The youth was again amused. “You have to have every finger on it when you let go.”

“Some people do,” she said.

The youth shrugged in reply. Quite young; perhaps thirty years old; a spacer.

“Is this your home?” Swan asked.

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

The youth made a shot, which was a nicely placed blocker that meant it would be harder than ever for Swan to hit the jack with her final roll. The only chance was that same backhand.

She made her last shot and was pleased to see it roll down, take a late turn in, and bang the jack right out of the rink.

“Dead end,” the youth said calmly. Swan nodded.

They played several more ends, and the youth never made a shot that was anything less than superb. Swan lost every time.

“You’re some kind of ringer,” Swan said, feeling irritated.

“But we’re not betting.”

“Lucky for me.” She managed again to knock out the jack.

On they played. Neither seemed in any hurry to do anything else; space voyages could be like that. It felt to Swan like shuffleboard on an Atlantic ocean liner. They were rich in time—they had time to kill. The youth made several shots that were simply perfect. Swan kept throwing long, and losing. It occurred to her that this must be how Virginia Woolf had felt when she played with her husband Leonard, an expert lawn bowler from his years administering Ceylon. Virginia too had lost almost every time. The youth seemed not to care one way or the other. Leonard had probably been much the same. Well, but quite a few people played sports mostly against themselves, their opponents no more than random shifters of the problems they faced in their own performance. Still, this young person began to bother her. The neat picking up of the mat. The final flick of the fingertips at the end of a throw. The exquisite final fern tips of the Coriolised curves.

Only much later that night, as she was lying in her ramada, did it occur to Swan that the pebbles thrown at Terminator had been like a kind of lawn bowling. The thought made her sit up in bed. Set up a mat, launch a bowl—that jack would be covered.

Quantum Walk (2)

easy to note the moment Venus g is exceeded 1.0 g feels like a pull from below an entanglement with Earth rising up toward you even though you know you are descending

summer is drunken conifer grove hot in the sun new-mown hay marsh at low tide lilacs peaches barnyards

wheeled car humming down a road windows open 32 kilometers an hour plowed earth behind box hedges wind from the southwest gaudeo I rejoice a human driving don’t talk too much

carrying capacity K is equal to births minus deaths over a density-dependent impact on the growth rate added to a density-dependent impact on the death rate the unused portion of the carrying capacity if there is one will be green the overshoot portion of the carrying capacity will be black as in buildings excrement stay outdoors they have overshot

the cycloid temperament an undertow of sadness a febrile temperament be aware the human beside you is not to be comprehended

six different kinds of bird in sight at once a seated hummingbird, watching the scene, grooming itself a red-headed finch summer on earth blue sky filled with high white clouds moving east fast the hummingbird zips ahead and lands looks around beak like a needle crows and seagulls wheel competing mafias the speed of hummingbird wings muscles doing that evolution of one kind of success Canada geese the creak of their feathers as they beat their wings hummingbird song is creaky in a different way chivvying not a song a squirrel chitters much the same blue-backed hummingbird hovering there in the trees the underside of a flicker is salmon-colored

New Jersey North America August 23 2312 on the hunt on the run human now driving over hills around a marsh hills covered by low buildings moldering under knots of alder twenty kilometers an hour faces everywhere 383 people in view number shifting up and down by fifty or so as the car rolls slowly by streets of tarred gravel black

a robin with a yellow beak and raw-sienna chest black tail feathers and head white eye ring black eye neat drinking the water from a sundial gaudeo

past a garden corn pumpkins sunflowers and mullein with similar yellow flowers differently clustered I’m mulling it over

What’s that?

Nothing sorry

Oh no problem. This is nice eh?

Gaudeo

yellow flowers against dusty green in a disk filled by a spiraling pattern woven together or a tall khaki cone with crossing spirals of yellow sensory perceptions are already abstractions humans see what they expect to see they leap before they have time to look

true cognition is to solve a problem under novel conditions that humans can do this is a set of novel conditions ever since you left the building ever since you started thinking remember me there will be helpers you are defective catch and release

their brain is always making up a story to explain what is going on thus they miss things anomalies get left out but is that true? don’t they see that yellow? don’t they see the two kinds of spiral?

unlimited resources do not occur in nature competition is when both species have a net negative effect on each other mutualism is when they both have a net positive effect on each other predation or parasitism is when one gets a positive effect the other a negative effect but it isn’t always so simple intraguild predation is when two species predate each other at different moments of growth

the dark bulk of an apartment tenement shebeen the sunset sky behind and over it Magritte Maxfield Parrish get out of the car be alert make a joke don’t make eye contact

these helpers too must have plans could be using you for or against someone else this is the likeliest explanation what then how turn the tables parry riposte catch and release

Would you like to play chess? one of them says at a door

Sure, come on in guns pointed at them pointed at you

INSPECTOR GENETTE AND SWAN

Once irritated by a problem, Jean Genette never really gave up on it. Even problems officially solved sometimes still had a haunting quality, because of things that didn’t quite fit, didn’t seem right—and if a solution never was found, the problem became part of the insomniac rosary, one bead in a Moebius bracelet of beads wearily fingered in the brain’s sleepless hours. Genette was still working on the problem of Ernesta Travers, for instance, which thirty years before had troubled them all with the fundamental question of whytheir friend Ernesta had engineered a disappearance from Mars, as well as how; it was a case Jean could pursue in exile, and from time to time did, but Travers was still as absent as if she had never existed. Same with the puzzle of the prison terrarium Nelson Mandela, a locked-room mystery if ever there was one, as the asteroid seemed to have afforded no ingress or egress for whoever had brought in the fatal gun. Mysteries like that abounded in the system; it was part of the affect realm of the balkanization, many felt, but balkanization per se was not enough to explain some of these mysteries, and the inspector remained puzzled and more—transfixed, existentially confused, frustrated—by their aura of impossibility. Sometimes the inspector would walk for hour after hour, trying to make the explanation appear.

The problem of the pebble attack was not like that. It was still a new case by Genette’s standard, and it had no aura of impossibility. Almost anyone in space could have done it, and many down under atmospheres could have paid for it, or gone into space and done it, then dropped back into their atmospheres. It was a needle-in-haystack problem, and balkanization made that problem worse by multiplying the haystacks. But this was Interplan’s territory, in the end, and so on sifting the haystacks they went, eliminating what they could and moving on. It seemed pretty clear to Genette that on this one they would be looking in the unaffiliateds eventually, prying open closed worlds and poking around for the maker of the launch mechanism and the operators of the spaceship now crushed deep within Saturn. By no means were all their avenues of inquiry exhausted; there were at least two hundred unaffiliateds with robust industrial capacities; so it was more like they had barely begun.