Schild’s Ladder

The life the settlers had unleashed on the sterile planet, though ultimately derived from natural terrestrial genomes, had been a little wilder and stranger than most. There were lithe winged cats in some of the jungles that could tear out your throat. Toward the end of his stay, it had been discovered that in one small, isolated town, deliberate exposure to harm by these creatures had become a "rite of passage" into adulthood — as if adolescence itself was insufficiently traumatic. The partially eaten bodies could generally be repaired, and at worst the Qusp could always be tracked down and recovered from the animal’s stomach, so the ritual fell short of local death, but as far as Tchicaya was concerned, that only made it more barbaric. Better to suffer memory loss and discontinuity than the experience of having your jugular gnawed open — and better anything than the company of people who’d decided that this was the definition of maturity.

Children in the town who declined to participate had been ostracized, but once the practice came to light, the wider society of Zapata had intervened — with a concerted effort to improve transport and communication links. After a few years of heightened exposure to the possibility of simply walking away from the town and its self-appointed cultural guardians, no one was interested in being bullied into conformity anymore.

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn’t need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently.

Mariama waved a small yellow fruit at him, half-bitten. "Try one of these. They’re delicious."

"Good grief. Where do you think he grew them?"

"In the garden. Lots of people have set up plots for food. You have to tweak the genomes to get photosynthesis to work in the borderlight, but that’s old hat, you just copy those ugly things the original builders put in."

"I must have walked past without even noticing."

"They’re quite far back from the path. Are you going to try one?"

Tchicaya shook his head. "I’ve tasted them before. There can’t be many; I’m not going to hog them."

Mariama turned to address Kadir, who’d appeared before them like a perfect host. She said, "Tchicaya was just telling me that he’d already tasted quetzal-fruit."

Kadir said, "You’ve visited Zapata?" He had probably intended to greet them politely then move on, but this claim could not be left unexamined.

"Yes." Tchicaya braced himself for a barrage of insults about travelers and other parasites.

"How long ago?"

"About nine hundred years."

"Where did you go?"

"All over." Kadir waited expectantly, so Tchicaya reeled off a list of towns.

When he’d finished, Kadir said, "I was born in Suarez, but I left when I was twenty. I never managed to get back. How long were you there?"

Tchicaya had been reorganizing his memories as they spoke, dragging the whole period upward in his association hierarchy. "Less than a year."

Kadir smiled. "That’s longer than most visitors stay. What was the attraction?"

"I don’t know. It was a quiet spot, I was tired of moving about. The landscape wasn’t spectacular, but from the house where I stayed you could see the top of the mountains in the distance."

"That slate-gray color, against the sky in the morning?"

"Yeah. Completely different at sunset, though. Almost pink. I could never work that out." He’d raised the memories so high that it might have been yesterday. He could smell the dust and the pollen, he could feel the heat of the evening.

Kadir said, "I think I know where you were. Not the house, it wasn’t built when I was there, but — do you remember the creek, north of the main road?"

"Yes. I was close to it. A few minutes' walk."

Kadir’s face lit up. "That’s amazing! It was still there? We used to go swimming in that creek. My whole family. All through summer, around dusk. Did you swim in it?"

"Yes." At the same time, the same season. Watching the stars come out, lying on his back in the cool water.

"Was the big tree still there? With the branch overhanging the deep end?"

Tchicaya frowned, summoning up eidetic imagery, constructing a panoramic view in his mind’s eye and searching for anything meeting this description. "I don’t think so."

"No, it wouldn’t have been." Kadir turned to Mariama. "We used to walk out along this branch, about four meters up, and dive off backward." He spread his arms and swayed. "The first time I did it, it must have been an hour after sunset. I couldn’t see anything, and when I hit the water I just kept sinking into the blackness. I was nine years old. I was terrified!"

Tchicaya said, "There was no deep water, when I was there. It must have silted up."

"Or the banks might have shifted," Kadir suggested. "I was there three hundred years before you. They might have built anything upstream."