Zey chirped amusement. “I can’t argue with that sentiment, can I? I’ve been built to think like you. But you come from a world where the ones who disagree with you are the sad, strange few. You haven’t spent a lifetime as the only one with that point of view.”
Rakesh didn’t know how to reply to her. The chasm between her and the other Arkdwellers was not something that any of them were capable of bridging. She could never be his ambassador, and he couldn’t hope to enter into any kind of dialogue with them himself, slowly coaxing them out of their shells, opening them up to new possibilities, turning their faces to the stars. Without a calamity to throw the switch, they were physically incapable of caring about such things.
Zey’s mind was working faster than his now. She said, “I would never ask you to bring trouble to my brothers and sisters, to damage the world, to sow fear and death. But is that the only way to bring change?”
Rakesh asked nervously, “What do you mean?”
“These genes, these molecules, these signals in our bodies. my ancestors built them to work one way, but I believe you are more powerful than my ancestors. These are all just made from atoms, aren’t they? Your little machines can move them around the way I move cargo from one side of the depot to another. If you wanted to, you could ask them to make these signals appear in all of our bodies, without any reason, without any danger.
“If you wanted to, you could wake us from our sleep.”
24
“Any progress?” Haf asked, as he wound the light machine.
Roi looked up from her template frame. “Not really,” she admitted. “Be patient, though. We haven’t followed this to the end yet.”
She had come to the sardside for the opening of the third tunnel, and to confer with Neth and Bard. Haf had tagged along as her helper, gathering food, providing light, and checking her interminable calculations. Even as they waited in this small chamber for their hosts to call them to the big event, Roi could not put her frames aside.
Since Cho and Nis had measured the Wanderer’s curvature from the tiny angle by which it bent the incoming light, she had been spending most of her time trying to discover a template for a geometry that could encompass both the Wanderer and the Hub. Without any of the old symmetries to rely on, though, the templates became vastly more complicated.
The curvature that wrapped the Wanderer was about six to the eighth times weaker than that around the Hub, so it might have been simpler to take the idealized geometry of the Hub alone as a guide to their calculations, and then rely on the observations of the void-watchers to tell them when their true position was deviating from their predictions. Like someone sliding down a steep tunnel that had been crudely mapped but never actually traversed, they could try to avoid the smaller hazards by sight, rather than aspiring to a mathematically perfect foreknowledge of every bump that lay ahead. The only problem with that eminently practical approach was that the dark phases were shrinking, so the observations of the void-watchers were already being curtailed. If it ever came to the point where the dark phases vanished, they would be skidding down the tunnel blind, entirely at the mercy of their calculations.
As the natural light dimmed, Roi handed Haf her last frame and started on a fresh one.
“Your templates are like weeds,” Haf remarked helpfully. “No shape at all, they just grow where they like.”
“Thanks for the encouragement. How about checking whether they’re true or not, and then you can weed out all the false ones to your heart’s content.”
As Haf set to work, Roi stared pensively at the stones of the blank frame. Sometimes the problem really did appear to be impossible to solve, but the geometry that twisted around the Hub had once seemed almost as intractable, and now the Splinter was spiraling out along a path that was confirming that solution, shift after shift. The weights, the cycles, the view of the void, all fitted together exactly as the templates decreed. Ruz had been up to the surface a few times, and he’d told her that the strange quarter-circle was expanding: the angle of the arc, its radius and its thickness had all grown visibly larger. Part of this change was due to the Splinter traveling more slowly around its larger orbit, and part to the gentler space-time curvature as they moved away from the Hub bending the incoming light less severely.
“I have a friend called Tio,” Haf said, without looking up from his frame. “He told me that the best way to think about curved geometry is to imagine it as lots of little flat pieces stuck together. I mean, a cube is just six flat pieces, but it’s not that far from the shape of a sphere. And if you use more pieces, you can get closer.”
“That’s true,” Roi said. “You can shift all the curvature into the corners between the pieces. But I’m not sure where that gets you. Who did Tio study with? Kem? Nis?”
“I don’t think it was either of them. He spoke to a lot of different people. Picked things up here and there.”
Roi kept staring at the frame, but her mind was blank. Having exhausted all the elegant tricks she knew, she had finally attacked the problem directly, with no subtlety but all the diligence she could muster, hoping that somewhere along the way an opportunity to simplify the mess would appear before her eyes. It hadn’t happened yet. There must be something simple, Zak had declared. But he’d found that once already, in the principle of the weights. In a void full of Jolts and Wanderers, and countless distant lights that for all Roi knew could be wrapped in curvature of their own, how much more simplicity could they expect?
Sen, one of Neth’s students, appeared at the entrance to the chamber. “We’re opening the tunnel now,” she said.
Roi put down her frame. Haf made ready to heft the light machine on to his back, but Roi said, “I don’t think we’ll need that.” The dark phase was almost over, and Sen knew the area so well that she’d come to them without any light of her own. Roi was getting better at following people by the sound of their footsteps, even when she was in an unfamiliar place, a skill that seemed to come naturally to Haf and the others hatched since the Jolt.
They followed Sen down a narrow, sloping tunnel toward the rarb-sard edge.
By the time they reached their destination, there was enough light to see Neth, Bard, and a few dozen others gathered in the plug chamber adjoining the new tunnel. The outer wall where the tunnel approached the surface had been thinned and weakened to the point where it had almost certainly broken apart during the last light phase. From this chamber, the first of the sets of stone plugs that were keeping the tunnel sealed would be pulled aside, at the same time as eleven others further downwind were withdrawn. If everything went as planned, the wind would flow freely across the width of the Splinter and strike the sharq end of the tunnel with enough force to break through the thin crust that had been left by the workers there, opening up a third unimpeded channel from Incandescence to Incandescence.
Roi approached Neth. “Surely your work’s done here now,” she joked. “We’ll be waiting for you to join us at the Null Chamber.” In fact the Null Chamber was empty of theorists and Roi had no reason to visit it any more, but no other place had the same ring to its name.
“When the tunnels have steered us past the Wanderer, I might take you up on that,” Neth replied, in all seriousness. “I want to work with someone who’s interested in a deep understanding of the changes we’ve seen in the density of the Incandescence as we’ve moved away from the Hub. There are many mysteries there. We understand weight and motion pretty well for rocks like the Splinter, I think, but when it comes to anything else we’re still just gathering data, and guessing.”