CAPACITY

Earth to Earth. Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust

David Schummel was eighty-two, but he looked older. His stomach bulged; the rest of his body was too thin, his legs seeming lost inside the baggy legs of his trousers, while his thin wrists were arthritic knots emerging from white cuffs. His pink scalp could be seen through thin white hair, and white stubble grew untidily on his gaunt face. He walked unsteadily, using handles fixed to the walls to support himself, as he led them through the hallway into his living area.

Judy gazed at him in awe, and a treacherous thought began curling and uncurling in her mind. Look at him; he can’t walk. Gravity is killing him. The thought curled around itself for a moment or two, and then it was back. We’re in space, so why does he live at full gravity?

The answer was obvious: because the Shawl was set to simulate full gravity.

Ah, but why? But why?

“Social Care?” David Schummel licked his lips as if tasting the words. “Social Care. Ah, yes. I remember you Judy-you used to come and play poker at the social center.” He gave a cackling laugh. “I never joined you. I never understood why anyone would be stupid enough to play a game of bluff against a member of SC.”

Judy looked at him and wondered. Did she remember him? A grey-haired old man playing cards with the children and adults at the compulsory mixer sessions?

There you are: there’s a reason for the Watcher. Ensuring that we all look after each other, learn about each other. That’s what the Watcher has done for us. Mixer sessions and parties, the old and the young together. No crime. No fear. No loneliness.

Ah, said the treacherous thought, but since when did it become a debate? You always assumed that the Watcher was there for the good of humankind. So why do you now begin to doubt that?

Because I’m doped up on MTPH. It’s having the old effect: schizophrenia. Multiple personalities are fighting to possess me.

Look at David Schummel easing himself into that chair with his arthritic joints. Why? Why does he have to do that? I thought we’d cured arthritis. Why do we still have it here in the twenty-third century?

Judy turned to Frances, but the robot’s big blue eyes were fixed on David Schummel. Not that that meant anything, of course, since that dome of a head just had eyes painted on. You never knew what Frances was looking at. Frances was actually watching her. Judy knew it.

“I don’t remember you, Frances,” Schummel said. His eyes traveled down to the pubic buttons between her legs. “I’m sure I would have remembered you, if we had met.” He made a thin, wracking cough. “Now, what is it about this time? My new apartment again, I suppose. Well, I’m leaving. I’ve not got much choice, have I? Stay here and plunge to my death or start again at the top. Well, I’ll tell you this: I’ll make it around the cycle again, and maybe next time I’ll just stay here at the end. Let myself just drop and burn. That would be a good end.”

Judy smiled weakly. The effect of the drug seemed to be increasing again; her thoughts were following their own paths.

“A good end.” She smiled. “Yes, maybe that would be.” She forced herself to concentrate. “But that’s not what we’re here about.” With some difficulty, she resumed her impassive expression. “I want to ask you about Justinian Sibelius.”

Schummel’s arms and legs trembled constantly, and yet there was a strange sort of stillness around him. Judy sensed a mix of emotions: fear, elation, but mostly she sensed relief. He licked his lips, and a spot of drool formed at the corner of his mouth. Frances leaned forward and gently wiped it away.

“Justinian Sibelius?” Schummel said. “So, the secret is finally out. I wonder what made them change their mind? I suppose whatever was in M32 must finally be catching up with us. The world really is coming to an end.”

Judy knelt on the floor before him. She closed her eyes for a moment, grateful for the chance to be off her feet-she felt so dizzy-and then she took a deep breath and took both his hands. They felt dry and cold.

“The world is coming to an end?” she said. “Why do you think that?”

“Because the fact that you are here suggests to me that they have finally found us. The Watcher must be getting ready to abandon this world before we all commit suicide. Or worse.”

Judy pulled a little red pill from her sleeve. She handed it to him.

“Here,” she said. “I’d like you to take this.”

David took the pill without hesitation, then sat back on the chair. Judy slipped out another pill for herself. The reaction was automatic. Then she remembered the strange drug that was still at work within her system. She ground the blue pill to powder between her fingers.

“Where shall I begin?” Schummel asked.

“At the beginning. What were you doing on Gateway?”

David Schummel closed his eyes as his thoughts traveled back through the years. When he began to speak, it was in a faint murmur that gradually grew louder as he gained confidence.

“I suppose you’re too young to remember the day the EA revealed the existence of the Enemy Domain? It was, what, twenty, thirty years ago? Completely unexpected: a message broadcast simultaneously to every console. I can’t think of another time they ever did that. It was a serial feed, too. You had to start at the beginning of the story and work your way through to the end, every human in the Earth System experiencing the story at the same time. I think you had to have lived through it to have any idea of the emotions we experienced. They were incredible… To think how close we had come to total destruction.

“The Enemy Domain! A hostile runaway region of self-replicating machines that had grown to the point that it could literally wipe us out. You saw the pictures on the feeds, that huge volume of hostile space, completely dwarfing ours. The Earth System was tiny, a blue-white pearl about to be cupped in the hands of a giant. All that machinery, all of that weaponry bent on our destruction, and we had been going about our daily lives unaware. Of course, the EA said we were never in any danger…but to see the pictures, you couldn’t bring yourself to believe it. I remember I just sat there, watching the scenes. Watching them, over and over again.

“And then we heard about the clones. The Enemy had been growing humans, trillions of them, but it had never completed them. Trillions of half-grown humans were scattered on planets in a bubble two hundred light years across.”

Schummel paused and looked at Judy. “How old are you? Late twenties?”

“Twenty-nine.”

He nodded. “I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but I should tell you something else. When all this happened, I was in my early sixties. Social Care had done their best, but I still had this sense of dissatisfaction, this feeling that I wanted to do something useful with my life. When I heard the requests for volunteers to travel to the ED, to aid in the harmonization, well, it struck a chord in me. It took me a couple of weeks to pluck up the courage, but I volunteered. I had skills: I could pilot craft, solo, without AI or TM help. I thought that had to be useful. It turns out it was, but not for the reasons I thought.

“There was only one way to volunteer, so I contacted Social Care, despite my misgivings.” A shadow crossed his face. “I should explain…I had a little habit back then that maybe wasn’t quite within socially acceptable parameters. Nothing actually wrong, you understand, but enough for me not to want them to know more than was necessary. Ah, why am I trying to hide it from you? It all came out after I returned from Gateway. You’ll have seen the records, of course. Still, I thought they were going to refuse me. They would have refused me, I’m convinced of it, if it hadn’t been for the fact that somebody wanted me. Social Care’s rejection was overruled, and I was accepted, but not for the ED. Not that I knew this at the time. Me, Mareka, Glenn, and Gwynnedd…and Justinian, all of us were being handpicked for the rescue mission to Gateway.”

Schummel took a deep breath and looked up at Frances. “This could take some time. Could you get me a glass of water, please?”

“Of course.” Frances quickly returned from the kitchen area, with a glass. David took a sip, then coughed a little.

“Okay. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about it until the day of departure. We boarded a ship in Kenya, as we had been instructed, a big city-class job, space for two or three hundred people in comfort. We thought that would be taking us all the way to the Enemy Domain. It wasn’t until we had taken off and were safely inserted into warp that they told us.

“We weren’t going to the ED at all. We were going to another galaxy: M32. It’s a small satellite galaxy of Andromeda. Look it up on your console.

“I remember all of us sitting there in the main assembly area of the ship. A robot stood up at the front and made the announcement. An odd-looking thing, it was: it had no skin on. I couldn’t believe what it was saying. The shock at being lied to, the confusion, but oh, the excitement. It was incredible. I remember turning to look at the expressions of the other people sitting around me. That’s when I twigged that what the robot was saying wasn’t news to most people in that room. Most sat there, faces impassive, just like this young lady here.”

He looked at Frances, but pointed to Judy.

“Oh, I was angry about that at the time, so angry. I wanted to know why I hadn’t been told. I calmed down later on when I realized that there was someone else with even more reason to be angry than I.”

“Justinian?” suggested Judy.

“Justinian.” David Schummel shuddered, took another sip of water. “Yes, Justinian. But that comes later. First we had to board the hypership…”

Schummel gazed into the distance, lost in thought. Gradually he collected himself and continued his story.

“The robot warned us about it. I don’t know how they built that ship, Judy. The robot told us it was beyond human comprehension. It’s not quite of this universe, its shell…You know, they wouldn’t let us see it as we flew to it. It was floating out in the Oort cloud, surrounded by baffles against chance discovery. We spent the journey out there wondering about that ship. How did it work? Why was it a secret? Why couldn’t we even see it? We tried getting the shuttle’s AI to put it up on the viewing fields, but it kept refusing. We tried all sorts of ways to get a proper look at it. Leslie caught some of the astronomers setting up a deep-radar telescope in their quarters, trying to get a picture of it through our ship’s hull. I remember, after that, he broadcast to the whole ship, warning us how dangerous it would be for us to see the hypership, warning us it was not a good idea for humans to look directly at it… But all the time he knew there was one human who would have to see it. One human who had no choice. The one who had to fly the shuttle. Me.

“Every time I flew up from Gateway, it was there. And me, alone in the cockpit of the shuttle, gazing up at it, hanging balefully over the planet…”

He shivered. “It was…long. No, that’s not the word. There isn’t a word to describe it. I don’t know…It always seemed to be much longer than the space it occupied. I used to get lost just flying towards it. I never knew for sure how far I had to go before I docked. It didn’t have a color, but there was a purple tinge at the boundary of where it existed-energy seeping through from somewhere else, Leslie once said. There’s something else…I could hear it. I could feel its presence.”

He looked deep into Judy’s eyes.

“You don’t believe me?”

Judy shook her head. At the moment she could feel everything. “I believe you,” she said.

Schummel gazed at her, not sure whether she meant it. He squeezed her white hands briefly, then continued.

“Oh, but inside it, there were three hundred of us inside it, and we all felt it. The ship’s…presence. I remember when we first boarded.

“We had to march from the warp ship down a silver corridor, but you knew you were in the hypership the moment it enfolded you. It was always cold inside, even though your skin was warm. Energy seemed to just leak away from inside you, though Leslie always denied that was the case. We had vivid dreams, even in the daytime. You would be speaking to someone, and then you’d realize that there was no one there; there never had been. The closer you got to the ship’s hull, the worse it was. The AIs that ran the ship said the effects were all psychosomatic. They offered to prove it, but I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe any AIs now, not after the way they lied to us. I don’t even believe the Watcher. There was a theory that circulated in the ship. I don’t know where it came from, but rumors were rife. It’s hard to understand what it means unless you’ve experienced it, but there was no Social Care on that ship. We weren’t constantly being cajoled and comforted and led down prescribed paths. I tell you, one time I even saw a fight. Yes, a fight! A real fight, born of anger. Kicking and punching and biting and…But I digress. No, there was a theory. That that ship was pulled from the fabric of somewhere else, and in entering it we had hung ourselves over this great sucking void, and that at any time it would claim us and take us down. I walked the corridors of that ship like a tightrope walker…”

“Tell me about Justinian,” Judy said, bringing him back on track.

“Justinian.” Schummel shook his head. Judy could feel him trying to clear it of the memory of the hypership. She wished she could help him; his thoughts were making her feel nauseated, too. “Justinian,” he said again, and then added more harshly, “You know, when people tell me about the Watcher and its great plans for humanity, I just think of Justinian and the baby.”

David Schummel glared at Frances as he spoke.

“When I first saw Justinian, he was walking through one of the recreation lounges, accompanied by Leslie. That robot never let him out of its sight; it was constantly controlling him, twisting his thoughts. It mapped out his life for him, and poor misguided fool that he was, he never saw it. Then again, who am I to call him a fool? AIs can do that to anyone. There but for the grace of the Watcher go I.”

He shuddered once more, took another sip of water.

“I didn’t know all that at the time, of course. If I had, I wouldn’t have felt so ill-disposed towards him when we first met. There he was, scheduled to go down to the planet, and what did he have along with him? His son. The baby.

“I hated him for that. Let Social Care understand and forgive me, but I hated him. By then we knew why we were going to Gateway, you see. We knew how dangerous the place was. If AIs were committing suicide without any reason, what was to stop humans doing the same?

“That’s before I discovered the truth. There were other babies on the ship. I remember one in particular: Emily, Mareka’s daughter. Mareka was meant to stay on the hypership at all times; she was never allowed to travel down to the planet. It was too dangerous, since there were BVBs down there. Black Velvet Bands that appeared from nowhere and then just shrank away to nothing. Once you had one of them around you, there was no getting it off. Can you imagine what would have happened if one of them had formed around the soft bones of a baby’s skull? I remember Mareka telling me about that as she was holding Emily. Pretty little thing, nine months old. I could see her fontanelle moving through her thin blond hair as she spoke, and I felt sick.

“I asked Mareka what she was doing here. She said she was an expert in human-AI psychology. She was to stay in orbit around Gateway and monitor the ship’s AIs. She had the authority to pull the mission at any time. On her say-so, the ship, the crew, everyone would make the jump back to Earth right away. I remember, I looked at Emily, and her alert little blue eyes stared straight back at me, and I thought that no way would I bring my own daughter here.

“That got me thinking about Justinian. ‘And what’s he doing here?’ I asked. ‘Will he be staying on the ship?’ I knew the answer of course, but I was just stirring things up. I was asking just so that she would confirm what I already knew, so I could strengthen my disapproval. I regret that now. I really do. I think Mareka knew what I was doing, too. Her answer was toneless. ‘No, he’ll be going down to the planet,’ she said.

“Then she looked at me. She was an odd woman. You’d think that she was rather plain: she had this cool way of looking at you, appraising you, putting you in your place. Then she would suddenly smile and move just so, and you’d realize she had this long lithe body…” He smiled. “That was a long time ago. I was too old even then. Anyway, I pushed the point.

“ ‘Will Justinian be taking the baby with him?’ I asked.

“ ‘He will,’ Mareka said. ‘I have offered to look after it for him, but he insists that the baby stays with him.’

“ ‘Is that safe?’ I asked.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ Mareka said. ‘It’s not the choice that I would make.’ And then she paused. I don’t know. Later on, we actually became good friends, me and Mareka, but at that time we were still strangers. Even so, I realized that she wanted to tell me something.

“ ‘Go on,’ I said.

“She looked down at Emily, those little blue eyes staring back at her, and then she spoke again.

“ ‘I don’t think that it’s his choice to keep the baby with him,’ she murmured. I didn’t press it any further. If she wanted to tell me, she would. And she did, although when she spoke it was so softly I could barely hear her. ‘It’s that robot. It’s making his choices for him.’ ”

David sat back in his chair and fished the lemon slice out of his glass. He placed it on the floor.

“Did I say she was an expert in human-AI psychology? I did, didn’t I? I checked her profile later in the public records and discovered she was very highly respected. After she had said it, of course, it was obvious. I watched Justinian and the baby around the ship. That robot kept them apart from the rest of us and, to my eternal shame, we let it. Well, for most of the time, anyway. Some of us tried to tell him, but that robot had a way of warning us off. And I get the feeling it wasn’t just the robot. The pressure came from the ship’s AI, through the EA, to the very top. The Watcher. All of them. They all wanted Justinian and the baby to go down to that planet. And when Leslie couldn’t quite keep him in order, they cajoled and bullied and persuaded the rest of us to help. Even me.

“There was a time when Justinian tried to leave the planet, but I persuaded him to stay. As I said, I had this little vice back then. I thought it was secret, but SC knew. They had always known, even before they signed me up for the trip. I think they wanted to make sure that they had a way to buy my cooperation.

“Anyway, that’s how it was. We were on that ship for just two weeks. Two weeks to travel nearly three million light years. Two weeks with a chilled heart and waking dreams. Two weeks with the feeling that your thoughts weren’t quite keeping up with your body. You know, someone told me that the ship was flying at only point zero eight percent of the speed it could achieve. That it had to slow down to accommodate human minds. I can believe it. Thinking was…different on that ship.

“But I’m wandering off the point again. We arrived at Gateway eventually. That was exciting. I flew the first twenty humans down to the planet in the shuttle. That’s when I saw the hypership for the first time. But I’ve told you about that-we don’t need to go over it again. I saw Gateway. It was a pretty place. Blue and white, just like Earth, but the blue is milkier. It reminded me of being a boy again; something to do with that shade of blue, I think. That feeling of innocence. The skies around Gateway were spectacular, too. Caught between the galaxies, the stars seem to separate into two sheets…

“We touched down, and Justinian left the shuttle. And that was the last I saw of him for three weeks.”

David drained the rest of his water.

“I’m sorry, could I have some more?”

“Of course,” Frances said. She looked down at Judy, still kneeling motionless before David, her kimono tucked under her knees. “How about you, Judy? Do you want something?”

Judy shook her head. David coughed and resumed his story.

“The mission was a failure from the start. I don’t think any one of us had realized how much humans have come to depend on AIs. It’s the human fantasy, isn’t it? We all think that we are strong enough to hack it on our own.

“Believe me, it’s just a fantasy. We cannot do it anymore. I found that out on Gateway. The human race has been housetrained; it’s been broken and domesticated and totally institutionalized by Social Care. We can’t react to new circumstances anymore. We think that we are sophisticated and worldly with our knowledge and accomplishments and appreciation of culture…” He paused to gaze significantly at Judy, resplendent in her wafuku. “We pick apart our past like connoisseurs, reveling in the myriad variety that is humankind, but it’s all in our imagination. When we encounter something truly new, we don’t know how to react anymore.

“Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise; we were terrified on that planet. Without AIs and Social Care, we felt lost, alone, abandoned. When we first saw the Schrödinger boxes dancing across the floor, we were scared. We awoke every morning patting at our bodies, wondering if we were going to find one of those BVBs wrapped around us-”

“How do we know this is real?” Judy said suddenly to Frances. “He certainly believes the truth of what he is saying, that’s obvious, but even so! It could be a trick. Chris could have set this up. How can we believe what Schummel is saying?” She eyed the old man. “I’m sorry, but you must understand.”

“She already knows,” Schummel said, hooking a thumb at the robot. “She can see it. She’ll have known ever since you came into the room.”

He fumbled at the buttons of his shirt: white plastic buttons, glittering in the light. He pulled open the front to reveal a pale, liver-spotted body. There was something wrapped around his chest, just above his purple nipples. Something black and unearthly. Something Judy and Frances had heard about, but had never actually expected to see.

The Black Velvet Band shone oddly in the light. Rays of red and blue and green light seemed to emerge from it at odd angles; they moved in all directions as Schummel shifted uncomfortably. The band seemed perfectly flat, its edge lost under the white flesh that bulged around it. Little white plastic stays had been inserted behind it to brace it in place.

“Can I touch it?” Judy asked.

“Yes,” he said, and Judy leaned forward and ran her finger across it.

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” she said.

“You learn to feel it,” Schummel said, “and then you learn to ignore it.”

Gazing at the alien artifact, Judy felt a chill. How far from its home had it traveled? Schummel had said three million light years, but what did that really mean? It was just a number.

“Why is it still there?” Frances asked. “Why didn’t Social Care cut you in two so they could remove it?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “My guess is that they wanted to see how it reacted to humans. Would it do anything else? I doubt it. You get a feel for something after you live with it for twenty years. This thing isn’t alive.”

Judy looked out of the window of Schummel’s lounge. Black space and white stars. Up above, the regular sections of the Shawl could be seen, a chequerboard pattern of black shapes running to infinity. Her attention was wandering. She brought herself back to the task at hand.

“Okay, David, let’s finish this off. I was told that the Watcher murdered Justinian. Is that true?”

He looked at her. The whites of his eyes were yellowing, she noticed. His hands trembled.

“The Watcher is murdering all of us,” he said bitterly. “It has been trying to get me for eighty-two years. Think about it. The Watcher can build a ship from material that is not of this universe. Why can’t it save the health of an eighty-two-year-old man?”

“In order to save our humanity…” Judy began, but the words sounded unconvincing even to her. David didn’t even bother to laugh at her reply.

“I know; I’ve heard it all before. Trust me, dear. You’ll see it differently when you get to my age.”

Frances interrupted. “I think we’re wandering off the point. We weren’t talking about abstruse philosophical points. David, can you answer Judy-did the Watcher kill Justinian?”

Judy held her breath. She worked for Social Care. Her life revolved around the belief that Social Care did what was best for humankind. Her thirteen lives. And what was the guiding force behind Social Care? The Watcher. Could it be true? Could the Watcher be responsible for murdering someone?

David Schummel looked her straight in the eyes. “Yes,” he said. “The Watcher may not have pulled the trigger, but nonetheless it knowingly sent Justinian Sibelius to his death. It’s the right thing to say. The Watcher murdered Justinian Sibelius.”

Judy felt something die inside her. This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be right. She stared up at the blank face of Frances, at her two cartoon eyes.

“It’s right,” Frances said softly.

“Okay,” Judy took a deep breath. “How?”

“Everyone on the hypership knew what had happened to the AIs on Gateway,” David said. “Can you imagine the tension? We had been told that the AIs committed suicide, but they assured us that we would be safe, just like those humans already down there.” He laughed. “Yeah, like poor James Gabriel, stuck in the Bottle with Pod Sixteen. You couldn’t stop thinking about that. What could drive a perfectly healthy mind to suicide? Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, Judy? You must deal with that regularly as a part of your job. Don’t you?”

Judy said nothing. He didn’t appear to notice.

“All the time we were down there, every emotion, every apparent difference you detected in your own attitudes, you examined with a fine-tooth comb. Like the time Mareka and I fell out about the way she was bringing up Emily. We were both thinking, is this argument really about Emily, or is it the edge of something else? Is this the beginning of the decline into madness? Of course, we were all of us looking in the wrong direction. Not that anyone knew it at the time.

“Me, I just kept flying that shuttle up to the hypership and back. All the time we were hearing rumors about Justinian and the baby. How they were flying around the planet and coming up with blanks. Two weeks, three weeks of nothing. And then the rumor flashed across the communication net. Something at last. Something. But not what we were expecting. Not about the AIs, but about Justinian. They had asked for him. The AIs on the planet that had committed suicide, they had asked for Justinian to be sent to Gateway. Out of all the humans in the galaxy, they asked for Justinian. But why him?”

David Schummel looked at the floor. “That’s when I had my most shameful moment. He wanted to leave the planet. He flew to the shuttle port and demanded to leave, but I persuaded him to stay. Okay, there was no way the Watcher would have let him go anyway-it controlled the hypership-but I still helped. I persuaded him to continue with his mission. And he did.

“When I think back to that period, it seems like things started to go wrong immediately after I persuaded Justinian to stay down there. But the human mind is a dramatist: it prefers to retell stories rather than recount facts. Maybe there were more Schrödinger boxes around after that, maybe the BVBs did settle more often, but I doubt it. How can we really tell? Here, in our world, we would ask an AI to mine the archives, but there were no AIs on Gateway.

“My memory tells me that I began to suspect the truth then.

“All that time I traveled up to the hypership and back again, I took the occasional sortie in a flier. I listened in to Justinian’s progress-we all did. I don’t think he realized that robot was transmitting everything that occurred on his flier to the rest of Gateway. Insurance, I suppose. If anything went wrong, we’d all know about it, and maybe we could avoid making the same mistakes.

“And then we heard it: the final link in the chain. One of the half-dead AIs gave Justinian the location of something-a secondary infection. Somewhere on the planet there was an effect just like the one that got sealed off in the Bottle, but this time it had been left out in the open.

“Justinian was told not to get too close to it, but he wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear anything by that point. He was so confused by Leslie’s manipulations, he didn’t really know what he was thinking. And I don’t think Leslie was exactly sane at that point, either. He was shutting himself down bit by bit, trying to save his mind, trying to avoid seeing what it was that the other AIs had seen.

“So Justinian began flying towards the source of the trouble. He was going to land there in a flier that was carrying the most powerful AI remaining on the planet-Leslie. We had to stop him. We held an emergency conference on what to do. It turned out there was no choice: I was the only one that could reach him in time. As it was, I had to take the shuttle practically up into orbit so as to intercept him. I burned a path down through the atmosphere, just in time to make it onto his flier.

“I know what I said earlier, about the mind dramatizing events, but I know what I saw on that ship, and I’m certain of this. There were definitely more Schrödinger boxes than ever before. They were sleeting through that ship. Leslie was looking at me all the time I was speaking to Justinian. That robot was trying to tell me something; it was putting ideas in my head. Don’t ask me how. Body language, telepathy? Oh, you’re a member of Social Care; you know how it’s done. But I was speaking to Justinian and the robot was looking straight at me and I looked at the cubes, and that’s when I started to think about their shape, because of course they weren’t cubes. They were trapezoidal. They looked like sweet corn. Leslie was staring at the cubes, looking at the sweet corn that the baby was having for dinner. You know, I swear that robot served up sweet corn deliberately, just to lead me to the conclusion it wanted me to reach. I knew what those cubes were.”

“What?” Judy asked. “What?”

David licked his lips. “I need to explain. Look, you know how plants have evolved to use their environment in order to propagate? Sycamores use the wind to spread their seeds. Flowers attract insects to spread their pollen. Apple trees grow fruit that is intended to be eaten by animals, then they use the animal’s digestive system to spread their seeds. Even venumbs have adapted. Look at the spider bush.

“Well, what if there was a plant which found its niche at the very basic level? Say it found a way to tap into quantum effects. Somehow-don’t ask me how. Its seed could move like the photon through the twin slits experiment, its position only being fixed by observation. Then, when the seed was fixed in place, it would germinate. Just like a seed won’t grow until it has the right soil, these wouldn’t grow unless the right level of intelligence existed in their surroundings. What if somewhere out there in M32 there is a plant that has learned to use intelligence to aid in its growth? If there are no intelligent observers, the seeds just blow through. But if there are…they get fixed in place, and they begin to grow…”

Schummel’s voice trailed off. He was gazing into space, thinking.

“Begin to grow into what?” Judy asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know. But the AIs on Gateway obviously didn’t like what they saw. They committed suicide rather than allow more seeds to germinate. Maybe the growth was exponential. Maybe the more intelligent the observer, the more developed the growth. Does this sound far-fetched? Have you ever stood in a meadow on a summer’s day? Have you ever suffered from hay fever? Have you ever thought about the myriad seeds just sleeting through the air above the grass? What if plants could exploit space in that way?”

He looked at Judy. “Do you understand? Do you believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you,” Judy whispered. She was thinking of the purple venumb that had stood in Peter Onethirteen’s apartment. The one that had fallen to Earth.

“But where do the plants come from?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Were they deliberately made, or did they naturally evolve? Are they like the venumbs: a result of out of control symbiosis? I have no idea.”

Judy turned to her friend. “Frances, what do you think?”

“I’m not sure. The Watcher believes there is life elsewhere. It believes it is a descendant of ET life, and yet…Where is the evidence? We have searched long and hard and found nothing. Maybe this is why: these plants are what destroyed intelligent life elsewhere. Was that deliberate? We don’t know. The very tool that makes us powerful is intelligence, and yet that is the very thing we cannot use to study our greatest threat. Every mind that is turned to contemplate these plants commits suicide.”

Judy turned back to David. “So that is why the Watcher has kept what happened on Gateway a secret.”

David gave a bitter laugh. “No. I don’t think so. There is more to it than that. The Watcher, the EA-they trade on trust. They want us to believe in them, in their capacity to look after us. But there is more. You didn’t see the way that robot played with Justinian on the flier. I wanted to take the baby to safety, but the robot wouldn’t let me. It hinted; it played on Justinian’s fears for his son’s safety; it made him angry so that he couldn’t think straight. And all so that it could keep the baby on board the ship.”

His voice, his voice that had started as a murmur and increased in volume as his speech went on, was now raised in anger. It cracked as he began to shout.

“Haven’t you realized? Justinian wasn’t the one the AIs wanted on that planet. It was the baby! All that nonsense about Justinian’s name being in the memories of the AI pods was just misdirection! The pods pretended they wanted Justinian, and then played with him to get him to bring the baby, too! I said it took intelligence to fix a seed in place. How much intelligence? How much human intelligence? When does it develop? All that maneuvering so they could get a baby at the right age to Gateway and watch as its mind developed to just the right point.

“Back then on the flier, as soon as the baby had fixed that cube in position by looking at it, Leslie got me off that ship. I saw Justinian fly off to his death, and I listened in to what happened. They deafened him, blinded him, flayed him alive. Leslie, the EA, the Watcher, all of them sent Justinian to his death, and all so they could measure the extent of the influence of intelligence on the plant.”

He slammed a pitiful fist down and shouted with the last of his cracked voice.

“And that’s not all. What about the baby? It was left to die!”

David Schummel began to cry.

“That’s what I think of the Watcher. That’s what I think of Social Care. To it, we are all expedient. When it comes to the crunch, it will sacrifice us all, just like the Watcher sacrificed a fifteen-month-old child!”