Incandescence

"I don't know," Rakesh confessed. "I can't read their minds, I can't know what they were thinking. Perhaps they wanted a kind of sentinel, a small group who would be vigilant enough to notice the first signs of danger and prepare the way, while the evidence was still below the threshold for the rest of the population. Or perhaps they wanted a route for the cultural transmission of some crucial ideas that everyone else would consider too impractical to retain."

"As long as the world is safe, though," Zey replied despairingly, "I'm useless, aren't I?"

Rakesh said, "Knowledge is good in itself. Understanding is good in itself."

Zey chirped amusement. "I can't argue with that sentiment, can I? I've been built to think like you. But you come from a world where the ones who disagree with you are the sad, strange few. You haven't spent a lifetime as the only one with that point of view."

Rakesh didn't know how to reply to her. The chasm between her and the other Arkdwellers was not something that any of them were capable of bridging. She could never be his ambassador, and he couldn't hope to enter into any kind of dialogue with them himself, slowly coaxing them out of their shells, opening them up to new possibilities, turning their faces to the stars. Without a calamity to throw the switch, they were physically incapable of caring about such things.

Zey's mind was working faster than his now. She said, "I would never ask you to bring trouble to my brothers and sisters, to damage the world, to sow fear and death. But is that the only way to bring change?"

Rakesh asked nervously, "What do you mean?"

"These genes, these molecules, these signals in our bodies. my ancestors built them to work one way, but I believe you are more powerful than my ancestors. These are all just made from atoms, aren't they? Your little machines can move them around the way I move cargo from one side of the depot to another. If you wanted to, you could ask them to make these signals appear in all of our bodies, without any reason, without any danger.

"If you wanted to, you could wake us from our sleep."

24

"Any progress?" Haf asked, as he wound the light machine.

Roi looked up from her template frame. "Not really," she admitted. "Be patient, though. We haven't followed this to the end yet."

She had come to the sardside for the opening of the third tunnel, and to confer with Neth and Bard. Haf had tagged along as her helper, gathering food, providing light, and checking her interminable calculations. Even as they waited in this small chamber for their hosts to call them to the big event, Roi could not put her frames aside.

Since Cho and Nis had measured the Wanderer's curvature from the tiny angle by which it bent the incoming light, she had been spending most of her time trying to discover a template for a geometry that could encompass both the Wanderer and the Hub. Without any of the old symmetries to rely on, though, the templates became vastly more complicated.

The curvature that wrapped the Wanderer was about six to the eighth times weaker than that around the Hub, so it might have been simpler to take the idealized geometry of the Hub alone as a guide to their calculations, and then rely on the observations of the void-watchers to tell them when their true position was deviating from their predictions. Like someone sliding down a steep tunnel that had been crudely mapped but never actually traversed, they could try to avoid the smaller hazards by sight, rather than aspiring to a mathematically perfect foreknowledge of every bump that lay ahead. The only problem with that eminently practical approach was that the dark phases were shrinking, so the observations of the void-watchers were already being curtailed. If it ever came to the point where the dark phases vanished, they would be skidding down the tunnel blind, entirely at the mercy of their calculations.

As the natural light dimmed, Roi handed Haf her last frame and started on a fresh one.

"Your templates are like weeds," Haf remarked helpfully. "No shape at all, they just grow where they like."

"Thanks for the encouragement. How about checking whether they're true or not, and then you can weed out all the false ones to your heart's content."