Schild's Ladder (36 page)

She said, “Don't you wish we could have come here with nothing to do but understand this place?”

“Yes.” Tchicaya felt no desire whatsoever to add a retort about her old allegiances. The factions belonged to another universe.

“For a thousand years.”

“Yes.” He put his arm across her shoulders.

Mariama turned to him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think you would have traveled to the
Rindler
at all, if it wasn't for the power station?”

“I don't know. I can't answer that.”

“But you still feel bad about it?”

Tchicaya laughed curtly. “It's not relentless crushing guilt, if that's what you mean. But I knew it was wrong, even when I did it, and I haven't changed my mind about that.”

She said, “You know, I actually expected you to be grateful, because you got what you wanted. That's the last time I made that mistake with anyone.”

“I bet it was. Ouch!” She'd punched him on the arm.

“But you just blamed me for everything, because I didn't fight hard enough against you.”

“I didn't blame you,” he protested.

Mariama gazed back at him neutrally.

Tchicaya said, “All right, I did. That was unfair.”

“You made me feel like a murderer,” she said. “I was just a child, the same as you.”

“I'm sorry.” Tchicaya searched her face. “I didn't know it still—”

She cut him off. “It doesn't. It doesn't still hurt me. It hadn't even crossed my mind for centuries. And it had nothing to do with me coming to the
Rindler
. I would have done that anyway.”

“Right.”

They stood for a while without speaking.

Tchicaya said, “Is that it? Are we at peace now?”

Mariama smiled. “Not histrionic enough for you?”

“The less catharsis I can get these days, the better.” She'd smuggled in a weapon, she'd been prepared to kill him, and they'd still found a way to go on. But it had taken them until now to speak a few words and untangle the oldest, simplest knot.

“I think we're at peace,” she said.

They continued down along the airflowers' crowded highway. Eventually the creatures began to thin out; presumably the
Sarumpaet
was approaching the bottom of the vendek current that had attracted them in the first place—or at least the end of the weather conditions that rendered the current detectable from afar.

After the last airflower had disappeared into the haze above them, they tracked the current itself for another hour. When it finally came to an end, there was nothing. Just the Bright itself, empty and shimmering.

Mariama said, “I don't believe it! A river like that can't appear out of nowhere.”

“We haven't seen any other currents as long,” Tchicaya said cautiously. “But what does that prove? We don't know the limits of ordinary weather.”

“I suppose some vendek mixes are just stable because they're stable,” she conceded. “But xennobes have particular uses for stable combinations. I was expecting at least a pile of decaying xennobe corpses.”

They circled around, examining the region with the probes. There was another persistent current, feeding into the first; it hadn't been obvious immediately, because the transition zone between them was far less orderly than the currents themselves. The vendek mix in the deeper current appeared to be decaying into the mix that had attracted the airflowers, catalyzed by a shift in the ambient weather; as they watched the probe image, they could see the transition zone drifting back and forth.

Tchicaya said, “Well, it's coming from deeper in. And I'm not going back up to try chasing rabbits.”

They followed the river back toward its source. Within an hour, they'd hit a second transition zone—this time forking into two different upward flows.

A third transition.

A fourth.

Mariama said, “At least we're learning a lot of vendekobiology. Can you imagine the kind of diagrams it would take to describe the Bright? I used to think the fusion reactions in a star were complicated.”

“Students will curse our names. What more can anyone hope for?”

A fifth transition.

A sixth. Here, the current was flowing down to them, making a U-turn. If they were going to trace it to its origin, they would have to travel an unknown distance back toward the honeycomb.

Tchicaya was torn. They didn't know if this was an offshoot of a mighty river, the backbone to an entire xennobe ecology, or just a meaningless cobweb drifting through the Bright. They could end up chasing it back and forth, like a cat stalking a feather, until the Planck worms came raining down.

“If we don't spot another xennobe before the next transition, that will be the last,” he declared.

Mariama concurred, reluctantly.

They stood together, staring into the haze. Tchicaya could think of no other strategy, once they abandoned this thread, than plunging straight down, hoping at least to hit bottom soon, yielding a purely physical measure of how much territory they'd be sacrificing if they built the tar pit for the Planck worms.

And if they never hit bottom, if the Bright went on forever? Then there'd be nothing they could do, nothing they could save.

Mariama said, “That's a sprite-shadow, isn't it? It's not just haze.”

“Where?”

She pointed. Tchicaya could see a tiny gray distortion in the light. “If it's another airflower, that doesn't count.”

The shadow grew, but the probes were still not reaching it. The object was much further away than they'd realized, and it was definitely not an airflower.

Tchicaya would have abandoned the vendek current to go after this new find, but the current itself was leading them straight to it.
This
, ultimately, was the source of the vendeks on which the airflowers had been feeding. And its sprite-shadow kept looming larger, while the probes remained oblivious to it.

Mariama said, “If this is a single organism, we've just gone from rabbits to whales. I thought the current must have come from necrotic decay, but this is so huge it wouldn't need to be mortally wounded; it could urinate a river.”

The flickering outline of the shadow was roughly circular. “I don't think it's one creature,” Tchicaya said. “I think we've found an oasis in the desert.”

The shadow now dominated the view completely, a sight as overwhelming as the border from Pachner, but its exact form remained elusive. “We have to get those probes to go faster,” Mariama complained.

A tiny patch of color and detail appeared suddenly at the center of the object, spreading slowly through the grayness. The framing effect was confusing; Tchicaya found it harder than ever to interpret the probe image. Things that might have been xennobes were moving around on a roughly spherical surface; the scape labeled them as being hundreds of times larger than the rabbits, but they looked like mites crawling over an elephant. The scale of the structure was extraordinary; if an airflower was the size of a daisy, this was a floating mountain, an asteroid.

The window of detail grew, revealing thousands of xennobes streaming about below them—the alignment of the
Sarumpaet
's deck still made “down” point to the center of the far side, but it was impossible not to grant this minor planet precedence—and that was just the surface. Some xennobes were coming and going from the mouths of tunnels leading into hidden depths. As yet, the probes were spread too thinly to report on the new xennobes' anatomy in any detail, and like the others, their forms swayed wildly in the winds that wrapped around them, merging with their bodies. Yet some system at the core of each xennobe retained its integrity through all the changes sweeping over it, and the same organizational information was endlessly reencoded, endlessly preserved.

As the probe image spread out to encompass the entire colony, Tchicaya's heart leaped. He struggled to temper his excitement. His intuition didn't count for much here, and everything he was witnessing was constantly deforming, as if the whole vision was a reflection in liquid metal. He couldn't even pin down the source of his conviction, the one regularity in all the busyness beneath them that struck him as the signature of artifice over nature. But all technology would be built from nature, here. Nothing entirely lifeless could endure.

He turned to Mariama. “This is not an oasis. It's not a jungle. We've found the Signalers. This is their city.”

Chapter 17

The
Sarumpaet
circumnavigated the xennobe colony, reconnoitering, apparently unnoticed. Tchicaya kept the density of the probes low, lest the rain of inquisitive devices cross the threshold of perception—or some more sensitive, artificial means of detection—and alarm the denizens. He had no urgent need to study these creatures' internal anatomy, and the details of the colony itself were overwhelming enough.

Veins and bladders and sheets composed of thousands of different vendek populations defined the structure, separated by an intricate warren of tunnels through which the free vendeks of the Bright continued to pass. The probes identified changes in the winds as they flowed through the colony; specialized vendeks were diffusing out of a multitude of reservoirs and modifying the raw weather, killing off some species, supplanting them directly, or interacting with them to create new variants. To Tchicaya, this looked exactly like air-conditioning for physics: the Colonists could probably cope with all but the most extreme natural changes in their environment, but it made sense that they'd find it less stressful to delegate some of their homeostatic efforts to their technology.

Hundreds of vendek currents snaked out of the colony, presumably waste products from both the thing itself and its inhabitants. A few were so stable that they completely resisted the passage of both probes and sprites, and they appeared in the scape as gnarled black roots twisting away into the distance.

Tchicaya saw nothing to dissuade him from his earlier conclusion, though everything was open to alternative interpretations. Termite mounds had air-conditioning, ants had mastered agriculture, and the Colonists might not have needed to expend even as much effort as social insects to bring their home into existence; it was possible that they were mere symbionts, mindlessly tending some giant natural organism. Mariama remained cautious, but she did not choose to play devil's advocate. They both had the same hopes now, and they both knew how easily they could be dashed.

They spent half a day debating the level of caution they needed to exercise. Whether these xennobes were the Signalers or not, they were likely to have far more potent defenses than the rabbit. It would be difficult to supervise any kind of complex interaction from too great a distance, though; if they hung back in their present orbit and sent down a drone, it would need to be largely autonomous.

The plan they finally settled upon was to send in a mobile form of their signaling banner, as large and obvious as they could make it, while following behind at a prudent distance. If the reception was violent, the tiny sprite-shadow of the
Sarumpaet
would be the less likely target.

If their mimicry of the signaling layer produced a promising reaction, they would move on to more complex exchanges, playing it by ear, hoping that the banner itself would prompt their hosts to respond in kind. Nothing the probes had revealed had offered any clues about the Colonists' preferred mode of interpersonal communication; sprites and other potential information-carriers flooded the colony, but plucking messages in an unknown language from all the influences modulating these carriers was beyond the standard Mediator software they'd brought through the border. Given time, Tchicaya would have happily observed the Colonists from a distance until everything about them, right down to the subtlest cultural nuance, was absolutely clear. He and Mariama could have descended from the sky expecting compliments on their perfect local accents and unprecedented good manners, like a pair of conscientious travelers.

It was not going to happen that way. The coming of the Planck worms would be unheralded, but the five percent error bars of the toolkit's best statistical guess had already been crossed. If the sky rained poison right now, as they rushed through their rudimentary preparations, they would not even have the bitter consolation of knowing that they'd been ambushed by unforeseeable events.

They'd reached the end game, ready or not. They'd have to walk a knife edge between recklessness and caution, but they could not afford to take a single step back.

The signaling banner spiraled down toward the colony, twisting and fluttering like an airborne tent in a hurricane, but pulsing steadily from translucent to opaque. The
Sarumpaet
followed, close enough to maintain a probe image of the banner that was only a fraction of a ship-second out of date. The probes could also ferry instructions from the ship to the banner, enabling the signal to be modified on a similar time scale as soon as the need arose.

From the deck of the
Sarumpaet
, Tchicaya formed a rapid series of impressions of the crowded world below, none of which he believed was worth trusting. The density and animation of the creatures made him think of the bustle of markets of festivals, of riots. Of the crew of some ancient, oceangoing vessel battling a storm. In fact, all this violent swaying in the wind was probably about as exciting for the Colonists as a terrestrial animal's endlessly beating heart. For all he knew, this was what they looked like at their most indolent.

He searched for any hint of a flickering shadow from the banner on the surface below, but between the shimmering of the sprites and the erratic geometry of all the objects involved, that was too much to expect. Perhaps it was fortunate that the nearsiders would not arrive with anything like the drama of an artificial eclipse; even if these xennobes did belong to the same species as the Signalers, different cultures could still have varying degrees of sophistication, and an overblown spectacle might have terrified a group for whom the search for life beyond the border was a barely comprehensible endeavor, something that only an obscure, deranged minority would even contemplate.