2312

During the flight to Pluto and Charon, Wang’s qube was able to ferret out quite a bit more about the lawn bowler’s brief life. It was a sad tale, though not uncommon: small terrarium run by a cult, in this case Ahura Mazda worshippers; strict gender division; patriarchal, polygamous; obsessed with physical punishments for demonic transgressions. Into that little world, an unstable child. Reports of aggression without remorse. Stuck there from the age of four until departure by defection at age twenty-four. Learned programming on Vesta, known by no one; absorbed for a time in qube design at the Ceres Academy, but then left school; detached from the school culture. Eventually kicked off Ceres for transgressing its security codes one too many times; then a return to his home rock, where, as far as anyone knew, he had remained. But in fact no one had been watching. How he had come to the work on Venus was unclear, that sequence hidden in the fog that surrounded the Venus Working Group-in this case Lakshmi and her anti-sunshield effort, a unit that had hidden all its actions very effectively. Thus Vinmara and the lab that made humanoids, including the ones that had gone to Mars and infiltrated the government. And the ones that had moved to Earth and then the asteroid belt, and built and operated the pebble launcher. So this young man had either invented the pebble mobs, or designed qubes that had invented them; and he or his creations had executed the attacks.

“ Yggdrasil?” Genette said to the bowler at one point.

The diagnostic monitors attached to the youth’s body and brain showed a solid jump.

Genette nodded. “Just a test, eh? Proof of concept?”

Again the monitors showed the jump in the metabolism. The idea that these jumps constituted a reliable lie detector had long since been abandoned, but the physiological leaps were still very suggestive.

Wordless as the youth remained, there was no way to be sure why any of these things had happened. But an association with Yggdrasil seemed clear.

To Genette, this was what mattered. “I think the attacks on Terminator and Venus were political,” he said to Wahram, with the youth right in the room with them, staring mutely at the wall, the monitor’s jumpy lines speaking for him in a sort of mute shouting. “I suspect they were approved by Lakshmi. But breaking open the Yggdrasil came first, and probably was this person’s idea. A demonstration for Lakshmi, perhaps. Proof of concept. And so three thousand people died.”

Genette stared up at the youth’s tight face, then said finally to Wahram, “Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s nothing more to do here.”

I n the three weeks it took to reach Pluto and Charon, Wahram’s injured leg took a turn for the worse, and after a consulation among themselves, the ship’s medical team decided to amputate it just below the knee and begin the pluripotent stem cell work that would start the growth of a new left leg. Wahram endured this with as little attention as possible, quelling the dread in him and reminding himself that at 113 his whole body was a medical artifact, and that regrowing lost limbs was one of the simplest and oldest of body interventions. Nevertheless it was creepy to look at, and phantom itchy to feel, and he kept himself distracted by grilling Genette repeatedly about the plan the inspector’s team was now executing. But no matter how much he distracted himself, he never got used to the sensation of the new leg growing down from his knee.

Spacecraft from all over the solar system were converging to join them on Charon, because this was where the Alexandrine group and the Interplan agents working with them were gathering all the qube humanoids that had been apprehended, which, as far as they knew, were all that had been manufactured. All had been captured on the same day they had closed the facility in Vinmara, most of them in the same hour. Almost half of them had been on Mars. The entire operation had been planned and coordinated by word of mouth, and the precise moment for the execution of the plan communicated the day before, when Genette sent a single radio message, a performance of the old jazz standard “Now’s the Time.” In every particular the plan had come off without a significant hitch, even though more than two thousand agents had taken part in the operation, and four hundred and ten humanoids captured. Not one of them had exhibited any sense that they might be in danger of arrest.