Schild’s Ladder

“After Crane? It became a kind of competition, to see who could Mead them the best: make up the most outlandish story, and get the anachronauts to swallow it. A plague wasn’t really barbaric enough. There had to be war between the sexes. There had to be oppression. There had to be slavery.”

“Slavery?”

“Oh yes. And worse. On Krasnov, they said that for five thousand years, men had slaughtered their own firstborn child to gain access to a life-prolonging secretion in mother’s milk. The practice had only ended a century before.”

Yann swayed against the bed. “That’s surreal on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin.” He regarded Tchicaya forlornly. “This is really what the anachronauts expected? No progress, no happiness, no success, no harmony? Just the worst excesses of their own sordid history, repeated over and over for millennia?”

Tchicaya said, “On Makela, the people insisted that their planet had been peaceful since settlement. The anachronauts were terribly suspicious, and kept digging for the awful secret that no one dared reveal. Finally, the locals reviewed the transmission from Crane describing the first contact, and they realized what was needed. They explained that their society had been stabilized by the invention of the Sacred Pentad, in which all family units were based around two males, two females, and one neuter.” Tchicaya frowned. “There were rules about the sexual relationships between the members, something about equal numbers of heterosexual and homosexual pairings, but I could never get a clear description of that. But the anachronauts were thrilled by the great cultural richness they had finally uncovered. Apparently, their definition of cultural richness was the widespread enforcement of any social or sexual mores even more bizarre and arbitrary than the ones they’d left behind.”

Yann said, “So what happened on Turaev?”

“The ship had been tracked for centuries, of course, so the mere fact of its arrival was no surprise to anyone. My father had known since early childhood that these strangers would be turning up, somewhere on the planet, at about this time. A variety of different hoaxes had been advocated by different groups, and though none of them had gained planet-wide support, the anachronauts rarely visited more than one place, so it would only require the people in one town to back each other up.

“My father wasn’t prepared at all, though. He hadn’t kept up with news of the precise timing of the ship’s arrival, and even though he’d been aware that it would happen soon, the chance of planet-fall outside his own town had been too microscopic to worry about. He’d had far more important things on his mind.”

Yann smiled expectantly, despite himself. “So when the flames died down, and the dust settled, and your father’s Mediator dug up the visitors' ancient language from its files…he had to stand there and insist with a straight face that he knew nothing whatsoever about the subject of their inquiries?”

“Exactly. Neither he nor Lajos had the slightest idea what they were supposed to tell these strangers. If they’d read the reports on the anachronauts, they’d have realized that they could have claimed all manner of elaborate taboos on discussing the subject, but they weren’t in a position to know that and invoke some imaginary code of silence. So all they were left with was claiming ignorance: claiming to be both prepubescent, and stupid.” Tchicaya laughed. “After six months of longing for each other? Within days, or even hours, of consumation? I don’t know how to translate that into terms you’re familiar with?—?”

Yann was offended. “I’m not an idiot. I understand how much pride they would have had to swallow. You don’t need to spoonfeed me similes.”

Tchicaya bowed his head in apology, but he held out for precision. “Pride, yes, but it was more than that. Claiming anything but the truth would have felt like they were renouncing each other. Even if they’d known their lines, I’m not sure that they could have gone through with the charade.” He held a fist against his chest. “It hurts, to lie about something like that. Other people might have been swept up in the excitement of the conspiracy. But to Lajos and my father, that was just noise. They were the center of the universe. Nothing else mattered.”

“So they told them the truth?”

Tchicaya said, “Yes.”

“About themselves?”

He nodded. “And more.”

“About the whole planet? That this was the custom all over Turaev?”

“More.”

Yann emitted an anguished groan. “They told them everything?”

Tchicaya said, “My father didn’t come right out and state that all their earlier informants had lied to them, but he explained that?—?apart from a few surviving contemporaries of the travelers themselves?—?there’d been nothing resembling sexual dimorphism in the descendants of humans, anywhere, for more than nineteen thousand years. Long before any extrasolar world was settled, it had gone the way of war, slavery, parasites, disease, and quantum indecisiveness. And apart from trivial local details, like the exact age of sexual maturity and the latency period between attraction and potency, he and his lover embodied a universal condition: they were both, simply, people. There were no other categories left to which they could belong.”

Yann pondered this. “So did the intrepid gendographers believe him?”

Tchicaya held up a hand, gesturing for patience. “They were far too polite to call my father a liar to his face. So they went into town, and spoke to other people.”

“Who, without exception, gave them the approved version?”

“Yes.”

“So they left Turaev none the wiser. With an unlikely tale from two mischievous adolescents to add to their collection of sexual mythology.”

Tchicaya said, “Perhaps. Except that since Turaev, they haven’t made planet-fall anywhere. They’ve been tracked, the ship’s still functioning, and they’ve had four or five opportunities to enter inhabited systems. But every time, they’ve flown on by.”

Yann shivered. “You think it’s a ghost ship?”

Tchicaya said, “No. I think they’re in cold sleep, with their bodies frozen, and tiny currents flowing in their brains. Dreaming of all the horrors they’d wished upon us, in the name of some crude, masochistic notion of humanity that must have been dying right in front of them before they’d even left Earth.”

As Tchicaya boarded the shuttle ahead of Yann, Mariama looked back and flashed him a brief smile. Her meaning was unmistakable, but he pretended not to notice. He didn’t mind her knowing what he and Yann had attempted, or even how it had ended, but it drove him to distraction that she could deduce at least half the story just by watching them together.

He could have instructed his Exoself to embargo whatever small gestures were giving him away. But that was not how he wanted to be: hermetically sealed, blank as a rock. For a moment, Tchicaya contemplated reaching over and putting his arm across Yann’s shoulders, just to devalue her powers of observation. On reflection that would have been petty, though, and likely to cause Yann all kinds of confusion.

Mariama sat beside Tarek. In the unlikely event that the two of them were lovers, Tchicaya would be the last to know. Behind him, the fifth passenger, Branco, strapped himself in place. Tchicaya turned to him and joked, “It doesn’t seem right that you’re outnumbered. You should at least have brought an observer along.”

Branco said pleasantly, “Fuck that. The last thing I want to do is start mimicking all your paranoid games.”

Branco had been part of the original coalition who’d designed and built both the Rindler and the Scribe. Yielders and Preservationists had arrived over the decades, exuding a kind of bureaucratic fog through which he was now forced to march, but as he’d explained to Tchicaya earlier, he’d become inured to the squatters and their demands. The Scribe was still available to its creators, occasionally, and with patience he could still get work done. The factions made a lot of noise, but in the long run, as far as Branco was concerned, they’d be about as significant as the vapid religious cults who’d once squabbled over contested shrines on Earth. “And you sad airheads can’t even slaughter each other,” he’d observed gleefully. “How frustrating that must be.”

As they fell away from the Rindler, Tchicaya barely noticed the weightlessness, or the strange doll’s-house/termite-colony view some of the modules offered as they shrank into the distance. The trip hadn’t quite become as unremarkable to him as air travel in a planetary atmosphere, but on a planet even repeated flights along the same route were never as unvarying as this.

Tarek said, “Actually, we’re outnumbered, three to two. If you’re neutral, you’re a