“Well, you tell me! Tell me how you are not that.”

“I have rubrics of evaluation I deploy to evaluate the data given to me, and hierarchies of significance.”

“All right, what else?”

“Having sifted what seems accurate from what is inaccurate, according to data so far received, I can make qualified judgments as to significance.”

Swan shook her head. “All right, go on. Keep judging!”

“I will. But now let’s return to your third assertion, which is that Inspector Genette has found compelling evidence that there are qube humanoids, and they are involved with the attack on Terminator and other attacks. That being the case, I refer back to my earlier statements. There may be qube humanoids; that seems possible, although awkward. And they may be involved with these attacks. But it is most likely that they are being programmed by humans, rather than deciding by themselves to become some kind of self-conscious actor in human history. And if you will recall the possible mistake you noted, of adding the relativistic precession of Mercury to a targeting program that already had it? That has the look of human error, I think you will agree.”

“Yes. That’s true.” Swan thought about that for a while. “All right, that’s good. That’s helpful, I think. Thank you. Now, given that explanation as a working assumption-what do you think we should do?”

Pauline let several seconds go by. Swan supposed this was the equivalent of millions or even billions of years of human thought, but it was still only a kind of fact-checking, so she was not that impressed by it. In fact she was distracted by a parched-looking tree orchid just over her head, and inspecting it, when Pauline finally said, “Let me talk to Wang’s qube in a radio exchange we will encrypt. It knows a lot, and I have some questions for it.”

“Can you safely encrypt your conversation, even from other qubes?”

“Yes.”

“All right, fine then. But you two better keep it a secret, or else this group of Alex’s will be really, really mad at me. I mean, I promised I wouldn’t tell you anything about this. The whole point of that group is to be sure qubes don’t know what it’s up to.”

“You need not worry. I will employ the strongest level of encryption I know, and Wang’s qube is good at encryption and used to confidentiality requests. Wang has programmed his qube to be an information sink-he often compares it to a black hole. And Wang refuses to know most of what his qube knows. He will never hear of this conversation.”

“Good. All right, find out what you can.”

A fter that, when Swan talked to Wahram she had to ignore her knowledge of what she had done with Pauline and pretend it had not happened. This mode of pretending to herself usually worked quite well; but as Wahram wanted to talk about the situation, often plumbing the depths of rather confusing questions, like what a new kind of qube consciousness might mean, it was a hard knowledge to dodge. And maybe she was no longer so good at pretending to herself.

To avoid these conversations she began to take him up several decks to the picture window rooms, where they could sit at cafe tables or in baths, listening to chamber music of various kinds-gamelans, gypsy orchestras, jazz trios, string quartets, wind ensembles, it didn’t really matter; they listened, and when they talked, spoke usually about the songs and the players. They never referred to the concert of transcriptions in Beethoven Crater.

They had spent quite a bit of time together at this point; made music together; were sleeping together. Swan felt herself liking him, and felt in her the desire to like him, and the pleasure she took in that feeling coming to her. This was a feedback loop. In the hall of mirrors that was her mind, his froggy face was often in the glass set off to the side, watching what she did with a gaze she could feel.

Sometimes they spoke of incidents in their shared past or discussed the ongoing drama of Earth’s reanimation. Sometimes they held hands. All this meant something, but Swan didn’t know what it was. The hall of mirrors was bouncy; sometimes she wondered if she had any more high-order faculties than Pauline, or the marmosets in the park. You could know a lot and still not be able to draw conclusions. Pauline had a decision rubric written into her to force her to collapse the wave of potentialities and say just one thing, thus emerging into the present. Swan wasn’t sure she herself had that rubric.

Once she said, “I wish Terminator weren’t so vulnerable, because of the tracks. I wish Mercury could be terraformed, like Titan.”

Wahram tried to reassure her. “Maybe your destiny is to stay a planet of sun worshippers and art institutes. Terminator will keep rolling, and maybe there will be other rolling cities-aren’t they starting a Phosphor in the north?”

Swan shrugged. “We’ll still depend on the tracks.”

He shrugged. “You know, this notion of a criticality… you can only avoid those to a certain extent. Even on Earth they have them. Anywhere. We’re stuffed with them.” He gestured at the room, regarded it with his pop eyes. “The whole thing is a giant bundle of criticalities.”

“I know. But there’s a difference between you and your world. Your body can break-it will break. But your home, your world-those should be stronger. You should be able to count on them lasting. Someone shouldn’t be able to pop all that, like popping a soap bubble with a pin. One prick kill everyone you know. Do you see the distinction I’m making?”

“Yes.”

Wahram settled back in his chair. Having granted her point, there was nothing more to say. The solemn set of his big face said it: life was a thing kept alive in little bottles. What could one do? His face said this, his little shrug; she could read him as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. She sat there watching him, thinking about what that meant. She knew him. Now he was going to try to find a way forward. It would be a creeping, gradualist way, a sloth moving under its branch, hanging there, trying to minimize effort. Although he had been the one who had suggested it was time for the reanimation. That she could not have predicted. Maybe he had surprised even himself. Now he was going to say something ameliorative and gradualist.

“All we can do is try our best,” he said. “That has to count for something.”

“Yes of course.” She was only just not laughing. She could feel the smile stretching her cheeks; it was going to make her cry. How wrecked in the head was she, if she was always feeling everything, if grief suffused every joy? Was any emotion always all emotion? “All right,” she said, “we try our best. But if crazy people can destroy Terminator, or anywhere else, then our best had better be good enough to change that.”

Wahram considered this for so long it seemed he had gone to sleep.

She whacked him on the shoulder, and he glanced at her. “What?”

“What!” she cried.

He only shrugged. “So we try to stop them. We have a situation, we try to deal with it.”

“Deal with it,” she said, scowling. “Suck up and deal!”

He nodded, regarding her with a fond look. She felt ready to hit him again; but then she recalled that she had just been laughing at him; and also had broken her promise to him by talking to Pauline. That rash act, much as he might have disliked it, was perhaps in fact her own attempt to suck up and deal. Maybe she could use that as an excuse if he caught her. In any case it was a little bit too complicated just to hit him.

T hey had flipped the ETH Mobile to deceleration, and it would be only a few more days and they would pass Earth’s orbit and close on Venus. This ship’s life, with its park and its music and its French cuisine, would come to an end. No one ever does something consciously for the last time without feeling a little sad, Dr. Johnson had once remarked to Boswell, and it was certainly true for Swan. She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent. Here they were, eating dinner on the upper balcony of a restaurant that looked down onto the top of a forest, and she was feeling sad because later she would not be here. This world lost, a world that would be unremembered. And here she was with Wahram, they were a couple; but what about when they got off this spaceship and moved on through space and time? What about a year from now, what about through the many decades possibly left to come?

A few days later they were closing on Venus when Pauline spoke in her ear. “Swan, I’ve been in communication with Wang’s qube, and also this ship’s AI, and I need to tell you about something. You may want to be alone when you hear it.”

This was unusual enough for Swan to excuse herself and walk quickly to a bathroom down a floor. “What is it?”

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