Schild’s Ladder

The procession entered a tunnel, angled steeply down into the colony’s interior. As the density of sprites dropped, the scape experimented with the other ambient information-carrying vendeks. No single species could come close to matching the details of the probe images, but taken together they provided a fair description of the surroundings. From the Colonists' point of view, the Bright might well have been horribly misnamed; the conditions down here stood a far better chance of providing useful illumination, and the colony could have been perceived to lie in a somber landscape of permanent twilight.

Out of the full force of the wind, the geometry of both the Colonists and their architecture became more stable. The walls of the tunnel were formed from a basic layer population, but hundreds of other structures adorned them. Apart from the "air-conditioning" and "light sources," Tchicaya couldn’t guess what purpose most of the structures served. They looked too complex to be decorations, but mere endurance required sophistication here; the air-conditioning wasn’t perfect, and anything incapable of responding to the weather risked being scoured away by the Bright.

The tunnel branched; the procession veered left. The air-conditioning was becoming more aggressive about removing impurities; the ship and the toolkit had to work harder than ever to keep the hull intact and the probes viable in the presence of all the new cleaning vendeks. Tchicaya had contemplated a number of unpleasant fates since the anachronauts had blown him out of the Rindler, but being scrubbed from the environment like an unwelcome speck of dust was one of the most insulting.

After a second fork, and a section that zigzagged and corkscrewed simultaneously, the tunnel opened out into a large cave. The physics here was more stable than anything they’d seen since the honeycomb; the weather had not been banished, but the turbulence had been subdued by an order of magnitude compared to the open Bright.

A stream of vendeks crossed the cave, rendered pitch black by the scape for most of its length, where the probes found it impenetrable. Near the center, the stream mingled with the surrounding free vendeks, expanding and becoming diluted before contracting back to its original width and continuing on its way. The probes could enter this region, which they portrayed as a sphere of gray fog; not all of them were coming back, though, and those that did reported that they’d almost lost control over their trajectories. Moving through the Bright had been difficult from the start, but some extreme, systematic distortion here was interfering with their attempts to navigate.

The toolkit collated all the evidence and reached its own conclusion. "There’s curvature engineered into the graphs here. You can invade these vendeks where the current opens out, but in the process they reorient your time axis."

It took Tchicaya a moment to digest this. Patterns in a quantum graph persisted by replicating themselves in future versions of the graph, but "the future" could only be defined by the orientation of the pattern itself. If you sliced the space-time foam one way to find a graph with vendek A in it, but needed to take a slice at a different angle to find vendek B, the two vendeks would see time as lying in different directions, and mere persistence, on their own terms, would put them in relative motion.

So "reorient your time axis" was toolkit-speak for "change your velocity." The vendek current couldn’t sweep anything along the way a river did, with pressure and momentum, but it could twist the local definition of being "stationary" progressively further away from its original orientation. In a sense it was like ordinary gravity, but on the near side the symmetries of the vacuum imposed a rigid austerity on the possibilities for space-time curvature. Here, the curvature had been tailored on the spot, woven directly into the graphs by the choice of vendeks.

"These people engineer space-time the way we do polymer design," he marveled. "Choose the right monomers, get their shape and reactivity right, and you can create whatever properties you desire."

Mariama smiled. "Except that they’re more like microbes than monomers. Everything comes down to breeding and blending the right vendeks."

"So what is this? A waste-disposal system?" If they wanted to toss the banner away, they could have done that from the surface with their towing bubble, but this accelerated sewer might send it further, faster.

The Colonists had paused at the entrance to the cave, but now they began to move along a shallow spiral, inching their way down toward the velocity gradient. They weren’t discarding the banner in the black river. They were going with it.

Tchicaya groaned. "I know what this is! We saw the rest of it, from the outside. It’s a transport system. We’re on the entry ramp to a highway."