Schild’s Ladder

family he’d left behind; it had never been that crude. But every kind of happiness bore some imprint in the shape of the pain it had assuaged.

He heard footsteps behind him, outpacing his own. He stopped and turned to face the wall of the walkway, as if admiring the view, wiping his eyes with his forearm, less embarrassed by his tears than the fact that he’d be at a loss to explain them. If he’d still been on Turaev after four thousand years, he would have gone mad. And if he’d traveled and returned in the approved way, to find that nothing had changed in his absence, he would have gone mad even faster. He did not regret leaving.

Mariama said, “You look like you’re about to jump off a bridge.”

“I didn’t realize you were following me.”

She laughed. “I wasn’t following you. What are we meant to do? Walk in opposite directions around the ship? All Preservationists must march clockwise? That would make for some long journeys.”

“Forget it.” He turned to look at her. It was unjust beyond belief, but right at this moment?—?having resolved for the thousandth time that he’d made the right decision?—?he wanted to rant in her face about the price she’d made him pay. After all her talk as a rebel child, after leading by example, after four thousand years as a traveler, she had now decided that her role in life was to fight to keep the planet-bound cultures?—?all the slaves she’d vowed to liberate, all the drones she’d promised to shake out of their stupor?—?safely marinating in their own inertia for another twenty thousand years.

He said, “Where are you heading?”

Mariama hesitated. “Do you know Kadir?”

“Only slightly. We didn’t exactly hit it off.” Tchicaya was about to add something more acerbic, when he realized that today was the day Kadir’s home world, Zapata, would have fallen. That was only true in terms of a reference frame fixed to the local stars, not the Rindler's notion of simultaneity, and in any case no confirmation of the event would reach them for decades, but unless the border had magically altered its speed in distant regions, the planet’s loss was a certainty.

“He’s holding a kind of wake. That’s where I’m going.”

“So you and he are close?”

Mariama said, “Not especially. But he’s invited everyone, not just his friends.”

Tchicaya leaned back against the wall, unfazed by its transparency. He said, “Why did you come here?”

She shaded her eyes against the borderlight. “I thought you’d decided that we were never going to have this argument.”

“If you think I’ve shut you up, now’s your chance.”

“You know why I’m here,” she said. “Don’t pretend it’s a mystery.” The glare was too much; she turned to stand beside him. “Do you want to come with me, to this thing of Kadir’s?”

“You must be joking. Do you think I’m a provocateur, or just a masochist?”

“This isn’t factional. He’s invited everyone.” She frowned. “Or are you afraid to spend ten minutes in the company of people who might disagree with you?”

“I spent ten years on Pachner.”

“Keeping your mouth shut.”

“No. I was honest with everyone I met.”

“Everyone who asked. If the issue came up.”

Tcicaya moved away from her angrily. “I wasn’t sure of my plans, when I first arrived. And when I was sure, I didn’t walk around with a banner that read I’m off to the Rindler, to make certain the same fate befalls as many other worlds as possible. Does that make me dishonest? Does that make me a coward?”

Mariama shook her head. “All right, forget Pachner. But if you’re so sure of your position now, why don’t you come with me? No one’s going to lynch you.”

“It would be inflammatory. What makes you think Kadir wants the company of people who disagree with him?”

“There’s an open invitation,” she protested. “Check with the ship if you don’t believe me.”

She was right. Tchicaya’s Mediator had filtered it out automatically; he’d told it to classify general announcements by known factional allegiances, to keep him from being distracted, and depressed, by news of events where Yielders were unlikely to be welcome.

“I’m tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

“You’re pathetic.” Mariama walked away without another word.

Tchicaya called after her, “All right! I’ll come with you!” She didn’t stop. He ran to catch up with her.

They walked in silence for a while, then Tchicaya said, “This whole iron curtain thing is insane. Within a decade, we’ll find a way to pin some state to the border that will freeze it in place. If we worked on it together, it would take half as long.”

Mariama regarded him coolly. “If we froze it, you think that would be enough?”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to satisfy either side.”

“Ideally, I still want to cross through,” Tchicaya admitted. “We shouldn’t have to flee from this, or annihilate it. We should be able to adapt. If the ocean comes a few meters inshore, you retreat. A few kilometers, you build a dike. A few thousand…you learn to live in boats. But if freezing the border turns out to be possible, and it rules out exploration, I’d just have to accept that.”

Mariama was skeptical. “And you’d take no risks at all, from that moment on? You’d do absolutely nothing that had a chance of unfreezing it? You’d let it sit there for a hundred thousand years, undisturbed, and you wouldn’t be tempted in the least?”

“Oh, I see. That’s the logic that dictates the use of Planck worms? If you don’t wipe the whole thing out of existence, some Yielder is certain to come along eventually, and unplug the dike.”

Mariama didn’t reply. They entered the module where the wake was being held, and walked up the stairs.

On the map Tchicaya consulted, Kadir’s cabin had been merged with a dozen of his neighbors', producing a roughly circular room. Ahead of him, the entrance was wide open, and music wafted out into the corridor.

Mariama’s clothes changed as they approached the doorway, forming a pattern of woven bands broken up by ellipses, in earthen colors. “You look good in that,” Tchicaya observed. The comment elicited a reluctant flicker of warmth in her eyes, and she knew him too well to mistake it for insincere flattery, but she walked on into the room without a word. He steeled himself, and followed her.

There was quite a crowd inside, talking, eating, a few people dancing. Tchicaya could see no other Yielders, but he resisted the urge to ask his Mediator to hunt for friendly signatures.

Images of Zapata shone from the walls. The planet from space; aerial views of towns, mountains, and rivers. Tchicaya had spent forty years on Zapata, moving from continent to continent, never really settling down long enough to make close friends.

The life the settlers had unleashed on the sterile planet, though ultimately derived from natural terrestrial genomes, had been a little wilder and stranger than most. There were lithe winged cats in some of the jungles that could tear out your throat. Toward the end of his stay, it had been discovered that in one small, isolated town, deliberate exposure to harm by these creatures had become a “rite of passage” into adulthood?—?as if adolescence itself was insufficiently traumatic. The partially eaten bodies could generally be repaired, and at worst the Qusp could always be tracked down and recovered from the animal’s stomach, so the ritual fell short of local death, but as far as Tchicaya was concerned, that only made it more barbaric. Better to suffer memory loss and discontinuity than the experience of having your jugular gnawed open?—?and better anything than the company of people who’d decided that this was the definition of maturity.

Children in the town who declined to participate had been ostracized, but once the practice came to light, the wider society of Zapata had intervened?—?with a concerted effort to improve transport and communication links. After a few years of heightened exposure to the possibility of simply walking away from the town and its self- appointed cultural guardians, no one was interested in being bullied into conformity anymore.

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling down toward the full-blown insanity of