Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

Tchicaya said, "No. I think they’re in cold sleep, with their bodies frozen, and tiny currents flowing in their brains. Dreaming of all the horrors they’d wished upon us, in the name of some crude, masochistic notion of humanity that must have been dying right in front of them before they’d even left Earth."

As Tchicaya boarded the shuttle ahead of Yann, Mariama looked back and flashed him a brief smile. Her meaning was unmistakable, but he pretended not to notice. He didn’t mind her knowing what he and Yann had attempted, or even how it had ended, but it drove him to distraction that she could deduce at least half the story just by watching them together.

He could have instructed his Exoself to embargo whatever small gestures were giving him away. But that was not how he wanted to be: hermetically sealed, blank as a rock. For a moment, Tchicaya contemplated reaching over and putting his arm across Yann’s shoulders, just to devalue her powers of observation. On reflection that would have been petty, though, and likely to cause Yann all kinds of confusion.

Mariama sat beside Tarek. In the unlikely event that the two of them were lovers, Tchicaya would be the last to know. Behind him, the fifth passenger, Branco, strapped himself in place. Tchicaya turned to him and joked, "It doesn’t seem right that you’re outnumbered. You should at least have brought an observer along."

Branco said pleasantly, "Fuck that. The last thing I want to do is start mimicking all your paranoid games."

Branco had been part of the original coalition who’d designed and built both the Rindler and the Scribe. Yielders and Preservationists had arrived over the decades, exuding a kind of bureaucratic fog through which he was now forced to march, but as he’d explained to Tchicaya earlier, he’d become inured to the squatters and their demands. The Scribe was still available to its creators, occasionally, and with patience he could still get work done. The factions made a lot of noise, but in the long run, as far as Branco was concerned, they’d be about as significant as the vapid religious cults who’d once squabbled over contested shrines on Earth. "And you sad airheads can’t even slaughter each other," he’d observed gleefully. "How frustrating that must be."

As they fell away from the Rindler , Tchicaya barely noticed the weightlessness, or the strange doll’s-house/termite-colony view some of the modules offered as they shrank into the distance. The trip hadn’t quite become as unremarkable to him as air travel in a planetary atmosphere, but on a planet even repeated flights along the same route were never as unvarying as this.

Tarek said, "Actually, we’re outnumbered, three to two. If you’re neutral, you’re a Yielder. There is no difference."

"Oh, here we go!" Branco chuckled and settled back into his couch. "It’s a short trip, but please, entertain us."

"You’re not fooling anyone," Tarek insisted heatedly.

"It’s not important," Mariama said. Tchicaya watched her, wondering if she’d make eye contact with Tarek as she spoke. She didn’t. "There are observers here for both sides. It doesn’t matter how many there are." Her tone was calm, neither argumentative nor imploring.

Tarek dropped the subject. Tchicaya was impressed; she’d defused the situation without alienating Tarek, or incurring any debt to him. She hadn’t lost her touch, she’d only grown more subtle. When Tchicaya had trailed after her as a tortured, infatuated child, it must have perplexed and frustrated her to find that she couldn’t hone her skills on him. Anything above and beyond mere hormonal effects had been superfluous; she might as well have tried to learn martial arts by practicing on a rag doll.

Branco sighed with disappointment, then closed his eyes and appeared to doze off.

Most of the Rindler 's passengers had watched with a mixture of denial and dismay as Sophus’s predictions had been borne out, and all their ingenious models had been dashed to pieces, once again, by the new spectrometer. Branco, however, had embraced the No Rules Theory wholeheartedly, and managed to extract predictions that went far beyond Sophus’s gloomy verdict. Just because there were no preexisting correlations between the dynamics on the far side of the border, that didn’t mean none could be created. Branco had designed an ingenious experiment that aimed to use the near side of the border as a kind of intermediary, to entangle different regions of the far side with each other. The dynamics revealed would still be a random choice from all the possibilities — or, strictly speaking, the near-side universe would split into decoherent branches, and in each, a different result would be observed — but at least the result would apply across more than a few square Planck lengths.

As they docked with the Scribe, Yann mused, "I think this is the first time I’ve come here with any possibility of being disappointed."

Tchicaya was taken aback. "You never had your hopes pinned on any of the old models? You never even had a favorite?"

"There were some esthetically pleasing ones," Yann conceded. "I certainly would have been happy if they’d survived testing. But I never had a good reason to expect it. Not until now."

"That’s very touching," Branco said dryly, "but I see no reason why you should abandon your earlier stance."

Tchicaya challenged him, "You have no emotional stake in the outcome at all?"

Branco regarded him with amusement. "You’ve been here how long ?"

Tarek went through the tunnel first, then Mariama. Tchicaya followed her. "Do you remember that playground?" he whispered. "With all the pipes?" She glanced back at him, puzzled, and shook her head. Tchicaya felt a stab of disappointment; he’d assumed that the sight would have triggered the same memory in her.

In the control room, Branco instructed the stylus. With his gravelly voice and deliberate singsong intonation, he succeeded in making every word drip with contempt, like a kind of sardonic poetry. "The phase relationships between the twelve TeV and fifteen TeV beams will be as follows." They really are making me read this aloud .

Tchicaya looked out the window, down at the immutable plane of light. He’d had vivid dreams about the border, imagining as he slept that the wall of his cabin was the thing itself. He’d hold his ear against it, listening for sounds from the far side, straining with his whole body, urging the signal across.

Sometimes, the instant before he woke, he’d see an iridescent film blossoming on the wall, and his heart would race with joy and fear. Did this new infestation mean that he’d been found out? Or that his crime had never really happened ?

Branco looked up and announced with mock astonishment, "Am I finished already? Is that all I have to do?"

Tarek said, "For now. But I’m invoking my right to a functional audit."

"Hooray," said Branco. He pushed himself away from the control panel and floated by the window with his hands on his head.

Tarek took his place, and instructed the stylus to rise from the border. Tchicaya had heard about functional audits, but he’d never witnessed one before. A package of detectors, verified by the faction invoking the audit, was placed under the tip of the stylus, and the particles emitted were scrutinized directly, to be sure that they conformed to the agreed sequence.

Tchicaya was tempted to say something derisive, but he held his tongue. Whatever made Tarek believe that this was necessary, complaining about the procedure would do nothing to lessen his suspicions.

He used the handholds beneath the windows to drag himself closer to Mariama. "Where have you been hiding? I haven’t seen you for weeks."