2312

In the pseudoiterative, one performs the ritual of the day attentive to both the joy of the familiar and the shiver of the accidental. To be out at dawn was important. The sunny point in the sunline cast shadows up the cylinder, and overhead flocks of birds flew from one lake to another. The migratory birds pretended to migrate, he was told; they took off at dawn and flew around for most of the day, then came back to where they had begun. Perhaps all his movement was a similar thing.

He went forward to the observation bubble when Wegener passed the famous asteroid Programming Error. Here one of the excavators had missed one of its commands-the AI error perhaps caused by the unlucky hit of a cosmic ray, some postulated-so that after coring its large iron-nickel asteroid and leaving the interior space floored by steel, the machinery had looped back on itself and begun to eat the remaining rock of the asteroid across the tube of the first cavity; then every time it broke through to the surface of the asteroid, it turned and dived back in, building and leaving behind more tubing as it went. After a few years it had become clear that this process was never going to stop on its own, as the entire asteroid, considerably reduced, had ended up looking like braided steel rope tied in a knot. Some advocated letting the process go on to see what would happen, but there must have been someone who hadn’t agreed with this, because an explosion with an intense electromagnetic pulse had shattered the AI and frozen the thing in the middle of a turn, leaving the excavator snout sticking out of the side like the head of a snake. Indeed at that point the asteroid was a kind of Medusa’s head, a pretzel sculpture that some considered beautiful and others horrifying, the very image of AI foolishness, or the futility of human effort.

Now Wegener flashed by it so fast that the people in the observation bubble could not blink without missing it; it grew from a dot to a basketball to a dot in the course of a single indrawn breath. There were gasps, then cheers. It was in fact a very striking accidental artwork, Wahram judged, so bulging with curves that it seemed to be still squiggling, as if the head of Ouroboros were chasing a reluctant tail, or, as it occurred to him when describing it back in the kitchen, like a tangle of Klein bottles.

The next day they flashed by another famous error, and more went forward to see this one than had seen Programming Error, which Wahram found depressing. This terrarium, Yggdrasil, had suffered a catastrophic break; an unnoticed ice-filled crack had blown open, in more of an explosion than a leak. Only a few of the inhabitants had survived, something like fifty out of three thousand. It could happen to anyone who did not live on Earth or Mars. Wahram did not care to look.

Lists (2)

Lying naked on a block of ice under a heat lamp Spending five hours in a spacesuit with only four hours of air Running around Mercury on the equator Cutting a solar system diagram into the skin of her chest with a laser knife Falling slowly (all day) down the Great Staircase, naked, as in Duchamp Flying in a popper up from the terminator into the light of a coronal flare, ejecting, and crash-landing on spacesuit jets only Sitting in a chair and staring into the eyes of people who sit down across from her, for a year Dancing on fire in a flame-resistant clear bodysuit Rolling bowling balls down the Great Staircase from the top of the Dawn Wall, for an entire day (Pachinko Day) Spending a week in a worm box Hanging in an upside-down crucified position in the light of the sun when the gates of the Dawn Wall are opened Sitting for a week in a pile of onions, peeling one after the next Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with air but no heat, to see how long she could stay out (fourteen minutes) Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with air but no heat, to see how long she could stay out while walking in partial sunlight and its radiative heating (sixty-one minutes) Leaving shelter in a spacesuit with heat but only a helmet full of air, to see how long she could stay out (eight minutes)

SWAN AND A CAT