Schild’s Ladder

Umrao said, "I’m completely lost. What are you people talking about?"

"One hundred and thirty-seven," Yann counted. "One hundred and thirty-eight. One hundred and thirty-nine."

He fell silent. The vibrations had stopped.

Tchicaya said, "The slower cycle is varying, a little. Maybe lengthening. What does that tell us?"

Rasmah had turned pale. At the console, Suljan, who’d been paying no attention to the conversation at their table, suddenly leaned into a huddle with Hayashi. Tchicaya couldn’t hear what they were whispering about, but then Suljan let out a long, loud string of obscenities. He turned to face them, looking shocked but jubilant.

"You know what we’ve got here?" he asked.

Umrao smiled. "I just worked it out. But we shouldn’t jump to conclusions."

Tchicaya pleaded, "What conclusions?"

"Three consecutive primes," Suljan explained.

The vibrations had resumed, and Yann was calmly tapping them out again. Tchicaya calculated the next number in the sequence, and thought about trying to quantify the odds of the first three occurring by chance, but it would be simpler just to wait for the pattern to be broken or confirmed.

"One hundred and forty-seven. One hundred and forty-eight. One hundred and forty-nine."

On cue, the vibrations halted.

Yann said, "I wouldn’t rule out nonsentient processes. We don’t know enough about the kinds of order that can arise in this system."

Umrao agreed. "There’s no reason evolution couldn’t have stumbled on something useful about primes in the far-side environment. For all we know, this could be nothing more than an exotic equivalent of cicada calls."

"We can’t rule out anything," Suljan conceded. "But that has to cut both both ways. It has to include the possibility that someone is trying to get our attention."

Chapter 12

"It looks as if the Colosseum is about to welcome us in," Rasmah said. "You first."

"I don’t think so." Tchicaya held up his hand; it was shaking. They’d spent almost two hours sitting in the corridor outside the impromptu amphitheater where the Preservationists were meeting, and now the blank, soundproof wall in front of them was beginning to form a door.

"Turn down your adrenaline," she advised him.

"I don’t want to do that," he said. "This is the right way to be. The right way to feel."

Rasmah snorted. "I’ve heard of traditional, but that’s ridiculous."

Tchicaya bit back an irritated reply. If he was going to harness his body’s natural agitation, he could still keep his behavior civilized. "I don’t want to be calm," he said. "This is too important."

"So I get to be the rational one, and you get to be impassioned?" Rasmah smiled. "I suppose that’s as good a strategy as any."

It had taken Tchicaya six days of arguing to push a motion through the Yielders' convoluted decision-making process, authorizing disclosure of the recent discoveries to the opposition, and he had hoped that it would be enough. The Preservationists would repeat the experiments, see the same results, reach the same conclusions. He’d set the chain of events in motion, and it would have an unstoppable life of its own.

Then the Preservationists had announced that two Yielders would be permitted to address them before they made their decision on a moratorium, and he’d found himself volunteering. Having worked so hard to create a situation where they were apprised of the facts and prepared to listen, it would have been hypocritical to back out and leave this last stage to someone else.

The door opened, and Tarek emerged, looking worse than Tchicaya felt. Whatever the body did in times of stress could be ameliorated at will, but Tarek had the eyes of someone whose conscience was robbing him of more than sleep.

"We’re ready for you," he said. "Who’s first?"

Rasmah said, "Tchicaya hasn’t smeared himself in goat fat yet, so it’ll have to be me."

Tchicaya followed her in, then hung back as she approached the podium. He looked up at the tiers of seats that almost filled the module; he could see stars through the transparent wall behind the top row. There were people here that he knew well, but there were hundreds of complete strangers, too; the ranks of the Preservationists had been swelled by new arrivals.

The audience was completely silent. There was an expression of stony resentment on some faces, an unambiguously hostile gaze, but most people just looked tired and frayed, as if the thing they hated most was not the presence of Yielders bearing unpalatable revelations, but the sheer burden of having to make an invidious choice. Tchicaya could relate to that; part of him longed for nothing more than a turn of events that would render all further effort irrelevant, one way or another, so he could curl up and sleep for a week.

Rasmah began. "You’ve seen the results of our recent experiments, and I’m going to assume that you’ve replicated them successfully. Perhaps someone will correct me if that’s wrong, and the raw data is in dispute."