Schild’s Ladder

Mariama resisted answering, knowing that she was being set up. After several seconds, she succumbed anyway.

"Terrified?"

"No. I think she’ll be grateful." Tchicaya smiled at Mariama’s expression of disgust. It was strange, but she’d probably given him more confidence in his stance, now that she’d turned out to be his opponent, than if they’d been allies willing to reassure each other endlessly.

He continued. "You don’t take a traveler for a partner if you hope that the world will always stay the same. You do it because you can’t quite break away, yourself, but you can’t live without the promise of change hanging over you every day.

"That’s what the border means, for a lot of people. The promise of change they’d never be able to make any other way."

Sophus’s presentation took place in a theater that the ship had improvised in the middle of one of the accommodation modules, folding up all the cabins that happened to be unoccupied to create a single large space. When Mariama realized that this included her own, she was not pleased.

"I have glass in there!" She pointed across the theater. "Right where that person’s sitting."

"It’ll be protected," Tchicaya reassured her, as if he were a veteran of the concertina effect. "Anyway, what’s there to lose? If anything’s broken, it can be reconstructed."

"They’ve never been broken," she complained.

Tchicaya said, "I hate to be the one to point this out, but — " He held up his thumb and forefinger and adjusted the spacing to atomic size.

Mariama glared at him until he dropped his hand. "It’s not the same thing. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand."

Tchicaya winced. "So now I’m an all-round philistine?"

Mariama’s face softened. She reached over and ran a hand affectionately across his stubbled scalp. "No. Your failings are much more specific than that."

Tchicaya spotted Yann coming through the entrance with a small group of people. He raised a hand and tentatively beckoned to him. Yann responded by bringing the whole group along to sit beside them.

Rasmah, Hayashi, Birago, and Suljan had been involved in designing the new spectrometer. Catching the tail end of the conversation they’d been having made it clear that all but Birago were Yielders; the other three were joking about his plans to sneak in a filter to conceal the telltale signature of Planck worms devouring the scenery. Birago seemed to be taking their teasing with equanimity, though it struck Tchicaya that he had the quietness of someone outnumbered, who had decided that there was no point in speaking his mind.

Perhaps Mariama felt outnumbered, too, but she appeared genuinely amiable toward the Yielders as introductions were made; she was certainly more than diplomatically polite. Tchicaya had been wondering whether their friendship had caused her to conceal the full measure of her distaste for his position, but whatever effort she was making for his benefit, she was nowhere near the point that Kadir and Zyfete had reached.

Yann said, "The new spectrometer looks good. We’ll be able to resolve a whole new band of gamma rays, and with twice the precision of the old machine."

Tchicaya nodded, unsure how much difference that would make. "Do you know what this is all about?" He gestured at the podium that was now growing before their eyes. His Mediator had explained that the timing was meant to encourage people to stop talking among themselves — like a change of lighting, or the raising of curtains — but apparently this was an aspect of the Rindler's local culture that had been documented without ever being practiced.

"Not really," Yann admitted. "There’s usually something on the grapevine about these talks, weeks in advance, but this one has come out of the blue. Sophus is always interesting, though. I’m sure he’ll be worth listening to."

"He said something to me earlier about time asymmetry."

"What, time-reversal asymmetry? He’s talking about an arrow of time in the novo-vacuum?"

"No, time-translation asymmetry."

Yann’s eyes widened. "Interesting might have been an understatement."

Sophus appeared and made his way to the podium, but then he stood to one side. People were still entering the theater, and it looked as if they’d keep on streaming in until it was completely full.

Mariama surveyed the latecomers irritably. "Why can’t they watch this in their heads?"

"It’s a flesh thing," Yann confided. "I don’t understand it either."

Tchicaya glanced up. People were sitting in chairs suspended from the ceiling, accessed via corridors through higher levels that would otherwise have come to a sudden end. The ship had made use of every square meter of available surface, even though there was no prospect of cramming every last passenger in. Rasmah caught Tchicaya’s eye and joked, "I always wanted to be at a performance where people were hanging from the rafters."