Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan Page B

countered, “What's so bad about Slowdown? It doesn't hurt anyone.”
    Mariama was venomous. “While every other civilized planet is flowering into something new, we do nothing and go nowhere, ten thousand times more ponderously than before.”
    “Lots of other planets do Slowdown.”
    “Not civilized ones.”
    Tchicaya fell silent. A faint star had appeared directly above him, even before the sun had fully set.
    He said, “So you'll leave one day? For good?” The question produced an odd, tight sensation in his windpipe. He'd never lost synch with anyone; he couldn't imagine that kind of unbridgeable separation.
    “No.”
    He turned to her, surprised. She said, “I plan to whip the whole planet into life, instead. Anything less would just be selfish, wouldn't it?”

    The machinery inside the power station was robust and intelligent enough to defend itself, and to safeguard any visitors, without the need for high fences or locked doors. Tchicaya remembered the place as being noisier the last time he'd explored it, but Slowdown had reduced the flow of waste from the town to an inaudible trickle. Energy was extracted from the waste by an enzyme-driven electrochemical process that he was yet to study in detail; fortunately, some of the energy ended up as heat, and even the diminished output was enough to make the building habitable at night. Mariama had made a nest of blankets right up against the coolant pipes that led to the radiator fins on the roof.
    Tchicaya sniffed the air cautiously, but there was no trace of the usual offensive odor, maybe because there was not only less sewage passing through, but the undiminished runoff from the fields was diluting it. There was a strange, boiled-vegetable smell to the place, but it was nothing he couldn't tolerate.
    Mariama had stockpiled cans of food, self-heating rations of the kind people took into the untouched, frozen lands to the south. It must have taken her a while to build up the collection without attracting suspicion. She handed him a can, and he pressed the tab to start it heating.
    “How long were you planning this?” he asked.
    “A bit more than a year.”
    “That's before I even knew Erdal would be traveling.”
    “Me too. I just wanted to be prepared, whenever it happened.”
    Tchicaya was impressed, and a little daunted. It was one thing to watch the sun and the stars racing around the sky, and think: what if I could be as fast as them ? Plotting to break out of Slowdown before she'd even experienced it required an entirely different line of thought.
    “What were you doing? Before you came to my house?”
    She shrugged. “Just exploring. Messing about. Being careful not to wake the drones.”
    Tchicaya felt his face harden at this contemptuous phrase, but then he wondered how much allowance to make for the fact that she was always striving to provoke him. The calculations became so difficult at times, it drove him mad. He wanted the two of them to be straightforward with each other, but he doubted that would ever be her style. And he didn't want her to be different, he didn't want her to change.
    He opened the can and hunched over his meal, unsure what his face was betraying.
    After they'd eaten, they switched off the lamp and lay beneath the blankets, huddled together. Tchicaya was self-conscious at first, as if the contented glow he felt at the warmth of her body against his was at risk of turning into something more complicated, but he knew that it was still physically impossible for anything sexual to happen between them. The prospect of that guarantee eventually failing disturbed him, but it couldn't vanish overnight.
    Mariama said, “Two weeks isn't long enough. You need to walk out of your room a centimeter taller: just enough to make your parents feel something is wrong, without being able to put their finger on it.”
    “Go to sleep.”
    “Or learn something you didn't know. Amaze them with your erudition.”
    “Now you're just mocking