Incandescence

"The principles appear sound," he said. "But we can't be sure that we can shape the metal to the necessary precision. And how can we test it, when our one passage to the surface is taken up completely with the system we need, and that we know is reliable? How can we disrupt all our observations to gamble on this?"

"I understand."

Roi struggled to weigh up the risks. They desperately needed to understand the nature of the Wanderer. If Nis's idea was right then the geometry that wrapped it would influence the Splinter's path, and while as yet she had no idea how to combine the Hub and the Wanderer's geometry into a single shape, the sooner they learned exactly what the geometry close to the Wanderer was, the better their chances of making sense of that complex interaction before it was too late.

At the same time, the present system was certainly running smoothly for the void-watchers. If they disassembled Cho's first invention to make room for his second, they would have to resort to observers clambering back and forth from the surface every junub dark phase. They would lose observations, or even people, in the rush.

She could always ask Bard to close the tunnel, to buy them more time. The Wanderer had its own schedule, though. If they kept delaying their ascent, the Wanderer would come to the Splinter, she was sure of that. To pass it by in its present large orbit was one thing; to be wedged in by it, this close to the Hub, would almost certainly be fatal.

"How thoroughly have you explored the area around here?" she asked Ruz.

Ruz knew exactly what she was asking. "There are no other cracks," he said.

"When we first came here," Roi recalled, "the one we were looking for, the one from Zak's map, was closed. It was sheer luck that we found an open one. But how much work would it take to reopen the old one?"

Ruz's posture shifted slightly, growing defensive, as if she had accused him of neglecting his duty. "I don't have enough people to do that job, to open it up."

Roi said, "Stop thinking the old way, my friend. Everyone is your team-mate now. We don't have to lure them away from their colleagues and recruit them, one by one. We just have to explain the need, and the urgency. We just have to make sense."

23

"You can have what you asked for," Zey told Rakesh. "You can take a part of me to study."

She had just finished her shift and had come out from the depot. The other workers were still milling around, talking among themselves before heading into the tunnels to sleep.

Rakesh felt no need to ask if she was sure; everything they'd spoken about for the last dozen shifts had been for the sake of informing her decision. He did feel he owed her a small moment of drama, though, so rather than admitting that, thanks to their long proximity, his own avatar was already plastered in her cells and he had no need to collect a sample, he reached out with one claw and gently scratched a soft part of her nearest leg.

Nanomachines inside his avatar swarmed over the cells, dissecting some destructively, infiltrating others to watch their components in action. The DNA sequences were only part of the analysis; they would be meaningless without the full context of cellular biochemistry.

Parantham spoke to him, back in the cabin. "You might have done this when I first suggested it, instead of elevating your own need for customary formalities over the real ethical issues." Rakesh ignored her.

He took the nanomachines' data and ran coarse-grained simulations of morphogenesis, precise enough to give a clear picture of the way the Arkdwellers' bodies were shaped generically, and to map out the strongest genetic and environmental influences on each individual, but not so precise that the simulation itself would experience anything.

The generic map of the Arkdwellers' brain that the simulation produced made visible what Rakesh had long suspected: their ability to form and manipulate abstract symbols was powerful enough to grant all of them general intelligence as a birthright. Though the data came solely from Zey's DNA, there were far too many genes involved for her to have mutant variants of all of them; the generic map encompassed the whole species. As for every human born since the Stone Age, as for the ancestors of every member of the Amalgam, there was nothing the universe was capable of doing that the Arkdwellers were not capable of comprehending. They were not mere clever-looking animals, with some hard-wired repertoire of impressive but inextensible skills. With sufficient motivation and freedom from distractions — and perhaps a modest boost in longevity — they could have grasped anything. Apart from the subjectivities of art and language, where everyone needed tweaking to cross the species barriers, there was nothing in the Amalgam's million-year-old storehouse of knowledge that would have been beyond their reach.