Incandescence (40 page)

"We might have passed it already," Nis said. "It might all be over, and we just don't know."

Roi said, "When we cross twenty-two, I'll believe it's over."

"There can still be flares," Kem reminded them. "We have to stick to the course."

"For how long?" Roi had never really confronted the question before; just crossing the Wanderer's orbit safely had always been hard enough to imagine. "We keep moving out, the Wanderer keeps moving in. Until there's a healthy distance between us. But what happens to the Wanderer?"

"The Hub tears it to pieces," Nis said. "Its own curvature has been holding on to less and less of. whatever it's made of. There'll come a point when there's simply nothing left, when it's all bled out into the Incandescence."

"And that's it?"

Nis said, "That's how weight and motion work. What else can happen?"

When Roi woke, she found Tan's chamber empty. She searched around frantically for anyone who might know what had happened to him.

Finally she met up with Pel, who would sometimes wake earlier than Roi and visit Tan herself.

"I saw him," Pel said. "I gave him the news."

"What news?"

"Everyone believes we've crossed the orbit," Pel said. "We're not at twenty-two, but the Wanderer can't have stayed in the same orbit all this time. We're past it, we're going in different directions now."

"That's good news," Roi said. "But where did Tan go?"

"He said he needed some exercise," Pel replied.

Roi hunted for him, until she could no longer leave Leh doing her job. As she shuffled the numbers, she pictured her old friend, finding a comfortable fissure in the rock somewhere, shutting off his vision, letting the long brightness fade from his mind.

"Be careful coming through," Rakesh warned Zey. "It's quite a squeeze at the end."

She climbed down through the habitat's entrance and dropped on to the deck beside him.

"I'm outside the world," she marveled. "But I'm not dead."

"The walls shield us from the radiation," Rakesh reminded her. "You couldn't survive unprotected outside."

Zey said, "How can we make the place outside the world our home, if we always need to be shielded from it?"

"It's not that big a problem," Rakesh assured her. "My ancestors needed a special mix of gases with them, everywhere they went. So did yours, but you've already been tweaked to live in vacuum. There are adjustments you can make to your bodies, if you want to. Matter is matter; many things are possible."

Zey wasn't listening to him; she'd discovered the view. The habitat was a bubble joined to the Ark over the crack in the wall on the neutron-star side; Rakesh had had nanomachines enlarge the passage through the rock to a size that any Arkdweller could climb through. As well as shielding them from the hard radiation that came from the innermost parts of the accretion disk and its flow on to the neutron star, the walls of the habitat screened out most of the terahertz synchrotron radiation coming from the plasma around them. This was the glow that suffused the whole Ark, the frequency at which the rock was translucent, and to which the Arkdwellers' vision was most sensitive. However, they could also see far enough into the infrared band that if the terahertz glow was removed, they were not left blind. Instead, the dazzling foreground fell away, and they could see beyond it. Bright infrared sources dotted the sky. Zey was looking out at the stars.

Using the workshop on
Lahl's Promise
, Rakesh had built the habitat and equipped it with everything he'd need. Then he had upgraded his Arkdweller avatar, hard-coded himself into it, and trashed his body back on the ship.

Docked to the habitat was a small ferry. It could exploit the winds and magnetic fields of the accretion disk for some journeys, but it also had a separate, fusion-powered drive. There was a halo of rocky and carbonaceous detritus around the outer parts of the accretion disk, well within the ferry's range; it was not exactly a mother lode of riches by Amalgam standards, but the Arkdwellers were small creatures, and their needs were likely to remain modest for a while.

It would not be an easy life, but the choice would be theirs to make. Rakesh wasn't offering them a cornucopia, a highway straight to the Amalgam's dazzling riches. It was possible that everyone he awakened might decline the chance to leave the Ark behind, when the alternative was so spartan.

Still, he had kept his promise to Lahl, whoever she was, and he had kept faith with Zey. He had neither ignored his cousins, leaving them to sleepwalk into eternity, nor obliterated their present, stable culture and robbed them of all meaningful choices.

Rakesh asked Zey, "Are you ready for a small journey?"

"A journey where?" Zey's body tensed nervously.

"It's not far, I promise. I just want to say goodbye to my friend."

They crossed into the ferry. Having no need for airlocks simplified things enormously. Rakesh was almost beginning to enjoy his new embodiment: crawling around in vacuum, clinging to walls and ceilings, and knowing that it wasn't an act of puppetry, but a benign metamorphosis. He hoped, he believed, that he could live this way until Parantham returned.

Rakesh started the fusion drive, and the ferry arced up out of the disk. Zey scuttled around the cabin, confused, not knowing which way to orient herself. "What's happening to my weight?"

"Acceleration. Get used to it."

"I don't understand."

"Be patient," Rakesh implored her. "Just enjoy the view."

Even with the limited range of frequencies that the combination of the hull's filters and their vision afforded them, the neutron star made a majestic sight. Parts of the disk and the central jet shone brightly, and the narrow band brought out complex structures woven into the jet that would have been much harder to discern in the glare of a full-spectrum image.

As the spinning ring of
Lahl's Promise
came into view, Rakesh's anxiety began to rival Zey's. With the sight of his last fragile link to the Amalgam looming in front of him, the prospect of renouncing it, of cutting his ties, was beginning to seem a thousand times more daunting than leaving the node had been. He had not felt the same vulnerability since the day he'd left Shab-e-Noor. In the bulge, nothing would be certain. He did not understand the Aloof and their whims. There was no guarantee that he'd ever see Parantham, or any other citizen of the Amalgam, again.

So be it. That was what backups were for.

He brought the ferry to a halt a hundred meters from the ship.

"This is the cart I traveled in," Rakesh told Zey. "Though not all the way from the place where I was born."

"I don't understand," Zey complained. "How you traveled, where you've been."

"Don't worry," Rakesh said. "Forget about those things. Think about this place, and your own journeys."

He spoke to Parantham as she sat in the cabin, through a radio link bridging the vacuum between them.

"I've found Tassef's star on the map," she said. "If I ask the ship to go there, I suppose the Aloof will try to inject me back into the Amalgam's network."

Tassef was on the far side of the bulge from Massa, where they'd entered. Parantham would be re-enacting Leila and Jasim's first journey in reverse. Assuming the Amalgam let her back in.

"Safar bekheyr, my friend," Rakesh replied.
May your journey be blessed.
They had said their goodbyes, and he had made it clear to her that he was resolved in his decision; he didn't know what else to add.

"I'll see you again, Rakesh," she promised. Whether or not that was possible, he knew she meant it honestly; she would try to return.

For a few long heartbeats nothing happened to
Lahl's Promise
, and Rakesh wondered if that was the way: the Aloof simply rescanned the ship's contents each time, and left the latest incarnation behind, intact, as a kind of fossil.

Then the spinning ring began to smear out before his eyes, each speck of material cut loose from its neighbors and set free to follow a separate trajectory. Before long it was a faint, diffuse cloud of dust.

Zey was running in rings around the cabin now. "The people who did that? Where do they live?"

"I don't know," Rakesh replied. "Don't worry, though; they're not going to do that to us."

"How do you know?"

Rakesh chirped amusement. "I don't know anything about them, for certain. But I'll tell you what I'm thinking right now."

Zey managed to calm herself, and she stood beside him, waiting for him to compose his reply.

"I think they might be sleepwalking," he said. "Like your team-mates. I think they've done many things, learned many things, seen many things, but now they've had to find a way to live without needing what the world can no longer provide for them." He could understand the attraction of a strategy like that, for the Arkdwellers, for anyone. It was better than going mad with boredom. "Maybe there are one or two among them who are a bit like you, but a lot less restless. Sentinels, not quite awake, who can watch the world go by, and even intervene in it a little, but who can't, or won't, reengage with the universe until it has something new to offer them."

Zey absorbed this. "But they brought you here, just to wake us?"

"That's what I believe," Rakesh said. "But I'm not certain about any of this."

He waited until the last traces of
Lahl's Promise
had drifted out of sight, then he started the ferry's drive.

"Forget the Aloof," he said. "Let's go and find out if any of your team-mates are ready to engage with the universe."

The message from Ruz began, "Cho has found the Wanderer."

Roi read on, amazed.

While most of the void-watchers had given up their old job and come to join the geometry-calculators, Cho had refused to accept that the act of observation had become impossible. The junub edge
had
become useless; not only had the Incandescence hidden all the ordinary, distant lights that might have been used as guides to the Splinter's motion, once the Wanderer was orbiting in the same plane as the Splinter, the rock of the Splinter itself blocked any chance of a view of it from the junub edge.

So Cho had gone first to the sard edge, hunting for another crack in the rock through which he could extend his light-gatherer. He'd had no luck, though, in finding such an opening, or even a promising site where one could be made.

Once the Splinter crossed the Wanderer's orbit, the garm edge, facing in toward the Hub, became the only feasible observation post. Cho had journeyed back across the length of the Splinter, carrying all his metal plates, to search for a new vantage point.

He had found a suitable crack in the rock, and lowered his light-gatherer through to the surface. By blocking the aperture with punctured metal sheets to limit the amount of light transmitted, and then projecting what remained on to a smooth stone surface backed with roughened metal, he had been able to form an image which could be viewed safely.

The image was not sharp, but even through the Incandescence a dazzling smear of elevated radiance could be seen. It was the Wanderer orbiting the Hub, its intensity cycling dramatically. The emission of a flare or some other misadventure had apparently knocked it into an elliptical orbit, and on its closest approaches to the Hub it was now shining with an unprecedented brightness, which fell away again as it moved further out.

Roi conferred with Kem and Nis. "What does this mean?" she wondered. "How strong can this new light become?"

"I have no idea," Nis confessed. "I don't understand what's happening. The weight is squeezing the Wanderer, agitating its material somehow, but this effect is out of all proportion to that. It's as if. a child had teased a susk a dozen times, always getting a response as mild as their teasing, but then they found they'd crossed some kind of threshold and driven it into a fury."

Roi did not like the sound of that. What could the Wanderer do to them,
in a fury?

Kem said, "We have two choices, I think. We could simply keep moving out, trying to put as much distance as we can between us and the Wanderer."

"That's getting harder, though," Roi replied. "And more perilous." Not only was the slower wind and the thinner Incandescence limiting their pace, if they ended up too far from the Hub there would be no hope of sustaining the crops. To survive the Wanderer only to die in a famine would be the worst thing she could imagine.

"The other choice is to take a different gamble," Kem said. "It's not too late to put ourselves in an orbit where we're constantly shielded by the Hub. The Wanderer's closest approach to the Hub is closer than we are now, but its furthest distance is still outside our present orbit. We can match orbital periods with it, and try to lock ourselves into a relationship where the Hub protects us as much as possible."

"Then what do we do when the Wanderer's orbit shrinks further?" Roi said. "We can't follow it back down toward the Hub in order to keep our orbital periods the same." She had had the idea, long ago, that perhaps Bard should have carved tunnels through the garmside as well as the sardside, granting the Splinter the ability to travel in either direction. If it came to a slow, drawn-out famine because they were too far from the Hub, that might yet be their only salvation, but there wasn't the slightest prospect of creating those tunnels in time to chase the Wanderer.

Nis held up the message sheet that contained Cho's observations. "Look how much brighter it's becoming already, just from the slight increase in weight when it reaches the closest point to the Hub along its orbit. When its orbit
shrinks
. "

He trailed off, but Roi didn't need him to complete the prediction. Either the process that was driving this radiance would come to a halt by destroying the Wanderer, or it would keep growing in the same spectacular fashion, and it would make no difference where the Splinter was. Unless they were shielded by the Hub, this light would be strong enough to outshine the Incandescence and sear them all to death.