war, perhaps the oddest one of all. What else could explain why Bat found Mord’s company more congenial than that of any human?