hundred qube humanoids, the lawn bowler, and the group of people who had been judged guilty of complicity in any of the attacks. It was not a big group, because the lawn bowler appeared to have conceived and designed the attacks in a way that did not need many human confederates to make it work. So: exile, from the solar system and from the rest of humanity.
“Surely Lakshmi should be in there too!” Wahram objected to Genette.
“I agree, but we couldn’t manage to grab her. The Venusians will have to deal with her, or maybe we can prosecute her on Ceres and see where it gets us.”
“But this exile ship,” Wahram said. “What if the qubes break through to the controls? Reverse their voyage and come back, hungry for revenge and smarter than ever?”
“The speeds are too great,” Genette said easily. “The fuel aboard will be quickly burned getting them to tremendous speed. By the time they dealt with the problem of refueling, it would take centuries to get back. By that time civilization will have worked out some way to deal with them.”
“What do you imagine that will be?”
“I have no idea. We’re going to have to deal with qubes, there’s no getting around that. We have the wolf by the ears. My sense is that if qubes are kept out of humanoid bodies, and out of the hands of angry programmers, they’ll just be part of the scene, like Passepartout is now.”
“Or Swan’s Pauline?”
“Maybe keeping a qube in your head isn’t a good idea,” Genette admitted. “I wonder if Swan would agree to move it into a wristqube like mine.”
Wahram doubted this, though he wasn’t sure why. He was less and less sure of Swan, no matter what the issue in question happened to be.
He went on to another uneasiness. “Isn’t this a clear case of cruel and unusual punishment?”
“It’s unusual,” Genette allowed cheerfully. “Even unique. But its cruelty is relative.”
“Sent off with qubes? Isn’t it a weird kind of solitary confinement, something out of a nightmare?”
“Exile is not cruel. Believe me, because I know. The mind is its own place. They could in theory make quite a fine terrarium in there, and then settle an empty Earth somewhere off in the distance, and start a whole new wing of humanity. There’s nothing stopping them from that. So it’s just exile. I am an exile myself, and it is a recognized form of severe but nonlethal punishment. And this person killed three thousand people, just to test out a weapon. And also programmed quantum computers that now can’t tell whether what they’re doing is good or bad. They’ve been given intentionality without adequate limits, and are an obvious danger, and we don’t have a good defense against them right now. So I think sending them away is making a statement about how we treat qubes. We don’t just turn them off and break them up, as some are calling for, but send dangerous ones off in exile, just like we send off humans. That’s got to be a good message to the qubes left behind. We’ll then keep them in boxes so we can keep them in our control-at least I hope we will. That may or may not work. But what I’m hoping is that we can stop any more qubes of any kind being made, at least for a while, and take some time to look more closely into what smarter qubes or intentional qubes or qubes in bodies might mean. So to my mind, we’ll have administered justice, and bought ourselves some time. So I’m glad there’s been agreement from the Plutonians and the Mondragon and all the other relevant parties, including Shukra. And hopefully Swan, when she hears about it, and everyone else.”
“Maybe,” Wahram said.
He was still not comfortable with Genette’s solution. But every alternative he came up with was either too harsh (death for all of them) or too lenient (reintegration into society). Exile-the first starship a prison-well, there were prison terraria in the asteroid belt, locked from the outside and with conditions inside ranging from utopia to hell. So the lawn bowler’s group and its creations could make what they wanted. Supposedly. It still struck him as a version of hell. When all was said and done, little Inspector Jean Genette could be quite as inhuman as the lawn bowler; sanguine, blithe, impenetrable; regarding Wahram now with a look that was the same for all-saint, criminal, stranger, brother-all of them regarded with the same birdlike gaze, frankly evaluative, interested, willing to be convinced.
S till Wahram was uneasy, and he read the files on all the humans and humanoids they held captive, which at this point came to a few thousand pages. When he was done, he came back to Genette more upset than ever.
“You’ve missed something here,” he said sharply. “Read the interviews and you’ll see that there was someone in that lab in Vinmara who was letting some of these qubanoids loose and sending them off to people elsewhere in the system who helped to hide them. The ones that Swan ran into in the Inner Mongolia, and at least four more-they all tell similar stories. Whoever was doing this told them they were defective, and that they needed to go on the lam if they wanted to keep from being demolished. The qubes didn’t know what to make of that, and some of them acted strangely after they got loose. Maybe they were defective, I have no reason to disbelieve it. Anyway, this person in the lab was getting them away from Lakshmi! So does that person deserve exile also? And do the defective qubanoids that got away deserve exile?”
Genette frowned at this and promised it would get looked into.
This was not satisfactory to Wahram. He had been involved with Genette and Alex in the problem of the strange qubes from the beginning, and now felt he was being somewhat shunted to the side. He rolled his wheelchair into a meeting of the Interplan investigators and other members of the group as they discussed the situation, and again made the case for these innocents caught up with the rest of their captives. In the end it was not unanimous, but a strong majority agreed: all the qubanoids were to go into exile; the lab assistant who had been setting the defectives loose would not. It turned out that this lab assistant had not only let them go, but also erased them from the lab’s records, in quite a clever bit of work, Genette informed Wahram-as if it were the cleverness that justified the pardon. Wahram, still deeply unsatisfied, let the matter drop. The Venusian lab assistant, a young person scarcely older than the lawn bowler, would be free to go. And the poor defective qubes might be better off among their own kind.
So when the time came, Wahram sat in the viewing chamber of the Interplan cruiser and watched with the rest of the people there as the matter-antimatter engine fired up, and the First Quarter of Nix began its trip to the stars. It looked like any other terrarium on the move, maybe a little bit bigger. Ice formed a fair percentage of its mass, and the exterior looked like an ice statue of something like a great white dolphin, flying on a tail of lightning.
“What about the people who built it?” Wahram asked. “Wasn’t that their starship?”
“We have to replace it. They intend to send four in a kind of fleet, so we will make another one for them out of Hydra. We can take some of Charon too if we need it. So they will still have their four ships.”
Wahram remained troubled. “I still don’t know what I think of this.”
Genette did not seem concerned at that. “Best we could do, I’m afraid! It was a hard thing to manage offline and in utter secrecy. Quite a nifty little operation, if you ask me. Amazing what you can do with paper and synchronized watches. Every person involved had to behave with the utmost secrecy and completely trust the people they knew in the network, and they all had to be right about that for it to work. It’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it.”
“Agreed,” Wahram said, “but will it be enough?”
“No. The problem remains. This just gives us a little breathing room.”
“And… you are confident you got all of them?”
“Not at all. But it looks like the facility on Venus was the only one making them, or so Wang’s qube believes. And we’ve got enough records from their energy use and input of materials to get a maximum count of how many could be made, and we got almost exactly that many. Possibly there are one or two still out there, but we’re thinking they will be too few to do any harm. They may be more of the defectives let free by that young lab assistant. Anyway, we will try to catch them if they are out there.”
Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other surveillance device would reveal what they were-out there hiding, trying to accomplish the goals they had been given, perhaps, or new ones they might choose for themselves, according to some self-invented algorithm of survival. Damaged, dangerous, detached from any other consciousness, solitary and afraid-in other words, just like everyone else.
Quantum Walk (3)
on the edge of the marsh the frogs croak the fecundity schedule concerns how often and when during life one
