hard rock in the highlands of the enormous volcanoes, and bore into that rock, and hide a little station. A cube to hold Wang’s qube. Everything there must be triply protected, first by physical walls, then by a magnetic field strong enough to counteract Jupiter’s radiation; but this field itself would be enough to kill, so inside that field a Faraday cage is necessary, to protect you from your protection.
Descend in a blue magnetic aurora, a fire of electrons. Below, the moon spreads from a ball to a plain to a tumultuous mountainscape of overlapping volcanoes, the bulky cones hard to spot in all the overlapping swaths of yellow on tan on white on black on brick on bronze, swaths of every burnt color, but most of all, yellow. Here and there scattered rings of black or red or white reveal active vents, pouring out the guts of the interior in irregular circles around the vents; but most of the patches are much less regular, and taken altogether, the surface is a jumble that cannot be resolved by the eye into a topography. It is what it looks like, a molten world, a world on fire. The names humans have applied are redundant. Fire gods, thunder gods, lightning and volcano gods, every combustible deity, from Agni the Hindu god of fire to Volund the German blacksmith of the gods: all these names attempt to humanize the moon, but fail. Io is not a human place. The hard crust on its surface, cooled only by contact with the chill vacuum of space, is so thin that in many places it would not support a standing person. Some early explorers found this out the hard way: walking too far away from their lander, they plunged through the sulfurous ground into red-hot lava and disappeared.
We think that because we live on cooler planets and moons, we live on safer ground than that. But it is not so.
SWAN AND WANG
The station on Io holding Wang’s qube and its support team was located high on the flank of Ra Patera, one of the biggest mountains in the solar system. As the ferry descended, the tilt of Ra’s broad apron came to seem barely off the horizontal. The ferry dropped into a gap in a concrete pad, and a roof then closed over them; from then on they were mostly underground. Everything they could see of the moon on the station’s various viewscreens, and through the little windows in the station’s little conning tower, was part of the apron of Ra.
There were several people in the station’s bridge, up in the conning tower. None of them looked up at Swan and Wahram, nor at Wang when he came in.
Wang Wei turned out to be a round person with an innocuous manner. A real principal investigator, as Mqaret would have said: one of the system’s foremost experts on qubes. Sometimes such individuals were sovereign to quite remarkable little Ruritanias. Swan wondered if Alex had been right in her notion that the solar system’s balkanization was a deliberate but unconscious human reaction to qubes, some kind of resistance to their incipient power.
Wang greeted Swan and Wahram, and with a quick “Ah, thank you,” took the envelope from Alex that Swan offered to him. It appeared he had already known about it. He read the letter in it, then plugged the tab that fell from it into the nearest desk. He stared at the desk console for a long time, reading carefully, using a forefinger to keep his place.
“So sorry to lose Alex,” he said to Swan finally. “Condolences from the heart. She was the hub of our little wheel, and now we spin off like broken spokes.”
Surprised at this, Swan said, “She told me in her note to me that I should come to you. The messages were left for me in her study. A kind of contingency plan, I guess. And part of it was this envelope for you.”
“Yes. She told me she might do this. And you also loaded a tab into your internal qube, Alex suggests in her note here.”
“That’s right. But my qube won’t tell me about it.”
“That was no doubt Alex’s instruction. The data are specialized. What you have is a kind of backup,” Wang explained apologetically.
Swan glared at Wang, and then Wahram, and saw that they were in cahoots, like Wahram and Genette back on Mercury. “Tell me what’s going on,” she demanded. “You two were working with Alex on something.”
The two of them hesitated, and then Wang said, “Yes. For many years. Alex was the hub, as I said. We were working with her.”
“But she didn’t like being in the cloud,” Swan said, gesturing around her at the station. “She kept things in her head, right? But you work with qubes, isn’t that right? Wang’s qube, Wang’s algorithm?”
“Yes,” Wang said.
Wahram said, “To stay off the record, Alex had to stay clear of qubes. And for that she needed a qube’s help. That’s just the way it is now, and she knew that.”
Wang nodded. “So she chose me. I can’t say why. Possibly she thought I have more contact than I really do with what she used to call the league of unaffiliated worlds. I do have a network of contacts like that, but it’s not comprehensive. No one has an accurate description of the system as it exists now.”
“Is that what Alex wanted?” Swan asked.
Wahram shook his head. “She knew the system as well as anyone could. Wang knows the unaffiliateds, but more importantly, to my mind, his qube is sequestered here. Its contact with the rest of the system is controlled by Wang. Alex liked that, because she was trying to shift all her dealings over to direct human communication.”
“But she left these messages,” Swan said. “For if she couldn’t talk. So she wanted us to talk. For you two to talk to me.”
“Evidently.”
“So tell me what you’re up to!”
The two men glanced at each other. For a long time they stared at the floor.
Then Wang looked her in the eye, which caught Swan by surprise. His gaze was intense. “No one knows exactly how to deal with this situation, because it has to do with qubes, and you have a qube embedded in you. So Alex would not tell you about this part of things, and I don’t want to either. Now that Alex’s list of contacts is safely here, we who were working with her can try to proceed with her plans.”
Swan said, “So you have information from Alex, and my qube has information from Alex, but I can’t have any information from Alex.”
Wang looked at Wahram. Wahram’s broad face looked as if pins were being stuck into him somewhere. His pop-eyed stare, Wang’s basilisk intensity: they stood there looking at her. They didn’t know what to say to her. They weren’t going to tell her anything.
With a sudden snort Swan waved them away and left the room.
T here wasn’t anywhere to go in this little station to get away, something that occurred to Swan only after she had made her exit. She badly needed to run off her anger in some hills, and here she was trapped in a qube cube, a box of rooms, only a few of which even had windows. Claustrophobia lay always just under her surface, and now, with her anger at the two men and her grief for Alex (and anger at Alex for keeping things from her just because of Pauline), the trapped feeling jumped her and she banged around cursing until she went up in the conning tower to a small room with a view window and was able to slam the door and pound her fists on a table for a while. Her rib hurt quite a bit as she did so, but that was just part of the mix now, the stab of all these other feelings combined. She hurt!
Then a movement outside caught her eye. She interrupted her fit and went to the window to look: through her tears she saw the blurry blinking image of a human figure, out on the yellow slag, walking toward the station. It moved oddly, wavering, staggering, blinking from one position to another.
“Pauline, can someone walk on the surface here? Outside the station?”
“Their suit would have to be as protective as the station is,” Pauline said. “Please-inform station security of your sighting immediately.”
“Surely they’ll have seen it?”
“That suit out there may be shielded in many ways. Your visual sighting may be the only indication they have. Please hurry. Arguing with me now is untimely.”
Swan growled and left the room. After some hurrying around, getting lost, she came to the room Wahram and she had entered first.
“There’s someone approaching your station on foot,” she said to the startled people inside. A few of them
