by Greg Egan
«So we wait until dark,» he said, retreating back into his hiding place. The delay was infuriating, but when he thought through the situation as calmly as he could, he had to accept that it need not be calamitous. The “diplomats” were alive, and their fate was yet to be decided. Risking all six lives for no other reason than his own impatience would have been the worst possible choice.
sunset arrived with the punctuality that geometry dictated, but then the dusk seemed to linger at its own pleasure. Seth stole a glance across the river and found that the streets were still far from empty. As in Baharabad, this appeared to be a time to make the most of the cool of the evening and go out to eat, or to visit friends.
Gradually the sky grew dark. Seth stepped out of the gloom beneath the bridge and looked down at his clothes; he could barely tell what color they were. An attempt to make his sleeves appear shorter turned into an unwinnable battle between the contradictory demands of the differently oriented fabrics, and he ended up with a bulbous mess like a child’s attempt to re-pack a tent. So he smoothed them back into their normal shape, then trudged up the riverbank and onto the road.
As he headed east, Seth saw two figures approaching through the gloom. Theo said, «I’m going to ask their Siders for directions to the nearest boarding house.»
«All right.» Seth kept his gaze on the road as he passed them—hoping to seem sufficiently preoccupied to forestall any need for an exchange of pleasantries—but through Theo’s view he could see them responding to his presence: turning their heads slightly to keep track of him, as anyone in Baharabad would have done, to ensure that they didn’t bump into him.
«Any reply?» he asked Theo.
«Nothing. Even their pinging is strange.»
«In what way?»
«Monotonous,» Theo replied. «Unvarying. Normally, when we crossed paths like that, there’d be a whole host of changes in the sounds the Siders emitted. It’s as if they imaged us without noticing us; they pinged us, but only the Walkers really saw us.»
«Sleepsiders.» Seth didn’t want to think too deeply about the whole disturbing phenomenon; he needed to stay focused on the search. «It looks as if we’re safe to make as much noise in your language as we like. So shout at will, and let me know if you need me to break the search pattern.»
Theo said, «There’s only one thing that could stop us finding them now.»
Seth knew what he was alluding to, but he didn’t want either of them to spell it out. «Two things: we could fail to be thorough. So let’s make sure that we don’t miss so much as a single farmhouse, if it comes to that.»
«Right.»
They’d sketched out their strategy under the bridge, as well as they could without knowing the whole city’s street plan. Seth walked east until he was four blocks from the river, then at the crossroads he began sidling north. He would weave his way across one quadrant of the city, repeat the process in the south, then cross the river and do it all again if need be.
As he approached a side street, a small crowd came around the corner: half a dozen people all talking and laughing. Theo’s view of their clothes was free of color but alarmingly crisp; Seth cringed at the thought that they were seeing him with the same kind of detail. As he moved to the other side of the street, someone called out to him, “Hey, ragamuffin!” A second speaker followed, with words he couldn’t understand at all.
Seth kept his face away from them as he passed to their east; he heard laughter and more shouting, including what might have been a reference to his appalling smell. But he heard no change of gait—no one breaking off their sidling to approach him directly. When they crossed into Theo’s view again, there was no sign that they’d ever shown an interest in his presence.
Apparently he could pass for an impecunious local, without anyone connecting his style of clothes to that of the captives. But then, how many people in Thanton would have actually seen the “diplomats”? Their presence might have been widely discussed, but other aspects had likely taken precedence over matters of couture.
Theo said, «I’m learning to ping like a Sleepsider, if that gives you any comfort.»
«Would anyone know if you didn’t?»
«Maybe not, but it’s better to be safe. Perhaps the Siders would twitch with surprise in their sleep, and their Walkers would notice.»
«Some comfort,» Seth replied. «Hearing their own language after who knows how long might surprise them more than anything.»
«I’m not going to yell when someone’s right beside us.»
They reached the northern edge of the city, went east for four more blocks, then south. Theo had promised that this grid was fine enough—that his call would be heard deep within each region they were skirting.
And the reply? Seth recalled Irina screaming for help, audible from afar to her brother, despite her constraints. It was only if Aziz and Amina had suffered the same treatment as Thanton’s own Siders that the search would be in vain—and all Seth could do was hope that the Council’s pending decision precluded any such prior atrocity.
Even if, to the Walkers of Thanton, it was not seen as an atrocity at all.
it was long after midnight when they began their sweep of the south-west quadrant. The streets were almost empty now, and the few people they encountered seemed less interested than ever in the business of passing strangers. Whether they were tired, wary, up to no good, or simply lost in their own thoughts, no one gave the ragamuffin with the screaming Sider a second glance.
Seth felt himself lapsing, if not into sleepwalking, into a kind of numbness. Since they’d hidden beneath the bridge he’d been one step removed from everything important about the search, and the mixture of danger and boredom, urgency and forced disengagement was exhausting. He felt no resentment at Theo’s ascendant role, but he envied him the sheer stimulation; if he’d been free to bellow out their friends’ names he might have been twice as frantic, but at least he would not have been dead on his feet.
«They’re here!» Theo proclaimed ecstatically.
Seth’s veneer of stupefaction shattered. He stopped walking but tensed his body, ready to bound off in whatever direction was required. «Where?» he demanded.
«East.»
The street they were on ran north-to-south, and Seth couldn’t make out the next crossroads. «Back to the north, or further south?»
«South, I think.»
Seth began sprinting down the street, ignoring Theo’s protests until the sound of his own echoing footsteps made his recklessness self-evident. He slowed to a brisk sidle, his skin tingling with excitement and fear.
«Are we any closer?»
«We’ve gone past them, but don’t go back. The next side street should get us there.»
Seth could see the corner now, in Theo’s view. «They’re all there together?» he asked.
«Yes.»
«Are you sure?»
Theo said, «Aziz and Amina have both replied. If you’re asking whether they’ve been torn out of their Walkers, the subject hasn’t come up, but in those circumstances I doubt they’d have the strength to make so much noise.»
Seth hadn’t even contemplated that possibility, but he pushed the image aside and focused on the news that both Siders seemed to be in good health.
He reached the crossroads and headed east, unimpeded by the darkness. He’d gained enough of a sense of the city’s public works that he was confident he would not be wrong-footed by a curb or a gutter appearing out of nowhere.
«Keep going,» Theo advised him as they approached an intersection. At the next one he said the same. They were only two blocks from the river now; Seth could hear the water.
When they came to the last crossroads, Seth paused. Theo offered no immediate instructions, but as Seth stood motionless in the cold air, he was aware for the first time of a pattern of tension and relaxation in his own skin where it abutted his Sider’s pingers. It could only be the rhythm of the conversation: Theo’s body expanding very slightly as he yelled, contracting as he
listened.
Finally Theo inspoke, «By day, they saw the river right below their window. The house they’re in has no road to its east—just the riverbank.»
«Right.» Seth didn’t know quite what to do with this information. «Where are they in this house?»
«The top floor.»
«Who else is there? And where, exactly?»
Theo said, «These are all good questions, but we need to get closer. So far Aziz and I have spent a lot of time shouting, “What did you say? Can you repeat that?”»
Seth said, «They might have lookouts on the street.»
«Of course,» Theo agreed.
«And they might have lookouts on the riverbank, too.»
Theo said nothing. Seth made a decision. «The riverbank’s the lesser risk.»
He followed the eastbound street to the end, where the paving stones gave way to soft ground. The scattered lamps that had appeared the night before were nowhere to be seen, but even in the utter blackness Seth could sense the turbulent water ahead by something more than its sound: a shimmer so faint that he had to drag it out of the dark by a constant force of attention, as if he were striving to keep a heavy weight on a rope from sinking down into the river.
Theo pinged a few paces north, guiding Seth along the narrow strip of ground between the houses and the point where the riverbank became too steep to traverse. If there were lookouts, unless their own pings were equally restrained Theo would detect them long before a bodily encounter was imminent—and Seth suspected that the Sleepsiders had already shown themselves to be incapable of such subtleties.
Theo said, «We’re close. We should stop here and work out a plan.»
«How close?»
«Maybe three houses away.»
Even if there’d been lamplight from inside, the building would still be in Seth’s dark cone, but he didn’t want Theo to risk pinging the place.
Theo said, «They’re being kept in a locked room on the eastern side of the top floor. There’s nobody in the room with them, but they think there are five or six Walkers in the house, and at least two are awake and guarding the door right now.»
Seth was dismayed, though he wasn’t sure what he’d been hoping for: a lone guard who might have dozed off, with the key poking out of their pocket?
«What about the window?» he asked.
Theo passed the question on to the captives, then replied, «Four vertical bars, but no shutter. They don’t believe there’s anyone outside on the riverbank.»
Seth had brought no tools with him at all, leaving everything back at the camp so that if he was grabbed he could fit into the diplomats-meet-thieves story. «Where are we going to find a jimmy?» The riverbank was all sand, and the paving stones were the wrong shape.
Theo said, «No city moves without leaving pieces behind.»
«You mean to the north.» Seth wished he’d thought of this on the way in, when he’d been slogging through the muddy fields. There might have been scattered building material within easy reach under the soil, but it had never occurred to him to look for it. «Before we go off on that hunt, ask them if they have any better ideas.»
Theo obliged. «They don’t.»
Seth hesitated. «And they’re all right for now? No one’s injured? Nothing’s going to happen to them while we’re gone?»
Theo said, «No one’s injured. And we’ll be quick.»
Seth continued north along the riverbank. How quick was quick enough? He’d lost confidence in his sense of time; his instincts told him dawn was hours away, but he was afraid now that it might take him unawares.
Fences and buildings intruded onto the narrow corridor he’d chosen, but he was determined not to waste time with a detour back onto the streets. He could squeeze past the artificial obstacles, but when reeds blocked the way he had no choice but to trample them, and hope that if he was heard he’d be mistaken for some kind of innocuous wildlife.
He said, «If we’d had just one more night after this, we could have gone back to the camp and made a real plan with Sarah and Judith.»
Theo took this lament literally. «Based on one conversation between random people on a bridge? Would you have risked everything on the chance that the information was correct?»
«There are too many levels of counterfactuals there for me to handle without a lot more sleep.» Seth backtracked to free himself from a thorny plant that had hooked into the fabric of his trousers. «How close are we to the farms now?»
«It can’t be far.»
«Should I have crossed the bridge and gone back to the east bank?» That way they would at least have been heading somewhere half-familiar.
Theo said, «Too many counterfactuals.»
Seth emerged from the thicket and sidled on through the mud. His brief, second-hand encounter with his friends already felt like something he’d hallucinated as he criss-crossed the city—an act that itself seemed less like reality than a dream he was having after reading the story of some mythic character cursed to walk forever through a maze full of jeering strangers and carnivorous plants.
«Do you believe in Sleepwalkers?» he asked.
Theo was silent for a while, as if expecting something more. «Are you serious?»
«I never believed in them,» Seth assured him. «But if Thanton can have Sleepsiders, why can’t the other kind exist?»
«How does a Sider wield a knife on a Walker?»
«You really think it’s like that?» Seth hadn’t intended to broach the subject, but weariness had robbed him of his tact.
«It’s either drugs or mutilation,» Theo insisted. «Even people who claim that there are Sleepwalkers describe them as rarities: the Walker is so old or weak-willed that the chatter in their skull wears them down until they surrender all volition. You don’t lull a few thousand healthy Siders into a stupor by inspeech alone.»
«Right now, I wouldn’t mind being a Sleepwalker,» Seth confessed. The riverbank stretched on interminably, a tiny patch of pinged ground surrounded by blackness. «That way it would be up to you to keep us moving, and I could just look on in comfort.»
Theo said, «Give it a million more generations.»
Seth stopped just in time to keep himself from stumbling into an irrigation channel. «Two million, to walk safely when we’re both asleep.» He waded across the channel, and was about to continue along the bank when he realized that that would be idiotic. The houses would have been farther from the water.
Theo pinged the field nearby, revealing both crops and fallow ground. Seth strode over to an empty plot, squatted down, and began groping through the soil.
It took a hundred or so empty handfuls before he understood that he was wasting his time. This land had been plowed; the farmers would have removed anything that might have blocked the roots of the crop.
Seth stood up and swayed giddily. The farmers would have removed it, but would they have bothered moving it far? How much of a market would there be for bits of broken masonry?
«There must be a junk heap,» he said. «That’s what we need to find.»
Theo pinged more widely. Seth walked slowly across the field, gazing into Theo’s view, searching for some kind of pit or pile into which everything struck by the plow had been cast.
«There!» Theo said.
«Can you be more specific?»
«South-south-west.»
Seth saw it now. He approached and fell to his knees beside the mother lode, then began scrabbling through it. There were pieces of bricks, pieces of tiles . . . and whole, unbroken window bars.
The first two he found were lying east-west. He didn’t discard them, but he kept looking until he found two axial ones as well. He gathered up these precious finds and headed back toward the riverbank. The gloom he moved through was unaltered, but everything seemed sharper now, urgent and specific.
«No more sleep-anything,» he said. «We need to keep each other awake on our feet.»
«Your feet,» Theo corrected him.
«For now,»
Seth conceded. «But you never know what the future holds.»
when they reached the house, Seth stood on the riverbank with his head tipped westward, staring at the wall behind him until the faint hints it offered solidified into four rectangular windows: two on the bottom floor, two on the top.
«Are they sure they’re in the northern room?» he asked Theo.
«No, but I am.»
Seth walked slowly toward the house. «Do you hear any of the guards moving around downstairs?»
«No.» Theo hesitated, seeking more information. «Aziz says they’ve been quiet for a while. But the two upstairs are awake and chatting.»
Seth’s outstretched hands made contact with the wall, palms against the stone, the non-axial fingers pointing to the ground. It was an awkward stance, but he was afraid that if he switched to the backs of his hands they might lose traction. The gray rectangles guiding him had started swimming uncertainly as he approached, as if his mind was doing its best to recreate their likely position but was no longer getting the kind of feedback it needed from his eyes. But unless he’d become completely disoriented, he was about a shoulder’s width north of the southern downstairs window.
With his feet far enough apart to give him some extra height without compromising his balance, he dug his heels into the ground. Then he began to tip his upper body to the north, shifting his palms up over the rough surface of the wall. He was sure he’d tried crazier stunts as a child, but usually with an accomplice, and never for remotely comparable stakes.
An ache spread up from his left hip and along his side. Seth froze, waiting to see if it presaged something more dangerous. If he slipped, he trusted his instincts to ensure that he ended up flat on the ground—rather than sliding across the wall until his body reached so high that the torque snapped his ankle. But any kind of fall was sure to make enough noise to wake the entire household.
The ache remained no more than a discomfort. He leaned a little further, then a little more. The friction between his palms and the wall began to seem perilously close to inadequate—like the moment before a sled flew freely up a ramp. He clawed at the gaps between the bricks, wedging as many fingertips as he could into the narrow crevices to give himself more purchase. Then he advanced slowly, never freeing both hands at once—until a north-pointing finger met air, and his momentary sense of panic turned to triumph. He was touching the edge of the window.
