Schild’s Ladder

Finally, Cass understood. “This is about safety? I’ve addressed the potential risks, very thoroughly?—?”

“On the basis that the Sarumpaet rules are correct.”

“Yes. What other basis should I have used?” Phoenician astrology? Californian lithomancy? Cass resisted the urge to lapse into sarcasm; there was too much at stake. “I’ve admitted that there’s no certainty that the rules hold in every last untested circumstance. But I have nothing better to put in their place.”

“Nor do I,” Livia said gently. “My point is, we mustn’t over-interpret the success of the Sarumpaet rules. General relativity and quantum field theory confessed from the start that they were just approximations: pushed to extremes, they both yielded obvious nonsense. But the fact that QGT doesn’t?—?the fact that there is no fundamental reason why it can’t be universally applicable?—?is no guarantee that it really does stretch that far.”

Cass gritted her teeth. “I concede that. But where does it leave us? Refusing to perform any experiment that hasn’t been tried before?”

Rainzi said, “Of course not. Livia is proposing a staged approach. Before attempting to construct your graph, we’d move toward it in a series of experiments, gradually bridging the gap.”

Cass fell silent. Compared to outright rejection this was a trivial obstacle, but it still stung: she’d worked for thirty years to refine her own proposal, and she resented the implication that she’d been reckless.

“How many stages?”

“Fifteen,” Livia replied. She swept a hand through the vacuum in front of her, and a sequence of target graphs appeared. Cass studied them, taking her time.

They’d been well chosen. At first one by one, then in pairs, then triples, the features that conspired to render her own target stable were introduced. If there was some undiscovered flaw in the rules that would make the final graph dangerous, there could be no more systematic way to detect it in advance.

“It’s your choice,” Rainzi said. “We’ll vote on whichever proposal you endorse.”

Cass met his eyes. The openness of his face was an act of puppetry, but that didn’t mean he was insincere. This wasn’t a threat, an attempt to bully her into agreeing. It was a mark of respect that they were letting her decide, letting her weigh up her own costs, her own fears, before they voted.

She said, “Fifteen experiments. How long would that take?”

Ilene answered, “Perhaps three years. Perhaps five.” Conditions varied, and the Quietener wasn’t perfect. Planning an experiment in QGT was like waiting for a stretch of ocean to grow sufficiently calm that a few flimsy barriers could block the waves and keep out the wildlife long enough to let you test some subtle principle of fluid dynamics. There was no equivalent of a laboratory water tank; space-time was all ocean, indivisible.

In terms of separation from her friends, five years was nothing compared to the centuries she’d already lost. Still, Cass found the prospect daunting. It must have shown on her face, because Bakim responded, “You could always return to Earth immediately, and wait for the results there.” Some of the Mimosans had trouble understanding why anyone who found life in the station arduous would feel obliged to be here in person at all.

Darsono, empathetic as ever, added quickly, “Or we could give you new quarters. There’s a suitable cavity on the other side of the station, almost twice as large; it’s just a matter of rerouting some cables.”

Cass laughed. “Thank you.” Maybe they could build her a new body, too, four whole millimeters long. Or she could abandon her scruples, melt into software, and wallow in whatever luxuries she desired. That was the hazard she’d face every day, here: not just the risk that she’d give in to temptation, but the risk that all the principles she’d chosen to define herself would come to seem like nothing but masochistic nonsense.

She lowered her gaze toward the illusory meadow, laserpainted on her retinas like everything around her, but her mind’s eye conjured up another image just as strongly from within: the Diamond Graph, as she saw it in her dreams. She could never reach it, never touch it, but she could learn to see it from a new direction, understand it in a new way. She’d come here in the hope of being changed, by that knowledge if by nothing else. To flee back to Earth out of fear that she might test her own boundaries more rigorously here, in a mere five years of consciousness, than if she’d spent the same three-quarters of a millennium at home, would be the greatest act of cowardice in her life.

“I’ll accept the staged experiments,” she declared. “I endorse Livia’s proposal.”

Rainzi said, “All in favor?”

There was silence. Cass could hear crickets chirping. No one? Not Livia herself? Not even Darsono?

She looked up.

All seven Mimosans had raised their hands.

Chapter 2

Riding her ion scooter the million kilometers to the Quietener, Cass found herself reveling in the view for the first time in years. The scooter was doing one-and-a-quarter gees, but the couch pressed against her back so gently that she might have been floating. Floating in dark water, beneath an alien sky. Even at half a light-year, Mimosa punched a dazzling violet hole in the blackness, a pinprick ten times as bright as a full moon. Away from its glare, the stars were far too plentiful to suggest constellations; any stick-figure object that she began to sketch between them was soon undermined by an equally compelling alternative, then a third, then a fourth?—?like a superposition of graphs, each with a different choice of edges between the same nodes. When she’d first arrived, she’d homed in on her own star, watching with a mixture of fear and exaltation as it hovered at the edge of visibility to her thousandth-scale eyes. Now, she’d forgotten all the cues she’d need to find it, and she felt no urge to ask her navigation software to remind her. The sun was no beacon of reassurance, and she’d be seeing it close-up again soon enough.

Each time one of Livia’s staged targets had been achieved, Cass had dispatched a small army of digital couriers to pass on the news to seven generations of her ancestors and descendants, as well as all her friends in Chalmers. She’d received dozens of messengers herself, mostly from Lisa and Tomek, full of inconsequential gossip, but very welcome. It must have grown strange for her friends as the years had passed, and they no longer knew whether or not there was any point continuing to shout into the void. If she had traveled embodied, as a handful of ancients still did, she could have caught up with centuries of mail on the return voyage. Reduced to a timeless signal en route, though, she’d have no choice but to step unprepared into the future. Her homecoming was going to be the hardest thing she’d ever faced, but she was almost certain now that her time here would prove to have been worth it.

Half an hour before arrival, Cass rolled onto her stomach and poked her head over the edge of the couch. Her engine’s exhaust was a barely perceptible flicker, fainter than a methanol flame by daylight, but she knew that if she reached down and placed her hand in the stream of plasma, she’d rapidly lose any delusion that her Mimosan body was indestructible.

She watched the Quietener growing beneath her, the silvery sphere glinting Mimosa-blue. Surrounding it was a swarm of smaller, twinned spheres, unevenly colored and far less lustrous. Tethers, invisibly slender, allowed the twins to orbit each other, while ion jets balanced the slight tug of the Quietener’s gravity, keeping each pair’s center of mass fixed against the stars.

The Quietener made it possible to perform experiments that could never be carried out elsewhere. The right distribution of matter and energy could curve space-time in any manner that Einstein’s equations allowed, but creating a chosen state of quantum geometry was a very different proposition. Rather than simply bending space- time in bulk, like a slab of metal in a foundry, it had to be controlled with the same kind of precision as the particles in a two-slit interference experiment. But the “particles” of geometry were twenty-five orders of magnitude smaller than atoms, and they could never be vaporized, ionized, or otherwise coaxed apart to be handled one by one. So the same degree of delicacy had to be achieved with the equivalent of a ten-tonne lump of iron.

Refining the starting material helped, and the Quietener did its best to screen out every form of impurity. Ordinary matter and magnetic fields absorbed or deflected charged particles, while a shell of exotic nuclei, trapped by gamma-ray lasers in states from which they could not decay without absorbing neutrinos, mopped up a greater