She stripped all the packets from the first three donors, and they shuddered with gratitude and disappeared into the crowd. When she took two globes from the fourth male and found that she was full, she muttered a few consoling words and left him wailing for further assistance.
The ripe seed packets secreted a substance that the males found extremely unpleasant, and while unplucked globes did shrivel up and die eventually, waiting for that to happen could be an ordeal. There were tools available for severing and discarding them, but that method was notoriously prone to spilling an agonizing dose of irritant. Something about a female’s mating claw—something harder to mimic than its shape and its mechanical action— sealed the broken cord far more effectively than any tool.
As Roi continued across the chamber, a pleasant haze of contentment washed over her. The seed packets were battling for supremacy, but the poisons they were using against each other had a thoroughly positive effect on her. The battle was rendered more intense by a weapon of her own: a small quantity of crushed plant material that she replenished regularly. All of her competing suitors would die, valiantly trying to out-poison this thoroughly sterile rival.
Roi left the chamber by the least crowded route, intent now on finding a quiet crevice in which to recuperate. The wind would never fall completely silent unless she traveled all the way to the narrow calm space that divided the garmside from the sardside, but it wouldn’t take long to reach some veins of less porous rock that offered a degree of shelter. There was no shelter from the geographical certainties of weight, but after so long working at the Splinter’s edge she didn’t need much lightening in order to feel unburdened.
Ahead of her, a lone male stood idle in the middle of the tunnel. He wasn’t begging for help, and as she drew closer Roi could see that he carried no seeds. A moment later she recognized something else in his appearance: the visibly laboring heart of someone who’d ventured well beyond the weight he was accustomed to bearing.
The male was blocking the easiest way ahead, so Roi, undeterred by the weeds, climbed the tunnel wall to detour around him.
“It must be something simple,” he declared.
Roi paused courteously. “What must be, father?”
“Whatever underlies it all.”
“Of course.” Roi had no idea what he was talking about, so she could hardly dispute him.
She hesitated, then started to move on.
The male scrambled after her. “My name is Zak.”
“My name is Roi.” He was exerting himself valiantly to match her pace, but she took pity on him and slowed down a little. “I work among the crops, at the garm-sharq edge.”
Zak chirped approval. “Valuable work.”
Roi glanced behind them. If this was some kind of recruitment ambush, his team-mates were well hidden. “What do you do?”
“I doubt you will have heard of my task. In fact, lately I’ve been working alone.”
Roi didn’t ask why he remained unrecruited; he was plainly quite old, and probably in poor health. Being stranded without team-mates was an unfortunate fate for anyone, but she had no power to change that for him. She certainly couldn’t recruit him into her own team, in his condition.
“I spend a lot of time in the Calm,” Zak continued. “Near the Null Line.”
“I see.” Resting, hoping to recover from an illness? Or perhaps being weightless too long was the cause of his weakness. “Doing what?”
“Playing with some contraptions of mine. Trying to find something simple.”
“I don’t understand. What is it you’re looking for?”
Zak said, “I’m not sure. But I’ll recognize it when I see it.”
They continued on in silence for a while. Roi didn’t mind him accompanying her; he could hardly hijack her loyalty on his own, and she was relieved to see him heading for a level more conducive to his health.
“Do you ever wonder why we climb
“What is there to ponder?” Roi replied, amused. “That’s just the way it is.” When Zak said nothing she added defensively, “Do you really think it’s surprising? Any point you name must be above some places, and below others. So why shouldn’t the four quarters be half and half?”
Zak said, “If you ascend to any other point and then continue on in the same direction, you cross between the two alternatives: the point that was originally above you is now below you. When you cross straight through the Null Line, that doesn’t happen. If you go from garm to sard, the Null Line remains above you. If you go from shomal to junub, it remains below.”
Roi was tired, but she forced herself to concentrate. She might have let the matter drop for the sake of harmony, but something about Zak provoked her to disputation.
“At the Null Line you have no weight,” she said finally, “so there really is no up or down. That’s the difference. If any other point stayed above you as you crossed through it, your weight would have to reverse suddenly, changing completely in a single step. At the Null Line it shrinks to nothing, so a change in direction is no change at all.”
“Exactly.” Her answer was clearly no revelation to Zak, but he sounded pleased that she’d made the effort to think it through. “That still doesn’t explain the particular pattern, though. I can see no logical difficulty with a far simpler situation: our weight always pointing away from the Null Line, or always pointing toward it. Nor can I see any barrier to more complex arrangements. Why the four quarters? When you circle around the Null Line, why should it be above you, then below you, then above, then below? Why not six changes of direction, or thirty- six?”
Roi rasped annoyance. “And if it was thirty-six, you’d be asking why not four, or six.”
“Of course I would. But I don’t believe it could ever be thirty-six.”
“You just told me you can see no reason why it shouldn’t be!”
Zak said, “I can’t see the reason yet. But four is small enough to point to something simple. If it was thirty, I could believe it might be thirty-six. Because it’s four, though, I believe it
They’d reached a junction in the tunnel. Roi moved toward the left branch, which she knew was a cul-de-sac ending in some comfortable crannies.
“Before we part,” Zak said, “can I show you something?” He opened his carapace and reached into the empty seed bed to remove a rolled-up sheet of cured skin, which he proceeded to spread out before her. “This is my favorite map of the Splinter.”
Roi was unimpressed. The single cross-section portrayed was covered with an absurdly regular hatching of short, straight lines which bore no resemblance to any routes she knew. And there was no hint of anything really useful, such as vegetation patterns or the lodes of dense, sheltering rock.
“Are you telling me I can get from
“It’s not a map of tunnels,” Zak replied. “It’s a map of weights.”
It took a moment for his meaning to become clear. The longest lines were drawn at the edge of the Splinter, where the weight was greatest. The lines’ varying lengths, and the way they gradually rotated as you followed them around the center of the map, offered a plausible rendering of the way weight changed from place to place. A small crossbar on each one distinguished the bottom end from the top.
“You drew this yourself?” she asked.
“No, I copied it from a map I found in a library. That had nothing to indicate its provenance, though, and it could easily have been a copy itself. For all I know this could be the seventh or eighth generation.”
Roi pondered the strange task the original cartographer had embarked upon. “Everybody knows that weight increases as you move away from the Null Line. What’s the need for a map like this?”
“In what manner does it increase?” Zak demanded. “How quickly, as you move in different directions? And which way, exactly, is down, as you move between the quarters?”
Roi couldn’t imagine why anyone would need to know these things with more precision than she already
