2312

ETH Mobile was outfitted with characteristic Swiss elegance, undemonstrative and superb, evoking the ocean liners of the classic era but entering whole new realms of human comfort, the floors warm, the air tangy, the food and drink a string of masterpieces. There were floor-to-ceiling window walls on many of the public decks, affording spectacular views of the stars and any local object they passed. About ten thousand people could be accommodated, all in luxury. Design in the hotel section combined great slabs of metal with vegetable prints and a William Morris wall vine. The park that filled one tall floor of the ship was an arboretum occupied by a semitropical canopy forest, featuring parts of several South American biomes, including animals from these zones that could handle a few moments of weightlessness without too much risk of injury. What the animals thought of these turnaround moments of zero g was a matter much studied but little understood. It did not appear to make the animals different in subsequent behavior. Sloths did not even seem to notice. Monkeys and jaguars and tapirs floated up chattering and moaning, coyotes howling with their usual genius; then after a suspended moment they would all together float sweetly back to the ground. In this same time the sloths hung from their branches-down, sideways, down again, sometimes spinning all the way round-never once waking up. Not unlike certain people in that regard.

SWAN AND PAULINE AND WAHRAM AND GENETTE

Swan spent her mornings in the ETH Mobile ’s little cloud forest. Wahram and the inspector were on the ship with her, and they were making their way as quickly as possible to Venus, where Genette wanted to look into what he called a pastward convergence of strange qube activity. Swan and Wahram had rooms next to each other, and Swan slipped into his room every night. But she was uneasy.

On mornings when Wahram joined her in the park, he sloped around looking at birds and flowers. Once she saw him spend half an hour inspecting a single red rose. He was one of the most placid animals she had ever seen; even the sloths above them were scarcely a match for his imperturbability. It was peaceful to be around, but disturbing too. Was it a moral quality, was it lethargy? She could not stand lethargy, and sloth was one of the seven deadly sins.

He was often listening to his music. He would nod to her and turn it off if she approached him, and so sometimes she did, and they would take a turn together, pausing when something of interest appeared in the branches and leaves above them, or in the ferns and moss underfoot. The park was a little Ascension as it turned out, and Australian tree ferns gave the ground a look more Jurassic than Amazonian-which was fine-it was a good look, and this was a kind of hotel atrium, really, an arboretum for sure, so its status as an Ascension should not be an issue with her. Swan tried not to be annoyed by it, or by Wahram’s indolence. But it was hard, because something else was bothering her too.

Finally one morning she figured it out and went for a walk by herself, up to a level of the ship where big picture windows gave her a broad view of the stars. She had turned Pauline back on soon after the meeting on Titan, and gone on from that moment as if nothing had happened. She had not tried to explain the shutdown to Pauline, and Pauline had not asked about it. Now she said, “Pauline, were you truly turned off during that meeting on Titan?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have some kind of recorder going anyway, even with you turned off?”

“No.”

“Why not? Why don’t you do that?”

“I’m not equipped with any supplementary recorders, as far as I’m aware.”

Swan sighed. “I probably should have done that. Well, listen. I want to tell you what happened.”

“Should you?”

“What do you mean, should? I’m going to tell you, so shut up and listen to me. The people in that meeting were the core of a group that Alex formed. They’ve been trying to do interplanetary diplomacy without any qubes knowing the content of their discussions, because they are worried that some qubes have self-programmed themselves in ways no one understands. Also, these new qubes are now manufacturing qube-minded humanoids that can’t easily be distinguished from people. I’m sure X-rays and the like could do it, but people can’t do it by eye or in conversation. They pass a brief Turing test. Like those silly girls we met, if they really were artificial-which amazes me, I must say-or that lawn bowler too, I think. And then, what’s more, it seems these qubes have been involved with the attacks made using pebble mobs. For sure the attack on Terminator, because Inspector Genette’s team has traced the launch mechanism, and qubes had it built, and it had to have a qube doing its targeting and trajectories. Evidence is good also for that cracked terrarium that killed so many people.”

After a silence from Pauline, Swan said, “So, Pauline, what do you think of that?”