Schild’s Ladder

Kadir turned around and interjected testily, "I can analyze the flows in a symplectic manifold perfectly well without pretending to inhabit it. That’s what mathematics is for. Imagining that you need to float through every last abstract space that shows up in a physics problem is just being literal-minded."

Yann smiled, unoffended. "I’m not going to argue with you. I haven’t come here to proselytize for acorporeality."

Zyfete, seated in front of Tchicaya, muttered, "Why bother, if you can render embodiment just as barren?"

Tchicaya bit his tongue. He’d been forewarned about the level of acrimony, and at some point everyone on the Rindler was going to have to wade waist-deep through their opponents' venom on their way to a resolution, but spur-of-the-moment bickering in a confined space wasn’t his idea of productive disharmony.

The shuttle’s drive kicked in, delivering a mild push that Tchicaya succeeded in interpreting as a precipitous dive, rather than a complete inversion of land and sky. He scanned the eye-watering whiteness, hunting for their destination, but the glare was impenetrable. It seemed miraculous to be skimming kilometers above an object that dominated the sky for hundreds of light-years — without being burnt to a cinder, as he would have been this close to the surface of a star — but it was sheer size that made the border visible from afar. Each square kilometer didn’t have to blaze fiercely for the total luminosity to outshine any supernova. Without the usual Doppler shift to boost the light’s power, a pinhole view looking straight at the border would actually have been dimmer, here, by a factor of three, than the equivalent view from any planet he’d visited. What dazzled was the fact that it filled his vision, leaving room for nothing else. On Pachner, for much of the year the border had been partly hidden by daylight, but even when it reached its furthest angle from the sun there’d always been a narrow strip of washed-out darkness left over somewhere on the horizon, with a few pallid stars on which to rest your eyes.

As the drive reversed, he finally spotted the silhouette of the Scribe. He made a mask against the surrounding glare with his hands, and managed to discern some structure. At the top of the machine was a sphere, rainbow iridescent in the light that grazed it. He knew it was embossed with a fine pattern of microjets, trillions of tiny devices capable of firing as few as one or two atoms in any direction. While the Rindler could keep pace with the border well enough simply by cruising, the Scribe’s stylus hovered so close that collisions with interstellar gas, and even the pressure of the borderlight itself, would have ruined the alignment if left uncompensated. Presumably, the visitors' own influence would be well within the machine’s defensive capacities, but to Tchicaya it was both marvelous and comical that their presence could be accommodated — like a calligrapher inscribing Gravitation on the head of a pin, while four fat infants clambered onto the artisan’s shoulders and proceeded to wrestle.

As the shuttle drew nearer, the Scribe’s modest size became apparent; it was smaller than one of the Rindler's modules, forty or fifty meters across, with the sphere of microjets held out on a boom above a flat deck. The shuttle’s drive made one last perceptible correction before a series of maneuvers too gentle to feel brought them into contact with the deck.

Kadir unstrapped himself, and approached the hatch in the floor of the shuttle. Tchicaya followed him.

"You keep an atmosphere in there?"

Kadir nodded. "People come and go, it’s easiest just to maintain the pressure."

Tchicaya frowned. "I’m never going to get to use this, am I?" He pinched the back of his hand to tug on the near-invisible membrane that he’d sprayed all over his skin; he’d been told it would let his body survive for up to a week in vacuum, and since it took three months to grow a new one, that had seemed like a precaution worth taking. The one thing the suit lacked was reaction mass. If he found himself drifting toward the border, the best thing to do would be to broadcast a final backup and resign himself to an interesting local death.

Kadir said, "I’ll see if I can arrange an opportunity on the way back." The remark was delivered without obvious malice, but it was still hard to know how to take it. Since Tchicaya had allowed Yann to introduce him to the two Preservationists as a fellow partisan, the tension he’d felt had ebbed and flowed, and he was never sure when to expect a bit of good-natured teasing, and when to brace himself for a genuinely chilly rebuff as an enemy of the cause.