“She saw him die,” Haf announced solemnly.
“That means she’ll die soon herself,” the friend explained. “That’s the way it happens.”
Roi was amused. Gul had sent his former students here to do fetching and carrying while they learned more about the intricacies of the project, and were gradually recruited into more specialized teams. She listened to their innocent gossip for a while; it made a welcome diversion. Then she turned her full attention back to the task ahead of her.
The control post she’d set up lay on the border between the junub and sard quarters, halfway along the line of light-messengers that Jos had established between Ruz’s void-watchers at the junub edge and Bard’s control post. From there, Bard’s own separate network of light-messengers branched out to reach all the tunnel-plug operators.
Twelve shifts before, Bard and Neth had reported success. They had developed a system of movable baffles to tweak the shape of the tunnel, and after some laborious trial and error in conjunction with Neth’s calculations, they had finally achieved a smooth flow. The tunnel had been opened on more than a dozen occasions, but only for a single bright phase each time. The wind would pass through it cleanly now, but the question that remained was whether Bard’s ambitious scheme could actually achieve its purpose: whether the free passage of the wind really could change the orbit of the Splinter itself.
Roi consulted the clock beside her, made a note of the time on a sheet of skin, then took the handle of the metal signal-sheet on her right and cranked out the code to have the great tunnel opened. Many spans away along the ordinary tunnel that sloped down into the sardside, the light-messenger watching her sheet would note the sequence and repeat it. Then the watcher for that sheet would do the same; on and on the message would go, all the way to Bard, and then to a dozen plug operators, who would call on their teams to drag on the ropes that pulled the wheeled stone plugs aside. A part of the sardside wind that had once forced itself from rarb to sharq through the rock’s reluctant pathways, losing all its strength along the way, would now make the same journey entirely unhindered. The force it had once imparted upon the rock of the Splinter would vanish.
Of course, the remainder of the sardside wind would still exert a powerful force, but on the garmside the opposing force would not be diminished at all. If the perfect balance of the winds really had kept the Splinter in place for generations, that balance would no longer hold.
Roi turned to Kem. “Now we wait.”
“Can we calculate while we wait?” Kem asked anxiously.
“Of course.”
Kem took her frame and started working through a fresh set of path calculations. There were some problems they could only treat in the most general fashion until they had data from the void-watchers to tell them how the Splinter was responding, but Kem seemed determined to pre-calculate every result they could possibly need.
Up at the junub edge, the void-watchers no longer needed to scramble back and forth through the crack that led to the surface. Inspired by Jos’s light-messengers, Cho, one of Ruz’s team, had invented an elaborate system of polished metal plates that allowed them to observe the lights in the void from the safety of the tunnel below. Each time the junub dark phase ended, the plates were retracted part-way into the crack, shielding them from the full savagery of the Incandescence, while a stone plug, like a smaller version of Bard’s tunnel-plugs, was wheeled into place below to provide some shelter for the void-watchers themselves. The system did not afford them the sweeping views of the whole quarter-circle that Roi had seen, but now that they had mapped the fixed pattern of lights in detail, and knew how to follow the Wanderer against that background, their sighting and tracking of individual lights would yield enough information for the theorists to calculate both the Wanderer’s shifting orbit and any hoped-for change in the Splinter’s own motion.
Roi passed the time by checking Kem’s results. She did the work scrupulously, but it scarcely demanded her attention; it was like walking now, pure instinct. These were not new template calculations, replete with symbols for unspecified values; rather, she and Kem were feeding a range of numbers into existing templates, making earlier, abstract computations concrete.
Kem was, in effect, mapping out dozens of possible futures for the Splinter, attempting to distinguish the safe paths from the hazardous. Shuffling the numbers in a single case was a straightforward process, but it was impossible to prepare for every combination of circumstances that might arise along their journey. Roi was almost certain that they had found the true geometry, but they still could not predict how the strength of the wind would change as they moved out from the Hub; its speed was dictated by the curvature of space-time, but its density was not. Anticipating the Wanderer’s behavior was even more difficult. Though it followed a comprehensible orbit for short stretches of time, its motion was subject to unpredictable changes, and only some of these could be clearly linked to its visible eruptions.
Nobody could understand the Wanderer’s nature. It appeared to be a ball of wind and light, but what could hold such a thing together? Nothing in the long run, apparently, since the wind and light were spilling out ever more violently the closer it came to the Hub. Whether the old stories of the Splinter’s origins were true or not, the Wanderer was fragmenting in a very different way; instead of being torn brutally in half in one cataclysmic moment, it was forever being stripped of small portions. If the Splinter’s mythical parent really had divided, that would have eased its plight for a very long time, halving the greatest of the weights until some ancient Jolt, or some generation-spanning drift toward the Hub had eventually increased them. The Wanderer’s losses seemed to make no difference, as if each small excision only gave it a chance to offer up something more, like a fast-growing crop eager to be pruned.
Haf and the others kept bringing food. Sometimes Roi caught herself trying to guess who among them were her children, but even when that urge passed she was surprised at the strength of her feelings toward them all. Her sense of duty had always been directed toward her team-mates; of course she had never been indifferent toward hatchlings, and would have aided any child she found in need, but the idea that the well-being of the next generation was as important as the completion of her next shift had always been a remote one, with little emotional force and even less need to be acted upon. Eggs hatched themselves, and the hatchlings found teachers; this didn’t require any attention from her. The clearest lesson on the matter she had received from her own teachers had concerned the need to practice contraception with sufficient diligence to avoid playing her part in bringing on a famine.
Now the sight of Haf, Pel, and Tio brought a warmth to her mind that was as strong as the buzz of cooperation. The hope she felt at the prospect of navigating the Splinter to safety was still, in part, the same kind of longing for a successful shift that she had known all her life, but that familiar emotion was increasingly overlaid with a compelling sense of what it would mean for the ultimate beneficiaries. The thought of her own premature death, of Gul’s, of Ruz’s, of all her ‘team-mates’, was dismaying, and more than enough to drive her, but the extraordinary idea that they could carry the hatchlings into a transformed world where this danger would finally lie completely behind them was imbued with both more urgency, and more prospective joy, than anything else she had ever contemplated.
Leh, who watched for light-messages from the junub edge, came to Roi with a written transcript. Ruz’s team had measured a small increase in the Splinter’s orbital period. It was tiny, but it stood out above the usual variations due to uncertainty in their observations and the imperfections of their clocks.
Roi waited three more shifts for the next report to arrive, before letting herself believe it. The second set of timings confirmed the earlier result: the Splinter was moving, drifting outward very slowly.
She sent the news on to Neth and Bard, then asked Kem to tell the other theorists. In no time at all there was a riot of delighted chirps coming to her from the surrounding tunnels.
When Kem returned, Tan was with her.
“It’s good news,” he said, “but I’m worried by how slowly we’re moving. It doesn’t give us much flexibility if we find ourselves in a dangerous situation.”
Roi concurred. “Bard and Neth understand that. They’ll make the new tunnels their priority now.”
Kem said, “If the Wanderer continues to behave as it has been, I believe that with three tunnels we’d have enough control over our ascent to pass through the Wanderer’s orbit on the opposite side of the Hub. The problem will be if that orbit shrinks rapidly without warning.”
“There’s something else we might need to consider,” Tan said. “One of my recruits, Nis, came to me two shifts ago with a new idea about the Wanderer. I don’t know how seriously we should take it, but he’s working on the details, trying to make it more precise.”
“What’s the general idea?” Roi asked.
