Incandescence

They left the cabin and circumnavigated the habitat, a spinning ring some two hundred meters across. The main corridor led them to a kitchen, storerooms, a bathroom, two bedrooms, an exercise room, and a workshop. It was both gratifying and slightly chilling to see how well the Aloof understood the human phenotype's needs. The fixtures all had a generic quality, rather than the look of something made by humans for humans, but many cultures within the Amalgam would not have done a better job. Rakesh had swallowed a library before they'd left Massa, so it was a moot point as to whether his hosts had read his mind as the source of all this, or had studied other unencrypted human travelers on their way through the bulge, but they certainly hadn't shaped this place from his own memories; there was nothing specific to the culture of Shab-e-Noor, and they hadn't covered the walls with portraits of his family or lovers. They really couldn't win, though, because such tact itself invited its own creepy sense of invasiveness: they'd peered inside him deeply enough to understand how wrong that would have been.

If Rakesh felt naked, he had nobody but himself to blame. He'd known from the moment Lahl had offered him the key exactly how vulnerable he'd be, and he'd poured scorn on his friends' concerns. These were the terms, this was the deal; it was too late to have second thoughts. In principle, the possibilities for abuse were endless: the Aloof could be systematically torturing a billion helpless Rakesh-clones at this very moment. When he'd mentioned this primal fear to Parantham back on Massa, she'd pointed out that, while she'd regret the Aloof making anyone suffer, they could easily construct de novos of their own from scratch in order to mistreat them; sufficiently deranged sadists could always manufacture someone to torture, removing any need to lure their victims into a trap. In any case, Rakesh decided, there was nothing to be gained now from such paranoid speculation. Having handed their minds and bodies to their hosts as open books, the only sensible strategy that remained was to take their pleasant surroundings at face value and assume that the Aloof's hospitality, however narrowly defined, was genuine.

Back in the meteor room, they set to work. Rakesh had never had reason to be much of a materials scientist or ejecta expert before, and as he invoked the aid of the library the knowledge that flowed into him brought a thrill of discovery, a sense of new vistas opening up before him, that stretched far beyond his immediate needs. Imbibing a massive bolus of pre-digested information was not his usual means of educating himself — he much preferred the slow process of building incrementally on his own prior knowledge, testing and interpreting every assertion before accepting it — but there was no denying the rush of suddenly having thousands of new facts and insights jostling in his skull.

The equipment the Aloof had given them could probe the meteor's surface down to an atomic level; elicit and analyze emissions across the spectrum from gamma rays to microwaves; tomograph it in a thousand different ways; strike it, tap it, pound it, tickle it, and listen to the harmonics as it rang like a bell. Its gross chemical composition and its rarest impurities, its crystalline microstructure and the subtlest deformations thereof, were there for the asking. This rock, Rakesh thought, was as naked to them as they were to the Aloof.

He and Parantham collaborated efficiently, discussing the best strategies for the investigation, speaking a dense specialist lingo that would have been foreign to them both just minutes before. The primary interface to all of the instruments was a touch-screen console, but mercifully they weren't limited to reading the screen and tapping menus; the Aloof had tailored the interface to their detailed embodiments rather than a generic notion of the ancestral human phenotype, and the console could exchange data with the infrared ports in their fingertips.