“You want her to trade one kind of loneliness for another?” Parantham retorted.
That had not been Rakesh’s plan. He did not want to tear Zey out of her world; he hadn’t even offered to take her to visit Lahl’s Promise. He wanted to kindle her innate curiosity and excitement to the point where it began to spread to those around her; he wanted to use her as an ambassador, as a bridge between their cultures.
The trouble was, however successfully he engaged with her, it was the gap that separated Zey from her fellow Arkdwellers that remained the hardest to bridge. Her instinct, she’d told him, had been to keep his revelations to herself, because she knew how they’d be received, but she hadn’t been able to control herself. Her instinct had been right: nobody wanted to hear about her “distant cousin”, or the thirty-six times thirty-six worlds. Nobody wanted to discuss the perils that their ancestors had survived, or to debate their options for evading the unknown catastrophes that the future might bring. They wanted to listen to inconsequential chatter as they worked, and when they were finished working, they wanted food, sex and sleep.
“Why am I sick?” Zey asked Rakesh. “Why is my mind so damaged?” They were doing their usual circuit of tunnels close to the depot, walking and talking until she needed to sleep.
It would be meaningless to reassure her that most of the galaxy was on her side, that the qualities that made her an anomaly here were almost universally valued and admired.
“I don’t know,” Rakesh said. “But if you allow me, I can try to find out.”
“How?”
“If you let me take a small part of your body, I can study it carefully. I might not be able to answer your question, but there’s a chance I can tell you something about the reasons that you’re different.”
Zey was alarmed. “I’m using every part of my body. I’m not a male, to offer a portion to be removed.”
Rakesh chirped amusement. “I’m talking about a part so small that you lose thirty-six times thirty-six in every shift, without even noticing.”
“I lose parts of my body without noticing?” However dazzled she’d been by Rakesh’s stories, Zey retained a healthy skepticism toward his wilder claims.
“Absolutely. They’re too small to see.”
“Then how will you study them?”
“With machines too small to see.”
“So all of this happens, invisibly, and you believe what these machines whisper to you at the end?”
“That’s about it.”
“I think your mind is damaged more than mine.”
This wasn’t banter; Zey was deadly serious. Rakesh had to spend the next four of their meetings explaining the atomic nature of matter, and trying to make it plausible without setting up a demonstration in chemical stoichiometry. Then they moved on to cellular biology, and the eleven known molecular replicators. If Rakesh had had any qualms about her ability to give informed consent to being sequenced, she seemed determined to make it clear that she would not allow him to perform his technological magic and then pronounce upon her nature like an oracle. When she understood his proposal well enough for his claims to seem plausible, she would consider it, but not before.
As they toured the basic sciences, Rakesh could see Zey building a picture far bigger than the subject at hand, integrating everything piece by piece into an ever more sophisticated world view. It was firmly anchored to the familiar things around her, but her mind was stretching to encompass the distant, the small, the abstract. Shift after shift, he was making her “sickness” worse, “damaging” her even more. Her co-workers didn’t care; they might tease her when she couldn’t keep quiet about her strange ideas, but they wouldn’t ostracize her as long as she kept doing her job. This was not a culture that could be scandalized by her dalliance with Rakesh, or her heterodox notions of history and reality; the only sacred thing was work. Zey was the one who would feel the separation; it didn’t have to be imposed on her by her peers. If Rakesh failed to bring the other Arkdwellers along with her on this intellectual journey—if he transformed her and then abandoned her, with nobody else who thought the same way—she would be lonelier than ever.
Thirty-six times thirty-six.
22
One of the children Gul had taught, a young male named Haf, approached Roi with three claws full of food. She accepted the gift gratefully, but he retreated before she had a chance to talk to him. As he rejoined his team-mates, she heard him whisper to one of them, “She was Zak’s first student.”
“She must be very old,” his friend replied.
“She saw him die,” Haf announced solemnly.
“That means she’ll die soon herself,” the friend explained. “That’s the way it happens.”
Roi was amused. Gul had sent his former students here to do fetching and carrying while they learned more about the intricacies of the project, and were gradually recruited into more specialized teams. She listened to their innocent gossip for a while; it made a welcome diversion. Then she turned her full attention back to the task ahead of her.
The control post she’d set up lay on the border between the junub and sard quarters, halfway along the line of light-messengers that Jos had established between Ruz’s void-watchers at the junub edge and Bard’s control post. From there, Bard’s own separate network of light-messengers branched out to reach all the tunnel-plug operators.
Twelve shifts before, Bard and Neth had reported success. They had developed a system of movable baffles to tweak the shape of the tunnel, and after some laborious trial and error in conjunction with Neth’s calculations, they had finally achieved a smooth flow. The tunnel had been opened on more than a dozen occasions, but only for a single bright phase each time. The wind would pass through it cleanly now, but the question that remained was whether Bard’s ambitious scheme could actually achieve its purpose: whether the free passage of the wind really could change the orbit of the Splinter itself.
Roi consulted the clock beside her, made a note of the time on a sheet of skin, then took the handle of the metal signal-sheet on her right and cranked out the code to have the great tunnel opened. Many spans away along the ordinary tunnel that sloped down into the sardside, the light-messenger watching her sheet would note the sequence and repeat it. Then the watcher for that sheet would do the same; on and on the message would go, all the way to Bard, and then to a dozen plug operators, who would call on their teams to drag on the ropes that pulled the wheeled stone plugs aside. A part of the sardside wind that had once forced itself from rarb to sharq through the rock’s reluctant pathways, losing all its strength along the way, would now make the same journey entirely unhindered. The force it had once imparted upon the rock of the Splinter would vanish.
Of course, the remainder of the sardside wind would still exert a powerful force, but on the garmside the opposing force would not be diminished at all. If the perfect balance of the winds really had kept the Splinter in place for generations, that balance would no longer hold.
Roi turned to Kem. “Now we wait.”
“Can we calculate while we wait?” Kem asked anxiously.
“Of course.”
Kem took her frame and started working through a fresh set of path calculations. There were some problems they could only treat in the most general fashion until they had data from the void-watchers to tell them how the Splinter was responding, but Kem seemed determined to pre-calculate every result they could possibly need.
Up at the junub edge, the void-watchers no longer needed to scramble back and forth through the crack that led to the surface. Inspired by Jos’s light-messengers, Cho, one of Ruz’s team, had invented an elaborate system of polished metal plates that allowed them to observe the lights in the void from the safety of the tunnel below. Each time the junub dark phase ended, the plates were retracted part-way into the crack, shielding them from the full savagery of the Incandescence, while a stone plug, like a smaller version of Bard’s tunnel-plugs, was wheeled into place below to provide some shelter for the void-watchers themselves. The system did not afford them the sweeping views of the whole quarter-circle that Roi had seen, but now that they had mapped the fixed pattern of lights in detail, and knew how to follow the Wanderer against that background, their sighting and tracking of individual lights would yield enough information for the theorists to calculate both the Wanderer’s shifting orbit and any hoped-for change in the Splinter’s own motion.