Phoresis by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan [Egan, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: hard science fiction, weird, genetic engineering, science fiction, survival
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2018-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

The last level of the tower was the tallest, and it had no stairs at all. Rope ladders stretched between the annular rest platforms, but though the bottoms of the platforms were helpfully painted red and the top surfaces blue, Rosalind struggled to perceive any fixed direction as up or down. She felt like an insect crawling along inside a hollowed-out tree branch, which a child had picked up and was whimsically turning this way and that. It was not that she feared being dislodged, and it seemed absurd to imagine that she could ever lose her way. But as she moved, hand over hand, in near weightlessness through the tube of luminous ice, the sense of disorientation was impossible to shake off. All she could do was embrace it, and hope she wouldn’t throw up.

“Matilda told me it was beautiful up here, but I never imagined!” Joanna called out, from a dozen rungs behind her. Matilda had worked on completing the tower, when the only thing at the open end between the ice-farmers and the void had been a series of tarpaulins, which were meant to trap the air but were forever coming loose or getting torn. She’d once told Rosalind that she’d often had to spend half a day without breathing, while the tarps were repaired and air was pumped in from the level below.

Sigrid said, “I’ll reserve the word beautiful for the first sight of fertile soil between my fingers.” She glanced across at Rosalind from her adjacent ladder. “Or better yet, my first child born on that soil.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Joanna replied tetchily. “It’s all about the practicalities; the rest is just a distraction.”

“Do you think a thousand people should have died just to give you a pretty ice sculpture?” Sigrid retorted.

“No. But that doesn’t stop me appreciating every part of what they built.”

Rosalind knew better than to urge them to make peace, or even just spare her from having to listen to their nonsense. They’d never actually come to blows over these meaningless quibbles, so if they found the bickering helped them pass the time, who was she to object?

As their last day attached to their birth world wore on, the sun crept below them without actually setting, even as Tvíburi turned gibbous behind the wall of ice. Rosalind couldn’t really discern its shape, but the slowly growing illumination from the west side of the ice ahead of her was all she needed in order to picture the new dawn sweeping over the face of the twin.

For all that the rules of light and geometry rendered everything she was seeing explicable, it remained deeply unsettling. If anything, what shocked her was that these strange sights made so much sense. As a child, she’d experimented with lamps and fruit, visualizing every stage of this journey. For the real sun, and the real worlds, to recapitulate her clumsy shadow play made her feel like someone half prophet, half puppet, unable to decide if she’d shaped this future, or if it had reached back in time and shaped her.

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