Schild’s Ladder

Preservationists were to producing Planck worms. “But whole worlds have been evacuated before, to leave the rare life we’ve found with a chance to develop undisturbed. We can create far more sophisticated organisms in vitro, but we’ve still recognized in the simplest alien microbes both a chance to understand better the science of our origins, and a distant kinship with whatever these creatures might become. I’m willing to write off the vendeks as little more than Planck-scale chemistry, but even a slim possibility of sentient life on the far side, just beyond our grasp, has to count for at least as much as the possibility that the microbes we’ve left to their own devices will flourish into anything as rich as life on Earth.

“I’m not asking anyone in this room to abandon the values that brought them here. But no one came here with the goal, or even the thought, of wiping out another civilization. If you believe there can be no sentient life on the far side, take the opportunity to prove yourself right. If you harbor even the slightest doubt, take the opportunity to gather more information.

“We’re not asking you to wait for certainty. The far side is too large; however advanced our techniques became, there’d always be a chance that a part of it remained hidden. But after six centuries in which the border has been completely opaque, and a few weeks in which we’ve managed to see through it a very short distance, we’re asking for one more year of exploration. We might never find out what’s at stake here, but now that we have our first real chance to do more than guess, I don’t believe we have the right to shut our eyes and refuse to look any closer.

“Thank you.”

Tchicaya backed away from the podium. He hadn’t felt too bad while he was speaking, but the discouraging silence that followed turned his stomach to water. Maybe the Yielders had merely decided to present the enemy with their best poker face, but the effect was still one of indifference verging on hostility. He instructed his Exoself to calm his body; whatever sense of urgency he’d managed to convey by allowing his stress hormones free reign, the effect had either succeeded or failed by now.

Tarek said, “Questions and comments.”

Birago rose to his feet and addressed his former colleague. “The vendeks appear genuine to me, and I doubt that you could have engineered them into existence without us noticing. I’m much less confident about this so- called signaling layer. How do we know you didn’t create it?”

Rasmah replied, “I’m not sure what you expect me to say. I suppose you could move the Right Hand away across the border and look for an edge to the layer, then see if the whole thing lies centered around the Left Hand. But if you seriously believe that we were skilled enough to create the layer at all, maybe you believe we could have disguised its point of origin.” She spread her arms. “Look more closely, gather more evidence. That’s exactly what we’re asking for, and if you have doubts, that’s the only cure for them.”

Birago laughed curtly, unimpressed, but he resumed his seat.

Tchicaya had come prepared for accusations of fake data, but the idea that anything indisputably present behind the border could be taken as counterfeit had never crossed his mind. If the Preservationists did have spies, surely they’d know how ludicrous this was? But then, spies would probably only share that knowledge with people who would not be swayed by it.

Sophus stood. “I’ve studied this question, and I don’t believe the layer could have been built from the Left Hand without us noticing, any more than the vendeks could. This thing is genuine, and it needs to be investigated. I came here to preserve civilizations, not to destroy them. The chance that we’re seeing intelligence here is extremely slim, but this is a matter of the utmost seriousness.

“I support the idea of a moratorium. This need not be lost time for us; we don’t have to stop thinking, we don’t have to stop planning. A year in which we were forced to consider our next step very carefully?—?in combination with all the information about the deeper structure of the far side that might be gained as part of this investigation?—?could easily save more worlds than it costs. The border is expanding at half the speed of light; the success of any attempt to halt or reverse it will be extremely sensitive to the propagation speed of the agent we finally deploy. Rushing to adopt the very first solution we think we’ve found, when we could be refining it into something vastly more effective, would be a shallow victory. If we can clear our conscience of any lingering doubt that we might be committing an atrocity, while continuing to hone our weapons against this threat, we will be steering an honorable course between arrogance and timidity?—?between laying waste to whatever lies before us, and jumping at shadows.”

Sophus took his seat. Tchicaya exchanged glances with Rasmah; they could not have hoped for a better ally. Tchicaya was glad, now, that he hadn’t raised the same benefits for the Preservationist cause himself; they sounded far more credible coming from Sophus, and hearing them first from the opposition would only have put people off.

One of the recent arrivals spoke next. Tchicaya had never been introduced to her, but her signature named her Murasaki.

“There might be sentient life here, there might not,” she said. “What difference should that make to our actions? Responsibility on our part can only arise through the hope of reciprocity?—?and many great thinkers have argued that sentient beings that bear no resemblance to us cannot be expected to conform to our own moral codes. Even on the level of pure emotion, these creatures will have arisen in a world we would find incomprehensible. What empathy could we have for them? What goals could we possibly share?”

Tchicaya felt a chill of horror. Murasaki spoke in a tone of mild puzzlement, as if she honestly couldn’t understand how anyone could attach the slightest value to an alien life.

“Evolution works through competion,” she continued. “If we don’t win back our territory and render it secure, then as soon as these far-siders learn of our existence, they will surely find a way to push the growth of the border all the way up to lightspeed. While we still possess the advantage of surprise, we must use it. If there is life here, if there are creatures for whom the far side is a comfortable home, the only thing that changes is that we should redouble our efforts, in order to wipe them out before they do the same to us.”

As she sat, a faint murmur rose up in the audience. If the Preservationists had resolved to give nothing away in response to the petitioners, their own members could still get a reaction. In all his time on the Rindler, in all his travels between worlds, Tchicaya had never heard anyone express a position as repugnant as this. Many cultures proselytized, and many treated their opponents' choices with open derision, but no champion of embodiment or acorporeality, no advocate for planetary tradition or the freedom of travel, had ever claimed that life in other modes was such a travesty that it could be annihilated without compunction.

These words could not be left unchallenged. The idea of genocide might have shrunk to little more than a surreal figure of speech, but in modern times there had never before been a situation in which the effort required to commit mass murder would not have been vastly disproportionate to even the most deranged notion of the benefits. If anything could still awaken horrors from the Age of Barbarism, six hundred years of dislocation, and the opportunity to eradicate something truly alien, might just be enough to end the nineteen-thousand-year era in which no sentient being had died at the hand of another.

As Tchicaya struggled to frame his response, Tarek said, “I’d like to answer that, if I may.”

Tchicaya turned to him, surprised. “Yes, of course.”

Tarek walked to the podium and rested his hands on the lectern. He looked up and addressed Murasaki directly.

“You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata?—?who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home?—?who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind.

“If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem?—?though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border.

“You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the