Schild’s Ladder

Yann shook his head, amused. “I don’t need a ride. I’m entirely used to not having my Qusp on legs, and I’m not worried about getting my memories elsewhere. But if you’re stranded, you might need some assistance.”

Tchicaya replied purely by radio, to save his breath. “That’s a good idea. But like I said, I don’t have storage for a second person.”

“I didn’t expect you would,” Yann said. “I’ve prepared a toolkit; it’s only a few exabytes, but it encompasses everything I know about the far side. Everything I’ve learned from Suljan, Umrao, and the others, and everything I’ve worked out for myself. Of course, all of this is useless if you don’t have access to the border, so I’m organizing a vote on ceding control of the Left Hand to you.”

Tchicaya didn’t reply. Yann said, “You probably don’t want all this riding on your shoulders, but believe me, we’re doing our best to avoid that.”

Tchicaya said, “What can they do up there?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just get to the shuttle, and move away as fast as you can. We’ll call you back once it’s safe.”

“Assuming the rebels don’t steal the shuttle first.” He checked the view; it was still in place.

Yann said, “They can’t steal it; the builders have disabled it. Branco has agreed to release it once you’re onboard. Now stop arguing, and take the toolkit.”

Tchicaya instructed his Mediator to accept the package. Yann added cheerfully, “Let’s hope you don’t need it.”

As Yann’s icon vanished, Tchicaya swerved to avoid a startled pedestrian, who stared at him as if he’d gone mad. No one he’d encountered since leaving Rasmah had been in much of a hurry, and the closer he came to the shuttle, the more people seemed to be heading in the opposite direction: away from the Rindler's sole lifeboat. Some planet-bound part of him found this surreal; there were few inhabited worlds where it would have been entirely pointless to abandon a burning ship in the middle of the ocean. Even in cultures where the loss of flesh was taken lightly, there were usually volunteers willing to make the effort to rescue endangered people who felt differently. Perhaps there were some crowded circumplanetary orbits where the shipwrecked could expect to be plucked bodily from the vacuum, but fleeing the Rindler as anything but a signal would have been raising optimism to new heights.

As he crossed the final walkway, Tchicaya asked the ship for a view of the entrance to the shuttle. There was no one visible, no one standing guard. He was on the verge of asking for a sequence of images covering the entire remainder of his journey when he spotted a group of people with his own eyes, ahead of him on the walkway. Four of them hung back, while a fifth approached, carrying a long metal bar.

Tchicaya slowed, then halted. The rebel kept walking toward him, briskly and purposefully. Tchicaya’s Mediator could detect no signature, but the ship put a name to the face: Selman.

Tchicaya caught his breath, then called out amiably, “Talk to me. Tell me what you want.” Selman continued toward him in silence. His face was even more damaged than Santos’s; there was a ridge of scarlet running along the side of his nose, and a massive edema around the eye socket. His four companions were similarly marked. If this was a sign of internal disputation, the whole group should have torn itself to shreds weeks ago.

Suddenly, Tchicaya understood. Selman wasn’t withholding his signature as a gesture of hostility, or in an attempt to conceal his identity. He had no signature, and no Mediator to send it. He had no Exoself. He had no Qusp. The rebels had improvised some kind of crude surgical tool, and plucked each other’s digital brains out.

Tchicaya said, “Talk to me, and I’ll find the right translator! We still have all the old languages.” He wasn’t expecting to be understood, but he could still provoke a response. Assuming Selman hadn’t lost the power of speech entirely. Tchicaya didn’t know how much neural tissue a Homo sapiens needed in order to be fully functional. Bodies like the Rindler's had plenty of neurons in reserve, since the precise delegation of tasks between the digital components and the central nervous system varied widely from culture to culture. He suspected that even this reserve was less than the size of a complete ancestral brain, but a careful redesign might still have packed everything in.

With ten or twelve meters remaining between them, Selman stopped and spoke. Tchicaya couldn’t even parse the speech into separate words; to his untrained ear it sounded like a continuous flow. This was the first time in his life that he’d begun a conversation with a stranger without the ground being prepared in advance, without two Mediators conspiring to bridge the gap. A moment after the utterance was complete, though, he recalled the sounds and understood them.

“Turn around and go back, or I’ll beat you to a pulp.”

Tchicaya replied in the same tongue, or what he hoped was near enough to be comprehensible. His Mediator had traced Selman’s words back to a language from twenty-third century Earth, but it was compensating on the fly for the kind of variations that could arise over millennia in an isolated population of the original speakers.

“As opposed to what? Turn around and go back, and fry with the ship?”

Selman said, “If the builders are willing to take the ship away from the border, no one has to fry.”

Tchicaya shrugged. “Flee or fry, it’s all the same to us. The only thing at stake is access to the border, so every choice that would put an end to that is equivalent. You can fly us all the way to Earth, or you can crack our heads open one by one, but don’t expect to get any more cooperation for one alternative than another.”

Selman said, “Spare yourself the pain, then. Or the mess, if pain is beneath you.” He stepped forward, swinging the bar. Tchicaya had no knowledge of martial arts; he delegated the problem to his Exoself, and watched the interaction as a detached observer until he was standing with one foot on the back of Selman’s neck, and holding the bar himself.

“That wasn’t even you, you bloodless worm!” Selman hissed.

“Oh, you noticed?” The other four were approaching; two of them were hefting large potted plants, a choice of weapon more alarming for its strangeness than its bulk. “None of this was necessary,” Tchicaya said. “Whatever grievance you had, we would have given you a hearing.”

“We gave our arguments peacefully,” Selman replied. “Hours ago.”

“What arguments? Evolutionary imperatives, and winning back territory? We’re the ones who’ve lost two thousand systems. You haven’t lost a single ship.”

“So you expected us to sit back and do nothing? While you betrayed your own species, and wiped out the last vestiges of humanity?”

Tchicaya was still struggling to come to terms with the rebels' origins. To pass as ordinary travelers at all, they must have translated themselves into versions that ran on their Qusps, as well as their Trojan-horse brains. Lying in wait, impotently watching their other halves act, must have been a deeply unpleasant experience. The neural versions would not have been able to follow much, if any, of what was spoken around them?—?even when the words passed through their own lips?—?so the Qusp versions would have had to brief them later, whispering in private in their native tongue. Coming prepared to survive their own preemptive digital lobotomies had been prescient, though. Tchicaya was almost certain now that the builders possessed halt switches for all the ship’s Qusps; that would have been the method they’d hoped to use against the rebels heading for the hub, before changing their mind and sending Rasmah and the others in pursuit.

The other four anachronauts stood before Tchicaya. One of them, Christa, said, “Let him go, and back away.”

“Or what? You’ll beat me to death with your rhododendron?” Tchicaya asked the ship, “What is that? Is it one of yours?”

“Originally, but it’s been tweaked.”

“Into something dangerous?”

“There’s nothing obviously harmful being expressed in the leaves or stalk.”

“And the roots?”

“I have no way of knowing about the roots.”

Christa repeated, “Let him go, and back away. This is your last chance.”

Tchicaya asked his Exoself if it could relieve both rebels of their pots without spilling the contents. It could make no promises.

He said, “I have nothing to gain by retreating.”

Christa glanced down at Selman, her mask of grim resolve melting for an instant. She was stranded in a deranged, alien world, and she believed she was about to die.

Tchicaya said, “We can?—?”