He probed the metal beneath the mound of bones, scanning back and forth with his fingertips. Streaks of light flashed behind his eyes, followed like thunder by a bludgeoning pain. Finally he held out the key itself and scraped it blindly over the vault’s unyielding surface.
Something gave, and his hand moved. Probably the key had just slipped. Rakesh waggled it, disbelieving. It had entered a keyhole, and it fitted snugly.
He tried to plow some of the mound aside, but he soon gave up. He doubted that he’d have the strength to lift the vault’s huge door even if he could clear it first. Still, there was something satisfying about getting this far. Let Csi paint his not-quite-triumphant skeleton into the scape and leave it as a signpost for the next traveler.
He turned the key, and felt a click.
The door dropped away beneath him. Mud, bones, Rakesh, and a geyser of water erupted from an opening in the floor of the ocean, into an endless space full of stars.
4
The sense of attachment Roi felt toward her work team had never been a constant, unwavering force. Even in the absence of recruitment efforts it rose and fell, following its own internal rhythm. So it was only when it had reached one of its peaks and she felt confident that her loyalty could survive a few missed shifts that she decided to take a break and travel to the Null Line.
Zak had invited her to come and see his “contraptions” as soon as she’d handed him her first batch of weight measurements, and each time since then when they’d met he’d reminded her that she was welcome to visit, though he’d never made her feel that she was under any pressure. It was, of course, conceivable that he had a team waiting at the Null Line ready to enact a full-blown recruitment, but Roi had made a point of quizzing people for any news they’d heard from the Calm, and she’d turned up no evidence of any such threat. It was hard to believe that an entire team indulging in activity as strange as Zak’s could have escaped notice. For a lone, unrecruited person to behave oddly was only to be expected.
When Zak had first invited her, she’d told him an old joke: the easy way to reach the Null Line from the garm quarter was to travel to the shomal quarter, and from there the journey would be downhill all the way. Rather than expressing amusement or irritation, Zak had responded by showing her yet another of his maps.
“These lines are paths that lead neither up nor down,” he’d explained. “I call them ‘levels’. I’ve arranged their spacing so that climbing from one level to the next is an equal effort in each case. Counting the lines to be crossed will tell you how much work any journey requires.”
In fact, counting the lines told Roi nothing new; the whole point of the joke was that everyone knew it would take at least as much effort to reach the shomal quarter from the garm as to travel to the Null Line itself. Still, the map made this fact clear at a glance, because the Null Line was level with the boundary between the quarters.
Zak insisted that he’d drawn this second map, not by laboriously measuring the weight lines on the first map and marking off increments of effort, but by a kind of reasoning that started with the underlying mathematical rule that described the pattern of weights, and led to a new rule describing the shape and spacing of these levels. Roi was astonished, but when she’d asked for more details she’d found his explanation impenetrable. “When you come to the Calm, when you have time to ponder these ideas at leisure, it will all make sense,” he’d promised.
Roi planned the journey to take twelve shifts in alclass="underline" four spent traveling up to the Null Line, five visiting Zak, and three for the easier return leg. She’d been with the team long enough for an absence like this to be acceptable; everybody needed to recuperate sometimes, and travel was a common form of recreation. If it also made you vulnerable to recruitment, the unspeakable truth was that a certain amount of turnover kept the teams fresh, and if a tired or restless worker was ambushed it was not the end of the world.
It was easy to ponder these matters as abstractions, but when Roi woke in the shelter of her crevice and faced the reality of setting out in the opposite direction to all of her team-mates, she realized that she’d chosen the hardest time to leave. By the end of each shift she craved solitude, but on waking all she could think about was company and cooperation. She’d made no close friends in this team, but that wasn’t the point: it gave her the same sense of accomplishment to work beside the most taciturn stranger as it did beside someone sociable and garrulous whose history she knew inside-out. Work was work; everything else was superfluous chatter, however delightful that could be.
As she eased herself out of her resting place, she resolved to follow her plan regardless. The more difficult it was to begin the journey, the more she would feel reassured that her attachment to the team was secure.
Zak had given her a series of maps that showed the way between their usual meeting place and a rendezvous point that he’d chosen near the Null Line. Roi had decided not to follow his suggested route precisely; whether she trusted him or not, it would be more enjoyable to take a few detours and keep the journey unpredictable. She’d been in the Calm a few times, and had even worked for a while in the sard quarter, but Zak’s haunts were further rarb along the Null Line than she’d ever gone, and there would be plenty of territory along the way that she’d never seen before.
In the first tunnel she entered, she encountered a crowd of workers descending for the start of their shifts. She deferred to their numbers and climbed along the matted ceiling, trying to exhibit an uncomplicated purposefulness with her gait even as she struggled to keep her footing. The tangle of vegetation seemed imbued with malice; among the crops at the edge the same weeds would be proliferating luxuriantly in the unfiltered wind, and she would not be there to keep them in check. Five of her team-mates passed her below, oblivious to her presence. She was alone and useless; no wonder she was invisible to them.
What was she doing? Taking a rest. Satisfying her curiosity. Scratching an itch so she could keep on working, with all the more energy and dedication.
Taking a rest, and walking into an ambush. Zak was probably just the healthiest member of his team, the only one who still possessed enough strength to travel deep into the garm quarter. Once Roi arrived in his territory all the others would float around her, weakened and deformed by their countless shifts of weightlessness, ready to induct her into their deranged schemes.
The crowd below her thinned, but the anxieties and self-accusations kept coming. She was a traitor, an unrecruitable freak. She would bring on a famine with her selfishness and perversity. Roi didn’t argue with any of it. She just stared straight ahead and kept moving.
The tunnel led into a chamber that was almost empty, except for a group of children playing with their tutors. Roi kept her distance, still feeling guilty and tainted, not wanting to infect these young minds with her treachery. Listening to their exuberant shouts, though, began to lift her spirits. Everyone remembered stumbling into a team like this: their first ever recruitment. She now knew that hatchlings rarely spent more than eight or nine shifts wandering and grazing alone before finding a group of willing tutors, but in her memory it was as if an eternity of desperate searching had preceded that first moment of fulfillment.
Watching the children mimicking pointless, stylized poses and movements for the sheer joy of acting in unison, Roi began to feel, paradoxically, more at ease with her own truancy. The simple truth was that there would always be a team somewhere that would welcome her. She fervently hoped that she would return safely to tend the crops again, but whatever changes her journey wrought, the sight of these contented infants seemed like a promise that there would always be a place for her in the world.