Swan gave Wahram a dagger of a look and said to Genette, “It was Pauline who informed us of the attack in time to do something about it. And it was Wang’s qube who set up the new surveillance system able to detect that pebble mob. So you can thank me for that later. But my point is, whatever these Venusians are up to with their qube people and their plots, there are other qubes who are clearly on our side. We need to be working with them!”
Inspector Genette agreed. “I’ve had a long talk with Wang and his qube, and what you say is true. There are factions among the qubes too, I’m afraid.”
“So we need ours informed!”
“Maybe,” Genette said. “Although which are ours is an open question. And in this case, the fewer that know, the better. So look, with this information from Kiran, I am going to proceed with this particular Interplan operation as planned.”
“And that is?” Swan said pointedly.
The inspector’s little face, as beautiful and curious as a langur’s, regarded Swan with a bright smile. “Please let me tell you about it after we are farther along.”
Swan gave Wahram another black look. “You see what you’ve done.”
Wahram shrugged. “The plan needs complete secrecy to work. Even I am ignorant of the details.”
“I should also add,” Genette added quickly, “that my plan also needed this information from your young friend here. So it is just now coming together. Please allow me to make the next move confidentially. Even Wahram, as he says, and really everyone here on Venus”—bowing toward Shukra—“is ignorant of our next step, and it has to be that way to succeed.”
Whether Genette was just helping Wahram to look better in Swan’s eyes, Swan couldn’t tell; she was too furious to keep a good sense of the nuances of the situation. Her judgment was off. Genette was now talking to a colleague who had come into the room, finally turning to the rest of them and saying, “If you will excuse us.”
“I will not,” Swan said, and stormed out.
Wahram caught up with her down the hall and matched her step for step, rolling along in his wheelchair and capable therefore of keeping up with her no matter how fast she walked.
“Swan, don’t be angry at me, I needed to tell the inspector what happened to stay in good faith on an important matter; this operation is delicate and the whole situation had to be told.”
“So now it is.”
“Yes, and soon you’ll know everything too. But for a while you have to trust us.”
“Us?”
“I’m going to help the inspector. It shouldn’t take too long. During that time I hope you will go back to Terminator and talk with your people there, about the situation on Titan and about us.”
“You think I’m still interested in any of that?”
“I certainly hope so. It’s more important than your bruised feelings here, if you will allow me to say so. Especially as they needn’t be bruised. I think considering you and Pauline as an indivisible pair is a good thing, don’t you? It’s accurate, it describes you better, let us say. You are a new thing. And most especially to me, I might add.” He reached out and clutched her hand, then stopped them both by braking his wheelchair with his other hand. They slewed around, and he held on to her hand even though she tugged on it. “Come on,” he said, “be serious. Were you out there marooned with me or not? Were you in the tunnel or not?”
Turning her question around on her; and of course she remembered. “Yes, yes,” Swan groused, looking down.
“Well then, here we are now, and there is a situation that requires confidentiality, and so in that context you have to see what I just said to Genette as being under the light of utmost necessity. Especially given my own feelings for you, which are”—he paused to pound his chest with his wheel hand—“profound. Confused but profound. And that’s what matters. It makes life interesting. So I have been thinking that we ought to get married, in the Saturnian crèche I am already part of. It would solve so many problems more than it would create that I really think it is the best thing for both of us. For me, certainly. So I am hoping you will marry me, and that’s the long and short of it.”
Swan yanked her hand away, raised it as if to hit him. “I don’t understand you!”
“I know. I have trouble with that myself. But that’s not the main thing. It’s only part of it. We would make that part of our project.”
“I don’t know….” Swan began, then trailed off: there was so much that could follow this opening that she found herself at a loss. She didn’t know anything! “I’m going to Earth, anyway,” she said mulishly. “I have a meeting there with the UN mammals committee; we’re making some progress there. And now I want to talk to Zasha too.”
“That’s all right,” Wahram assured her. “You think about it. I have to go join Genette; we really are engaged in something urgent, and this information from Kiran is the linchpin, so let us complete that, and I’ll come see you wherever you are, as soon as I can.” And after an anguished clasp of hands to heart, he swiveled and wheeled back down the hall to the inspector.
WAHRAM AND GENETTE
Wahram returned to Genette, who was leaving for Vinmara and did not want to waste time, saying only, “Come on,” and then hurrying off as fast as a terrier. As Wahram wheeled along in pursuit, Genette looked back up at him and asked if all was well with Swan. Wahram replied that it was, although he was none too sure about this. But it was time to focus on the plan.
As they flew to Vinmara, Genette talked to some of his associates using his wristqube Passepartout as his radio, and Wahram gestured at it questioningly.
With a shake of the head Genette said, “There are qubes working for us, as Swan pointed out, and indeed hers may be one of them, it seems likely. But I haven’t been able to check it yet, and you were probably right to keep her out of this. It’s hard to tell what she would do. But meanwhile Wang’s qube and Passepartout have both been checked out, and are helping us as instructed. So I believe,” he enunciated at his wristqube with a cross-eyed frown.
Wahram said, “Do you think the qubes are beginning to function as their own society, with groups or even organizations, and disagreements?”
Genette threw up his hands. “How can we tell? It may be they are only being given different instructions by different people and therefore acting differently. So we hope to apprehend the maker of these qube humans in Vinmara, and then maybe we can find out more.”
“What about the Venusians? Will they allow you to do what you intend to here?”
“Shukra and his group are backing us. They are in the midst of quite a tussle right now, and the stakes are high. Lakshmi’s people are either manufacturing these humanoids or else are benefitting from their existence, I can’t tell which yet, but either way Shukra’s group is happy to assist us. I think the Working Group is divided enough that we can do what we need to and get off-planet before they can react.”
This sounded ominous to Wahram. “Jump through the middle of a civil war?”
Genette said with a quick shrug, “No way now but forward.”
They came to the spaceport and hurried through it and down a jetway into a small airplane. After they were on board and in the air, Genette looked out the window and observed, “It’s a lot like China here. In fact they may still be ruled from China, it’s hard to be sure. Anyway, decisions are in the hands of a fairly small group. And they’re split now over what to do about the sunshield. How you regard it has become a kind of loyalty test for both sides. I thought most Venusians had come to accept reliance on it as just one danger among many. But the ones who object to it tend to be more vehement in their feelings. For them it’s a kind of existential issue. And so they are willing to be more extreme to get their way.”
“So what do you think they did?”
“I think what may have happened is that one of their programmers decided to instruct some qubes to help the effort to get rid of the sunshield. Maybe an open command, something like ‘figure out a way to get t
his done.’ So that means some qube running a probable-outcomes algorithm. And the algorithm could have been poorly constrained. Willing to consider anything, so to speak. Kind of like a person in that regard! Very lifelike. So, what if that qube then proposed to put qubes in humanoid bodies, so they could make attacks that immobile box qubes couldn’t manage on their own—attacks that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do? Sabotage, I mean. Or call them educational spectacles, meaning some arranged disasters. If they could make the majority of Venusians believe that the sunshield was in danger of an attack—that they could all be cooked like bugs—then public sentiment would surely back another era of bombardment to give Venus a spin.”
“Scaring a civilian populace into making a certain political choice,” Wahram said.
“Yes. Which we recognize is one definition of terrorism. But this might not be so apparent to a qube programmed to look for results.”
“And so the attack on Terminator was a kind of demonstration?”
“Exactly. And it certainly had that effect here on Venus.”
“But this new attack on the sunshield, it could have been much more than a scare,” Wahram said. “If it had succeeded, it would have killed a lot of people.”
“Even that might not register as a negative. Depends on the algorithm, and that means it depends on the programmer. There are lots of people on Earth available to replace anyone killed up here. China alone could easily restock the place. The whole Venusian population could be killed and replaced by Chinese and China not even notice. So who knows what people might be thinking? These programmers may have set their qubes off in new directions, even given them new algorithms, but whatever they did they won’t have made human thinkers of them, even if they did get them to the point of passing a Turing test or whatnot.”
“So these qubanoids definitely exist.”
“Oh yes. Your Swan has met some, as have I. The thing on Io was one. And I’ve been interested to learn that a great many of them are on Mars, passing for human and involved in government. Mars’s problems with the Mondragon and with Saturn—they look a little suspicious to me now.”
“Ah,” said Wahram, thinking it over. “And so you are doing what?”
“We are apprehending all of them at once,” Genette said, checking Passepartout quickly. “I sent out the code to do it, and now’s the time. Midnight Greenwich mean time, October 11, 2312. We have to pounce.”
They landed outside Vinmara and after that Wahram was thankful that he was in a wheelchair, because Genette terriered from one brief meeting to another at a terrific clip; even wheeling along Wahram could barely keep up.
Kiran came in a few minutes later on another flight and met with them to show them which building the eyeballs had been heading for. Soon after that an armed group arrived and wasted no time surrounding this building. After a short delay they blasted down the front door and rushed in with weapons drawn, in full spacesuits. A thick pall of gray gas poured out of the interior from the very moment they broke down the door.
In less than five minutes the building was secured. Immediately Genette was conferring with the assault team, and then with Shukra, who showed up with another contingent of armed supporters, there to make sure there would be no local resistance to a rapid extraction of the facility’s contents.
Genette conversed continuously with people, in person and over mobiles, unflustered but very intent—used to this kind of thing. Used even to the idea of plunging into a fight between Venusian factions, which Wahram thought must be extremely dangerous.
When Genette seemed to be done for the moment, and was sitting on the edge of a table, drinking coffee and looking at his wristqube, Wahram said curiously, “So these pebble attacks—they were a matter of one Venusian faction wanting to influence the population here? To get its way in a fight with another faction?”
“That’s right.”
“But… if the attack on the sunshield had succeeded, wouldn’t the terrorists have killed themselves too?”
Genette said, “I think there would have been time for an evacuation. And the perpetrators could be off-planet by now. Also, if qubes made the decision, they might not have cared either way. Whoever the original programmers were, at that point they might not have been in control of the decisions being made. The qubes themselves might have been thinking, Well, it’s a loss, but there’s more of us where we came from. So they would get what they wanted whether the attack worked or failed.”
Wahram thought it over. “What about that killed terrarium out in the asteroid belt? The Yggdrasil?”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe it was meant to make people feel vulnerable. Maybe they were just testing their method. But it’s odd, I agree. It’s one of the reasons I want to see these qubanoids, and any people they’ve picked up here.”
A group of people emerged from the front door of the complex, and Genette made a beeline to them. Many were smalls; the attack on the building had apparently had a Trojan horse component to it, with a bunch of smalls cutting in through air ducts and firing gas canisters to start the attack.
“All right, come on,” Genette said when he returned to Wahram’s side, “let’s get out of here. We have to get these things off-planet as fast as we can.”
A line of about two dozen people, mostly standard size, but including a small and a tall, filed out the door, chained together by their security vests. Genette stopped them one by one as they passed, asking questions very politely, only detaining them for a few seconds each. Wahram inspected them also as they passed, and he noted their possibly too-smooth motion, and an intent glassy-eyed blankness to some of them; but he would not have put bets on his own ability to tell which ones were human and which manufactured. It was disconcerting, that was for sure. A little drop of dread seemed to have slid down his throat to his stomach, where it was spreading.
Genette stopped the last person in line: “Aha!”
“Who’s this?” Wahram asked.
“This is Swan’s lawn bowler, I believe.” Genette held up Passepartout and photographed the person, then nodded at the matched photos on the wristqube’s little screen. “And, as it turns out”—running a wand over the young person’s head—“a human being after all.”
The youth stared at them mutely.
Genette said, “Maybe this is our programmer, eh? We can investigate on our way out. I want to get off Venus as fast as we can.”
This meant another quick crossing of the city, and a tense passage through lock gates to their impromptu helicopter pad. More than once, officials who should have had reason to question such a large group instead let them pass, sometimes while chattering nervously on their headsets through the whole process.
When they were airborne again, Genette glanced at Wahram with a mime’s round-eyed wiping of the brow. Their helicopter headed for Colette, and at the spaceport there, they rushed onto a pad and got into a space plane, and rode it juddering up into lower orbit, there to be hauled in by an orbiting Interplan cruiser.
It was the Swift Justice; and when everyone was aboard, they set a course for Pluto.
In the weeks of their trip out, they brought the lawn bowler in for questioning more than once; but he never said a word. He was definitely human. A young man, thirty-five years old. They were able to trace him back from Swan’s sighting in the Chateau Garden to one of the unaffiliateds, one that would not give its name to outsiders; Interplan had it listed, with accidental prescience, as U-238.
During the flight to Pluto and Charon, Wang’s qube was able to ferret out quite a bit more about the lawn bowler’s brief life. It was a sad tale, though not uncommon: small terrarium run by a cult, in this case Ahura Mazdā worshippers; strict gender division; patriarchal, polygamous; obsessed with physical punishments for demonic transgressions. Into that little world, an unstable child. Reports of aggression without remorse. Stuck there from the age of four until departure by defection at age twenty-four. Learned programming on Vesta, known by no one; absorbed for a
time in qube design at the Ceres Academy, but then left school; detached from the school culture. Eventually kicked off Ceres for transgressing its security codes one too many times; then a return to his home rock, where, as far as anyone knew, he had remained. But in fact no one had been watching. How he had come to the work on Venus was unclear, that sequence hidden in the fog that surrounded the Venus Working Group—in this case Lakshmi and her anti-sunshield effort, a unit that had hidden all its actions very effectively. Thus Vinmara and the lab that made humanoids, including the ones that had gone to Mars and infiltrated the government. And the ones that had moved to Earth and then the asteroid belt, and built and operated the pebble launcher. So this young man had either invented the pebble mobs, or designed qubes that had invented them; and he or his creations had executed the attacks.
“Yggdrasil?” Genette said to the bowler at one point.
The diagnostic monitors attached to the youth’s body and brain showed a solid jump.
Genette nodded. “Just a test, eh? Proof of concept?”
Again the monitors showed the jump in the metabolism. The idea that these jumps constituted a reliable lie detector had long since been abandoned, but the physiological leaps were still very suggestive.
Wordless as the youth remained, there was no way to be sure why any of these things had happened. But an association with Yggdrasil seemed clear.
To Genette, this was what mattered. “I think the attacks on Terminator and Venus were political,” he said to Wahram, with the youth right in the room with them, staring mutely at the wall, the monitor’s jumpy lines speaking for him in a sort of mute shouting. “I suspect they were approved by Lakshmi. But breaking open the Yggdrasil came first, and probably was this person’s idea. A demonstration for Lakshmi, perhaps. Proof of concept. And so three thousand people died.”
Genette stared up at the youth’s tight face, then said finally to Wahram, “Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s nothing more to do here.”