Schild's Ladder (9 page)

Zyfete and Yann joined them as the hatch irised open, revealing a softly lit tunnel lined with handholds. Tchicaya hung back until last, not wanting to block anyone's progress if he froze. The others all went feetfirst, as if they were descending a ladder, but he felt more secure crawling along the tunnel, imagining himself more or less horizontal. He recalled a playground back on Turaev, a maze of interconnected pipes. When Zyfete glanced up at him and scowled, he poked his tongue out at her and recited a few lines of childish rhyme. In spite of herself, she smiled.

The Scribe's control room was octagonal, with eight slanted windows facing down toward the border. Judging the distance by eye was difficult, with no texture to the light to set the scale, but Tchicaya guessed he was now floating just five or six meters from the novo-vacuum. He suddenly noticed the beating of his heart, though the rhythm didn't feel abnormal; it was a shift in his attention, rather than a rush of adrenaline. He wasn't afraid, but he was acutely aware of his body: the softness and fragility of it, compared to most other things in the world. It was the way he felt when he found himself stranded in the middle of a harsh landscape, insufficiently prepared for its rigors, but not so threatened that he'd simply write off his current incarnation as unsalvageable. It would take a cosmic disaster even larger than Mimosa to rob him of more than a few minutes' memories, but while he inhabited a body he identified with it wholly. He was in a place where a mishap could shred him into something smaller than atoms, and under the circumstances he was more than happy to let instincts predicated on absolute life and death come to the fore and do their best to protect him.

A bank of displays in the center of the room surrounded an octagonal dome, the housing for the stylus. Tchicaya watched as Kadir and Zyfete issued a long series of spoken commands. The lack of automation was almost ritualistic; he glanced inquiringly at Yann, who whispered, “It's a kind of transparency. There are more sophisticated ways we could monitor each other, but having observers from both sides at every experiment, and controlling everything with words, keeps the proceedings out in the open on one level—while we check the equipment and audit the software with a thousand different kinds of high-powered tools, offstage.”

“That's so much like Earth-era diplomacy it's depressing.”

Yann smiled. “I knew your arcane knowledge would come in handy here.”

Tchicaya snorted. “Don't look at me to spout Machiavelli. If you want that shit, go and dig up an ancient.”

“Oh, I'm expecting anachronauts to arrive at the
Rindler
any day now—preceded by a few megatonnes of fusion by-products—and announce that they've come to save the universe.”

“Any day, or any millennium.” It was an eerie prospect to contemplate. Scattered remnants of pre-Qusp civilization, twenty thousand or so years old, still chugged between the stars in spluttering contraptions, spewing spent fuel and taking thousands of years for every journey. Tchicaya had never met any of the ancients himself, but his father had encountered one group, which had visited Turaev long before he was born. None had traveled more than eighty light-years from Earth, so as yet they hadn't been endangered by the novo-vacuum, but unless the Preservationists triumphed, within decades the anachronauts would face a decision between adopting some of the hated new technologies and annihilation.

Kadir shot them a disapproving look, as if their chattering meant they weren't taking their monitoring role seriously. Tchicaya had full-sensory recall, regardless of conscious attention, and Yann would undoubtedly boast something even fancier, but he disciplined himself and fell silent.

Zyfete was describing a sequence of particles to be emitted by the stylus. The disaster at Mimosa had provided at least one compensatory boon: experiments in quantum gravity had become far easier to perform. The border was only a few Planck lengths deep, providing experimenters with a tool compared to which an atomic blade would look wider than a planetary system. While the highest-energy particles the Scribe could create were laughably blunt instruments, the border itself could be made to carve them into shrapnel vastly more effective than each innocuous whole. When the stylus fired a coherent beam of mesons at the border, the razor wire of disrupted graphs sliced fragments of their own surreal dimensions from the knot of virtual quarks and gluons making up each meson, and it was possible to exploit coherence effects to make some of these fragments act in unison to modify the border itself. Natural sources of noise had no prospect of accidentally triggering the same effect, so the kind of exorbitant shielding the Quietener had used was no longer required.

Kadir turned to look at them inquiringly. Yann nodded approval. “That's all as we agreed. Go ahead.”

Zyfete addressed the Scribe. “Execute that.”

With no perceptible delay, the Scribe began to answer with the results. Tchicaya's skin tingled; he'd had no time to remind himself between risk and reprieve, but they'd just tickled a tiger that might have responded by raking the four of them into geometric quanta, swallowing the
Rindler
a fraction of a millisecond later, and redoubling its efforts to devour all their distant backups and more prudent friends.

Kadir started cursing, his Mediator politely tagging the words with a cue that would shut off translation for anyone inclined to be offended. Zyfete watched him, anguished but silent.

When the tirade stopped, Tchicaya asked cautiously, “Not what you were hoping for, but did it tell you anything?”

Kadir kicked the stylus housing, the recoil driving him back to hit the window behind him with a thud. Tchicaya couldn't help wincing; however robust the participants in these collisions, precision machinery, living flesh, and windows facing interstellar vacuum all seemed to merit gentler treatment.

Zyfete said, “This sequence was meant to confirm a previous experiment, but it didn't yield the same results as the last time we ran it. Our model can't explain the discrepancy, either as a statistical variation, or any predictable change in the novo-vacuum.”

Kadir turned and blurted out, “Either you genocidal traitors have corrupted this machine, or—”

Yann pleaded, “Or
what
? Give us the more likely alternative!”

Kadir hesitated, then smiled grimly. “I think I'll keep that hypothesis to myself.”

Tchicaya was dismayed, though he was prepared to put the outburst down to frustration, rather than genuine contempt. Both sides were equally helpless. If this went on, no one was going to get their own way, and no one was going to forge a compromise. The novo-vacuum would simply roll on over them.

Halfway back to the
Rindler
, Kadir apologized. Tchicaya didn't doubt his sincerity, though the words were more formal than friendly. Yann tried to joke with him, making light of the incident, but Kadir withdrew from the conversation.

When they reached the dock and disembarked, the group broke apart. Yann wanted to observe some tests on a new spectrometer package that were being conducted in a workshop higher up in the same module, but Tchicaya didn't feel like tagging along, so he headed back toward his cabin.

He hadn't expected to witness a breakthrough on the trip, let alone gain some kind of dramatic insight himself from mere proximity to the border; he might as well have hoped to learn the secrets of the ordinary vacuum by gazing into thin air. Nevertheless, he felt a pang of disappointment. Before he'd arrived, there'd been an undeniable thrill to the notion of cruising just beyond reach of the fatal shock wave, and then compounding the audacity by turning around and studying it. Dissecting the danger, laying it bare. It was like a legend his mother had told him: in the Age of Barbarism, when humans had rained bombs on each other from the sky, people called Sappers had dived from airplanes to fall beside them and defuse them in midair, embracing the devices like lovers as they reached into their mechanical hearts and seduced them into betraying their malign creators. But if aerodynamics rendered this romantic fable unlikely, at least no one had expected the Sappers to teach themselves nuclear physics from scratch as they fell, then reach inside each atom of fissile material and pluck out the destabilizing protons one by one.

Zyfete caught up with Tchicaya on the stairs leading down to the walkway. She said, “Kadir's home is this far away from the border.” She held up her hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Nine thousand years of history. In less than a year, it will be gone.”

“I'm sorry.” Tchicaya knew better than to respond with platitudes about history living on in memory. He said, “Do you think I want to see Zapata destroyed?” She didn't need to name the planet; everyone knew the awful schedule by heart. “If we can halt the border without wiping out the entire novo-vacuum, I'll back that. I'll fight for that as hard as anyone.”

Zyfete's eyes flashed angrily. “How very evenhanded of you! You'd let us keep our homes, so long as there was no danger of you losing your precious new toy!”

“It's not a toy to me,” Tchicaya protested. “Was Zapata a ‘toy’ nine thousand years ago, when it lay on the frontier?”

“
That
frontier spread out from Earth, and it was made up of willing settlers. It didn't incinerate anyone who dared to stay put.” She scowled. “What do you think you're going to find in there? Some great shining light of transcendence?”

“Hardly.”
Transcendence
was a content-free word left over from religion, but in some moribund planetary cultures it had come to refer to a mythical process of mental restructuring that would result in vastly greater intelligence and a boundless cornucopia of hazy superpowers—if only the details could be perfected, preferably by someone else. It was probably an appealing notion if you were so lazy that you'd never actually learned anything about the universe you inhabited, and couldn't quite conceive of putting in the effort to do so: this magical cargo of transmogrification was sure to come along eventually, and render the need superfluous.

Tchicaya said, “I already possess general intelligence, thanks. I don't need anything more.” It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner—something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age—the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style. “All I want to do is explore this thing properly, instead of taking it for granted that it has to be obliterated for our convenience.”

“
Convenience
?” Zyfete's face contorted with outrage. “You arrogant piece of shit!”

Tchicaya said wearily, “If you want to save people's homes, you have greater obstacles than me to overcome. Go and comfort your friend, or go and work on your model. I'm not going to trade insults with you.”

“Don't you think it's insult enough that you come here and announce your intention to interfere, if we ever look like we might be on the verge of succeeding?”

He shook his head. “The
Rindler
was built by a coalition with no agenda beyond studying the novo-vacuum. The individual members all had their personal goals, but this was meant to be a platform for neutral observation, not a launching pad for any kind of intervention.”

They'd reached the walkway. Tchicaya kept his eyes cast down, though he knew it made him look ashamed.

Zyfete said, “The bodiless I can understand: what lies outside their Qusps is irrelevant to them, so long as they can keep the same algorithms ticking over. But you've felt the wind. You've smelled the soil. You know exactly what we have to lose. How can you despise everything that gave birth to you?”

Tchicaya turned to face her, angered by her bullying but determined to remain civil. He said, “I don't despise anything, and as I've said, if it's possible, I'll fight to preserve all the same things as you. But if all we're going to do with our precious embodiment is cling to a few warm, familiar places for the next ten billion years, we might as well lock ourselves into perfect scapes of those planets and throw away the key to the outside world.”

Zyfete replied coldly, “If you think a marriage has grown too stale and cozy, I suppose you'd step in and stave one partner's head in?”

Tchicaya stopped walking and held up his hands. “You've made yourself very clear. Will you leave me in peace now?”

Zyfete faced him in silence, as if she'd run out of venom and would have been happy to depart at precisely this moment, if only he hadn't asked her. After a delay long enough to preclude the misconception that she might be doing his bidding, she turned around and strode back along the walkway. Tchicaya stood and watched her, surprised at how shaken he was. He'd never concealed his views from the people he'd lived among—apart from keeping his mouth politely shut in the presence of anyone in genuine distress—and over the decades he'd had to develop a thick hide. But the closer he'd come to the source of the upheaval, the harder he had found it to believe that he was witnessing an unmitigated tragedy, like the floods and famines of old. On Pachner, where the sorrow and the turmoil had been at their most intense, he'd also felt most vindicated. Because beneath all the grief and fear, the undercurrent of excitement had been undeniable.

If Zyfete's attack had stung him, though, it was mostly through the things she hadn't said. Just being here meant that she had already left her own home behind, already tasted that amalgam of liberation and loss. Like Tchicaya, she had paid once, and no one was going to tell her that the price had not been high enough.

Tchicaya took a shower to wash off his vacuum suit, then lay on his bed, listening to music, brooding. He didn't want to spend every waking moment on the
Rindler
questioning his position, but nor did he wish to grow impervious to doubt. He didn't want to lose sight of the possibility that he had chosen the wrong side.

If the Preservationists did achieve their goal, the possibilities offered by the novo-vacuum need not be lost forever. Whatever was learned in the process of destroying it might open up the prospect of re-creating it, in a safer, more controlled fashion. In a few tens of millennia, there could be a whole new universe on their doorstep again, but this time it would pose no threat to anyone. No one would be forced from their homes. No one would be made to choose between exile and adaptation.