Authors: Greg Egan
Mariama tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the door. “Come on!” Her expression made a joke of it, but she couldn't disguise the note of genuine impatience. They were like lightning now, their least purposeful meanderings a dazzling feat in everyone else's eyes, but that still wasn't fast enough.
“Not that way.” He gestured at the window.
Mariama said accusingly, “You're afraid to walk past them.”
“Of course.” Tchicaya gazed back at her calmly. It was perfectly reasonable not to want to be discovered, and however skillful she was at manipulating him, he wasn't going to be made ashamed of every last instinct of his own. “It's safer to use the window. So we'll use the window.”
Mariama managed to look both amused and martyred, but she didn't argue. Tchicaya climbed out, then she followed him, carefully pulling the hinged pane closed behind her. He was puzzled for a moment; no one was going to notice an open window in the short time they'd be gone. But in two weeks, the night frosts would have left an indelible mark on some of his more fragile possessions.
As they crossed the garden, he said, “Don't you go home to sleep?”
“No. I've set up camp in the power station. All my food's there.” She turned to face him, and Tchicaya was sure she was on the verge of demanding that he go back to the house to pilfer some supplies of his own, but then she said, “You can share it. I've got plenty.”
The bright afternoon was eerily quiet, though Tchicaya doubted that he would have been unsettled if he'd heard no other voices for a minute, or an hour, on an ordinary day. As they stepped onto the road, he spotted two other pedestrians in the distance. During Slowdown, his Exoself had not only reprogrammed his own gait, it had tweaked his expectations of other people's appearance: moving with both feet constantly on the ground, positioning the arms to maximize stability, had looked as normal as it had felt. With his old notions of bodily dynamics restored, the pedestrians appeared, not merely frozen, but cowed and timid, as if they expected an earthquake at any moment.
He looked back at his house, quickly lowering his eyes from the windows to inspect the garden. Wind and rain could shift soil and pebbles into unwanted places on a time scale of decades, but the plants were engineered to herd those unruly elements; he'd watched the process with his own eyes. Out in the fields, the crops would be tending themselves, collectively arranging whatever changes they needed in irrigation and drainage, glorying in the strange seasons of unharvested bounty.
Tchicaya said, “How did you find the code?” It was the first Slowdown for both of them; she couldn't have stored it on a previous occasion.
Mariama replied casually, “It's not a big secret. It's not buried deep, or encrypted. Don't you ever examine your Exoself? Take apart the software?”
Tchicaya shrugged. He'd never even dream of tinkering with things on that level: his Exoself, his Mediator. Next thing you were probing the working of your own Qusp, dissecting your own mind. He said, “I only take things apart if I can survive not putting them back together.”
“I'm not stupid. I make backups.”
They'd reached the park. Four giant hexapods huddled motionless in a corner. The decorative robots consisted of nothing but six coiled legs, arranged as three pairs that met at right angles in the center. If they'd been endowed with even the mildest form of sentience, they would have gone insane from the lack of stimulation, but they were little more than pattern-recognizers on springs.
Mariama ran up to them and clapped her hands. The nearest one stirred sluggishly, shifting its center of mass and wobbling on the tripod of the three legs currently touching the ground. She started dancing back and forth, encouraging it, and it began to tumble for her.
Tchicaya watched, laughing, biting back an admonition:
someone would notice that they'd moved, and know that the Slowdown had been violated
. He doubted that the hexapods had memories, but there was machinery everywhere, monitoring the streets, guarding the town against unlikely dangers. The fact that they hadn't woken anyone didn't prove that they wouldn't be found out in the end.
Mariama weaved between the robots. “Aren't you going to help me?”
“Help you do what?” She'd managed to get all four of them moving simultaneously, without his aid. Tchicaya hadn't played with them since he was an infant, but he'd never been able to hold the attention of more than one at a time.
“Make them collide.”
“They won't do that.”
“I want to get their legs tangled together. I don't think they understand that that can happen.”
“You're a real sadist,” he protested. “Why do you want to confuse them?”
Mariama rolled her eyes. “It can't hurt them. Nothing can.”
“It's not them I'm worried about. It's the fact that you enjoy it.”
She kept her eyes on him without breaking step. “It's just an experiment. It's not malicious. Why do you always have to be such a prig?”
Tchicaya felt a surge of anger, but he fought it down and replied pleasantly, “All right, I'll help you. Tell me what to do.” He caught the flicker of disappointment in her eyes before she smiled and started issuing detailed instructions.
The hexapods were primitive, but their self-and-environment model was more reliable than Mariama had imagined. After fifteen minutes trying to trick them into tying their legs into knots, she finally gave up. Tchicaya collapsed on the grass, breathless, and she joined him.
He stared up into the sky. It had grown pale already, almost colorless. It had been summer when the Slowdown began; he'd forgotten how short the winter days were.
Mariama said, “Has anyone you know even
heard
of Erdal?”
“No.”
She snorted, her expectations confirmed. “He probably lives on the other side of the planet.”
“So? Do you want half the planet to go into Slowdown, and the other half not?” Everyone on Turaev was connected somehow. While Erdal traveled, the whole world would wait for him, together. It was either that, or they broke into a thousand shards.
Mariama turned to face him. “You know why they do it, don't you?”
It was a rhetorical question. People always had an ulterior motive, and Tchicaya had always been taken in by their explanations. He squirmed like an eager child and asked with mock excitement, “No, tell me!”
Mariama shot him a poisonous look, but refused to be sidetracked. “
Guilt
. Cosmic apron strings. Do you think poor Erdal would dare not come home, with nine million people holding their breath for him?”
Tchicaya knew better than to dispute this claim directly; instead, he 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 me.” Tchicaya kissed the back of her head. He immediately wished he hadn't done it, and he waited, tensed, for some kind of rebuke. Or worse, some attempt to move further along a path on which he'd never meant to set foot.
But Mariama lay motionless in the darkness, and after a while he began to wonder if she'd even noticed. Her hair was thick at the back, and his lips had barely brushed a few loose strands.
In Tchicaya's view, the town's effective desertion didn't render it more interesting, and the freedom to wander the streets and fields at any hour was less appealing now, in winter, than in the ordinary summers when it was barely curtailed by parental authority anyway. Tchicaya thought of suggesting that they drop back into Slowdown and reemerge when the weather was warmer, but he was afraid of compromising their original deal. If he didn't stick to the letter of it, he could forget about holding Mariama to her word.
Mariama wanted to catch a train to Hardy, further if possible, preferably circumnavigating the entire continent. In one weird concession to practicality, the trains moved at their ordinary speed, whisking commuters to their destinations in an eye blink. Understandably, though, departures were rare, and on examining the schedules it turned out that they could not have traveled anywhere and back in less than ten years.
Tchicaya did his best to keep Mariama distracted, terrified that she might harbor a yearning for sabotage that went beyond playground equipment. She'd know it was futile to hope to succeed in damaging any of the town's infrastructure, but he could picture her delight at sirens wailing and people shuddering into motion around her. This image might have been unfair, but there was no point asking her for assurances; at best, that would only offend her, and at worst it might tempt her to act out his fears. So he tried to go along with any suggestions she made that weren't completely outlandish, but only after putting up enough resistance to keep her from becoming too bored, or too suspicious of his compliance.
On their tenth night out of Slowdown, Tchicaya was woken by lukewarm fluid dripping onto his face. He opened his eyes in the pitch blackness, and rashly poked his tongue out to sample the fluid. It was water, but it had a complicated, slightly metallic taint. He pictured a crack in the ceiling, the heat from the radiator fins above them on the roof melting the surrounding frost.
He slid out from the blankets without waking Mariama, and groped for the lamp. When he held it up, a faint liquid sheen was visible snaking down one thick coolant pipe, collecting in drops at a right-angled bend above the cushion where his head had lain.
Mariama stirred, then shielded her eyes. “What is it?”
“Just some water from the roof. We might have to shift.” He moved the lamp about, hunting for leaks along the other pipes. Then something different caught his eye, a flash of iridescent colors at the very top of the pipe that had proved to be the original culprit. “Is that oil?” Why would there be oil leaking from the roof? As far as Tchicaya knew, the plant's few moving parts were all inside the building, and they'd all be molecularly smooth if they made physical contact with each other at all. Maybe flakes of ice could catch the light like that. But what could make them thin and flat enough?
There was sure to be a simple answer, but the puzzle gnawed at him. It was cold, and part of him wanted nothing more than to curl up beneath the blankets again—but what was the point of achieving a state in which no one could tell him to stop worrying and leave it till morning, if he didn't take advantage of his freedom to act on his curiosity immediately?