Schild’s Ladder

Yann lay on the floor, watching him. "I think I’m getting all the signals you talked about," he mused. "But they’re so crude, even now. And before, it was just a single message, repeating itself endlessly: Be happy, be happy, be happy! Do you think there’s something wrong with this body?"

"I doubt it." Tchicaya sat cross-legged on the floor beside him.

"You expected more?"

"I was already happy, so it was a bit redundant."

"How happy?"

"As happy as it’s possible to be, for no particular reason."

"I have no idea how to interpret that. What gets to count as a particular reason?"

Yann shrugged. "Something more than being told by my body: Be happy. Be happy…why?"

"Because you’re with someone you like. And you’re making them happy, too."

"Yes, but only if they accept the same reasoning. That’s circular."

Tchicaya groaned. "Now you’re being disingenuous. It’s a tradition, passed down from reproductive biology. Every tradition’s arbitrary. That doesn’t mean it’s empty."

"I know. But I still expected something more subtle."

"That takes time."

"What, hours?"

"Centuries."

Yann narrowed his eyes with suspicion.

Tchicaya laughed, but made a face protesting his honesty. "On Turaev, it takes six months of attraction before anything’s physically possible." Like most generic bodies, the Rindler's were promiscuous: any two of them could develop compatible sexual organs, more or less at will. You could wire in your own chosen restraints while you inhabited them, but since leaving home, Tchicaya had never felt the need to delegate the task. "The waiting was nice, in its own way," he admitted. "You might think it was risking an awful anticlimax, but I think the buildup improved the sex itself almost as much as it raised expectations. Acting on the spur of the moment is more likely to be disappointing."

Yann protested, "I’ve been contemplating this for almost six months."

"Since I arrived? I’m flattered. But then, who else would you dare to ask?"

Yann smiled abashedly. "How could I not be curious? It’s what flesh is famous for. However undeservedly." He watched Tchicaya carefully, serious for a moment. "Have I hurt you?"

Tchicaya shook his head. "That usually takes longer, too." He hesitated. "So what do acorporeals do, instead? When I was a child, I used to imagine that you’d all have simulated bodies. Sex would be just like embodied sex, but there’d be lots of colored lights, and cosmic bliss."

Yann guffawed. "Maybe twenty thousand years ago there were people that vacuous, but they must have all decayed into thermal noise before I was born." He added hastily, "I’m not saying you’re wrong to continue the tradition. You’ve mapped some stable mammalian neurobiology, and it’s not too pathological in its original form. I suppose it still serves some useful social functions, as well as being a mild existential placebo. But when you have a malleable mental structure, intensifying pleasure for its own sake is a very uninteresting cul-de-sac. We worked that out a long time ago."

"Fair enough. But what do you do instead?"

Yann sat up and leaned against the side of the bed. "All the other things the embodied do. Give gifts. Show affection. Be attentive. Sometimes we raise children together."

"What kind of gifts?"

"Art. Music. Theorems."

"Original theorems?"

"If you’re serious."

Tchicaya was impressed. Mathematics was a vast territory, far more challenging and intricate than physical space. Reaching a theorem no one had proved before was a remarkable feat. "That’s positively…chivalric," he said. "Like a knight riding off to the edge of the world, to bring back a dragon’s egg. And you’ve done that, yourself?"

"Yes."

"How often?"

"Nine times." Yann laughed at Tchicaya’s expression of astonishment, and added, "It’s not always that serious. If it was, it really would be as daunting as winning the hand of medieval royalty, and no one would bother."

"So you start with something easier?"

Yann nodded. "When I was ten years old, all I gave my sweet-heart was a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations in four dimensions into principal bundles over the three-sphere. Ancient constructions, though I did rediscover them for myself."

"How were they received?"

"She liked them so much, she extended them to larger spaces and gave me back the result."

"Can you show me?"