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.”
“ Youcomplain to meabout 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.