Incandescence

renaissance arrived, their descendants would figure out everything and make a new set of choices for themselves— reengineering their own genome as they saw fit, to suit the next set of challenges. Maybe it was never their intention that their children would end up stranded with this ad hoc solution for so long; they just did their best and hoped that it would tide them over for a couple of million years.”

“Can we be sure, though,” Parantham wondered, “that this situation is entirely artificial? What if a similar mechanism had already evolved long before the neutron star approached the home world, and the Arkmakers were merely fine-tuning it?”

Rakesh said, “So if it’s natural, that changes everything?”

“No, but it’s not entirely irrelevant,” Parantham replied. “All your drives, all your values, all your priorities come from your biological ancestors. You’ve removed some drives, and strengthened others, but you didn’t sit down one day and say, ‘From first principles—ignoring all my inherited traits—what should I be like? How should I live? What should I value?’”

“All right, I take your point,” Rakesh said. “There are no such first principles. I risk plastering my own values all over the Ark. But if the Arkdwellers inherited this long winter of the mind—and some deep part of them cherishes it, the way I cherish various human things for no great, universal reason—they must have inherited the intellectual spring as well. I gave Zey a few simple science lessons; I didn’t colonize her brain with nanoware and turn her into something alien. What she represents is a part of everyone’s birthright, just as much as the alternative, docile state. It’s an accident of circumstances that’s put them in a place where that birthright can never be realized again, short of almost certain death. I mean, what’s going to tear them away from a neutron star, and still give them time to reboot their culture into a state that will let them defend themselves?”

Parantham fell silent. Rakesh pushed his plate aside. He could curse the Aloof all he wanted, he could listen to Zey, he could listen to Parantham, but Parantham could debate the pros and cons for a thousand years without coming down on one side. However much he hated it, this was in his hands alone. He could not walk away and pretend that he simply hadn’t seen the Ark, or go begging all around the disk for someone else to take responsibility.

He said, “What if we wake them all to the point where we can communicate with them meaningfully—the way I can communicate with Zey—and then let them choose for themselves? We can grant them an easy way to switch back to the docile mode, individually, if they want to. They can’t give consent for what I’m proposing, but putting them in a state where they can understand the question isn’t forcing them to remain that way. Zey’s state isn’t hermetically self-affirming: merely entering it doesn’t guarantee that you prefer it. Every individual will still have the power to reflect on their situation, and choose.”

Parantham considered this. “Suppose we do what you suggest. Then what happens next? Those who choose to revert remain in the Ark, obviously, but can they tolerate sharing it with a thousand restless Zeys, when their life doesn’t depend on that?”

“The rest explore the bulge, or come out to the disk with us.”

“Explore the bulge how?” Parantham demanded. “Do we have some promise from the Aloof that they’ll have access to the local network?”

“Well, no,” Rakesh conceded.

“Do we have a promise from the Amalgam that they’ll be allowed out into the disk?”

“You think they’ll be refused membership of the Amalgam, just because of the stunt the Aloof pulled with Lahl?”

Parantham said, “I think it will take a while to negotiate exactly what’s going to happen between the bulge and the disk. I think we need to go back and sort out that mess, before we start triggering an intellectual renaissance in a small, crowded place with no escape hatch.”

Rakesh couldn’t argue with her central concern. They couldn’t light this fire and then walk away, leaving the Arkdwellers to sort out the ensuing conflict. These people were stuck deep in a gravity well, with no planet to mine for materials, and no resources save the meager contents of the Ark itself and the thin plasma of the neutron star’s accretion disk. The Arkmakers had envisaged the switch being thrown in a time of crisis, but also a time of opportunity. Without a bridge leading away from the Ark itself, there was no opportunity. Leaving them to stew in their own frustration would be unconscionable.

“All right,” he said, “we have to clear the way to the disk. Go and come back. Hope the idiots in the disk let us out, and then hope the idiots in the bulge let us back in again.”

Parantham nodded, then started laughing with relief. “So that’s it? We’re agreed? This is your final decision?”

Rakesh hesitated. It would be thousands of years before they returned. The Ark would survive, and little would have changed, but Zey would be long dead.

If he went to her with this plan, this promise for the distant future, he knew what she would say. She would beg him to locate the spark in her mind, the thing that made her different from her team-mates, the thing that he had spoken to, nurtured and encouraged, shift after shift.

Then she would ask him to reach inside her and extinguish it.

26

The darkness was gone; the Splinter was immersed in constant brightness again. The light was softer than that in which their journey had begun, its colors less fierce. Everything was gentler, further from the Hub: the wind, the weights, the light. Roi thought: if we’d done this long before the Wanderer came, it might have been a simple, peaceful journey.

“I never really believed you and Gul,” Haf confessed, “when you said you’d grown up without dark phases. How could anyone imagine such a thing?” Roi wasn’t sure if he was joking; sometimes it was difficult to tell. “I wonder how it will be for the next generation.”

“Wait and see,” Roi replied. Sometimes she felt like playing along with Haf, joining him in his wild speculations, but lately she was afraid of too much talk about the future, as if any hope put into words was more exposed, more vulnerable, than everyone’s unspoken longing for safety.

In the last few dwindling dark phases, Ruz’s team had snatched their final observations from the void. Just as the Splinter sank back into the plane of the Incandescence, the Wanderer’s orbit had lost its own traces of elevation; they were confined to the same two dimensions now, locked into a closer, more dangerous dance. If the only thing to fear had been a head-on collision with the Wanderer itself, then the problem would not have been so difficult, but mere proximity could be as fatal as contact. The Wanderer was far hotter and brighter than the Incandescence; if they drew too near, or were struck by one of its flares at close range, the heat could sear right through the shelter of the rock and kill them, as surely as if they’d been standing unprotected on the surface.

Kem had computed the trajectories for both light and flares, and sketched out the safest passage past the Wanderer’s orbit. The twisted curvature of the geometry had a pernicious effect, focusing the danger into places where a simpler analysis might have anticipated safety; the Hub did act as a kind of shelter, but the points to which it offered the greatest protection did not lie directly opposite the Wanderer.

Kem’s laborious calculations had identified the path of least danger; the only problem now was to follow it, without a glimpse of the void to confirm their position. Roi had set up systematic weight measurements, and cycling stones and Rotators in a new Null Chamber; all of this helped quantify their distance from the Hub, but the most crucial information, their angle from the Wanderer, could not be measured this way.

Sen and her team were monitoring the strength of the wind, and had done their best to calibrate a model linking the characteristics of the flow through the tunnels with the last of the solid data that the void-watchers had been able to gather on the Splinter’s changing orbit. The varying density of the Incandescence could not be anticipated, but it could be measured in the wind, moment by moment, and fed into the templates to derive a range of estimates as to the effect the tunnels were having on the Splinter’s position and speed.

These efforts gave them a far better chance than they would have had by merely trusting in luck, but two things remained to elevate the uncertainty. One was the Wanderer’s erratic orbital shifts, which they had never been able to understand and no longer had any hope of observing. Roi had accepted that there was nothing to be