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.”
When they’d woken on Massa, surrounded by delirious, cheering Eavesdroppers, they’d been asked: What happened in there? What did you see? Leila didn’t know why she’d kept her mouth shut and turned to her husband before replying, instead of letting every detail come tumbling out immediately. Perhaps she just hadn’t known where to begin.
For whatever reason, it was Jasim who had answered first. “Nothing. We stepped through the gate on Tassef, and now here we are. On the other side of the bulge.”
For almost a month, she’d flatly refused to believe him. Nothing? You saw nothing? It had to be a lie, a joke. It had to be some kind of revenge.
That was not in his nature, and she knew it. Still, she’d clung to that explanation for as long as she could, until it became impossible to believe any longer, and she’d asked for his forgiveness.
Six months later, another traveler had spilled out of the bulge. One of the die-hard Listening Party pilgrims had followed in their wake and taken the short cut. Like Jasim, this heptapod had seen nothing, experienced nothing.
Leila had struggled to imagine why she might have been singled out. So much for her theory that the Aloof felt morally obliged to check that each passenger on their network knew what they were doing, unless they’d decided that her actions were enough to demonstrate that intruders from the disk, considered generically, were making an informed choice. Could just one sample of a working, conscious version of their neighbors really be enough for them to conclude that they understood everything they needed to know? Could this capriciousness, instead, have been part of a strategy to lure in more visitors, with the enticing possibility that each one might, with luck, witness something far beyond all those who’d preceded them? Or had it been part of a scheme to discourage intruders by clouding the experience with uncertainty? The simplest act of discouragement would have been to discard all unwelcome transmissions, and the most effective incentive would have been to offer a few plain words of welcome, but then, the Aloof would not have been the Aloof if they’d followed such reasonable dictates.