2312

Wahram and Swan

Although no doubt they were simply the result of an engineering response to an engineering problem, regarded as an aesthetic matter the Mercurial launching gyres were interesting. A maglev tube twisted in a cone set on its point, increasing in size as it rose. The tip of the cone was secured to a platform that moved in a circle, about the size of the widest part of the cone. The movement of the platform exaggerated very effectively the force of acceleration on the ferries as they were being magnetically thrown up the tube. Thus the ferry they were in had them seated sideways to the ground, but as it careened around and up, their floor became most definitely down, and then with dizzying speed they were launched into space, going so fast that if there had been an atmosphere they would have burned to a crisp the moment they left the tube. The effect as seen from the spaceport resembled some kind of antique carnival ride. From inside the ferry it proved to be a quite serious acceleration, very near the maximum allowed in commercial travel, which was 3.5 g.

Swan Er Hong had strapped herself into the seat beside Wahram just before takeoff, grimacing apologetically at the cliché of her lateness. Now she leaned toward him to look out the little window at the rapidly receding craterscape of her home world. Quickly the land changed from a plane to a ball, a thin crescent of it bathed in sunlight, the gibbous nightside black. Mercury was an interesting place, but Wahram was not unhappy to leave; despite the locals’ best efforts to spruce it up with art, the landscape was a cindery clinker. And the truth was that when he was inside its marvelous gliding city, the sudden blink of illumination on high points to the west always reminded him of the sun, following them relentlessly, always about to burst over the horizon and torch everything.

Their ferry was going to catch the terrarium Alfred Wegener, which was moving so fast that the ferry would have to make another long three-g burn to catch up. During this time, Wahram shifted his seat into bed mode and endured like everyone else. Across the room Swan groaned and curled around herself on her bed. Wahram forbade himself to think about the studies that had been made on the effect of g-forces on the human brain, delicate goo that it was, trapped without much padding inside its hard prison walls. Then the Wegener caught them and reeled them in with a final little squish of g, as if to emphasize the problem.

After that Wahram and the other passengers had to adjust to the sudden weightlessness, and pull themselves from the ferry into the terrarium’s dock, then through the neck and down broad padded stairs to the cylinder floor.

The interior space in the Wegener was pretty substantial, about twenty kilometers long and five across, spun to a one-g equivalent. The great majority of the interior space was park, with a few small towns scattered mostly fore and aft. The mix of savanna and pampas was very attractive, Wahram thought as he walked toward the first village, looking up at the land overhead. Grass prairie and patches of forest arched like a giant Sistine Chapel overhead, a Sistine on which Michelangelo had painted a version of Eden—a savanna, the first human landscape, appealing to something very deep in the mind. Although terrarium topology always made Wahram feel as if he were inside a map that had been rolled into a tube. As one looked along the longitude line one occupied, the land always appeared as a long U-valley, with nearby trees topped by higher, more distant trees, tilting toward the valley bottom in a curve of ever-steepening parkland, up to vertical side walls, as in certain great glacial U-valleys—but then the walls continued up and folded over, breaking past verticality in a manner very distinct to the eye. Above that line the landscape was simply overhead, and quite undeniably upside down. As now, for instance, when beyond a cloud he saw the tops of a sheet of flocking birds, flying over the surface of a lake hanging directly over his head.

Wahram went to a little Saturn House in the first town, called Plum Lake, and checked in. They kept a restaurant in the ground floor, so he signed up for kitchen duties (he liked all the simplest chores), and after showering he took a walk around the town. It was a handsome place, with a lakefront and a hill, and a tram station at its eastern end. Trams ran through parkland to the other towns. The central plaza was full of Venusians, presumably on their way home: tall broad-shouldered young Chinese, for the most part, with intent eyes and big smiles. They were working on Venus hip deep in dry ice, doing dangerous things. Wahram engaged in similar work when he was home on Titan, but Titan had only .14 g, and this had often saved him from little accidents; Venus, at .9 g, impressed him as dangerous.

At the edge of town he came to a line of trees and a fence. He signed in at a little kiosk and read on a plaque that his new acquaintance Swan Er Hong had designed the biome here some seventy years before. This was a surprise; he had heard she had once been a designer, but she had shown no interest in the Wegener when they arrived.

Wahram took a little stun gun out of a box of them, put it in the pocket of his coat, and let himself through the gate into the park. He walked at an angle up the curve of the land. The soil was a thick black loam, with a mixed Tanzanian and Argentinian provenance, he had read at the kiosk. A stand of broad-topped acacia trees showed signs of elephant damage on their trunks. Treetops directly overhead looked like round bumps of lichen. Tall clumps of grass obscured the view beyond his immediate locality; one could see more up where the park curved over the nearby treetops. Up to his left, over the trees, a little knoll of rocks looked like a good lookout; although of course that might have occurred to a puma or a hyena, so he was careful as he approached. Most animals were wary of humans, but he didn’t want to surprise anybody. You don’t need danger to get your thrills, his mother used to tell him. That would be decadent, and I don’t like decadence! The rest of his parents had not been so judgmental, perhaps considering that as they were all living around Saturn, their take on danger might be skewed. But his mother had made her point, and Wahram was not decadent; he was continually shocked by the new; and now his heart was pounding a little.

The knoll was empty, however. The rocks were spotted with actual lichen, as if sprayed with a surfacing of semiprecious stones, yellow and red and pale green. He crouched in a crack and had a look around.

There were a mother cheetah and two cubs, below him in clumps of bunchgrass. The mother’s attention was focused on some pampas deer grazing in the mid-distance. Wahram wondered what pampas deer made of cheetahs—whether there had been any predator that fast in South America. It seemed unlikely.

He felt lucky to see cheetahs on their feet, as it seemed they were usually asleep. It looked like this mother was trying to teach her cubs how to hunt; she squashed one down with a forepaw to get it to flatten. The chiral wind was rushing down from the left, so he was crosswind to the cats; they would not smell him. Or so it seemed, although in fact many animals’ senses were so sharp as to make humans seem deaf and dumb.

He settled down to watch. The cubs, still brindled, were looking confused, as if they didn’t even comprehend the concept of a lesson. They batted each other still, as if wanting to play. The peak point of brain growth was also the peak point of playfulness.

They were downwind of the deer, who looked unruffled and were coming their way. The mama cheetah crouched in the grass, and now her cubs were doing likewise, their tails twitching uncontrollably.

Then the mama was off in a burst of grass blades, and the cubs bounded after. The deer dashed away in great pronging leaps, leaving the cheetahs in the dust; but then the deer had to diverge around some trees, and the mother cheetah intercepted the last deer in one group and knocked it over in a tangle of fur that ended with her on top, teeth sunk in the spine at the deer’s neck, holding on. The deer heaved up a little and then was still. The sight of blood was its usual red shock. The cubs arrived late, and Wahram wondered if their lesson had taught them anything but the need to grow up, the need to run fast.

He found he was standing. And now, looking left at some motion, he saw another person: Swan. Surprised, he waved to her, and she lifted her chin as she continued to watch the cheetah kill. The mother was now teaching the kittens how to eat a deer, not that they needed much instruction there. Wahram surveyed the scene. The lit part of the sunline was now far toward the fore end of the terrarium, its light slanting back with a sunset tint. Masses of grass clumps waved in the wind. It felt like an ancient moment.

Swan walked over to him and ascended the knoll. It was going to be a little embarrassing to be found out here alone, which in some parks was not legal, and in general was not considered prudent. Then again, here she was too.

He nodded his greeting, formal but not unfriendly. “Unusual luck to see such a thing,” he remarked as she approached.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you out here alone?”

“I am. And you?”

“Alone, yes.” She was looking at him curiously. “I’m surprised to find you out here, I must confess. I didn’t know you liked this kind of thing.”

“Mercury isn’t really where you would find out.”

She gestured at the cats. “You aren’t worried?”

“They’re scared of people, I find.”

“Well, but if they’re hungry…”

“But they never are, that’s the thing. There’s so much easy prey.”

“That’s true. But if they have never run into people before, they’ll just think of you as a kind of chimp. Very tasty, no doubt. A delicacy. You hear of it happening. They have no experience of being hunted.”

“I’m aware we could be prey,” Wahram said. “I carry a little stunner just in case. Don’t you?”

“I don’t,” she admitted after a pause. “I mean, sometimes I do, but mostly to avoid spending a night in jail.”

“Indeed.”

She tilted her head, as if listening to a voice in her ear. She had had her qube implanted, Alex had told him, back when the idea was fashionable. “Speaking of eating,” she said, “shall we get something?”

“My pleasure.”

They returned to the perimeter fence. When they reached it, they found a little group at the kiosk; these people saw Swan and crowded around her, greeted her cheerfully. “What do you think?” they asked her. “How do you like it now that it’s all grown up?”

“It’s looking good,” she told them in a reassuring tone. “We saw a cheetah take down a pampas deer. I thought maybe there were too many deer, actually, what’s that about?”

One of the group said deer were high because cats were still low, and Swan asked some questions about that. Wahram gathered that predator-prey populations went up and down in sine wave patterns tied together, and predators moved up or down a quarter of a cycle behind prey; there were further complications that Wahram couldn’t follow from what they were saying.

When Swan was done with her conversation, she led him along the street back to the town.

“So they knew you designed this terrarium,” Wahram said as they walked.

“Yes, I’m surprised anyone remembers. I hardly do myself.”

“So you were an ecologist?”

“A designer. It was a long time ago. I don’t like a lot of what I did, to tell the truth. These Ascensions are too much. We need all the terraria to be conserving species gone on Earth. I don’t know what I was thinking. But I wouldn’t say that to the people who live here. They’re into this, it’s their place.”

They hiked up the curve of the cylinder several degrees. A cloud they had seen overhead at sunset, hugging the land above like an orange shawl, had come round the cylinder and now immersed them in a diffuse fog. Things lost their shadows in the misty twilight, and the land above went invisible, the few lights on the other side like blurred stars. It seemed a different world now, an outie rather than an innie.

Wahram explained that he had signed up to run dishwashers in the Saturnian restaurant, so they made their back to the Saturn House in Plum Lake and ate there. Swan hadn’t signed up for any work; she seldom did, she said. As they sat there she grew quiet and distracted, looked out the window, then around the room, always moving just a little, tapping a foot, rubbing fingertips together. They ate and she went completely silent. No doubt she was still grieving for Alex. Wahram, often pierced by the thought of the loss himself, could only wordlessly sympathize; but then she tilted her head to the side and said, “Quit talking to me, I don’t want to hear you.”

“What’s that?” Wahram said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m talking to my qube.”

“Can you make it so that it speaks aloud?”

“Of course,” Swan said. “Pauline, you can speak up.”

A voice coming from the right side of Swan’s head said, “I am Pauline, Swan’s faithful quantum computer.” It sounded like Swan’s voice, except, as it was projected from speaker buds in her skin, a little muffled.

Swan made a face and began to spoon soup into her mouth. Nonplussed, Wahram focused on eating. Then Swan snapped, “Well then you talk to him!”

The voice from the side of her head said, “I understand you are traveling to the Jupiter system.”

“Yes,” Wahram said warily. If Swan had just assigned her qube to do her talking for her, that did not seem like a good thing. But he wasn’t sure that was what was happening.

“What kind of artificial intelligence are you?” he asked.

“I am a quantum computer, model Ceres 2196a.”

“I see.”

“She is one of the first and weakest of the qubes,” Swan said. “A feeb.”

Wahram pondered this. Asking How smart are you? was probably never a polite thing. Besides, no one was ever very good at making such an assessment. “What do you like to think about?” he asked instead.

Pauline said, “I am designed for informative conversation, but I cannot usually pass a Turing test. Would you like to play chess?”

He laughed. “No.”

Swan was looking out the window. Wahram considered her, went back to focusing on his meal. It took a lot of rice to dilute the fiery chilies in the dish.

Swan muttered bitterly to herself, “You insist on interfering, you insist on talking, you insist on pretending that everything is normal.”

The qube voice said, “Anaphora is one of the weakest rhetorical devices, really nothing more than redundancy.”

“You complain to me about redundancy? How many times did you parse that sentence, ten trillion?”

“It did not take that many times.”

Silence. Both of them appeared to be done with speech.

“Do you study rhetoric?” Wahram asked.

The qube voice said, “Yes, it is a useful analytic tool.”

“Give me an example, please.”

“When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.”

Swan snorted at this. “How so, Socrates?”

“ ‘Exergasia’ means ‘use of different phrases to express the same idea,’ ‘synathroesmus’ means ‘accumulation by enumeration,’ and ‘incrementum’ means ‘piling up points to make an argument.’ So listing them does all three, yes?”

“And what argument would you be piling up points in?” Swan asked.

“That I was giving you too much credit in thinking you were using many different devices, when really you only have the one method, because these are distinctions without a difference.”

“Ha-ha,” Swan said sarcastically.

But Wahram had only just kept himself from laughing.

The qube went on: “One could also argue that the classical system of rhetoric is a false taxonomy, a kind of fetishism—”

“Enough!”

The silence stretched on.

“I’m going to help in the kitchen,” Wahram said, and got up.

After a while she followed him in and emptied dishwashers next to the window, looking out at the fog. There was a bottle of wine and she poured a glass. The wet clank of kitchen work always struck him as a kind of music.

“Say something!” she commanded at one point.

“I’m thinking about those cheetahs,” he said, startled, hoping she was speaking to him, even though there was no one else in the room. “Have you seen very much of them?”

No answer. They went out and washed down the tables, which took a while. Swan muttered; it sounded like she was arguing with her qube again. Once she bumped into Wahram and said, “Come on, move it! Why are you so slow?”

“Why are you so fast?”

Of course this kind of nervous rapidity was a notorious characteristic of qubeheads; but one couldn’t say that, and besides, she seemed worse than most. And possibly she was still distracted by grief and deserved a break. She did not answer him now but merely chucked away her apron and walked out into the fog. He went to the door to look after her; she veered suddenly toward a bonfire in the center of the square, around which people were dancing. When she was no more than a silhouette against the firelight, he saw her skip into the dance.

Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.

Wahram was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set of habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. That was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when one wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world.

They came a bit too often for his taste. Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long before by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror—terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost.

Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram’s desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized.

So the next morning he left the Saturn House after breakfast and walked back to the park, and at the kiosk joined a group going out to track a little elephant herd. After a while Swan too joined them, coming from farther in the park and looking a little flushed, as if she had been running. Their group had with them a device that shifted the elephants’ subsonic vocalizations up to human hearing levels, and Swan now frowned as she listened to them talking, or singing, as if she understood their language. When the elephants went silent, she asked the zoologist leading their group to explain why the sunline’s twilight had gone on so long the previous evening. Quickly Wahram gathered that this biome, being equatorial, should have had a very short twilight, as on Earth the equatorial sun dropped almost perpendicularly to the horizon, no matter the season. The zoologist, surprised that Swan had noticed, explained rather defensively that they were running an experiment that placed their terrarium at a twenty-three-degree latitude equivalent, because there were great swaths of Earth’s northern hemisphere along that latitude that were now as hot as the equator had been before Earth’s warming. Forests were turning into grassland, there was widespread desertification, so the assisted migration movement was investigating the possibility of relocating tropical semiarid populations like this one up to those latitudes. In the hope of giving them some preliminary data, the sunline regime in Wegener had been adjusted accordingly.

Swan did not look too satisfied with this explanation, and soon afterward she took off again on her own, ignoring the disappointment of the zoologist and the disapproval of some of the other guests. Wahram saw her later that evening at his restaurant; probably she too practiced some form of the pseudoiterative, as she too traveled a lot; and it was a natural human impulse. Wahram ate at the table next to hers and then went to wash dishes, and though he nodded politely to her, she did not speak. When he was done in the kitchen and went back out for a drink, she had gone. Down the street the bonfire was again burning, the dancers dancing.

So that second day had some elements of new habit; but the next afternoon the Wegener was making a close passby of Venus, using it as a gravity handle to help sling it faster out to Jupiter. Wahram took a tram forward to the bulkhead, then with the help of handholds pulled through the nearly weightless passageway to the observation room that bubbled out from the forward end of the asteroid. This chamber had a steady view of the hemisphere of stars arched over them—and there, swelling visibly ahead of them, was Venus. Wahram, who at home spent a fair bit of time in micro g like this, balanced happily with one hand holding a strap, eager to watch the second planet pass under them. Swan came in just as they made their final closing, hurrying as usual to avoid being late.

Venus’s atmosphere was now so reduced in density from its native state that it was transparent, and even though the whole planet was in the shadow of its sunshield and therefore in perpetual night, one could make out the dim white dry ice seas, and the black rock of the two continents partially blown and scraped free. Cloud patterns familiar from Earth and Mars swirled over snowy plains and the dry ice oceans, making a salt-and-pepper effect that could not be comprehended even with the most intense effort. The observation chamber rang with the sounds of excited and puzzled viewers. Black as high and white as low didn’t work very well for the human eye, and it was not that simple anyway. Even at their closest approach it was still a mess of stippling. They angled in at it and then Wegener shot by just above the atmosphere, maximizing the gravity sling. Below passed a cluster of lights that someone said was Port Elizabeth. Nearby there was a town called Billie Holliday, where Wahram had once worked in a giant waldo, covering the dry ice in the lowlands with foamed rock. Now they were doing similar things on Titan. Venus and Titan were really the best remaining candidates to join Mars as fully terraformed worlds—shirtsleeve worlds, as some called them, with free atmospheres humans could breathe. The example of Mars showed what could happen: an independent new world, free from all the troubles of the old one.

Swan was dancing by herself. “I want to go back,” she was chanting to no one in particular, or perhaps to her qube. “I want to feel the poison wind slap the poison sea.”

The Venusians had debarked before the swingby, so now Wegener was not as humanly interesting. No bonfires, no all-night dances. Wahram spent most of his days in the park; it became the heart of this particular pseudoiterative. They were trying to do a census of its birds and mammals. Often they spotted Swan out there, running by herself. She definitely slept out there, and one night in the kitchen remarked that she never slept indoors if she could avoid it, although of course the entire terrarium was indoors in a certain sense. Out in the park he saw signs that she was also trying to catch some of her food. They once found a rabbit caught in a little snare set by the creek side that spiraled through the park. This kind of thing was illegal, and, more importantly, not done. A few times they also saw the ashes of little fires, with little bones in them not fully burned. Rabbit or fawn, cooked over a little fire… One would have to keep an eye out for hyenas if one did that. Surely the excellent south Indian food in his restaurant was preferable.

Then one morning they came on Swan still crouched by her little fire, her face greasy and streaks of blood still on her hands, with a small mass of fur there between her feet. She looked up at them with a feral glare, very like the look one would have gotten from a hyena caught in the same moment, and for a long time no one knew quite what to say. Poaching was no more popular with the authorities than it had ever been, Wahram saw with a quick glance at the zoologist, although Swan would not get hung for it; and indeed, because of her founder status here, the locals, all half her age at most, were shuffling around, trying to find a way out of the situation.

“I guess this is what they meant by the phrase getting caught red-handed,” Wahram said in his most jovial voice. “But please, I want to see those elephants while I can, and they are moving away from us. I’m sure the situation here will soon revert to normal.” And he walked off in a way that shepherded his guides with him.

Better to explore the park in the other direction. Or he could track the little cheetah family. Once he saw Swan doing that too, but did not approach her. It was clear by now that she felt like being alone. In the town, if she came by his restaurant, she ate by herself. Wahram found that a little disappointing.

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental. To be out at dawn was important. The sunny point in the sunline cast shadows up the cylinder, and overhead flocks of birds flew from one lake to another. The migratory birds pretended to migrate, he was told; they took off at dawn and flew around for most of the day, then came back to where they had begun. Perhaps all his movement was a similar thing.

He went forward to the observation bubble when Wegener passed the famous asteroid Programming Error. Here one of the excavators had missed one of its commands—the AI error perhaps caused by the unlucky hit of a cosmic ray, some postulated—so that after coring its large iron-nickel asteroid and leaving the interior space floored by steel, the machinery had looped back on itself and begun to eat the remaining rock of the asteroid across the tube of the first cavity; then every time it broke through to the surface of the asteroid, it turned and dived back in, building and leaving behind more tubing as it went. After a few years it had become clear that this process was never going to stop on its own, as the entire asteroid, considerably reduced, had ended up looking like braided steel rope tied in a knot. Some advocated letting the process go on to see what would happen, but there must have been someone who hadn’t agreed with this, because an explosion with an intense electromagnetic pulse had shattered the AI and frozen the thing in the middle of a turn, leaving the excavator snout sticking out of the side like the head of a snake. Indeed at that point the asteroid was a kind of Medusa’s head, a pretzel sculpture that some considered beautiful and others horrifying, the very image of AI foolishness, or the futility of human effort.

Now Wegener flashed by it so fast that the people in the observation bubble could not blink without missing it; it grew from a dot to a basketball to a dot in the course of a single indrawn breath. There were gasps, then cheers. It was in fact a very striking accidental artwork, Wahram judged, so bulging with curves that it seemed to be still squiggling, as if the head of Ouroboros were chasing a reluctant tail, or, as it occurred to him when describing it back in the kitchen, like a tangle of Klein bottles.

The next day they flashed by another famous error, and more went forward to see this one than had seen Programming Error, which Wahram found depressing. This terrarium, Yggdrasil, had suffered a catastrophic break; an unnoticed ice-filled crack had blown open, in more of an explosion than a leak. Only a few of the inhabitants had survived, something like fifty out of three thousand. It could happen to anyone who did not live on Earth or Mars. Wahram did not care to look.