Incandescence

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.

"The strength of rock is what holds the Splinter together," Tan said. "But the Wanderer doesn't seem to be made of rock. So why doesn't it simply fall apart from the usual weights? Spinning in different ways from the Splinter won't do the trick. Without strength of some kind, it ought to be smeared all along its orbit by now."

"So what kind of strength can it have?" Kem asked.

"Geometry," Tan replied. "The same thing that keeps us close to the Hub holds the Wanderer together. But now the Hub and the Wanderer's geometry are fighting each other for the Wanderer's wind and light."

Roi allowed herself a moment of pure exhilaration. It was a beautiful, audacious proposition. Who ever said the Hub was the only object in the void that could be wrapped in curvature? It might be the strongest thing in sight, powerful enough to twist the Wanderer's path around it, but that didn't mean the Wanderer itself was a mere passive follower of geometry, as the Splinter seemed to be. Why couldn't it carry its own curvature? The Hub had the glory of the entire Incandescence, but the Wanderer, at least for now, held on to its own portion of wind and light. The two were alike, one smaller, one greater.

Unfortunately, if this elegant solution to the mystery was true, it changed everything. If the Wanderer was wrapped in space-time shaped as it was around the Hub, then in turn the geometry around the Hub itself could not be described perfectly by the rotationally symmetrical solution that she and Tan had found. The presence of the Wanderer was like a dent hammered into a smoothly curved sheet of metal; it could be ignored from afar, but the closer you came to it, the more significant it would be.

Kem appeared dazed. "Two Hubs fighting? We need the geometry for two Hubs fighting?"

Tan said, "It's just one possibility. It needs to be thought through in a lot more detail."

"But how will we know?" Kem demanded. "When will we know?" Her careful preparations had always been in jeopardy from the Wanderer's erratic behavior, but this new unknown threatened to render half the calculations meaningless.

Roi said, "We need to observe something in motion close to the Wanderer. That's the only way to understand its geometry." If they waited for it to have a measurable effect on the Splinter's own motion, all their questions would be answered too late.

"What is there close it?" Kem asked forlornly. "Just its wind and light erupting chaotically every now and then. How can we make sense of that?"