2312

Inspector Genette and Swan

Once irritated by a problem, Jean Genette never really gave up on it. Even problems officially solved sometimes still had a haunting quality, because of things that didn’t quite fit, didn’t seem right—and if a solution never was found, the problem became part of the insomniac rosary, one bead in a Moebius bracelet of beads wearily fingered in the brain’s sleepless hours. Genette was still working on the problem of Ernesta Travers, for instance, which thirty years before had troubled them all with the fundamental question of why their friend Ernesta had engineered a disappearance from Mars, as well as how; it was a case Jean could pursue in exile, and from time to time did, but Travers was still as absent as if she had never existed. Same with the puzzle of the prison terrarium Nelson Mandela, a locked-room mystery if ever there was one, as the asteroid seemed to have afforded no ingress or egress for whoever had brought in the fatal gun. Mysteries like that abounded in the system; it was part of the affect realm of the balkanization, many felt, but balkanization per se was not enough to explain some of these mysteries, and the inspector remained puzzled and more—transfixed, existentially confused, frustrated—by their aura of impossibility. Sometimes the inspector would walk for hour after hour, trying to make the explanation appear.

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 at 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.”