scape at all unless he played along with the scenario, right to the end.
A smudge of silver light appeared beneath him, and Rakesh used what strength he had to swim, or at least steer his fall, toward it. As it grew closer, he suffered a dizzying shift of scale; what had seemed like a small glowing benthic creature was a patch of sea floor twenty or thirty meters wide, strewn with scores of individual white lights.
He put out his arms as he struck the bottom, jarring his elbows and shoulders, burying his face in sticky mud. He rolled upright, sitting on his haunches, amazed that he still had any strength left. There was a hammering at his throat imploring him to inhale, but he wasn’t going to breathe water and pull down the curtain prematurely.
As the silt around him settled Rakesh rose to his feet. The white lights scattered across the sea floor were piles of bones. Some were more or less whole human skeletons, others were jumbled assortments of parts. Some bacterial infestation had rendered them all phosphorescent as they decayed.
He must have begun to vocalize something, because he found salt water suddenly burning his nostrils and palate, as if he’d taken a heedless preparatory breath. He rapidly forgot whatever curse he’d been aiming at Csi, and fought desperately to get the water into his stomach instead of his lungs.
As he forced down the mouthful of brine, he felt something hard and smooth under his tongue. He clamped his hand to his mouth and managed to expel the thing without admitting any more water. He didn’t need to hold it up to the ghost light to know what it was; his fingertips told him. It was the glass key that Lahl had given him.
Rakesh crouched down and groped through the mud. What had Csi planted? A treasure chest? That might be worth searching for, so long as it contained an oxygen tank and not a pile of worthless coins.
He rose to his feet again and looked around at the graveyard of failed divers. If there was any logic to this macabre metaphor, surely some of them had come close to the prize, even if they’d been unable to unlock it.
Blood was pounding in his ears. Overlaid on a random scatter of remains, there seemed to be a group concentrated on a spot about fifteen meters away.
Rakesh slogged his way toward the hillock of bones. It would have been nice to have Parantham’s help at this point, but she seemed to have landed elsewhere, or been shunted right out of his version of the scenario.
As he waded in among the ribs and tibias, he felt a pang of desolation. What were these corpses to Csi? Hopes? Friendships? After nearly twice as long in the node as Rakesh, Csi was still stranded.
Without leaving the scape, Rakesh spawned an insentient messenger who’d visit Csi after a week had passed and hand him a copy of the key. For all the scorn and derision he’d heaped upon the sirens’ call, there was a chance that after a few days’ reflection Csi might change his mind and decide to follow them.
His conscience salved, Rakesh put aside his squeamishness and dived into the graveyard of travelers’ ambitions. His skull was bursting, but he was determined to find the tin box with the treasure map, or whatever Csi’s wry punchline was, before he surrendered consciousness.
His fingers hit metal. Jubilantly, he moved his hands apart to try to span the edges, but the surface just went on and on. The treasure chest was more like a vault, at least a few meters wide.
He probed the metal beneath the mound of bones, scanning back and forth with his fingertips. Streaks of light flashed behind his eyes, followed like thunder by a bludgeoning pain. Finally he held out the key itself and scraped it blindly over the vault’s unyielding surface.
Something gave, and his hand moved. Probably the key had just slipped. Rakesh waggled it, disbelieving. It had entered a keyhole, and it fitted snugly.
He tried to plow some of the mound aside, but he soon gave up. He doubted that he’d have the strength to lift the vault’s huge door even if he could clear it first. Still, there was something satisfying about getting this far. Let Csi paint his not-quite-triumphant skeleton into the scape and leave it as a signpost for the next traveler.
He turned the key, and felt a click.
The door dropped away beneath him. Mud, bones, Rakesh, and a geyser of water erupted from an opening in the floor of the ocean, into an endless space full of stars.
4
The sense of attachment Roi felt toward her work team had never been a constant, unwavering force. Even in the absence of recruitment efforts it rose and fell, following its own internal rhythm. So it was only when it had reached one of its peaks and she felt confident that her loyalty could survive a few missed shifts that she decided to take a break and travel to the Null Line.
Zak had invited her to come and see his “contraptions” as soon as she’d handed him her first batch of weight measurements, and each time since then when they’d met he’d reminded her that she was welcome to visit, though he’d never made her feel that she was under any pressure. It was, of course, conceivable that he had a team waiting at the Null Line ready to enact a full-blown recruitment, but Roi had made a point of quizzing people for any news they’d heard from the Calm, and she’d turned up no evidence of any such threat. It was hard to believe that an entire team indulging in activity as strange as Zak’s could have escaped notice. For a lone, unrecruited person to behave oddly was only to be expected.
When Zak had first invited her, she’d told him an old joke: the easy way to reach the Null Line from the garm quarter was to travel to the shomal quarter, and from there the journey would be downhill all the way. Rather than expressing amusement or irritation, Zak had responded by showing her yet another of his maps.
“These lines are paths that lead neither up nor down,” he’d explained. “I call them ‘levels’. I’ve arranged their spacing so that climbing from one level to the next is an equal effort in each case. Counting the lines to be crossed will tell you how much work any journey requires.”
In fact, counting the lines told Roi nothing new; the whole point of the joke was that everyone knew it would take at least as much effort to reach the shomal quarter from the garm as to travel to the Null Line itself. Still, the map made this fact clear at a glance, because the Null Line was
Zak insisted that he’d drawn this second map, not by laboriously measuring the weight lines on the first map and marking off increments of effort, but by a kind of reasoning that started with the underlying mathematical rule that described the pattern of weights, and led to a new rule describing the shape and spacing of these levels. Roi was astonished, but when she’d asked for more details she’d found his explanation impenetrable. “When you come to the Calm, when you have time to ponder these ideas at leisure, it will all make sense,” he’d promised.
Roi planned the journey to take twelve shifts in all: four spent traveling up to the Null Line, five visiting Zak, and three for the easier return leg. She’d been with the team long enough for an absence like this to be acceptable; everybody needed to recuperate sometimes, and travel was a common form of recreation. If it also made you vulnerable to recruitment, the unspeakable truth was that a certain amount of turnover kept the teams fresh, and if a tired or restless worker was ambushed it was not the end of the world.
It was easy to ponder these matters as abstractions, but when Roi woke in the shelter of her crevice and faced the reality of setting out in the opposite direction to all of her team-mates, she realized that she’d chosen the hardest time to leave. By the end of each shift she craved solitude, but on waking all she could think about was company and cooperation. She’d made no close friends in this team, but that wasn’t the point: it gave her the same sense of accomplishment to work beside the most taciturn stranger as it did beside someone sociable and garrulous whose history she knew inside-out. Work was work; everything else was superfluous chatter, however delightful that could be.
As she eased herself out of her resting place, she resolved to follow her plan regardless. The more difficult it was to begin the journey, the more she would feel reassured that her attachment to the team was secure.
Zak had given her a series of maps that showed the way between their usual meeting place and a rendezvous point that he’d chosen near the Null Line. Roi had decided not to follow his suggested route precisely; whether she trusted him or not, it would be more enjoyable to take a few detours and keep the journey unpredictable. She’d been in the Calm a few times, and had even worked for a while in the sard quarter, but Zak’s haunts were further rarb along the Null Line than she’d ever gone, and there would be plenty of territory along the way that she’d never seen before.
