2312

“Yes. She told me she might do this. And you also loaded a tab into your internal qube, Alex suggests in her note here.”

“That’s right. But my qube won’t tell me about it.”

“That was no doubt Alex’s instruction. The data are specialized. What you have is a kind of backup,” Wang explained apologetically.

Swan glared at Wang, and then Wahram, and saw that they were in cahoots, like Wahram and Genette back on Mercury. “Tell me what’s going on,” she demanded. “You two were working with Alex on something.”

The two of them hesitated, and then Wang said, “Yes. For many years. Alex was the hub, as I said. We were working with her.”

“But she didn’t like being in the cloud,” Swan said, gesturing around her at the station. “She kept things in her head, right? But you work with qubes, isn’t that right? Wang’s qube, Wang’s algorithm?”

“Yes,” Wang said.

Wahram said, “To stay off the record, Alex had to stay clear of qubes. And for that she needed a qube’s help. That’s just the way it is now, and she knew that.”

Wang nodded. “So she chose me. I can’t say why. Possibly she thought I have more contact than I really do with what she used to call the league of unaffiliated worlds. I do have a network of contacts like that, but it’s not comprehensive. No one has an accurate description of the system as it exists now.”

“Is that what Alex wanted?” Swan asked.

Wahram shook his head. “She knew the system as well as anyone could. Wang knows the unaffiliateds, but more importantly, to my mind, his qube is sequestered here. Its contact with the rest of the system is controlled by Wang. Alex liked that, because she was trying to shift all her dealings over to direct human communication.”

“But she left these messages,” Swan said. “For if she couldn’t talk. So she wanted us to talk. For you two to talk to me.”

“Evidently.”

“So tell me what you’re up to!”

The two men glanced at each other. For a long time they stared at the floor.

Then Wang looked her in the eye, which caught Swan by surprise. His gaze was intense. “No one knows exactly how to deal with this situation, because it has to do with qubes, and you have a qube embedded in you. So Alex would not tell you about this part of things, and I don’t want to either. Now that Alex’s list of contacts is safely here, we who were working with her can try to proceed with her plans.”

Swan said, “So you have information from Alex, and my qube has information from Alex, but I can’t have any information from Alex.”

Wang looked at Wahram. Wahram’s broad face looked as if pins were being stuck into him somewhere. His pop-eyed stare, Wang’s basilisk intensity: they stood there looking at her. They didn’t know what to say to her. They weren’t going to tell her anything.

With a sudden snort Swan waved them away and left the room.

T here wasn’t anywhere to go in this little station to get away, something that occurred to Swan only after she had made her exit. She badly needed to run off her anger in some hills, and here she was trapped in a qube cube, a box of rooms, only a few of which even had windows. Claustrophobia lay always just under her surface, and now, with her anger at the two men and her grief for Alex (and anger at Alex for keeping things from her just because of Pauline), the trapped feeling jumped her and she banged around cursing until she went up in the conning tower to a small room with a view window and was able to slam the door and pound her fists on a table for a while. Her rib hurt quite a bit as she did so, but that was just part of the mix now, the stab of all these other feelings combined. She hurt!

Then a movement outside caught her eye. She interrupted her fit and went to the window to look: through her tears she saw the blurry blinking image of a human figure, out on the yellow slag, walking toward the station. It moved oddly, wavering, staggering, blinking from one position to another.

“Pauline, can someone walk on the surface here? Outside the station?”

“Their suit would have to be as protective as the station is,” Pauline said. “Please-inform station security of your sighting immediately.”

“Surely they’ll have seen it?”

“That suit out there may be shielded in many ways. Your visual sighting may be the only indication they have. Please hurry. Arguing with me now is untimely.”

Swan growled and left the room. After some hurrying around, getting lost, she came to the room Wahram and she had entered first.

“There’s someone approaching your station on foot,” she said to the startled people inside. A few of them began scanning screens very closely. Swan couldn’t tell them which direction her window had been facing, and had to take them back to it (just barely recalling the way) to show them. By that time nothing was visible on the slaggy landscape extending downhill from the station. Apparently the people back in the control room weren’t seeing anything either.

“Pauline, tell them,” Swan said.