Schild's Ladder (38 page)

But if the banner was being taken to the Signalers themselves, that could be the expedition's one opportunity to meet people with the knowledge and motivation needed to understand the warning at all.

Mariama said, “You don't want to back out?” Perhaps she was afraid that if this turned out to be the wrong choice, he'd hold her responsible for urging him down here in the first place.

Tchicaya said, “No. We have to trust these people to take us to someone who'll work hard to communicate with us. If that's not what they're planning, then we're screwed—but if we hang back and miss the chance to meet the experts, we're screwed anyway.” Ahead of them, the banner was blinking feebly; undamaged still, but it had never been designed to modulate all the forms of illumination that filled the cave.

The bubble arced smoothly down into the gray fog of the entry ramp. As they followed it, the fog around them actually seemed to grow thinner; once the
Sarumpaet
began to surrender to the highway's demands, the probes had an easier task finding their way back to it—though the rest of the cave rapidly vanished from sight. Tchicaya felt a pang of frustration that he was insulated from any sense of the dynamics at play here.
What would it feel like, for a native, to be whisked into motion like this
? Would there be something akin to tidal effects, as different parts of your body were brought up to speed? It was a trivial thing to ponder, but he needed to cut through the barriers that separated him from the Colonists. He needed to imagine himself inside their skins, any way he could.

The convoy straightened out. They were in the center of the highway now, portrayed by the probes as a narrow tube of clarity surrounded by fog. The Colonists themselves had begun emitting some of the parasprites that had illuminated the tunnels and the cave; the bubble and its cargo blocked the view ahead, but Tchicaya could still catch glimpses of them, shy luminescent starfish waving their four legs lethargically. They were probably relaxing, free from the arduous demands of the Bright—or if those demands were trivial, perhaps this trip was so dull for them that they'd entered something close to suspended animation. The
Sarumpaet
was doing absolutely nothing to keep up with them; as far as it was concerned, everyone was motionless. The highway had them all free-falling effortlessly toward their destination.

Mariama asked the toolkit, “Can you tell how fast we're moving?”

“I have no direct access to the Bright around us, and interpreting the acceleration process we've just been through is difficult.”

“Don't be such a killjoy; take a wild guess. In the broadest, most naive, near-side terms.”

“We might be doing something comparable to relativistic speeds.”

Mariama looked around the scape, her eyes shining. “Do you remember what Rasmah said?” She was addressing Tchicaya now. “When she spoke to the Preservationists before the moratorium vote?”

“Of course.” Tchicaya had to make a conscious effort to summon up the memory, but he'd had a few other things on his mind.

“She was right,” Mariama declared. “Her whole vision of this place was exactly right. Not in the details; she couldn't anticipate half the things we've seen here. But she understood precisely what the far side could mean for us.”

Tchicaya experienced a twinge of irritation, bordering on jealousy.
What right did she have to share Rasmah's vision
? He was ashamed of himself immediately; she'd earned it, at least as much as he had.

“You've had a change of heart,” he observed mildly.

“I told you I'd never fight for an exotic wasteland,” she said, “but that's not what this is. And I'll fight for the Signalers because they deserve our help, but that's not the end of it. Not anymore.”

She took Tchicaya's hands. “Some astronomically rare event created sentient life on the other side of the border, but that's all it was: bad luck, an accident of birth. We've found ways to live with all the hardships: the distance, the loneliness. That's a great achievement, an amazing feat, but that's no reason to sentence ourselves to repeat it for eternity.

“How can we go on living in that wasteland, when even space is alive here?
This is where we belong, Tchicaya
. I'll fight for this place because it's our home.”

In the eerie calm of the highway, Tchicaya felt himself losing his grip on reality. A whole universe was at stake, and here he was playing stowaway on a road train? Unknown multitudes would die, because he lacked the nerve to tap the driver on the shoulder and make his presence known. He could get his message across to anyone, if he put his mind to it. He'd managed to converse with twenty-third-century zealots with flesh for brains; how much harder could a glowing starfish be?

When the highway began to disgorge them after barely two hours, he almost wept with relief. His gamble might yet fail to pay off, but at least it hadn't irrevocably sunk the whole endeavor.

As they spiraled out of the darkness, the
Sarumpaet
steeled itself for the worst contingencies the toolkit could imagine. The Bright had been a challenge, but there was no reason to believe that it was the most extreme environment the far side could contain.

Probes began returning. Parasprites flooded in. The convoy slipped out of the ramp into a vast, tranquil space. The toolkit analyzed the vendeks around them; the mixture was not honeycombstable, but it was like the Bright tamed, domesticated. The airconditioning in the colony had gone a short way in the same direction, but it was like the difference between a mesh cage in the open ocean, keeping the largest predators at bay, and an aquarium of hand-picked species that could coexist and thrive with a minimum of drama.

The six Colonists were not alone here; the scape showed hundreds of similar four-branched xennobes moving around them in a multitude of neat, loosely defined rows, as if the place was crisscrossed with invisible escalators. Compared to the crush of the outpost, though, conditions were far from crowded. Layer walls undulated gently in the distance, dotted with parasprite lamps, but there was none of the density of structure they'd seen in the tunnels. High above Tchicaya—“above” according to the random orientation in which the
Sarumpaet
had emerged—other dark highways were visible.

“I believe we're in a railway station,” he said. “The question is, where?”

Mariama declared confidently, “This is the big smoke. All space and comfort.”

“Where we came from wasn't exactly a ghost town.”

“No, just a small village with no entertainment, and no contraception.”

Tchicaya scowled, but then he realized that she was being neither serious nor entirely flippant. Tossing a few anthropomorphic parodies at the least important of the ten thousand unanswered questions they faced might at least stop them wasting energy trying to fill in the same blanks with earnest hypotheses that were just as likely to be wrong.

As the Colonists crossed the atrium, alien cargo and its wouldbe puppeteers in tow, Mariama mimed cracking a whip. “Take me to your linguists,” she said. “And don't spare the vendeks.”

If they were in a city, they had no way of judging its size from within, no way of knowing if they were moving from building to building through something like open air, or merely navigating through the rooms of a single, vast, hermetically sealed structure.

They passed through narrow apertures and wide corridors; they wove through denser crowds; they encountered structures as baffling and varied as the machinery—or artwork, or gardens—of the outpost in the Bright. The probes gathered information, and the toolkit puzzled over it, but even when it made sense it was just another tiny piece of a vast mosaic. Grabbing hints of how the vendek populations were interacting inside some gadget—or pet—that they passed was all grist for the mill, but it was not going to make the whole city and its people snap into focus in an instant.

Still, Tchicaya clung stubbornly to the notion that it was better to observe whatever he could, and provisionally entertain some wildly imperfect guesses, than to close his eyes and surrender to the verdict that he might as well have been a flea aspiring to understand the culture of a great metropolis. The scale in that analogy was right, but nothing else was. Both he and his hosts possessed general intelligence, and however mutually foreign their needs and drives, there was nothing—including each other's lives, customs, and languages—that could remain incomprehensible to them, given time, patience, and motivation.

Time, they did not have, but he'd leave it to the Planck worms to declare when the supply was exhausted.

Mariama drank in the sights like a happily dazed tourist. She treated their purpose at least as seriously as he did, and she'd confronted every problem they'd faced with ferocious energy and clarity, but something in her temperament refused to admit that the corollary of that dedication could ever be despair at the thought of failure. They'd accepted a burden that was constantly on the verge of crushing them both, but he'd rarely seen her so much as tremble beneath the load.

The procession came to a halt in a huge chamber, containing a structure resembling a cluster of grapes the size of a whale. The surface of this object was like nothing the probes had seen before, and the interior proved even more surprising, killing them off completely. Other, slightly more familiar techology was arrayed around this bizarre leviathan.

The Colonists broke rank; three of them fussed around the towing bubble, while the others went to one wall of the chamber and returned with some kind of small device, or creature. Whatever they were fetching didn't need to be towed; it followed its summoners back under its own power.

When the Colonists burst the banner's bubble and lured their apparatus closer to it, Tchicaya moved the
Sarumpaet
away. He didn't want the ship caught up inadvertently in whatever they were about to do.

Sprayed by vendeks, the apparatus began to shine. It emitted sprites, not the related vendeks the Colonists seemed to favor.

Mariama said, “They're illuminating the banner with the right kind of lighting. The signal is encoded in its transparency to sprites; they understood that much.”

“I think you're right.” There was always a chance that they were misreading the action, but Tchicaya felt hopeful.

He surveyed the scene, trying to guess what would happen next. The banner was positioned between the sprite source and the giant bunch of grapes. Meaning what?
This
was their expert linguist? Another species of xennobe entirely, or some caste of the Colonists who sat motionless in this chamber like a bloated termite queen? He dismissed the notion immediately. They'd seen no other “castes.” A few teeming xennobes in a crowded “hive,” and he was starting to invent ridiculous insectile
non sequiturs
.

The Colonists moved back from the illuminated banner, and did nothing more. They floated at the edge of the chamber, branches twitching lazily in the gentle currents.

The toolkit said, “I've found a way to get probes into the unmapped structure now. This is very strange.”

Mariama said, “We'll be the judge of strange. Just tell us what they've found.”

“Take a cluster of protons and neutrons, and compress it by a factor of a hundred million. That's what this is.”

Tchicaya blinked, disbelieving, “We're looking at a nugget of squashed near-side matter?”

“Yes. It's wrapped in some complicated vendek-based layers that are helping to stabilize it, but basically it's a pile of ordinary nucleons with most of the empty space squeezed out of them.”

Mariama turned to him. “It could be a kind of meteorite. With all the matter that's passed through the border, some microscopic speck might have encountered conditions that preserved it.”

Tchicaya didn't welcome the conclusion this suggested. “So this room could be nothing but a museum display? I can't believe they'd go to the trouble of building the signaling layer, only to take the reply—proof of intelligent life behind the border—and stuff it in a cabinet for people to gawk at.”

“Or study. People will come to study it.”

“
When
?”

Mariama said, “If you want to draw crowds, maybe it's time we changed the loop.”

Tchicaya sent instructions to the banner. It stopped counting out primes, and switched to a simple, ascending sequence of integers.

The Colonists responded with a flurry of activity: moving around the chamber, summoning new equipment. Tchicaya watched them, his hopes rising again. They had to realize that the banner was as good as alive, and ready to talk. Surely they'd reply now.

He was wrong. They aimed no shuttered sprite lamp back toward the banner, they flashed no answering sequence.

He switched to the Fibonacci series. This stirred the Colonists' branches a little, as if they welcomed the stimulation, but whatever the purpose of the equipment they'd gathered after the first change of message, it continued to be all they required.

They were happy to watch, but they had no intention of replying. They were politely, respectfully observing the alien emissary, but too cautious to engage with it and speed up the process of understanding its message.

“What do we have to do to get through to them?”

Mariama said, “We could push ahead with the mathematics leading to the GDL.”

“Just like that? As a monologue?”

“What choice do we have?”

The toolkit had developed a Graph Description Language, a precise set of semantic conventions for talking about vendeks, Planck worms, and what would happen when they met. Given some moderately sophisticated mathematical concepts—which could be built up from elementary ideas based on integer exemplars—quantum graphs were far easier to talk about than anything as abstract and contingent as social structures.

If the Colonists weren't going to degin to reply, though, there'd be no way of knowing if the dictionary of concepts was coming at them too quickly, or even whether the basic syntax was being understood. They manipulated vendeks with skills that no QGT theoretician would dare aspire to, but that didn't mean they understood them in the same way. Humans had tamed and modified dozens of species of plants and animals before they'd had the slightest idea what DNA was.