Incandescence

Spin produced weight away from the center, and the garm-sard weight itself was also away from the center, so part of it could be attributed to the Splinter's spin. «Without the spin, it would be less.»

«Yes,» Zak said. «Less, per span, by exactly the shomal-junub weight.»

«So if it was three times the shomal-junub weight with the spin, then without the spin it would be two?» Roi ventured.

Zak chirped with delight. «Yes! And that is what makes three beautiful. With spin, we can say the weights for the shomal-junub, garm-sard, and rarb-sharq axes are: one toward the center of the Splinter, three away, and zero. But the hidden picture, if we strip away the complication of the spin, is: one toward the center, two away from it, and one toward it again.»

«I can see that garm and sard are special,» Roi conceded. «But why should the garm-sard weight be exactly twice the others?»

«Because that gives a perfect balance between the amount of squeezing and the amount of stretching. Take a package of resin and squeeze it in two directions; I promise you, it will burst out in the third direction, with twice the force. It's not free to do anything else.»

Roi pondered Zak's mundane analogy for the arcane symmetry he was proposing. She could see the appeal of it, but was that really enough to determine all the laws of weight and motion?

She said, «What if the reality, with spin included, is two, not three? Then without spin, all the weights would be equal in size, but the garm-sard weight would be opposite the others. Wouldn't that be simple, too?»

«Perhaps,» Zak conceded. «Perhaps it's too much to hope for the geometry of weight to match the geometry of resin.»

«What we need to do,» Roi said, «is find some way to check. The map told us one thing, but our own weight measurements disagreed. We have to find another test, another measurement we can perform that will settle the question.»

Zak made a sound of concurrence, then sank into contemplation. Roi looked around the chamber. How long had passed since she'd entered? A whole shift? She was hungry, but reluctant to move, reluctant to break her connection to Zak. The most important thing now was their work.

He'd done it, she realized. All alone, without team-mates, with nothing but words, a couple of machines, and some simple ideas.

She was not going back to the crops on the edge. He'd hijacked her loyalty. He'd recruited her.

7

The first thing Rakesh saw upon opening his tent was Parantham, seated in a chair, in human form. Her detailed appearance was not the same as that which he'd assigned to her back in the node, but her identity signal ensured instant recognition. As he stepped out of the tent he tensed his forearm; his body believed it was real flesh. A moment's further introspection told him that he was not modifying his perceptions in any way. As far as he could tell he was simply seeing her as she was.

Parantham said, «Welcome to the bulge.» She was even speaking in his own native tongue.

«Thanks.»

She must have noticed his puzzlement, because she explained, «I thought it would make things simpler for our hosts if they only had to deal with one phenotype and one language.» She gestured at the instruments around them, which Rakesh had barely begun to take in. «Lots of hand-and-eye-driven interfaces, so it looks as if I made the right choice.»

Rakesh told his tent to fold itself. They were in a large cabin, inside some kind of space habitat; a window looked out on to a densely packed field of stars, slowly turning, suggesting a centrifugal origin for the gravity he felt. They'd requested exactly the same destination address as Lahl, but her metabolic and ergonomic needs would have been very different, so their hosts must have undertaken some extensive reconstruction. Rakesh had no idea what the Aloof would have done if Parantham had asked to be embodied as a blind limbless blob: maybe piped all the data straight into their minds, which would have been useful. Then again, maybe their hosts would have split them up, requiring them to take turns to examine the meteor with different instruments tailored to their different bodies.

The meteor itself was prominently displayed in the middle of the cabin, encased in a transparent enclosure, protected from contamination. As Rakesh walked over to it Parantham joined him. The object that had brought them all these thousands of light years was a dark gray slab of basalt about four meters across, its surface pitted with small impact craters.

He said, «What do the Aloof think we can do with this, that they can't do themselves?»

«Give a damn?» Parantham suggested.

«They cared enough to summon us here.»

«That wasn't difficult,» she said. «Though it might not be a question of effort; it might be a matter of what they see as appropriate. They might believe that they have no right to mess with this themselves, but we're entitled to know about it, and make of it what we will.» She smiled. «Though maybe that only applies to you, as molecular next-of-kin.»