Dichronauts

by Greg Egan

  “It will be tough if we lose it,” Amir observed solemnly. “How long since we got by on nothing but local rain?”

  “A while,” Sarah said. “But that’s the point of surveying so far from the river, instead of just seeing what’s ahead downstream.”

  Before the evening meal, Maria ordered an inventory of their supplies. They had enough food for another fourteen days, but Seth knew they wouldn’t push their luck; they would probably head back in the morning, or at most after one more day.

  «I’m going to miss this,» he told Theo, as he sat down to eat.

  «It’s not over yet.»

  «No.» But the prospect of being back in the city already felt oppressive.

  «Once we’re qualified, we can go on every survey you like.»

  «You won’t mind?»

  Theo was amused. «I’m the one who suggested this job.»

  «And ten days in the sticks hasn’t dampened your enthusiasm?»

  «Sleeping rough has no effect on me,» Theo pointed out. «You could lie on a bed of stones and I wouldn’t know the difference.»

  The sky grew dark, and the world of light shrank to two flickering triangles, stretching out from the campfire to illuminate the huddled diners. To the north and south Theo’s vision reached farther, but it too was soon defeated by the vastness of the plain. The campsite was like a pinprick of awareness, poised between fading memories and the unknown future—and if daybreak and the journey home would reclaim some of what the darkness now shrouded, that reprieve itself was only temporary. Seth thought of the old maps in the museum, recording the courses of rivers long ago baked dry and roads that no one would walk upon again.

  But if the north was forever lost, the darkness to the south was always hopeful, charged with new possibilities. He’d made the right choice, he and Theo. Nothing could be more vital than to plot the way into the unfolding new world.

  5

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” elena demanded, daring her brother to contradict her.

  “Of course,” Seth replied. He reached down and placed a fingertip in the infant’s hand; she clutched at it, clumsily but with surprising strength.

  “I’m going to call her Patricia.”

  “Patricia,” Seth repeated. His niece squinted up at him from her crib then pushed his finger away. “It’s good that she’s west-facing,” he decided. It wouldn’t make much difference while she lay flat on her back, but once she was walking it would be nice for Elena to be able to make eye contact without having to tip her head.

  Theo inspoke, «Ask her when she’s going to fill the hole in her daughter’s skull.»

  «Ask her yourself.»

  Irina said, “You know the father’s moving in tomorrow?”

  “Really?” Seth was surprised; the last he’d heard, the boy’s family had been refusing to acknowledge his paternity.

  “Of course,” Elena replied serenely, as if this had never been in doubt. “Daniel can’t wait to join us.”

  Theo said, “I didn’t see him here for the birth.”

  “Don’t be so stupid,” Elena retorted. “Men have no business getting involved with that.”

  Seth wasn’t sure that this rule extended to the child’s father, but he’d been happy to take a long walk while his mother and aunts had overseen the event. He believed his father had remained downstairs, muttering imprecations.

  “What does Daniel do?” he asked.

  “He’s a road-builder.”

  “And what about his Sider?”

  “I really don’t care,” Elena declared.

  “Sam’s studying architecture,” Irina interjected.

  “Oh, good.” Seth could imagine this mix of vocations working out, especially if Daniel was willing to switch from roads to more elaborate structures once his Sider was qualified. “I’d better let you rest,” he said. Elena was watching her daughter, but Seth leaned forward so Theo could show him his sister’s face. “I’m glad it all went well,” he added.

  Downstairs, all the parents and aunts were whispering angrily at each other, so Seth walked out of the house again so they wouldn’t be forced to make insincere small talk for his benefit.

  The optimism he’d felt in the presence of the newborn child was beginning to fade. «What happens if Sam wants a child now?» he asked Theo. «Or Irina?» Whether they did this independently, or changed their minds and had one together, the age difference would already rule out a place for it in Patricia’s skull. And even if they found another unpaired Walker of the right age to act as host, how would the paired infants share their time between the Walker’s parents and the Sider’s? There could be three or four different households involved.

  But Theo seemed to find the whole question ludicrous. «Do you really think Elena would allow that?»

  «Why would it be her choice? She had a child alone; she can hardly tell Irina not to do the same.»

  «And of course hypocrisy is physically impossible,» Theo replied sarcastically.

  Seth let it drop. He wasn’t interested in taking sides, but there seemed to be no end to the recriminations.

  He strode east across the city, over the southern bridge then on into a residential district that he had no memory of visiting before. The houses all looked disconcertingly pristine—as if they’d never been moved, let alone bumped or scratched—but perhaps they’d just been re-clad. There was a hot breeze blowing and the sun was in his eyes, but he longed to keep walking and never go back.

  «You want to run away to Shakton?» he asked Theo.

  «And waste all our study?»

  «They must need surveyors there too.»

  «Yes, but if we just wander in, half-trained, they’re not going to pay for the rest of our education. Where would we live? How would we support ourselves?»

  Seth had no answers.

  «I’m worried about Irina,» Theo confided.

  «Our parents won’t let anything happen to her.» Seth didn’t want to believe that Elena would attack her again, even if the pair were far from reconciled.

  «And how will they protect her when Elena and Daniel have their own house?»

  «Why would they want their own house?» Seth replied. «Once we move out there’ll be plenty of room for the children.» Of course Elena would have another child with Daniel, whatever Sam and Irina did. Seth could feel a part of himself wanting to spring to her defense: why shouldn’t it be her and Daniel’s choice, and no one else’s? But then that principled stance began to sag under the weight of the endless complications.

  Theo said, «Can you look up?»

  Seth shielded his eyes and peered down the street. A crowd was gathered outside one of the houses, arguing heatedly. A man and a woman were banging on the door, demanding to be admitted.

  Seth considered backing away, but his curiosity got the better of him. As he approached the edge of the crowd he made eye contact with a west-facing woman, who must have been resting her neck or leaving it to her Sider to observe proceedings.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Those two want to see their father.” It was the Walker woman who replied, so Seth supposed she meant the Walkers at the door specifically. “Jonathan, the widower. They’re worried about him.”

  Seth didn’t understand why they didn’t have keys to the family home—or, if they were really concerned, why they hadn’t broken in. But then he heard a Sider’s voice from within the house: “Clear these people away, then you’ll be welcome to visit.”

  This response only seemed to infuriate the children. “These are our friends, they’re here to help us!” Jonathan’s daughter shouted.

  “We’re not letting a mob into the house,” the Sider replied.

  “Who’s this ‘we’?” the son yelled back contemptuously. “You don’t speak for my father!”

  “So his father’s too sick to talk?” Seth guessed. It didn’t sound like he was bed-ridden, though; it sounded like he was standing right behind the door. “But what’s with all t
hese hangers on?”

  The woman’s Sider said, “They’re interfering fools.”

  The woman clarified this remark, without really contradicting it. “They think he’s turned Sleepwalker. They think Matthew’s in charge now.”

  Seth hadn’t heard the word since childhood. Were there really adults who believed in Sleepwalkers?

  A new tumult rose up from the crowd. A man was attacking the window of the front room, trying to force the bars out of the frame with some kind of improvised jimmy. As he wiggled it clumsily back and forth, it protruded out over the heads of the onlookers, almost reaching as far as the street. Half the crowd was cheering him on—but Seth could hear the man’s own Sider loudly berating him, presumably hoping that this humiliation would cut through where mere inspeech had failed.

  The door to the house swung up, forcing the half-dozen people on the porch to back away. An elderly man stepped out into view. “Leave the window alone!” his Sider shouted. Matthew and Jonathan, the woman had called them. The man with the jimmy withdrew, and the crowd fell silent.

  “Father?” Jonathan’s daughter approached him and put a hand on his shoulder; he returned the gesture, but remained mute.

  “His throat’s very weak,” Matthew explained. “We’ve already been to the clinic—”

  “You’re a liar!” the son declared.

  “Get a pen and paper!” a woman shouted. “That’s the test!” There was some discussion in the crowd, then a boy ran off down the street.

  Seth tried to read the widower’s face. His eyelids drooped, and his demeanor was impassive. There was no doubt that he was sick, but that hardly proved that he’d been robbed of all volition. “They should just take him to the clinic again,” he suggested.

  He’d addressed his words to the woman he’d been gossiping with, but an east-facing man beside her tipped his head back and interjected angrily, “Mind your own business!”

  “And why is it yours?” Seth challenged him. “Are you a relative?”

  “I’m his neighbor. Who the fuck are you?”

  “If you’re such a good neighbor, why don’t you take his problems seriously, instead of stirring up trouble?”

  The man backed closer to Seth, bringing his inverted face right up to him. “There’s only one way to help a Sleepwalker, and they don’t offer that service in the clinics.”

  The boy returned with writing implements. Jonathan’s daughter took her father’s hand and held it between her own two, allowing her to trace a shape on his palm with a fingertip—out of sight of everyone, her father included. In the children’s stories this always ended badly: a Sleepwalker’s Sider controlled their host’s limbs, but didn’t share their sense of touch, so the Walker’s failure to reproduce the shape betrayed their true state.

  Son and daughter held the paper and ink pot steady as Jonathan took the pen. Seth watched the old man’s shaking hands with a sense of foreboding. He didn’t have to be a Sleepwalker to be flustered by the crowd, or confused by the whole absurd ritual.

  When he’d finished drawing, his children held the paper up for the crowd to inspect. The son seemed disappointed, but the daughter was clearly relieved by the roughly sketched pair of hyperbolas. “This is what I gave him through his skin,” she declared. “This is proof that my father still controls his body.”

  A few bystanders offered desultory cheers, but the rest just muttered darkly. Seth had expected all the Siders to express their anger and disgust now, shaming the instigators of the farce, but he heard nothing from them as the crowd dispersed.

  He wanted to say something to Theo—to offer some kind of vow about his fate when they grew old—but what could he promise that was actually within his power? And no Sider wanted to be forced to think about that time. If Theo died first, he’d merely be left side-blind—but if he died first, Theo would be reduced to a pitiful half-life, beholden to charity, slurping donated blood from a bowl.

  «You don’t want to change your mind about Shakton?» Seth asked.

  «Shakton’s to the east,» Theo replied.

  «Yes. What difference does that make?»

  Theo said, «Everyone knows you can only walk away from your problems by traveling south.»

  6

  Seth woke early and made his way through the dark streets, swinging the empty buckets back and forth to enliven the journey. Other people must have been afoot on the same errand, but around him the city was silent. The pump was almost due east of the house, so he’d let Theo sleep; there was no reason for both of them to be tired all day. On the rare occasions when he’d been side-blind in daylight it had felt like a terrible affliction, but now it seemed almost natural. He had no trouble moving through the blackness: each time his foot touched the ground he could sense the precise direction of his step from the proportions formed between his sole and the cobblestones.

  The pump-house lamp appeared in the distance, proving that he hadn’t gone astray. As Seth joined the queue, Theo woke, summoning whole buildings out of the darkness. «I thought I was dreaming,» he said groggily. «Isn’t it Daniel’s turn today?»

  «I swapped with him, so we’ll be rested tomorrow.»

  «Good idea.»

  Seth said, «Go back to sleep if you want to. I’ll just be shuffling down the line for a while yet.»

  «No, that’s a terrible habit.» Theo’s inspeech was sharper already. «But if they organized the roster better, people wouldn’t need to queue for so long.»

  «Take it up with the Office of Hydrology.»

  «You mean the Office of Complacency, Panic, and Guesswork?»

  «Don’t be cruel. Not everything can be as simple as geodesy.»

  Through Theo’s view, Seth could see the empty water channels running along the side of the street. He’d been a small child the last time the river had fallen so low; his parents must have carried water to the house, but he had no memory of it.

  Theo said, «We have records going back to the day Baharabad joined the Zirona, and maps of the topography of the steamlands for most of the same period. You’d think that by now someone would have sat down in the museum and worked it all out.»

  «If it’s an afternoon’s work for a genius like you, you should have mentioned that sooner and I’d have set aside the time.»

  «Ha. I never said it was trivial, but we should be able to do better.»

  Early in their training the surveyors had joined the hydrologists for a few classes, but even the basics had left Seth’s mind spinning. He could understand the formula for the north-south temperature gradient due to insolation; that was simple geometry. But then there was an altitudinal temperature gradient, followed by corrections for atmospheric moisture content—which wasn’t fixed by latitude or height, but changed dynamically in response to everything else. Parcels of air rose and fell, warmed and cooled, grew denser or more rarefied. By the time you threw in a mountain range or two, the idea that it might be possible to calculate the strength and location of the rainstorms from details of the terrain where they formed seemed wildly optimistic.

  When they reached the front of the queue, Seth worked the pump as quickly as he could to keep the people behind him from complaining. The sun was coming up, and as he peered over the railing at the darkly shimmering surface of the river, the water looked even lower than it had been four days before.

  He sidled away from the pump, then tipped his head and started back down the street.

  «One more day,» he said numbly. «Is it really that close?»

  «Assuming we’re not dreaming,» Theo replied.

  «You’d better not be planning to sleep through the exams.»

  «Likewise,» Theo replied irritably.

  Seth laughed. The buckets felt heavy already; he’d grown used to walking for days with a pack of tools and provisions on his back, but having these sloshing weights dangling from his arms made every step arduous.

  Theo said, «It’s a joint certification. You’re not there solely as my scribe, and I’m not
there merely as your Sider.»

  «I know.» But it still wounded Seth’s pride a little to acknowledge that while Theo could have passed the exams with any idiot writing down his answers, he would have been struggling to do the same, unaided.

  «I’m just glad we can sleep until dawn tomorrow,» Theo declared. «That alone should be enough to tip the balance.»

  as seth wandered through the crowded hall, he saw the same expression of dazed relief on face after face. Caught in the yellow lamplight or etched by Theo’s pings, everyone looked amazed by their good fortune. But even some of the students who he knew had failed to graduate appeared strangely satisfied. Perhaps they were glad to have been spared from a career that they’d never really wanted in the first place.

  He found Sarah and Judith beside one of the buffet tables, chatting with a group of people. He recognized a few of them: they’d been in a class ahead of his own, a while back, so presumably they were working surveyors now.

  Judith made the introductions, and everyone offered their congratulations to him and to Theo.

  “Where have you been out to lately?” Seth asked, directing his words at no one in particular so that whoever had the most interesting answer would feel free to respond.

  “The northern steamlands,” Raina replied.

  “The steamlands? You mean you came close?”

  “I mean we went in.”

  Seth had never heard of an expedition entering the steamlands—not since ancient times, when people had been naïve enough to imagine that summer might be finite and traversable, and hoped to return with news of milder climes on the other side. But once the temperature at noon reached the point where water could simply vanish into the air, by any sane definition you’d left the habitable zone behind.