She ran to him, and drummed directly on his body. “What happened? Can you move?”
He stirred feebly, but there was no reply.
“Climb on to my back. Can you do that?” She placed herself beside him and flattened herself against the rock.
Nothing. She waited a few heartbeats, but he didn’t move.
“All right. I’m going to try to lift you. Relax your grip on the rock.” She nudged his body and it shifted slightly; whether he’d heard her and complied, or had simply lost his hold along with his strength, he wasn’t sticking.
Roi tilted her carapace and managed to get all four claws on her right side beneath him. The edge of her body was too blunt simply to slide under him, so she tried to raise him with her claws first. She was not so old and weak that his weight should be immovable, and she was sure that once she got him on to her back she would be able to move quickly enough.
She strained against the rock. The very posture that she was forced to adopt undermined her strength, but if she couldn’t raise him she could at least make it easier for Zak to complete the action by his own efforts.
She kept pushing, clinging to the hope that in a few more heartbeats the balance of forces would shift, he would slide into place, and they would dash to safety together, but whether or not Zak was striving to assist her, between the two of them he was barely moving.
She’d made a joke to Ruz about a rope, but it was exactly what she needed. She looked up at the tracker that Zak had assembled, wondering if she could use it somehow to lever him up. Then she noticed a sudden brightening, an aura of true, strong light seeping around the rock in the distance.
Roi hesitated, trying to imagine some way in which she might yet save them both. If they both died here, then it would begin to look as if the void itself was fatal, and Ruz would not be so foolhardy as to try to make the measurements himself. The chances were that nobody would leave the Splinter again.
Zak twitched, then tapped one claw against her.
“Run, you fool!”
She bolted for the crack and skidded over the edge, losing her grip by accident but then understanding that it was better this way, better to fall. She bounced painfully against the jagged rock, but kept her claws tightly closed, refusing to slow herself. The rock around her was brightening, and she could feel the heat of the raw, unfiltered Incandescence growing above her.
She hit the floor, bruised and aching, but forced herself to limp down the tunnel away from the searing light. Ruz appeared beside her and she climbed on to his back. She clung to him tightly as he sprinted to the intersection and around the corner.
He kept running until it was clear that they were sheltered by the rock, immersed in nothing but ordinary brightness. Roi listened to the pounding of their hearts. Ruz sounded almost as shaken as she was.
After a while, she spoke. “He was too weak to move. I couldn’t shift him.”
Ruz said gently, “He might have died in the Null Chamber instead, but it would have been soon, whatever he did. This was the risk he chose.”
“I know.”
“He did a lot in one lifetime. More than any of us. What he learned, what he taught, what he changed.”
“That’s true.” Roi let the sadness sweep over her. In the end, there was only work, only the Splinter, only the next generation of hatchlings, and the next, on and on into the future. Nobody could live forever. But Zak had woken them all from a daze, woken them to a new kind of thought, a new kind of work, a new kind of happiness. Even if the Splinter itself had not been at stake, he deserved to be remembered for that.
Ruz said, “Are you badly hurt?”
“No. Give me one shift and I’ll have my strength back.”
“You want to go back there?” Ruz’s tone was neutral; he wasn’t going to pressure her to take Zak’s place, but nor would he try to dissuade her.
“I’ve walked beneath the void once, I can do it again. And I’m sure there’s something out there that we can track, something we can measure.” Roi pictured the strange ribbon of colors stretched across the darkness; she had no idea what it was, but she had seen lights moving within it.
“There must be something simple,” she said. “We have to keep searching for it.”
Zak’s body had been seared beyond recognition. Roi had seen many corpses in her life, most of them half- eaten by murche, but she had never faced a choice before about the fate of a friend’s remains. Though everyone expected to be consumed by scavengers, as it was normally as inevitable as death itself, was it her duty to Zak to ensure that end? It seemed more fitting to leave him here, where the Incandescence had claimed him.
The tracker, made of metal and susk cuticle, was pitted and tarnished but appeared to have survived intact. Roi went to it and adjusted the aim, sighting a bright point of light at the edge of the colored arc. She took the clock Ruz had made for her from her right cavity, and held the moving wheels against her claw so she could time the occultation of the light by the tracker’s wires.
As the light moved, its color changed smoothly. It didn’t take long for it to cross the whole width of the band and vanish completely. Roi had no idea how to explain this peculiar behavior. Was the light now being hidden by something in the void—something opaque, like metal—or had it been destroyed?
She recorded the time it had taken for the light to cross a small portion of the view, but she didn’t trust that number to tell her much about the Splinter’s motion. The lights weren’t merely changing color, they were moving apart as they flowed across the band. To expect the time it took for them to cross one thirty-sixth of a circle to be directly proportional to the whole journey seemed absurdly optimistic.
Ruz called to her anxiously, and she returned to the interior with plenty of time to spare. When she was safe in the shelter of the side tunnel she explained what she had seen.
“I have to go out again,” she said. “Maybe we’ll think of an explanation for all of this, and find some way to calculate the Splinter’s orbital period from this data, but since we don’t really know what we’re measuring, the more observations I can make, the better.”
Back on the outside, Roi confirmed a hunch that she’d had before: if she confined her measurements to one part of the band, all the lights took the same time to move through the same angle; when she reoriented the tracker and looked elsewhere, though, the time was different.
Halfway through her second stint, Roi thought she recognized some familiar patterns among the points of light, appearing again in the same part of the band. She wasn’t sure, though; she hadn’t made an effort to commit the patterns to memory.
The third time she returned, she was certain that some patterns were recurring. By the fifth time, she was convinced that everything she could see in the void was following the same periodic motion. Her first impression of the lights drifting across the band had been that they were like motes of dust, never the same twice. That wasn’t true, though. Notwithstanding the strange distortions of color, angle and speed that accompanied their passage, and the fact that they regularly disappeared from view, she was seeing the lights arranged in exactly the same patterns, again and again. The view as a whole was as cyclic as clockwork.
The period was certainly longer than the window of time she was able to spend making observations during each junub dark phase; it was not, however, equal to the shomal-junub cycle itself, as the lights were not the same each time she returned. Her first guess was that three cycles of the moving lights was close to two shomal-junub cycles, and once she knew what she was looking for her observations bore this out. The two-thirds ratio was not exact, though; it was closer to thirteen parts in twenty.
So much for the simple geometry.
“If we understand anything about orbital motion,” Ruz ventured, “then this period has to be coming from the Splinter. There’s no way that the orbits of all these other objects could conspire together to give the same result.”
Roi would have been happier about attributing everything to the Splinter’s motion if the pattern of lights had moved rigidly across the sky, like the view when she leaped from one side of the Null Chamber to the other, tumbling as she went.
“If these things really are motionless,” she said, “then why does their appearance change all the time?”
Ruz pondered this. “If they’re very distant from us,” he said, “then the natural paths of the light that’s reaching us from them might be affected by the geometry. This isn’t like seeing something that’s right in front of us, when we can reach out and confirm by touch that what we’re seeing is what’s really there. If the geometry can bend the Splinter’s natural path to wrap it around the Hub, why shouldn’t it bend light as well?”
