The half-stranger stood before him. “How are you?”
Tchicaya smiled. “I’m fine. You seem to have put on weight.”
Yann shrugged apologetically. “Conforming to local fashions. I still think it’s an absurdity: boosting millions of tonnes of furniture into a trajectory like this, when a few hundred kilograms of instrumentation and Qusps could have achieved as much. But given that they’ve gone ahead and done it anyway, and given that most of the people here are wearing flesh, I have to take account of that. I need to be in the thick of things, or there’s no point being here at all.”
“That makes sense,” Tchicaya conceded. He hated the idea of anyone being forced out of their preferred mode, but the political realities were undeniable.
If the optimists were right, and the border’s current velocity was the highest it would ever be, the simplest way to avoid the threat would be to flee from it. If your whole world already consisted of compact, robust hardware that was designed to function in interstellar space, the prospect of engineering in the necessary shielding against relativistic collisions with gas and dust, accelerating to a suitable velocity — half c plus a chosen safety margin — then simply coasting away from the danger, was not unthinkable at all. A dozen acorporeal communities, and countless scattered individuals, had already done that.
For people accustomed to dwelling on a planetary surface, though, the notion of entering a permanent state of flight was more likely to be horrifying. So far, the Mimosan vacuum had swallowed more than two thousand inhabited systems, and while most of the planet-hopping refugees were willing to transmit themselves at lightspeed from point to point, in less than two millennia all the old, established colony worlds that had taken them in would themselves be gone. In principle, the process could be prolonged indefinitely: new, habitable planets could be prepared in advance by high-velocity spore packages, with people following close behind. Each temporary home would last a little longer than the one before, as the border was outpaced. People might even grow accustomed to the fact that every world they set foot upon would be obliterated, not in billions of years, but in a few thousand. It would take six times as long as recorded history before the entire Milky Way was lost, and by then, the gulf between neighboring galaxies might seem less daunting.
Even assuming a watertight proof, though, that the border would not speed up without warning and turn that whole scenario into a rosy-hued fantasy, exile was not a fate to be accepted lightly. If it was physically possible to turn back the novovacuum — to seed its destruction, the way the Mimosans had seeded its creation — Tchicaya’s fellow embodied had by far the greatest stake in making that happen. It was not going to be easy to persuade them that they shouldn’t try.
Yann said, “You’ve just come from Pachner?”
Tchicaya nodded. He was pleased to have met up with Yann, but he was having trouble maintaining eye contact; the spinning sky kept drawing his gaze. “When did you get here?” He’d lost track of Yann’s recent movements; communication between interstellar travelers had always been difficult, with line-of-sight time lags and transit insentience, but having to route signals around a constantly growing obstacle had added a further level of delays and fragmentation.
“Almost nine years ago.”
“Ha! And there I was thinking you were the one out of your element.”
Yann took a moment to interpret this. “You’ve never been in space before?”
“No.”
“Not even planetary orbit?” He sounded incredulous.
Tchicaya was annoyed; it was a bit rich for a former acorporeal to put such stock in where he had or hadn’t been, in the flesh. “Why would I have been in space? Vacuum never used to be much of an attraction.”
Yann smiled. “Do you want to take the grand tour, while I fill you in?”
“Definitely.” Everything Tchicaya had heard about the state of play on the Rindler was out of date — though not by the full sixty years that his thirty-year journey would normally have implied. He did a quick calculation before confirming the result with the ship: fifty-two years had elapsed here, since the last bulletin that he’d received on Pachner had been sent.
Stairs led down from the observation deck to a walkway. The ship was made up of sixteen separate modules arranged in a ring; the tethers joining them to the hub were not traversable, but there were umbilicals linking adjacent modules. Once they’d left the shelter of the deck behind, Tchicaya could see the engines sitting at the hub as dark outlines clustered at the zenith. They were unlikely to be used again for some time; if the border suddenly accelerated, it would probably move too fast for the Rindler to escape, and everyone onboard would evacuate the way they’d arrived: as data. Even if the ship was destroyed without warning, though, most people would only lose a few hours' memories. Tchicaya had instructed his Qusp to transmit daily backups, and no doubt Yann was doing something similar, having escaped from the Mimosan vacuum once already that way.
The view from the narrow walkway was disorienting; without an expanse of deck imposing a visual horizon, the rim of the border became the most compelling cue. Tchicaya began to feel as if he was walking inside a huge horizontal centrifuge, hovering an indeterminate distance above an ocean shrouded in white fog. Any attempt to replace this mildly strange hypothesis with the idea that he was actually keeping pace with a shock wave six hundred light-years wide did nothing to improve his steadiness.
“The factions have names now,” Yann began.
Tchicaya groaned. “That’s a bad sign. There’s nothing worse than a label, to cement people’s loyalties.”
“And nothing worse than loyalties cementing while we’re still in the minority. We’re Yielders, they’re Preservationists.”
“Yielders? Whose idea was that?”
“I don’t know. These things just seem to crystallize out of the vacuum.”
“With a little seeding from the spin doctors. I suppose it’s a step up from being Suicidal Deviants, or Defeatist Traitors.”
“Oh, those terms are still widely used, informally.”
Without warning, Tchicaya’s legs buckled. He knelt on the walkway and closed his eyes. He said, “It’s all right. Just give me a second.”
Yann suggested mildly, “If the view’s that unsettling, why not paste something over it?”
Tchicaya scowled. His vestibular system wanted him to curl up on the ground, block out all the contradictory visual signals, and wait for normality to be restored. He spread his arms slightly, reassuring himself that he was prepared to take action to recover his balance at short notice. Then he opened his eyes and rose to his feet. He took a few deep breaths, then started walking again.
“Both stances remain purely theoretical,” Yann continued. “The Preservationists are no more prepared to erase the Mimosan vacuum than we are to adapt to it. But the team working on the Planck worms has just attracted a fresh batch of recruits, and they’re running experiments all the time. If it ever does come down to a technological race, it’s sure to be a close one.”
Tchicaya contemplated this prospect glumly. “Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn’t that the definition of barbarism?” They’d reached the stairs that led up to the deck of the next module. He gripped the rails and ascended shakily, relieved to be surrounded by the clutter of ordinary objects.
They emerged at the edge of a garden, engineered in a style Tchicaya hadn’t seen before. Stems coiled in elaborate helices, sprouting leaves tiled with hexagonal structures that glinted like compound eyes. According to the ship, the plants had been designed to thrive in the constant borderlight, though it was hard to see how that could have required some of their more exotic features. Still, the embellishments did not seem overdone here. Purebred roses or orchids would have been cloyingly nostalgic in the middle of interstellar space.