2312

Swan and Wang

The station on Io holding Wang’s qube and its support team was located high on the flank of Ra Patera, one of the biggest mountains in the solar system. As the ferry descended, the tilt of Ra’s broad apron came to seem barely off the horizontal. The ferry dropped into a gap in a concrete pad, and a roof then closed over them; from then on they were mostly underground. Everything they could see of the moon on the station’s various viewscreens, and through the little windows in the station’s little conning tower, was part of the apron of Ra.

There were several people in the station’s bridge, up in the conning tower. None of them looked up at Swan and Wahram, nor at Wang when he came in.

Wang Wei turned out to be a round person with an innocuous manner. A real principal investigator, as Mqaret would have said: one of the system’s foremost experts on qubes. Sometimes such individuals were sovereign to quite remarkable little Ruritanias. Swan wondered if Alex had been right in her notion that the solar system’s balkanization was a deliberate but unconscious human reaction to qubes, some kind of resistance to their incipient power.

Wang greeted Swan and Wahram, and with a quick “Ah, thank you,” took the envelope from Alex that Swan offered to him. It appeared he had already known about it. He read the letter in it, then plugged the tab that fell from it into the nearest desk. He stared at the desk console for a long time, reading carefully, using a forefinger to keep his place.

“So sorry to lose Alex,” he said to Swan finally. “Condolences from the heart. She was the hub of our little wheel, and now we spin off like broken spokes.”

Surprised at this, Swan said, “She told me in her note to me that I should come to you. The messages were left for me in her study. A kind of contingency plan, I guess. And part of it was this envelope for you.”

“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.

There 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.

Pauline said, “There was something about three hundred meters downslope. Footprints should still be visible. The figure was moving irregularly—”

Wang hurried into the room, summoned, no doubt. “Lock it down,” he said curtly to his people. Ringing alarms went off in every room, painfully high and loud. Quickly the halls filled with people. Swan and Wahram were hustled along a hallway to the lockdown shelter. By the time they got there it was already crowded, and after they pushed their way in, the door was closed; apparently everyone was accounted for. Now they were inside the smallest Russian doll of all.

There were screens on one wall, and Pauline helped the station AI direct the station’s surveillance cameras. Soon enough one screen zoomed in on a view downslope: there, far down the rumpled and tilted plain of slag, a tiny figure was hopping downhill.

“Not a good idea,” Wang said. “The crust thins down there.”

And then the distant figure sank into a brief flare and disappeared.

“Keep looking around the station,” Wang said after a shocked silence. “See if there is anyone else out there. And put up a drone to have a look around for a hopper.”

The people in the room watched the screens in a grave silence. If the Faraday cage were to lose power, they would be cooked very quickly, every cell in them burst by Jupiter’s radiation.

But nothing seemed to have happened. The station’s power seemed secure, and there was no one else to be seen in the surrounding area.

Then there was a stir across the room. “Call from a ship requesting to land!” someone said.

“Who are they?”

“It’s an Interplan ship, Swift Justice.”

“Make sure it’s really them.”

The image of an incoming ship was shifted to a larger screen, and everyone watched as a small spaceship flared down into the hole in the station’s landing pad. Shortly thereafter a helmeted face appeared right in front of a surveillance camera lens in the landing bay, filling the screen to provide a retinal scan, then waving and giving them a brief thumbs-up. Friends, apparently.

They were let in, and there in the doorway stood three people, helmets off, one of them a small. Swan was startled to recognize the inspector who had visited them at Mqaret’s laboratory: Jean Genette.

“You’re late,” Wang said.

“Sorry,” Genette replied. “We were detained. Tell me what happened.”

Wang made his account brief, ending, “It appears to have been a single intruder. It approached and then went downslope and fell through the crust. We haven’t found any hoppers yet.”

Genette’s head was tilted to the side. “It just ran downslope to its death?”

“Apparently so.”

The inspector looked up at his companions. “We need to pull whatever remains of it out of the lava.” Then, to Wang and the others: “Back shortly. Maybe you should stay in lockdown a little longer.”

And the three of them disappeared back toward the station lock.

All right,” Swan said heavily, staring hard at Wahram in particular. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m not sure,” Wahram said.

“We were just attacked!”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

Wang spoke while still reading their screens. “A very ineffective attack, I must say.”

“So who would want to attack you?” Swan asked. “And how did this Inspector Genette get here so fast? And does this have anything to do with what you were doing with Alex?”

Wahram said, “It’s hard to tell at this point,” and Swan interrupted by punching him in the arm.

“Quit it,” she said viciously. “Tell me what’s going on!”

She looked around the packed room: twelve or fifteen people all crowded in there, but now ostentatiously focused on their own affairs, leaving Wang and his visitors alone at a small table in a corner. “Tell me or I’ll start screaming.” She let out a little shriek to show them what could happen, and people all over the room jumped and looked their way, or tried not to.

Wahram glanced at Wang. “Let me try,” he said.

“All yours,” Wang said.

Wahram tapped on the table screen and called up a schematic of the solar system, a three-dimensional image that seemed to float inside the table. Spheres of bright holographic colors made something like the familiar solar system orrery, though this one had many more colored spheres in it, Swan saw, and a great number of colored lines connecting these spheres. Also, the spheres were not sized in proportion to the real sizes of the planets and moons.

“This image was generated from Alex’s analysis,” Wahram told Swan. “It’s an attempt to show power, and the potential for power. A kind of Menard graphic. The size of the spheres is determined by a compound function of the factors Alex considered important.”

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.”

“But they don’t decide to run it,” Swan said.

“I know what you mean, but look at the image.”

In this version, he explained, red designated human power, blue the power of computers, with light blue marking classical computers, and dark blue quantum computers. A big dark blue ball appeared near Jupiter, and there were other blue dots scattered everywhere, most netted in a single web. Humans appeared as clumps of red, fewer and smaller than the blue dots, with far fewer red lines between them.

“What’s the blue ball around Jupiter?” Swan asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Wang said.

“And so now someone has attacked this rather immense blue ball.”

“Yes.” Wang was frowning heavily as he stared into the table. “But we don’t know who, or why.”

After a silence, Wahram said, “Images like this one were part of what concerned Alex. She initiated some efforts to come to grips with the situation. Let’s leave it at that for now, please. I hope you understand.”

His froggy eyes popped more than ever with the force of his entreaty. He was sweating.

Swan glared at him for a while, then shrugged. She wanted to argue and realized again that it felt good to find something besides Alex’s death to be angry at. Pretty much anything would do. But in the end it wouldn’t help.

Wahram tried to return the subject to Earth: “Alex said we should think of Earth as our sun. We all revolve around it, and it exerts a huge drag on us. And because of the individual need spacers have for their sabbaticals, we can’t just ignore it.”

“For any number of reasons we can’t do that,” Wang pointed out.

“True,” Wahram said. “So. We are determined to keep her projects going. You can help with that. Your qube now has her contact list. It’ll take a big effort to keep that whole group on board. We could use your help.”

Swan, unsatisfied with this kind of generality, inspected the new image again. Finally she said, “Who did she work with most on Earth?”

Wahram shrugged. “Many people. But her main contact there was Zasha.”

“Really?” Swan said, startled. “My Zasha?”

“Yours in what sense?”

“Well, we were partners once.”

“I didn’t know that. Well, Alex certainly relied on Zasha for a sense of the situation on Earth.”

Swan had been vaguely aware that Zasha did things with the Mercury House in Manhattan, but she had never heard Alex or Zasha speak of each other. It was another new thing to learn about Alex, and it suddenly occurred to Swan that this was the way it would happen from now on; she would not learn things from Alex, but about her. That was the way Alex would live on, and small though it was, it was better than nothing. Better than the void. And if Zasha had been working with her—

“All right,” Swan said. “When your inspector lets us out of here, I’m going to Earth.”

Wahram nodded uncertainly.

Swan said, “What will you do?”

He shrugged. “I have to go to Saturn and report.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Yes, thank you.” Although he looked a little alarmed at the idea. “I’ll soon be returning to Terminator. The Saturn League council has been contacted by the Vulcanoids, who it turns out also had some verbal agreements with Alex. There are Vulcanoid light transfers out to Saturn in the works, and I am currently the league’s inner planet ambassador. So I’ll see you when you return to Mercury.”