Schild's Ladder

by Greg Egan

  “This had better be important,” Tchicaya said.

  “I'm very sorry to disturb you,” the messenger whispered. It was much more polite than Branco himself. “But this is something you'll want to hear. I'm only telling a handful of people. People I trust.”

  “I'm flattered.”

  The messenger gave him a look that suggested it was not immune to irony. “Someone has been trying to take control of the ship. I don't know who. The proximate, physical source of the attack was a spare communications link for external instruments, sitting in a storage area that hundreds of people have had access to.

  “There was no chance of the attack succeeding. Whoever did this must be awfully naive about some of the technology they're dealing with.” Tchicaya felt a frisson of recognition; hadn't Tarek imagined that Yann could “corrupt” the ship's network, just by running on one of its Qusps? “But it suggests a combination of foolishness and desperation that might not stop with this. So I'm telling a few reasonably level-headed members of both factions: you'd better find out who these idiots are, and keep them from going any further. Set your own houses in order, or you might all find yourselves walking the airlock.”

  The messenger bowed, and vanished. Tchicaya blinked into the darkness. “Walking the airlock” was a quaint way of putting it, but he didn't think Branco was bluffing. If factional squabbling reached the point where the Rindler itself was at risk, Tchicaya didn't doubt that the ship's builders would evict the squatters, one way or another.

  He woke Rasmah, and shared the news.

  “Why didn't Branco tell me?” she complained. “Why am I not trustworthy?”

  “Don't take it personally. He probably just thought it would give the message more gravitas if it trickled through, instead of going straight to everyone.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. “I was joking, actually, but thanks for the reassurance.” She groaned. “Oh, here we go.”

  “What?”

  “Yann wants to talk to us.” She hesitated. “And Suljan. And Umrao.”

  “We need to get together. We need to organize a meeting.” Tchicaya picked up his pillow and put it over his face. “I can't believe I just said that.”

  Rasmah laughed and patted his arm. “We do have to discuss this. But you won't need to get out of bed.”

  Rasmah had her Mediator arrange the protocols, then she invited Tchicaya into a virtual Blue Room. His viewpoint drifted across the floor, toward a table where Rasmah, Yann, Suljan, Hayashi, and Umrao were seated. He knew he was visible to the others as an icon, and he could alter his gaze and make gestures at will, but he had no real sense of being embodied in the scape; he still felt himself lying motionless on the bed.

  Suljan said, “Any ideas, Tchicaya?”

  “Who could be so foolish as to try this? I thought of Tarek, but that doesn't add up. Unless he's involved in some elaborate bluff.”

  Hayashi shook her head. “Not Tarek. I heard that the Preservationists split down the line on the vote, but he was definitely on the side of the moratorium.”

  “You're saying it was close?”

  “Closer than I'd expected,” she replied. “Almost forty percent against. Mostly new arrivals.”

  “Forty percent.” Tchicaya had being fervently hoping that Murasaki and Santos were rare extremists. And it was still possible that they were; you didn't have to be sanguine about genocide to have voted against the moratorium, merely skeptical that destroying the far side would entail anything of the kind. Perhaps some of the newcomers had found the unfamiliar physics so bewildering that they'd decided they simply couldn't trust the evidence for the signaling layer, even with their own experts confirming it.

  Yann said, “We shouldn't rule out some hothead in our own camp. Just because we've achieved the moratorium, that doesn't guarantee that we'll get everything else people want.”

  Suljan sighed. “That's very even-handed of you, but given the timing, it doesn't seem likely to me.”

  “It could have been a setup, though,” Umrao suggested. “Someone who hoped their tampering would be detected, and get us all thrown off the Rindler—which would put back any prospect of the Preservationists unleashing their Planck worms by several centuries.”

  Rasmah said, “At the cost of every last trace of goodwill and cooperation between the factions. At the cost of everything we'd learn in the year of the moratorium.”

  “The neutrals would continue to do research,” Umrao replied.

  Tchicaya said, “Getting thrown off the ship is no good for either side. It must have been someone who really did think they could succeed.”

  “Succeed at what, exactly?” Hayashi asked. “They wanted control of the ship, in order to do what?”

  Bhandari appeared suddenly, standing beside the table. “I hate to interrupt, but if any of you here are interested in reality...” He held up a framed image showing a view of one of the Rindler's tethers. Six people were clinging to the cable near the top of one of the modules, slowly ascending toward the hub. Strapped to the backs of two of the climbers were bulky, box-shaped objects that looked as if they might have been built from the same modules as the instrumentation packages for the border experiments. Tchicaya didn't recognize the silver-suited figures, but he asked the ship to match their facial geometry with its manifest of occupants. The six were Murasaki, Santos, and four other newcomers, all of whom had arrived more or less together from Pfaff.

  Rasmah vanished from the scape, and Tchicaya felt her shaking him by the shoulders. “Get up!”

  He complied, momentarily disoriented.

  “What?” he asked. “What do you think they're doing?”

  “I don't know, but we have to be prepared for the worst.” Rasmah grabbed her can of suit spray and hurriedly coated him. “Now spray me. Quickly!”

  Tchicaya did as she'd asked. “The worst? What are you expecting?”

  “They're headed for the engines, aren't they? Can you think of a benign explanation for that? I want you to go straight to the shuttle.”

  “Why? You're not turning protective on me, are you? I've backed up last night. Even if we die here, I'm not going to forget you.”

  Rasmah smiled, and shook her head. “Sorry to be unromantic, but I'm thinking about more than us. If these people manage to remove the Rindler, someone has to be around to protect the far side. No one else I trust is any closer to the shuttle.”

  Tchicaya started pulling on his clothes. “Then come with me.”

  “No. Until we know what's happening, it's better we split up. They might have done something to the shuttle, it might be a lost cause. Better that only one of us goes there, while the other tries to stop them doing anything at the hub.”

  Tchicaya felt a surge of resentment, but this argument made sense, and she wasn't ordering him around for the sake of it. They had to move quickly, and it was pointless quibbling over who did what.

  He asked the ship for a view of the shuttle. It was still docked in the usual place, and it appeared to be intact, though that hardly ruled out sabotage.

  “You're going up after them?” he said.

  “If the builders trust me enough to let me out there.”

  “How did those six get outside? Assuming Branco didn't toss them out.”

  Rasmah finished dressing. “They're on the tether that holds the module with the instrumentation workshop. They must have been pretending to be working on some sensor that needed to operate in vacuum.” She glanced around the cabin with an air of finality, as if she was putting her memories of the place in order.

  Tchicaya ached to hold her, but he didn't want to make it harder for them to part. As they stepped out into the corridor, he said, “If this all goes wrong, where will we meet?”

  “My closest backup is on Pfaff. If it stops getting reassurance signals from here, that's the one that will wake.”

  “Mine too.”

  “That's where we'll meet, then.” She smiled. “But let's see if we can achieve a swifter reu
nion.”

  They'd reached the stairs. Tchicaya said, “Be careful.”

  “Of all the things I came here to be, that was never on the list.” She took his face in her hands, and touched her forehead to his. Tchicaya listened to her breathing. She was excited, and afraid, and she hadn't followed her own advice about adrenaline. She didn't want to be calm, for this.

  Then she released him, turned, and bolted up the stairs without another word.

  As Tchicaya took the stairs down toward the walkway, he asked the ship to show him the instrumentation workshop. There was some kind of half-assembled sensor sitting on the main platform, open to space, but he could see no obvious clues as to what Murasaki and the others intended. What did they think they were going to do at the hub? Hot-wire the engines and drive the Rindler away? That was never going to happen. It would be a simpler task than taking control of the whole ship, but not by much. Assuming they were being wildly optimistic, though, what good would it do their cause if they succeeded? Whisking everyone away from the border would only delay the work of both sides.

  As Tchicaya panned around the workshop, he saw a dark, powdery stain on the floor, by the airlock.

  “What's that?” he asked the ship.

  “Blood.”

  The whole workshop was always in vacuum, and it would take much more than a minor act of carelessness to cut yourself through a suit.

  “Can you show me when it was spilt?”

  The ship showed him recorded vision from fifteen minutes before. As Santos stepped through the airlock, blood dripped from his fingers to the floor. His suit was only just beginning to silver against the cold; Tchicaya could still see his face. One nostril was full of red and black clots, only contained by the membrance of the suit, and the lid of one half-closed eye was encrusted with blood. He looked as if he'd been smacked in the face with an iron bar. Had he been in some kind of struggle with the others? It was bizarre.

  On the walkway, Tchicaya saw Kadir coming toward him. They approached each other warily. Kadir spread his arms in a protestation of innocence. “I'm not with these lunatics! We disown them!”

  “Do you know what this is all about?”

  “I know that they opposed the moratorium, but I don't have a clue what they think this will get them. Birago's joined them now, but he's the only one I really knew. The others were never very communicative. They claimed they were travelers like you, but they were never at ease with anyone but each other. Whatever the faults of travelers, if you express an opinion they find unusual, they tend not to stop in midconversation and stare at you as if you'd sprouted wings.”

  “Where's Birago?” Tchicaya asked.

  “Last I heard, he was standing guard at the entrance to the workshop, trying to stop anyone getting through and going after them.”

  “But he won't say what they want? There's no threat, no conditions they're trying to bargain for?”

  Kadir said, “I think this has gone beyond bargaining.”

  “Is the Right Hand secure? Could they have used it, done something with it, without the rest of you knowing?”

  Kadir shrugged. “The records say it's done nothing for days. But Birago helped build it. I don't know what he was capable of doing.”

  They parted. As Tchicaya reached the end of the walkway, Rasmah spoke in his head. “The builders let me out. I'm up on the cable.” Even through an unvocalized radio channel, her Mediator made her voice as expressive as ever; she sounded both nervous and exhilarated, as if she almost welcomed the chase. “I'm a fair way behind our mutineers, but I think I'm gaining on them.”

  “You're outnumbered, and they're completely deranged.” Tchicaya told her about Santos's appearance.

  “Suljan and Hayashi are heading for another tether. They begged Branco to let them out before, but he fobbed them off, he said there was no need. I guess the builders changed their mind.”

  Tchicaya jogged through the bottom level of his own accommodation module. He was still three modules away from the shuttle. “So they thought they could deal with it, but then they realized they couldn't?” He struggled to make sense of this. The tethers clearly weren't made of anything smart enough to impede the rebels, or dispose of them directly; the insides of the modules were endlessly reconfigurable, but it probably never occurred to the builders that these cables would require any property but tensile strength. “What were they pinning their hopes on?” he mused. “Picking them off with debris-clearance laser? You'd think that would either be technically feasible, or not.”

  “Maybe they had some last-minute moral qualms.”

  “These people are either trying to hijack the ship, or to destroy it, and they're free to send backups wherever they like. Their memories are in their own hands. I doubt Branco would have had any scruples about vaporizing them, if it were possible.”

  Rasmah said, “He might have been outvoted.”

  Tchicaya asked the ship to show him an image of her. The lone figure was only about five or six meters up the kilometer-long cable, but she was ascending rapidly: gripping the slender braid of monofilaments with her knees, reaching up, dragging her body another arm's-length higher. At least at the hub she'd have a negligible velocity; if she ended up floating, he'd have plenty of time to reach her in the shuttle.

  Tchicaya said, “Let me see through your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Just for a moment. Please.”

  Rasmah hesitated, then sent him the vision. She looked down at the shiny globe of the module beneath her, then up across the spoked wheel of the ship, toward the faint glint of her quarry on the tether a quarter of a turn away. On her right, the dazzling plain of the border was as serene and immutable as ever.

  “I'm not afraid of heights,” she said dryly. “Stop fretting about me.” She cut off the image.

  “I'm not,” Tchicaya lied.

  “I just spotted Suljan emerging. Look, I'm not on my own here. Just get to the shuttle! If there's anything to tell you, I'll call back.”

  “All right.”

  As his sense of her presence faded, Tchicaya broke into a run. He'd been wasting time trying to piece everything together; he didn't need to know exactly what the rebels were planning. Rasmah's logic was sound. He hated not being beside her, but she'd trusted him with another task, and he had to dedicate himself to it, unswervingly.

  He raced past people in the corridors and on the walkways, without stopping to shout questions or exchange hypotheses. If there was solid information being passed around, it would reach him eventually, wherever he was. Within minutes, he was dripping with sweat; the ship's bodies stayed reasonably fit by sheer biochemical fiat, but his own had been neither designed nor trained for speed. Refusing to be swayed by discomfort was easy, but there were limits that had nothing to do with pain.

  Yann appeared suddenly, sprinting beside him. “Rasmah said you're heading for the shuttle. How much free storage do you have in your Qusp?”

  “Not enough for a passenger. I'm sorry.”

  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.