Despite these truths, no one there looked particularly comforted.

“What about the facility where these humanoids are made, or decanted or whatnot?” Wahram asked Genette. “Can we shut it down?”

“When we find it,” the inspector said grumpily.

“Could we round up all the humanoids you’ve identified?”

“I think so,” Genette said. “We’ve had to do some scrambling there, because Alex was central to this effort, and we’ve had to reestablish our team by shaking the network pretty hard. So we managed that, and the team has relinked around her absence. They have identified and are following about four hundred of these things, as I said. Our scan of the system has been fine enough that we don’t think there are any more hiding in any settlement we have access to. I can’t be positive about the unaffiliateds, but we’re looking in all of them. While we do that, we’re keeping our distance from the humanoids we have under surveillance, and they don’t seem to know they’re tagged. Very few of them act as strange as those three in the Inner Mongolia, or the one that burned up on Io. They tend to try to blend in. I don’t know how to interpret that. It’s as if they’re waiting for something. It makes me feel like we’re not seeing the whole picture, and so I don’t want to wait much longer before we act. But it would be nice to think we understood the total situation before doing so.”

Genette had been walking around on the table while speaking, and now stopped before Swan, as if making a case specifically to her: “These organisms, these qubical humanoids, exist. And in some respects their pattern of behavior so far hasn’t been what I would call sane. Some have attacked us, and we don’t know why.”

After a silence Wahram added, “So we have to act.”

Lists (15)

health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are

that’s all you need

EIDGENÖSSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE MOBILE

The spaceliner ETH Mobilewas not a hollowed asteroid but rather one of the very large manufactured ships built in lunar orbit in the previous century. Made by Swiss universities and engineering firms that continued to operate them, they were combinations of glassy metals, bioceramics, aerogels, and water both frozen and liquid. They were extremely fast; frequent small fission explosions firing behind a pusher plate at the rear of the ship accelerated it at a one-g equivalent for those inside, and this very rapid rate of acceleration was typically maintained to the midpoint of a trip, at which point the ship was going so fast that it was necessary for it to turn and decelerate at the same rate. But even decelerating for half of each trip, the average speeds were so high that relatively short transit times were possible all over the solar system, and the longer the trip, the faster the top speeds became, so it was not a linear thing: Earth to Mercury took three and a half days; Saturn to Mercury, eleven days; across the Neptune orbit (“width of solar system”), sixteen days.

ETH Mobilewas outfitted with characteristic Swiss elegance, undemonstrative and superb, evoking the ocean liners of the classic era but entering whole new realms of human comfort, the floors warm, the air tangy, the food and drink a string of masterpieces. There were floor-to-ceiling window walls on many of the public decks, affording spectacular views of the stars and any local object they passed. About ten thousand people could be accommodated, all in luxury. Design in the hotel section combined great slabs of metal with vegetable prints and a William Morris wall vine. The park that filled one tall floor of the ship was an arboretum occupied by a semitropical canopy forest, featuring parts of several South American biomes, including animals from these zones that could handle a few moments of weightlessness without too much risk of injury. What the animals thought of these turnaround moments of zero g was a matter much studied but little understood. It did not appear to make the animals different in subsequent behavior. Sloths did not even seem to notice. Monkeys and jaguars and tapirs floated up chattering and moaning, coyotes howling with their usual genius; then after a suspended moment they would all together float sweetly back to the ground. In this same time the sloths hung from their branches—down, sideways, down again, sometimes spinning all the way round—never once waking up. Not unlike certain people in that regard.

SWAN AND PAULINE AND WAHRAM AND GENETTE

Swan spent her mornings in the ETH Mobile’s little cloud forest. Wahram and the inspector were on the ship with her, and they were making their way as quickly as possible to Venus, where Genette wanted to look into what he called a pastward convergence of strange qube activity. Swan and Wahram had rooms next to each other, and Swan slipped into his room every night. But she was uneasy.

On mornings when Wahram joined her in the park, he sloped around looking at birds and flowers. Once she saw him spend half an hour inspecting a single red rose. He was one of the most placid animals she had ever seen; even the sloths above them were scarcely a match for his imperturbability. It was peaceful to be around, but disturbing too. Was it a moral quality, was it lethargy? She could not stand lethargy, and sloth was one of the seven deadly sins.

He was often listening to his music. He would nod to her and turn it off if she approached him, and so sometimes she did, and they would take a turn together, pausing when something of interest appeared in the branches and leaves above them, or in the ferns and moss underfoot. The park was a little Ascension as it turned out, and Australian tree ferns gave the ground a look more Jurassic than Amazonian—which was fine—it was a good look, and this was a kind of hotel atrium, really, an arboretum for sure, so its status as an Ascension should not be an issue with her. Swan tried not to be annoyed by it, or by Wahram’s indolence. But it was hard, because something else was bothering her too.

Finally one morning she figured it out and went for a walk by herself, up to a level of the ship where big picture windows gave her a broad view of the stars. She had turned Pauline back on soon after the meeting on Titan, and gone on from that moment as if nothing had happened. She had not tried to explain the shutdown to Pauline, and Pauline had not asked about it. Now she said, “Pauline, were you truly turned off during that meeting on Titan?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have some kind of recorder going anyway, even with you turned off?”

“No.”

“Why not? Why don’t you do that?”

“I’m not equipped with any supplementary recorders, as far as I’m aware.”

Swan sighed. “I probably should have done that. Well, listen. I want to tell you what happened.”

“Should you?”

“What do you mean, should? I’m going to tell you, so shut up and listen to me. The people in that meeting were the core of a group that Alex formed. They’ve been trying to do interplanetary diplomacy without any qubes knowing the content of their discussions, because they are worried that some qubes have self-programmed themselves in ways no one understands. Also, these new qubes are now manufacturing qube-minded humanoids that can’t easily be distinguished from people. I’m sure X-rays and the like could do it, but people can’t do it by eye or in conversation. They pass a brief Turing test. Like those silly girls we met, if they really were artificial—which amazes me, I must say—or that lawn bowler too, I think. And then, what’s more, it seems these qubes have been involved with the attacks made using pebble mobs. For sure the attack on Terminator, because Inspector Genette’s team has traced the launch mechanism, and qubes had it built, and it had to have a qube doing its targeting and trajectories. Evidence is good also for that cracked terrarium that killed so many people.”