Schild’s Ladder

religion. You didn’t need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently.

Mariama waved a small yellow fruit at him, half-bitten. “Try one of these. They’re delicious.”

“Good grief. Where do you think he grew them?”

“In the garden. Lots of people have set up plots for food. You have to tweak the genomes to get photosynthesis to work in the borderlight, but that’s old hat, you just copy those ugly things the original builders put in.”

“I must have walked past without even noticing.”

“They’re quite far back from the path. Are you going to try one?”

Tchicaya shook his head. “I’ve tasted them before. There can’t be many; I’m not going to hog them.”

Mariama turned to address Kadir, who’d appeared before them like a perfect host. She said, “Tchicaya was just telling me that he’d already tasted quetzal-fruit.”

Kadir said, “You’ve visited Zapata?” He had probably intended to greet them politely then move on, but this claim could not be left unexamined.

“Yes.” Tchicaya braced himself for a barrage of insults about travelers and other parasites.

“How long ago?”

“About nine hundred years.”

“Where did you go?”

“All over.” Kadir waited expectantly, so Tchicaya reeled off a list of towns.

When he’d finished, Kadir said, “I was born in Suarez, but I left when I was twenty. I never managed to get back. How long were you there?”

Tchicaya had been reorganizing his memories as they spoke, dragging the whole period upward in his association hierarchy. “Less than a year.”

Kadir smiled. “That’s longer than most visitors stay. What was the attraction?”

“I don’t know. It was a quiet spot, I was tired of moving about. The landscape wasn’t spectacular, but from the house where I stayed you could see the top of the mountains in the distance.”

“That slate-gray color, against the sky in the morning?”

“Yeah. Completely different at sunset, though. Almost pink. I could never work that out.” He’d raised the memories so high that it might have been yesterday. He could smell the dust and the pollen, he could feel the heat of the evening.

Kadir said, “I think I know where you were. Not the house, it wasn’t built when I was there, but?—?do you remember the creek, north of the main road?”

“Yes. I was close to it. A few minutes' walk.”

Kadir’s face lit up. “That’s amazing! It was still there? We used to go swimming in that creek. My whole family. All through summer, around dusk. Did you swim in it?”

“Yes.” At the same time, the same season. Watching the stars come out, lying on his back in the cool water.

“Was the big tree still there? With the branch overhanging the deep end?”

Tchicaya frowned, summoning up eidetic imagery, constructing a panoramic view in his mind’s eye and searching for anything meeting this description. “I don’t think so.”

“No, it wouldn’t have been.” Kadir turned to Mariama. “We used to walk out along this branch, about four meters up, and dive off backward.” He spread his arms and swayed. “The first time I did it, it must have been an hour after sunset. I couldn’t see anything, and when I hit the water I just kept sinking into the blackness. I was nine years old. I was terrified!”

Tchicaya said, “There was no deep water, when I was there. It must have silted up.”

“Or the banks might have shifted,” Kadir suggested. “I was there three hundred years before you. They might have built anything upstream.”

Zyfete approached, and slipped an arm around Kadir’s waist. She regarded Tchicaya warily, but it must have been obvious that he was not making trouble.

Looking away from her into the crowd, Tchicaya spotted Sophus, Tarek, Birago. He was conspicuous here; it couldn’t be otherwise.

He said, “I have to go.”

Kadir nodded, unoffended. He reached out and shook Tchicaya’s hand. “I’m glad you saw Suarez,” he said.

Mariama caught up with him outside.

“Go back in with your friends,” he said.

She ignored him. “Was that so unbearable?”

“No. I never claimed it would be. I was afraid my presence might upset someone. It didn’t. I’m glad.”

“I suppose you think that’s all pathological? The music, the pictures, the food?”

Tchicaya scowled. “So much for you reading my mind. It’s ordinary nostalgia. I feel the same way about all kinds of places. There’s nothing sick or obsessive about it. And because of that, it’s hardly going to destroy him that he can’t go back. His favorite swimming hole would have turned into a silted-up pond by now, anyway. He’s been spared the disappointment.”

“You really are made of stone.” She sounded disappointed, as if she’d seriously expected a few minutes' reminiscing with Kadir to change his mind about everything.

“No one will have died, leaving Zapata. The rocks are gone. The trees are gone. If anyone really lived for those things, they’ll find a way to re-create them.”

“That will never be the same.”

“Good.” Tchicaya stopped and turned on her. “What exactly do you imagine he’s suffering? He’s thinking about the things he’s experienced, and the things he’s lost. We all do that. He hasn’t been eviscerated. Nine thousand years is a long time, but no one sprang from the ground of Zapata fully formed.”

“They’ve still been dispossessed,” Mariama insisted.

“Of rocks. Nothing else.”

“Of memories. Of meaning.”

“You know that’s not true! What do you think, we’re back in the colonial era, on Earth? There was a time when it was possible for an honest, intelligent person to subscribe to a cosmology where their dead ancestors lived in the mountains, and if you angered the spirit of the waterhole the crops would fail for the next ten years. Where the land was alive, and unique, and sacred. And if some horde of barbarians came marching through, subscribing to an even more surreal religion and claiming everything in sight for some inbred fop in a powdered wig, what else would you do but fight for your land, and cling to your beliefs?

“No one is in that position anymore. No one can confuse the landscape with the inalienable things inside them.”

Mariama replied pointedly, “Which would explain why you don’t care at all what lies behind the border, and why you’d be just as happy to go and live in some abstract scape with the acorporeals.”

Tchicaya was tongue-tied. He believed she understood the difference perfectly, but he knew he’d sound clumsy and self-contradictory if he backtracked to spell it out.

He said, “How many thousands of years should Zapata have remained unchanged? How many million?”

She shook her head. “That’s not the question. It would have changed of its own accord.”

“When? And how many children would it have smothered, before it changed?”

“You weren’t smothered on Turaev. You got out in time.”

“Not everyone did.”

“Not everyone needed to.”

They’d reached the stairs leading up to his cabin.

“You think I’m a hypocrite?” Mariama demanded. “Because I’m a traveler, and I’m championing people’s right to stay put?”

“I don’t think you’re a hypocrite.”

“I’ve seen change,” she said. “Unforced, driven from within, not a response to some crisis that dictates the alternatives. That’s painful in its own way, but it’s better to go through that than have