Incandescence

The crowd below her thinned, but the anxieties and self-accusations kept coming. She was a traitor, an unrecruitable freak. She would bring on a famine with her selfishness and perversity. Roi didn't argue with any of it. She just stared straight ahead and kept moving.

The tunnel led into a chamber that was almost empty, except for a group of children playing with their tutors. Roi kept her distance, still feeling guilty and tainted, not wanting to infect these young minds with her treachery. Listening to their exuberant shouts, though, began to lift her spirits. Everyone remembered stumbling into a team like this: their first ever recruitment. She now knew that hatchlings rarely spent more than eight or nine shifts wandering and grazing alone before finding a group of willing tutors, but in her memory it was as if an eternity of desperate searching had preceded that first moment of fulfillment.

Watching the children mimicking pointless, stylized poses and movements for the sheer joy of acting in unison, Roi began to feel, paradoxically, more at ease with her own truancy. The simple truth was that there would always be a team somewhere that would welcome her. She fervently hoped that she would return safely to tend the crops again, but whatever changes her journey wrought, the sight of these contented infants seemed like a promise that there would always be a place for her in the world.

The chamber opened into a larger space, where susk and murche were grazing. The adult susk were about half Roi's size, with a general body shape very much like a person's, each male having six ordinary limbs while the females carried an extra, shorter pair for mating. From certain angles they looked eerily like children. They even made a range of plaintive sounds, scraping their limbs against the underside of their carapace just like an inconsolable child. The murche, in contrast, were barely the size of Roi's claws, and swarmed around the field on twelve busy legs. If the crops ever failed, Roi decided, she would have no qualms about eating them.

Herders moved quietly among the flock, gently encouraging them to graze on the plants that people found least palatable. Roi had heard it claimed that the best herders controlled the susk by a process akin to recruitment. The murche ate what they pleased, but fortunately that included susk droppings.

The ground here was tiered, rising up in small steps along countless jagged edges. To Roi it looked as if one large, continuous sheet of rock had come crashing down, with pieces breaking off the edge where it collided at an angle with whatever lay beneath it. The marks of this kind of violence could be found everywhere, but Roi had never seen the ground fall. If the Splinter really had been torn from a larger world — and if weight had always grown with distance — that world might have encompassed more powerful forces than any to be found in the present.

If all of this was true, though, how had that mother world itself come to be? That was the trouble with any question about the history of things: how could you ever reach an end to it?

The wind was brisk, but it blew from behind her as she climbed the steps of the field. The light from the rock ahead of her was a gentle glow; she was leaving the raw intensity of the garm-sharq edge behind.

Roi had grown hungry, so she surveyed the area ahead of her for food, and finally settled on a solid patch of kahu to munch on. As she ate, two of the herders approached, unaccompanied by any susk.

«To your life and strength,» each bid her encouragingly.

«And yours.» Roi watched them warily as they ate beside her. If they wanted a new team-mate, she was outnumbered and surrounded, with nowhere to run.

«What do you do?» one of the herders inquired.

«I tend the crops at the edge.»

«Valuable work.»

«As is yours.»

«Where are you headed?» the other asked.

«To the Calm.»

«That's a long journey.»

Roi said, «I need to spend a few shifts seeing the world. It will make me a better worker.»

Both herders chewed on this in silence for a while.

«Travel safely,» said the first, moving away, firing a pellet of faeces deftly into a clump of weeds.

«Thank you.»

The second herder lingered. «Work is what makes better workers,» he opined.

«Perhaps,» Roi replied.

He rasped disapproval, but followed his team-mate.