Mariama exhaled heavily. “I think that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever been a part of.” She held up her hands and inspected them. “You know, I half-expected to feel the amplitude come flooding into me. Moving from spine to fingertips, of course.”
Tchicaya laughed, grateful that she’d found a way to break the tension. “We should have programmed in an oscillating factor, for that extra existential thrill.” Not long after the Qusp had been developed, people had played around with all manner of quantum novelties, putting themselves into intentionally prolonged superpositions inside their skulls. But there was nothing even mildly strange to report about this: from the inside, each part of the state vector that described your mind experiencing something definite simply had that one, definite experience. Shuffling amplitude back and forth between two alternatives before finally letting one of them interact with the world could not be “sensed” as some kind of ontological ebb and flow.
As the shielding was removed from the hull, the bright expanse of vendeks reappeared beneath them. The inner workings of the ship still needed to be protected, just like the interior of any Qusp, but they could now live with the equivalent of sunlight on their faces. Sunlight, or a swarm of gnats. The Sarumpaet would keep sending out probes, but in this region some information would come to them for free.
“What now?” Mariama asked.
Tchicaya looked up at the bottom of the honeycomb; it appeared as black and fathomless here as it had from the other side. It would hold back the Planck worms for a while, but it would be hoping for too much to assume that they’d all dash lemminglike into oblivion. “We need to find out how deep this region goes, and exactly what it contains. Maybe we can build some kind of firebreak here, something that will stop the Planck worms once and for all.”
They descended through the Bright as fast as they could, but their progress was erratic. The number of different vendeks here was thousands of times greater than in any cell of the honeycomb, and though there were no abrupt transitions, the environment was constantly changing. Currents of different physics flowed around them as the vendeks intermingled in new proportions and combinations. Umrao had largely anticipated the structures in the honeycomb, but these strange tides would probably have been too complex to show up in his simulations. Tchicaya could not decide if this place would be more hostile or more amenable to higher forms of life: the vastly greater diversity of the vendeks made it seem richer, but the honeycomb cells had offered a kind of stability that was entirely absent here.
The scape showed nothing beneath the ship but a distant haze, constantly retreating. The information-bearing vendeks — which Mariama dubbed sprites — seemed to pass intact through all the changing conditions, but they were refracted and scattered to varying degrees, so the visibility they provided was limited. The Sarumpaet's artificial probes became lost in the currents even sooner; beyond about half a micron, only a tiny fraction managed to return.
It was impossible to guess how deep this region might be. Though the border was advancing through the near side relentlessly at half the speed of light, the precise meaning of this for the far side remained unclear. Viewed from either side, the border itself had to be expanding in a consistent fashion, but that left open the question of whether all, or most, structures in the far side sat motionless while the edge of their universe rocketed away from them, or whether the relationship was more like that of the cosmic expansion of the near side, where relative velocities grew slowly with distance. The honeycomb was certainly clinging to the border, but that was not a good enough reason to believe that everything else in the far side would be following close behind. Sweeping principles of homogeneity were wishful thining here.
There was something deeply restful about moving through the Bright. With the scape’s fake gravity insulating them from the ship’s actual, bumpy passage, the Sarumpaet might have been a glass gondola hanging from an invisible hot air balloon, drifting through a planetary atmosphere after a volcanic eruption had shrouded the world in dust. Although there was nothing to see but the shimmering of the sprites, Tchicaya resisted the lure of Slowdown, and instead of retreating into virtual landscapes from their memories, they sat and talked about their travels. Mariama described the renaissance on Har’El, the excitement of the changes that had percolated up from nowhere. Tchicaya told her more about Pachner, and the similar vitality he’d seen at the approach of the border.
They were beyond arguing, beyond accusing, beyond holding up each other’s earlier ideals as some standard against which they’d fallen. They had seen different things, lived different lives, and they had allowed it to change them. All they could do now was keep on climbing Schild’s ladder.
Five tranquil days into the Bright, just as Tchicaya was beginning to fear that they risked being lulled into an irreversible torpor, they spotted a small, translucent structure drifting by at a leisurely pace. The sprites that the object modified and deflected reached them long before the ship’s probes could journey out to form their own impression, and for nearly an hour it was not at all clear that this was anything more than an unusually stable and localized feature of the shifting currents. The sprite-image looked like an eddy of some kind, and if no circulating winds could be detected brushing across the Sarumpaet as it approached, the rules governing vendek flows didn’t bear much resemblance to fluid dynamics.
Once they were close enough, the probes gave a more detailed picture. There were veins and pockets of vendeks inside the eddy that were like nothing they’d seen floating free here. Some of the mixes were similar to honeycomb populations; others were different again.
They tracked the thing for hours, and watched it negotiate the currents. As the free vendeks flowed over it and through it, the interior structures deformed wildly; these were not the kind of breezes that could stir a few leaves, they were shifts in the fundamental dynamic laws. Some species of interior vendeks died before their eyes; others seemed to be leached out, carried off into the wind. It was like witnessing an animal being sandblasted with bacteria and assorted foreign cells, fighting off some, incorporating others, surrendering whole lineages of its own. Twisting and reeling beneath the onslaught, but all the while continuing to function.
After eight hours of watching these feats of persistence, with neither of them willing to put it into words, Mariama finally declared, “This has to be alive. This is our first xennobe.”
Tchicaya agreed. “What do you want to call it?”
“I named the sprites,” she said. “It’s your turn.”
The internal structures that the probe revealed looked like knots of offal caught in a tornado, but not many creatures were beautiful to behold once you dug that deep. The sprites' gentler scrutiny gave an impression of something woven from the winds.
“An airflower.”
Mariama was amused, but she didn’t object. If the Bright was not actually much like air, nor did anything here lie within reach of one-word descriptions in near-side language.
They continued to follow the airflower, though it was drifting upward, back toward the honeycomb. The toolkit ventured no opinion on the question of whether or not this system was alive, but its observations had already yielded dozens of new methods for easing the Sarumpaet's way through the currents of the Bright.
“Could it be sentient?” Mariama wondered. The airflower had shown no obvious reaction to their presence, but it wasn’t actively probing its environment, and the ship was a fraction of its size. The tiny distortion in the sprite flow around the Sarumpaet's hull would barely be distinguishable from the background shimmer.