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 creche 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
W ahram 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 this 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.”
T hey 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
