Schild’s Ladder

The vote was taken, returning ninety-two percent support for Branco’s suggestion. Rasmah scribed the modified pulse, and they waited again.

Tchicaya sat on the console as people talked around them. "I never really thought we’d get this far," he admitted. "Even once I’d made up my mind to come here, it seemed like a mad, quixotic notion." He described the legend of the falling Sappers.

"I like that story," she said, "but it’s not a good metaphor. Bombs hit the ground, and that’s that. We’re not facing a single, decisive deadline. Thousands of planets have fallen, but there is no moment when everything will be won or lost. So long as the border doesn’t accelerate, we could hang on here for another thousand years, learning whatever we need to learn."

"Unless we lose everything to the Preservationists first."

Rasmah shrugged, as if that went without saying. Tchicaya hadn’t told her about Mariama’s ultimatum; the actual words had been so ambiguous that to most people they’d convey little more than the obvious fact that Planck worms were on the Preservationists' agenda. He hadn’t given up hope of finding a way to freeze the border, but there was no clear path leading toward that outcome; randomly pinning dynamics was never going to do it. They had to look deeper, they had to learn more.

He said, "So you never doubted that this moment would come?"

"Never. Not for a second." She laughed. "You should see your face, Tchicaya. I grew up with the border, remember? My parents used to take me outside at night and show me this tiny little disk of light, where the brightest star in the sky used to be. Sixty years later, it was on top of us. I’d never felt as angry as the day we had to evacuate. Not just because I was losing all the places I’d known on Maeder. I hated running from this thing."

"You wanted to stay and fight?"

"I wanted to stay and understand it. I would have been on the Rindler from the start if I’d heard about it early enough. Instead, I went chasing rumors of another project. That fell through, and it took me centuries to make my way here. But I always knew we’d find a way through the border. The night before I left Maeder, I stood on the roof of my house and promised myself: next time, it won’t just look as if I could reach up and push my hand into the far side. It will be possible. It will be true."

Tchicaya could easily picture her in this scene. "You’re making me feel very old and indecisive," he complained.

She smiled. "I’m sorry, but that’s because you are."

The console said, "Move your backside, please." Tchicaya slid off; data was coming through.

This time, he fought harder to stay beside Rasmah, peering over her shoulder at the console as the pulse appeared, and its interference pattern was analyzed.

Branco’s refinement had been on target: the new set of images showed a graph changing smoothly. Again, this was just an average for the whole path that had been traversed, not any particular piece of the far side, but it was still as informative as, say, a sample of images of terrain from a million different Earth-sized planets of different ages. You didn’t need to have the entire history of one specific world to get a qualitative sense of how things changed.

Rasmah set the image looping, and the Blue Room crowd fell silent. The intricate waves of knotted edges flowing through the graph were mesmerizing. Animations of standard particle physics could be austerely beautiful; watching something like pair-production, with the mirror-image patterns of electrons and positrons forming out of their parent photons and moving through the vacuum, you couldn’t help but admire the elegant symmetry of the process. This was a thousand times more complex, without being random or chaotic. The still image had reminded Tchicaya of a clumsy sculptural collage, but that was only because he’d imagined all the separate parts still playing their old, vacuum-based roles. Seeing the integrated whole in action destroyed that impression completely. Rather, the old Sarumpaetstyle patterns and interactions were beginning to look like repetitive attempts to imitate parts of this — like the work of some awful, sample-driven artist who took a tiny piece of someone else’s intricately composed, wall-sized image and treated it as a decorative tile to be stamped out a thousand times in a rectangular grid.

Near-side physics did achieve the same kind of complex beauty, but not at this scale, twenty orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. You had to move up to the size of atoms, at least, and even the richness of chemistry appeared crude and stodgy in comparison. When atoms changed their bonds, it was generally a haphazard, rough-and-tumble process, driven at random by thermal collisions, or at best chaperoned by enzymes or nanomachines. These polymers of indivisible nodes and edges were reweaving themselves with a speed and precision that made the most sophisticated molecular factories look like children tossing snowballs.