Schild’s Ladder

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."

Mariama said, "Do they understand that the border’s still encroaching? That we’re still losing territory?"

"Yes," Cass replied. "But they’ve offered to work with us, to do what they can to find a solution."

Tchicaya was bemused. "Don’t you think that problem is a bit beyond them?" The toolkit had found no way to freeze the border. All the evidence suggested that the expansion was unstoppable.

Cass said, "Of course it is, right now. But they’ve come from nothing, to this" — she gestured at the highway around them — "in just six hundred years. Give them another near-side month or two, and they’ll definitely be the ones leading the way."

They returned to the place Mariama had named Museum City. The tar pit would take time to stabilize, and until the Planck worms had either been trapped and killed, or failed to show up entirely, it would not be safe to try to drill through the mess and make contact with the border.

It had been less than a millisecond since the Sarumpaet had begun its flight. Tchicaya enjoyed imagining his own startled near-side version hearing the news that the Planck worms had been defeated, before he’d even had time to grow anxious about the fate of the mission. He’d made no firm plans for reversing his bifurcation, since he’d never really expected to return, but the less-traveled Tchicaya would probably be willing to be subsumed. If not, he only hoped that their continued separation would be justified, and they didn’t merely dog each other’s footsteps. If they both tried to meet up with Rasmah it would be awkward, though Tchicaya had little doubt which one of them she’d choose.

Cass gave Mariama xennobe language lessons. Tchicaya sat in on them, but he found them heavy going. Mariama made her own copy of the vendek-based communications software and began converting it into something a Mediator could work with, but filling in the gaps and formalizing the structures of the language was a huge task.

Tchicaya had expanded the Sarumpaet's scape, building rooms beyond the observation deck, giving all three passengers privacy. He began sleeping more, eight or ten hours in every ship-day.

Mostly, he dreamed that he was back on the Rindler. It was strange to feel pangs of nostalgia, not for solid ground and blue skies, but for stars and borderlight.

The Colonists were intensely curious about the aliens, and eager to explain their own world to them. They dragged the Sarumpaet from group to group, place to place; if Cass had let them, they probably would have taken her on a tour of every city in their realm, talking to her nonstop all the way. In near-side terms, their history only stretched back about a year, and they had only explored a few thousand cubic kilometers of the far side, but by any local measure their civilization was orders of magnitude vaster than all of inhabited space. And they were far from alone: they’d had direct contact with twelve other sentient species, and they had secondhand knowledge of hundreds more.

Tchicaya listened to Cass’s translations, and marveled at the things they were learning, but he could see how weary she was becoming, and he felt both a protective sympathy for her, and a lesser, parallel exhaustion of his own. He had dived into the far side unprepared, and whether or not he eventually made it his home, he needed to come up for air.

On their fifty-third night in the city, Mariama woke him, standing by his bed, shaking him by the arm. He squinted at her and willed the scape to grow brighter.

"It’s about Cass."

He nodded. "She has to get out soon. The minute the tar pit’s safe to traverse, we need to start drilling."

Mariama sat on the bed beside him. "She’s started talking to me about staying on. Seeing out her original project, in some form or other: freezing the border, pushing away the far side. Whatever can be done to stop the evacuations."

Tchicaya was horrified. "That could take centuries!" He only meant far-side time, though on reflection he wondered if that wasn’t optimistic.