“No promises?” she asked. “No guarantee I’ll come out the other side? No intimations of contact, to tempt me further?” She was thinking aloud, she did not expect answers. Her hosts, she was beginning to conclude, viewed strangers through the prism of a strong, but very sharply delineated, sense of obligation. They sent back the insentient probes to their owners, scrupulously intact. They had woken this intruder to give her the choice: did she really want to go where her transmission suggested, or had she wandered in here like a lost child who just needed to find the way home? They would do her no harm, and send her on no journey without her consent, but those were the limits of their duty of care. They did not owe her any account of themselves. She would get no greeting, no hospitality, no conversation.
“What about Jasim? Will you give me a chance to consult with him?” She waited, picturing his face, willing his presence, hoping they might read her mind if her words were beyond them. If they could decode a yearning toward a point in the sky, surely this wish for companionship was not too difficult to comprehend? She tried variations, dwelling on the abstract structure of their intertwined data in the transmission, hoping this might clarify the object of her desire if his physical appearance meant nothing to them.
She remained alone.
The stars that surrounded her spelt out the only choices on offer. If she wanted to be with Jasim once more before she died, she had to make the same decision as he did.
Symmetry demanded that he faced the same dilemma.
How would he be thinking? He might be tempted to retreat back to the safety of Tassef, but he’d reconciled with her in Shalouf for the sole purpose of following her into danger. He would understand that she’d want to go deeper, would want to push all the way through to Massa, opening up the shortcut through the core, proving it safe for future travelers.
Would he understand, too, that she’d feel a pang of guilt at this presumptuous line of thought, and that she’d contemplate making a sacrifice of her own? He had braved the unknown for her, and they had reaped the reward already: they had come closer to the Aloof than anyone in history. Why couldn’t that be enough? For all Leila knew, her hosts might not even wake her again before Massa. What would she be giving up if she turned back now?
More to the point, what would Jasim expect of her? That she’d march on relentlessly, following her obsession to the end, or that she’d put her love for him first?
The possibilities multiplied in an infinite regress. They knew each other as well as two people could, but they didn’t carry each other’s minds inside them.
Leila drifted through the limbo of stars, wondering if Jasim had already made his decision. Having seen that the Aloof were not the torturers he’d feared, had he already set out for Tassef, satisfied that she faced no real peril at their hands? Or had he reasoned that their experience at this single node meant nothing? This was not the Amalgam, the culture could be a thousand times more fractured.
This cycle of guesses and doubts led nowhere. If she tried to pursue it to the end she’d be paralyzed. There were no guarantees; she could only choose the least worst case. If she returned to Tassef, only to find that Jasim had gone on alone through the bulge, it would be unbearable: she would have lost him for nothing. If that happened, she could try to follow him, returning to the bulge immediately, but she would already be centuries behind him.
If she went on to Massa, and it was Jasim who retreated, at least she’d know that he’d ended up in safety. She’d know, too, that he had not been desperately afraid for her, that the Aloof’s benign indifference at this first node had been enough to persuade him that they’d do her no harm.
That was her answer: she had to continue, all the way to Massa. With the hope, but no promise, that Jasim would have thought the same way.
The decision made, she lingered in the scape. Not from any second thoughts, but from a reluctance to give up lightly the opportunity she’d fought so hard to attain. She didn’t know if any member of the Aloof was watching and listening to her, reading her thoughts, examining her desires. Perhaps they were so indifferent and incurious that they’d delegated everything to insentient software, and merely instructed their machines to baby-sit her while she made up her mind where she wanted to go. She still had to make one last attempt to reach them, or she would never die in peace.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe you’ve watched us for the last million years, and seen that we have nothing to offer you. Maybe our technology is backward, our philosophy naive, our customs bizarre, our manners appalling. If that’s true, though, if we’re so far beneath you, you could at least point us in the right direction. Offer us some kind of argument as to why we should change.”
Silence.
Leila said, “All right. Forgive my impertinence. I have to tell you honestly, though, that we won’t be the last to bother you. The Amalgam is full of people who will keep trying to find ways to reach you. This is going to go on for another million years, until we believe that we understand you. If that offends you, don’t judge us too harshly. We can’t help it. It’s who we are.”
She closed her eyes, trying to assure herself that there was nothing she’d regret having left unsaid.
“Thank you for granting us safe passage,” she added, “if that’s what you’re offering. I hope my people can return the favor one day, if there’s anywhere you want to go.”
She opened her eyes and sought out her destination: deeper into the network, on toward the core.
10
The mountains outside the town of Astraahat started with a gentle slope that promised an easy journey, but gradually grew steeper. Similarly, the vegetation was low and sparse in the foothills, but became steadily thicker and taller the higher up the slope you went.
Jasim said, “Enough.” He stopped and leaned on his climbing stick.
“One more hour?” Leila pleaded.
He considered this. “Half an hour resting, then half an hour walking?”
“One hour resting, then one hour walking.”
He laughed wearily. “All right. One of each.”
The two of them hacked away at the undergrowth until there was a place to sit.
Jasim poured water from the canteen into her hands, and she splashed her face clean.
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar wildlife. Under the forest canopy it was almost twilight, and when Leila looked up into the small patch of sky above them she could see the stars of the bulge, like tiny, pale, translucent beads.
At times it felt like a dream, but the experience never really left her. The Aloof had woken her at every node, shown her the view, given her a choice. She had seen a thousand spectacles, from one side of the core to the other: cannibalistic novas, dazzling clusters of newborn stars, twin white dwarfs on the verge of collision. She had seen the black hole at the galaxy’s center, its accretion disk glowing with X-rays, slowly tearing stars apart.
It might have been an elaborate lie, a plausible simulation, but every detail accessible from disk-based observatories confirmed what she had witnessed. If anything had been changed, or hidden from her, it must have been small. Perhaps the artifacts of the Aloof themselves had been painted out of the view, though Leila thought it was just as likely that the marks they’d left on their territory were so subtle, anyway, that there’d been nothing to conceal.
Jasim said sharply, “Where are you?”
She lowered her gaze and replied mildly, “I’m here, with you. I’m just remembering.”