2312

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.”

“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.