Schild’s Ladder

Zyfete approached, and slipped an arm around Kadir’s waist. She regarded Tchicaya warily, but it must have been obvious that he was not making trouble.

Looking away from her into the crowd, Tchicaya spotted Sophus, Tarek, Birago. He was conspicuous here; it couldn’t be otherwise.

He said, "I have to go."

Kadir nodded, unoffended. He reached out and shook Tchicaya’s hand. "I’m glad you saw Suarez," he said.

Mariama caught up with him outside.

"Go back in with your friends," he said.

She ignored him. "Was that so unbearable?"

"No. I never claimed it would be. I was afraid my presence might upset someone. It didn’t. I’m glad."

"I suppose you think that’s all pathological? The music, the pictures, the food?"

Tchicaya scowled. "So much for you reading my mind. It’s ordinary nostalgia. I feel the same way about all kinds of places. There’s nothing sick or obsessive about it. And because of that, it’s hardly going to destroy him that he can’t go back. His favorite swimming hole would have turned into a silted-up pond by now, anyway. He’s been spared the disappointment."

"You really are made of stone." She sounded disappointed, as if she’d seriously expected a few minutes' reminiscing with Kadir to change his mind about everything.

"No one will have died, leaving Zapata. The rocks are gone. The trees are gone. If anyone really lived for those things, they’ll find a way to re-create them."

"That will never be the same."

"Good." Tchicaya stopped and turned on her. "What exactly do you imagine he’s suffering? He’s thinking about the things he’s experienced, and the things he’s lost. We all do that. He hasn’t been eviscerated. Nine thousand years is a long time, but no one sprang from the ground of Zapata fully formed."

"They’ve still been dispossessed," Mariama insisted.

"Of rocks. Nothing else."

"Of memories. Of meaning."

"You know that’s not true! What do you think, we’re back in the colonial era, on Earth? There was a time when it was possible for an honest, intelligent person to subscribe to a cosmology where their dead ancestors lived in the mountains, and if you angered the spirit of the waterhole the crops would fail for the next ten years. Where the land was alive, and unique, and sacred. And if some horde of barbarians came marching through, subscribing to an even more surreal religion and claiming everything in sight for some inbred fop in a powdered wig, what else would you do but fight for your land, and cling to your beliefs?

"No one is in that position anymore. No one can confuse the landscape with the inalienable things inside them."

Mariama replied pointedly, "Which would explain why you don’t care at all what lies behind the border, and why you’d be just as happy to go and live in some abstract scape with the acorporeals."

Tchicaya was tongue-tied. He believed she understood the difference perfectly, but he knew he’d sound clumsy and self-contradictory if he backtracked to spell it out.

He said, "How many thousands of years should Zapata have remained unchanged? How many million?"

She shook her head. "That’s not the question. It would have changed of its own accord."

"When? And how many children would it have smothered, before it changed?"

"You weren’t smothered on Turaev. You got out in time."

"Not everyone did."

"Not everyone needed to."

They’d reached the stairs leading up to his cabin.

"You think I’m a hypocrite?" Mariama demanded. "Because I’m a traveler, and I’m championing people’s right to stay put?"

"I don’t think you’re a hypocrite."

"I’ve seen change," she said. "Unforced, driven from within, not a response to some crisis that dictates the alternatives. That’s painful in its own way, but it’s better to go through that than have your whole way of life determined by some senseless accident that has nothing to do with anything.

"When I arrived on Har’El, there was a genuine renaissance going on. People were reexamining their own traditions, not having them undermined by external events. Everything was fluid, everything was being questioned. It was the most exciting place I’ve ever lived in."

"Really? For how long?"

Mariama shrugged. "Nothing lasts forever. You can’t have a whole world in perpetual upheaval."

"No, but when the upheaval ended the result was apparently not a world you were prepared to live in."

"My marriage broke up," she said. "And Emine wanted to travel. If she’d stayed on Har’El, I might still be there. But those are personal, idiosyncratic reasons. You can’t start treating my decisions as some kind of measure of whether or not a whole society deserves to exist."

"That’s true," Tchicaya conceded. He was beginning to feel both battered and invigorated; she’d always had to push him to the edge of defeat before he got his second wind. He’d forgotten how much he’d loved arguing with her, when they’d taken the opposite sides back on Turaev. The only part he hated was the very thing that made it so exhilarating: there was always far too much at stake.