Schild’s Ladder

It was impossible to guess how deep this region might be. Though the border was advancing through the near side relentlessly at half the speed of light, the precise meaning of this for the far side remained unclear. Viewed from either side, the border itself had to be expanding in a consistent fashion, but that left open the question of whether all, or most, structures in the far side sat motionless while the edge of their universe rocketed away from them, or whether the relationship was more like that of the cosmic expansion of the near side, where relative velocities grew slowly with distance. The honeycomb was certainly clinging to the border, but that was not a good enough reason to believe that everything else in the far side would be following close behind. Sweeping principles of homogeneity were wishful thining here.

There was something deeply restful about moving through the Bright. With the scape’s fake gravity insulating them from the ship’s actual, bumpy passage, the Sarumpaet might have been a glass gondola hanging from an invisible hot air balloon, drifting through a planetary atmosphere after a volcanic eruption had shrouded the world in dust. Although there was nothing to see but the shimmering of the sprites, Tchicaya resisted the lure of Slowdown, and instead of retreating into virtual landscapes from their memories, they sat and talked about their travels. Mariama described the renaissance on Har’El, the excitement of the changes that had percolated up from nowhere. Tchicaya told her more about Pachner, and the similar vitality he’d seen at the approach of the border.

They were beyond arguing, beyond accusing, beyond holding up each other’s earlier ideals as some standard against which they’d fallen. They had seen different things, lived different lives, and they had allowed it to change them. All they could do now was keep on climbing Schild’s ladder.

Five tranquil days into the Bright, just as Tchicaya was beginning to fear that they risked being lulled into an irreversible torpor, they spotted a small, translucent structure drifting by at a leisurely pace. The sprites that the object modified and deflected reached them long before the ship’s probes could journey out to form their own impression, and for nearly an hour it was not at all clear that this was anything more than an unusually stable and localized feature of the shifting currents. The sprite-image looked like an eddy of some kind, and if no circulating winds could be detected brushing across the Sarumpaet as it approached, the rules governing vendek flows didn’t bear much resemblance to fluid dynamics.

Once they were close enough, the probes gave a more detailed picture. There were veins and pockets of vendeks inside the eddy that were like nothing they’d seen floating free here. Some of the mixes were similar to honeycomb populations; others were different again.

They tracked the thing for hours, and watched it negotiate the currents. As the free vendeks flowed over it and through it, the interior structures deformed wildly; these were not the kind of breezes that could stir a few leaves, they were shifts in the fundamental dynamic laws. Some species of interior vendeks died before their eyes; others seemed to be leached out, carried off into the wind. It was like witnessing an animal being sandblasted with bacteria and assorted foreign cells, fighting off some, incorporating others, surrendering whole lineages of its own. Twisting and reeling beneath the onslaught, but all the while continuing to function.

After eight hours of watching these feats of persistence, with neither of them willing to put it into words, Mariama finally declared, "This has to be alive. This is our first xennobe."

Tchicaya agreed. "What do you want to call it?"

"I named the sprites," she said. "It’s your turn."

The internal structures that the probe revealed looked like knots of offal caught in a tornado, but not many creatures were beautiful to behold once you dug that deep. The sprites' gentler scrutiny gave an impression of something woven from the winds.

"An airflower."

Mariama was amused, but she didn’t object. If the Bright was not actually much like air, nor did anything here lie within reach of one-word descriptions in near-side language.

They continued to follow the airflower, though it was drifting upward, back toward the honeycomb. The toolkit ventured no opinion on the question of whether or not this system was alive, but its observations had already yielded dozens of new methods for easing the Sarumpaet's way through the currents of the Bright.

"Could it be sentient?" Mariama wondered. The airflower had shown no obvious reaction to their presence, but it wasn’t actively probing its environment, and the ship was a fraction of its size. The tiny distortion in the sprite flow around the Sarumpaet's hull would barely be distinguishable from the background shimmer.