Schild’s Ladder

She paused. Sophus called out, "That’s not in dispute." Tchicaya felt a small weight lifting; if there’d been a technical hitch, or some elaborate bluff in which the Preservationists claimed that they’d seen nothing, the whole discussion would have bogged down in recriminations immediately.

Rasmah said, "Good. You’ve also seen Umrao’s simulations, and I hope you’ve performed some of your own. We could sit here for a week debating whether or not the structures we’ve called vendeks deserve to be described as living creatures, but it’s plain that a community of them — or a mixture, if you prefer a more neutral term — forms a completely different backdrop than the vacuum we’re familiar with, or anything else most of us imagined we’d find behind the border when we made our way here.

"We’ve all pinned states with exotic dynamic laws to the border. We’ve seen tens of thousands of samples from the whole vast catalog of vacuum-based physics. But the far side’s natural state, the closest it can come to emptiness and homogeneity, has access to all of those possibilities at once.

"I came here expecting to see physics written in a different alphabet, obeying a different grammar, but conforming to the same kind of simple rules as our own. It was Sophus who first realized how myopic that expectation was. Our vacuum isn’t just devoid of matter; our universe isn’t simply sparse, in a material sense. What lies behind the border is neither physics in a different language, nor an amorphous, random Babel of every possibility jumbled together. It’s a synthesis: a world painted in hues so rich that everything we’ve previously imagined as a possible universe begins to seem like a canvas filled from edge to edge with a single primary color.

"We’ve seen hints, now, that there might be organisms far more sophisticated than the vendeks, just behind the border. There’s probably nothing I can say that will influence your interpretation of the evidence. I’m not certain what it means, myself. It could be anything: sentient creatures longing for contact; a mating song between animals; an inanimate system constrained by far-side physics to lie in a state more ordered than our instincts deem likely. I don’t know the answer, nor do any of you.

"Maybe there is no far-side life worth speaking of. Maybe there are just different pools of vendeks, all the way down. We can’t tell yet. But imagine for a moment that the signal we’re seeing comes from a creature even as complex as an insect. If life of that sophistication can arise in just six hundred years, then the far side must be so amenable to structure, and order, and complexity that it’s almost inconceivable that we’d be unable either to adapt to it, or to render parts of it hospitable.

"Suppose we were handed a galaxy’s worth of planets, all so near to Earthlike that we could either terraform them easily, or tweak a few genes of our own in order to flourish on them. What’s more, suppose they came clustered together, so close that the time it took to travel between them was negligible: days or weeks, instead of decades or centuries. If we migrated to these worlds, it would mean an end to our fragmentation, an end to the rule that says: yes, you can see how other cultures live, but the price you pay will be alienation from your own.

"On top of this, imagine that interspersed among these Earthlike worlds was another galaxy’s worth of planets, all dense with a riotous variety of alien life. On top of that, imagine that these worlds were immersed in a new kind of physics, so rich and strange that it would trigger a renaissance in science that would last ten thousand years, transform technology, reinvigorate art.

"Is that what the far side really is offering us? I don’t know, and neither do you. Maybe there are some of you for whom it makes no difference: whatever lies behind the border, it can’t be worth the price of even one more planet lost, one more people scattered. But I hope that many of you are willing to pause and say: Mimosa has brought tragedy and turmoil, and that has to be stopped, but not at any cost. If there is a world behind the border that could bring new mysteries, new knowledge, and ultimately a new sense of belonging to billions of people — a place that could mean as much to our descendants as our home worlds mean to us — then it can’t be unimaginable that the balance could ever tip in its favor.

"People left families and nations behind them on Earth. They’d swum in rivers and walked on mountains that they would never see again. Were they all traitors, and fools? They didn’t destroy the Earth in their wake, they didn’t force the same sacrifice on anyone else, but they did put an end to the world as it had been, when humanity had been connected — when the speed of light was a phrase that meant instant contact, instant collisions of cultures and values, not a measure of your loss if you tried to achieve those things.