Schild’s Ladder

"I don’t know what lies behind the border, but possibilities that seemed like castles in the air a year ago are now a thousand times less fanciful. Everything I’ve talked about might yet turn out to be a mirage, but if so, it’s a mirage that we’ve all seen with our own two eyes now, hovering uncertainly in the heat haze. A few more steps toward it will tell us, once and for all, whether or not it’s real.

"That’s why I’m asking for this moratorium. Whether you recoil from the vision I’ve painted, or merely doubt its solidity, don’t make a decision in ignorance. Give us one more year, work beside us, help us find the answers — and then make your choice. Thank you."

Rasmah took half a step back from the podium. Someone in the audience coughed. There was no polite applause, but no jeering either. Tchicaya didn’t know how to read the indifferent silence, but Rasmah had been fishing for converts rather than searching for a compromise, and if anyone had been swayed by her message that would probably not be a response they’d wish to broadcast.

Tarek said, "We’ll take questions when Tchicaya has spoken."

Rasmah nodded and walked away from the podium. As she passed Tchicaya, she smiled encouragingly and touched his arm. He was beginning to wish he’d gone first, and not just because she was a hard act to follow. Before a gathering of Yielders, a speech like the one she’d just delivered would have fired him up, filling him with confidence. Watching it received with no visible effect by the people who counted was a sobering experience.

Tchicaya reached the podium and looked up at the crowd, without fixing his eyes on any one face. Mariama would be here, somewhere, but he counted himself lucky that he hadn’t spotted her, that her certain presence remained an abstraction.

"There is a chance," he said, "that there is sentient life behind the border. We have no proof of this. We lack the depth of understanding we’d need even to begin to quantify the odds. But we do know that complex processes that would have been inconceivable in a vacuum — or in the kind of hot plasma present in our own universe, six hundred years after its birth — are taking place right now on the far side. Whether or not you count the vendeks as living creatures, they reveal that the basic structure of this region is nothing at all like empty space.

"None of us arrived here armed with that knowledge. For centuries, we’d all pictured the novo-vacuum as the fireball from some terrible explosion. I came here myself in the hope that we might gain something from the challenge of learning to survive inside that fireball, but I never dreamed that the far side could harbor life of its own.

"Life does not arise easily in a universe of vacuum. Apart from the Earth, there are just four quarantined planets strewn with single-celled organisms, out of almost a million that have been explored. For twenty thousand years, we’ve clung to a faint hope that the Earth would not be unique as the cradle of sentience, and I don’t believe that we should abandon that hope. But we’re now standing at the border, not between a desert with rare oases on one side, and a lake of molten lava on the other, but between that familiar desert and a very strange ocean.

"This ocean might be a desert, itself. It might be turbulent, it might be poisonous. All we know for certain is that it’s not like the universe we know. But now we’ve seen something fluttering beneath the surface. To me, it looks like a beacon, a declaration of intelligence. I concede that this interpretation might be completely wrong. But if we’d ever spotted something a tenth as promising on a planet, wouldn’t we be shouting with joy, and rushing to investigate?

"The homes and communities of billions of people are at stake here. One full year’s delay would mean the certain loss of one more world." Tchicaya had agonized over the best way to phrase this; apart from starkly requesting an entire planet as a sacrifice, he had to tiptoe around the issue of exactly how close the Preservationists were to producing Planck worms. "But whole worlds have been evacuated before, to leave the rare life we’ve found with a chance to develop undisturbed. We can create far more sophisticated organisms in vitro, but we’ve still recognized in the simplest alien microbes both a chance to understand better the science of our origins, and a distant kinship with whatever these creatures might become. I’m willing to write off the vendeks as little more than Planck-scale chemistry, but even a slim possibility of sentient life on the far side, just beyond our grasp, has to count for at least as much as the possibility that the microbes we’ve left to their own devices will flourish into anything as rich as life on Earth.