Schild's Ladder (28 page)

Rasmah said, “He might have been outvoted.”

Tchicaya asked the ship to show him an image of her. The lone figure was only about five or six meters up the kilometer-long cable, but she was ascending rapidly: gripping the slender braid of monofilaments with her knees, reaching up, dragging her body another arm's-length higher. At least at the hub she'd have a negligible velocity; if she ended up floating, he'd have plenty of time to reach her in the shuttle.

Tchicaya said, “Let me see through your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just for a moment. Please.”

Rasmah hesitated, then sent him the vision. She looked down at the shiny globe of the module beneath her, then up across the spoked wheel of the ship, toward the faint glint of her quarry on the tether a quarter of a turn away. On her right, the dazzling plain of the border was as serene and immutable as ever.

“I'm not afraid of heights,” she said dryly. “Stop fretting about me.” She cut off the image.

“I'm not,” Tchicaya lied.

“I just spotted Suljan emerging. Look, I'm not on my own here. Just get to the shuttle! If there's anything to tell you, I'll call back.”

“All right.”

As his sense of her presence faded, Tchicaya broke into a run. He'd been wasting time trying to piece everything together; he didn't need to know exactly what the rebels were planning. Rasmah's logic was sound. He hated not being beside her, but she'd trusted him with another task, and he had to dedicate himself to it, unswervingly.

He raced past people in the corridors and on the walkways, without stopping to shout questions or exchange hypotheses. If there was solid information being passed around, it would reach him eventually, wherever he was. Within minutes, he was dripping with sweat; the ship's bodies stayed reasonably fit by sheer biochemical fiat, but his own had been neither designed nor trained for speed. Refusing to be swayed by discomfort was easy, but there were limits that had nothing to do with pain.

Yann appeared suddenly, sprinting beside him. “Rasmah said you're heading for the shuttle. How much free storage do you have in your Qusp?”

“Not enough for a passenger. I'm sorry.”

Yann shook his head, amused. “I don't need a ride. I'm entirely used to not having my Qusp on legs, and I'm not worried about getting my memories elsewhere. But if you're stranded, you might need some assistance.”

Tchicaya replied purely by radio, to save his breath. “That's a good idea. But like I said, I don't have storage for a second person.”

“I didn't expect you would,” Yann said. “I've prepared a toolkit; it's only a few exabytes, but it encompasses everything I know about the far side. Everything I've learned from Suljan, Umrao, and the others, and everything I've worked out for myself. Of course, all of this is useless if you don't have access to the border, so I'm organizing a vote on ceding control of the Left Hand to you.”

Tchicaya didn't reply. Yann said, “You probably don't want all this riding on your shoulders, but believe me, we're doing our best to avoid that.”

Tchicaya said, “What can they do up there?”

“Don't worry about that. Just get to the shuttle, and move away as fast as you can. We'll call you back once it's safe.”

“Assuming the rebels don't steal the shuttle first.” He checked the view; it was still in place.

Yann said, “They can't steal it; the builders have disabled it. Branco has agreed to release it once you're onboard. Now stop arguing, and take the toolkit.”

Tchicaya instructed his Mediator to accept the package. Yann added cheerfully, “Let's hope you don't need it.”

As Yann's icon vanished, Tchicaya swerved to avoid a startled pedestrian, who stared at him as if he'd gone mad. No one he'd encountered since leaving Rasmah had been in much of a hurry, and the closer he came to the shuttle, the more people seemed to be heading in the opposite direction: away from the
Rindler
's sole lifeboat. Some planet-bound part of him found this surreal; there were few inhabited worlds where it would have been entirely pointless to abandon a burning ship in the middle of the ocean. Even in cultures where the loss of flesh was taken lightly, there were usually volunteers willing to make the effort to rescue endangered people who felt differently. Perhaps there were some crowded circumplanetary orbits where the shipwrecked could expect to be plucked bodily from the vacuum, but fleeing the
Rindler
as anything but a signal would have been raising optimism to new heights.

As he crossed the final walkway, Tchicaya asked the ship for a view of the entrance to the shuttle. There was no one visible, no one standing guard. He was on the verge of asking for a sequence of images covering the entire remainder of his journey when he spotted a group of people with his own eyes, ahead of him on the walkway. Four of them hung back, while a fifth approached, carrying a long metal bar.

Tchicaya slowed, then halted. The rebel kept walking toward him, briskly and purposefully. Tchicaya's Mediator could detect no signature, but the ship put a name to the face: Selman.

Tchicaya caught his breath, then called out amiably, “Talk to me. Tell me what you want.” Selman continued toward him in silence. His face was even more damaged than Santos's; there was a ridge of scarlet running along the side of his nose, and a massive edema around the eye socket. His four companions were similarly marked. If this was a sign of internal disputation, the whole group should have torn itself to shreds weeks ago.

Suddenly, Tchicaya understood. Selman wasn't withholding his signature as a gesture of hostility, or in an attempt to conceal his identity. He had no signature, and no Mediator to send it. He had no Exoself. He had no Qusp. The rebels had improvised some kind of crude surgical tool, and plucked each other's digital brains out.

Tchicaya said, “Talk to me, and I'll find the right translator! We still have all the old languages.” He wasn't expecting to be understood, but he could still provoke a response. Assuming Selman hadn't lost the power of speech entirely. Tchicaya didn't know how much neural tissue a
Homo sapiens
needed in order to be fully functional. Bodies like the
Rindler
's had plenty of neurons in reserve, since the precise delegation of tasks between the digital components and the central nervous system varied widely from culture to culture. He suspected that even this reserve was less than the size of a complete ancestral brain, but a careful redesign might still have packed everything in.

With ten or twelve meters remaining between them, Selman stopped and spoke. Tchicaya couldn't even parse the speech into separate words; to his untrained ear it sounded like a continuous flow. This was the first time in his life that he'd begun a conversation with a stranger without the ground being prepared in advance, without two Mediators conspiring to bridge the gap. A moment after the utterance was complete, though, he recalled the sounds and understood them.

“Turn around and go back, or I'll beat you to a pulp.”

Tchicaya replied in the same tongue, or what he hoped was near enough to be comprehensible. His Mediator had traced Selman's words back to a language from twenty-third century Earth, but it was compensating on the fly for the kind of variations that could arise over millennia in an isolated population of the original speakers.

“As opposed to what? Turn around and go back, and fry with the ship?”

Selman said, “If the builders are willing to take the ship away from the border, no one has to fry.”

Tchicaya shrugged. “Flee or fry, it's all the same to us. The only thing at stake is access to the border, so every choice that would put an end to that is equivalent. You can fly us all the way to Earth, or you can crack our heads open one by one, but don't expect to get any more cooperation for one alternative than another.”

Selman said, “Spare yourself the pain, then. Or the mess, if pain is beneath you.” He stepped forward, swinging the bar. Tchicaya had no knowledge of martial arts; he delegated the problem to his Exoself, and watched the interaction as a detached observer until he was standing with one foot on the back of Selman's neck, and holding the bar himself.

“That wasn't even you, you bloodless worm!” Selman hissed.

“Oh, you noticed?” The other four were approaching; two of them were hefting large potted plants, a choice of weapon more alarming for its strangeness than its bulk. “None of this was necessary,” Tchicaya said. “Whatever grievance you had, we would have given you a hearing.”

“We gave our arguments peacefully,” Selman replied. “Hours ago.”

“What arguments? Evolutionary imperatives, and winning back territory? We're the ones who've lost two thousand systems. You haven't lost a single ship.”

“So you expected us to sit back and do nothing? While you betrayed your own species, and wiped out the last vestiges of humanity?”

Tchicaya was still struggling to come to terms with the rebels’ origins. To pass as ordinary travelers at all, they must have translated themselves into versions that ran on their Qusps, as well as their Trojan-horse brains. Lying in wait, impotently watching their other halves act, must have been a deeply unpleasant experience. The neural versions would not have been able to follow much, if any, of what was spoken around them—even when the words passed through their own lips—so the Qusp versions would have had to brief them later, whispering in private in their native tongue. Coming prepared to survive their own preemptive digital lobotomies had been prescient, though. Tchicaya was almost certain now that the builders possessed halt switches for all the ship's Qusps; that would have been the method they'd hoped to use against the rebels heading for the hub, before changing their mind and sending Rasmah and the others in pursuit.

The other four anachronauts stood before Tchicaya. One of them, Christa, said, “Let him go, and back away.”

“Or what? You'll beat me to death with your rhododendron?” Tchicaya asked the ship, “What is that? Is it one of yours?”

“Originally, but it's been tweaked.”

“Into something dangerous?”

“There's nothing obviously harmful being expressed in the leaves or stalk.”

“And the roots?”

“I have no way of knowing about the roots.”

Christa repeated, “Let him go, and back away. This is your last chance.”

Tchicaya asked his Exoself if it could relieve both rebels of their pots without spilling the contents. It could make no promises.

He said, “I have nothing to gain by retreating.”

Christa glanced down at Selman, her mask of grim resolve melting for an instant. She was stranded in a deranged, alien world, and she believed she was about to die.

Tchicaya said, “We can—”

She raised the pot to her shoulder, and started to shake the plant free. Tchicaya told his Exoself to keep as much as it could from falling; he sprang forward, grabbed the stalk, and forced the plant back into its container. As Christa toppled backward, his Exoself had him reach out with his other hand and secure the pot around the roots.

As he did this, in the corner of his eye he saw another anachronaut swinging the second plant by its stalk. The roots were already free of the pot, and the soil around them was falling away. Between the gnarled gray fingers of the roots were dozens of swollen white nodules. Tchicaya told his Exoself to prevent the nodules from coming into contact with anything solid. It knew how fast he was capable of moving, and how fast he needed to be. The task, it declared, was impossible.

The anachronaut slammed the roots of the plant down on the floor.

Tchicaya lost everything but his sense of motion. He was deaf and blind, falling, waiting for an impact. He'd been thrown into the air, so he had to come back down to the ground eventually. That made sense, didn't it?

The impact never came, but his vision was restored in an instant. His suit had turned fully opaque to protect his eyes; now it had decided that it was safe for him to see again. He was outside the
Rindler
, falling away from it. He could see the damaged walkway narrowing into two hourglass waists on either side of the ruptured section, pinching it off, stopping the flow of air. A skein of filaments was already beginning to crisscross the wound.

He looked around for the anachronauts. He spotted one in the distance, silhouetted against the borderlight, sharing the velocity he'd acquired from the
Rindler
's spin but separated from him by the force of the blast. The limbs were fixed at unnatural angles; he was looking at a corpse. All the ships' bodies could switch modes and cope without oxygen, but between the explosion and the exposure to vacuum there'd been no prospect of anyone surviving unprotected. The rebels had had more time than anyone else to think about putting on suits before endangering themselves, but they'd apparently decided not to bother. That was either willful martyrdom, or the expectation that, whatever happened, no one was going to be left alive to come and rescue them.

Branco spoke. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” If his suit had been damaged at all by the blast, it had since repaired itself, and his Exoself reported nothing more than bruising to his body.

“I'll send the shuttle after you.”

Tchicaya said, “Thanks.” He waited, watching numbly as the necklace of the ship continued to recede. He was tumbling slowly around an axis that almost coincided with the direction of his motion; the
Rindler
never vanished from sight, but the horizon between the border and the stars wheeled in front of him.

Branco said, “Plan A might not be possible. They've glued the shuttle's release bolts in place.”

Tchicaya pondered this, dreamily amused for a moment. The sheer strangeness of his situation had induced a sense of detachment; it was a struggle to think his way back into events on the ship.

“What's happening at the hub?”

“We reviewed what the climbers were doing earlier, in the instrumentation bay,” Branco replied. “They were building a particle detector, with some powerful superconducting magnets. Which are now part of the devices they have with them.”