Tan was staying in a small chamber, not far from Tio’s geometry-calculators. Before starting her shift Roi brought him food, and they spoke for a while.
“Where are we now?” he asked.
“All the measurements put our orbit close to size twenty.”
“Twenty!” Tan marveled. “No wonder I feel like I’m back in the Null Chamber.”
“The weights are nothing,” Roi agreed. “Even at the garm edge now, people can cling to the ceiling for a whole shift if they want to.”
“I don’t want to cling to the ceiling,” Tan said. “I just want to live a few more shifts. I want to see this through.”
“I understand.” Roi had never asked him about his children, whether he caught himself hunting for them in the crowds. Everyone’s gaze had shifted, though, whether it was focused on their own hatchlings or just the generation as a whole.
“Either that, or we’ll all go out like Zak did,” Tan chirped, making a joke of it.
“We’ve worked hard,” Roi said. “There’ll be ease and safety for the next generation.”
“Let them have safety,” Tan said, “but not ease.”
“Why?”
“Do you want them to go back to the old ways?” Tan looked at her searchingly. “You do know that’s what will happen, don’t you? If they have nothing to push against, nothing to understand, nothing to explore.”
Roi didn’t know how to answer him. She knew, now, that she could never go back herself, but she wouldn’t have to face that; she would not live a great deal longer than Tan. Did it matter, though, if Haf and Pel and Tio slipped gradually from their adventurous youth into a world where the generation that followed would once more live for nothing but the buzz of cooperation, whatever the team, whatever the task?
“Do I have any say in it?” she replied. “Is there anything I can do that will determine how much they’ll struggle?”
Tan said, “Nothing at all. But you can still hope for the right thing.”
Roi left him to start her shift, entering quietly and taking her place in the chamber from Leh; the two of them shared a position, working alternate shifts. Tio had arranged the geometry-calculators in a carefully designed pattern, so that each one exchanged information with just five of their neighbors. There was no need for messengers to weave back and forth between them; the results each person needed in order to continue always came from someone beside them.
Numbers washed back and forth across the chamber, but Roi could stay focused on her own simple tasks, ignoring the wider picture. Compared to battling the templates for a space-time connection, it was almost as mindless as weeding a crop. She let herself fall into a happy daze, thinking of nothing but the details of each calculation.
Halfway through the shift, she emerged from her trance; Tio had called a halt. A dozen people walked across the chamber, moving from calculator to calculator, asking them about the numbers associated with the piece of space-time they had just analyzed. The answer they were given decided which of the calculator’s neighbors to move on to. In effect, Tio’s path-walkers were letting an imaginary object fall in a straight line across each small region of space-time being modeled, and seeing where it emerged. By keeping track of a few simple details, they could follow it into the future—across a region that was effectively curved by the way the many flat pieces were joined—building up a fair approximation to a natural path.
The orbit of the Splinter. The orbit of the Wanderer. The light and flares that might pass between them.
Kem and Nis studied the results, and shaped them into instructions for Sen. The changes made in the tunnels, ever finer now, steered the Splinter closer to their best guess for the safest possible place to be.
When her shift was over, Roi went to see Kem and Nis.
“Where are we?” Roi asked. It was a question that no one could stop asking.
“Twenty and three-quarters,” Kem replied. “That’s the latest from the Null Chamber.”
Roi echoed the number. “And now I have to sleep?” At its last sighting, the Wanderer had been in an orbit at a little more than twenty-two, but everything in its history made them believe that it would be down to less than twenty-one by now. The path they were following tried to steer down the middle of the uncertainty, putting some bounds on the danger without them being sure exactly where their nemesis lay.
“We might have passed it already,” Nis said. “It might all be over, and we just don’t know.”
Roi said, “When we cross twenty-two, I’ll believe it’s over.”
“There can still be flares,” Kem reminded them. “We have to stick to the course.”
“For how long?” Roi had never really confronted the question before; just crossing the Wanderer’s orbit safely had always been hard enough to imagine. “We keep moving out, the Wanderer keeps moving in. Until there’s a healthy distance between us. But what happens to the Wanderer?”
“The Hub tears it to pieces,” Nis said. “Its own curvature has been holding on to less and less of. whatever it’s made of. There’ll come a point when there’s simply nothing left, when it’s all bled out into the Incandescence.”
“And that’s it?”
Nis said, “That’s how weight and motion work. What else can happen?”
When Roi woke, she found Tan’s chamber empty. She searched around frantically for anyone who might know what had happened to him.
Finally she met up with Pel, who would sometimes wake earlier than Roi and visit Tan herself.
“I saw him,” Pel said. “I gave him the news.”
“What news?”
“Everyone believes we’ve crossed the orbit,” Pel said. “We’re not at twenty-two, but the Wanderer can’t have stayed in the same orbit all this time. We’re past it, we’re going in different directions now.”
“That’s good news,” Roi said. “But where did Tan go?”
“He said he needed some exercise,” Pel replied.
Roi hunted for him, until she could no longer leave Leh doing her job. As she shuffled the numbers, she pictured her old friend, finding a comfortable fissure in the rock somewhere, shutting off his vision, letting the long brightness fade from his mind.
27
“Be careful coming through,” Rakesh warned Zey. “It’s quite a squeeze at the end.”
She climbed down through the habitat’s entrance and dropped on to the deck beside him.
“I’m outside the world,” she marveled. “But I’m not dead.”
“The walls shield us from the radiation,” Rakesh reminded her. “You couldn’t survive unprotected outside.”
Zey said, “How can we make the place outside the world our home, if we always need to be shielded from it?”
“It’s not that big a problem,” Rakesh assured her. “My ancestors needed a special mix of gases with them, everywhere they went. So did yours, but you’ve already been tweaked to live in vacuum. There are adjustments you can make to your bodies, if you want to. Matter is matter; many things are possible.”
Zey wasn’t listening to him; she’d discovered the view. The habitat was a bubble joined to the Ark over the crack in the wall on the neutron-star side; Rakesh had had nanomachines enlarge the passage through the rock to a size that any Arkdweller could climb through. As well as shielding them from the hard radiation that came from the innermost parts of the accretion disk and its flow on to the neutron star, the walls of the habitat screened out most of the terahertz synchrotron radiation coming from the plasma around them. This was the glow that suffused the whole Ark, the frequency at which the rock was translucent, and to which the Arkdwellers’ vision was most sensitive. However, they could also see far enough into the infrared band that if the terahertz glow was removed, they were not left blind. Instead, the dazzling foreground fell away, and they could see beyond it. Bright infrared sources dotted the sky. Zey was looking out at the stars.
Using the workshop on
