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“This is what we were taught when we were young,” Genette said. “And more importantly, when the qubes were young.”

“But also it’s what we have studied all our lives, and seen with our own two eyes,” the small woman replied somewhat sharply. “And programmed.”

Despite these truths, no one there looked particularly comforted.

“What about the facility where these humanoids are made, or decanted or whatnot?” Wahram asked Genette. “Can we shut it down?”

“When we find it,” the inspector said grumpily.

“Could we round up all the humanoids you’ve identified?”

“I think so,” Genette said. “We’ve had to do some scrambling there, because Alex was central to this effort, and we’ve had to reestablish our team by shaking the network pretty hard. So we managed that, and the team has relinked around her absence. They have identified and are following about four hundred of these things, as I said. Our scan of the system has been fine enough that we don’t think there are any more hiding in any settlement we have access to. I can’t be positive about the unaffiliateds, but we’re looking in all of them. While we do that, we’re keeping our distance from the humanoids we have under surveillance, and they don’t seem to know they’re tagged. Very few of them act as strange as those three in the Inner Mongolia, or the one that burned up on Io. They tend to try to blend in. I don’t know how to interpret that. It’s as if they’re waiting for something. It makes me feel like we’re not seeing the whole picture, and so I don’t want to wait much longer before we act. But it would be nice to think we understood the total situation before doing so.”

Genette had been walking around on the table while speaking, and now stopped before Swan, as if making a case specifically to her: “These organisms, these qubical humanoids, exist. And in some respects their pattern of behavior so far hasn’t been what I would call sane. Some have attacked us, and we don’t know why.”

After a silence Wahram added, “So we have to act.”

Lists (15)

health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are that’s all you need

Kim Stanley Robinson

EIDGENOSSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE MOBILE

The spaceliner ETH Mobile was not a hollowed asteroid but rather one of the very large manufactured ships built in lunar orbit in the previous century. Made by Swiss universities and engineering firms that continued to operate them, they were combinations of glassy metals, bioceramics, aerogels, and water both frozen and liquid. They were extremely fast; frequent small fission explosions firing behind a pusher plate at the rear of the ship accelerated it at a one-g equivalent for those inside, and this very rapid rate of acceleration was typically maintained to the midpoint of a trip, at which point the ship was going so fast that it was necessary for it to turn and decelerate at the same rate. But even decelerating for half of each trip, the average speeds were so high that relatively short transit times were possible all over the solar system, and the longer the trip, the faster the top speeds became, so it was not a linear thing: Earth to Mercury took three and a half days; Saturn to Mercury, eleven days; across the Neptune orbit (“width of solar system”), sixteen days.