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 Wegenerpassed 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 Wegenerflashed 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.

Lists (2)

Lying naked on a block of ice under a heat lamp

Spending five hours in a spacesuit with only four hours of air

Running around Mercury on the equator

Cutting a solar system diagram into the skin of her chest with a laser knife

Falling slowly (all day) down the Great Staircase, naked, as in Duchamp

Flying in a popper up from the terminator into the light of a coronal flare, ejecting, and crash-landing on spacesuit jets only

Sitting in a chair and staring into the eyes of people who sit down across from her, for a year

Dancing on fire in a flame-resistant clear bodysuit

Rolling bowling balls down the Great Staircase from the top of the Dawn Wall, for an entire day (Pachinko Day)

Spending a week in a worm box

Hanging in an upside-down crucified position in the light of the sun when the gates of the Dawn Wall are opened

Sitting for a week in a pile of onions, peeling one after the next

Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with air but no heat, to see how long she could stay out (fourteen minutes)

Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with air but no heat, to see how long she could stay out while walking in partial sunlight and its radiative heating (sixty-one minutes)

Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with heat but only a helmet full of air, to see how long she could stay out (eight minutes)

SWAN AND A CAT

Swan got off the Wegenerfeeling embarrassed and depressed by the horrid ideas of her youth, in this case the savanna-pampas Ascension—not to mention her own poaching in same, caught red-handed indeed, the smart-ass. But then it got even worse when their taxi unloaded them into a terrarium headed Jupiterward, and it turned out to be the Pleistocene, another of her youthful indiscretions, an ice age north with any number of spavined megafauna resurrected and clomping around in pathetic mutant versions of themselves. Giant short-faced bears, looking around in openmouthed confusion—also dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, American cheetahs, mastodons, and woolly mammoths, most of them only semi-genuine revivals from ancient DNA, really synthetics, birthed from elephants or lions or Kodiak bears, and thus uneducated in the ways of their kind. It was sad. Swan cursed herself and went feral to get through the remaining week to Jupiter, and almost paid for it with her life; for one thing, it was painfully cold, and then one morning she woke up in a stupidly uncomfortable perch in a tree to find it shaking under the weight of a cat climbing it, a big cat, a who-knew-what—possibly just a mountain lion, maybe a snow leopard, it had such long fur—intent to get to her, and as it was no heavier than she was, it seemed like it could climb the tree high enough to make it happen. Maybe twelve meters to the ground, terrarium spinning at one g—for a second she cursed the long-ago shift away from Martian g in terraria, which at first had been the norm—then fear drove all thought from her head. Get out of the nest. Get higher than a cat your own weight can get: obviously a problem. She pulled herself up onto the branch over her, which pronged up much more vertically than her sleeping branch. The cat eyed her calmly, not moving yet. Topaz eyes in brindled long white fur; upper lip drawn back, teeth white and hungry. No malice in it. Up the vertical branch, feet deep in forks, painful twists to free herself, up and up. Swaying now in the canopy, all the branches around her equally thin and flexible. Some kind of oak. If she kicked it on the snout when it attacked, possibly it would miss and fall. Foreclaws would latch on to her; her kick would have to twist away—maybe up. She tried to get higher, couldn’t.