by Greg Egan
Martha reached over the wall and placed him on a blanket of his own, then raised her head up and gazed at him from outside the enclosure. “Thank you,” he said, hoping that the context might be enough to show her the meaning of the words. She, or whoever had built these quarters, had clearly put some thought into their guests’ needs, and if the accommodation wasn’t perfect, the real problems lay with the mismatch between their bodies and the local gravity. Seth had no idea what the best solution to his maladapted anatomy would be, so he hadn’t been expecting anyone else to find a way to render him magically safe, autonomous, and comfortable.
Martha departed. The walls of the enclosure were low enough to let Seth look out across the settlement; beyond that, with the bowl of blue-gray land rising up in all directions and the line of lights stretching off to infinity, he did not feel boxed in at all.
Ada said, “I vote we shit at the point farthest from the water, given that they’ve made no other arrangements.”
“All right.” Mercifully, it had been so long since Seth had eaten that this wasn’t a pressing concern. “How are you coping?” he asked. Dahlia seemed to be asleep.
“Don’t worry about me,” Ada replied, but her tone was listless.
“We’re going to get through this,” Seth promised her. “These people seem to have about as much good will toward us as we could have hoped for. It might take a while to learn to communicate with them, but if they were prepared to go out of their way to stop us drowning, I can’t see why they wouldn’t be willing to give us what we need for the journey back: a small boat, a few supplies, and local knowledge of the currents. And if they’ve mapped the edge of the hole we came through, we might even make it back to the surface with a definite answer as to whether or not the migration could pass safely around the chasm.” If this catalog of wishes wasn’t extravagant enough, in truth, he wanted even more: Andrei and Nicholas to turn up safe and join them; Sarah and Judith, Raina and Amina to be waiting in the camp when they finally returned to the steamlands. “We’ll probably miss the hundred-day pickup,” he conceded, “but they’ll keep raising and lowering the basket long after that.”
“Whatever you say.” Ada curled up on her blanket, tucking her head close to her knees.
Theo said, «Nothing makes the hard times harder than having your slave wake up and start screaming in your skull.»
«No doubt. But we’d probably all be dead if that hadn’t happened.» Seth couldn’t deny that he’d felt an occasional twinge of satisfaction at Ada’s plight, but in the circumstances gloating was neither morally laudable nor at all pragmatic. And if there was any question as to whether he really needed Ada as his ally, the fact remained that Dahlia needed all three of them.
Martha approached the enclosure again, carrying two net bags whose contents Seth couldn’t make out. She began tossing the objects over the wall, and they landed near the water trough.
Black sapote. Eight in all.
Seth slithered toward the nearest one, learning how to move as he went. He soon realized that keeping his back curled actually made him quite stable; he could advance by sticking his knee and elbow out and then shifting his weight onto them and dragging himself forward.
It was laborious and uncomfortable, but when he arrived at the fruit it was worth it. The taste wasn’t quite what he remembered, but it was still delicious; he devoured it, then started on a second one.
When he’d finished his share, he felt bloated; his stomach had probably shrunk from his long fast. He returned to his blanket to lie still and digest the meal.
«What do you think?» Theo asked. «A close cousin of the real thing?»
«Probably.» Seth took a moment to see his point: not only were there trees in the south, at one time there had to have been a tree that could grow in either hyperboloid—or seeds that had been shed in one but then sprouted, successfully, in the other.
Theo said, «The migration might not have witnessed another chasm anytime in recorded history, but in the eons before, there must have been others. Over time, there must have been all kinds of exchanges.»
«All kinds? What are the odds of anything bigger than a seed surviving?»
«Probably very small, on each occasion. But what if there were ten thousand opportunities? Or ten billion?»
«This from someone who’s only just stopped claiming that the world is finite.»
«When the evidence changes, I change my mind.»
Seth said, «Why is it that I think I can guess where you’re going with this?» Once Theo chose a direction, there was no such thing as pursuing it too far.
«If it’s so obvious to you already, that probably means I’m right.»
Seth was too full of food, and too tired, to start arguing.
Theo said, «The Southites have no pingers of their own, because it’s not worth it: they’re low enough on the ground that they won’t put a foot wrong using light—which is always present—and there’s nothing to ping up in the sky. But if you grabbed one of them and took them to our hyperboloid, beyond the problems they’d have moving about, that cone of blindness around the axis would suddenly become a much more serious deficit. Maybe over the eons they could find their own way to deal with that—but making a bargain with a local might be a much faster solution.»
«You’re saying I’ve come home to my ancestors?»
«To your cousins.»
«We don’t even have the same number of limbs,» Seth protested sleepily.
«Limbs might come and go. You don’t have a scamper’s tails, but everyone thinks it’s likely you’re related to them. And all your limbs are non-axial, like a Southite’s.»
Axial, non-axial: there was no more fundamental distinction. «So I belong here, but you’re just an interloper? I can see by light all day and all night, while your useless pings hit the dirt or disappear into the sky?»
«Exactly.»
«All it would take to make me positively smug about that would be some prospect of actually walking.»
«Give it time.»
Seth laughed and closed his eyes. He pictured the line of lights wheeling around him, as the sun scoured the distant surface. «What a joy it is to be home,» he said.
15
Seth was woken by Dahlia’s wailing. He tried to retreat back into sleep, but the glare of daylight was too strong. Daylight? He opened his eyes and looked around for the line of lights; it was pointing straight toward him. The distant chasms appeared no brighter than before—if anything, they seemed more subdued against the blue-white haze that now filled the air. But in a direction he had no name for, perpendicular to the line, that haze reached an almost painful intensity. It was like staring at the sun through a thin layer of cloud, except that the light was surrounded not by sky, but by land—as if the sun had risen, not over the horizon, but somewhere much closer.
«If they didn’t get away from that, they’re dead,» he realized. Up on the surface, the chasm’s opening had started well clear of absolute summer, but Seth had no doubt now that the mouth of the thing stretched far enough south to be touched by the sun’s cone. On the surface, being near to such a sun-blasted place could include being safely to the north of it—in the dark cone of any secondary, scattered light—but here, the rules were different: every point on the southern hyperboloid was visible from every other point.
«Nicholas and Andrei would have worked that out,» Theo said. «If they couldn’t find a way north in time, they would have headed for the shore.»
Seth wasn’t confident that that would have been far enough. Still, the Southites had left their boats moored there, so they couldn’t have been expecting heat intense enough to ignite the wooden vessels, or to turn the water itself to steam.
«Fuck this place,» he muttered. He needed to defecate, and it wasn’t going to be as simple as it had been on the slope.
When he was done, he approached the water trough. At first, he thought it would be impossible to drink without sticking half his head below the su
rface and immersing one of Theo’s pingers, but eventually he found a way to lean against the side of the trough for balance, then position his right hand so that the water ran up over it and trickled into his mouth.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked Ada.
She didn’t reply. “Do you mind if we come over there and play with Dahlia?”
“Do what you like.” Her tone wasn’t sullen or irritable; nor was it distracted, as if her mind was busy elsewhere, or haughtily indifferent, as if such matters were beneath her. It was flat and dead, as disengaged from everything else imaginable as it was from the subject of their exchange.
Still, she’d eaten her share of the fruit they’d been given the night before—unless someone had taken it away, or she’d tossed it out of the enclosure herself.
Seth dragged himself toward her, self-conscious now about how filthy he was. In the not-quite-night the ground had been hard and icy, but in the not-quite-day the top layer had thawed into reddish brown mud, so splashing any of their limited supply of water onto his body would have been futile.
At first Dahlia was inconsolable, but whether it was Theo’s inaudible baby-talk or Seth’s hand-puppetry that did the trick, after a few minutes she became much calmer. Seth was beginning to think that the greatest mercy would be if the drug had left her incapable of understanding anything; that might be better than having to live with the knowledge of what Ada had done to her—and what Thanton had done to her relatives—let alone the implications of the fact that the world to the south of her had vanished.
“Did any of the Southites visit while I was asleep?” Seth asked Ada. He didn’t want to needle her with constant small talk, but he wasn’t going to close off all communication between them, however tempting she made that seem.
“No.”
“Theo and I are going to try to give them all names. The one who carried us here from the cart is ‘Martha’ until we know better. Or maybe for a bit longer: even if she told us her real name, we might struggle to pronounce it straight away.”
Ada said nothing. Seth looked out across the settlement; the open space he could see was deserted. Perhaps the Southites preferred the cooler hours; if so, he’d need to learn to adjust his own sleeping pattern.
The thought prompted him to spend a moment taking stock of the state of his body. He was hungry, but not ravenous, and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to wake his hosts in the hope of being fed again so soon. His muscles felt both drained and disused; his left arm wasn’t exactly in pain so much as in a state of perpetual, bewildered complaint at the way its motion had been unnaturally constrained while it had been forced, against all precedent, to bear most of his weight.
He was about to tell himself to get used to it, when his gaze fell on the sheltered section of the enclosure. He dragged himself over to the structure. The roof was high enough that if he lay beside it he could reach up and grip it, then use that handhold to lift most of his body off the ground, pivoting on the side of his foot—and by trial and error, he found a position where he didn’t knock his head against anything in the process. Suspended, he could swing his left arm freely back and forth, while his left shoulder, blissfully, touched nothing but air.
“You have to try this,” he told Ada. “That which spares you skin ulcers also makes you stronger.”
Seth remained hanging for as long as he could, and when his right arm tired he used the left one to prop himself up, letting his forearm touch the ground. It was uncomfortable twisting his arm around to try to get the northern axial fingers of his left hand out of the way, so he dug into the mud and made a hole for them.
When he finally lay down on the ground again, both arms were aching, but he felt better than he had since his rescuers had dragged him from the water.
«You should do the same thing with your legs,» Theo suggested.
«So now you’re an expert on other people’s bodies?»
«I’m an expert on the downside of immobility. But if you think you can stay a Walker with no strength in your legs, go ahead.»
«Martha will carry me everywhere I need to go.»
«To Baharabad?»
Seth slithered around and got his foot up on the roof. Unlike his Southite cousins, though, he had no ability to grip anything with his toes. As he started raising his left leg from the ground, he felt his foot slipping. He stopped, then curved his upper body to make it harder for him to overbalance. Then he lifted his left leg, from the hip to the toe, and cautiously swung it back and forth. There was no doubt that it felt good, but it still felt precarious. «More next time,» he promised Theo. «Now it’s your turn to practice pinging to the right, so Dahlia doesn’t overtake you.»
Later, Seth lay on his blanket, waiting for the settlement to wake, watching the line of lights turning, trying to think his way more deeply into the rhythms of this new world.
«They must have their own migration,» he reasoned. «If they stayed in one place, eventually it would get too cold; the solar cone would keep sweeping over the nearest chasm, but it would do it faster and faster, until the ‘days’ only lasted a fraction of a second.»
Theo said, «So their habitable circle will correspond to the southern rim of our habitable zone. But they won’t be restricted to a narrow band of longitude by the surface grain, like we are.»
«No, but if the chasms themselves are so far apart that you leave all the heat from one of them behind before you get to the next one, the region in which it’s warm enough to raise crops might still be quite small. And when the time comes to move, it would be a long trek across cold ground.»
«That’s true,» Theo conceded. «We complain about a few shifting rivers, but if we tell these people we can pick a mild solar latitude and then live at the same temperature every step of the way as we follow it south, they might go mad with jealousy.»
«What makes me jealous is the thought of planning the whole migration just by looking.» Seth waved a hand at the bowl of the hyperboloid, stretching out to the edge of his vision. «At all the same places where we’d risk stumbling over a cliff, with no idea what’s ahead of us, they get the most prominent beacons imaginable, visible in advance for generations.»
«I told you this was your homeland.» Theo thought for a while. «It might not be quite that simple, though. A chasm might seem promising from a distance, but if the soil and the water and the climate don’t work out, it could be a long trip to the second choice. I bet they have to send out advance parties to be sure that it’s really worth bringing everyone.»
«So they might still have surveyors, of a kind.» Seth found the notion comforting. If the expedition’s goals weren’t entirely foreign to them, if they could understand what brought it here, surely they’d be willing to help the survivors return home with the information they needed?
as the light dimmed and the air became cooler, the settlement came to life. Seth could hear the Southites conversing inside their houses; the sounds they made seemed so diverse to him that if he hadn’t seen them with his own eyes, making all the same noises, he would have thought there were four or five different species contributing to the racket.
Shortly afterward, they began emerging from the buildings and moving briskly across the open space. Many were carrying small objects, but none of them wore clothing; apparently their fur offered all the protection they needed from the elements, at least at this hour, and the houses were mainly for shelter from the sun. Seth was hoping that there were no predators around; as yet, he’d seen no creature other than the Southites that was larger than an insect, and still not a blade of grass, so it was hard to imagine what anything capable of eating him would have subsisted on normally. But the sapote must have come from somewhere nearby—if not a jungle, at least an orchard.
He spotted Martha striding toward the enclosure, on just six legs, carrying more food. Witnessing the speed and economy of her motion could have just driven home his own incapacity, but instead it filled him with hope. However hostile this
place seemed, it need not defeat him if he had the right friends.
«I think I’m in love,» he joked to Theo.
«Please don’t ever tell her that.»
Martha reached the wall and tossed the fruit she was carrying into the enclosure. It wasn’t sapote this time; Seth was excited at the thought of something new to try, but rather than rushing for the food, he wanted to take the opportunity to start engaging with his host.
“Thank you for the food,” he said, enunciating as clearly as he could and looking at her directly as he spoke. Their eyes locked briefly, but her gaze slid over him, then she turned and walked away. “Thank you!” he called after her.
Ada started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Seth asked, glad to see her animated at last.
“We’re just animals to them. A couple of strange, exotic specimens that they plucked out of the water. They’re not going to learn our language and talk to us. Even if the possibility crossed their mind, why would they bother making that much effort? They must have a thousand better things to do.”
Seth was stung, but he had to accept that some of what she was saying might be true. He and Ada wore clothes, but what did that mean to the Southites, who didn’t? And they’d seen Ada’s fragment of the boat, but even if they’d recognized it as part of a once-serviceable vessel, there’d been nothing to suggest that she’d built it herself, or even piloted it; she’d just been some wet, screaming creature clinging to a piece of flotsam that might have come from anywhere. What was there to point to the conclusion that these animals were capable of sophisticated thought, let alone conversation?
He said, “They might have better things to do, but we don’t. We can learn their language, if we watch and listen carefully.”
“Really?” Ada emitted some crude squawks and hoots. “We’re never going to understand that, let alone speak it.”
“We have to,” Seth said. “Or we’ll die here.”
Ada smiled joylessly. “Which means we’ll die here. Let’s hope it’s not from disease or old age; let’s hope someone gets curious and cuts us open to see what’s inside.”
