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 goodpseudoiterative, 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 Wegenerhad 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 Wegenerwas 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 Wegenershot 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 Wegenerwas 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.