She felt no discomfort, of course. The Discontinuity left her with numbness where pain or discomfort should sit. Like a fading-down of reality. She toweled herself dry again, trying not to scrape her skin.
Perhaps it should have been expected. Before the reality of Saddle Point teleportation had been demonstrated, there had been those who had doubted whether human minds could ever, even in principle, be downloaded, stored, or transmitted. The way data was stored in a brain was not simple. A human mind appeared to be a process, dynamic, and no static “snapshot,” no matter how sophisticated the technology, could possibly capture its richness. So it was argued.
The fact that the first travelers, including Madeleine, had survived Saddle Point transitions seemed to belie this pessimistic point of view. But perhaps, in the longer term, those doubts had been borne out.
She knew there was talk of treatment for Discontinuity sufferers. Madeleine wasn’t holding her breath: Nobody was putting serious money into the problem. There were only a handful of star travelers, and nobody cared much about them anyhow. And so Madeleine had to wear a constricting biocomp sensor suit that warned her when she’d sat still for too long or when her skin was burned or frozen, and that woke her up in the night to turn her over.
Maybe the Gaijin weren’t affected the same way. Nobody knew.
She stood, naked, at an open window, trying to get cool. It was evening. She looked across kilometers of hilly country, all of it coated by burgeoning life. There was a breeze, lifting loose leaves high enough to cross the balcony. But the breeze served only to push more water-laden air into her face.
The blanket of foliage coating the hills around the launch areas looked etiolated: the leaves yellowed, stunted, the trees sickly and small by comparison with their neighbors farther away. And the leaves at her feet were yellow and black, others holed, as if burned.
She pulled on a loose dress and walked a kilometer to the block containing Ben’s apartment.
She glimpsed Aborigines: her trainees — men, women, and children — passing back and forth in little groups, engaged in their own errands and concerns. They showed no interest in her. They were loose-limbed people, many of them going barefoot, some of the women overweight; they wore loose togas like Ben’s, the cloth worn, dirty, well used. Their faces were round, a paler brown than she had expected, with blunt noses, prominent brows. Many of them wore breathing filters or sunscreen, and their skin was marked by cancer scars.
They were alien to Madeleine, but no more so than most of the people of the year 2131.
Ben welcomed her. He served her a meal: couscous with saffron, chunks of soya, a light local wine.
He told her about his wife. She was called Lena; she was only twenty, a decade younger than Ben. She was in orbit, working on the big emigrant transports Nemoto was assembling. Ben hadn’t seen her for months.
Madeleine felt easy with Ben. He even took care with the words he used. Language drift seemed remarkably rapid; less than a century out of her time, even if she was familiar with a word, she couldn’t always recognize its pronunciation, and she had learned it wasn’t safe to assume she knew its modern usage. But Ben made sure that she understood.
“It’s strange finding Aborigines here,” Madeleine said. “So far from home.”
“Not so strange. After all, East Guiana is another colonial relic. The French wanted to follow the example of the British in Australia, by peopling East Guiana with convicts.” He grinned, his teeth white and young, a contrast in Madeleine’s mind to the ruined mouth of Nemoto. “Anyhow,” he said, “now we can escape on the fizzers.” He mimed a rocket launch with two hands clasped as in prayer. “Whoosh.”
“Ben — why Triton? I know Nemoto has her own objectives. But for you…”
“Nemoto’s offer was the only one we had. We have nowhere else to go. But perhaps we would follow her anyway. Nemoto is marginalized, her ideas ridiculed — most vigorously by friends of the Gaijin. But she is right, on the deepest of levels. We used to think we were alone in a primordial universe. Suddenly we find ourselves in a dangerous, crowded universe littered with ruins. There was fear and deep anger at the discovery of the violation of Venus. It might have been a sister world to Earth — or Earth might have been the victim. With time, the outrage faded, but we remembered — we, a people who have been dispossessed already.”
More leaves blew in from a darkening sky, broken, damaged by rocket exhaust.
Ben told her he came from central Australia, born into a group called the Yolgnu. “When I was a boy my family lived by a riverbank, living in the old way. But the authorities, the white people, came and moved us to a place called Framlingham. Just a row of shacks and tin houses. Then, when I was eight years old, more white men took me away to an orphanage. The men were from the Aboriginal Protection Board. When they thought I was civilized enough, they sent me to foster parents in Melbourne. White people, called Nash. They were rich and kind. You see, it was the policy of the government to solve their Aboriginal problem once and for all, by making me white.”
All of this stunned her, embarrassed her. “You must hate them,” she said.
He smiled. “This was merely a part of their shared history. They were always frightened, first of the Japanese, then of Indonesians and Chinese, flowing down from the north, with their eyes on Australia’s empty spaces, its huge mineral deposits. Now perhaps they fear the Gaijin, come to take their land. And each time they exorcise their fears using us. I do not hate them. I understand them.”
To her surprise, he turned out to hold a doctorate in black-hole physics. But he had been drawn back to Framlingham, as had others of his generation. Slowly they had constructed a dream of a new life. Almost all of the people escaping to Triton were from Framlingham, he said. “It was a wrench to leave the old lands. But we will find new lands, make our own world.”
Ben served her sambuca, an Italian liqueur: a new craze, it seemed. Sambuca was clear, aniseed flavored. Ben floated Brazilian coffee beans in her glass and set it alight. The alcohol burned blue in the fading light, cupped in the open space above the liquid, and the coffee beans hissed and popped. The flames were to release the oils from the beans, Ben said, and infuse the drink with the flavor of the coffee.
He doused the flames and took careful sips from her glass, testing its temperature for her so that Madeleine would not burn her lips. The flavor of the hot liquid was strong, sharp enough to push at the boundary of her Discontinuity.
They sat under the darkling sky, and the stars came out.
Ben pointed out constellations for her, and he traced other features of the celestial sphere for her, the geography of the sky.
There was the celestial equator, an invisible line that was a projection of Earth’s equator on the sky. From here, of course, the equator passed right over their heads. Lights moved along that line, silent, smoothly traversing, like strangely orderly fireflies. They were orbital structures: factories, dwellings, even hotels. Many of them were Chinese, Ben told her; Chinese corporations had built up a close working relationship with the Gaijin. Then he distracted her with another invisible line called the ecliptic. The ecliptic was the equator of the Solar System, the line the planets traced out. It was different from the Earth’s equator, because Earth’s axis was tipped over through twenty-three degrees or so.
…Rather, the ecliptic used to be invisible. Now, Madeleine found, it was marked by a fine row of new stars, medium bright, some glowing white but others a deeper yellow to orange. It was like a row of street lamps.