In 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.
Genette’s plan now was to exile all these humanoids, along with the lawn bowler and about thirty other people involved with the qube attacks. An agreement had been made to use one of the starships being built out of Pluto’s moon Nix. This starship was in fact just a specialized terrarium—an almost completely closed biological life-support system, exceptionally well supplied, and with extremely powerful engines. It would now serve as a kind of prison ship, similar to the ones orbiting in the asteroid belt, but ejected from the solar system. The starship terrarium’s inside would be sealed, its navigating AI placed outside the sealed cylinder. And off it would go: four hundred qube humanoids, the lawn bowler, and the group of people who had been judged guilty of complicity in any of the attacks. It was not a big group, because the lawn bowler appeared to have conceived and designed the attacks in a way that did not need many human confederates to make it work. So: exile, from the solar system and from the rest of humanity.
“Surely Lakshmi should be in there too!” Wahram objected to Genette.
“I agree, but we couldn’t manage to grab her. The Venusians will have to deal with her, or maybe we can prosecute her on Ceres and see where it gets us.”
“But this exile ship,” Wahram said. “What if the qubes break through to the controls? Reverse their voyage and come back, hungry for revenge and smarter than ever?”
“The speeds are too great,” Genette said easily. “The fuel aboard will be quickly burned getting them to tremendous speed. By the time they dealt with the problem of refueling, it would take centuries to get back. By that time civilization will have worked out some way to deal with them.”
“What do you imagine that will be?”
“I have no idea. We’re going to have to deal with qubes, there’s no getting around that. We have the wolf by the ears. My sense is that if qubes are kept out of humanoid bodies, and out of the hands of angry programmers, they’ll just be part of the scene, like Passepartout is now.”
“Or Swan’s Pauline?”
“Maybe keeping a qube in your head isn’t a good idea,” Genette admitted. “I wonder if Swan would agree to move it into a wristqube like mine.”
Wahram doubted this, though he wasn’t sure why. He was less and less sure of Swan, no matter what the issue in question happened to be.
He went on to another uneasiness. “Isn’t this a clear case of cruel and unusual punishment?”
“It’s unusual,” Genette allowed cheerfully. “Even unique. But its cruelty is relative.”
“Sent off with qubes? Isn’t it a weird kind of solitary confinement, something out of a nightmare?”
“Exile is not cruel. Believe me, because I know. The mind is its own place. They could in theory make quite a fine terrarium in there, and then settle an empty Earth somewhere off in the distance, and start a whole new wing of humanity. There’s nothing stopping them from that. So it’s just exile. I am an exile myself, and it is a recognized form of severe but nonlethal punishment. And this person killed three thousand people, just to test out a weapon. And also programmed quantum computers that now can’t tell whether what they’re doing is good or bad. They’ve been given intentionality without adequate limits, and are an obvious danger, and we don’t have a good defense against them right now. So I think sending them away is making a statement about how we treat qubes. We don’t just turn them off and break them up, as some are calling for, but send dangerous ones off in exile, just like we send off humans. That’s got to be a good message to the qubes left behind. We’ll then keep them in boxes so we can keep them in our control—at least I hope we will. That may or may not work. But what I’m hoping is that we can stop any more qubes of any kind being made, at least for a while, and take some time to look more closely into what smarter qubes or intentional qubes or qubes in bodies might mean. So to my mind, we’ll have administered justice, and bought ourselves some time. So I’m glad there’s been agreement from the Plutonians and the Mondragon and all the other relevant parties, including Shukra. And hopefully Swan, when she hears about it, and everyone else.”
“Maybe,” Wahram said.
He was still not comfortable with Genette’s solution. But every alternative he came up with was either too harsh (death for all of them) or too lenient (reintegration into society). Exile—the first starship a prison—well, there were prison terraria in the asteroid belt, locked from the outside and with conditions inside ranging from utopia to hell. So the lawn bowler’s group and its creations could make what they wanted. Supposedly. It still struck him as a version of hell. When all was said and done, little Inspector Jean Genette could be quite as inhuman as the lawn bowler; sanguine, blithe, impenetrable; regarding Wahram now with a look that was the same for all—saint, criminal, stranger, brother—all of them regarded with the same birdlike gaze, frankly evaluative, interested, willing to be convinced.
Still Wahram was uneasy, and he read the files on all the humans and humanoids they held captive, which at this point came to a few thousand pages. When he was done, he came back to Genette more upset than ever.
“You’ve missed something here,” he said sharply. “Read the interviews and you’ll see that there was someone in that lab in Vinmara who was letting some of these qubanoids loose and sending them off to people elsewhere in the system who helped to hide them. The ones that Swan ran into in the Inner Mongolia, and at least four more—they all tell similar stories. Whoever was doing this told them they were defective, and that they needed to go on the lam if they wanted to keep from being demolished. The qubes didn’t know what to make of that, and some of them acted strangely after they got loose. Maybe they were defective, I have no reason to disbelieve it. Anyway, this person in the lab was getting them away from Lakshmi! So does that person deserve exile also? And do the defective qubanoids that got away deserve exile?”
Genette frowned at this and promised it would get looked into.
This was not satisfactory to Wahram. He had been involved with Genette and Alex in the problem of the strange qubes from the beginning, and now felt he was being somewhat shunted to the side. He rolled his wheelchair into a meeting of the Interplan investigators and other members of the group as they discussed the situation, and again made the case for these innocents caught up with the rest of their captives. In the end it was not unanimous, but a stro
ng majority agreed: all the qubanoids were to go into exile; the lab assistant who had been setting the defectives loose would not. It turned out that this lab assistant had not only let them go, but also erased them from the lab’s records, in quite a clever bit of work, Genette informed Wahram—as if it were the cleverness that justified the pardon. Wahram, still deeply unsatisfied, let the matter drop. The Venusian lab assistant, a young person scarcely older than the lawn bowler, would be free to go. And the poor defective qubes might be better off among their own kind.
So when the time came, Wahram sat in the viewing chamber of the Interplan cruiser and watched with the rest of the people there as the matter-antimatter engine fired up, and the First Quarter of Nix began its trip to the stars. It looked like any other terrarium on the move, maybe a little bit bigger. Ice formed a fair percentage of its mass, and the exterior looked like an ice statue of something like a great white dolphin, flying on a tail of lightning.
“What about the people who built it?” Wahram asked. “Wasn’t that their starship?”
“We have to replace it. They intend to send four in a kind of fleet, so we will make another one for them out of Hydra. We can take some of Charon too if we need it. So they will still have their four ships.”
Wahram remained troubled. “I still don’t know what I think of this.”
Genette did not seem concerned at that. “Best we could do, I’m afraid! It was a hard thing to manage offline and in utter secrecy. Quite a nifty little operation, if you ask me. Amazing what you can do with paper and synchronized watches. Every person involved had to behave with the utmost secrecy and completely trust the people they knew in the network, and they all had to be right about that for it to work. It’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it.”
“Agreed,” Wahram said, “but will it be enough?”
“No. The problem remains. This just gives us a little breathing room.”
“And… you are confident you got all of them?”
“Not at all. But it looks like the facility on Venus was the only one making them, or so Wang’s qube believes. And we’ve got enough records from their energy use and input of materials to get a maximum count of how many could be made, and we got almost exactly that many. Possibly there are one or two still out there, but we’re thinking they will be too few to do any harm. They may be more of the defectives let free by that young lab assistant. Anyway, we will try to catch them if they are out there.”
Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other surveillance device would reveal what they were—out there hiding, trying to accomplish the goals they had been given, perhaps, or new ones they might choose for themselves, according to some self-invented algorithm of survival. Damaged, dangerous, detached from any other consciousness, solitary and afraid—in other words, just like everyone else.
Quantum Walk (3)
on the edge of the marsh the frogs croak the fecundity schedule concerns how often and when during life one procreates and how many offspring morphogenesis is the process by which an organism creates itself growth curves with a time lag results in oscillating patterns the predators always a quarter cycle behind the prey
these new humans are taking you to be destroyed fat gun in your face commanded to walk between them away from your helpers out there on the Jersey shore Manhattan skyscrapers topping the east horizon on the run on the hunt
kick the gun and run humans hilariously slow on the uptake dash into cinder shadows of dun brake duck and turn jump a creek green meadow crumpled with moss pads were Persian carpets ever green?
almost stride directly into another person looks human
I need help some people just mugged me and I think they’re still after me
human stares at you pure blue iris marbled by a darker blue come with me then
off on a path human stops, points white-tailed deer frozen in place ears facing them a febrile temperament they’re back the human says
You say Would you like to play chess?
Human says Sure come on
To a little shack another human already there they talk in the kitchen go outside at sunset the red on the hill taketh away my will needles on the conifers prick silver deciduous leaves flush on their western sides a moment comes when a distant streetlight casts a glow against the sunset and a space of light is set up without shadow exceptionally clear and articulate to the sight there’s a fox at the edge of a clearing flowing through weeds russet and white the propagule rain falling both ways from Earth to space then back again a symbiogenesis lifting both blue of sky slightly veiled by white transparencies
Swan it’s Zasha from inside the house I’ve got a thing here a chess player it seems kind of confused
black birds banner back to town land in a tree on the horizon black dots flopping lazily getting settled at end of day
birdcalls talking to each other maybe fifty birds of various kinds making a sonic sphere it’s all together that make it music the continuo is the hum of the cars trucks generators engines motors a jet so big it looks nearby its sound far behind it in the sky bird chorus at sunset surcharge and overlap civilization in the open air avian wisdom conserved in archaic parts of brain not apparently programmable a leap of the imagination
near midnight a third human arrives tall graceful Hi Zasha what’s up
introductions hail the reality of the other namasté I salute the spirit within you
I’m Swan tell me about yourself
summarize events since coming to consciousness shoved out the door into the street departure from Venus transport by humans in a private system land on Earth all began as part of an attempt to end the eclipse on Venus not immediately but as a project to be enacted safely hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul ignorant of details of plan helpers somehow actually against the larger project helpers arrested or kidnapped forced departure mention of being put down escape
Swan looks at Zasha those fuckers are treating them like qubes
Well? Zasha says What do you call them? Qubanoids? Qubans?
Qubans is good I say they’re like Pauline remember it was a qube that drove the A-Tay-Ha right into that pebble mob killed itself for us did its duty I mean I like the inspector as much as anyone which is quite a lot despite all but I feel no need to agree on every issue this is just crazy
Jean just thinks we need to hit the reset button a little
You never get to do that! life doesn’t work that way I’m going to take this one with me
Swan
Don’t you try to stop me! standing quickly fist pulled back to strike
Zasha both hands up Stop stop I don’t disagree for once just maybe you might have it right that’s why I called you up till now I was helping to track these things down so when I heard this one got away I went out and hauled it back in it was easy they’re credulous but then I called you I called you
That’s my Z we’ll leave at dawn
Zasha shaking head You and your strays here you are doing it again fuck every time you come out here
Hey you’re the one who asked me here you wanted my help you wanted me to do this
Yeah yeah gowan wicha getoutahere
The breaking of the day addedth to my degree if any ask me how artist who drew me so must tell
Hope is a bird the birds quieter at break of day sleepier cheerful at what the light portends a breeze throws waves through the parlor of the dawn
Follow Swan to a car off to a dock where a public ferry awaits all the faces dense with life eyes looking inward to other times past or future or watching the day like you
Across the broad river in spate water surface closely scalloped by the wind creased by wakes bubbly cross chop the round bow of the ferry skidding on the tide crashes gulps the broken water slides ahead Manhattan left to right before them a cliff made by people sunrise has not
yet topped it long shadows over the river slowly grumble into the slip a giant vise that grips the ferry and rocks it still
Out with the people onto a platform out between tall buildings canals below long thin boats 52 boats visible 423 people in morning shadow busy day already
What do you think? Swan asks Can you pass? Will you be all right?
41 boats visible 364 people we are the birds that stay
I’ll be all right
Good off with you then
the human kisses you on the mouth click of eyeteeth jolts you both suddenly awake to the reality of the other look in the eye maple irises left eye marked with a bottom arc of blue Do good go
WAHRAM
People hunger for time both ways. Certain things we want to come faster: the terraforming of a new world we have come to love, the arrival of universal justice in human affairs, a good project. Other things we want to go slower: our own lives, the lives of those we love. Either way it’s a hunger for time—more time to do things, to experience things.
Getting married at age 113 is the triumph of experience over hope. So many lives have already been lived. One’s hopes long since have been reduced to a focus on the things of the day. Experience has taught all it is going to teach; more experience will be a reiteration.
But never quite reiteration. Life is always at most a pseudoiterative. Each day has its particulars. Performing the same actions day after day, in a ritual to ward off time, to hold the moment, does not remove these particulars, but rather burnishes them. The animals, our horizontal brothers and sisters, remind us; each day lived is a kind of adventure, a success. Nothing ever repeats. Each breath is a new suck at the atmosphere, a gasp for life. A hope for experience. Feel that and go on.
Fitz Wahram sat in the meeting room of the Titan Planetary Relations council, thinking these thoughts. When it was his turn, he made his case to his colleagues.
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