Incandescence

„No. I checked that. I found small, random discrepancies, not some systematic distortion. We all make errors: me, you, the signage teams. Enough to mistake two for two and a quarter, perhaps. But not three.“

„Apart from the map, then,“ Roi said, „why can't the true value be two? If you had never found the map, would you be satisfied with two?“

Zak made a chirp of wry admiration. „That's a good question. Maybe I've been fooling myself. Maybe I've let a mapmaker who I've never even met corrupt my idea of simplicity.“

„Tell me,“ Roi begged him, „why you think it should be three. How can one answer be favored over another? How can anything in the world be more than chance?“ This was what she'd come here to learn: the answer to the impossible question that had dragged her away from her work team, away from everything she knew and trusted.

„If I'm right,“ Zak said, „then weight is all about motion, and motion is all about geometry. That's where the simplicity comes from.“

With these cryptic words hanging in the air, he led Roi along the wire, deep into the Null Chamber. She struggled to remain calm; it was hard enough being weightless anywhere, but at least in the tunnels there'd been rock all around her to assuage the feeling that she was constantly falling. Here, out in the middle of the chamber with only Zak's flimsy web to hold on to, the confusion and contradictions were starker. The fact was, Roi had no trouble supporting herself with the weakest of single-clawed grips, and even if she released that claw-hold accidentally she'd easily have time to regain it. She had probably never been in less danger of falling in her life. So why did the lack of weight, the very thing that guaranteed her safety, also make her feel that she was forever on the verge of being dashed against the walls of the chamber?

„Here at the Null Line, with no wind and no weight to confuse us, how do things move?“ Zak took a stone from his carapace and tossed it gently away from them. „What do you see?“

Roi said cautiously, „As far as I can tell, that stone moved smoothly in a straight line until it hit the wall.“

„Good. I don't expect you to be certain about anything from one crude experiment, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that's true: weightless things move smoothly in a straight line. And I'll tell you something more from my own experience, which you can confirm for yourself when you feel more confident: once I've given myself a push and started moving across the chamber, it doesn't matter how fast I make myself travel; except for the slight touch of the air passing over me I really can't feel any difference. Weightlessness is weightlessness, as long as you're moving smoothly, and the only thing that stops you moving smoothly is contact with a wall, or a wire.“

Zak led her to a small apparatus attached to the wire that marked the Null Line. It was a tube of susk cuticle, containing a spring with a stone at one end, much like the one she used to measure weights. Here, of course, the spring was unstretched, and the stone lay beside a mark on the tube that indicated no weight at all.

The end of the tube opposite the stone was attached to the wire by a small loop that allowed it to pivot. Zak flicked the tube and set it spinning, the free end sweeping out a circle while the other remained fixed. „What do you see?“

„The spring is stretched now,“ Roi observed. „As if the stone had weight.“

„Yes.“ Zak reached over and gave the tube another sharp tap, setting it moving faster. „And now?“

„It's stretched even more. As if the weight had increased.“

„Good. Now let's put some numbers to this.“

Zak took a sheet of cured skin from his carapace, and had Roi count while the tube spun around, to judge how quickly it made each revolution. Six times, they spun the tube and recorded both the time it took to complete a circle and the weight indicated by the stretching of the spring. A special kind of pointer that could only move one way under pressure from the stone made it possible to read the weight off the scale after the tube was brought to a halt; squeezing the pointer made it narrower and allowed it to be slid back, resetting the weight.

Zak said, „Multiply the weight by the time, and then by the time again.“

Roi stared at the skin, as if the answers might simply leap into her mind, but nothing happened. „I can't do that,“ she admitted. She understood the concept, but when it came to manipulating actual figures she had only been taught how to add and subtract. „None of my teams ever needed multiplication.“

„All right, don't worry, I'll teach you later.“ Zak moved down the list of figures, rapidly scratching in the results. Although the individual times and weights varied greatly, the numbers produced by his calculation — weight by time, by time again — were all similar, all close to two hundred and seventy.

Roi was mystified. „Two hundred and seventy? What does that mean?“