2312

O ut getting banged on by the wind obviously pleased Swan. She looked around at things more than when Genette had last traveled with her. She looked slightly electrocuted, one might say. She had been on Earth for the reanimation, so no doubt that had made her happy. But there was also a new set to her mouth, a little chisel mark between her eyebrows.

“Wahram sent me to say you need to get out to a meeting on Titan,” she said. “It’s Alex’s group, and they’re meeting off the grid to discuss something important. Something about qubes. I’m going to go too. So can you tell me what this is all about?”

Buying a little time to think it over, Genette brought the boat about and had Swan change pontoons. Once set on the new course, a tug on the mainsheet tilted her upright. She grinned a little fiercely at this sailor’s evasion, shook her head; she would not be distracted.

Although in fact this shift had brought them on course to catch one of the waves breaking on the reef. Genette pointed this out, and together they watched the swells as Genette trimmed the sails for more speed. They skidded over the water in a broad turn that met the wave as it was rising on the reef; the trimaran was lifted and then caught by the wave, surfing across its face, falling more than sailing, and yet the wind on the top half of the sail served to keep them ahead of the break, if Genette could capture it right. Swan proved expert at providing a counterweight, leaning and shifting in response to the fluctuations of the ride.

Where the reef petered out, the wave lost its white teeth and laid back into a mere swell. After one last bump over the backwash of a crossing wave, they were only sailing again.

“Well done,” Swan said. “You must sail a lot.”

“Yes, I travel in aquaria when I can. So by now I’ve sailed most of them. Or iceboated them. When they’re frozen inside, you can get going like in a centrifuge.”

“I was just up in Inuit country myself, but it was summer and all the ice was gone. Except for the damn pingos.”

They sailed on for a while. Overhead their water-silvered sky bent through a smooth curve of blues from turquoise to indigo.

Swan said, “But back to this meeting. Wahram said it had something to do with some new qubes. So… do you remember that time we were in the Inner Mongolia and I met those silly girls, and I thought they were people? And you thought they might be some strange qube people?”

“Yes, of course,” the inspector said. “They were.”

“Well, a strange thing happened to me on the way out here. I was lawn bowling with a young person in the Chateau Garden, and this kid was… trying to impinge on my attention, I guess I would call it, without actually saying very much. It was mostly in the play of the game, but also… it was like the long stare you sometimes get from wolves. There’s a thing wolves do when they’re on the hunt called the long stare. It’s unnerving to prey animals, to the point where some quit trying as hard to get away.”

Genette, familiar with the look and the technique, nodded. “And this person had a long stare.”

“So it seemed, yes. Maybe that was part of what gave me the creeps. I’ve had wolves look at me that way. I could see in my peripheral vision how different it was from an ordinary look. Maybe that was how a sociopath looks at people.”

“A wolf person.”

“Well, but I like wolves.”

“Perhaps like a qube,” Genette suggested. “Not like the ones on the Inner Mongolia, but not quite human either.”

“Maybe. When I talk about the long stare, I’m just trying to figure it out. Because it was unnerving. And then the way this kid was lawn bowling-as if it meant something.”

Genette regarded her, interested by this. “As if lawn bowling might be the tossing of balls at a target?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s what it is, yes?”

She shook her head, frowning at this.

Genette sighed. “Anyway, it should be perfectly easy to ask the Chateau Garden for a manifest.”

“I did that, and looked at all the photos. This lawn bowler wasn’t there.”

“Hmm.” Genette thought about it. “Can you share your qube’s records with me?”

“Yes, of course.”

She shifted from the pontoon to the cockpit, and Genette came up into the wind a bit. She leaned over and asked Pauline to transfer the photos she had already pulled. Genette inspected Passepartout’s little wristpad display.

“There,” Swan said, pointing to one photo. “That’s the one. And that’s the look I mean.”

The inspector studied the image: an androgynous face, an intent look. “It doesn’t really come through in a photo.”

“What do you mean? Look at that!”

“I am, but this person could be thinking of a calculus problem, or suffering a moment of indigestion.”

“No! It wasn’t like that in person. I think you should see if you can find this kid. If you can, you’ll see for yourself. And if you can’t, it gets kind of mysterious, doesn’t it? This person wasn’t on the manifest. So if you can’t find them, maybe the look will begin to mean more to you.”