2312

Swan got off the Wegener feeling embarrassed and depressed by the horrid ideas of her youth, in this case the savanna-pampas Ascension-not to mention her own poaching in same, caught red-handed indeed, the smart-ass. But then it got even worse when their taxi unloaded them into a terrarium headed Jupiterward, and it turned out to be the Pleistocene, another of her youthful indiscretions, an ice age north with any number of spavined megafauna resurrected and clomping around in pathetic mutant versions of themselves. Giant short-faced bears, looking around in openmouthed confusion-also dire wolves, saber-toothed tigers, American cheetahs, mastodons, and woolly mammoths, most of them only semi-genuine revivals from ancient DNA, really synthetics, birthed from elephants or lions or Kodiak bears, and thus uneducated in the ways of their kind. It was sad. Swan cursed herself and went feral to get through the remaining week to Jupiter, and almost paid for it with her life; for one thing, it was painfully cold, and then one morning she woke up in a stupidly uncomfortable perch in a tree to find it shaking under the weight of a cat climbing it, a big cat, a who-knew-what-possibly just a mountain lion, maybe a snow leopard, it had such long fur-intent to get to her, and as it was no heavier than she was, it seemed like it could climb the tree high enough to make it happen. Maybe twelve meters to the ground, terrarium spinning at one g-for a second she cursed the long-ago shift away from Martian g in terraria, which at first had been the norm-then fear drove all thought from her head. Get out of the nest. Get higher than a cat your own weight can get: obviously a problem. She pulled herself up onto the branch over her, which pronged up much more vertically than her sleeping branch. The cat eyed her calmly, not moving yet. Topaz eyes in brindled long white fur; upper lip drawn back, teeth white and hungry. No malice in it. Up the vertical branch, feet deep in forks, painful twists to free herself, up and up. Swaying now in the canopy, all the branches around her equally thin and flexible. Some kind of oak. If she kicked it on the snout when it attacked, possibly it would miss and fall. Foreclaws would latch on to her; her kick would have to twist away-maybe up. She tried to get higher, couldn’t.

She was on the Pleistocene. She carried a stun gun.

But she had left it in the nest. “Shit.”

The cat began to shift onto Swan’s branch. Quite a weight to sway it that much.

“Pauline, any suggestions here?”

“Scare it,” Pauline said. “Adrenalate fully, then do something bizarre.”

Swan twisted and let go, fell feetfirst into the face of the cat, screaming as loud as she could. When her feet hit something else, she clasped branches to her and felt something smash into her ribs. Air knocked out of her, no more scream. She scrabbled with her feet for some purchase, found none, looked down. The cat was on the ground, looking up at her. Swan screamed again, felt the stab of a cracked rib. She changed to a raging shout, cursing the cat foully. Kill it like Archilochus. Grating, painful snarl of a voice, bitter shrieking that hurt her throat and screeched unbearably in her own ears, the sound making her aware she had lost it. The cat heaved a heavy sigh and padded away.

She climbed back to her nest and retrieved the stun gun. Getting down out of the tree hurt like hell.

S he avoided Wahram completely after that, and by the time they were dropped off on Callisto, she had become a little fond of that stab in her side. It made her feel better; it was an expression of her grief, her anger. The moment of dread involved was not forgotten, but digested into something else, some kind of triumph. She had almost been eaten for breakfast! She had been a fool and survived yet again-how often it had happened. Surely it was a fate. Surely it would keep on happening.

“This is the most basic of false syllogisms,” Pauline assured her when she spoke the thoughts aloud.

The Jovian moons were huge, with Jupiter itself a gargantuan oil painting of overelaborate genius, viscous blobs swirling around from one gorgeous paisley orangerie to the next; every border between the bands was a fantasia beyond compare. Swan loved the sight of it, and the city from which she viewed it wasn’t bad either: the Fourth Ring of Valhalla, built on the eponymous rim of the great multi-ringed crater. Valhalla had six rings, splashed into the side of Callisto like concentric waves on a pond after a rock is thrown in. The city was located on the top of the fourth ring, extending all the way around; now cities were beginning on the tops of the third and fifth rings as well. It was said that they would eventually tent the entirety of Valhalla and, after that, maybe all the rest of Callisto; and it was a big world. There were even those arguing it could be properly terraformed, despite the lack of a starter atmosphere.