Incandescence

"Wait and see," Roi replied. Sometimes she felt like playing along with Haf, joining him in his wild speculations, but lately she was afraid of too much talk about the future, as if any hope put into words was more exposed, more vulnerable, than everyone's unspoken longing for safety.

In the last few dwindling dark phases, Ruz's team had snatched their final observations from the void. Just as the Splinter sank back into the plane of the Incandescence, the Wanderer's orbit had lost its own traces of elevation; they were confined to the same two dimensions now, locked into a closer, more dangerous dance. If the only thing to fear had been a head-on collision with the Wanderer itself, then the problem would not have been so difficult, but mere proximity could be as fatal as contact. The Wanderer was far hotter and brighter than the Incandescence; if they drew too near, or were struck by one of its flares at close range, the heat could sear right through the shelter of the rock and kill them, as surely as if they'd been standing unprotected on the surface.

Kem had computed the trajectories for both light and flares, and sketched out the safest passage past the Wanderer's orbit. The twisted curvature of the geometry had a pernicious effect, focusing the danger into places where a simpler analysis might have anticipated safety; the Hub did act as a kind of shelter, but the points to which it offered the greatest protection did not lie directly opposite the Wanderer.

Kem's laborious calculations had identified the path of least danger; the only problem now was to follow it, without a glimpse of the void to confirm their position. Roi had set up systematic weight measurements, and cycling stones and Rotators in a new Null Chamber; all of this helped quantify their distance from the Hub, but the most crucial information, their angle from the Wanderer, could not be measured this way.

Sen and her team were monitoring the strength of the wind, and had done their best to calibrate a model linking the characteristics of the flow through the tunnels with the last of the solid data that the void-watchers had been able to gather on the Splinter's changing orbit. The varying density of the Incandescence could not be anticipated, but it could be measured in the wind, moment by moment, and fed into the templates to derive a range of estimates as to the effect the tunnels were having on the Splinter's position and speed.

These efforts gave them a far better chance than they would have had by merely trusting in luck, but two things remained to elevate the uncertainty. One was the Wanderer's erratic orbital shifts, which they had never been able to understand and no longer had any hope of observing. Roi had accepted that there was nothing to be done about that. The other complication was the influence of the Wanderer's curvature, and that was a flaw she could not accept without a fight.

They could never hope to track the Wanderer's proximity with a change in the weights; the differences it made from one end of the Splinter to the other were too tiny. But that lack of detectable influence did not mean that as the two of them swept around the Hub, the Wanderer was incapable of advancing the Splinter in its orbit, slowly dragging them out of the safe zone that Kem had delineated.

With Haf and Pel as their checkers, Roi, Kem and Nis stood with their template-frames, shift after shift, trying to merge the geometries in a way that satisfied Zak's principle. Having failed to make progress before, Roi had them try the simplest approach: imagining that both the Hub and the Wanderer possessed the twistless curvature of their first, incorrect guess for the Hub. Such an answer would not have been the true geometry, of course, but it might have opened up a crack leading in the right direction.

Roi's vision as she fell into sleep at the end of each shift was filled with images of smooth, bright surfaces colliding, grating against each other, refusing to meld. Each time she woke, the problem filled her thoughts again immediately. How could they pass the Wanderer, blinded by the Incandescence, without slipping unknowingly into danger? The geometry of space-time was the only guide left to them, but while their knowledge of its shape remained imperfect, that guide was uncertain, and perhaps even treacherous.

Kem put down her frame. "I can't think any more. I'm going to get some food."

"Haf can bring you food," Roi suggested.

"Pel can do it!" said Haf. "She's not doing anything!" Pel was lying on her back, gazing at the ceiling. No one had passed her a frame to check since the start of the shift.

"I can get it myself," Kem replied. She left the chamber.

Nis had paused while they were speaking; now he looked to Roi, almost accusingly.

"We're all tired," he said. "I think we're going nowhere."