Neth, a young student of Tan’s. As far as Roi knew, Neth’s only other work since her hatchling’s education had been herding susk, but she had taken to template mathematics as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Neth continued, a little shyly. “If the next division is like the last one, I’m sure many people would survive. The weights would be greater, but both new Splinters would be smaller, and the weights alone would not be enough to harm us. The wind would still blow, the crops would still spread, we would mourn our team-mates and then continue with our lives.
“But it might not be that way.”
She hesitated. Zak said encouragingly, “Go on. We all want to hear you.”
Neth said, “I’ve been studying the templates that describe the motion of the looping stones. When you toss a stone directly garm or sard from the Null Line, it follows a closed curve, an ellipse about three times as long as it is wide.
“This looping motion shows that an object that shares our orbit, then is slightly disturbed, won’t wander too far. Even if you toss the stone along the Null Line, giving it a sustained motion in that direction, it won’t go far garm or sard of us. Any small disturbance of the orbit we’re on leads to another orbit which stays more or less the same distance from the Hub.”
Zak said, “Agreed.”
“The problem,” Neth said, “is that it’s not the strength of the weights alone that has changed over time, but also the relationship between them. If we can believe the Map of Weights, then when it was drawn all the relative strengths were different. The total garm weight was three times the spin weight. At present, that ratio is more than three and a half. If we’d tossed a stone garmwards from the Null Line when the Map of Weights was drawn, the loop it followed would have been a different shape than the one we see now; it would have been just twice as long as it was wide.
“If the ratio between the garm weight and the spin weight keeps increasing the closer we get to the Hub, then the loop will keep growing longer and skinnier. But the shape changes faster than the ratio, and the ratio only has to reach a value of
There was silence as people absorbed the implications of this. What Neth was describing for a stone tossed in the Null Chamber applied equally well to the Splinter itself. If the ratio of weights changed in the way she described, any slight disturbance that nudged the Splinter garmwards would no longer lead to a small variation in its path, a gentle meandering that never saw it stray far from the original orbit. Instead, it would immediately send it spiraling in toward the Hub.
Ruz said, “Might it not be that this ratio never actually reaches four? Might it not approach that value as we approach the Hub, without ever quite getting there?”
“That’s a possibility,” Neth replied. “As things stand, though, we have no way of knowing whether that’s true or not.”
The meeting’s attentive silence gave way to a cacophony, as most of the team began talking among themselves. Roi made her way over to Zak, whose body was hunched against the rock in a protective posture.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he rasped. “Just a few pangs, nothing unusual.” After a moment he added, “I can still remember when we first calculated the period of the looping stones. The square of the inverse period was proportional to
“Let me get you out of here.” Roi started clearing a path for him.
Zak said, “Wait.” He forced his pain aside and looked up at her. “Let me speak to the meeting first.” Roi drummed a call for silence, and when it was finally heeded Zak addressed the team.
“Neth’s work changes everything,” he declared. “We are a long way from predicting the ratios of weights all the way down to the Hub, and even if we did find some beautiful templates that seemed to fit the handful of numbers we have, we would be foolish to trust them absolutely. We can’t rule out reaching a ratio of four, so we have to be prepared for that possibility.
“I believe that we have two priorities now, both of them equally urgent. The first is to continue the experiments, the calculations, and the philosophical speculations that have brought us this far. This is the work that led us to Neth’s insight. We must do our best to map the dangers that lie ahead, even if our foresight can never be perfect.
“Our other priority must be to strengthen our ability to act on whatever insights we can gain. We need to recruit, we need to educate, we need to start the whole Splinter talking about these dangers.
“A few heartbeats ago, I declared that Bard’s plan would take several lifetimes to achieve. That might or might not be true, but it’s no longer an excuse to delay taking it seriously. If we can devise an easier, less contentious way to move the Splinter out of danger, that would be the greatest achievement we could hope for. If we can’t, then we need to prepare ourselves to accept the reality: the lives of all our descendants might depend on whether we can recruit enough workers, and win enough support, to carve a tunnel from one side of the Splinter to the other.”
11
In the center of the bulge, a billion and a half stars wheeled around in a disk fifteen hundred light years wide. The astronomers of the Amalgam called this the NSD—the Nuclear Stellar Disk—and had long ago resigned themselves to observing it from afar, as just one more example of the kind of structure seen in a billion other galaxies. It was a telescopic object, not a destination for travelers.
Many of the stars in the NSD were infant prodigies: hot, bright, fast-burning giants born a few tens of millions of years ago in the clouds of gas swept inward by the complex dynamics of the galactic core. Others were older, smaller stars that had wound their way in over billions of years, their orbits slowly decaying as they lost energy to chance encounters.
The meteor that the Aloof had captured had managed to climb just beyond the edge of the NSD. Given that the rock had not been melted by the impact that had sent it on its way, there were limits to the speed with which it could have been blasted free of its parent world. If that world had been bound to a star at the time, meteor and star could not have parted company too quickly.
Over fifty million years, the two might have completed as many as ten laps around the galactic center, with their orbits gradually diverging as they came under the sway of different neighbors. However, if the star in question was assumed to be the Interloper that had scrambled the system of the planet that Rakesh had named Touched- by-Steel, then the possibilities became much more tightly constrained. Many of the stars that might have been close enough to the meteor itself certainly hadn’t traveled far enough from the galactic center at any time in the last two hundred million years to have kidnapped the Steelmakers’ world. According to the models Rakesh ran, only forty-six stars could have captured the planet, sunk down into the NSD, and then been in the right place fifty million years ago to make sense of the meteor’s trajectory.
When the remaining siblings of Touched-by-Steel, the three gas giants and their moons, proved to be untouched themselves, Parantham asked the map to take
This time, the Aloof’s hidden travel agent delivered no pleasant twist to their itinerary. The jump-cut in their consciousness filled the sky with hot blue stars that far outshone the sun they now orbited, but as the seconds ticked by and the cabin window completed its three hundred and sixty degree pan, no planet swam into view.
They scoured the region with their instruments, but this star’s sole companion was a sparse disk of rubble, with all the fine dust that might normally have been expected blown away by the wind from the neighboring stars. No gas, no ice; just barren rock. With volatiles so rare, Rakesh thought, it must have been a challenge for the Aloof’s engineering spores to scrape together the raw materials to reconstruct the whole ship, unless they’d
