It was beautiful mathematics, but was any of it true? Roi’s observations of the void were still useless, because although they knew the angle at which the light had reached the Splinter, they had no way of measuring how fast it had been traveling. She’d joked with Ruz on the journey back from the junub edge that he should make that his next task, but for all his ingenuity she couldn’t imagine how he could succeed.
“The problem is twofold,” Tan mused. “It’s not just the speed of light we need to discover, because what matters is the ratio of that speed to Neth’s unknown speed, the speed for turning time into space. Knowing the first without the second is useless.”
Kem said, “But we don’t need both, we just need the ratio?”
“It would be nice to have both, but we could make a lot of progress with just the ratio,” Roi replied.
“Light travels so fast,” Kem observed, “that we might not be far from wrong if we suppose that the ratio is one.”
Tan rasped disapproval. “Nothing can travel at Neth’s speed. Anyone doing so would have a heart that never beat, a sense of time that never advanced, and a notion of distance that squashed the whole world flat.”
Roi couldn’t deny those absurdities, but she wasn’t sure that was the point. “As an approximation, though, would it necessarily mislead us? We won’t calculate anything from the light’s point of view; what we’re interested in are our own measurements. And if we make this choice, the calculations become easier.” That was an understatement. Neth’s speed had the gloriously simple property that everyone agreed on it, regardless of their own motion. If they imagined that the speed of light was Neth’s speed, then the light they were seeing would not gain or lose velocity at all as it traveled from the void toward the Hub.
“Eat stones, excrete stones,” Tan rasped sullenly. “If we start with nonsense, what should we expect at the end?”
Kem looked dismayed, but Roi was not dissuaded.
“I think it’s worth trying,” she said.
Tan left them, to pursue ideas of his own. Roi worked with Kem, carefully setting up the calculations. Strictly speaking, they could still only deal with the paths taken by light that remained in the plane of the Incandescence, but Roi had many observations from the void where she’d followed lights that appeared to be skimming the surface of the rock. The paths that linked her eyes to those distant objects were so close to the plane that the difference scarcely mattered.
They spent half a shift calculating, then they called in some helpers to check the results.
Roi took Kem with her and went in search of Tan. He was alone in a small chamber, surrounded by frames, scraping his legs distractedly against his carapace.
“This is going to take me a while,” he admitted. “I can’t seem to find the way forward.”
Roi said, “Try eating what we ate.”
She passed him the final template that she and Kem had derived, and let him check it against the observations. “Correct,” he murmured after a while. He put down one skin of data, copied from Roi’s time and angle measurements, and picked up the next. Each time, the verdict was the same.
“Nothing can travel at Neth’s speed,” he insisted. “But perhaps light can get very close. Too close for us to see the difference.”
Kem spoke shyly. “I have some ideas about orbits that go out of the plane. There’s a trick I think we can use to understand them.”
For a few heartbeats, Roi gazed at her in silence. Before the Jolt, Kem had been cleaning susk carcasses. Tan had taught her well, giving her the tools every geometer needed, but he had not fed her any of these insights himself. Whatever mysterious skill it required to take the knowledge of your teachers and double it had blossomed across the Splinter at precisely the time it was needed. Where had it been hiding? How had it emerged? Roi couldn’t begin to imagine how such things could be explained.
When they’d dealt with the Wanderer, she could worry about that. She’d look forward to spending her final shifts cataloguing her ignorance.
“Tell us your ideas,” she said to Kem. “Tell us how we’re going to understand the Wanderer.”
21
Shift after shift, Rakesh returned to the depot and waited for Zey to finish work. Sometimes she was too tired to speak with him, but more often she would spend a few minutes chatting before she went to find a crevice to rest in.
Zey talked about her life, and the things she’d heard about the history of her world, and the cousins’. The various jobs she’d done had all been important to her at the time, but she had little to say about them; even the time she spent in the depot moments before they met seemed to pass in a kind of pleasant daze, and left almost no impression once the shift had ended.
She talked about the ideas that had crept into her life in the cracks between these episodes of dutiful sleepwalking. The story of the six worlds had been passed on by a fellow worker as idle chatter, three jobs past, but it had resonated deeply with Zey, and since that time she had viewed her surroundings in a new light, always trying to guess the age and origin of things, always trying to fit them into a coherent picture. Who built the first cart? Who carved out the tunnels? What kind of machine could carry you between worlds?
It was not that her fellow Arkdwellers were simpletons in comparison. They could all master complex tasks, and juggle equally sophisticated concepts, if and when the need arose. They were, however, monumentally indifferent to their history, their circumstances, and their prospects. Every question that to Rakesh seemed most compelling struck them as, at best, a frivolous diversion.
As they traded stories, Rakesh tried to find a balance between misleading Zey and confusing her. How could you tell someone who had never seen the stars about the size of the galaxy, or the scale of the journey he’d made? He spiraled out gently from the things she knew or imagined—her guesses about the cousins, criss-crossing the all-enveloping warmth and light of the accretion disk—into the swarming emptiness beyond. She was interested to hear about the way he’d lived, on the surface of a rock that was far from its own source of warmth and light, but what really galvanized her were the hints he’d found of her people’s history. As he unwound the story, all the way back to the Steelmakers’ fossilized spacecraft and their missing world, Zey soaked up every word, every detail, and begged him for more. That this was a need no one around her shared, let alone had the power to fulfill, only made the situation more poignant. Rakesh had never seen anyone lonely in quite this way before.
Parantham watched through the probes that filled the Ark, though she really didn’t need to spy on them that way; if she’d asked, Rakesh would have let her take the data stream straight from his avatar’s senses.
“So where exactly is this seduction leading?” she demanded.
“Seduction? If you want to call it anything, call it a recruitment.”
“Instead of dreaming about her long lost cousins, now Zey can spend her life dreaming about the Amalgam. And this has helped her. how?”
Rakesh said, “If she wants, she can come with us to the disk. Imagine seeing ten thousand new worlds with fresh eyes, after spending all your life buried in a rock.” And never mind that their own ability to return to the disk was far from certain.