Dichronauts

by Greg Egan

  “And yet I see you’re not starving yourself to death.”

  “That would have been my first choice,” she replied. “But it’s not worth the noise this blood-sucker makes when it feels the tiniest pang of hunger.”

  Seth was tempted to ask her why she hadn’t silenced Dahlia for good, but then thought better of it. The idea must have occurred to her, but if he raised it that would only risk provoking her into action.

  Theo said, “Suppose you’re right about everything. The Southites are preoccupied, at best. Seth and I are incapable of learning their language, however much effort we devote to the task. But even if I grant you all of that, it’s still not reason to give up.”

  “And why is that?” Ada asked. “Do you think Andrei and Nicholas are speeding back to the surface right now in their one-fifth of a boat, and when they get there they’ll rally their friends to fly down in a balloon and rescue us?”

  “I wouldn’t rule out a word of that,” Theo replied. “But it’s not what I had in mind.”

  “Then . . .?”

  Theo hesitated. “Tell me that you want to live. Tell me that you want to survive this, and get back home.”

  Ada snorted with derision. “It doesn’t matter what I want; that won’t make it possible.”

  “No,” Theo agreed, “but it could make it impossible if you don’t. If you want to wreck our chances, if you want us all to die here, just be honest and say so, and I’ll leave you in peace.”

  Ada’s face contorted with misery. “I’m the only one honest enough to face the truth.”

  “Maybe,” Theo said calmly. “But you still haven’t answered my question. When you tell us that we’re going to die here, are you describing what you believe, or what you want?”

  “Who could want any of this?” she replied. “I’m not insane. Of course I’d rather live.”

  “So if there was a way back, you’d do everything in your power to make it happen?” Theo persisted.

  “Yes. But there isn’t.”

  Theo said, “There might be, there might not. The drug you gave Dahlia might have damaged her brain, permanently and irrevocably, to the point where all she can do now is live out the rest of her life with no more mental capacity than an infant.

  “Or, the drug might not have ended her development so much as held it in abeyance. And now that she’s no longer receiving it, she might actually possess something even closer to the mental capacity of an infant: the power to learn by exposure and example faster and more efficiently than any adult. The power to acquire a language just by watching, and listening, and trial and error—and perhaps, like most Siders, two languages at once.

  “In which case, Dahlia would be our best hope, our best chance to have a competent translator. But it’s in your hands. Seth and I can talk to her, and she can probably hear the Southites shouting wherever she is in this cage. But you’re her only real pair of eyes, her only chance to connect what she hears with what’s happening around her.

  “So that’s what you need to decide. Are you willing to be her eyes? Are you willing to dedicate yourself to seeing what she needs to see, and making sure that she’s sharing your vision? Because if you are, we might have a chance of surviving.”

  16

  “Here’s my hand,” seth crooned, holding it above Dahlia’s pinger, “and here’s my hand,” bringing it down in front of Ada’s face. “Here’s my hand . . . and here’s my hand.”

  Dahlia burbled with delight as he spoke, but Seth was still not sure if she was being entertained by the experience of this one object manifesting through two modalities, or whether to her it was a simple hiding game. It was certainly true that any opportunity to use her pingers evoked a far stronger response than the most elaborate display of color and motion in Ada’s field of view, but that didn’t necessarily mean that she was light-blind. There was always something to be seen around her, even if it was only the walls of the enclosure, but anything intruding into the pristine space above was a novelty—at least for a while.

  Seth kept up the game until Dahlia fell silent, either bored or exhausted. “She’s asleep,” Ada confirmed.

  “Did she ever used to sleep while you were awake, back in Thanton?” Seth had got past the mixture of squeamishness and tact that might once have kept him from asking.

  “Very rarely,” Ada replied. “But it was rare that I’d be lying this still for so long unless I was asleep myself. As soon as I got up in the morning and moved around a bit, I could always see to the sides, though I never thought of that as someone else ‘waking up.’ If you lose sensation in your feet, you might say that they’ve ‘fallen asleep’—but when everything works normally you don’t say, ‘I woke up, and so did my feet.’”

  “Hmm.” Seth maintained an expression of mild interest, but as much as he tried not to judge Ada, he still found himself unable to listen to a revelation like this without dissecting it, separating out threads of culpability and extenuation. To render her Sider invisible by picturing it as just one more part of her body seemed staggeringly crass—but if she’d been taught to think that way from the start, and her Sider had never been able to raise its voice to claim its own separate identity, what could be more natural?

  At the sound of footsteps, Seth turned to see a young Southite approaching the enclosure. Many of the children in the settlement had displayed an initial burst of curiosity about the guests and then lost interest, but this was one of the more persistent visitors. Seth had named him Iqbal, after Amir’s irrepressible younger brother.

  Iqbal rose up as high as he could, bending all his legs, moving all his feet farther from his body so he could peer down over the wall at the inhabitants. Then he began hooting and shrieking, loudly and at great speed.

  “Well, that woke her up,” Ada muttered, but she dutifully turned to watch Iqbal as he spoke, imitating the Southites’ grimace of attention in the hope of prolonging the interaction and making it more meaningful for both Iqbal and Dahlia.

  «Is he inviting us to come out and play,» Theo wondered, «or telling us to crawl back where we came from and stop stinking out his town?»

  «If he really despised us, there are plenty of things he could throw,» Seth reasoned. «So either he’s afraid that the adults would punish him if he went that far, or he’s actually being friendly.»

  Dahlia babbled back at him, unintimidated by his exotic anatomy, if she was even aware of it, or his cacophonous voice, which she certainly heard. To Seth, her replies sounded nothing like Iqbal’s language, or even his own, but Iqbal seemed to have more patience with this non-conversation than Martha showed when Seth tried to engage with her. Sometimes they talked over each other, but that had been happening less and less. It was not communication, but so long as neither of them were indifferent to the other’s speech, Seth still held out hope that it could lead to something more.

  When Iqbal departed—Seth thought he heard an adult calling him away, but he wasn’t confident that the timing was more than a coincidence—Theo took over.

  “Did you have a good time with Iqbal? He’s such a nice friend to visit you.” He went on like this, narrating the encounter for Dahlia in the Walkers’ language again and again with slightly different words, for far longer than Seth could have done it. To Seth, the children’s games came naturally, and he could play them without a trace of self-consciousness. But when he listened to these calculated language lessons, all he could hear was desperation.

  When Theo finally stopped talking, Ada said quietly, “You know what today is.”

  Seth had tried to lose count, without success. “So we should celebrate,” he said. “There’s a chance that the others are on their way home.”

  “I hope so. But when they bring the basket down again, it’s not going to be in the same position as before.”

  “Probably not,” Seth conceded. “But it will be as close as the rope teams can make it. If it takes us a couple more days on the slope to find it, that’s the least of our worries.”
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  “A couple?”

  Theo said, “When we get home and exchange stories with the others, even if they tell us that everyone else was riding the basket today, we’ll still be counted as the lucky ones. Because when we get back to the slope, we’ll be better fed, better supplied, and better prepared than anyone else was. We’ve all seen the Southites’ boats. Which would you rather ride north: the brand new, two-tiered vessel that they’ll build for their beloved cousins, as a gift to make up for all the time they unwittingly snubbed us, or those pieces of tat we rode down in, whose sole virtue was the fact that we could fit them in our packs?”

  Ada didn’t reply.

  Theo asked anxiously, «Are we losing her again?»

  «No.» Seth didn’t begrudge Theo his ability to remain almost insanely resolute, but he was sure that it wasn’t going to help Ada if they started haranguing her every time her confidence wavered.

  He said, “To Raina and Amina, Sarah and Judith, Andrei and Nicholas: we wish you a safe trip home.”

  in a day, the population of the settlement doubled.

  Seth watched the people traipsing in, dragging battered carts piled high with what he supposed were their belongings. The new arrivals all looked exhausted, and some appeared injured, with limping gaits or limbs held strangely. The locals swarmed around them, vocalizing loudly, offering them food, taking charge of their loads, leading some straight into their homes.

  “This must be a second group of migrants joining the outpost,” Theo decided. “No wonder they’re so bedraggled, if they’ve come all the way across the ice from another chasm.”

  “There’s hardly room for them here,” Ada said. She sounded as affronted as if it were her own hometown faced with an equivalent influx.

  “Relax, no one’s going to want to billet with us,” Theo teased her. “Though I’m sure our ordure is the envy of the hyperboloid.”

  “They might build a second village, once they’ve had a chance to recuperate,” Seth replied. “Prepare their own farmland, plant their own orchards.” None of which would happen quickly. “This is what it will be like if we end up having to switch rivers back home.” Despite the drought, he still hadn’t witnessed an end to the luxury of incremental migration, where the farmers merely shifted all their fences a little to the south, and plowed a little more ground at one end of their fields while abandoning an equal amount at the other.

  Theo said, “Switching rivers will be the least of it.”

  “Maybe.” Seth wasn’t ready to start debating the possibilities all over again, before they’d even acquired the one useful datum that they’d come here to obtain. “If we’re right about these people, though—if they’ve come from far away—they must have seen this chasm the way we see the others: a light in the distance, small enough to take in at a glance.”

  Ada completed the thought. “Small enough to measure.”

  Theo said, “And all we need to do is ask them for the numbers. How hard can that be?”

  when martha didn’t turn up to feed them at the usual time, Seth supposed she was busy with the newcomers. Dahlia became irritable, wailing in protest at the declining nutrient level in Ada’s bloodstream, but Seth played with her until she fell asleep.

  Then the same thing happened at the second mealtime, and the third.

  “They must have been expecting these people,” Ada said. “Even if they didn’t know exactly when they’d arrive. So they would have tried to plant enough fruit trees and crops in advance, to be ready to feed them; it’s not as if they’ve been taken by surprise.”

  “While they waited, they would have had more food than they needed,” Seth added. “Some of which they could store, some of it perishable. Throwing us the fruit that was going to go bad anyway would have cost them nothing. But now that the intended recipients have arrived, there’s no excess any more.”

  “There must be a hundred people here,” Theo protested. “How much would each of them have to give up, in order to feed us?”

  “Not much,” Seth conceded. “But if things are tight now, if they’re all going hungry . . .”

  Dahlia lost the energy to maintain her howling, and instead just made curt, disapproving noises which only became more vehement when Seth attempted to distract her. As his own strength waned, he stopped exercising, but it felt like a poor trade: within a day, he could feel the skin of his left shoulder burning from the unbroken contact with the ground. Rolling about on his blanket to shift his weight only ended up making things worse: the skin split open, creating a small wound that would have been tolerable if he could keep it in the air, but was excruciating when he lay on it. He dug a pit in the ground under his blanket, so he could position the wound directly over it and spare it most of the pressure. That helped for a while, but the pit kept filling up and needing to be re-excavated. And the circle of skin that was resting on the rim of the pit began to sting, then crack and bleed.

  Iqbal came to visit Dahlia. His initial greeting was as loquacious as ever, but he quickly became more subdued. Seth looked on, trying not to over-interpret the exchange and raise his hopes too high. Even if this child understood his friend’s plight—or his pet’s suffering—what could he do? Dahlia’s own vocalizations were more varied in his presence than they were when Seth tried to play with her; instead of just rattling her pingers in protest, she seemed to be making a genuine attempt to communicate. Whatever her limitations, perhaps she was observant enough to understand by now that Seth was not the kind of creature who had ever brought food for her Walker, so it really wasn’t worth her time attempting to procure his assistance. But Iqbal, like Martha, had eight legs and orange fur. If she babbled at him in just the right way, anything might be possible.

  twelve days into their fast, with the heat of the sun still lingering, Seth saw Martha approaching the enclosure, striding briskly across the open ground. People were usually indoors at this hour, and there was no one else in sight. She did not appear to be carrying any food, but Seth had stopped thinking of that as a serious possibility; now that the trough was almost empty, what he’d been hoping for was water. It was a long journey from the river’s edge, but that had never stopped the Southites from sparing a little for their guests before.

  Martha clambered over the wall and moved straight toward Seth. “Are you taking us somewhere?” he asked.

  Ada said, “I think she has a knife.”

  “What?” Seth couldn’t see it but he started to crawl away, dragging his burning shoulder over the rough ground. He’d barely moved before she was on top of him, gripping him with four of her hands. He tried to struggle, but he might as well have been wrestling with a boulder. Theo showed the underside of her torso above him, covered with loose, wrinkled skin; it looked soft and vulnerable, but he had no hope of landing a blow.

  «Ping her harder!» Seth pleaded. If the Southites had heard Dahlia screaming on the water from afar, maybe a high-pitched sound this close could be painful. Theo’s image of her underbelly grew brighter and wavered strangely, and Seth felt a shivering ache in his skull, but whatever Martha was perceiving, she was undeterred.

  Seth saw the knife now; she was holding it, poised, just behind his back, as if she was trying to decide exactly where to plunge it in order to do the most damage. “Please don’t,” he gasped. Maybe this was meant as an act of mercy: now that she could no longer feed them, she’d decided to end their suffering. “Please don’t,” he repeated. His hunger was unbearable, but he didn’t want this either.

  Theo showed him the knife descending. Seth twisted away from it, contorting his body with all his remaining strength, but the blade sliced into his back. He bellowed with shock and pain, and as he struggled to free himself he felt his assailant’s hands growing slick with blood, but she didn’t yield.

  As Martha raised the knife again, Dahlia started babbling: a string of strange, urgent noises. “You fucking animal!” Seth screamed. “You don’t do this in front of a child!”

  Martha was still, the k
nife suspended. Seth’s body had been arched, but now his muscles turned to water and he flopped against the ground. Unwillingly, he closed his eyes, and a moment later Theo stopped pinging. The searing pain across his back confused him: it hurt his eyes too, like a bright light. Dahlia’s protests rang in his head, but each time she paused now, another voice joined her, echoing back some of the same motifs with more authority and precision.

  “eat this,” ada urged him. She was holding something toward him. Seth opened his mouth and let her put it in. It was a piece of spoiled fruit, with the flesh half rotten while the skin was hard and dry. Seth almost gagged, but he forced himself to swallow. She fed him another piece, then another.

  Dahlia said, “Seth wake up.”

  “Yes,” Ada agreed. “He woke up.”

  Seth wanted to ask for a second opinion on his sanity, but Theo wasn’t awake.

  “Have you talked to Theo?” he asked Ada.

  “No. He’s not talking to you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Give it time,” she said. “You must both be very weak. I’ll bring you some water.”

  Ada had nothing to use as a cup but a small piece of sapote skin, so the water came in tenths of a mouthful, but she kept ferrying it patiently from the trough to Seth’s mouth until he told her he’d had enough.

  His back was stinging, but when he moved, cautiously, to try to assess the severity of the wound he realized that the knife had only skidded across the skin and the damage was superficial.

  “What happened, exactly?” he asked Ada.

  “‘Exactly’?” The stipulation seemed to amuse her, as much as if he’d asked for something truly impossible, like clean clothes.

  “Dahlia talked her out of it?”

  “That might be overstating it. But if she talked at all, in Martha’s own language, the second part might be a tautology. I think they know now that we’re not quite what they thought we were, and I think that was enough to change her mind.” She held up a piece of rotten fruit. “If we’re not exactly the beloved cousins, at least we’re not animals to be slaughtered without compunction.”