Mariama shook her head. “All right, forget Pachner. But if you’re so sure of your position now, why don’t you come with me? No one’s going to lynch you.”
“It would be inflammatory. What makes you think Kadir wants the company of people who disagree with him?”
“There’s an open invitation,” she protested. “Check with the ship if you don’t believe me.”
She was right. Tchicaya’s Mediator had filtered it out automatically; he’d told it to classify general announcements by known factional allegiances, to keep him from being distracted, and depressed, by news of events where Yielders were unlikely to be welcome.
“I’m tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”
“You’re pathetic.” Mariama walked away without another word.
Tchicaya called after her, “All right! I’ll come with you!” She didn’t stop. He ran to catch up with her.
They walked in silence for a while, then Tchicaya said, “This whole iron curtain thing is insane. Within a decade, we’ll find a way to pin some state to the border that will freeze it in place. If we worked on it together, it would take half as long.”
Mariama regarded him coolly. “If we froze it, you think that would be enough?”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to satisfy either side.”
“Ideally, I still want to cross through,” Tchicaya admitted. “We shouldn’t have to flee from this, or annihilate it. We should be able to adapt. If the ocean comes a few meters inshore, you retreat. A few kilometers, you build a dike. A few thousand…you learn to live in boats. But if freezing the border turns out to be possible, and it rules out exploration, I’d just have to accept that.”
Mariama was skeptical. “And you’d take no risks at all, from that moment on? You’d do absolutely nothing that had a chance of unfreezing it? You’d let it sit there for a hundred thousand years, undisturbed, and you wouldn’t be tempted in the least?”
“Oh, I see. That’s the logic that dictates the use of Planck worms? If you don’t wipe the whole thing out of existence, some Yielder is certain to come along eventually, and unplug the dike.”
Mariama didn’t reply. They entered the module where the wake was being held, and walked up the stairs.
On the map Tchicaya consulted, Kadir’s cabin had been merged with a dozen of his neighbors', producing a roughly circular room. Ahead of him, the entrance was wide open, and music wafted out into the corridor.
Mariama’s clothes changed as they approached the doorway, forming a pattern of woven bands broken up by ellipses, in earthen colors. “You look good in that,” Tchicaya observed. The comment elicited a reluctant flicker of warmth in her eyes, and she knew him too well to mistake it for insincere flattery, but she walked on into the room without a word. He steeled himself, and followed her.
There was quite a crowd inside, talking, eating, a few people dancing. Tchicaya could see no other Yielders, but he resisted the urge to ask his Mediator to hunt for friendly signatures.
Images of Zapata shone from the walls. The planet from space; aerial views of towns, mountains, and rivers. Tchicaya had spent forty years on Zapata, moving from continent to continent, never really settling down long enough to make close friends.
The life the settlers had unleashed on the sterile planet, though ultimately derived from natural terrestrial genomes, had been a little wilder and stranger than most. There were lithe winged cats in some of the jungles that could tear out your throat. Toward the end of his stay, it had been discovered that in one small, isolated town, deliberate exposure to harm by these creatures had become a “rite of passage” into adulthood — as if adolescence itself was insufficiently traumatic. The partially eaten bodies could generally be repaired, and at worst the Qusp could always be tracked down and recovered from the animal’s stomach, so the ritual fell short of local death, but as far as Tchicaya was concerned, that only made it more barbaric. Better to suffer memory loss and discontinuity than the experience of having your jugular gnawed open — and better anything than the company of people who’d decided that this was the definition of maturity.
Children in the town who declined to participate had been ostracized, but once the practice came to light, the wider society of Zapata had intervened — with a concerted effort to improve transport and communication links. After a few years of heightened exposure to the possibility of simply walking away from the town and its self-appointed cultural guardians, no one was interested in being bullied into conformity anymore.
It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn’t need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently.
Mariama waved a small yellow fruit at him, half-bitten. “Try one of these. They’re delicious.”
“Good grief. Where do you think he grew them?”
“In the garden. Lots of people have set up plots for food. You have to tweak the genomes to get photosynthesis to work in the borderlight, but that’s old hat, you just copy those ugly things the original builders put in.”
“I must have walked past without even noticing.”
“They’re quite far back from the path. Are you going to try one?”
Tchicaya shook his head. “I’ve tasted them before. There can’t be many; I’m not going to hog them.”
Mariama turned to address Kadir, who’d appeared before them like a perfect host. She said, “Tchicaya was just telling me that he’d already tasted quetzal-fruit.”
Kadir said, “You’ve visited Zapata?” He had probably intended to greet them politely then move on, but this claim could not be left unexamined.
“Yes.” Tchicaya braced himself for a barrage of insults about travelers and other parasites.
“How long ago?”
“About nine hundred years.”
“Where did you go?”
“All over.” Kadir waited expectantly, so Tchicaya reeled off a list of towns.
When he’d finished, Kadir said, “I was born in Suarez, but I left when I was twenty. I never managed to get back. How long were you there?”
Tchicaya had been reorganizing his memories as they spoke, dragging the whole period upward in his association hierarchy. “Less than a year.”
Kadir smiled. “That’s longer than most visitors stay. What was the attraction?”
“I don’t know. It was a quiet spot, I was tired of moving about. The landscape wasn’t spectacular, but from the house where I stayed you could see the top of the mountains in the distance.”
“That slate-gray color, against the sky in the morning?”
“Yeah. Completely different at sunset, though. Almost pink. I could never work that out.” He’d raised the memories so high that it might have been yesterday. He could smell the dust and the pollen, he could feel the heat of the evening.
Kadir said, “I think I know where you were. Not the house, it wasn’t built when I was there, but — do you remember the creek, north of the main road?”
“Yes. I was close to it. A few minutes' walk.”
Kadir’s face lit up. “That’s amazing! It was still there? We used to go swimming in that creek. My whole family. All through summer, around dusk. Did you swim in it?”
“Yes.” At the same time, the same season. Watching the stars come out, lying on his back in the cool water.