Pauline said, “Ordinary orbital mechanics programs for inner planet transport routes routinely include general relativity as a matter of course. It is not necessary to remember to add the relativity equations. If, however, someone who did not know that tried to program a trajectory for an impact without using open-source templates, then they might have added the relativity equations to a situation where they were already being used. And thus, if targeting the city directly, they would create an error of 13.39 kilometers to the west.”
“Ah,” Swan said, feeling sicker than ever. She looked for a place to sit down. Terminator was one thing, its people something else: her family, her community…. That there could be someone capable of killing them all… “So… But that sounds like a human error.”
“Yes.”
That evening, late in the galley, she found herself again alone with the inspector, who again was sitting on the table in front of her, eating grapes. Swan said, “Since you told me about the pebble mob, I’ve been thinking that it was probably aimed directly at Terminator, but that somebody made a mistake. If they didn’t know that the relativity equations for the precession of Mercury were already part of the standard algorithms, and added the operation, they would end up hitting just the distance to the west that they did.”
“Interesting,” Genette said, looking at her closely. “A programming error, in other words. I’ve been assuming that it was a deliberate miss—a warning shot, so to speak. I’ll have to think about that.” After a moment: “You must have asked your Pauline about this?”
“I did. She already had deduced the general topics of what she missed when I turned her off. I’m sure your Passepartout is the same.”
Genette frowned, unable to deny it.
Swan said, “I can’t believe anyone would try to kill so many people. And actually do it, too, in the Yggdrasil. When so much space is available… so much everything, really. I mean, we’re in what people call post-scarcity. So I don’t get it. You talk about motive, but in a physiological sense, there isn’t a motive for stuff like this. I suppose that means that evil really does exist. I thought it was just an old religious term, but I guess I was wrong. It’s making me sick.”
The inspector’s attractive little face creased in a slight smile. “Sometimes I think it’s onlyin post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.”
“Exactly!” Swan cried. “Why not!”
Genette shrugged with a Gallic weariness. “Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as an assault on something external. And so something evil happens.” Another shrug. “However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.”
“I guess I have to.”
“Please do.” Now the inspector was not smiling. “I will not burden you with some of the things I’ve seen. I’ve had to wonder at them, like you are now. The concept of the servile will has helped me. And lately, I’ve been wondering if every qube is not by definition some kind of a servile will.”
“But this programming error that might explain the impact hitting west of town—that’s a human error.”
“Yes. Well, the servile will exists in humans first. So, in parts of themselves people know these acts are bad, but they do them anyway, because in other parts of them some itch gets scratched.”
“But most people try to do good,” Swan objected. “You see that.”
“Not in my line of work.”
Swan considered the little figure, so neat and quick. “That must change your perspective,” she said after a while.
“It does. And… you see the same self-justifications, over and over. It’s even known which parts of the brain are involved in the justifications. They’re very near the parts involved with religious feeling, just as you might expect. Not far from the epileptic triggers, and the sense of meaning. Those parts light up like fireworks when one commits evil or justifies it. Think what that means!”
“But everything we do is in the brain somewhere,” Swan said. “Where in the brain doesn’t matter.”
Genette did not agree. “There are patterns in there. Reinforcements. Bad events grow certain parts of the brain bigger. The brain reconfigures to create a spiral of ever more horrible feelings. Further actions follow.”
“So what do we do?” Swan exclaimed. “You can’t make a perfect world and thenget decent people, that’s backwards, it can’t work.”
The inspector shrugged. “Either way seems unlikely to me.” Then, after a pause: “It can go so wrong. Living in space may be too hard for us. Reduced environments. I’ve seen kids raised in Skinner boxes—human sacrifice—”
“You need your sabbatical,” Swan interrupted, not wanting to hear more.
She saw suddenly that Genette was looking weary. Usually smalls were hard to read; at first glance they looked rather perfect, like dolls, or innocent, like children. Now she saw the reddened eyes, the blond hair a little oily, the simple ponytail all flyaway with hairs that had broken at the hair tie.
And a grimace, very unlike the usual ironic smile. “I do need my sabbatical. I’m late, in fact, and I hope our investigation will soon get me there. Because I’m a little tired. The Mondragon is a beautiful thing, but there are many terraria not in it, some of them seriously deranged. Ultimately what we get by not enforcing a universal law is some kind of accidental libertarian free-for-all. So we’re in trouble. This is what I’m seeing. When you combine political inadequacy with the physical problems of being in space, it may be too much. We may be trying to make an impossible adaptation out here.”
“So what do we do?” she said again.
Genette shrugged again. “Hold the line, I guess. Maybe we need to understand out here that post-scarcity is both heaven and hell at once. They are superposed, like options in a qubit before its wave function collapses. Good and evil, art and war. All there in potentiality.”
“But whatdo we do?”
Genette smiled a little at that, shifted and sat cross-legged on the table before her, looking like a garden Buddha or Tara, slim and stylized. “I want to talk to Wang. I’ll figure out how. And to your friend Wahram. That’s much easier. After that… it depends on what I learn. Did Alex by chance give you a letter for me too, or for anyone else?”
“No!”
A raised hand, like the adamantine Buddha: “No reason to be annoyed. I just wish she had, that’s all. To her this was just a contingency, a backup for something she didn’t expect to happen. She probably figured Wang would tell the rest of the group about her plans. And he will, I hope.”
The next day the inspector’s crew had news, and after a conference Genette emerged and said to Swan, “Wang’s qube identified an asteroid that orbits between Jupiter and Saturn, that drifted outward in its orbit as it would have if it launched the impactor mass at Terminator. The drift happened three years ago, over a period of about six months. Wang took a look through the Saturn League records of ship movements in Saturn space, and those had signals that look like a small ship left this asteroid and from there flew into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It might have taken the plunge, but it entered the upper clouds at an angle that means it could have tucked in there, as quite a few ships have. If so, we might be able to track it down.”