Schild’s Ladder

The new border lay some sixty kilometers down, but its altitude was no longer constant; the shuttle came to a halt in the middle of a sinuous valley. The borderlight around them revealed the striations they’d seen from afar to be just one level of structure: the bands were crossed with networks of fine, dark lines, super-imposed over shifting waves of increased luminosity. And this was just the naked-eye view of a ravaged landscape, exposed to the vacuum and thick with alien marauders. What the pristine depths contained on a xennometer scale, Tchicaya couldn’t begin to imagine, but between these macroscopic structures and the vendeks themselves, the opportunities for complex life were greater than ever.

While they waited for the stylus to realign itself, Mariama said, "Can I ask the toolkit something?"

Tchicaya nodded warily.

"How complex an algorithm could you inject into the far side?" she said.

The toolkit replied, "On what time scale? If you give me long enough, there are no limits."

"How long would it take to inject yourself?"

"Scribing all the data directly with the Left Hand? About a hundred thousand years."

Mariama laughed in infrared. "What about other ways of doing it? What’s the most efficient method that would be achievable with the hardware at our disposal?"

The toolkit fell silent, conducting an exhaustive search.

Tchicaya said, "What’s this about?"

"We’re blind up here," she replied. "All our time and effort is going into shuttling information back and forth across the border. Yann and the others have given you a lot of valuable knowledge, but the place where it needs to be applied is the far side."

The toolkit said, "I could scribe a series of graphs that would give rise to a far-side structure that would let me send data through the border as modulated light. That would take seventeen minutes. The total bandwidth would then be about one zettabyte per second. I could send myself through in a millisecond."

"In a form that could then travel deeper, away from the border?"

"Possibly. I could wrap the basic quantum processor in a shell of motile vendeks. It still might not be able to survive in every environment it encountered, but it could send out probes to explore its surroundings, and it could tweak the vendek populations in the protective shell as it moved."

"What about communications with the near side?" Mariama asked.

"I could try to maintain a shielded data cable back to the border, but the prospects for that look much poorer. The Planck worms are going to attack the border interface, and anything else that isn’t moving faster than they are."

"Okay. But you could operate autonomously, once you were in there?"

"Sure."

Tchicaya said, "You want to just drop it through and tell it to improvise from there?"

"Why not? What’s it up against? It’s a lot smarter than the Planck worms. It would know exactly what it was doing."

"On one level." Tchicaya asked the toolkit, "How would you go about recognizing sentient life?"

"I have no idea," it admitted. "I have no information about that concept, beyond the rudimentary epistemological sketch that’s stored in the conversational interface you’re now addressing."

Tchicaya said, "I’ve spoken to cribs with more sense than that. We can’t unleash it on the far side as a free agent."

Mariama closed her eyes. Clear fluid was spilling from fissures in her scalp and running down her face. She said, "My Exoself now tells me that this body’s packing up. It thought it could repair itself, but there’s too much damage. I’m afraid you’re about to be stuck with a corpse."

Tchicaya reached over and took her hand, gently. "I’m sorry."

"It’s all right," she said. "I’ve never gone acorporeal before, but I’m not a fanatic. A few days without flesh won’t kill me." She smiled, splitting the skin on her face. "If you live long enough, you get to compromise on everything."

As Tchicaya watched, she let go of her body. Her breathing halted, and she slumped sideways. The flesh of her hand became rigid beneath his fingers; the individual cells had given up trying to maintain the integrity of the tissues they comprised, and had started to encyst, protecting themselves as best they could in case they were of any use for recycling.

Tchicaya felt tears spilling down his face. "Fuck." Mariama could no longer hear him; the IR link to her Mediator had worked via nerve and skin cells, and that was the only functioning route into her Qusp. She was deaf, dumb, and blind now, until he dug her out.

He made his way to the shuttle’s tool bin, and selected something long and sharp. Then he strapped himself into the seat beside her, to keep himself from being pushed away by the force he applied.

Tchicaya knew that she was beyond harm, but he couldn’t stop weeping as he cut into her flesh. He was not an acorporeal. He had never found a way to love her that entirely surrendered the notion that her body was the thing to cherish and protect.