“Scaring a civilian populace into making a certain political choice,” Wahram said.

“Yes. Which we recognize is one definition of terrorism. But this might not be so apparent to a qube programmed to look for results.”

“And so the attack on Terminator was a kind of demonstration?”

“Exactly. And it certainly had that effect here on Venus.”

“But this new attack on the sunshield, it could have been much more than a scare,” Wahram said. “If it had succeeded, it would have killed a lot of people.”

“Even that might not register as a negative. Depends on the algorithm, and that means it depends on the programmer. There are lots of people on Earth available to replace anyone killed up here. China alone could easily restock the place. The whole Venusian population could be killed and replaced by Chinese and China not even notice. So who knows what people might be thinking? These programmers may have set their qubes off in new directions, even given them new algorithms, but whatever they did they won’t have made human thinkers of them, even if they did get them to the point of passing a Turing test or whatnot.”

“So these qubanoids definitely exist.”

“Oh yes. Your Swan has met some, as have I. The thing on Io was one. And I’ve been interested to learn that a great many of them are on Mars, passing for human and involved in government. Mars’s problems with the Mondragon and with Saturn—they look a little suspicious to me now.”

“Ah,” said Wahram, thinking it over. “And so you are doing what?”

“We are apprehending all of them at once,” Genette said, checking Passepartout quickly. “I sent out the code to do it, and now’s the time. Midnight Greenwich mean time, October 11, 2312. We have to pounce.”

They landed outside Vinmara and after that Wahram was thankful that he was in a wheelchair, because Genette terriered from one brief meeting to another at a terrific clip; even wheeling along Wahram could barely keep up.

Kiran came in a few minutes later on another flight and met with them to show them which building the eyeballs had been heading for. Soon after that an armed group arrived and wasted no time surrounding this building. After a short delay they blasted down the front door and rushed in with weapons drawn, in full spacesuits. A thick pall of gray gas poured out of the interior from the very moment they broke down the door.

In less than five minutes the building was secured. Immediately Genette was conferring with the assault team, and then with Shukra, who showed up with another contingent of armed supporters, there to make sure there would be no local resistance to a rapid extraction of the facility’s contents.

Genette conversed continuously with people, in person and over mobiles, unflustered but very intent—used to this kind of thing. Used even to the idea of plunging into a fight between Venusian factions, which Wahram thought must be extremely dangerous.

When Genette seemed to be done for the moment, and was sitting on the edge of a table, drinking coffee and looking at his wristqube, Wahram said curiously, “So these pebble attacks—they were a matter of one Venusian faction wanting to influence the population here? To get its way in a fight with another faction?”

“That’s right.”

“But… if the attack on the sunshield had succeeded, wouldn’t the terrorists have killed themselves too?”

Genette said, “I think there would have been time for an evacuation. And the perpetrators could be off-planet by now. Also, if qubes made the decision, they might not have cared either way. Whoever the original programmers were, at that point they might not have been in control of the decisions being made. The qubes themselves might have been thinking, Well, it’s a loss, but there’s more of us where we came from. So they would get what they wanted whether the attack worked or failed.”

Wahram thought it over. “What about that killed terrarium out in the asteroid belt? The Yggdrasil?”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe it was meant to make people feel vulnerable. Maybe they were just testing their method. But it’s odd, I agree. It’s one of the reasons I want to see these qubanoids, and any people they’ve picked up here.”

A group of people emerged from the front door of the complex, and Genette made a beeline to them. Many were smalls; the attack on the building had apparently had a Trojan horse component to it, with a bunch of smalls cutting in through air ducts and firing gas canisters to start the attack.

“All right, come on,” Genette said when he returned to Wahram’s side, “let’s get out of here. We have to get these things off-planet as fast as we can.”

A line of about two dozen people, mostly standard size, but including a small and a tall, filed out the door, chained together by their security vests. Genette stopped them one by one as they passed, asking questions very politely, only detaining them for a few seconds each. Wahram inspected them also as they passed, and he noted their possibly too-smooth motion, and an intent glassy-eyed blankness to some of them; but he would not have put bets on his own ability to tell which ones were human and which manufactured. It was disconcerting, that was for sure. A little drop of dread seemed to have slid down his throat to his stomach, where it was spreading.

Genette stopped the last person in line: “Aha!”

“Who’s this?” Wahram asked.

“This is Swan’s lawn bowler, I believe.” Genette held up Passepartout and photographed the person, then nodded at the matched photos on the wristqube’s little screen. “And, as it turns out”—running a wand over the young person’s head—“a human being after all.”

The youth stared at them mutely.

Genette said, “Maybe this is our programmer, eh? We can investigate on our way out. I want to get off Venus as fast as we can.”

This meant another quick crossing of the city, and a tense passage through lock gates to their impromptu helicopter pad. More than once, officials who should have had reason to question such a large group instead let them pass, sometimes while chattering nervously on their headsets through the whole process.

When they were airborne again, Genette glanced at Wahram with a mime’s round-eyed wiping of the brow. Their helicopter headed for Colette, and at the spaceport there, they rushed onto a pad and got into a space plane, and rode it juddering up into lower orbit, there to be hauled in by an orbiting Interplan cruiser.

It was the Swift Justice; and when everyone was aboard, they set a course for Pluto.

In the weeks of their trip out, they brought the lawn bowler in for questioning more than once; but he never said a word. He was definitely human. A young man, thirty-five years old. They were able to trace him back from Swan’s sighting in the Chateau Gardento one of the unaffiliateds, one that would not give its name to outsiders; Interplan had it listed, with accidental prescience, as U-238.

During the flight to Pluto and Charon, Wang’s qube was able to ferret out quite a bit more about the lawn bowler’s brief life. It was a sad tale, though not uncommon: small terrarium run by a cult, in this case Ahura Mazdā worshippers; strict gender division; patriarchal, polygamous; obsessed with physical punishments for demonic transgressions. Into that little world, an unstable child. Reports of aggression without remorse. Stuck there from the age of four until departure by defection at age twenty-four. Learned programming on Vesta, known by no one; absorbed for a time in qube design at the Ceres Academy, but then left school; detached from the school culture. Eventually kicked off Ceres for transgressing its security codes one too many times; then a return to his home rock, where, as far as anyone knew, he had remained. But in fact no one had been watching. How he had come to the work on Venus was unclear, that sequence hidden in the fog that surrounded the Venus Working Group—in this case Lakshmi and her anti-sunshield effort, a unit that had hidden all its actions very effectively. Thus Vinmara and the lab that made humanoids, including the ones that had gone to Mars and infiltrated the government. And the ones that had moved to Earth and then the asteroid belt, and built and operated the pebble launcher. So this young man had either invented the pebble mobs, or designed qubes that had invented them; and he or his creations had executed the attacks.