“Are you going to leave the baby behind, then?”

“Of course not. He’s coming with me.”

“So you’re going to cross the freezing snow out there carrying a fifteen-month-old child? And you claim that I’m erratic?”

“You’ve turned your intelligence back up again, haven’t you?” Justinian observed. “It’s not just your body that goes into hiding behind that fractal skin. What is it that you’ve got hanging around in your mind?”

Leslie abandoned the baby, leaving him to play with the spoon. Soon the baby was quite happily trying to pick up a piece of sweet corn. The robot looked hurt.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m doing my best in difficult circumstances.”

A black flicker in the corner of Justinian’s eye turned out to be a Schrödinger cube, sitting on the orange patterned carpet nearby. “Okay,” he said. “No problem. We’ll just fly somewhere warmer, then make the swap there. After that we fly to the secondary infection, and then go home.”

“So you feel perfectly safe putting your child’s safety in the hands of a human intelligence? Do you really think that David’s reactions will be quick enough to evade danger should everything start going wrong on board his shuttle?”

Justinian looked at Schummel. The older man held up his hands, still damp from the melting snow.

“Hey! I don’t know exactly what is out there. All I’m saying is that every other AI on this planet is giving up the ghost and climbing back down the mental planes all the way into the basement. So if you must fly all the way to the secondary infection, Justinian, I think it would be safer if you were to do it with me.”

“Okay then,” Justinian said. “I’m convinced. I won’t insist on flying all the way there.”

“Great.” Schummel beamed triumphantly at the robot. “If Justinian isn’t going all the way to the secondary infection, that’s fine by me. But, even so, why risk the baby? Why not leave the baby with me while you go there alone?”

Justinian looked down at his son. The baby had picked up a Schrödinger cube on his spoon and was bringing it towards his mouth.

“Hey!” Justinian called warningly. “Ah ah ah! Don’t eat that!”

The baby frowned as Justinian replaced the cube with a piece of chicken. Several more cubes rattled onto a plastic tray nearby.

Leslie’s fractality was turned down, making him look almost human. “And why should Justinian trust a man who he has known for barely forty minutes in total with his child?”

Schummel shrugged. “Why not? We’re all in the same craft here. We’ve got to look after each other.”

“Are you saying that Justinian is not capable of looking after his own child?” the robot asked smoothly.

“I know what you’re trying to do, Leslie,” Justinian snapped. “You’re playing with my emotions. You’ve turned your intelligence up so you can manipulate me again.”

Schummel was looking around the flier with a thoughtful expression. “Have you noticed,” he said, “how he’s turned up his intelligence, and all of a sudden there are Schrödinger cubes appearing everywhere?”

Justinian realized that he was right: the floor was a drift of cubes. Little black cubes tumbled from the flight chairs, sat in the window recesses, rolled on the baby’s tray. “I’ve never seen so many,” he whispered.

“Of course there’s more,” Leslie said. “Think about it. If I turn my intelligence up, I have a wider sense of awareness; I fix more of the cubes in place as they pass through this space.”

Schummel’s eyes widened. He suddenly looked very sick. “Of course,” he murmured. “I never thought of that before. It’s so obvious; there must be a constant flux of cubes across this planet.”

“The flux increases the closer we get to the secondary infection,” Leslie said, teasingly.

“Oh, hell,” Schummel said. “I just didn’t think of that, Justinian. I just never saw it. We were standing outside barely five minutes ago, and I said that it was the first time a human had stood there looking at the stars. But, think about it: what if this is the first time that intelligent beings have ever stood on this planet? The cubes could have been flowing past this planet for millennia until we got here. And now our intelligence is fixing them here!”

Justinian stared at David, his lips moving slowly as he sampled the idea. He turned to the robot.

“Is that right?” he asked.

“Possibly,” Leslie said in a tone that implied otherwise. “But it’s an anthropomorphic way of looking at things. What makes you human beings? I’ll tell you. Intelligence. Birds fly, cheetahs run fast, plants photosynthesize. What is your defining characteristic? You can think.”

“Yeah…” David said. Leslie waved a dismissive hand.

“It colors your perception. You believe thinking is your defining characteristic, so you build AIs to think for you. Would a dog have built a smelling machine, or a bat a hearing machine? You have colonized the galaxy through the power of thought. And so, because it has been a successful method of propagation for you, you seek evidence elsewhere of objects that can be identified by intelligence. Does this not strike you as being anthropomorphic? What if evolution had left dogs the dominant creature on Earth? Would they think it significant that the cubes stayed put when you could smell them?”

Justinian was getting riled. “The argument is facile. It would take an intelligence to identify the smell. Plus, a sense of smell alone would not give us the freedom to explore the galaxy.”

“Okay, fair enough. But what if there were other ways to be successful in the race to spread your genes to other planets? Blind luck, maybe, or evolving into creatures that can fly through a vacuum?”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know, but what if that is where we are going wrong? We search for signs of other intelligent life, yet maybe none exists. Maybe there is no other intelligent life. There are other ways of evolving. And here on this planet maybe we have found one of those other ways. Or at least its by-products.”

They stood in thoughtful silence. In the background the baby was making a noise, banging his spoon on the table and repeating one syllable over and over again. “Da da, da da…”

“Is he saying Dad?” Justinian asked.

“No,” Leslie said matter-of-factly. “He has quite a different intonation for that concept. This is the noise that he makes when he thinks he has done something clever.”

Justinian stared at the robot. He had never imagined that Leslie could already understand what his son was saying. It made sense, he supposed, for Leslie seemed to read humans at a deeper level. There was no reason why he could not understand the sounds a child made as it was developing language facility.

Then he realized what the child was doing. It had picked up a Schrödinger cube and was banging it against the yellow plastic of the tray.

“He’s holding a cube,” said Justinian.

The baby meanwhile was beaming at his father and saying something over and over again.

“I think he’s saying that he’s managed to fix it in position by looking at it,” Leslie said. “I think he’s telling us that he’s never managed to do that before.”