Incandescence

Still, he had kept his promise to Lahl, whoever she was, and he had kept faith with Zey. He had neither ignored his cousins, leaving them to sleepwalk into eternity, nor obliterated their present, stable culture and robbed them of all meaningful choices.

Rakesh asked Zey, "Are you ready for a small journey?"

"A journey where?" Zey's body tensed nervously.

"It's not far, I promise. I just want to say goodbye to my friend."

They crossed into the ferry. Having no need for airlocks simplified things enormously. Rakesh was almost beginning to enjoy his new embodiment: crawling around in vacuum, clinging to walls and ceilings, and knowing that it wasn't an act of puppetry, but a benign metamorphosis. He hoped, he believed, that he could live this way until Parantham returned.

Rakesh started the fusion drive, and the ferry arced up out of the disk. Zey scuttled around the cabin, confused, not knowing which way to orient herself. "What's happening to my weight?"

"Acceleration. Get used to it."

"I don't understand."

"Be patient," Rakesh implored her. "Just enjoy the view."

Even with the limited range of frequencies that the combination of the hull's filters and their vision afforded them, the neutron star made a majestic sight. Parts of the disk and the central jet shone brightly, and the narrow band brought out complex structures woven into the jet that would have been much harder to discern in the glare of a full-spectrum image.

As the spinning ring of Lahl's Promise came into view, Rakesh's anxiety began to rival Zey's. With the sight of his last fragile link to the Amalgam looming in front of him, the prospect of renouncing it, of cutting his ties, was beginning to seem a thousand times more daunting than leaving the node had been. He had not felt the same vulnerability since the day he'd left Shab-e-Noor. In the bulge, nothing would be certain. He did not understand the Aloof and their whims. There was no guarantee that he'd ever see Parantham, or any other citizen of the Amalgam, again.

So be it. That was what backups were for.

He brought the ferry to a halt a hundred meters from the ship.

"This is the cart I traveled in," Rakesh told Zey. "Though not all the way from the place where I was born."

"I don't understand," Zey complained. "How you traveled, where you've been."

"Don't worry," Rakesh said. "Forget about those things. Think about this place, and your own journeys."

He spoke to Parantham as she sat in the cabin, through a radio link bridging the vacuum between them.

"I've found Tassef's star on the map," she said. "If I ask the ship to go there, I suppose the Aloof will try to inject me back into the Amalgam's network."

Tassef was on the far side of the bulge from Massa, where they'd entered. Parantham would be re-enacting Leila and Jasim's first journey in reverse. Assuming the Amalgam let her back in.

"Safar bekheyr, my friend," Rakesh replied. May your journey be blessed. They had said their goodbyes, and he had made it clear to her that he was resolved in his decision; he didn't know what else to add.

"I'll see you again, Rakesh," she promised. Whether or not that was possible, he knew she meant it honestly; she would try to return.

For a few long heartbeats nothing happened to Lahl's Promise, and Rakesh wondered if that was the way: the Aloof simply rescanned the ship's contents each time, and left the latest incarnation behind, intact, as a kind of fossil.

Then the spinning ring began to smear out before his eyes, each speck of material cut loose from its neighbors and set free to follow a separate trajectory. Before long it was a faint, diffuse cloud of dust.

Zey was running in rings around the cabin now. "The people who did that? Where do they live?"

"I don't know," Rakesh replied. "Don't worry, though; they're not going to do that to us."

"How do you know?"

Rakesh chirped amusement. "I don't know anything about them, for certain. But I'll tell you what I'm thinking right now."

Zey managed to calm herself, and she stood beside him, waiting for him to compose his reply.

"I think they might be sleepwalking," he said. "Like your team-mates. I think they've done many things, learned many things, seen many things, but now they've had to find a way to live without needing what the world can no longer provide for them." He could understand the attraction of a strategy like that, for the Arkdwellers, for anyone. It was better than going mad with boredom. "Maybe there are one or two among them who are a bit like you, but a lot less restless. Sentinels, not quite awake, who can watch the world go by, and even intervene in it a little, but who can't, or won't, reengage with the universe until it has something new to offer them."

Zey absorbed this. "But they brought you here, just to wake us?"

"That's what I believe," Rakesh said. "But I'm not certain about any of this."