Schild’s Ladder

“Someone who’ll usurp your present role as most junior arrival. In fact, technically, I suppose she’s already done that, but she’s not yet in a state to show herself and claim the position.”

Tchicaya smiled at the memory of his own appearance in the crib. “Two arrivals in as many days?” That wouldn’t have been so strange if someone had been following him from Pachner, but he hadn’t come across anyone there who’d shared his travel plans. “They’ll be running out of bodies if this keeps up. We’ll have to squeeze the ex-acorporeals right into the ship’s processors.”

Sophus frowned, mock-reprovingly. “Hey, no discrimination, please! It’s up to them to volunteer, not us to suggest it.”

“The way they offered to share those cabins, to make room for new arrivals?”

Sophus nodded, apparently amused by the gesture. Tchicaya felt a twinge of unease, unsure whether he had just endeared himself to Sophus with some remarks that had been taken as evidence of bigotry, or whether he was just being hypersensitive. He wondered how long it would take Sophus to quiz him about his allegiance; either the answer had spread through the grapevine already, or Sophus was polite enough to make small talk for a while, and see if he could extract the information indirectly.

“Actually, we’ll start some new bodies growing soon,” Sophus explained. “We were expecting a rush about now?—?give or take a decade. People will want to be here, it’s what the models predicted.”

Tchicaya was puzzled. “What, because of Zapata?”

Sophus shook his head. “It’s far too late to save Zapata. Maybe not literally, but most people are realistic enough not to think that they can turn back the tide at the very last moment. Look a bit further down the track. A century, a century and a half.”

“Ah.” In the right company, Tchicaya might have made a joke of the prospect Sophus was raising, but it wasn’t the kind of casual blasphemy he’d try out on a stranger. And the truth was, he did feel genuine sorrow, in some ways deeper than his feelings about Turaev’s eventual demise. Like the uprooting of some much-loved, long- sedentary ancestor through whom a scattered family remained in touch, the exodus of Earth’s people, and the destruction of its soil, would scar the hearts of even the most cosmopolitan travelers.

“There’s still talk of moving it,” Sophus said casually. “Pushing a white dwarf into the solar system, to carry it away. Sirius B is the obvious candidate.” Tchicaya blinked at him, incredulous. “It wouldn’t be impossible,” Sophus insisted. “When you dump matter on a white dwarf, it undergoes tidal compression heating. If you do it in the right way, a significant amount squirts off in jets. If you arrange for asymmetric jets, and if you have enough mass to play with, you can achieve a modest net acceleration. Then you get the Earth into orbit around the star; the acceleration displaces the orbit, but it can still be bound.”

“But to get Sirius B up to half the speed of light?—?”

Sophus raised a hand. “I know, I know! You’d have to gather so much reaction mass, and move all of it so swiftly into place, the damage would rival Mimosa. To wreak that kind of havoc just to put the whole ball of rock into exile as an unbroken whole would be like saving New York from the floods by blasting it all the way to Io. The only sane response is to work on designing an effective sandbag, while being prepared to give up gracefully and watch the place sink if that proves to be impossible.”

“Yeah.” If Tchicaya remembered the story correctly, though, while New York hadn’t quite ended up on Io, gracefully watching the place sink would be putting things charitably. Hadn’t some famous statue ended up in Paris, and various bridges and buildings gone to scattered theme parks?

Sophus attended briefly to an internal perception. “My colleague is on the brink of emerging. Would you like to meet her?”

“I’d be delighted.” They rose together and headed for the stairs. On the walkway, Tchicaya forced himself to keep pace with Sophus, as if no one would make allowances for his lack of experience now that he’d ceased to be literally the rawest recruit.

“Where’s she come from?”

“You mean, directly?”

“Yeah. I was on Pachner, and no one else there was talking about traveling to the Rindler. Maybe I just didn’t bump into her?—?”

Sophus shook his head. “She’s been in transit almost a century, standard time.”

That was a long journey. Though it cost you more lost years in total to travel by an indirect route, breaking up the trip with as many stops as possible eased the sense of alienation. Whatever faction she supported, she had to be serious about the cause.

Tchicaya pictured a map of the region. “She’s come from Chaitin?”

“Right.”

“But she wasn’t born there?”

“No. You know, you’ll be able to ask her for her life’s history directly, in a couple of minutes.”

“Sorry.” Maybe it was absurd to be so curious about the newcomer when he still knew next to nothing about the Rindler's other passengers, but Yann’s gloomy summary, and his own limited experience, had already made him long for someone who’d shake up the status quo.

As they crossed the observation deck, the door to the recovery room opened. Tchicaya smiled in recognition at the newcomer’s posture: loose-limbed and confident after the kinesthetic retuning, seizing up for a moment at the sight of the border.

Then he recognized something more, and his own body turned to stone again.

He didn’t need to check her signature; she hadn’t changed her appearance since their paths had last crossed. In fact, she hadn’t changed in four thousand years, since the day they’d first parted.

Tchicaya broke into a run, blind to everything around him, calling out her name.

“Mariama!”

She turned at the sound. He could see that she was shocked, and then uncertain how to respond. He halted, not wanting to embarrass her. It had been twelve hundred years since they’d set eyes on each other, and he had no idea what she’d make of his presence.

Mariama held out her hands, and he ran forward to grip them in his own. They whirled around, laughing, surefooted on the polished floor, leaning back into their own centrifugal force, moving ever faster, until Tchicaya’s arms ached and his wrists burned and his vision blurred. But he would not be the one to stop moving, and he would not be the one to let go.

Chapter 6

Something unseen stung Tchicaya’s hand, a vibration like a tuning fork held against the bone. He turned and stared at the empty space beside him, and a dark blur shivered into solidity.

“Quickly! Give your Exoself this code.”

No sooner had the data passed between their Mediators than Tchicaya wished he’d rejected it. He felt as if he’d been tricked into catching something incriminatory thrown his way, the reflex action triggered by the object in flight turning out to have been the wrong response entirely.

“I can’t!”

Mariama said, “No one will ever know. They’re like statues. You’ll be invisible.”

Tchicaya’s heart pounded. He glanced at the door, and caught himself straining his ears for footsteps, though he knew there’d be nothing to hear. Could she have really walked through the house undetected, marching right past his parents in that scandalous state?

“Our Exoselves scan for danger,” he protested. “If anything happens at ordinary speed?—?”

“Did your Exoself detect me?”

“I don’t know. It might have.”

“Did it signal you? Did it bring you out of Slowdown?”

“No.” He wasn’t an adult, though. Who knew how differently theirs were programmed?

“We’ll stay clear of them,” Mariama explained. “I’m not doing this to pick their pockets. If we’re not a threat to anyone, we won’t trigger any alarms.”

Tchicaya stared at her, torn. He had never feared his parents, but he basked in their approval. It only took