Schild's Ladder (14 page)

He replied, “I didn't say I believed you. Now I know you're just spreading misinformation.”

Sophus said, “The data's all public; you should judge for yourself. But I'm giving a presentation later today that might interest you.”

“On why we should all give up and go home? Yielders first, of course.”

“No. On why we shouldn't, even if I'm right.”

Tchicaya was intrigued. “Dishing out despair with one hand, taking it away with the other. You're never going to drive us away like that.”

“I'm really not interested in driving anyone away,” Sophus protested. “The more people there are working on this, the sooner we'll understand it. I'm happy to share my ideas with everyone—and if some Yielder beats me to the punch line because of it, and fails to show reciprocal generosity, what have I lost?”

“You're not afraid we'll get through the border first? And shore up what you hope to annihilate?”

Sophus smiled amiably. “There might come a point when that's a real threat. If I'm ever convinced that we've reached it, I suppose I might change my strategy. For now, though, it's like a game of Quantum Pass-the-Parcel: all the players work simultaneously to tear off the wrapping, and all the players share the benefits. Why convert to the classical version? This is faster, and much more enjoyable.”

Tchicaya let the argument rest. It would have been impolite to state the obvious: when Sophus finally decided that sharing his insights had become too risky, it would not be to his advantage to announce the fact. At that point, the most logical strategy would be to continue displaying the same generosity as he'd shown in the past, but to replace the genuine, hard-won conjectures he'd revealed to his opponents in the past with equally well-crafted red herrings.

When they reached Mariama's cabin, Sophus left them. Tchicaya hung back in the corridor, unsure whether she wanted him to stay or go.

She said, “Would you come in, if you're coming in?”

He sat cross-legged on the bed while she moved around the cabin. She'd included some physical ornaments in her transmission—a handful of carved rocks and blown-glass objects that the
Rindler
's reception unit had obligingly re-created for her from spare materials—and now she couldn't decide where to put them.

“I traveled light, myself,” Tchicaya said teasingly. “It didn't seem fair to ask them to cannibalize the ship to provide me with knickknacks.”

Mariama narrowed her eyes. “Aren't you the puritan? Not to the point of amnesia, I hope.”

He laughed. “Not these days.” In the past, he'd left some rarely used memories behind in the Qusps of his body trail. With fullsensory recall, the amount of data mounted up rapidly, and there'd come a point when knowing precisely what it had been like to shake water out of his ears in a river on Gupta or roll over and fart while camping in a desert on Peldan didn't really strike him as a crucial part of his identity.

Yet he'd gathered up all the trivia again, before any of the Qusps were erased. And now that there was nowhere he could store his memories in the expectation that they'd remain secure—even if he archived them with a fleeing acorporeal community, their safety would come at the price of accessibility—they all seemed worth dragging around with him indefinitely.

Mariama finally settled on the shelf by the bed as the place for an elaborately braided variant of Klein's bottle. “Holding on to your memories is one thing,” she said. “It doesn't stop you going over the horizon.”

Tchicaya snorted. “Over the horizon? I'm four thousand and nine years old! Take out Slowdowns and travel insentience, and I've barely experienced half of that.” Information theory put bounds on the kind of correlations anyone could sustain between their mental states at different times; the details depended on the structure of your mind, the nature of its hardware, and, ultimately, on the recently rather plasticized laws of physics. If there were unavoidable limits, though, they were eons away. “I think I can still lay claim to doing a far better job of resembling myself—at any prior age—than a randomly chosen stranger.”

Mariama folded her arms, smiling slightly. “In the strict sense, obviously. But don't you think people can cross another kind of horizon? The strict definition counts everything: every aspect of temperament, every minor taste, every trivial opinion. There are so many markers, it's no wonder it takes an eternity for all of them to drift far enough to change someone beyond recognition. But they're not the things that define us. They're not the things that would make our younger selves accept us as their rightful successors, or recoil in horror.”

Tchicaya gave her a warning look that he hoped would steer her away from the subject. With a stranger, he might have asked his Mediator to handle the subtext, but he didn't believe either of them had changed so much that they couldn't read each other's faces.

He said, “Any more children?”

She nodded. “One. Emine. She's six hundred and twelve.”

Tchicaya smiled. “That's very restrained. I've had six.”

“Six! Are any of them with you here?”

“No.” He took a moment to realize why she was asking; he'd always sworn that he'd never leave a child before a century had passed. “They're all on Gleason; large families are common there. The youngest is four hundred and ninety.”

“No travelers among them?”

“No. What about Emine?”

Mariama nodded happily. “She was born on Har'El. She left with me. We traveled together for a while.”

“Where is she now?”

“I'm not certain.” She admitted this without a trace of reticence, but Tchicaya still thought there was a hint of sadness in her voice.

He said, “One thing about being planet-bound is, once you've committed to the place, that's it. Even if you wander off to the other side of the world, everyone else who's chosen to stay is just a few hours away.”

“But two travelers? What does that guarantee?” Mariama shrugged. “Chance meetings, every few hundred years. Or more often, if you make the effort. I don't feel like I've lost Emine.”

“Of course not. Nor the others. What's to stop you visiting the ones who've stayed put?”

She shook her head. “You know the answer to that. You're like a cross between a fairy-tale character and some kind of...rare climatic disaster.”

“Oh, come on! It's not that bad.” Tchicaya knew there was a grain of truth in what she said, but it seemed perverse to complain about it. When he was made to feel welcome, it was as a visitor, a temporary novelty. When your child had lived with three or four generations of their own descendants, for centuries, you were not a missing piece of the puzzle. But he never expected to
slot in
, anywhere. Once he'd told the crib on Turaev that his birth flesh could be recycled, he'd given up the notion that somewhere there'd always be a room waiting for him.

He said, “So what about Emine's other parent?”

Mariama smiled. “What about your partner back on Gleason? The one you raised six children with.”

“I asked first.”

“What is there to say? She stayed on Har'El. Not even Emine could drag her away.” Mariama lowered here eyes and traced a fingertip over the edges of one of the abstract carvings.

Tchicaya said, “If you could drag everyone with you, what would be the point of leaving? There were cultures back on Earth that traveled across continents, whole extended families together—and they were usually more conservative than the ones that stayed put, or the ones that spawned diasporas.”

Mariama scowled. “If two travelers happened to have a child, would that constitute a tribe?”

“No. But traveling is not about a change of scenery. It's about breaking connections.” Tchicaya felt a sudden sense of
déjà vu
, then realized that he was quoting her own words back at her. He'd got into the habit long ago of using them on other people. “I'm not saying that there'd be anything wrong if six whole generations uprooted themselves together, if that's not a contradiction in terms. But they wouldn't stay together for long—or at least, they wouldn't without imposing rules on themselves a thousand times more restrictive than any they'd needed when they were planetbound.”

Mariama said irritably, “You're such a fucking ideologue sometimes! And before you call me a hypocrite: it's always the converts who are the worst.”

“Yeah? That's not such a convenient axiom for you, if you remember that it cuts both ways.” Tchicaya raised his hands in apology; he wasn't really angry or offended yet, but he could see where they were heading. “Just...forget I said that. Can we change the subject? Please?”

“You can tell me what happened on Gleason.”

Tchicaya thought for a while before replying. “Her name was Lesya. I was there for a hundred and sixty years. We were in love, all that time. We were like bedrock to each other. I was as happy as I've ever been.” He spread his arms. “That's it. That's what happened on Gleason.”

Mariama eyed him skeptically. “Nothing soured?”

“No.”

“And you don't wish you were still there?”

“No.”

“Then you weren't in love. You might have been happy, but you weren't in love.”

Tchicaya shook his head, amused. “Now who's the ideologue?”

“You just woke up one morning and decided to leave? And there was no pain, and no rancor?”

“No,
we
woke up one morning, and we both knew I'd be gone within a year. Just because she wasn't a traveler doesn't mean it was all down to me. What do you think? I lied to her at the start?” He was becoming so animated he was messing up the bed; he stroked the sheet, and it tightened. “You know how I think she'll feel, if the border reaches Gleason?”

Mariama resisted answering, knowing that she was being set up. After several seconds, she succumbed anyway.

“Terrified?”

“No. I think she'll be grateful.” Tchicaya smiled at Mariama's expression of disgust. It was strange, but she'd probably given him more confidence in his stance, now that she'd turned out to be his opponent, than if they'd been allies willing to reassure each other endlessly.

He continued. “You don't take a traveler for a partner if you hope that the world will always stay the same. You do it because you can't quite break away, yourself, but you can't live without the promise of change hanging over you every day.

“That's what the border means, for a lot of people. The promise of change they'd never be able to make any other way.”

Sophus's presentation took place in a theater that the ship had improvised in the middle of one of the accommodation modules, folding up all the cabins that happened to be unoccupied to create a single large space. When Mariama realized that this included her own, she was not pleased.

“I have glass in there!” She pointed across the theater. “Right where that person's sitting.”

“It'll be protected,” Tchicaya reassured her, as if he were a veteran of the concertina effect. “Anyway, what's there to lose? If anything's broken, it can be reconstructed.”

“They've never been
broken
,” she complained.

Tchicaya said, “I hate to be the one to point this out, but—” He held up his thumb and forefinger and adjusted the spacing to atomic size.

Mariama glared at him until he dropped his hand. “It's not the same thing. But I wouldn't expect you to understand.”

Tchicaya winced. “So now I'm an all-round philistine?”

Mariama's face softened. She reached over and ran a hand affectionately across his stubbled scalp. “No. Your failings are much more specific than that.”

Tchicaya spotted Yann coming through the entrance with a small group of people. He raised a hand and tentatively beckoned to him. Yann responded by bringing the whole group along to sit beside them.

Rasmah, Hayashi, Birago, and Suljan had been involved in designing the new spectrometer. Catching the tail end of the conversation they'd been having made it clear that all but Birago were Yielders; the other three were joking about his plans to sneak in a filter to conceal the telltale signature of Planck worms devouring the scenery. Birago seemed to be taking their teasing with equanimity, though it struck Tchicaya that he had the quietness of someone outnumbered, who had decided that there was no point in speaking his mind.

Perhaps Mariama felt outnumbered, too, but she appeared genuinely amiable toward the Yielders as introductions were made; she was certainly more than diplomatically polite. Tchicaya had been wondering whether their friendship had caused her to conceal the full measure of her distaste for his position, but whatever effort she was making for his benefit, she was nowhere near the point that Kadir and Zyfete had reached.

Yann said, “The new spectrometer looks good. We'll be able to resolve a whole new band of gamma rays, and with twice the precision of the old machine.”

Tchicaya nodded, unsure how much difference that would make. “Do you know what this is all about?” He gestured at the podium that was now growing before their eyes. His Mediator had explained that the timing was meant to encourage people to stop talking among themselves—like a change of lighting, or the raising of curtains—but apparently this was an aspect of the
Rindler
's local culture that had been documented without ever being practiced.

“Not really,” Yann admitted. “There's usually something on the grapevine about these talks, weeks in advance, but this one has come out of the blue. Sophus is always interesting, though. I'm sure he'll be worth listening to.”

“He said something to me earlier about time asymmetry.”

“What, time-reversal asymmetry? He's talking about an arrow of time in the novo-vacuum?”

“No, time-translation asymmetry.”

Yann's eyes widened. “‘Interesting’ might have been an understatement.”

Sophus appeared and made his way to the podium, but then he stood to one side. People were still entering the theater, and it looked as if they'd keep on streaming in until it was completely full.

Mariama surveyed the latecomers irritably. “Why can't they watch this in their heads?”

“It's a flesh thing,” Yann confided. “I don't understand it either.”

Tchicaya glanced up. People were sitting in chairs suspended from the ceiling, accessed via corridors through higher levels that would otherwise have come to a sudden end. The ship had made use of every square meter of available surface, even though there was no prospect of cramming every last passenger in. Rasmah caught Tchicaya's eye and joked, “I always wanted to be at a performance where people were hanging from the rafters.”