Schild’s Ladder

Rasmah invoked some further processing. "No. No dimension, integer or otherwise. The branching’s not at all self-similar; there’s no redundant information."

"Modify the probe pulse and send it again. Here are the details." Branco’s voice rang out from midair, as if he were among the acorporeals; he’d declined to leave his cabin and join the crush. Some Yielders had been reluctant to grant access to the results to anyone who refused to declare their allegiance, but sanity had finally prevailed.

Rasmah said, "Thanks for the suggestion, but it will have to wait." The meeting that had approved Yann’s experiment had set aside a week for the interpretation of the results, before any further action was to be taken.

Branco sighed. "Do it, don’t do it. I couldn’t care less."

Rasmah displayed Branco’s proposal for everyone to see. It was a straightforward alteration to Yann’s original state, accompanied by some calculations suggesting that components would bounce back to them in a staggered sequence that would make changes in the graphs over time easier to deduce. If this worked, it would give them a movie of the far side, in place of a single, still image.

Suljan yelled out, "We should try that, immediately!" Bhandari, in a far corner of the room, disagreed. People started voicing approval and shouting alternative suggestions from all directions. Tchicaya would have covered his ears, but his hands were trapped. This was bedlam, but it was intoxicating. It reminded him of the time he and a group of friends on Peldan had landed a remotecontrolled vehicle on a passing asteroid: everyone wanted to grab the joystick.

Rasmah screamed, "Shut up!"

Something approximating silence descended.

"Read Branco’s proposal," she pleaded. "Think about it. We’ll have a vote in fifteen minutes. And if anyone feels like going out to stretch their legs in the meantime…don’t rush back. You can vote from anywhere."

The noise rose up again, but there was no real note of discord. Rasmah slumped against the control panel.

Yann poked his head down in front of Tchicaya. "You’re all completely mad. Someone’s going to get crushed."

"Some of us have no choice about taking up space."

"There’s plenty of room up here," Yann suggested helpfully.

"Yeah, right, just give me a hand up." The ship could probably have molded a tier of hanging chairs, but the ceiling was so low that this would have meant a constant risk of being kicked in the head.

"Some people are so inflexible. When Cass came to Mimosa, she insisted on a body. We obliged, but we made it small enough to fit."

Tchicaya had never heard this detail before.

"How small?" he asked.

Yann held out his hand, thumb and forefinger a couple of millimeters apart.

"You evil, sadistic bastards."

Tchicaya squeezed his way through the crowd back to the control panel. Rasmah looked frazzled but happy.

"What do you make of this?" he asked, gesturing at the polymer.

"It’s too early for interpretations," she said.

"But it’s structured, isn’t it?" he suggested. "You said as much yourself."

Rasmah had grown more cautions. "It’s not an equal superposition of all the things it could be. It’s not a maximum-entropy quantum blancmange. That still leaves a lot of room for it to be disordered, in lesser ways."

Tchicaya didn’t pursue the point, but the very fact that Yann’s pulse had come back to them bearing information proved that there was some potential for setting up causal processes on the far side. Lawless as it was in the conventional sense, it could still support a kind of machinery. They could try to build more sophisticated exploratory vehicles. Perhaps, eventually, even bodies and Qusps.

More importantly, if they ever succeeded in doing that, the place they’d be entering was looking less and less like a featureless desert. When Tchicaya had arrived on the Rindler, it had still been conceivable that the world behind the border would be nothing but a different form of empty space, with no particular reason to contain even the equivalent of the tiny smudge of matter that enlivened the near side. They’d barely glimpsed the structure of the far side, but his first impression was that the hundred million cubic light-years of vacuum claimed by Mimosa had been rewoven into something orders of magnitude more complex.

"Do you think we should show this to the opposition?" Tchicaya asked. "It might give them pause, if they can finally see that they’re not just dealing with a corrosive void."

Rasmah laughed. "You honestly believe they’d care?"

"Some would. And I don’t see what we have to lose."

"Nor do I, but only because I’m sure they’ll end up with exactly the same details, whether we inform them officially or not."

Tchicaya was startled. "You think someone’s spying for them?"

"Of course."

"What makes you so sure? Do we have spies with them?"

"Not that I know of," Rasmah admitted. "But that’s not a fair comparison. The most relaxed Preservationist is an order of magnitude more security-conscious than our most diligent supporter."