At the edge of town he came to a line of trees and a fence. He signed in at a little kiosk and read on a plaque that his new acquaintance Swan Er Hong had designed the biome here some seventy years before. This was a surprise; he had heard she had once been a designer, but she had shown no interest in the Wegener when they arrived.
Wahram took a little stun gun out of a box of them, put it in the pocket of his coat, and let himself through the gate into the park. He walked at an angle up the curve of the land. The soil was a thick black loam, with a mixed Tanzanian and Argentinian provenance, he had read at the kiosk. A stand of broad-topped acacia trees showed signs of elephant damage on their trunks. Treetops directly overhead looked like round bumps of lichen. Tall clumps of grass obscured the view beyond his immediate locality; one could see more up where the park curved over the nearby treetops. Up to his left, over the trees, a little knoll of rocks looked like a good lookout; although of course that might have occurred to a puma or a hyena, so he was careful as he approached. Most animals were wary of humans, but he didn’t want to surprise anybody. You don’t need danger to get your thrills, his mother used to tell him. That would be decadent, and I don’t like decadence! The rest of his parents had not been so judgmental, perhaps considering that as they were all living around Saturn, their take on danger might be skewed. But his mother had made her point, and Wahram was not decadent; he was continually shocked by the new; and now his heart was pounding a little.
The knoll was empty, however. The rocks were spotted with actual lichen, as if sprayed with a surfacing of semiprecious stones, yellow and red and pale green. He crouched in a crack and had a look around.
There were a mother cheetah and two cubs, below him in clumps of bunchgrass. The mother’s attention was focused on some pampas deer grazing in the mid-distance. Wahram wondered what pampas deer made of cheetahs-whether there had been any predator that fast in South America. It seemed unlikely.
He felt lucky to see cheetahs on their feet, as it seemed they were usually asleep. It looked like this mother was trying to teach her cubs how to hunt; she squashed one down with a forepaw to get it to flatten. The chiral wind was rushing down from the left, so he was crosswind to the cats; they would not smell him. Or so it seemed, although in fact many animals’ senses were so sharp as to make humans seem deaf and dumb.
He settled down to watch. The cubs, still brindled, were looking confused, as if they didn’t even comprehend the concept of a lesson. They batted each other still, as if wanting to play. The peak point of brain growth was also the peak point of playfulness.
They were downwind of the deer, who looked unruffled and were coming their way. The mama cheetah crouched in the grass, and now her cubs were doing likewise, their tails twitching uncontrollably.
Then the mama was off in a burst of grass blades, and the cubs bounded after. The deer dashed away in great pronging leaps, leaving the cheetahs in the dust; but then the deer had to diverge around some trees, and the mother cheetah intercepted the last deer in one group and knocked it over in a tangle of fur that ended with her on top, teeth sunk in the spine at the deer’s neck, holding on. The deer heaved up a little and then was still. The sight of blood was its usual red shock. The cubs arrived late, and Wahram wondered if their lesson had taught them anything but the need to grow up, the need to run fast.
He found he was standing. And now, looking left at some motion, he saw another person: Swan. Surprised, he waved to her, and she lifted her chin as she continued to watch the cheetah kill. The mother was now teaching the kittens how to eat a deer, not that they needed much instruction there. Wahram surveyed the scene. The lit part of the sunline was now far toward the fore end of the terrarium, its light slanting back with a sunset tint. Masses of grass clumps waved in the wind. It felt like an ancient moment.
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.”
