Dichronauts

by Greg Egan

  «No, I was wrong about there being an edge to the world. What we came through was just a hole; the world goes on far beyond it.»

  «And you know that how?»

  Theo said, «You’re showing me the proof. Sunlight can’t scatter off the void—and even if there was enough dust out there to shine in the light, it’s not going to form motionless clusters. But if the land stretches on to the south, and if the hole we passed through was just one of thousands . . .»

  Seth gazed at the points of blue light: chasms like the one they’d traversed, but with entrances deep in absolute summer. The absurdly smooth curve that they didn’t quite trace wasn’t some coincidental alignment between the holes themselves; rather, the only chasms that were visible at any moment were those that happened to be close to the curve on the hyperboloid where it intersected the cone of brightest sunlight. Like the twilight that had illuminated the slope, this light was scattered by air and dust, but the source now was so unutterably fierce that, even from a great distance, it was enough to banish the night completely.

  «I see it,» he replied. «But if there are so many holes in the world, why did it take us so long to find one?»

  «Because what lies in your field of view, right now, is at least a million times more land than the whole migration has traversed throughout recorded history. Geology has always constrained the migration to a narrow swathe, and we’ve never had a way to see beyond that—but here, with the land rising up all around you, you can see forever. If you count ten thousand of these dots as the sun completes its orbit, that’s not a measure of their proximity to each other. It’s a measure of how vast a territory you now survey.»

  The grandiose language seemed cruel, even if the irony was hardly of Theo’s making. Seth could well believe that no Walker in history had beheld such a vista before—but then, no Walker had ever been as powerless to explore the land around them as he was now.

  there was nothing keeping Seth from turning his gaze toward the boat’s destination, but with so much of the lower part of his view obstructed he had no way of knowing if they were heading for the grandest city in the world, or the humblest village. The land he could actually see, above the rim of the hull, was so distant and so strangely lit that he struggled to discern its topography. A few hills stood out, catching the light on one side, but with their multitude of shadows they cast the surrounding terrain into confusion. There were glints that might have been rivers, or might have been tricks of the light. Everything was rendered in muted blues and grays; a subtle shift in hue and shading suggested a forest, but Seth wasn’t confident that barren land might not look stippled in the same way.

  The boat came to a halt without warning. One member of the crew crawled over the side, and Seth caught glimpses of a rope being thrown. There was shouting between the Southites, but he wouldn’t have known the difference if they were cheerfully coordinating the task of securing the mooring, or arguing bitterly over some longstanding property dispute.

  For a minute or two he was left alone in the boat. Then two of the crew returned, approached him without pause or ceremony, slipped two hands each under the side of his torso, and lifted him up from the deck.

  Seth could feel their knuckles pressing against him; their feet didn’t just double as hands, they were reversible, curling up to grip him from below. As the creatures’ peculiar scent wafted into his face, he forced himself not to flinch or squirm away; the last thing he wanted them to do was drop him. They carried him off the boat, almost as briskly as they’d disembarked the first time; they might never have unloaded such strange cargo before, but his general shape and weight didn’t seem to present an unprecedented challenge.

  A few paces from the shore, they’d positioned some kind of thick, furry blanket in advance; they placed him down on it, and withdrew a short distance as if to judge how it suited him. Compared to the deck, it was comfortable: apart from being gentler on the parts of his body that he was forced to lie on, the way he sank into it felt like it offered a degree of restraint against the risk of toppling.

  Peering between the watching Southites, he could finally see some of the land nearby. It was covered in low rocky outcrops, rising up from barren soil with patches of mud and ice.

  “Now look for our friends,” Seth pleaded, gesturing toward the water. “Take the boat back out and look for our friends!” He didn’t expect them to understand his words, but how hard could it be for them to reason that a stranger they’d rescued from peril would only make a fuss and point back to the site of danger if there were others who still needed help?

  The Southites chattered and watched Seth attentively, but none of them made a move toward the boat.

  «Here come Ada and Dahlia,» Theo announced. Seth tipped his head back and saw the second boat approaching the shore.

  “Please look for our friends!” Seth repeated, hoping that his continuing distress would make it clear that it wasn’t Ada and Dahlia that he was fretting about. If Andrei’s portion of the boat had remained intact, he and Nicholas might have improvised some kind of runner—but if they were unaware of their potential allies, they’d probably choose to stay in open water, at first just searching for their missing colleagues, and then seeking out a current to take them back north. It was what Seth would have done in their place, believing that he had no other options, but even if they made it back to the slope, without fresh supplies he didn’t like their chances.

  Two of the crew from the second boat placed Ada and Dahlia on the blanket beside him. Seth could hear Dahlia himself now; she wasn’t confining her wailing to the Sider’s range.

  “How long has she been like that?” he asked Ada.

  “Since we hit the water. When the boat came up, she just started screaming.”

  Seth spoke bluntly. “Do you have any knowledge of this happening to other Thantonites? People must have run out of puffballs before.”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “There’s never been a shortage?” Seth was incredulous. “There’s never been a traveler whose journey took longer than they’d planned, or who lost their supply along the way?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Ada said defensively. “But if that happened, no one wrote a book about it.”

  Dahlia had become quieter as they spoke, at least as Seth heard her.

  «Have you calmed her down?» he asked Theo.

  «A little.»

  «What did you do?»

  «I just made soothing noises.»

  «As you would to a baby?»

  «Hmm.» Theo’s tone suggested that he found the comparison offensive, but in the circumstances he had better things to worry about.

  Seth addressed Ada again. “Can you tell whether she’s sharing your vision?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Are you actively blocking it?”

  “I have no idea,” she admitted. “We never talked about anything like that in Thanton.”

  “So Dahlia might be seeing nothing but what she can ping: a tiny patch of ground, and the empty sky? What a world to wake up to!”

  Ada raised no objection to Theo’s choice of name, but Seth’s accusations seemed to rankle. She said, “I’m not deliberately keeping anything from her. And I’ve never had any trouble seeing what she pings; that’s always worked, by instinct alone. So I don’t see why it shouldn’t be the same in the other direction.”

  One of the Southites approached. “Please look for our friends!” Seth shouted, waving his free arm at the boats behind them. “Please look for our friends!” The Southite showed no interest in decoding his message; it picked him up, unaided, made a surreal, ninety-degree turn, and started walking along the shore.

  For several seconds Seth was dizzy and disoriented, then he finally turned his head to see where they were going. They walked past the point where the boats were moored, toward a strange contraption that was sitting on firmer ground. The top part was an elevated wooden platform, about as high as a Southite’s head; beneath
it he could see two segmented belts weaving through a system of guide rods and conical capstans. Each belt lay flat on the ground for part of its length, before twisting sideways up into the mechanism.

  Theo said, «It’s a cart.»

  Seth stared at the thing. «I think you’re right.» No wheel with a horizontal axis would work here, but these belts were apparently flexible enough to roll over the ground and then loop back to their starting point.

  Two more Southites joined them, one bearing Ada and Dahlia, the other carrying the blanket. They covered the platform with the blanket then maneuvered their guests up onto it. Seth had almost grown used to being handled, but being raised above his bearer’s head was terrifying. All he could do was brace himself and hope that the Southites’ experience made it exceptionally rare for an adult of their species to destroy something of even moderate value by inadvertently letting it tip.

  Once Ada and Dahlia were settled on the blanket in front of him, someone moved around the cart, sliding up safety rails along all four edges. This diminished Seth’s anxiety considerably, but blocked his view of everything nearby.

  “Please look for our friends!” he begged his hosts one more time, though no one could see him pointing to the river. The platform started moving; presumably a couple of drivers were dragging the cart, oblivious to his concerns. “What does it take,” he muttered.

  “For all they know, you could be expressing your undying gratitude at being plucked from the water,” Ada said mildly.

  “You have a better idea?”

  “No. I’m just trying to be realistic.”

  “When you were in the water, I did everything I could to get them to find you.”

  “And did they understand what you wanted?”

  “They didn’t need to, but if they hadn’t located you themselves so quickly, I think there might have been some kind of dialog.” Seth wondered if he was fooling himself; he had no evidence that they’d read anything into his attempts to point to Theo’s best guess of Dahlia’s location. And Andre and Nicholas lay one level of abstraction beyond that: Dahlia’s existence had been a given, but pointing vaguely at the now silent water could mean anything. Whether he’d been rescued out of compassion or mere curiosity, Seth didn’t know how to summon a fresh object of interest into the minds of people with no knowledge of the expedition’s size, and nothing with the immediacy of a screaming infant to make it obvious to them that their task was incomplete.

  He looked up at the line of lights, and realized that the pattern of bright dots along its length was different now from the configuration he’d first seen. The Southites might know how to read this transformation as the lapse of some precise interval of time, or maybe they’d just measure the angle of the line against some fixed landmark, but he’d been spun around so much that he had nothing to compare it with. All he knew was that if he’d still been in the water at this moment, he would have been close to exhaustion, and close to death.

  the terrain around them changed very little as they moved along in the cart. Beside the river the land was covered in ice and rock, with patches of mud and still no vegetation in sight. There had to be trees somewhere, though, given that the cart Seth was traveling on and the boat that had come to his rescue were both made of wood. If there were paved roads in the southern hyperboloid, they’d yet to arrive at one; Seth could tell that the cart’s drivers were steering it around small rocks, and despite their efforts the belts sometimes hit obstacles they couldn’t be dragged over, forcing the drivers to backtrack and try again.

  The lack of any clear grain to the land was exactly what Seth would have expected, but no less disconcerting for that. The idea of being able to turn horizontally through any angle at all was bizarre enough, but then doing so to such little effect felt like a kind of dream, where the thing that you supposedly knew was happening, declared as fact by an internal narrator, bore no relationship to the accompanying images. Seth tried thinking of the land around him as a giant, south-facing cliff, to which everything was drawn by a magical new force. That, at least, made some sense of his miserably impractical posture, and went some way toward assuaging his impossible desire to plant his feet on the ground and walk.

  The cart turned toward a small settlement, with an open circle of half a dozen low buildings. Southites emerged and chatted with the drivers; a few raised themselves up for a better view of the contents of the cart. Seth was growing used to their short, broad faces, with bare wrinkled skin surrounded by orange fur, but this familiarity wasn’t yet mutual: one glimpse of his body was enough to drive some of the onlookers into bouts of wild hooting. He hoped that they were merely expressing surprise and amusement; it was hard to believe that he was provoking fear, but if he was actually giving rise to disgust or revulsion that might influence the way the four of them were treated.

  «Do you think they know that you’re not actually part of me?» he asked Theo.

  «Hard to tell. They have nothing like pingers themselves, so it might seem odd to them that one organism would make sound in two different ways.»

  «No pingers, yet they can hear in your range. Are any of their vocalizations that high?»

  «No.»

  «Then why hear those sounds?»

  Theo said, «There are plenty of natural sources pitched as high: grains of sand sliding over each other in the wind, chaff in the fields crackling when it rains. But maybe the reason you can’t hear those sounds is to spare you from having to listen to me pinging all day.»

  «What a deal: we gave up the power to hear sand squeaking . . . and you gave up the power to walk. No wonder your father thought Siders needed more experience in contract law.»

  The cart stopped, a few paces from the nearest building. Seth still couldn’t see what was happening around him, except when people jumped up to gawk.

  Dahlia began wailing again.

  Theo said, “Ada, you need to help comfort her. I’m doing what I can, but you’re . . . the place where she needs to feel safe.”

  “Comfort her how? She won’t understand a word I say.”

  “Just croon to her,” Theo suggested. “Softly, but out loud.” He wasn’t cruel enough to start quizzing her as to whether she possessed any capacity for inspeech; that seemed unlikely, and even if she did it might be unreliable, or even stranger to Dahlia than everything else she was having to face.

  Ada complied, though she sounded uncomfortable, and her efforts had no immediate effect. Seth could only wonder how much Dahlia was capable of understanding about her situation; it was unlikely that the drug had kept her silent her whole life but unimpaired in any other fashion.

  “Should we give her something to ping?” he wondered. “Just to break the monotony?”

  “It can’t hurt,” Theo replied. Seth waited to see if Ada would try the experiment herself, but when she didn’t he reached over and waved his right hand above Dahlia’s pinger.

  The wailing changed, slowing a little. Seth made shapes with his hand, the way he had sometimes for his niece’s adopted Sider, Leanne.

  Dahlia began a kind of cooing. Seth was startled; it was so much like Leanne’s response as to be eerie. But he persisted, and the soft murmurs that he took as signs of interest and amusement continued.

  «Tell me if you ever want this yourself, to keep your pinger in shape,» he told Theo.

  «Thanks, but I’d rather read a book.»

  «I think your options might be limited there.»

  They remained on the cart for what felt like hours, though now that he was motionless Seth could track the line of lights, which showed that his frustration and impatience were outracing the actual passage of time. Dahlia’s moods came and went, but between the three of them they could usually find something that calmed her. Seth had given up shouting about Andrei and Nicholas; repeating the message more often and more loudly wouldn’t make it any clearer, it would only risk making him seem like a lower-pitched version of Dahlia. He had to trust in the Southites’ curiosity to lead t
hem either to the missing pair directly, if they still had boats out on the water, or to a systematic attempt to communicate with their guests.

  Finally, someone lowered one of the safety rails and reached up to take Ada and Dahlia off the cart. Seth was still struggling to distinguish one Southite from another, but when this one returned and took hold of him he was fairly sure that it was not the one who’d put him on the cart back at the shore: the scent, the grip, and some distinctive patches of mottled fur on the arms all seemed new to him.

  «We need to learn to recognize individuals,» he said, as the Southite carried him across the open ground. It wasn’t just a matter of courtesy—of avoiding the offense of misidentifying an interlocutor in some halting conversation once they’d started to make themselves understood. Different members of the community were likely to hold different attitudes to the guests, and if he couldn’t learn to respond to different people in ways that accommodated that, any attempt to obtain the cooperation and resources that the expedition needed could be jeopardized.

  «I haven’t got much more to go on than you have,» Theo replied. «But I’ll try to listen carefully to their voices.»

  «We should start giving them names,» Seth decided. He’d have no chance of organizing his impressions without using some kind of label for each Southite, and there was no point waiting to learn what they called themselves. «This is Martha, holding us now.»

  «What if you’ve guessed the wrong sex, and that’s a grave insult in their culture?»

  «How would he ever know?»

  Theo said, «It’s sure to slip out eventually.»

  «I don’t plan on being here that long.»

  Martha carried them toward a small, rectangular enclosure that had apparently been prepared for them in the space between two of the buildings. Ada was lying on a blanket at one end, and Seth could see a water trough running alongside one of the low walls. There was even a sheltered area at the far end, with a wooden roof, large enough to offer protection from the rain.