He looked up at the sky again. A million stars, a million dead worlds. Only four planets had ever held anything different. His hunch was sure to be disproved, but the prospect only made him smile. There were some things so large and outlandish that you could only wish for them with your tongue in your cheek, and to be disappointed when they failed to appear would be like throwing a tantrum and cursing the world because the sun failed to rise at your beck and call.
He made his way to the edge of the roof, his breath frosting in front of him.
As he was climbing down the drainpipe, his leg began to throb. His body had managed to close the wound, and now it was warning him not to break the temporary seal of collagen it had woven across the gap in his skin. As he adjusted his legs to shift the pressure away from the cut, Tchicaya made a decision: he wanted to remember this night, he wanted it to leave a mark. He instructed his Exoself never to permit the cells of his skin to grow back in their normal pattern across the wound. For the first time, he would let the world scar him.
“Why do we need to borrow your parents' ladder?”
Tchicaya waved Mariama back from the toolshed. “I’m hoping it won’t trigger any alarms. If I tried to borrow someone else’s, that might look like I was stealing.” He didn’t want her taking part in the act, though. That the house had permitted her to enter uninvited, and even borrow his clothes without his permission, proved that it was prepared to show some tolerance toward his friends. His parents had never been obsessed with safeguarding their possessions, so it was not surprising that they hadn’t programmed any paranoid, hair-trigger responses. He didn’t want to push his luck, though.
When he emerged from the shed, Mariama said, “Yes, but what do we need it for? What’s so interesting, up on the roof?”
Tchicaya swung the ladder toward her, making her jump back. “Probably nothing.” He had planned to show her the film on the coolant pipes inside the building when she woke that morning, but by daylight the sight had been so drab and uninspiring that he’d changed his mind; she’d probably looked herself, and seen nothing but a mild discoloration. She’d laugh at his naiveté when he finally described his experiment, but he didn’t care. “We’ll find out tonight.”
Mariama was puzzled. “What’s to stop me going up there before nightfall?”
Tchicaya tightened his grip on the ladder, but even if he could keep it from her, she wouldn’t need it.
He said, “Nothing. I’m asking you to wait, that’s all.”
This answer seemed to please her. She smiled back at him sunnily.
“Then I’ll wait.”
The ladder couldn’t stretch to the full height of the roof, and Tchicaya had to argue with it before it would extend itself at all.
“It’s not safe,” the ladder wailed.
“I’ve already been up there once, without any help from you,” he protested. He showed it his new pink scar. “I’ll climb up the drainpipe again if I have to. You can either make this as safe as possible, or you can stay on the ground and be completely useless.”
The ladder gave in. Tchicaya gripped the bottom end firmly while a wave of deformation swept along the length of the device. As the side rails stretched, material was redistributed into new rungs. In its final shape, paper-thin, the ladder was still a meter too short to touch the edge of the roof, but it would bring it within reach.
Mariama said, “After you.”
Tchicaya had planned to follow her up, so he’d have a chance to catch her if she slipped, but he’d been assuming that she’d demand to go first anyway, so he had no argument prepared. He mounted the ladder and began to ascend. He didn’t need to look down to know when she’d joined him; he could feel the structure vibrating with a second load.
If she did fall and injure herself, she could retreat at will into the painless world of her Qusp. An accident would mean discovery and shame, but no great suffering. Yet Tchicaya’s hands shook at the thought of it, and he could not imagine feeling differently. The structure of his mind had been passed down with only a few small modifications from the original human form, shaped by evolution in the Age of Death, leaving him with the choice between embracing its impulses in all their absurdity — like ancient figures of speech whose literal meaning bore no resemblance to anything people still did — or struggling to invent a whole new vocabulary to replace them. If you cared about someone, what could replace the sick feeling of the misery you’d feel if they came to harm? The bodiless, he knew, had found their own, varied answers, but the idea that he might one day do the same made him giddy.
He peered down.
Mariama said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
The long climb was far easier than it had been the night before, but Tchicaya found the act of reaching back to grab hold of the gutter a lot more disconcerting while perched on the top rung of the ladder than when he’d gripped the drainpipe firmly with his legs. He hoisted himself up and clambered onto the roof, then moved away from the edge quickly so he wouldn’t be in Mariama’s way. Seconds later, she was beside him.
“We should have used ropes, and grappling hooks,” she said. “Like they do on mountains.”
“I never thought of that,” Tchicaya admitted.
“I was joking.”
“It might have been fun, though.” It might have been safer.
“Are you going to let me in on the big secret now?”
Tchicaya feigned indifference. “I did warn you: there’s probably nothing to see.” He aimed the lamp’s beam across the roof, but deliberately kept it low. “This way.”
They crossed the tiles together in silence. When they reached the radiator, Tchicaya showed her the patch of iridescent film he’d discovered the night before.
Mariama examined it. Tchicaya had half-expected her to identify the substance immediately, puncturing his fantasy with a far simpler explanation, but she was as baffled as he was. When he showed her how the film responded to the lamplight, she said, “Is that why you thought there’d be nothing here? You expected the sunlight to destroy it?”
“No. This surface ought to be in the shade all day.”
“It would still get some light from the sky, though.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “But if it was there last night, it either had to be able to survive that much indirect sunlight, or it had to have formed after sunset, at least once. So why wouldn’t it be here again?”
Mariama nodded patiently. “All right. So what were you warning me not to expect?”
Tchicaya’s throat tightened. “I scraped some off, and put it on another fin. One that should have been about equally shaded. To see if it would…” He couldn’t say the word.
“To see if it would grow?”
He nodded stupidly.
Mariama whooped with delight. “Where!” She clutched at the lamp, but when he held on to it she didn’t fight him for it. Instead, she took hold of his arm and said, “Will you show me? Please?”
They stumbled around the radiator, helping each other stay balanced. Tchicaya told himself he didn’t care what they found; when there turned out to be nothing, they could laugh at his grandiose delusions together.
“This is the one.” He aimed the lamp into the wedge-shaped space between the fins, but he couldn’t hold it still. “Do you see anything?”
Mariama put an arm around him, steadying his whole body to steady the lamp.
There was a patch of the film in front of them, an oval about the size of his hand, at exactly the height where he would have scraped the knife clean.