Schild's Ladder (20 page)

He recalled a night he'd spent in a small town on Quine, thirty-six subjective years after he'd left Turaev: the mirror image of his birth in the moment of his departure. Three centuries had passed, in real time. He'd sat in an alley and wept for hours, like an abandoned child. The next day, he'd made half a dozen new friends among the locals, and some of the friendships had lasted three times longer than all the years he'd spent on his home world.

He still missed those people. He still missed Lesya, and his children and grandchildren on Gleason. And yet, he could never entirely separate that from the realization that part of the joy he'd felt in their presence had come from the sense that they were lifting him out of his state of exile. They had never been substitutes for the home and family he'd left behind; it had never been that crude. But every kind of happiness bore some imprint in the shape of the pain it had assuaged.

He heard footsteps behind him, outpacing his own. He stopped and turned to face the wall of the walkway, as if admiring the view, wiping his eyes with his forearm, less embarrassed by his tears than the fact that he'd be at a loss to explain them. If he'd still been on Turaev after four thousand years, he would have gone mad. And if he'd traveled and returned in the approved way, to find that nothing had changed in his absence, he would have gone mad even faster. He did not regret leaving.

Mariama said, “You look like you're about to jump off a bridge.”

“I didn't realize you were following me.”

She laughed. “I wasn't
following you
. What are we meant to do? Walk in opposite directions around the ship? All Preservationists must march clockwise? That would make for some long journeys.”

“Forget it.” He turned to look at her. It was unjust beyond belief, but right at this moment—having resolved for the thousandth time that he'd made the right decision—he wanted to rant in her face about the price she'd made him pay. After all her talk as a rebel child, after leading by example, after four thousand years as a traveler, she had now decided that her role in life was to fight to keep the planet-bound cultures—all the slaves she'd vowed to liberate, all the drones she'd promised to shake out of their stupor—safely marinating in their own inertia for another twenty thousand years.

He said, “Where are you heading?”

Mariama hesitated. “Do you know Kadir?”

“Only slightly. We didn't exactly hit it off.” Tchicaya was about to add something more acerbic, when he realized that today was the day Kadir's home world, Zapata, would have fallen. That was only true in terms of a reference frame fixed to the local stars, not the
Rindler
's notion of simultaneity, and in any case no confirmation of the event would reach them for decades, but unless the border had magically altered its speed in distant regions, the planet's loss was a certainty.

“He's holding a kind of wake. That's where I'm going.”

“So you and he are close?”

Mariama said, “Not especially. But he's invited everyone, not just his friends.”

Tchicaya leaned back against the wall, unfazed by its transparency. He said, “Why did you come here?”

She shaded her eyes against the borderlight. “I thought you'd decided that we were never going to have this argument.”

“If you think I've shut you up, now's your chance.”

“You know why I'm here,” she said. “Don't pretend it's a mystery.” The glare was too much; she turned to stand beside him. “Do you want to come with me, to this thing of Kadir's?”

“You must be joking. Do you think I'm a provocateur, or just a masochist?”

“This isn't factional. He's invited everyone.” She frowned. “Or are you afraid to spend ten minutes in the company of people who might disagree with you?”

“I spent ten
years
on Pachner.”

“Keeping your mouth shut.”

“No. I was honest with everyone I met.”

“Everyone who asked. If the issue came up.”

Tcicaya moved away from her angrily. “I wasn't sure of my plans, when I first arrived. And when I was sure, I didn't walk around with a banner that read ‘I'm off to the
Rindler
, to make certain the same fate befalls as many other worlds as possible.’ Does that make me dishonest? Does that make me a coward?”

Mariama shook her head. “All right, forget Pachner. But if you're so sure of your position now, why don't you come with me? No one's going to lynch you.”

“It would be inflammatory. What makes you think Kadir wants the company of people who disagree with
him
?”

“There's an open invitation,” she protested. “Check with the ship if you don't believe me.”

She was right. Tchicaya's Mediator had filtered it out automatically; he'd told it to classify general announcements by known factional allegiances, to keep him from being distracted, and depressed, by news of events where Yielders were unlikely to be welcome.

“I'm tired,” he said. “It's been a long day.”

“You're pathetic.” Mariama walked away without another word.

Tchicaya called after her, “All right! I'll come with you!” She didn't stop. He ran to catch up with her.

They walked in silence for a while, then Tchicaya said, “This whole iron curtain thing is insane. Within a decade, we'll find a way to pin some state to the border that will freeze it in place. If we worked on it together, it would take half as long.”

Mariama regarded him coolly. “If we froze it, you think that would be enough?”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to satisfy either side.”

“Ideally, I still want to cross through,” Tchicaya admitted. “We shouldn't have to flee from this, or annihilate it. We should be able to adapt. If the ocean comes a few meters inshore, you retreat. A few kilometers, you build a dike. A few thousand...you learn to live in boats. But if freezing the border turns out to be possible, and it rules out exploration, I'd just have to accept that.”

Mariama was skeptical. “And you'd take no risks at all, from that moment on? You'd do absolutely nothing that had a chance of unfreezing it? You'd let it sit there for a hundred thousand years, undisturbed, and you wouldn't be tempted in the least?”

“Oh, I see. That's the logic that dictates the use of Planck worms? If you don't wipe the whole thing out of existence, some Yielder is certain to come along eventually, and unplug the dike.”

Mariama didn't reply. They entered the module where the wake was being held, and walked up the stairs.

On the map Tchicaya consulted, Kadir's cabin had been merged with a dozen of his neighbors', producing a roughly circular room. Ahead of him, the entrance was wide open, and music wafted out into the corridor.

Mariama's clothes changed as they approached the doorway, forming a pattern of woven bands broken up by ellipses, in earthen colors. “You look good in that,” Tchicaya observed. The comment elicited a reluctant flicker of warmth in her eyes, and she knew him too well to mistake it for insincere flattery, but she walked on into the room without a word. He steeled himself, and followed her.

There was quite a crowd inside, talking, eating, a few people dancing. Tchicaya could see no other Yielders, but he resisted the urge to ask his Mediator to hunt for friendly signatures.

Images of Zapata shone from the walls. The planet from space; aerial views of towns, mountains, and rivers. Tchicaya had spent forty years on Zapata, moving from continent to continent, never really settling down long enough to make close friends.

The life the settlers had unleashed on the sterile planet, though ultimately derived from natural terrestrial genomes, had been a little wilder and stranger than most. There were lithe winged cats in some of the jungles that could tear out your throat. Toward the end of his stay, it had been discovered that in one small, isolated town, deliberate exposure to harm by these creatures had become a “rite of passage” into adulthood—as if adolescence itself was insufficiently traumatic. The partially eaten bodies could generally be repaired, and at worst the Qusp could always be tracked down and recovered from the animal's stomach, so the ritual fell short of local death, but as far as Tchicaya was concerned, that only made it more barbaric. Better to suffer memory loss and discontinuity than the experience of having your jugular gnawed open—and better anything than the company of people who'd decided that this was the definition of maturity.

Children in the town who declined to participate had been ostracized, but once the practice came to light, the wider society of Zapata had intervened—with a concerted effort to improve transport and communication links. After a few years of heightened exposure to the possibility of simply walking away from the town and its self-appointed cultural guardians, no one was interested in being bullied into conformity anymore.

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn't need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently.

Mariama waved a small yellow fruit at him, half-bitten. “Try one of these. They're delicious.”

“Good grief. Where do you think he grew them?”

“In the garden. Lots of people have set up plots for food. You have to tweak the genomes to get photosynthesis to work in the borderlight, but that's old hat, you just copy those ugly things the original builders put in.”

“I must have walked past without even noticing.”

“They're quite far back from the path. Are you going to try one?”

Tchicaya shook his head. “I've tasted them before. There can't be many; I'm not going to hog them.”

Mariama turned to address Kadir, who'd appeared before them like a perfect host. She said, “Tchicaya was just telling me that he'd already tasted quetzal-fruit.”

Kadir said, “You've visited Zapata?” He had probably intended to greet them politely then move on, but this claim could not be left unexamined.

“Yes.” Tchicaya braced himself for a barrage of insults about travelers and other parasites.

“How long ago?”

“About nine hundred years.”

“Where did you go?”

“All over.” Kadir waited expectantly, so Tchicaya reeled off a list of towns.

When he'd finished, Kadir said, “I was born in Suarez, but I left when I was twenty. I never managed to get back. How long were you there?”

Tchicaya had been reorganizing his memories as they spoke, dragging the whole period upward in his association hierarchy. “Less than a year.”

Kadir smiled. “That's longer than most visitors stay. What was the attraction?”

“I don't know. It was a quiet spot, I was tired of moving about. The landscape wasn't spectacular, but from the house where I stayed you could see the top of the mountains in the distance.”

“That slate-gray color, against the sky in the morning?”

“Yeah. Completely different at sunset, though. Almost pink. I could never work that out.” He'd raised the memories so high that it might have been yesterday. He could smell the dust and the pollen, he could feel the heat of the evening.

Kadir said, “I think I know where you were. Not the house, it wasn't built when I was there, but—do you remember the creek, north of the main road?”

“Yes. I was close to it. A few minutes' walk.”

Kadir's face lit up. “That's amazing! It was still there? We used to go swimming in that creek. My whole family. All through summer, around dusk. Did you swim in it?”

“Yes.” At the same time, the same season. Watching the stars come out, lying on his back in the cool water.

“Was the big tree still there? With the branch overhanging the deep end?”

Tchicaya frowned, summoning up eidetic imagery, constructing a panoramic view in his mind's eye and searching for anything meeting this description. “I don't think so.”

“No, it wouldn't have been.” Kadir turned to Mariama. “We used to walk out along this branch, about four meters up, and dive off backward.” He spread his arms and swayed. “The first time I did it, it must have been an hour after sunset. I couldn't see anything, and when I hit the water I just kept sinking into the blackness. I was nine years old. I was terrified!”

Tchicaya said, “There was no deep water, when I was there. It must have silted up.”

“Or the banks might have shifted,” Kadir suggested. “I was there three hundred years before you. They might have built anything upstream.”

Zyfete approached, and slipped an arm around Kadir's waist. She regarded Tchicaya warily, but it must have been obvious that he was not making trouble.

Looking away from her into the crowd, Tchicaya spotted Sophus, Tarek, Birago. He was conspicuous here; it couldn't be otherwise.

He said, “I have to go.”

Kadir nodded, unoffended. He reached out and shook Tchicaya's hand. “I'm glad you saw Suarez,” he said.

Mariama caught up with him outside.

“Go back in with your friends,” he said.

She ignored him. “Was that so unbearable?”

“No. I never claimed it would be. I was afraid my presence might upset someone. It didn't. I'm glad.”

“I suppose you think that's all pathological? The music, the pictures, the food?”

Tchicaya scowled. “So much for you reading my mind. It's ordinary nostalgia. I feel the same way about all kinds of places. There's nothing sick or obsessive about it. And because of that, it's hardly going to destroy him that he can't go back. His favorite swimming hole would have turned into a silted-up pond by now, anyway. He's been spared the disappointment.”

“You really are made of stone.” She sounded disappointed, as if she'd seriously expected a few minutes' reminiscing with Kadir to change his mind about everything.

“No one will have died, leaving Zapata. The rocks are gone. The trees are gone. If anyone really lived for those things, they'll find a way to re-create them.”

“That will never be the same.”

“Good.” Tchicaya stopped and turned on her. “What exactly do you imagine he's suffering? He's thinking about the things he's experienced, and the things he's lost. We all do that. He hasn't been eviscerated. Nine thousand years is a long time, but no one sprang from the ground of Zapata fully formed.”