Tchicaya’s heart sank. The cabin was divided into two banks of narrow slots, each about a meter wide and half as high. A number of the slots contained inert figures. Rows of handholds between the pigeonholes were apparently intended to assist the occupants in gaining access. Yann followed his gaze and said, “It’s not that hard, once you’re used to it.” He demonstrated, clambering up and sliding into his coffin-sized bunk, the fifth in a stack of eight.
Tchicaya said forlornly, “My embodiment request had the standard clause: if there was no room for me here at full size, the ship was meant to bounce me to the nearest alternative destination. Maybe I’m going to have to start spelling out the meaning of some of those terms.” In four millennia of traveling between planetary surfaces, he’d encountered a wide range of living conditions deemed acceptable by the local people, whether through custom or necessity. On rare occasions, he’d even been provided with deliberately inhospitable accommodation. He’d never seen people squeezed together as tightly as this.
“Mmm.” Yann’s response was noncommittal, as if in retrospect he wasn’t surprised by the complaint, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to him that a newcomer would see the Rindler as cramped. He deftly reversed his insertion maneuver and joined Tchicaya on the deck.
“I’d suggest they ease things by scrapping the garden,” Tchicaya mused, “but given how little difference that would make, they probably should keep it, for sanity’s sake.”
Yann squeezed past him, back into the corridor. Tchicaya trudged after him dejectedly. He’d felt no sense of panic upon waking in the confinement of the crib, but he hadn’t realized he’d soon be moving into something smaller.
He crossed the final walkway with his eyes locked straight ahead, still faltering every ten or fifteen meters when the false horizon became impossible to ignore. He was angry that he was letting these petty tribulations weigh on him. He was lucky: he was used to travel, he was used to change, and he should have been inured to this kind of minor disappointment. Most of the evacuees on the verge of leaving Pachner had lived there all their lives, and change of the kind they were about to confront was something metaphysically foreign to them. Never mind what lay behind the borderlight; those people knew the shape of every rock within a thousand-kilometer radius of their homes, and even if they ended up on a world miraculously similar by any planetologist’s standards, they’d still feel alienated and dispossessed.
As they climbed the stairs, Tchicaya joked, “Let’s head back to the garden. I can sleep in the bushes.” His shoulders were already aching at the thought of having to lie so still. He could modify himself to lose his usual urge to turn over repeatedly as he slept, but the prospect of needing to do that only made him feel claustrophobic in a deeper sense. You could whittle away a hundred little things like that, and not miss any of them individually, but then you woke one day to find that half your memories no longer rang true, every minor joy and hardship drained of its flavor and significance.
“D37, wasn’t it?” Yann asked cheerfully. “That’s left here, then fourth door on the right.” He stopped and let Tchicaya walk past him. “I’ll talk to you again soon about the probe drop, but I’m sure the others won’t object.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Tchicaya raised a hand in farewell.
The doors he passed were all closed, but the fourth recognized him and opened to his presence.
In front of him stood a desk, two chairs, and a set of shelves. He stepped into the room, and saw one, quite spacious, bed. Behind a partition, there was a shower, toilet and basin.
He sprinted after Yann, who started fleeing halfheartedly, then gave up and doubled over with laughter.
“Bastard!” Tchicaya caught up with him, and thumped him on the arm, hard enough to elicit a satisfying yelp.
“Show some cultural sensitivity!” Yann pleaded. “Pain isn’t part of my traditional gestalt.” Which made it unlikely that he’d actually felt any; even among the embodied, it was a shade conservative to let anything short of structural damage register as genuine discomfort.
“Nor is space, apparently.”
Yann shook his head, and tried to appear earnest. “On the contrary. I’ve always had a sophisticated self-and-environment map; us ex-acorporeals just aren’t hung up about its correlations with the physical world. Whatever it looks like to you, what we experience in that crowded cabin is ten orders of magnitude beyond any luxury you’ve ever known.” He said this without a trace of gloating or pomposity. It wasn’t hyperbole, or wishful thinking; it was simply true.
“You know I almost turned around and left the ship?”
Yann snickered, completely unconvinced.
Tchicaya was at a loss for any suitable parting threat, so he just raised his arms in resignation and walked back to his cabin.
Sweeping his gaze around the modest few square meters made him beam like an idiot. It was one-thousandth the size of the house he’d lived in on Pachner, but it was everything he needed.
“Bastard.” He lay down on the bed and thought about revenge.
Chapter 5
The shuttle separated from the Rindler, sending Tchicaya’s stomach into free fall. He watched the docking module retreat, knowing full well that he’d been flung off at a tangent, backward, but so viscerally convinced that he’d fallen straight down that the sight of the module — continuing along its arc of rotation, yet dropping from the zenith in front of him rather than disappearing behind his head — scrambled his sense of balance and direction completely. At first he felt as if he was tumbling backward, which would at least have explained what he was seeing, but when his inner ears failed to confirm the motion, the illusion vanished — only to return a moment later, to take him through the same cycle again. The lurching fits and starts that followed might have made him less queasy if they’d actually been happening; it was the inability to make sense of his perceptions that was disturbing, far more than any direct, physical effect of the lack of gravity.
He began to get his bearings once the whole ship was visible, edge-on. A minute later it had shrunk to a sparse necklace of glass beads, and the newly fixed stars finally crystallized in his mind as cues worth taking seriously. The infinite plane of whiteness on his right might have been a moonlit desert seen through half-closed eyes. He’d once flown a glider high over sand dunes at night, on Peldan, nearly free-falling at times in the thin air. There’d been no moonlight, of course, but the stars had been almost as bright as these.
Yann, sitting beside him, caught his eye. “You okay?”
Tchicaya nodded. “In the scapes you grew up in,” he asked, “was there a vertical?”
“In what sense?”
“I know you said once that you didn’t feel gravity…but was everything laid out and connected like it is on land? Or was it all isotropically three-dimensional — like a zero-gee space habitat, where everything can connect in any direction?”
Yann replied affably, “My earliest memories are of CP4 — that’s a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology’s quite different. But I didn’t really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space — "for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space.”