CAPACITY

see.

The Black Velvet Band shone oddly in the light. Rays of red and blue and green light seemed to emerge from it at odd angles; they moved in all directions as Schummel shifted uncomfortably. The band seemed perfectly flat, its edge lost under the white flesh that bulged around it. Little white plastic stays had been inserted behind it to brace it in place.

“Can I touch it?” Judy asked.

“Yes,” he said, and Judy leaned forward and ran her finger across it.

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” she said.

“You learn to feel it,” Schummel said, “and then you learn to ignore it.”

Gazing at the alien artifact, Judy felt a chill. How far from its home had it traveled? Schummel had said three million light years, but what did that really mean? It was just a number.

“Why is it still there?” Frances asked. “Why didn’t Social Care cut you in two so they could remove it?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “My guess is that they wanted to see how it reacted to humans. Would it do anything else? I doubt it. You get a feel for something after you live with it for twenty years. This thing isn’t alive.”

Judy looked out of the window of Schummel’s lounge. Black space and white stars. Up above, the regular sections of the Shawl could be seen, a chequerboard pattern of black shapes running to infinity. Her attention was wandering. She brought herself back to the task at hand.

“Okay, David, let’s finish this off. I was told that the Watcher murdered Justinian. Is that true?”

He looked at her. The whites of his eyes were yellowing, she noticed. His hands trembled.

“The Watcher is murdering all of us,” he said bitterly. “It has been trying to get me for eighty-two years. Think about it. The Watcher can build a ship from material that is not of this universe. Why can’t it save the health of an eighty-two-year-old man?”

“In order to save our humanity…” Judy began, but the words sounded unconvincing even to her. David didn’t even bother to laugh at her reply.

“I know; I’ve heard it all before. Trust me, dear. You’ll see it differently when you get to my age.”

Frances interrupted. “I think we’re wandering off the point. We weren’t talking about abstruse philosophical points. David, can you answer Judy-did the Watcher kill Justinian?”

Judy held her breath. She worked for Social Care. Her life revolved around the belief that Social Care did what was best for humankind. Her thirteen lives. And what was the guiding force behind Social Care? The Watcher. Could it be true? Could the Watcher be responsible for murdering someone?

David Schummel looked her straight in the eyes. “Yes,” he said. “The Watcher may not have pulled the trigger, but nonetheless it knowingly sent Justinian Sibelius to his death. It’s the right thing to say. The Watcher murdered Justinian Sibelius.”

Judy felt something die inside her. This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be right. She stared up at the blank face of Frances, at her two cartoon eyes.

“It’s right,” Frances said softly.

“Okay,” Judy took a deep breath. “How?”

“Everyone on the hypership knew what had happened to the AIs on Gateway,” David said. “Can you imagine the tension? We had been told that the AIs committed suicide, but they assured us that we would be safe, just like those humans already down there.” He laughed. “Yeah, like poor James Gabriel, stuck in the Bottle with Pod Sixteen. You couldn’t stop thinking about that. What could drive a perfectly healthy mind to suicide? Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, Judy? You must deal with that regularly as a part of your job. Don’t you?”

Judy said nothing. He didn’t appear to notice.

“All the time we were down there, every emotion, every apparent difference you detected in your own attitudes, you examined with a fine-tooth comb. Like the time Mareka and I fell out about the way she was bringing up Emily. We were both thinking, is this argument really about Emily, or is it the edge of something else? Is this the beginning of the decline into madness? Of course, we were all of us looking in the wrong direction. Not that anyone knew it at the time.

“Me, I just kept flying that shuttle up to the hypership and back. All the time we were hearing rumors about Justinian and the baby. How they were flying around the planet and coming up with blanks. Two weeks, three weeks of nothing. And then the rumor flashed across the communication net. Something at last. Something. But not what we were expecting. Not about the AIs, but about Justinian. They had asked for him. The AIs on the planet that had committed suicide, they had asked for Justinian to be sent to Gateway. Out of all the humans in the galaxy, they asked for Justinian. But why him?”

David Schummel looked at the floor. “That’s when I had my most shameful moment. He wanted to leave the planet. He flew to the shuttle port and demanded to leave, but I persuaded him to stay. Okay, there was no way the Watcher would have let him go anyway-it controlled the hypership-but I still helped. I persuaded him to continue with his mission. And he did.

“When I think back to that period, it seems like things started to go wrong immediately after I persuaded Justinian to stay down there. But the human mind is a dramatist: it prefers to retell stories rather than recount facts. Maybe there were more Schrödinger boxes around after that, maybe the BVBs did settle more often, but I doubt it. How can we really tell? Here, in our world, we would ask an AI to mine the archives, but there were no AIs on Gateway.

“My memory tells me that I began to suspect the truth then.

“All that time I traveled up to the hypership and back again, I took the occasional sortie in a flier. I listened in to Justinian’s progress-we all did. I don’t think he realized that robot was transmitting everything that occurred on his flier to the rest of Gateway. Insurance, I suppose. If anything went wrong, we’d all know about it, and maybe we could avoid making the same mistakes.

“And then we heard it: the final link in the chain. One of the half-dead AIs gave Justinian the location of something-a secondary infection. Somewhere on the planet there was an effect just like the one that got sealed off in the Bottle, but this time it had been left out in the open.

“Justinian was told not to get too close to it, but he wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear anything by that point. He was so confused by Leslie’s manipulations, he didn’t really know what he was thinking. And I don’t think Leslie was exactly sane at that point, either. He was shutting himself down bit by bit, trying to save his mind, trying to avoid seeing what it was that the other AIs had seen.

“So Justinian began flying towards the source of the trouble. He was going to land there in a flier that was carrying the most powerful AI remaining on the planet-Leslie. We had to stop him. We held an emergency conference on what to do. It turned out there was no choice: I was the only one that could reach him in time. As it was, I had to take the shuttle practically up into orbit so as to intercept him. I burned a path down through the atmosphere, just in time to make it onto his flier.

“I know what I said earlier, about the mind dramatizing events, but I know what I saw on that ship, and I’m certain of this. There were definitely more Schrödinger boxes than ever before. They were sleeting through that ship. Leslie was looking at me all the time I was speaking to Justinian. That robot was trying to tell me something; it was putting ideas in my head. Don’t ask me how. Body language, telepathy? Oh, you’re a member of Social Care; you know how it’s done. But I was speaking to Justinian and the robot was looking straight at me and I looked at the cubes, and that’s when I started to think about their shape, because of course they weren’t cubes. They were trapezoidal. They looked like sweet corn. Leslie was staring at the cubes, looking at the sweet corn that the baby was having for dinner. You know, I swear that robot served up sweet corn deliberately, just to lead me to the conclusion it wanted me to reach. I knew what those cubes were.”

“What?” Judy asked. “What?”

David licked his lips. “I need to explain. Look, you know how plants have evolved to use their environment in order to propagate? Sycamores use the wind to spread their seeds. Flowers attract insects to spread their pollen. Apple trees grow fruit that is intended to be eaten by animals, then they use the animal’s digestive system to spread their seeds. Even venumbs have adapted. Look at the spider bush.

“Well, what if there was a plant which found its niche at the very basic level? Say it found a way to tap into