18
“Seventy-two more shifts and we’ll be done!” Bard said proudly.
Roi stared down the length of the giant tunnel. It vanished into the distance, the far end lost in the glow from the walls. She could hear the din of workers chipping away at the rock face, but she couldn’t see them, and it probably would have taken her half a shift to reach them. There might have been other tunnels in the Splinter as long as this, but there were none as wide, or as straight. In a way, she found the sight of it stranger than anything she’d seen in the void; you expected to be shocked when you climbed outside the world, but in this ordinary place the simple rearrangement of rock and empty space had created something unprecedented: a structure with the power to move the Splinter itself.
“Just seventy-two? Are you sure?” They were standing in the middle of the tunnel’s longest segment, but there were a dozen others still growing out from their starting points, reaching toward each other but yet to join up.
Bard retreated slightly. “Something close to that. I can’t say exactly. The team’s been growing steadily ever since the Jolt, but if the numbers level off we might take longer to complete it. We have as many workers as we can fit at the rock face, but we can always do with more shifting rubble.”
Word of Bard’s project had spread throughout the Splinter. In ordinary times that would have counted for nothing, but it seemed that everyone who had been shaken free of their loyalties had come to take a look at the tunnel, and to hear the arguments its builders had to offer. Roi had encountered more than a dozen such travelers on her journey into the sardside, and they had all been willing to listen carefully to the case she’d made on Bard’s behalf. People who, she was sure, would once have turned away in boredom and incomprehension at such useless metaphysical talk had striven patiently to come to terms with the subtleties of weight and motion, the nature of the Jolt, and the way the wind’s free passage through this sardside tunnel might unbalance the Splinter and allow the garmside wind to carry them to safety.
Bard wasn’t even sure of the number of workers he had at any moment; he’d appointed supervisors to take charge of the various stretches of the tunnel, all the way from the rarb edge to the sharq, and they recruited new arrivals for themselves. When a segment was completed earlier than expected, as sometimes happened because the rock turned out to be softer than usual, the workers moved along until they found another place where they were needed.
Roi had come to break the news to Bard that the tunnel was going to require some modifications. With the Wanderer orbiting further out from the Hub, they couldn’t simply open the tunnel to the wind and then trust in their luck to carry the Splinter to safety. They would need to be able to block and reopen the tunnel at will, providing some control over the Splinter’s outward spiral.
Bard listened carefully as Roi explained what she and Ruz had observed. She knew he had lost interest in the fine points of space-time geometry, and he had nothing to say about the strange appearance of the void, but the prospect of a more complex role for his cherished creation seemed to delight him.
“We can build cross-tunnels with plugs we can roll across into the main shaft,” he suggested. “There are plenty of lodes of dense rock that we had to move whole, because they were too hard to break. In fact, if we build a whole system of movable plugs with different kinds of rock, we ought to be able to set the flow to any level you like.”
“That’s a good start,” Roi said. “I was wondering, though, what would happen if we needed to block or unblock the tunnel while we were in the Incandescence?”
Bard was startled. “You think we might need such fine control that we can’t wait for the next dark phase? Isn’t it going to take a shift or two just to get word here that the tunnel should be blocked?”
“I don’t know what we’re going to need,” Roi admitted. “We still don’t know how we’re going to do this: what path we’ll require the Splinter to take, and how we can ensure that we follow it precisely. But even if we don’t need to alter the tunnel at short notice, there’s a chance that as we move out from the Hub we might lose the oscillation the Jolt gave us; we might sink back into the Incandescence permanently. So we need to be able to open and close the tunnel, whether we’re in the Incandescence or the void.”
Bard pondered this new challenge. “We could build some kind of system of ropes. Mount the plugs on wheeled carts, and have people in the side-tunnels—sheltered behind fixed, dense lodes themselves—who can operate the ropes and slide the plugs into place.”
“That sounds perfect.”
Bard pressed himself against the rock, a posture jokingly suggesting that she was putting him under stress. “I hope you theorists know what you’re doing.”
“I can assure you that we don’t. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learned in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.”
“That’s comforting.” Bard looked down the tunnel and rasped frustration. “So when this magnificent work is finished, you’ll want us to keep it plugged up for another thirty-six shifts while you do your calculations?”
“At least,” Roi agreed. “Maybe longer.”
“So what are we honest workers supposed to do while we’re waiting for you to judge the shape of space-time?”
Roi said, “You had plans for a second tunnel, didn’t you?”
Bard replied wryly, “On skin, a second tunnel costs nothing. It was on the drawing I made, when I first had the idea. But I spent so long failing to get the first one started that I gave up thinking about anything so ambitious.”
“You should build the second one if you can,” Roi said. “Then a third, then a fourth. There’s every chance we’re going to need them. When we go ducking and weaving around the Wanderer, the faster we can move, the better.”
Roi’s second task on the sardside was to visit Neth, and see if she could persuade her to return to the Null Chamber. The theorists would need all the help they could get, and the battle Neth had come here to fight, to win people over to the cause of the tunnel, had been resoundingly won.
Bard had given her directions to the place where she could find Neth, but nobody could keep track of all the obstructions and detours surrounding the Great Project. The signage teams had probably all gone mad, or disbanded. As Roi passed among a group of workers shifting rubble from the tunnel’s construction, she recognized one of them as Jos, the light-maker she’d met when she was traveling with Ruz and Zak.
Jos was happy to see her, but didn’t want to stop working, so Roi walked beside her, helping her to carry a heavy piece of stone. Ideally, everyone doing this job would have had wheeled carts for their loads, but there probably weren’t that many carts in the whole of the Splinter.
“This must be hard work,” Roi said. “Shift after shift.” She was struggling beneath the weight of the stone, even with two of them sharing the burden.
“It’s not so bad,” Jos said. “We’re always taking the rubble downhill, sard of the tunnel. Bard told us that every rock we move shifts the Calm a small way sardwards, strengthening the garmside winds.”
The darkness descended, but Jos insisted that they keep moving. “I’ve traveled this route so many times that I know it by touch.”
Roi had little choice but to trust her. “What happened to your light machine?”
“It’s at one of the rock faces. It’s more useful there, where they can leave it in one place for a while. If I tried to carry it with me everywhere, I’d have no room on my back, and no strength for any rock.”
“Fair enough.” Roi hadn’t brought the one that Cot had given her, even though she had little else to carry; this deep into the sardside the weight would have been too much.