Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

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.

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.

"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.