by Greg Egan
Yann said thoughtfully, “I suppose we could always stop messing about trying to peek behind the border, and just resurrect the Quietener.” He punched his hands together enthusiastically. “A few well-planned experiments in the old style might cut straight to the heart of things.”
“Oh, that's a great idea. We could do it right here.” A second seeding of the novo-vacuum, from a starting point that was already moving rapidly in the same direction as everyone who was fleeing the first, would be twice as difficult to escape. Yann's sardonic suggestion was sobering, though, since it was far from being the only way in which the disaster might be magnified. However careful they were, whatever their motives, there was always the chance of simply making things worse.
“We're dropping the next probe in about twelve hours' time,” Yann said. “If you're interested, I could probably swing it.”
“Swing what?”
“Bringing you along.”
Tchicaya's throat tightened. “You mean, you go down there? In person?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
Yann laughed. “Don't ask me! You're the one with the flesh fetish; I thought you'd understand. That's how they do things here. I just play along.”
Tchicaya looked past him, into the opaque pearly light, more featureless than any darkness he'd ever encountered. The eyes relished darkness, conjuring up hints of what it might contain, but the borderlight flooded his vision with incontrovertible blankness.
And he believed he could live in that light? He believed the embodied should end their flight, end their resistance, and march straight into that blinding whiteness?
The borderlight was a surface phenomenon, a distractingly perfect veil. Whatever lay behind it could easily be as richly structured and complex as the universe he knew.
He said, “Let me sleep on it.”
Half the Rindler's sixteen modules were devoted to accommodation. The ship informed Tchicaya of the cabin he'd been allocated, but he declined detailed directions, since Yann seemed eager to continue as his guide.
“I'll show you where I am, myself, first,” Yann offered. “It's on the way, and you're always welcome to drop by.” The accommodation modules were all split into multiple levels; away from the edges, where you could still glimpse the sky, it was like being in a high-rise building. When they left the stairwell, Yann paced briskly down a corridor, and pointed out the room.
Tchicaya's heart sank. The cabin was divided into two banks of narrow slots, each about a meter wide and half as high. A number of the slots contained inert figures. Rows of handholds between the pigeonholes were apparently intended to assist the occupants in gaining access. Yann followed his gaze and said, “It's not that hard, once you're used to it.” He demonstrated, clambering up and sliding into his coffin-sized bunk, the fifth in a stack of eight.
Tchicaya said forlornly, “My embodiment request had the standard clause: if there was no room for me here at full size, the ship was meant to bounce me to the nearest alternative destination. Maybe I'm going to have to start spelling out the meaning of some of those terms.” In four millennia of traveling between planetary surfaces, he'd encountered a wide range of living conditions deemed acceptable by the local people, whether through custom or necessity. On rare occasions, he'd even been provided with deliberately inhospitable accommodation. He'd never seen people squeezed together as tightly as this.
“Mmm.” Yann's response was noncommittal, as if in retrospect he wasn't surprised by the complaint, but it honestly hadn't occurred to him that a newcomer would see the Rindler as cramped. He deftly reversed his insertion maneuver and joined Tchicaya on the deck.
“I'd suggest they ease things by scrapping the garden,” Tchicaya mused, “but given how little difference that would make, they probably should keep it, for sanity's sake.”
Yann squeezed past him, back into the corridor. Tchicaya trudged after him dejectedly. He'd felt no sense of panic upon waking in the confinement of the crib, but he hadn't realized he'd soon be moving into something smaller.
He crossed the final walkway with his eyes locked straight ahead, still faltering every ten or fifteen meters when the false horizon became impossible to ignore. He was angry that he was letting these petty tribulations weigh on him. He was lucky: he was used to travel, he was used to change, and he should have been inured to this kind of minor disappointment. Most of the evacuees on the verge of leaving Pachner had lived there all their lives, and change of the kind they were about to confront was something metaphysically foreign to them. Never mind what lay behind the borderlight; those people knew the shape of every rock within a thousand-kilometer radius of their homes, and even if they ended up on a world miraculously similar by any planetologist's standards, they'd still feel alienated and dispossessed.
As they climbed the stairs, Tchicaya joked, “Let's head back to the garden. I can sleep in the bushes.” His shoulders were already aching at the thought of having to lie so still. He could modify himself to lose his usual urge to turn over repeatedly as he slept, but the prospect of needing to do that only made him feel claustrophobic in a deeper sense. You could whittle away a hundred little things like that, and not miss any of them individually, but then you woke one day to find that half your memories no longer rang true, every minor joy and hardship drained of its flavor and significance.
“D37, wasn't it?” Yann asked cheerfully. “That's left here, then fourth door on the right.” He stopped and let Tchicaya walk past him. “I'll talk to you again soon about the probe drop, but I'm sure the others won't object.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Tchicaya raised a hand in farewell.
The doors he passed were all closed, but the fourth recognized him and opened to his presence.
In front of him stood a desk, two chairs, and a set of shelves. He stepped into the room, and saw one, quite spacious, bed. Behind a partition, there was a shower, toilet and basin.
He sprinted after Yann, who started fleeing halfheartedly, then gave up and doubled over with laughter.
“Bastard!” Tchicaya caught up with him, and thumped him on the arm, hard enough to elicit a satisfying yelp.
“Show some cultural sensitivity!” Yann pleaded. “Pain isn't part of my traditional gestalt.” Which made it unlikely that he'd actually felt any; even among the embodied, it was a shade conservative to let anything short of structural damage register as genuine discomfort.
“Nor is space, apparently.”
Yann shook his head, and tried to appear earnest. “On the contrary. I've always had a sophisticated self-and-environment map; us ex-acorporeals just aren't hung up about its correlations with the physical world. Whatever it looks like to you, what we experience in that crowded cabin is ten orders of magnitude beyond any luxury you've ever known.” He said this without a trace of gloating or pomposity. It wasn't hyperbole, or wishful thinking; it was simply true.
“You know I almost turned around and left the ship?”
Yann snickered, completely unconvinced.
Tchicaya was at a loss for any suitable parting threat, so he just raised his arms in resignation and walked back to his cabin.
Sweeping his gaze around the modest few square meters made him beam like an idiot. It was one-thousandth the size of the house he'd lived in on Pachner, but it was everything he needed.
“Bastard.” He lay down on the bed and thought about revenge.
Chapter 5
The shuttle separated from the Rindler, sending Tchicaya's stomach into free fall. He watched the docking module retreat, knowing full well that he'd been flung off at a tangent, backward, but so viscerally convinced that he'd fallen straight down that the sight of the module—continuing along its arc of rotation, yet dropping from the zenith in front of him rather than disappearing behind his head—scrambled his sense of balance and direction completely. At first he felt as if he was tumbling backward, which would at least have explained what he was seeing, but when his inner ears failed to confirm the m
otion, the illusion vanished—only to return a moment later, to take him through the same cycle again. The lurching fits and starts that followed might have made him less queasy if they'd actually been happening; it was the inability to make sense of his perceptions that was disturbing, far more than any direct, physical effect of the lack of gravity.
He began to get his bearings once the whole ship was visible, edge-on. A minute later it had shrunk to a sparse necklace of glass beads, and the newly fixed stars finally crystallized in his mind as cues worth taking seriously. The infinite plane of whiteness on his right might have been a moonlit desert seen through half-closed eyes. He'd once flown a glider high over sand dunes at night, on Peldan, nearly free-falling at times in the thin air. There'd been no moonlight, of course, but the stars had been almost as bright as these.
Yann, sitting beside him, caught his eye. “You okay?”
Tchicaya nodded. “In the scapes you grew up in,” he asked, “was there a vertical?”
“In what sense?”
“I know you said once that you didn't feel gravity...but was everything laid out and connected like it is on land? Or was it all isotropically three-dimensional—like a zero-gee space habitat, where everything can connect in any direction?”
Yann replied affably, “My earliest memories are of CP4—that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this”—he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space—“for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space.”
So much for being a seasoned traveler. Tchicaya didn't envy Yann's upbringing, but it probably rendered the world behind the border less exotic to him than the notion of a jungle had been to Tchicaya as a child. It shook his confidence to be reminded that there were measures by which his millennia of experience had been laughably narrow.
He couldn't have it both ways, though: he couldn't claim that the embodied needed the shock and the strangeness of this burgeoning universe, and then wish it could be no more daunting to confront than one more mundane planetary surface.
Kadir turned around and interjected testily, “I can analyze the flows in a symplectic manifold perfectly well without pretending to inhabit it. That's what mathematics is for. Imagining that you need to float through every last abstract space that shows up in a physics problem is just being literal-minded.”
Yann smiled, unoffended. “I'm not going to argue with you. I haven't come here to proselytize for acorporeality.”
Zyfete, seated in front of Tchicaya, muttered, “Why bother, if you can render embodiment just as barren?”
Tchicaya bit his tongue. He'd been forewarned about the level of acrimony, and at some point everyone on the Rindler was going to have to wade waist-deep through their opponents' venom on their way to a resolution, but spur-of-the-moment bickering in a confined space wasn't his idea of productive disharmony.
The shuttle's drive kicked in, delivering a mild push that Tchicaya succeeded in interpreting as a precipitous dive, rather than a complete inversion of land and sky. He scanned the eye-watering whiteness, hunting for their destination, but the glare was impenetrable. It seemed miraculous to be skimming kilometers above an object that dominated the sky for hundreds of light-years—without being burnt to a cinder, as he would have been this close to the surface of a star—but it was sheer size that made the border visible from afar. Each square kilometer didn't have to blaze fiercely for the total luminosity to outshine any supernova. Without the usual Doppler shift to boost the light's power, a pinhole view looking straight at the border would actually have been dimmer, here, by a factor of three, than the equivalent view from any planet he'd visited. What dazzled was the fact that it filled his vision, leaving room for nothing else. On Pachner, for much of the year the border had been partly hidden by daylight, but even when it reached its furthest angle from the sun there'd always been a narrow strip of washed-out darkness left over somewhere on the horizon, with a few pallid stars on which to rest your eyes.
As the drive reversed, he finally spotted the silhouette of the Scribe. He made a mask against the surrounding glare with his hands, and managed to discern some structure. At the top of the machine was a sphere, rainbow iridescent in the light that grazed it. He knew it was embossed with a fine pattern of microjets, trillions of tiny devices capable of firing as few as one or two atoms in any direction. While the Rindler could keep pace with the border well enough simply by cruising, the Scribe's stylus hovered so close that collisions with interstellar gas, and even the pressure of the borderlight itself, would have ruined the alignment if left uncompensated. Presumably, the visitors' own influence would be well within the machine's defensive capacities, but to Tchicaya it was both marvelous and comical that their presence could be accommodated—like a calligrapher inscribing Gravitation on the head of a pin, while four fat infants clambered onto the artisan's shoulders and proceeded to wrestle.
As the shuttle drew nearer, the Scribe's modest size became apparent; it was smaller than one of the Rindler's modules, forty or fifty meters across, with the sphere of microjets held out on a boom above a flat deck. The shuttle's drive made one last perceptible correction before a series of maneuvers too gentle to feel brought them into contact with the deck.
Kadir unstrapped himself, and approached the hatch in the floor of the shuttle. Tchicaya followed him.
“You keep an atmosphere in there?”
Kadir nodded. “People come and go, it's easiest just to maintain the pressure.”
Tchicaya frowned. “I'm never going to get to use this, am I?” He pinched the back of his hand to tug on the near-invisible membrane that he'd sprayed all over his skin; he'd been told it would let his body survive for up to a week in vacuum, and since it took three months to grow a new one, that had seemed like a precaution worth taking. The one thing the suit lacked was reaction mass. If he found himself drifting toward the border, the best thing to do would be to broadcast a final backup and resign himself to an interesting local death.
Kadir said, “I'll see if I can arrange an opportunity on the way back.” The remark was delivered without obvious malice, but it was still hard to know how to take it. Since Tchicaya had allowed Yann to introduce him to the two Preservationists as a fellow partisan, the tension he'd felt had ebbed and flowed, and he was never sure when to expect a bit of good-natured teasing, and when to brace himself for a genuinely chilly rebuff as an enemy of the cause.
Zyfete and Yann joined them as the hatch irised open, revealing a softly lit tunnel lined with handholds. Tchicaya hung back until last, not wanting to block anyone's progress if he froze. The others all went feetfirst, as if they were descending a ladder, but he felt more secure crawling along the tunnel, imagining himself more or less horizontal. He recalled a playground back on Turaev, a maze of interconnected pipes. When Zyfete glanced up at him and scowled, he poked his tongue out at her and recited a few lines of childish rhyme. In spite of herself, she smiled.
The Scribe's control room was octagonal, with eight slanted windows facing down toward the border. Judging the distance by eye was difficult, with no texture to the light to set the scale, but Tchicaya guessed he was now floating just five or six meters from the novo-vacuum. He suddenly noticed the beating of his heart, though the rhythm didn't feel abnormal; it was a shift in his attention, rather than a rush of adrenaline. He wasn't afraid, but he was acutely aware of his body: the softness and fragility of it, compared to most other things in the world. It was the way he felt when he found himself stranded in the middle of a harsh landscape, insu
fficiently prepared for its rigors, but not so threatened that he'd simply write off his current incarnation as unsalvageable. It would take a cosmic disaster even larger than Mimosa to rob him of more than a few minutes' memories, but while he inhabited a body he identified with it wholly. He was in a place where a mishap could shred him into something smaller than atoms, and under the circumstances he was more than happy to let instincts predicated on absolute life and death come to the fore and do their best to protect him.
A bank of displays in the center of the room surrounded an octagonal dome, the housing for the stylus. Tchicaya watched as Kadir and Zyfete issued a long series of spoken commands. The lack of automation was almost ritualistic; he glanced inquiringly at Yann, who whispered, “It's a kind of transparency. There are more sophisticated ways we could monitor each other, but having observers from both sides at every experiment, and controlling everything with words, keeps the proceedings out in the open on one level—while we check the equipment and audit the software with a thousand different kinds of high-powered tools, offstage.”
“That's so much like Earth-era diplomacy it's depressing.”
Yann smiled. “I knew your arcane knowledge would come in handy here.”
Tchicaya snorted. “Don't look at me to spout Machiavelli. If you want that shit, go and dig up an ancient.”
“Oh, I'm expecting anachronauts to arrive at the Rindler any day now—preceded by a few megatonnes of fusion by-products—and announce that they've come to save the universe.”
“Any day, or any millennium.” It was an eerie prospect to contemplate. Scattered remnants of pre-Qusp civilization, twenty thousand or so years old, still chugged between the stars in spluttering contraptions, spewing spent fuel and taking thousands of years for every journey. Tchicaya had never met any of the ancients himself, but his father had encountered one group, which had visited Turaev long before he was born. None had traveled more than eighty light-years from Earth, so as yet they hadn't been endangered by the novo-vacuum, but unless the Preservationists triumphed, within decades the anachronauts would face a decision between adopting some of the hated new technologies and annihilation.