dozen spans thick, though like much common knowledge that claim might not have had much grounding in solid information.
Ruz said, “If there’s a system of cracks, there might be other openings. Even if the vegetation got to all the old ones, the Jolt might have broken a way through somewhere else.”
Roi climbed down to the floor. “Stay here with Zak,” she said. “I’ll take a look around.”
She continued along the tunnel by which they’d reached the intersection. When the darkness came she froze and looked back, but there was no faint glow in the distance; she hadn’t bothered to rewind the light machine, and apparently Ruz hadn’t either.
As the light returned she advanced slowly, listening to the wind. The sound had an odd, resonant beat that she’d never heard before, and as she approached the next intersection it grew louder.
She turned right into the cross-tunnel, pursuing the sound. The floor of the tunnel was piled high with rubble, and it reached the point where it became easier just to climb on to the ceiling and stay there. When darkness fell once more it hardly seemed to matter; there might be cracks here, but at least she couldn’t slip on a loose stone. She inched her way forward through the blackness.
When the wind rose up again, Roi could hardly believe that she was in the Calm. Even at the garm-sharq edge she’d felt nothing like this; her carapace tingled beneath the assault as if she was being pelted with fine sand.
The light now was brighter than she’d ever seen it. Brighter everywhere, but ahead, opposite the mouth of a side tunnel, a patch on the wall was almost blinding.
She dimmed her vision as much as she could, and approached the intersection cautiously. As she turned to peer into the side tunnel she saw the floor ahead awash with radiance, blazing too brightly to bear. She retreated, her heart racing.
When the next cycle of darkness came and the light ebbed from the surrounding rock, the intersection did not lose its strange radiance entirely. Roi approached the entrance to the side tunnel again, and looked toward the place that had been intolerably bright before. She could see a hole in the ceiling, with a ragged patch of the floor illuminated beneath it. The Incandescence was far away now, but it seemed that a part of its light was still reaching through that hole.
No doubt remained in Roi’s mind: this was a crack in the Splinter’s edge, leading out to whatever lay beyond. The next time darkness fell the Incandescence would lie safely on the other side, and the secrets of the void would be rendered visible to whoever dared step outside.
15
Rakesh was dreaming that he was a child on Shab-e-Noor, diving into a river with a group of friends, when Parantham appeared among them. She stood on the riverbank, smiling. “We’ve found an Ark,” she said.
“Is this real, or am I dreaming?” he asked.
“Both,” she replied.
His friends seemed troubled by the news. “Don’t worry,” he told them, “I’ll be back as soon as I’m finished with this.” A sense of panic was rising in his chest. Why couldn’t he remember any of these children’s names?
“If we let you come back,” one said darkly.
Rakesh woke. He had not imagined the claim about the Ark; the telescope’s report had entered his skull and the discovery had seeped into the dream’s scenario.
He walked to the control room. Parantham said, “I was about to wake you.”
“The news did that itself.”
“What do you think?”
Rakesh scanned the data. The neutron star where the Ark had been found was twenty light years from the galactic center. Even with ninety per cent of the telescope’s mirror in place the image of the find was just a tiny dark blur against the glow of the accretion disk. The spectrum was unmistakable, though; the object in question was made from the same material as the failed Ark that had been left behind.
This Ark would be immersed in powerful winds from the differences in orbital velocity across its length. In spite of the turmoil of its surroundings it had apparently managed to remain in place for fifty million years, kept from spiraling inward by a passive asymmetry in its structure that allowed it to gain energy from the wind if it ever sank too close to the neutron star. It was in precisely the environment for which it had been built. If its makers survived anywhere, surely it was here.
“Is there anything to keep us here?” he wondered. They had already built a communications link that would allow the telescope to convey any further discoveries to
“Nothing I can think of,” Parantham replied.
Rakesh felt a twinge of anxiety. “What if this one’s empty, too?”
“Then we wait for the telescope to find another one.” Even if this neutron star had captured all of the successful Arks initially, that didn’t mean it had held on to them all. If there had been enough of them to start with—or if the Arkmakers had flourished in their new environment and found a way to build more—then viable Arks might have ended up orbiting several different neutron stars.
“And if it doesn’t find another one?”
Parantham walked up to him and put a hand on his cheek, an almost maternal gesture of tenderness mixed with exasperation. “Then our time here will be over. We’ll move on.” She took her hand away. “But it hasn’t come to that yet, so can you please stop fretting? Whatever this Ark contains will be fifty million years removed from its makers, so I’m not offering any bets about the nature of its inhabitants. But even fifty million years of energy starvation didn’t finish off the other one completely. We’ve already faced the worst-case scenario. We’ve seen the desert; now we’re heading for an oasis.”
When their hosts rebuilt and woke them at their destination, the sky had turned from dazzling salt to luminous milk. Fifty times more crowded than before, it had lost every perceptible trace of black. The closer stars still outshone the bright backdrop formed by the crowd behind them, but the contrast was greatly diminished. Night had become day; it was almost as if they were back on Massa, where the stars of the bulge could be seen against the pale twilight sky long before darkness fell.
When the accretion disk came into view it outshone the sky around it, but it was not the kind of spectacle that it would have been against the black night of the disk. Then again, it could never really have existed out there. This was not a blazing X-ray binary, where a neutron star actively tore strips off a closely orbiting companion, but no star was truly isolated here, and the combined exhalations of thousands of neighbors kept the accretion disk aglow. The neutron star itself was almost lost in the bright center of the disk, where a narrow jet of plasma shot up from the plane. Its days as a conventional sun were long gone, but the chances were that it had never hosted life until it traded its own thermonuclear glow for this gravity-powered renaissance.
The Ark was far too small to see with the naked eye from their distant vantage point, so Parantham aimed the shipboard telescopes while launching surveyor probes. The gray ovoid was six hundred meters long, the same size as the one they’d left behind, but its surface appeared far smoother. That might have meant better repairs by better-fed fungus, or it might just have meant that it had avoided more of the debris from the destruction of the home world.
The Ark’s rotation was tidally locked: it spun around its axis in exactly the time it took to complete an orbit, fixing its orientation with respect to the neutron star. This froze the stretch and squeeze of tidal forces into a stationary pattern, allowing the material of the Ark to respond to those stresses once and for all rather than suffering endless cycles of flexing; no doubt this had not always been the case, but the process of flexure would have stolen energy from the rotation until the spin finally did fall into synch. The fixed stance the Ark had achieved did not aim its long axis directly at the neutron star, though; the torque from the orbital wind produced a perceptible slant on the telescope’s annotated image.
Rakesh wondered if this leaning tower had been crafted to take account of its inevitable inclination. The interior of the Ark they’d visited had been essentially weightless, but here the orbit, fifty thousand kilometers from the neutron star, was small enough for tidal forces to be felt. While they waited for the surveyor probes, he
