Schild’s Ladder

She took Tchicaya’s hands. "Some astronomically rare event created sentient life on the other side of the border, but that’s all it was: bad luck, an accident of birth. We’ve found ways to live with all the hardships: the distance, the loneliness. That’s a great achievement, an amazing feat, but that’s no reason to sentence ourselves to repeat it for eternity.

"How can we go on living in that wasteland, when even space is alive here? This is where we belong, Tchicaya. I’ll fight for this place because it’s our home."

In the eerie calm of the highway, Tchicaya felt himself losing his grip on reality. A whole universe was at stake, and here he was playing stowaway on a road train? Unknown multitudes would die, because he lacked the nerve to tap the driver on the shoulder and make his presence known. He could get his message across to anyone, if he put his mind to it. He’d managed to converse with twenty-third-century zealots with flesh for brains; how much harder could a glowing starfish be?

When the highway began to disgorge them after barely two hours, he almost wept with relief. His gamble might yet fail to pay off, but at least it hadn’t irrevocably sunk the whole endeavor.

As they spiraled out of the darkness, the Sarumpaet steeled itself for the worst contingencies the toolkit could imagine. The Bright had been a challenge, but there was no reason to believe that it was the most extreme environment the far side could contain.

Probes began returning. Parasprites flooded in. The convoy slipped out of the ramp into a vast, tranquil space. The toolkit analyzed the vendeks around them; the mixture was not honeycombstable, but it was like the Bright tamed, domesticated. The airconditioning in the colony had gone a short way in the same direction, but it was like the difference between a mesh cage in the open ocean, keeping the largest predators at bay, and an aquarium of hand-picked species that could coexist and thrive with a minimum of drama.

The six Colonists were not alone here; the scape showed hundreds of similar four-branched xennobes moving around them in a multitude of neat, loosely defined rows, as if the place was crisscrossed with invisible escalators. Compared to the crush of the outpost, though, conditions were far from crowded. Layer walls undulated gently in the distance, dotted with parasprite lamps, but there was none of the density of structure they’d seen in the tunnels. High above Tchicaya — "above" according to the random orientation in which the Sarumpaet had emerged — other dark highways were visible.

"I believe we’re in a railway station," he said. "The question is, where?"

Mariama declared confidently, "This is the big smoke. All space and comfort."

"Where we came from wasn’t exactly a ghost town."

"No, just a small village with no entertainment, and no contraception."

Tchicaya scowled, but then he realized that she was being neither serious nor entirely flippant. Tossing a few anthropomorphic parodies at the least important of the ten thousand unanswered questions they faced might at least stop them wasting energy trying to fill in the same blanks with earnest hypotheses that were just as likely to be wrong.

As the Colonists crossed the atrium, alien cargo and its wouldbe puppeteers in tow, Mariama mimed cracking a whip. "Take me to your linguists," she said. "And don’t spare the vendeks."

If they were in a city, they had no way of judging its size from within, no way of knowing if they were moving from building to building through something like open air, or merely navigating through the rooms of a single, vast, hermetically sealed structure.

They passed through narrow apertures and wide corridors; they wove through denser crowds; they encountered structures as baffling and varied as the machinery — or artwork, or gardens — of the outpost in the Bright. The probes gathered information, and the toolkit puzzled over it, but even when it made sense it was just another tiny piece of a vast mosaic. Grabbing hints of how the vendek populations were interacting inside some gadget — or pet — that they passed was all grist for the mill, but it was not going to make the whole city and its people snap into focus in an instant.

Still, Tchicaya clung stubbornly to the notion that it was better to observe whatever he could, and provisionally entertain some wildly imperfect guesses, than to close his eyes and surrender to the verdict that he might as well have been a flea aspiring to understand the culture of a great metropolis. The scale in that analogy was right, but nothing else was. Both he and his hosts possessed general intelligence, and however mutually foreign their needs and drives, there was nothing — including each other’s lives, customs, and languages — that could remain incomprehensible to them, given time, patience, and motivation.

Time, they did not have, but he’d leave it to the Planck worms to declare when the supply was exhausted.