“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.
H abits 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
