Rakesh said, “You should look for someone new to go with you.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to stay here a while and talk with Zey,” he explained.
“Talk with Zey?” Saf seemed to find this suggestion far more surreal than any of Rakesh’s baroque cosmic fantasies. “You’re going to join this team, after three words with one member? When were you hatched?”
“I’m sorry to let you down,” Rakesh said, “but this is part of my job, part of my duty.”
Saf rasped a word with no simple translation, but the gist of it was that Rakesh was a damaged infant simpleton who could not be relied upon to perform any task, and his loyalty was so promiscuously offered and so easily withdrawn that he might as well have been a flake of excrement drifting on the wind.
Zey said, “We have all the workers we need.”
Saf drummed contemptuously, “They don’t even want you, you fool!”
“I’m staying here,” Rakesh replied firmly. “I’ll find work somewhere nearby.” For a moment he caught himself worrying about his prospects, as if he actually needed a job. Still, it was the right thing to say; Zey had been beginning to look alarmed, and the news that at least he wouldn’t try to foist himself upon her team seemed to reduce her anxiety.
Saf walked away, rasping to herself.
Zey said, “There’s work for me to do, I should join my team-mates.”
Rakesh said, “I’m going to rest here, but I don’t feel like sleeping. When you’re finished, if you want to talk—”
Zey turned away and went back into the chamber. Rakesh waited, wondering what was going on in her mind. His strange appearance and unlikely claims had been met with little more than indifference before. No one else had been curious enough to question him about his origins, let alone make an effort to fit his answers into some larger framework. How reliable these fragments of oral history were was beside the point; what mattered was that Zey remembered the story, and could conceive of it as more than a myth. She could imagine the cousins returning. She could believe in other worlds, and accept the idea of traveling between them.
She might not provide a link to the past, but she could still help build a bridge to the Ark’s future.
20
As the Calculation Chamber filled, Roi realized that she barely knew the names of half the people around her. It was an encouraging sign. While Bard and Neth, Ruz and Gul were all busy with their own work, Tan and the other theorists had managed to keep recruiting. Even as people grew hungry, they had been driven not to ransack the diminished crops at the edge, but to gather around the seeds that Zak had planted, to tend and protect a very different crop.
Tan approached her. “Are you ready?”
Roi felt sick. She remembered the time at the junub edge, when Zak had gone silent. If they failed now, it would be the very same feeling played out in slow motion for everyone in the Splinter. Worse than a new division, worse than anything that had happened before.
“Absolutely,” she said.
In silence, side by side, she and Tan plunged into the world of geometry.
This time, there were not two but five unknown templates to feed through every step of the calculations. One was tied to the way the symmetries slanted around the Hub; another to the freedom they needed to express the size of orbits; another to the way the shape of space-time varied as you moved out of the plane of the Incandescence. Along with the other symbols they needed to wrap the whole space-time in unknown numbers, the total was so great that Gul’s beautiful frames had all needed to be hastily rebuilt.
Roi lost herself in the process. She worked slowly, satisfying herself that every step she took was valid before moving on to the next, so that when it came time to pass each frame to her checkers she felt no hesitation. As the dark phases approached, the newest recruits wound the light machine and kept the work going.
The stones clicked gently, the templates grew longer and more intricate. The third of her checkers called an error to her; she accepted the frame back, and corrected the mistake.
As well as the Splinter’s old circular orbit, it would be necessary to apply Zak’s principle to at least three other paths through space-time in order to unravel all the unknowns. To provide an extra degree of confidence in their results, she had not conspired with Tan on the choice of paths; the two of them would make their own separate decisions, and then see if their final answers still agreed.
Final answers? The prospect still seemed impossibly remote. The templates thickened like weeds. Someone brought Roi some food. She had lost count of the number of dark phases they had passed through. She finished her first analysis of the Splinter’s orbit, and chose the next path: an orbit that went backward around the Hub. In the simple geometry that would have told her nothing new, but with the strange new twist they’d added, it became an entirely different kind of motion.
Tan called a break; they all needed to sleep. Roi clipped protectors over the wires of her frame to keep the stones in place. She didn’t speak to Tan, to anyone, she just found a crevice in the wall of the chamber and shut off her vision.
When they resumed, she felt refreshed, but the intervening time melted away; it was if she’d never put the frame down at all. The templates were too big to be considered beautiful, but she was beginning to recognize similarities in some of the ugly knots writhing around within them, and she clung to the hope that these knots might meet up in a way that would allow them to untangle each other.
A chance came to use her own tool to unravel some of the ugliness: the free template linked to the size of the orbits. She hesitated, wondering if she was acting too soon; how could she know if a different choice, delayed, might not spare her even greater effort?
The knots were crowded around this one point right now, though. She let them join up, loosen, vanish.
She finished her third path, her fourth. She had applied Zak’s principle four times, and now there were no more decisions left for her to make; all she could do was keep smoothing the templates, following the internal logic of their forms.
Sleep again. Already?
Roi woke before anyone else, and walked softly back to her frames. She stared at the template locked on the wire, and saw in her mind’s eye what three or four steps would produce. Her tactic with the orbit-size template had paid off: the period of the Rotator, the period of the Splinter’s spin when judged against the path of a tossed stone, obeyed the square-cube rule exactly. The same had been true for the simple geometry, but she had never dreamed that such a relationship could survive all the complications they’d thrown into the mix.
Her checkers stirred, and patiently resumed their places. She dared to cast a glance at Tan; his posture seemed optimistic. She was not fooling herself, then. They had not become lost in this maze of symbols.
Roi pushed on to extract the other results. The period of the orbit, the ratios of the weights were much more complicated templates than before. Roi found them ugly, but that didn’t prove that they were wrong.
This time, as well as determining the size of the Splinter’s orbit—compared to a still unknowable natural unit—she would need to quantify the twisting of the geometry around the Hub. The two were entangled in the templates, but taken together, their newest observation, the ratio of the Splinter’s orbital period to the shomal-junub cycle, and their oldest, the ratio of the weights, could unlock the numbers.
Roi finished the calculation, but couldn’t bring herself to pass on the frame for checking. She was sure she had made a mistake. The amount of the twist, in natural units, was very close to one. She had no real idea what that meant, but at least it was simple.