Schild’s Ladder

“Maybe we should try to make a more obvious proxy,” he suggested. “Something that resembles one of their bodies.”

“How would we decide which features to include, and which to leave out? We don’t even know the difference between their communications signals and their waste products. We’d probably come up with the equivalent of a glove puppet of a monkey that smelled exactly like human excrement.”

She had a point; even the six Colonists high above the din?—?and/or stench?—?of the colony were now bathed in a confusing fog of vendeks, and it was beyond the Sarumpaet's resources to untangle their functions and meaning.

Tchicaya felt a sudden stab of pessimism. He believed he’d finally reached the people he’d come to find?—? but he had days, at most, not only to describe the Planck worms to them, but to reach a level of communication and trust that would enable them to work together to deal with the threat. However many subtleties, abstractions, and courtesies he omitted along the way, even conveying the core of the message was beginning to seem hopelessly ambitious.

He said, “Maybe we should change the signal right now, instead of waiting for them to reply? Just to make it clear that the banner’s not passive?”

Before Mariama could respond, the Colonists began regrouping around the banner. In unison, they released a stream of vendeks, denser than before; in the probe image, it looked as if the six veined bodies were blowing soap films. The individual sheets met at the edges and merged, forming a bubble, enclosing the banner.

The Colonists retreated again, then sprayed a new mixture at the bubble. It began to drift after them, down toward the surface.

Mariama said, “They’ve grabbed it! They’re towing it!”

The wall of the bubble was passing sprites, but it resisted the Sarumpaet's probes?—?the only means they had to get instructions to the banner. They’d lost control of the device completely, now; they couldn’t even reprogram its message, let alone command it to try to break out of its cage.

“We could make another one,” Tchicaya suggested. “Right in front of their eyes.”

“Why not see what they do with this one?”

“You think we should follow it?”

Mariama nodded. “They might release it from the container, once they’ve got it where they want it. They might even have their own signaling device down there.”

Tchicaya was not convinced. “If they think it’s just a message in a bottle, they’re not going to talk back to it. And if we can’t regain control of it, the last place we want to try scribing a new one is in the middle of some chamber down there.”

“We’ll only find out what they think it is if we go after it,” Mariama replied. “Besides, we initiated contact with this object. We should stick to that, follow through with it, or we risk confusing them.”

That did make sense. They had to be flexible, or they’d end up chasing their preconceptions down a cul-de-sac, but they also had to try to be consistent. Changing tack every time they feared that they might have been misinterpreted could bury any message beneath all the distracting shifts in strategy.

Tchicaya said, “All right, we’ll follow it!” He instructed the Sarumpaet to pursue the purloined banner.

As they descended, it finally struck him just how extraordinary a sight they were witnessing. The banner was still flashing out its programmed sequence from within its container; the Colonists hadn’t damaged it at all. Towing anything without destroying it, here, was a feat akin to putting a tornado on a leash. There were no simple analogs of the notions of pushing or pulling something, let alone any reason to expect it to respond by moving as a whole?—?like a nice near-side object made from atoms bonded together into a mildly elastic solid. You couldn’t even rely on the local physics to permit something to behave, in uniform motion, as it had when it was stationary, however gently you conveyed it from one state to the other.

He turned to Mariama. “This is proof, isn’t it? They have to be more than animals, to be able to move it like that.”

Mariama hesitated, no doubt pondering the evolutionary advantages of a delicate touch when kidnapping other species of xennobe to fill with your parasitic young.

But she said, “I think you’re right. I’ve been giving them the benefit of the doubt until now, but I think they’ve finally earned it.”

The six Colonists touched down on the surface and proceeded along a narrow path that opened up in the throng ahead of them. The bubble appeared to be following a vendek trail laid by its creators, and the Sarumpaet stayed close enough behind it to avoid the crowd as it reclaimed the ground in the wake of the procession. Rather than rendering the flight deck in proportion to the ship’s actual physical dimensions, the scape was constantly making choices of scale to keep the view of their surroundings intelligible, and the Colonists on either side of the ship appeared roughly as large as giraffes. Absurd as it was, Tchicaya found it difficult to suppress the feeling that they might look in through the hull and see him standing on the deck gazing back at them; he kept wanting to avert his eyes, so as not to risk frightening or provoking them.

Close up, the ship’s probes revealed more of the Colonists' anatomy. Dwelling on the crude, wind-blown X of their overall shape was pointless; everything that mattered was in the vendek mixtures locked in the network of tubes. The toolkit struggled to annotate the images, hinting at the subtlety of the vendekobiology and the complexity of the network’s topology. Tchicaya could only take in a fraction of what the toolkit was managing to glean, but the Colonists were manipulating their internal physics with as much precision as any animal controlling its biochemistry, juggling pH or glucose concentrations.

He caught Mariama’s eye, and the two of them exchanged giddy, fearful smiles. Like Tchicaya, she was enraptured by the beauty and strangeness around them, but more painfully aware than ever of the vast gulf they’d have to bridge in order to protect it. The closer they came to the possibility of success, the more vertiginous the fall if they lost their grip. To be overrun by Planck worms in the honeycomb would have meant nothing but a bleak local death; here, they would be witnessing a whole world dying.

The procession entered a tunnel, angled steeply down into the colony’s interior. As the density of sprites dropped, the scape experimented with the other ambient information-carrying vendeks. No single species could come close to matching the details of the probe images, but taken together they provided a fair description of the surroundings. From the Colonists' point of view, the Bright might well have been horribly misnamed; the conditions down here stood a far better chance of providing useful illumination, and the colony could have been perceived to lie in a somber landscape of permanent twilight.

Out of the full force of the wind, the geometry of both the Colonists and their architecture became more stable. The walls of the tunnel were formed from a basic layer population, but hundreds of other structures adorned them. Apart from the “air-conditioning” and “light sources,” Tchicaya couldn’t guess what purpose most of the structures served. They looked too complex to be decorations, but mere endurance required sophistication here; the air-conditioning wasn’t perfect, and anything incapable of responding to the weather risked being scoured away by the Bright.

The tunnel branched; the procession veered left. The air-conditioning was becoming more aggressive about removing impurities; the ship and the toolkit had to work harder than ever to keep the hull intact and the probes viable in the presence of all the new cleaning vendeks. Tchicaya had contemplated a number of unpleasant fates since the anachronauts had blown him out of the Rindler, but being scrubbed from the environment like an unwelcome speck of dust was one of the most insulting.

After a second fork, and a section that zigzagged and corkscrewed simultaneously, the tunnel opened out into a large cave. The physics here was more stable than anything they’d seen since the honeycomb; the weather had not been banished, but the turbulence had been subdued by an order of magnitude compared to the open Bright.

A stream of vendeks crossed the cave, rendered pitch black by the scape for most of its length, where the probes found it impenetrable. Near the center, the stream mingled with the surrounding free vendeks, expanding and becoming diluted before contracting back to its original width and continuing on its way. The probes could enter this region, which they portrayed as a sphere of gray fog; not all of them were coming back, though, and those that did reported that they’d almost lost control over their trajectories. Moving through the Bright had been difficult from