“That’s good,” Swan said. “But… this is Wang’s qube giving you this lead, yes?”

Genette shrugged. “I know. But the ship track is from the Saturn League, and they tagged it with a transponder on its way down. They also got a read on the transponder already in it, and so they know it was a ship owned by a consortium on Earth.”

“On Earth!”

“Yes. I’m not sure what to make of that, but, you know—a pebble mob can’t be launched from within an atmosphere. Nor from under a dome or tent. It had to happen on an open surface in the vacuum. So if you were on Earth and wanted to do this, you would have to go into space to do it.”

“I see that. But—Earth? I mean, who on Earth—?”

The inspector’s look was so sharp she could not continue.

Genette said, “There are more than five hundred organizations on Earth that have expressed opposition to the idea of humans in space.”

“But why?”

“They usually point out that Earth’s problems remain unsolved, and assert that spacers are trying to escape these problems and leave them behind. Often the bodily modifications in spacers are cited as evidence of the beginnings of a forced speciation. Homo sapiens celestishas been suggested as a name for us. Some also call it the speciation of class. Many Terrans have not gotten the longevity treatments. Thus there are claims that space civilization is perverse, wicked, decadent, and horrible. Destabilizing human history itself.”

“Damn it,” Swan said. “I thought they saw how much good we do them.”

“Please,” Genette said. “You must take your sabbaticals in very sheltered places.”

Swan thought about it for a while. “So what do we do?”

“I want to go to Saturn and look for this little ship. Passepartout thinks it can predict its location from its entry point.”

“And I can come along?”

“More than welcome. We are already on our way.”

The Swift Justiceferried them to a passing terrarium called Inner Mongolia, a beautiful innie of big rolling green hills, often interrupted by outcroppings of black rock, and home to herds of wild horses and elusive packs of wolves, an animal Swan particularly loved. The little towns were set on hilltops and looked like collections of fine yurts, often surrounded by lawns, and pools perched on overlooks. Genette brought along only a couple of assistants, and spent a fair amount of time with them working on what Swan assumed were other cases, in a yurt set among a cluster of them on a hilltop.

One afternoon after a morning of wandering the grassy hills, trying to spot wolves and failing, Swan came to a hilltop yurt resort that had a broad sloping lawn, a big wading pool and set of steaming baths, and a tent aviary filled with hanging baskets of flowers and many different kinds of hummingbirds, lories, and small colorful finches. The undulating lawn had been manicured until it looked like a green carpet. To Swan this was excessively ornamental, out of tune with the wild hills she had spent the morning on. She passed a pair of women who were laughing as if they also found the place ludicrous, and she said as they passed, “It’s silly, isn’t it.”

They stopped and one pointed back up the hill. “Those three people up there in dresses told us that they’re qubes in android bodies, and didn’t we think they could pass as humans. We told them they probably could, but—” The two women looked at each other and laughed again. “But that they were totally blowing it by asking us!”

Swan spotted the three sitting on the grass near the wading pool. “Sounds interesting,” she said, and headed up toward them.

“Pauline, did you hear that?” she said on the way up.

“Yes.”

“All right, well, be quiet, then, and pay attention.”

It was an old hypothesis, that humans would be comfortable with intelligent robots either when the robots were housed in something like a box, or else when they were simply indistinguishable from humans, at which point they would be just another kind of person. In between these two extremes, however, lay what the hypothesis called the uncanny valley—the zone of like-but-not-like, same-but-different, which would cause in all humans an instinctive repulsion, disgust, and fear. Thus the hypothesis, plausible enough; but because there had never actually been a robot built in a form human enough to test the near side of the uncanny valley, it had always remained a notion only. Now Swan was perhaps going to get to test the near side of the uncanny valley.

The tasteless design sense of this resort seemed to extend to the clothing of these three guests. They sat by themselves in long dresses like Victorian crinolines, looking enough alike to be siblings, or even, yes, cloned androids from a single model. Although one looked slightly more female than the other two.

Swan approached them and said, “Hello, I’m Swan, from Mercury, where we are rebuilding our burned city with the help of many qubes. I understand that you three are claiming that you are qubes, that you are not biologically human? Is that right?”

The three people sat there staring at her. The one who looked slightly female in body proportions smiled and said, “Yes, that’s right. Sit down with us and share some tea. I’ve got a pot almost ready,” gesturing at a little portable stove on the ground, and a little squat red teapot resting over its blue flames. There were cups and spoons and little pots on a blue square cloth next to her.

The other two also met her eye and nodded at her. One gestured to the grass beside them. “Have a seat, if you want.”

“Thanks,” Swan said as she flopped down. “It’s pretty heavy in here. Where do you all come from?”

“I was made in Vinmara,” the most female one said.

“What about you?” Swan asked the other two.

“I cannot pass a Turing test,” one of them replied stiffly. “Would you like to play chess?”

And the three of them laughed. Open mouths—teeth, gums, tongue, inner cheeks, all very human in look and motion.

“No thanks,” Swan said. “I want to try a Turing test. Or why don’t you test me?”

“How would we do that?”

“How about twenty questions?”

“That means questions that can be answered by yes or no?”

“That’s right.”

“But one could just ask us if the other is a simulacrum or not, and the other answers, and that would take only one question.”

“True. What if we only allow indirect questions?”

“Even so it would be very simple. What if you had to do it without questions at all?”

“But real people ask each other questions all the time.”

“But one of us or more are not real people. And it’s you who suggested a test.”

“That’s true. All right, let me look at you. Tell me about Inner Mongolia.”

“Dear Inner Mongolia, hollowed in the year…”

“Hollowéd be thy name,” one of the indeterminates interjected, and they laughed.

“Population approximately twenty-five thousand people,” said the more feminine one.

“You must be a qube,” Swan said. “No human ever knows that kind of thing.”

“None?”

“Maybe some people, but it’s odd. But I must say, you look fabulous.”

“Thank you, I decided to wear green today, do you like it?” Showing off the sleeve of the dress.

“It’s very nice. Can I look closer?”

“At my dress or at my skin?”

“At your skin, of course.”

And they all laughed.

Laughter, Swan thought as she examined the person’s skin. Could robots laugh? She wasn’t sure. The person’s skin was lightly pocked by hair follicles, slightly lined by creases at the bend points; there was a scattering of nearly transparent hair on the back of the person’s wrists and forearms, and a little patch of longer darker hairs on the inside of the wrist, which had four permanent creases just inside the hand, where the skin was thinner but darker, revealing a pair of veins, with bumps and bends in them. The skin on the underside of the hand had faint whorls, like big fingerprints, on the ball of the thumb and the meat of the hand. The lifeline was a deep long curve. It looked very much like anyone’s hand, anyone’s skin. If it was artificial skin, it was very impressive; this was said to be the hardest thing to make look natural. If it was a biological skin, as in the labs, but grown over a frame, that would be impressive in a different way. It didn’t look possible that these people’s skin could be artificial, but of course materials science was very sophisticated, and many things were possible to it. Set goals and parameters, and what wasn’t possible?