stretches silver curves lay over pewter, then jet black. The floor had been chipped to a texture that made for a good grip underfoot. The tight curve of Mercury meant that the most distant overhead lights merged into a single bar of light. It was as if they could see the arc of the planet, which Wahram found vaguely encouraging. He was finding the idea of thirty-three kilometers a day, for more than forty days in a row, daunting. Must recall they were down around the forty-fifth latitude south here, so the distance was not as far as it would have been if they were on the equator. Sometimes Terminator’s tracks went even farther south, as he recalled. Things could be worse.
S o. Walk for an hour, in a tunnel that changed very little, and only in iterative ways. Stop, sit on the ground, rest for a while; then walk an hour more. At the end of three hours, stop and eat. Already that interval felt very long, something like a week or more in ordinary human time, in the time of thinking. But they did that three times before stopping to eat a larger meal, then slept for eight or nine hours.
Hour, hour, hour; hour, hour, hour; hour, hour, hour.
The sensation of lengthening time grew very strong in Wahram. Why it should feel so long was hard to tell; the repetition of the elements of the day he would have thought might streamline and thus speed the hours; but no. Instead it was protraction, a very pronounced feeling of protraction. At the end of each day, as he settled down, footsore and exhausted, to sleep, he could stretch out on his air mattress and say, “One down, thirty-seven to go,” or even “thirty-three to go,” and feel a little stab of despair. Every hour felt like a week! Could they endure it?
The sunwalkers usually hiked a bit ahead, and by the time Wahram and Swan joined them at a stop, they were always prepping tea. Then, well before Wahram was ready to get up and go again, the young ferals were off, almost apologetically, with a nod and a wave. His days, therefore, were spent mostly with Swan.
She was clearly not happy at the prospect of this hike, even though it was her idea. She was doing it only because the alternative was worse, in her estimation. It was something to be endured, in misery mute or voluble. Some days she went ahead, some days fell behind. “I’m going to get sick at some point,” she said once. It became clear to Wahram that she liked the situation even less than he did-far less than he did, as she told him herself. She hated it, she said; suffered from claustrophobia; could not stand to be indoors; needed copious daily sunlight; needed lots of variety in her daily routines and in her sensory stimuli. These were necessities, she told Wahram, and in no uncertain terms. “This is so horrible,” she exclaimed often, making the word an emphatic three syllables with fore and aft stresses. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. I won’t be able to make it.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” Wahram would suggest.
“How can I? It’s horrrr-i-bull.”
Endless repetition of these points would still occupy only the first hour of their twelve-hour day of walking and rests. After such a first hour, Wahram would usually decide it was appropriate to point out that they would need to talk about something else if they were to avoid undue repetition stress on both their parts.
“Tired of me already?” Swan concluded from these observations.
“Not at all. Vastly entertained. Even interested. But this motif, of the unhappy voyage of necessity, it’s limited. It’s played out. I want a different story.”
“That’s lucky for you, because I was going to change the subject.”
“Lucky for me indeed.”
She trudged on ahead of him. There was no reason to hurry to say the next thing; they had all day. Wahram watched her walk ahead of him: her stride was graceful and long, she was in her home g and sinuous, efficient. Very quickly she could get well ahead of him. She did not seem ill yet. From behind he sometimes heard her having conversations with her qube. For whatever reason, she had shifted Pauline’s voice to exterior audibility; maybe she was keeping that little promise to him. The conversations between the two almost always sounded like arguments; Swan’s voice was clearer and more hectoring, but Pauline’s alto, slightly muffled by Swan’s own skin, was somehow mulishly contentious as well. Depending on how one programmed them, qubes could be real fiends for argument, quibblers to the highest degree. Once Wahram caught up enough to be able to eavesdrop on them, and came in on something that had been going on for a while; Swan was saying, “Poor Pauline, if I were you I would be so sad! I feel so sorry for you! It must feel terrible to be nothing but a packet of algorithms!”
Pauline said, “This is the rhetorical device called anacoenesis, in which one pretends to put oneself in the place of one’s opponent.”
“No, not at all,” Swan assured her. “I really am sympathetic. To be so few qubits, to be just algorithms grinding it out. I mean considering that, you do very well.”
Pauline said, “This is the rhetorical device called synchoresis, in which one makes a concession before renewing the assault.”
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t really know why I thought you were stupid, given the huge power of these arguments of yours. And yet-”
“This is both sarcasm and aporia in the bad sense I mentioned before, of a momentary expression of doubt, often faked, before renewing the attack.”
“And this is the defense called casuistry, where when you’ve got nothing you retreat into a cloud of verbiage. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s just smart consciousness and stupid consciousness. That would explain a lot.”
Pauline did not seem to be deterred. “Happy to submit our speech acts to a double-blind study to see if any distinctions at all can be made between yours and mine.”
“Really?” Swan said. “Are you saying you can pass a Turing test?”
“It depends who’s asking the questions.”
Swan laughed scornfully, but she really was amused, Wahram could hear it. So at least the qube was good for that.
T he two of them swapped the lead every half hour, just to mark time and change the view, such as it was. They did not always talk; it would have been impossible, he thought. In any case they hiked in silence for many minutes at a time. Over them the tunnel lights seemed to move independently backward, as if they walked at the top of a vast Ferris wheel, and only just kept pace with the backward sweep of the wheel. At the end of an hour Wahram’s feet were sore, and he was happy to sit down. They used their aerogel sleeping pads as cushions to sit on. Meals came from foil envelopes found in the emergency gear at the stations, and were bland for the most part. After a while they mostly only wanted to drink water, though there were some powders to mix in if one wanted.
In general their rests were about half an hour long. Any longer and Wahram began to stiffen up, and Swan became fretful. And the sunwalkers would get too far ahead. So Wahram would heave himself to his feet and take off again. “Do you think any of these stations have walking poles in them?”
“I doubt it. We can look at the next one. Maybe something could be used as canes.”
A fter a time of silence she would sometimes snap. “All right tell me something! Tell me about yourself! What’s your first memory?”
“I don’t know,” Wahram said, trying to locate it.
“My first memory,” she said, “comes from a time that my parents tell me I was three. My parents were part of a house that decided to move to the other side of the city. I think we were trading places north to south, in order to look at the other half of the countryside as we passed by it. Or maybe they just told me that. So a bunch of carts were there, and both houses were moving stuff back and forth. Everything my family owned could fit on the back of one battery cart and two handcarts. My mother took me back inside when the place was emptied, and it scared me. I think that’s why I remember it. My room looked much smaller when it was empty, and that seemed backward and scared me, like the world had shrunk. We fill rooms to make them bigger. Then we went back outside, and the other image that sticks with me, along with the empty room, was all the stuff in the bed of the cart, and everyone standing by it at the curb, under a set of trees. Above some trees I could see the Dawn Wall.”
She hiked on for a time in silence, and Wahram felt the empty grumble in his stomach that marked another mealtime’s approach.
“By now that’s all burned down,” she said.
But now her voice was unusually calm. She was no longer grieving in the same way, it seemed.
“When the sun got high enough that the city was out of the shade of the Dawn Wall,” she added, “it would go quick.”
“I know the tracks don’t melt on the brightside,” Wahram said. “Anything else?”
“The city infrastructure will be fine,” she conceded. “The shell. Some metals, ceramics, mixes of the two. Glassy metals. And then just ordinary tempered steel, stainless steel. Austenite steel. We’ll see. I suppose it will be interesting to see what it looks like when night falls on it again. Everything will have burned away except the frame,
