2312

Swan spotted Mercury, down by the sun, small and red. The Mondragon members were all red, making a constellation of red dots scattered through the system-all small, but there were a lot of them. Earth was huge and multicolored, a bundling of spheres, like a bunch of helium balloons tugging at a fist. Mars was a single green sphere, almost as big as Earth. Colored lines connecting spheres made webs that were dense through the system out to Saturn, sparser beyond that.

“What factors?” Swan asked, trying to calm herself. She was still rattled, more by the appearance of Genette than by the attack.

Wahram said, “Accumulated capital, population, bioinfrastructure health, terraforming status and stability, mineral and volatile resources, treaty relations, military equipment. We can give you the details of the heuristic later. What you can see immediately is that Mars, and Earth, considered as a collective, are tremendously larger than any other powers at this point. And China, the big pink ball, is a very big fraction of Earth’s power. Venus, meanwhile, has such great potential that it’s hard to represent, because at present it has nothing like the power it’s going to have. Venus and China are colored pink because they both have good relations with the Mondragon. You can see that there is potential in the China-Venus-Mondragon nexus for the largest power of all. Alex often said that Chinese dominance is the default norm throughout history, except for the brief period of subjugation to Europe. That may be putting it too strongly, but the image speaks for itself concerning the current situation.

“Also, notice the smallness of almost all the other space settlements. Even taken together, they are still small. However, if you amp up their terraforming potential in the calculation, as I will do now-then look: Venus, Luna, the Jovian Galileans not counting Io, Titan, and Triton get much bigger. They represent the largest opportunities for more power in space. The asteroids are for the most part filled. So in near-term potential, Venus and the big moons are the new powers. And Venus will soon be fully habitable and experiencing a growth spurt, so things are already getting strange there and destabilizing things on Earth.”

“So what was Alex’s concern?” Swan asked. “And what was she proposing to do about it?”

Wahram took a deep breath, let it out. “She saw an unstable system, headed for a crash unless some corrections were made. She wanted to stabilize things. And she thought the fundamental source of trouble was Earth.”

He stared at the image for a while, which made the point very effectively; there, in the middle of all the clear primary colors, the party balloon jumble that represented Earth was so garish it almost vibrated.

“So she wanted to do what?” Swan asked, feeling a stab of worry. “Are you saying she wanted to change things on Earth?”

“Yes,” Wahram said firmly. “She did. She knew, of course, that this desire is a famous mistake for spacers to make. An impossible project, sure to go wrong. But she thought we might have enough leverage by now to make a difference. She had a plan. A lot of us felt like it was a bit of the tail wagging the dog, you know. But Alex was persuasive that we would never be safe until Earth was in better shape. So we were going along with her.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’ve been stockpiling food and animals in the terraria, and setting up Terran offices in friendly countries there. There were agreements. But now that’s been complicated by Alex’s death, because she did so much of it in person. They were verbal agreements.”

“She didn’t trust qubes, I know that.”

“Right.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I… Perhaps I shouldn’t really say now.”

After an uncomfortable pause, Swan said, “Tell me.” When he raised his eyes and met her gaze, she gave him the look Alex would have given him-she could feel it coursing through her. Alex had been able to make people talk with a look.

But it was Wang who answered her. “It has to do with some funny stories about qubes,” he said carefully. “On Venus and in the asteroid belt. Those incidents are being looked into by Inspector Genette and his team. So”-he gestured at the doorway-“this may be another part of that. So until they learn more, let us leave that matter alone for now. Also… assuming your internal qube is recording all this? If you could get it to keep the recording locked, that would be best.”

Wahram said to Wang, “Show Swan the image of the system with qube power included.”

Wang nodded and tapped at the table’s image. “This one tries to include both qubes and classical AIs. It hopes to give an image of how much of our civilization is run by artificial intelligence.”

“Qubes don’t run anything,” Swan objected. “They don’t make any decisions.”

Wang frowned. “Some things they do decide, actually. When to launch a ferry, for instance, or how to allot the goods and services in the Mondragon-things like that. Most of the work of the system’s infrastructure, as it turns out.”