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Once irritated by a problem, Jean Genette never really gave up on it. Even problems officially solved sometimes still had a haunting quality, because of things that didn’t quite fit, didn’t seem right-and if a solution never was found, the problem became part of the insomniac rosary, one bead in a Moebius bracelet of beads wearily fingered in the brain’s sleepless hours. Genette was still working on the problem of Ernesta Travers, for instance, which thirty years before had troubled them all with the fundamental question of why their friend Ernesta had engineered a disappearance from Mars, as well as how; it was a case Jean could pursue in exile, and from time to time did, but Travers was still as absent as if she had never existed. Same with the puzzle of the prison terrarium Nelson Mandela, a locked-room mystery if ever there was one, as the asteroid seemed to have afforded no ingress or egress for whoever had brought in the fatal gun. Mysteries like that abounded in the system; it was part of the affect realm of the balkanization, many felt, but balkanization per se was not enough to explain some of these mysteries, and the inspector remained puzzled and more-transfixed, existentially confused, frustrated- by their aura of impossibility. Sometimes the inspector would walk for hour after hour, trying to make the explanation appear.

The problem of the pebble attack was not like that. It was still a new case by Genette’s standard, and it had no aura of impossibility. Almost anyone in space could have done it, and many down under atmospheres could have paid for it, or gone into space and done it, then dropped back into their atmospheres. It was a needle-in-haystack problem, and balkanization made that problem worse by multiplying the haystacks. But this was Interplan’s territory, in the end, and so on sifting the haystacks they went, eliminating what they could and moving on. It seemed pretty clear to Genette that on this one they would be looking in the unaffiliateds eventually, prying open closed worlds and poking around for the maker of the launch mechanism and the operators of the spaceship now crushed deep within Saturn. By no means were all their avenues of inquiry exhausted; there were at least two hundred unaffiliateds with robust industrial capacities; so it was more like they had barely begun.

S wan Er Hong rejoined Genette inside the aquarium South Pacific 101, a water world that filled its interior cylinder with water to a depth of ten meters, spinning against the interior of a big chunk of ice that had been melted and refrozen in such a way as to leave it transparent, so that from space the whole thing looked like a clear chunk of hail. Genette had sailed the Hellas Sea as a child, and learned to love the wild slop of a windy day in Martian g, and even all these years later had not lost the little thrill that came with feeling the fluctuating wind in one’s fingertips on tiller and line-the feeling of being picked up and thrown over the water in plunge after plunge.

The little sea in this aquarium was not as grand as Hellas, of course, but sailing remained sailing. And from inside an aquarium with walls this clear, the view inside a cylinder was as if looking at and through a curved silvery mirror, everywhere broken up by the crisscrossing waves formed by the Coriolis current and the chiral wind, creating between them very complex patterns. It was as if the classic patterns of a physics class wave tank were here topologically warped onto the inside of a cylinder. Intersecting waves on this surface curved in non-Euclidean ways, a strange and lovely thing to see in all the mirrored silvers. And behind all the silvers lay blues. Inside the transparent shell of the aquarium, with the ocean also the sky, every silvery surface on the sunward side of the cylinder was backed or filled by a deep eggshell blue, while if one was looking away from the sun, the backing blue was an equally rich but much darker shade, almost indigo, and flecked here and there by the white pricks of the brightest stars. A floating town disrupted this cylindrical sea, but Genette spent most of the time on the water, sailing a trimaran at the fastest angles the winds offered.

On hearing Swan was there, Genette sailed into Pitcairn and picked her up. There she stood on the end of the dock, fizzing in her usual way-tall, arms crossed, hungry look in her eye. She glared down at the inspector’s sailboat suspiciously; it was sized for smalls, and Swan was just barely going to fit. Genette dismissed her suggestion to take out a larger boat, and placed her on the windward pontoon with her feet on the main hull, while he sat in the cockpit, holding a wheel that seemed to come from a much larger vessel. And there they were, talking as they skidded over the waves like a shearwater. With such a big weight to windward, Genette could really catch a lot of wind on the mainsail, and the bow of Swan’s pontoon knocked a lot of spray up into the blues.