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.
I n 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 Mazda 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.”
I n the three weeks it took to reach Pluto and Charon, Wahram’s injured leg took a turn for the worse, and after a consulation among themselves, the ship’s medical team decided to amputate it just below the knee and begin the pluripotent stem cell work that would start the growth of a new left leg. Wahram endured this with as little attention as possible, quelling the dread in him and reminding himself that at 113 his whole body was a medical artifact, and that regrowing lost limbs was one of the simplest and oldest of body interventions. Nevertheless it was creepy to look at, and phantom itchy to feel, and he kept himself distracted by grilling Genette repeatedly about the plan the inspector’s team was now executing. But no matter how much he distracted himself, he never got used to the sensation of the new leg growing down from his knee.
Spacecraft from all over the solar system were converging to join them on Charon, because this was where the Alexandrine group and the Interplan agents working with them were gathering all the qube humanoids that had been apprehended, which, as far as they knew, were all that had been manufactured. All had been captured on the same day they had closed the facility in Vinmara, most of them in the same hour. Almost half of them had been on Mars. The entire operation had been planned and coordinated by word of mouth, and the precise moment for the execution of the plan communicated the day before, when Genette sent a single radio message, a performance of the old jazz standard “Now’s the Time.” In every particular the plan had come off without a significant hitch, even though more than two thousand agents had taken part in the operation, and four hundred and ten humanoids captured. Not one of them had exhibited any sense that they might be in danger of arrest.
Genette’s plan now was to exile all these humanoids, along with the lawn bowler and about thirty other people involved with the qube attacks. An agreement had been made to use one of the starships being built out of Pluto’s moon Nix. This starship was in fact just a specialized terrarium-an almost completely closed biological life- support system, exceptionally well supplied, and with extremely powerful engines. It would now serve as a kind of prison ship, similar to the ones orbiting in the asteroid belt, but ejected from the solar system. The starship terrarium’s inside would be sealed, its navigating AI placed outside the sealed cylinder. And off it would go: four
