Schild’s Ladder

It was a pity the same magical resilience couldn’t apply to her encounters with less tangible obstacles. She’d left Earth with no guarantee that the Mimosans would see any merit in her proposal, but it was only in the last few days that she’d begun to face up to the possibility of a bruising rejection. She could have presented her entire case from home, stoically accepting a sevenhundred-and-forty-year delay between each stage of the argument. Or she could have sent a Surrogate, well briefed but nonsentient, to plead on her behalf. But she’d succumbed to a mixture of impatience and a sense of proprietorship, and transmitted herself blind.

Now the verdict was less than two hours away.

She unstrapped herself and drifted away from the bed. She didn’t need to wash, or purge herself of wastes. From the moment she’d arrived, as a stream of ultraviolet pulses with a header requesting embodiment on almost any terms, the Mimosans had been polite and accommodating; Cass had been careful not to abuse their hospitality by pleading for frivolous luxuries. A self-contained body and a safe place to sleep were the only things she really needed in order to feel like herself. Being hermetically sealed against the vacuum and feeding on nothing but light took some getting used to, but so did the customs and climate of any unfamiliar region back on Earth. Demanding the right to eat and excrete, here, would have been as crass as insisting on slavish recreations of her favorite childhood meals, while a guest at some terrestrial facility.

A circular tunnel, slightly wider than her height, connected her spartan quarters to a chamber where she could interact with the software she’d brought from Earth, and through it the Mimosans themselves. She bounced down the borehole, slapping the wall with her hands and feet, bumping her head and elbows deliberately.

As she entered the chamber, she seemed to emerge from the mouth of a burrow to float above a lush, wide meadow beneath a cloud-dappled sky. The illusion was purely audiovisual — the sounds encoded in radio waves — but with no weight to hold her against the ceramic hidden beneath the meadow, the force of detail was eerily compelling. It only took a few blades of grass and some chirping insects to make her half-believe that she could smell the late-summer air.

Would it really have been an act of self-betrayal, if this landscape had stretched all the way inside her — right down to the sensations of inhabiting her old, two-meter body, gorging on a breakfast of fruit and oats after swimming across Chalmers Lake? If she could drift in and out of this soothing work of art without losing her grip on reality, why couldn’t she take the process a few steps further?

She pushed the argument aside, though she was glad that it never stopped nagging at her. When the means existed to transform yourself, instantly and effortlessly, into anything at all, the only way to maintain an identity was to draw your own boundaries. But once you lost the urge to keep on asking whether or not you’d drawn them in the right place, you might as well have been born Homo sapiens, with no real choices at all.

A short distance from the burrow stood a marble statue of Rainzi, arms folded, smiling slightly. Cass gestured at the messenger and it came to life, the white stone taking on the hue and texture of skin. Rainzi himself was several generations removed from anyone who’d bothered to simulate a living dermis, let alone possess one, but Cass was not equipped to make sense of the Mimosans' own communications protocols, so she’d chosen to have everything translated into the visual dialect used back on Earth.

"We’ll give you our decision at nine o’clock, as promised," the messenger assured her. "But we hope you won’t mind if we precede this with a final review session. Some of us feel that there are matters that have yet to be entirely resolved. We’ll begin at half past seven." The messenger bowed, then froze again, expecting no reply.

Cass tried not to read too much into the sudden change of plan. It was unnerving to discover that her hosts still hadn’t been able to reach a verdict, but at least they weren’t going to keep her waiting any longer than she’d expected. The fact that she’d alread briefed them in detail on every aspect of the experiment that had crossed her mind during three decades of preparation, and they now hoped to hear something new and decisive from her in twenty minutes' time, was no reason to panic. Whatever loose ends they’d found in her analysis, they were giving her the chance to put things right.