Schild's Ladder

by Greg Egan

  “The homes and communities of billions of people are at stake here. One full year's delay would mean the certain loss of one more world.” Tchicaya had agonized over the best way to phrase this; apart from starkly requesting an entire planet as a sacrifice, he had to tiptoe around the issue of exactly how close the 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 dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who's obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment's regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity—fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way—and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them.”

  Tarek gripped the lectern tightly, but continued in the same calm voice. “You're so gloriously, indisputably right: if there is sentient life behind the border, we should wipe these creatures out of existence, on the mere chance that they might do the same to us. Then we can learn to predicate everything else we do on the same assumptions: there is no other purpose to life than an eternity of grim persistence, and the systematic extinguishment of everything—outside ourselves, or within us—that stands in the way of that goal.”

  He stood in place for several seconds. The room had fallen silent again. Tchicaya was both heartened and ashamed; he had never imagined Tarek taking a stand like this, though in retrospect he could see that it was an act of constancy, not betrayal. Perhaps Tarek had left his own family and friends behind solely in order to fight for the security of their future home, but in the very act of coming here, he'd been transformed from a member of that culture into an advocate for something universal. Maybe he was a zealot, but if so, he was an idealist, not a hypocrite. If there were sentient creatures behind the border, however foreign to him, the same principles applied to them as to anyone else.

  Tarek stepped back from the podium. Santos, another of the newcomers, stood and delivered an impassioned defense of Murasaki's position, in similarly chilling language. When he'd finished, half a dozen people rose to their feet simultaneously and tried to shout each other down.

  Tarek managed to restore order. “Do we have more questions for Rasmah and Tchicaya, or is this the time to proceed with our own debate?”

  There were no more questions. Tarek turned to them. “I'll have to ask you to leave now.”

  Tchicaya said, “Good luck.”

  Tarek gave him a reluctant smile, as if to concede that the two of them finally could mean the same thing by those words. He said, “I don't know how much longer this will take, but we'll keep going until we have a decision.”

  Out in the corridor, Rasmah turned to Tchicaya. “Where are those people from? Murasaki and Santos?”

  “I don't know. It's not in their signatures.” He checked with the ship. “They both came via Pfaff, but they haven't made their origins public.”

  “Wherever it is, remind me not to visit.” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Do we have to wait here for the verdict? It could be a while. And they will make it public.”

  “What did you have in mind? I don't think I could face the Blue Room.”

  “How about my cabin?”

  Tchicaya laughed. “You have no idea how tempting that sounds, right now.”

  “That's how it was meant to sound.” Rasmah took his hand; she hadn't been joking. “These bodies are very fast learners, especially when they have memories of a prior attraction.”

  Tchicaya said, “I thought we'd put an end to all that.”

  “This is what's known as persistence.” She faced him squarely. “Whoever it is you're still hung up about, I promise you I'll make an impression that will erase all memories of the competition.” She smiled at her own hyperbole. “Or I can try, if you're willing to make the same effort.”

  Tchicaya was tongue-tied. He liked everything about her, but some deeply ingrained part of him still felt as if it was a matter of principle to back away.

  He said, “I'm seven times your age. I've had thirty-one children. I have sixth-generation descendants older than you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You're a battered old creature, on the verge of slipping out of sentience into senility. But I think I can drag you back from the brink.” She leaned closer; the scent of her body was beginning to regain significance for him. “If you have scars, I'll kiss them away.”

  “I want to keep my scars.”

  “That's all right. I can't actually erase them.”

  “You really are sweet, but you hardly know me.”

  Rasmah groaned. “Stop dividing everything by four thousand years. Your age is not the natural unit of time, by which all else must be measured.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth; Tchicaya did not pull away.

  She said, “How was that?”

  Tchicaya gave her his best Quinean wine-judge frown. “You're better than Yann. I think you've done this before.”

  “I should hope so. I suppose you waited a millennium to lose your virginity?”

  “No, it just felt that way.”

  Rasmah stepped back, then reached out and took both his hands. “Come and wait with me for the vote. We can't do anything you don't want to do; it's biologically impossible.”

  “That's what they tell you as a child. But it's more complicated than that.”

  “Only if you make it complicated.” She tugged on his arms. “I do have some pride. I'm not going to beg you. I'm not even going to threaten you, and say this is your last chance. But I don't believe we're wrong for each other, and I don't believe you're sure that we are.”

  “I'm not,” he conceded.

  “And didn't you just deliver a speech about the folly of making decisions without sufficient information?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled triumphantly. He wasn't going to argue his way out of this. Logic had nothing to do with it; he simply had to make up his mind what he wanted. One instinct told him that he should turn her down, because it was a decision he'd made so many times before that it seemed like a betrayal of himself to do otherwise. And another told him that if he didn't change, there was no point living even one more century.

  Tchicaya said, “You're right. Let's put an end to our ignorance.”

  They went to Rasmah's cabin and lay on the bed together, still dressed, talking, occasionally kissing. Tchicaya knew his Mediator would make the vote known to him instantly, but he couldn't help but remain distracted. He'd done everything in his power to see that the Preservationists heard the whole case for the far side, but he couldn't rest until he knew whether or not they'd been persuaded.

  Almost two hours after they'd spoken to the gathering, the news came through: the moratorium had been approved. No percentages had been released, but the Preservationists had agreed unanimously before beginning their debate that the majority decision would be binding.

  Tchicaya watched Rasmah's face as the information registered. “We did it,” she said.

  He nodded. “And Tarek. And Sophus.”

  “Yeah. More them than us. But we can still celebrate.” She kissed him.

  “Can we?” Tchicaya wasn't being coy; he
couldn't tell by mere introspection.

  “I'm positive.”

  As they undressed each other, Tchicaya felt a rush of happiness, beyond sex, beyond his affection for her. Whatever hold he'd imagined Mariama had over him, it was finally dissolving. Their conspiracy over the power plant might have ended any chance that he could be truly at ease with her, but that hadn't poisoned everything he'd admired in her. He hadn't forfeited the right to be with someone who had the same strength, the same ideals as she'd once had.

  Rasmah stroked the scar on his leg. “Do you want to tell me about this?”

  “Not yet. It's too long a story.”

  She smiled. “Good. I didn't really want to hear it right now.” She moved her hand higher. “Oh, look what we made! I knew it would be beautiful. And I think I have something that would fit here, almost perfectly. And here. And maybe even...here.”

  Tchicaya gritted his teeth, but he didn't stop her moving her fingers over him, inside him. There was no more vulnerable feeling than being touched in a place that had not existed before, a place you'd never seen or touched yourself. He lay still, and allowed her to make him aware of the shape, the sensitivity, the response of each surface.

  He took her by the shoulders and kissed her, then did the same for her, mapping the other half of the geometry their bodies had invented. He was four thousand years old, but he was never tired of this, never jaded. Nature had never had much imagination, but people had always found new ways to connect.

  Chapter 13

  Tchicaya's Mediator woke him. It had just received a messenger from Branco, and judged it urgent enough to break him out of sleep.

  He let the messenger run. He didn't want to close his eyes and risk drifting off again as he watched, so he hallucinated Branco standing in the darkened cabin beside the bed.