2312

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The problem of the pebble attack was not like that. It was still a new case by Genette’s standard, and it had no aura of impossibility. Almost anyone in space could have done it, and many down under atmospheres could have paid for it, or gone into space and done it, then dropped back into their atmospheres. It was a needle-in-haystack problem, and balkanization made that problem worse by multiplying the haystacks. But this was Interplan’s territory, in the end, and so on sifting the haystacks they went, eliminating what they could and moving on. It seemed pretty clear to Genette that on this one they would be looking in the unaffiliateds eventually, prying open closed worlds and poking around for the maker of the launch mechanism and the operators of the spaceship now crushed deep within Saturn. By no means were all their avenues of inquiry exhausted; there were at least two hundred unaffiliateds with robust industrial capacities; so it was more like they had barely begun.

  Swan Er Hong rejoined Genette inside the aquarium South Pacific 101, a water world that filled its interior cylinder with water to a depth of ten meters, spinning against the interior of a big chunk of ice that had been melted and refrozen in such a way as to leave it transparent, so that from space the whole thing looked like a clear chunk of hail. Genette had sailed the Hellas Sea as a child, and learned to love the wild slop of a windy day in Martian g, and even all these years later had not lost the little thrill that came with feeling the fluctuating wind in one’s fingertips on tiller and line—the feeling of being picked up and thrown over the water in plunge after plunge.

  The little sea in this aquarium was not as grand as Hellas, of course, but sailing remained sailing. And from inside an aquarium with walls this clear, the view inside a cylinder was as if looking at and through a curved silvery mirror, everywhere broken up by the crisscrossing waves formed by the Coriolis current and the chiral wind, creating between them very complex patterns. It was as if the classic patterns of a physics class wave tank were here topologically warped onto the inside of a cylinder. Intersecting waves on this surface curved in non-Euclidean ways, a strange and lovely thing to see in all the mirrored silvers. And behind all the silvers lay blues. Inside the transparent shell of the aquarium, with the ocean also the sky, every silvery surface on the sunward side of the cylinder was backed or filled by a deep eggshell blue, while if one was looking away from the sun, the backing blue was an equally rich but much darker shade, almost indigo, and flecked here and there by the white pricks of the brightest stars. A floating town disrupted this cylindrical sea, but Genette spent most of the time on the water, sailing a trimaran at the fastest angles the winds offered.

  On hearing Swan was there, Genette sailed into Pitcairn and picked her up. There she stood on the end of the dock, fizzing in her usual way—tall, arms crossed, hungry look in her eye. She glared down at the inspector’s sailboat suspiciously; it was sized for smalls, and Swan was just barely going to fit. Genette dismissed her suggestion to take out a larger boat, and placed her on the windward pontoon with her feet on the main hull, while he sat in the cockpit, holding a wheel that seemed to come from a much larger vessel. And there they were, talking as they skidded over the waves like a shearwater. With such a big weight to windward, Genette could really catch a lot of wind on the mainsail, and the bow of Swan’s pontoon knocked a lot of spray up into the blues.

  Out getting banged on by the wind obviously pleased Swan. She looked around at things more than when Genette had last traveled with her. She looked slightly electrocuted, one might say. She had been on Earth for the reanimation, so no doubt that had made her happy. But there was also a new set to her mouth, a little chisel mark between her eyebrows.

  “Wahram sent me to say you need to get out to a meeting on Titan,” she said. “It’s Alex’s group, and they’re meeting off the grid to discuss something important. Something about qubes. I’m going to go too. So can you tell me what this is all about?”

  Buying a little time to think it over, Genette brought the boat about and had Swan change pontoons. Once set on the new course, a tug on the mainsheet tilted her upright. She grinned a little fiercely at this sailor’s evasion, shook her head; she would not be distracted.

  Although in fact this shift had brought them on course to catch one of the waves breaking on the reef. Genette pointed this out, and together they watched the swells as Genette trimmed the sails for more speed. They skidded over the water in a broad turn that met the wave as it was rising on the reef; the trimaran was lifted and then caught by the wave, surfing across its face, falling more than sailing, and yet the wind on the top half of the sail served to keep them ahead of the break, if Genette could capture it right. Swan proved expert at providing a counterweight, leaning and shifting in response to the fluctuations of the ride.

  Where the reef petered out, the wave lost its white teeth and laid back into a mere swell. After one last bump over the backwash of a crossing wave, they were only sailing again.

  “Well done,” Swan said. “You must sail a lot.”

  “Yes, I travel in aquaria when I can. So by now I’ve sailed most of them. Or iceboated them. When they’re frozen inside, you can get going like in a centrifuge.”

  “I was just up in Inuit country myself, but it was summer and all the ice was gone. Except for the damn pingos.”

  They sailed on for a while. Overhead their water-silvered sky bent through a smooth curve of blues from turquoise to indigo.

  Swan said, “But back to this meeting. Wahram said it had something to do with some new qubes. So… do you remember that time we were in the Inner Mongolia and I met those silly girls, and I thought they were people? And you thought they might be some strange qube people?”

  “Yes, of course,” the inspector said. “They were.”

  “Well, a strange thing happened to me on the way out here. I was lawn bowling with a young person in the Chateau Garden, and this kid was… trying to impinge on my attention, I guess I would call it, without actually saying very much. It was mostly in the play of the game, but also… it was like the long stare you sometimes get from wolves. There’s a thing wolves do when they’re on the hunt called the long stare. It’s unnerving to prey animals, to the point where some quit trying as hard to get away.”

  Genette, familiar with the look and the technique, nodded. “And this person had a long stare.”

  “So it seemed, yes. Maybe that was part of what gave me the creeps. I’ve had wolves look at me that way. I could see in my peripheral vision how different it was from an ordinary look. Maybe that was how a sociopath looks at people.”

  “A wolf person.”

  “Well, but I like wolves.”

  “Perhaps like a qube,” Genette suggested. “Not like the ones on the Inner Mongolia, but not quite human either.”

  “Maybe. When I talk about the long stare, I’m just trying to figure it out. Because it was unnerving. And then the way this kid was lawn bowling—as if it meant something.”

  Genette regarded her, interested by this. “As if lawn bowling might be the tossing of balls at a target?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s what it is, yes?”

  She shook her head, frowning at this.

  Genette sighed. “Anyway, it should be perfectly easy to ask the Chateau Garden for a manifest.”

  “I did that, and looked at all the photos. This lawn bowler wasn’t there.”

  “Hmm.” Genette thought about it. “Can you share your qube’s records with me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She shifted from the pontoon to the cockpit, and Genette came up into the wind a bit. She leaned over and asked Pauline to transfer the photos she had already pulled. Genette inspected Passepartout’s little wristpad display.

  “There,” Swan said, pointing to one photo. “That’s the one. And that’s the look I mean.”

  The inspector studied the image: an androgynous face, an intent look. “It doesn’t really come through in a photo.”

  “What do you mean? Look a
t that!”

  “I am, but this person could be thinking of a calculus problem, or suffering a moment of indigestion.”

  “No! It wasn’t like that in person. I think you should see if you can find this kid. If you can, you’ll see for yourself. And if you can’t, it gets kind of mysterious, doesn’t it? This person wasn’t on the manifest. So if you can’t find them, maybe the look will begin to mean more to you.”

  “Maybe,” Genette said. This was the kind of break in a case that amateurs hoped for, which in reality seldom happened. On the other hand, it might be some kind of move on the part of the qubes. Some of the ones inhabiting humanoid bodies had behaved so oddly it was hard to know what they might or might not do.

  The question now was how much Swan could be trusted, given how permanent her qube was, and how little was known about it. Not for the first time Genette was grateful that Passepartout was located in a wristpad that could be turned off, or taken off if necessary. Of course it was possible to ask Swan to turn off Pauline, as before. Secrecy from qubes could be achieved, even when they were stuck inside your head. It only had to be arranged. And on Titan the Alexandrines would be arranging for a sequestered conversation. It was clearly the next step if they were going to fold Swan into the new effort.

  Genette watched her while thinking it over. “We need to talk with Wahram and the whole group involved with this. There are things you need to know, but the meeting there will be the best place to tell you.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go then.”

  TITAN

  Titan is larger than Pluto, larger than Mercury. It has a nitrogen atmosphere, like Earth’s but ten times more dense. Temperature at the surface is ninety K, but there is a liquid-water ocean deep under its surface that serves as a reservoir of potential warmth. On the surface all the water is frozen very hard and forms the material of the landscape—glacial to every horizon, with rock ejecta scattered here and there like warts and carbuncles. Here methane and ethane play the role of water on Earth, changing from a vapor in the nitrogen atmosphere to clouds that rain down into streams and lakes running over the water ice.

  Sunlight hitting this atmosphere strikes up a yellow smog of complex organic molecules. The hydrogen in this haze escapes easily into space, but while in Titan’s air, it drives all the bigger organic molecules back to simpler building blocks; so there are not many complex organics, and therefore no indigenous life. Not even in the water ocean below, as if the corrosive atmosphere formed some kind of quarantine.

  The glacial surface is broken in most places, smooth in a few. When you stand on the surface, you can see Saturn, with a thin slicing curve of the edge-on rings cutting the gas ball in half; you can also see the brighter stars. The haze in the Titanic air is of a thickness such that looking out of it, visibility is fairly good, while looking into it is to see nothing but a yellow cloud.

  No impact craters; as they are formed in ice, the ice then deforms and resurfaces as the centuries pass. There is only a convoluted, swirling chaos of broken ice features and rock outcroppings, cut by liquid methane into shapes like watersheds. Dips in the land are filled with liquid methane: Titan’s Lake Ontario is three hundred kilometers across, and shaped like the one on Earth.

  There is seasonal weather, as Saturn makes its way from perihelion to aphelion: methane rain in the rainy season.

  It was the nitrogen that first brought people to Titan. Martians, unhappy with the never-explained shortage of nitrogen on Mars, flew out in the first ships fast enough to be practical for human use over these distances; robots had preceded them, of course. They set up stations, built a system for gathering and freezing nitrogen and casting it downsystem in naked solid chunks. People complained this was an unauthorized expropriation, but the Martians pointed out that Titan in its distant past had had several times as thick an atmosphere as it had now, that the nitrogen was leaking away to space to no one’s advantage, that if it wasn’t harvested it would go away—and that there were no Titans. The last argument was decisive. By the time there were Titans, by the time Titan and the rest of the Saturn League had ejected the Martian nitrogen miners from their system, Titan’s atmosphere had been reduced by half. Mars was correspondingly enriched, with part of the imported nitrogen in its soil, part in the atmosphere; it formed a crucial component of the Martian Miracle. And the Martians claimed no harm had been done; that in fact it had helped Titan’s future prospects, by getting it closer to a human-friendly pressure.

  The loss of Dione in those same years, however, was not a loss that could be claimed to help Saturnians in any way. The Saturn League then declared their system off-limits to Martians, also to Terrans (the Chinese in particular)—to anyone, in fact, except themselves. It was the first post-Martian revolution, against the great revolutionaries themselves, a statement very forcefully made by the threat of bombardment. So everything changed once again, because of a few people on Titan.

  The new light from the Vulcanoids sparking now in the skies of Titan had already started temperatures in the remaining atmosphere to rise, and the surface was therefore subliming faster than before. The tented cities in the highlands now had some of the most violent weather anywhere. From the inside of the city tents, the Titans watched clouds rising in thunderheads that sheered off horizontally some five kilometers up, where jet streams decapitated them. Sunlight before had been one one-hundredth of that striking Earth, making the whole planet seem about as bright as an ordinary room; now, with its beamed and reflected additions, it was fifty times brighter than it had been naturally, and was said to resemble the light on Mars, which the Martians said was the best light of all. In truth the human eye could adjust to a huge range of incoming light, and very little would serve for seeing, as had been the case here before the mirrorlight arrived. Now however the Titanic landscape positively glowed, and as its orbit and day were both sixteen days long, the sunsets, when they tinted the clouds to every shade of mineral glory, burnished the sky for some eighteen hours at a time.

  With the new influx of light, the full terraformation of Titan seemed very promising. They could capture and export the methane and ethane; spread foamed rock to make islands on the ice; use heat from the ocean below to warm the atmosphere; melt water lakes on their islands of rock and soil; landscape the islands, introduce bacteria, plants, animals; heat the air enough to get melted seas on the glacier surfaces; hold the atmosphere inside an ultrathin bubble; and light everything with the sunlight sent up from the Vulcanoids. The Titans looked out their tent walls with sharp anticipation. My oh my, they said. If we can just keep our shit together here we’re gonna make this a real nice place.

  SWAN AND GENETTE AND WAHRAM

  It was in one of the famous Titanic sunsets that Swan saw Wahram, crossing the gallery deck to greet her and Inspector Genette. She ran to him and embraced him, then let him go and looked at him, feeling shy. But he gave her that brief smile of his, and she saw that all was well between them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—especially, she thought, absence from her.

  “Welcome to our work in progress,” he said. “You see how the Vulcan light is helping us.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “But is it enough light to heat you? Can you get up to biosphere temperatures, wouldn’t that be almost two hundred K higher?”

  “The light alone can’t do it. But we have an interior ocean that averages about two hundred eighty K, so heat per se is no problem. We’ll shift some of that heat out to our air. And with this extra light helping, it’ll be fine, even more than fine. There will be gas balance problems, but we can work them out.”

  “I’m happy for you.” She looked up at the immense thunderheads over the tent, flaring orange and salmon and bronze. Above the clouds, brilliant chips of light blazed in a royal-blue sky, chips bigger and brighter than any stars: a few of the gathering mirror solettas, she assumed, redirecting the Vulcan light to Titan’s nightside. The huge thunderheads, lit by the sun from one side and mirrors from
the other, looked like marble statues of clouds. The sunset was going to last a couple of days, they told her.

  “Beautiful,” Swan said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “This is my real home, believe it or not. Now let’s grab the inspector and go for a walk. We want to talk to you in confidence.”

  “Is everyone else here?” Genette asked him when they approached.

  Wahram nodded. “Follow me.”

  The three of them donned suits and left the spaceport city, called Shangri-La, by way of a gate at the northern end of the city tent. They walked a few kilometers north on a broad track, ramping gradually up a tilted glaciated plain to an overlook. Here a broad flagstoned area made a kind of open plaza, overlooking an ethane lake. The metallic sheen of the lake reflected the clouds and sky like a mirror, so it was a stunning plate of mixed rich color, gold and pink, cherry and bronze, all in discrete Fauvist masses; really nature had no fear when it came to spinning the color wheel. The reflections of the new mirrors in the lake were like chunks of silver, swimming in liquid copper and cobalt. True sunlight and mirrored sunlight crossed to make the landscape shadowless, or faintly double-shadowed—strange to Swan’s eye, unreal-looking, like a stage set in a theater so vast the walls were not visible. Gibbous Saturn flew through the clouds above, its edge-on rings like a white flaw cracking that part of the sky.