Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

"Lots of other planets do Slowdown."

"Not civilized ones."

Tchicaya fell silent. A faint star had appeared directly above him, even before the sun had fully set.

He said, "So you’ll leave one day? For good?" The question produced an odd, tight sensation in his windpipe. He’d never lost synch with anyone; he couldn’t imagine that kind of unbridgeable separation.

"No."

He turned to her, surprised. She said, "I plan to whip the whole planet into life, instead. Anything less would just be selfish, wouldn’t it?"

The machinery inside the power station was robust and intelligent enough to defend itself, and to safeguard any visitors, without the need for high fences or locked doors. Tchicaya remembered the place as being noisier the last time he’d explored it, but Slowdown had reduced the flow of waste from the town to an inaudible trickle. Energy was extracted from the waste by an enzyme-driven electrochemical process that he was yet to study in detail; fortunately, some of the energy ended up as heat, and even the diminished output was enough to make the building habitable at night. Mariama had made a nest of blankets right up against the coolant pipes that led to the radiator fins on the roof.

Tchicaya sniffed the air cautiously, but there was no trace of the usual offensive odor, maybe because there was not only less sewage passing through, but the undiminished runoff from the fields was diluting it. There was a strange, boiled-vegetable smell to the place, but it was nothing he couldn’t tolerate.

Mariama had stockpiled cans of food, self-heating rations of the kind people took into the untouched, frozen lands to the south. It must have taken her a while to build up the collection without attracting suspicion. She handed him a can, and he pressed the tab to start it heating.

"How long were you planning this?" he asked.

"A bit more than a year."

"That’s before I even knew Erdal would be traveling."

"Me too. I just wanted to be prepared, whenever it happened."

Tchicaya was impressed, and a little daunted. It was one thing to watch the sun and the stars racing around the sky, and think: what if I could be as fast as them ? Plotting to break out of Slowdown before she’d even experienced it required an entirely different line of thought.

"What were you doing? Before you came to my house?"

She shrugged. "Just exploring. Messing about. Being careful not to wake the drones."

Tchicaya felt his face harden at this contemptuous phrase, but then he wondered how much allowance to make for the fact that she was always striving to provoke him. The calculations became so difficult at times, it drove him mad. He wanted the two of them to be straightforward with each other, but he doubted that would ever be her style. And he didn’t want her to be different, he didn’t want her to change.

He opened the can and hunched over his meal, unsure what his face was betraying.

After they’d eaten, they switched off the lamp and lay beneath the blankets, huddled together. Tchicaya was self-conscious at first, as if the contented glow he felt at the warmth of her body against his was at risk of turning into something more complicated, but he knew that it was still physically impossible for anything sexual to happen between them. The prospect of that guarantee eventually failing disturbed him, but it couldn’t vanish overnight.

Mariama said, "Two weeks isn’t long enough. You need to walk out of your room a centimeter taller: just enough to make your parents feel something is wrong, without being able to put their finger on it."

"Go to sleep."

"Or learn something you didn’t know. Amaze them with your erudition."

"Now you’re just mocking me." Tchicaya kissed the back of her head. He immediately wished he hadn’t done it, and he waited, tensed, for some kind of rebuke. Or worse, some attempt to move further along a path on which he’d never meant to set foot.

But Mariama lay motionless in the darkness, and after a while he began to wonder if she’d even noticed. Her hair was thick at the back, and his lips had barely brushed a few loose strands.

In Tchicaya’s view, the town’s effective desertion didn’t render it more interesting, and the freedom to wander the streets and fields at any hour was less appealing now, in winter, than in the ordinary summers when it was barely curtailed by parental authority anyway. Tchicaya thought of suggesting that they drop back into Slowdown and reemerge when the weather was warmer, but he was afraid of compromising their original deal. If he didn’t stick to the letter of it, he could forget about holding Mariama to her word.

Mariama wanted to catch a train to Hardy, further if possible, preferably circumnavigating the entire continent. In one weird concession to practicality, the trains moved at their ordinary speed, whisking commuters to their destinations in an eye blink. Understandably, though, departures were rare, and on examining the schedules it turned out that they could not have traveled anywhere and back in less than ten years.

Tchicaya did his best to keep Mariama distracted, terrified that she might harbor a yearning for sabotage that went beyond playground equipment. She’d know it was futile to hope to succeed in damaging any of the town’s infrastructure, but he could picture her delight at sirens wailing and people shuddering into motion around her. This image might have been unfair, but there was no point asking her for assurances; at best, that would only offend her, and at worst it might tempt her to act out his fears. So he tried to go along with any suggestions she made that weren’t completely outlandish, but only after putting up enough resistance to keep her from becoming too bored, or too suspicious of his compliance.

On their tenth night out of Slowdown, Tchicaya was woken by lukewarm fluid dripping onto his face. He opened his eyes in the pitch blackness, and rashly poked his tongue out to sample the fluid. It was water, but it had a complicated, slightly metallic taint. He pictured a crack in the ceiling, the heat from the radiator fins above them on the roof melting the surrounding frost.

He slid out from the blankets without waking Mariama, and groped for the lamp. When he held it up, a faint liquid sheen was visible snaking down one thick coolant pipe, collecting in drops at a right-angled bend above the cushion where his head had lain.

Mariama stirred, then shielded her eyes. "What is it?"

"Just some water from the roof. We might have to shift." He moved the lamp about, hunting for leaks along the other pipes. Then something different caught his eye, a flash of iridescent colors at the very top of the pipe that had proved to be the original culprit. "Is that oil?" Why would there be oil leaking from the roof? As far as Tchicaya knew, the plant’s few moving parts were all inside the building, and they’d all be molecularly smooth if they made physical contact with each other at all. Maybe flakes of ice could catch the light like that. But what could make them thin and flat enough?

There was sure to be a simple answer, but the puzzle gnawed at him. It was cold, and part of him wanted nothing more than to curl up beneath the blankets again — but what was the point of achieving a state in which no one could tell him to stop worrying and leave it till morning, if he didn’t take advantage of his freedom to act on his curiosity immediately?

He said, "I’m going up on the roof."

Mariama blinked at him in the lamplight, apparently at a loss for words.

Tchicaya put on his shoes and walked outside, taking the lamp with him.

He circled the building twice, before settling on a sturdylooking drainpipe. The lamp was attached to a chain; he hung it around his neck, like a pendant worn backward, and gripped the drainpipe between his forearms and knees. There were no handholds, and the frosted surface was slippery. The first time he found himself sliding back down, he panicked and almost let go, but the friction from the polymer surface was never enough to really hurt him. After ending up back on the ground twice, he found that if he tightened his grip the instant he began to slip, he could bring himself to a halt in a fraction of a second, and retain most of his hard-won altitude.