Schild’s Ladder

at least one thing that went against the grain. After five years of monastic restraint, five years of denying herself the dishonest comforts of virtual reality, she was sick of placing that principle above everything else. Beyond the fact that this disembodiment would be entirely in the service of honesty, she needed, very badly, to drag herself out of the absolutist rut she’d been digging from the moment she’d arrived. If she’d compromised a little from the start, maybe she wouldn’t have felt the same sense of desperation. But it was too late now for half-measures. If she returned to Earth unchanged, it wouldn’t be a triumph of integrity. It would be a kind of death. She’d implode into something as hermetic and immutable as a black hole.

All this, weighed against the thing she hated most: lack of control. Every choice she made rendered meaningless. What choices, though? Her clones would run for a few subjective minutes, most of them in rapt attention as the data poured in. What was the worst that one of these transient selves might do? Utter a few unkind words to Livia or Darsono? Disclose some small guilty secret from her past to people who either wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t care, or at the very least, wouldn’t have the chance to reproach her for long? She wasn’t opening up the gates to the old human nightmare: endless varieties of suffering, endless varieties of stupidity, endless varieties of banality. She would diffuse a very small distance into the space of possibilities, and whatever unhappiness she might experience, whatever misdemeanors she might commit, would be erased beyond recovery.

Rainzi looked skeptical, and she couldn’t blame him. But there was no time left for him to play devil’s advocate, to test her resolve. Cass stood her ground, silently, and after a moment he nodded assent.

She felt a stream of low-level requests for data, and she willed her Mediator to respond. She’d been through the same process before her transmission from Earth: sending the preliminaries first, things that needed to be known about the structure of her mind before it could be implemented in a new environment.

Rainzi said, “Take my hand. We’ll step through together.” He placed his ghost-fingers over hers, and asked her for everything.

Cass examined his face. It was pure chance that her Mediator had given him an appearance that inspired trust in her, but the faces of the embodied were no better guides to character, whether they’d been sculpted by genes or by their wearer’s wishes. If Rainzi’s eyes still seemed kind to her, after five years, wasn’t that because he’d shown her genuine kindness? This was not the time for paranoid delusions about the unknowable mind behind the mask.

She said, “Are you ever afraid of this, yourself?”

“A little,” he admitted.

“What frightens you the most? What is it that you think might happen?”

He shook his head. “There’s no terrible fate that I fear is lying in store for me. But however many times I do this, I come no closer to knowing what it’s actually like. Don’t you think there’s something frightening about that?”

She smiled. “Absolutely.” They weren’t so different that she’d be insane to follow him, the way it would be insane to follow an armored robot into a volcano. This would not be strange or painful beyond her power to bear. If she truly wanted it, she had nothing to fear.

Cass opened the floodgates.

Rainzi’s hand passed through her own, intangible as ever. Cass shuddered. She was who she always was, and the part of her who valued that above all else could not disguise its relief.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her, “you won’t be hanging around waiting. And you won’t be disappointed. The femtomachine will only start up on a definite signal from the Quietener; if there’s nothing, it won’t ever be run.”

Cass protested, “Aren’t you telling the wrong person?” He might have mentioned this before she’d been split.

Rainzi shrugged. “To the clone, it will be self-evident. If it gets the chance to think anything at all.”

If the vacuum at the heart of the Quietener changed, her other self would wake, watch the whole event unfold in slow motion, bifurcate a million times, then vanish, before Cass had even noticed the good news. Neither the price nor the payoff were part of her own future, now.

Yet they would all be one person: awake, asleep. The dream she would not remember would be her own.

Here and now, though?

She would have to make do with whatever glimpses she could steal.

She turned to Yann. “Freeze me. One last time.”

Chapter 3

Cass looked around the simulated chamber. The display on the wall was densely inscribed with new data, but nothing else appeared to have changed. The Mimosans were the usual icons drawn by her Mediator; she still had no hope of perceiving them as they perceived themselves. The structures in her mind where sensory data was represented hadn’t changed; they simply weren’t coupled to genuine sense organs anymore. It was only the touch of Rainzi’s nonexistent skin against her own?—?a translation interacting with a simulation?—?that proved she’d stepped from her world into his.

Or rather, they’d both stepped together into a new world, from which neither of them could hope to emerge.

Cass felt no anxiety, just a bittersweet sense of everything her newfound freedom did and didn’t mean. If she’d abandoned embodiment a year or two earlier, she might have had some prospect of going further: finding a path of gradual change that led to new abilities, such as the power to interpret the Mimosans' language firsthand. As it was, she didn’t even have time for the smallest act of self-indulgence: a simulated swim, a solid meal, a glass of cool water. After five years, all the pleasures she’d been pining for had become attainable at the very moment when they would be nothing but unwelcome distractions.

She slipped her hand free of Rainzi’s and turned to examine the display. A faint spray of particles was radiating out from the center of the Quietener, the sign of an unstable boundary between old vacuum and new.

The data had only been coming in for a few hundredths of a picosecond, so the statistics were still ambiguous. As she watched, rows of figures were updated, the sprinkling of points on half a dozen charts grew denser, curves shifted slightly. Cass knew where every number and every curve was heading; it was like watching the face of a long-awaited friend materialize out of the darkness, having pictured the reunion a thousand times. And if the face might yet turn out to be a stranger’s, that had nothing to do with the way she felt. There was pleasure enough in anticipation; she didn’t need to conjure up traces of doubt just to savor the added suspense.

“What we’re doing isn’t all that unusual,” Darsono mused. “I think everyone lives in at least two time scales: one of them fast and immediate, and too detailed to retain in anything but outline; the other slow enough to be absorbed completely. We think our memory has no gaps, we think we carry our entire past inside us, because we’re accustomed to looking back and seeing only sketches and highlights. But we all experience more than we remember.”

“That’s not true of everyone,” Bakim countered. “There are people who record every thought they have.”

“Yes, but unless every part of that record has the potential to be triggered automatically by subsequent thoughts and perceptions?—?which no one ever allows, because the barrage of associations would drive them mad? —?it’s not true memory. It’s just a list of all the things they’ve forgotten.”

Bakim chortled. “True memory? And I suppose if I perceive something with so much spatial resolution that I can’t give immediate, conscious attention to every last detail simultaneously, it’s not a true perception?—?it’s just a cruel taunt to drive home all the things I’ve failed to perceive?”

Cass smiled, but stayed out of the argument. With certainty? Probably not. But it was pointless dwelling on every potential branching; if and when she experienced something unpleasant, firsthand,