Schild’s Ladder

There was no time to spell out in glacial words everything she was feeling, everything that had swayed her. Part of it was the same sense of ownership that had brought her all this distance in the first place: justifiably or not, she didn’t want the Mimosans to have a better view than she did of the thing they were about to create together. There was the same longing for immediacy, too: she would never see, or touch, any graph as it really was, but to remain locked in a body that could only perceive a fraction of the data, milliseconds after the fact, would leave her feeling almost as detached from the event, now, as if she’d stayed on Earth, waiting for the centuries-old news of an experiment conducted light-years away. Every viewpoint was a compromise, but she had to be as close as she could get.

Beyond the experiment itself, though, it was clear to her now that she couldn’t leave Mimosa without doing at least one thing that went against the grain. After five years of monastic restraint, five years of denying herself the dishonest comforts of virtual reality, she was sick of placing that principle above everything else. Beyond the fact that this disembodiment would be entirely in the service of honesty, she needed, very badly, to drag herself out of the absolutist rut she’d been digging from the moment she’d arrived. If she’d compromised a little from the start, maybe she wouldn’t have felt the same sense of desperation. But it was too late now for half-measures. If she returned to Earth unchanged, it wouldn’t be a triumph of integrity. It would be a kind of death. She’d implode into something as hermetic and immutable as a black hole.

All this, weighed against the thing she hated most: lack of control. Every choice she made rendered meaningless. What choices, though? Her clones would run for a few subjective minutes, most of them in rapt attention as the data poured in. What was the worst that one of these transient selves might do? Utter a few unkind words to Livia or Darsono? Disclose some small guilty secret from her past to people who either wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t care, or at the very least, wouldn’t have the chance to reproach her for long? She wasn’t opening up the gates to the old human nightmare: endless varieties of suffering, endless varieties of stupidity, endless varieties of banality. She would diffuse a very small distance into the space of possibilities, and whatever unhappiness she might experience, whatever misdemeanors she might commit, would be erased beyond recovery.

Rainzi looked skeptical, and she couldn’t blame him. But there was no time left for him to play devil’s advocate, to test her resolve. Cass stood her ground, silently, and after a moment he nodded assent.

She felt a stream of low-level requests for data, and she willed her Mediator to respond. She’d been through the same process before her transmission from Earth: sending the preliminaries first, things that needed to be known about the structure of her mind before it could be implemented in a new environment.

Rainzi said, "Take my hand. We’ll step through together." He placed his ghost-fingers over hers, and asked her for everything.

Cass examined his face. It was pure chance that her Mediator had given him an appearance that inspired trust in her, but the faces of the embodied were no better guides to character, whether they’d been sculpted by genes or by their wearer’s wishes. If Rainzi’s eyes still seemed kind to her, after five years, wasn’t that because he’d shown her genuine kindness? This was not the time for paranoid delusions about the unknowable mind behind the mask.

She said, "Are you ever afraid of this, yourself?"

"A little," he admitted.

"What frightens you the most? What is it that you think might happen?"

He shook his head. "There’s no terrible fate that I fear is lying in store for me. But however many times I do this, I come no closer to knowing what it’s actually like. Don’t you think there’s something frightening about that?"

She smiled. "Absolutely." They weren’t so different that she’d be insane to follow him, the way it would be insane to follow an armored robot into a volcano. This would not be strange or painful beyond her power to bear. If she truly wanted it, she had nothing to fear.

Cass opened the floodgates.

Rainzi’s hand passed through her own, intangible as ever. Cass shuddered. She was who she always was, and the part of her who valued that above all else could not disguise its relief.

"Don’t worry," he assured her, "you won’t be hanging around waiting. And you won’t be disappointed. The femtomachine will only start up on a definite signal from the Quietener; if there’s nothing, it won’t ever be run."

Cass protested, "Aren’t you telling the wrong person?" He might have mentioned this before she’d been split.

Rainzi shrugged. "To the clone, it will be self-evident. If it gets the chance to think anything at all."