“Twenty and three-quarters,” Kem replied. “That’s the latest from the Null Chamber.”
Roi echoed the number. “And now I have to sleep?” At its last sighting, the Wanderer had been in an orbit at a little more than twenty-two, but everything in its history made them believe that it would be down to less than twenty-one by now. The path they were following tried to steer down the middle of the uncertainty, putting some bounds on the danger without them being sure exactly where their nemesis lay.
“We might have passed it already,” Nis said. “It might all be over, and we just don’t know.”
Roi said, “When we cross twenty-two, I’ll believe it’s over.”
“There can still be flares,” Kem reminded them. “We have to stick to the course.”
“For how long?” Roi had never really confronted the question before; just crossing the Wanderer’s orbit safely had always been hard enough to imagine. “We keep moving out, the Wanderer keeps moving in. Until there’s a healthy distance between us. But what happens to the Wanderer?”
“The Hub tears it to pieces,” Nis said. “Its own curvature has been holding on to less and less of. whatever it’s made of. There’ll come a point when there’s simply nothing left, when it’s all bled out into the Incandescence.”
“And that’s it?”
Nis said, “That’s how weight and motion work. What else can happen?”
When Roi woke, she found Tan’s chamber empty. She searched around frantically for anyone who might know what had happened to him.
Finally she met up with Pel, who would sometimes wake earlier than Roi and visit Tan herself.
“I saw him,” Pel said. “I gave him the news.”
“What news?”
“Everyone believes we’ve crossed the orbit,” Pel said. “We’re not at twenty-two, but the Wanderer can’t have stayed in the same orbit all this time. We’re past it, we’re going in different directions now.”
“That’s good news,” Roi said. “But where did Tan go?”
“He said he needed some exercise,” Pel replied.
Roi hunted for him, until she could no longer leave Leh doing her job. As she shuffled the numbers, she pictured her old friend, finding a comfortable fissure in the rock somewhere, shutting off his vision, letting the long brightness fade from his mind.
27
“Be careful coming through,” Rakesh warned Zey. “It’s quite a squeeze at the end.”
She climbed down through the habitat’s entrance and dropped on to the deck beside him.
“I’m outside the world,” she marveled. “But I’m not dead.”
“The walls shield us from the radiation,” Rakesh reminded her. “You couldn’t survive unprotected outside.”
Zey said, “How can we make the place outside the world our home, if we always need to be shielded from it?”
“It’s not that big a problem,” Rakesh assured her. “My ancestors needed a special mix of gases with them, everywhere they went. So did yours, but you’ve already been tweaked to live in vacuum. There are adjustments you can make to your bodies, if you want to. Matter is matter; many things are possible.”
Zey wasn’t listening to him; she’d discovered the view. The habitat was a bubble joined to the Ark over the crack in the wall on the neutron-star side; Rakesh had had nanomachines enlarge the passage through the rock to a size that any Arkdweller could climb through. As well as shielding them from the hard radiation that came from the innermost parts of the accretion disk and its flow on to the neutron star, the walls of the habitat screened out most of the terahertz synchrotron radiation coming from the plasma around them. This was the glow that suffused the whole Ark, the frequency at which the rock was translucent, and to which the Arkdwellers’ vision was most sensitive. However, they could also see far enough into the infrared band that if the terahertz glow was removed, they were not left blind. Instead, the dazzling foreground fell away, and they could see beyond it. Bright infrared sources dotted the sky. Zey was looking out at the stars.
Using the workshop on Lahl’s Promise, Rakesh had built the habitat and equipped it with everything he’d need. Then he had upgraded his Arkdweller avatar, hard-coded himself into it, and trashed his body back on the ship.
Docked to the habitat was a small ferry. It could exploit the winds and magnetic fields of the accretion disk for some journeys, but it also had a separate, fusion-powered drive. There was a halo of rocky and carbonaceous detritus around the outer parts of the accretion disk, well within the ferry’s range; it was not exactly a mother lode of riches by Amalgam standards, but the Arkdwellers were small creatures, and their needs were likely to remain modest for a while.
It would not be an easy life, but the choice would be theirs to make. Rakesh wasn’t offering them a cornucopia, a highway straight to the Amalgam’s dazzling riches. It was possible that everyone he awakened might decline the chance to leave the Ark behind, when the alternative was so spartan.
Still, he had kept his promise to Lahl, whoever she was, and he had kept faith with Zey. He had neither ignored his cousins, leaving them to sleepwalk into eternity, nor obliterated their present, stable culture and robbed them of all meaningful choices.
Rakesh asked Zey, “Are you ready for a small journey?”
“A journey where?” Zey’s body tensed nervously.
“It’s not far, I promise. I just want to say goodbye to my friend.”
They crossed into the ferry. Having no need for airlocks simplified things enormously. Rakesh was almost beginning to enjoy his new embodiment: crawling around in vacuum, clinging to walls and ceilings, and knowing that it wasn’t an act of puppetry, but a benign metamorphosis. He hoped, he believed, that he could live this way until Parantham returned.
Rakesh started the fusion drive, and the ferry arced up out of the disk. Zey scuttled around the cabin, confused, not knowing which way to orient herself. “What’s happening to my weight?”
“Acceleration. Get used to it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Be patient,” Rakesh implored her. “Just enjoy the view.”
Even with the limited range of frequencies that the combination of the hull’s filters and their vision afforded them, the neutron star made a majestic sight. Parts of the disk and the central jet shone brightly, and the narrow band brought out complex structures woven into the jet that would have been much harder to discern in the glare of a full-spectrum image.
As the spinning ring of Lahl’s Promise came into view, Rakesh’s anxiety began to rival Zey’s. With the sight of his last fragile link to the Amalgam looming in front of him, the prospect of renouncing it, of cutting his ties, was beginning to seem a thousand times more daunting than leaving the node had been. He had not felt the same vulnerability since the day he’d left Shab-e-Noor. In the bulge, nothing would be certain. He did not understand the Aloof and their whims. There was no guarantee that he’d ever see Parantham, or any other citizen of the Amalgam, again.
So be it. That was what backups were for.
He brought the ferry to a halt a hundred meters from the ship.
“This is the cart I traveled in,” Rakesh told Zey. “Though not all the way from the place where I was born.”
“I don’t understand,” Zey complained. “How you traveled, where you’ve been.”
“Don’t worry,” Rakesh said. “Forget about those things. Think about this place, and your own journeys.”
He spoke to Parantham as she sat in the cabin, through a radio link bridging the vacuum between them.
“I’ve found Tassef’s star on the map,” she said. “If I ask the ship to go there, I suppose the Aloof will try to inject me back into the Amalgam’s network.”