“So what was Alex’s concern?” Swan asked. “And what was she proposing to do about it?”

Wahram took a deep breath, let it out. “She saw an unstable system, headed for a crash unless some corrections were made. She wanted to stabilize things. And she thought the fundamental source of trouble was Earth.”

He stared at the image for a while, which made the point very effectively; there, in the middle of all the clear primary colors, the party balloon jumble that represented Earth was so garish it almost vibrated.

“So she wanted to do what?” Swan asked, feeling a stab of worry. “Are you saying she wanted to change things on Earth?”

“Yes,” Wahram said firmly. “She did. She knew, of course, that this desire is a famous mistake for spacers to make. An impossible project, sure to go wrong. But she thought we might have enough leverage by now to make a difference. She had a plan. A lot of us felt like it was a bit of the tail wagging the dog, you know. But Alex was persuasive that we would never be safe until Earth was in better shape. So we were going along with her.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’ve been stockpiling food and animals in the terraria, and setting up Terran offices in friendly countries there. There were agreements. But now that’s been complicated by Alex’s death, because she did so much of it in person. They were verbal agreements.”

“She didn’t trust qubes, I know that.”

“Right.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I… Perhaps I shouldn’t really say now.”

After an uncomfortable pause, Swan said, “Tell me.” When he raised his eyes and met her gaze, she gave him the look Alex would have given him—she could feel it coursing through her. Alex had been able to make people talk with a look.

But it was Wang who answered her. “It has to do with some funny stories about qubes,” he said carefully. “On Venus and in the asteroid belt. Those incidents are being looked into by Inspector Genette and his team. So”—he gestured at the doorway—“this may be another part of that. So until they learn more, let us leave that matter alone for now. Also… assuming your internal qube is recording all this? If you could get it to keep the recording locked, that would be best.”

Wahram said to Wang, “Show Swan the image of the system with qube power included.”

Wang nodded and tapped at the table’s image. “This one tries to include both qubes and classical AIs. It hopes to give an image of how much of our civilization is run by artificial intelligence.”

“Qubes don’t run anything,” Swan objected. “They don’t make any decisions.”

Wang frowned. “Some things they do decide, actually. When to launch a ferry, for instance, or how to allot the goods and services in the Mondragon—things like that. Most of the work of the system’s infrastructure, as it turns out.”

“But they don’t decideto run it,” Swan said.

“I know what you mean, but look at the image.”

In this version, he explained, red designated human power, blue the power of computers, with light blue marking classical computers, and dark blue quantum computers. A big dark blue ball appeared near Jupiter, and there were other blue dots scattered everywhere, most netted in a single web. Humans appeared as clumps of red, fewer and smaller than the blue dots, with far fewer red lines between them.

“What’s the blue ball around Jupiter?” Swan asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Wang said.

“And so now someone has attacked this rather immense blue ball.”

“Yes.” Wang was frowning heavily as he stared into the table. “But we don’t know who, or why.”

After a silence, Wahram said, “Images like this one were part of what concerned Alex. She initiated some efforts to come to grips with the situation. Let’s leave it at that for now, please. I hope you understand.”

His froggy eyes popped more than ever with the force of his entreaty. He was sweating.

Swan glared at him for a while, then shrugged. She wanted to argue and realized again that it felt good to find something besides Alex’s death to be angry at. Pretty much anything would do. But in the end it wouldn’t help.

Wahram tried to return the subject to Earth: “Alex said we should think of Earth as our sun. We all revolve around it, and it exerts a huge drag on us. And because of the individual need spacers have for their sabbaticals, we can’t just ignore it.”

“For any number of reasons we can’t do that,” Wang pointed out.

“True,” Wahram said. “So. We are determined to keep her projects going. You can help with that. Your qube now has her contact list. It’ll take a big effort to keep that whole group on board. We could use your help.”

Swan, unsatisfied with this kind of generality, inspected the new image again. Finally she said, “Who did she work with most on Earth?”

Wahram shrugged. “Many people. But her main contact there was Zasha.”

“Really?” Swan said, startled. “My Zasha?”

“Yours in what sense?”

“Well, we were partners once.”

“I didn’t know that. Well, Alex certainly relied on Zasha for a sense of the situation on Earth.”

Swan had been vaguely aware that Zasha did things with the Mercury House in Manhattan, but she had never heard Alex or Zasha speak of each other. It was another new thing to learn about Alex, and it suddenly occurred to Swan that this was the way it would happen from now on; she would not learn things from Alex, but about her. That was the way Alex would live on, and small though it was, it was better than nothing. Better than the void. And if Zasha had been working with her—

“All right,” Swan said. “When your inspector lets us out of here, I’m going to Earth.”

Wahram nodded uncertainly.

Swan said, “What will you do?”

He shrugged. “I have to go to Saturn and report.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Yes, thank you.” Although he looked a little alarmed at the idea. “I’ll soon be returning to Terminator. The Saturn League council has been contacted by the Vulcanoids, who it turns out also had some verbal agreements with Alex. There are Vulcanoid light transfers out to Saturn in the works, and I am currently the league’s inner planet ambassador. So I’ll see you when you return to Mercury.”

Extracts (2)

to simplify history would be to distort reality. By the early twenty-fourth century there was too much going on to be either seen or understood. Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians to achieve an agreed-upon paradigm foundered, and we are no different now, looking back at them. It’s hard even to assemble enough data to make a guess. There were thousands of city-states out there pinballing around, each with its presence in the data cloud or absence from same, and all of them adding up to—what? To the same mishmash history has been all along, but now elaborated, mathematicized, effloresced—in the word of the time, balkanized. No description can be

instability nodes, when many pressured stresses rupture at once—in this case the withdrawal of Mars from the Mondragon, its counterimperial campaign on Earth, and the return of the Jovian moons to the larger interplanetary scene. As the first settlements beyond Mars, the Jovians were hampered by path dependency on earlier, less powerful settlement technology, also the discovery of life inside Ganymede and Europa, as well as Jupiter’s intense radiation. Later more powerful settlement strategies, and terraforming efforts on Venus and Titan, caused the Jovians to reevaluate their stations, domes, and tented Luxembourgs as inadequate. Even with Io permanently off-limits, the three other Galilean moons constituted together an enormous potential surface area, and it was the resolution of their inner conflicts and their common commitment to full terraformation that threw the volatiles markets into disarray and triggered the nonlinear breaks of the following two decades