Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

For all the bad news that accompanied it, understanding the Sarumpaet 's presence seemed to solidify Cass’s sense of reality. She could connect herself to the near side again. She could imagine something other than exile, and madness.

When Tchicaya finished speaking, she stood. "You want them to evacuate the Bright, so you can trap the Planck worms there?"

"Yes."

"And you’d like me to translate that message?"

"If you can."

"I’ll need to be able to create vendeks," Cass explained. She had invented her own terminology for everything, but Tchicaya’s Mediator was smoothing over the differences. "I don’t understand the perceptual physiology, but there’s a family of short-lived vendeks related to the parasprites that my first xennobe tribe employed for communication. Though what their descendants will make of any of this, I don’t know."

Mariama worked with the toolkit to sort out interfaces with the software Cass had used back on the Oppenheimer to create the communications vendeks. While this was happening, Tchicaya rehearsed scenarios with her, possible responses from the Colonists. He wasn’t entirely sure why she wanted this, but she appeared to be afraid of being caught out, unprepared.

"Everything’s ready," Mariama declared. "As much as it will ever be."

They moved the Sarumpaet right up to the ruins of the Oppenheimer . The Colonists were still patiently looking on as the banner flashed out its mathematical lexicon.

Cass said, "I hope they really are expecting this. If I waved a papyrus at Tutankhamen and he started speaking to me, I’d probably run screaming from the room and never come back."

She sent the first vendeks out from the ship.

The scape painted a burst of color spreading out around them, fading rapidly as it moved. These vendeks did not last long in the room’s environment; to Tchicaya’s eyes, the signal looked faint by the time it reached the Colonists.

It was not too faint for them to notice. They sprang into action, gathering more equipment. If the Bright had made them feign constant excitement, this was the real thing; Tchicaya hadn’t seen their bodies convulse so much since they’d descended from the surface of the outpost.

Reassembled in a huddle, armed with their additional machinery — recording devices, translators? — they finally found a reason to talk back.

Tchicaya wasn’t privy to the exchange. Cass didn’t talk aloud in her own native language, offering up sentences for direct translation, nor was there any running translation of the replies. She had never got far enough to integrate the xennobe language into the usual, Mediator-based scheme of things; she was working from her own mental dictionary of signals, memories of past conversations, brute-force software assistance, and guesswork. She made gestures with her body, frowned to herself, and emitted grunts and sighs, but most of the action was going on inside her simulated skull.

After almost twenty minutes, she paused to give the two spectators a brief commentary. "They expected me to speak in an ancient language, but they weren’t quite sure which one it would be. We’ve sorted that all out now." She looked ragged, but she smiled.

Tchicaya was about to launch into a stream of lavish praise, but Mariama replied calmly, "That’s good."

Cass nodded. "I think they trust me, more or less. At least they’re willing to listen."

She resumed the conversation. Vendeks washed back and forth between the Colonists and the flea masquerading as a resurrected mummy.

More than four hours after the exchange had begun, Cass sat down on the deck and cradled her head in her arms. Three of the Colonists left the chamber.

Tchicaya waited. There’d be a reason for the hiatus: the Colonists were fetching another language expert, another translation device, a better dictionary.

Cass looked up suddenly, as if she’d completely forgotten that she was no longer alone.

"It’s done," she said. "They understood me."

The Bright itself was of little value to their hosts, she explained, but it did contain several outposts from which they’d been attempting to learn more about whatever lay beyond. They hadn’t constructed the signaling layer; they’d heard stories about the artifact, which had supposedly been built by an earlier civilization, but they had never had the means to verify its existence. They couldn’t quite comprehend the nature of the threat she had described, but they did believe that she came from the outer reaches, and they had decided that they had nothing to lose by erring on the side of caution.

They would permit the creation of the tar pit. They would begin evacuating the Bright immediately.

The Sarumpaet rode the highway loop back into the Bright, escorted by Tännsjö and Hintikka — Cass’s names for two of the Colonists who’d traveled down from the outpost with the banner. She’d explained to them that she’d moved from the wreck of her old vehicle into this new, smaller model, brought here by two colleagues who’d traveled all the way from her home; they found many aspects of this account baffling, but didn’t expect to make sense of it until they’d learned much more. The legends about her had been full of obvious nonsense that they’d hoped to dispel, but they were patient, and they could wait for a more complete understanding.

"Do they know you’re their creator?" Mariama asked.

Cass snorted. "That would be an overblown claim for me to make, when I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was creating. But I haven’t told them anything about Mimosa. All I’ve ever said is that I came into their world to try to keep it from colliding with my own."

The outposts in the Bright were all located unfavorably for their purpose, so they left the highway at a brand new ramp that Tännsjö and Hintikka fashioned from within, with tools they’d brought along for the purpose. Even more impressively, after forming the exit, the Colonists sent a signal into the structure that began to shift its operation into reverse. This expedition would not be able to get home by completing the loop in the original direction, and apparently it had never occurred to the highway-makers to have two opposing lanes running side by side.

The Bright was exactly as Tchicaya remembered it, but he had never expected to see Planck worms bearing down on him again the way they had in the honeycomb, unless it was at the moment before his death. The Bright was some three centimeters deep, but the Colonists had never mapped its limits in latitude or longitude. Tchicaya could only hope that if other xennobe civilizations unknown to the Colonists had sent their own explorers into the region, they’d see the tar pit coming, and flee.

The Sarumpaet launched the seed; it disappeared into the haze. For several minutes, there was nothing. Then an ominous sprite shadow appeared, a gray stain spreading across the sky.

This was as much as they could afford to witness. The Colonists would monitor the tar pit from below, but they would not see anything of the battle, if it was won here.

Tännsjö and Hintikka led the way back.

Once they were in transit, the highway sealed behind them, Tchicaya asked Cass, "What do they make of the fact that some near-siders almost wiped them out?"

"I told them that the top of the Bright was encroaching on our homes," she said, "which alarmed us, and made some of us act in haste. I think they could empathize with that; shifting weather’s been known to have the same effect on people here, now and then. But I gather they’re still a bit skeptical about the notion that the Planck worms could have killed everything in their path. They’re also puzzled that the advance of the Bright could be such a big deal to us — given that we come from somewhere even more hostile."