Incandescence

Zak hesitated. «Who can say? Maybe it's simply in our nature to imagine a larger, more glorious world in the past. To console ourselves, as we confront our limitations, with the idea that we were once part of something greater.»

Roi joked, «I think I'd find more consolation by imagining a larger world in the future.»

Zak took her words perfectly seriously. «Exactly, but how? Should we hope to catch up with our mythical cousins who went tumbling away into the Incandescence?»

This was becoming too strange for Roi. «You said something about measurements.»

«Yes.» Zak opened his carapace again, and removed a long tube wrought from susk cuticle. As he offered it to her, the shifting light revealed a coil of metal inside, with a small, smooth stone attached to the end of it.

Roi took it, trying not to show her astonishment at how casually he was handing over this extraordinary device. «See the numbers carved along the side?» Zak asked her.

«Yes.»

«The greater the weight, the further the spring stretches.»

«Of course.» That principle was clear, but how would she measure the exact direction? There were a number of slender rods lying against the side of the tube; Roi tugged gently on one of them, and it unfolded into a spindly leg. There were three legs, and a system of shorter rods as well.

«You need to take sights of some reference points,» Zak explained. «And then record the angles between the legs and the weight tube.»

«This is beginning to sound complicated.»

In fact, it was beginning to sound like work. What she felt about Zak's plans, though, was nothing at all like the buzz of camaraderie. He wasn't competing with her team; he was offering her something entirely different.

«You only have to record a few numbers,» Zak assured her. «I'm not asking you to do any of the calculations.»

He set up the tripod and demonstrated. There were navigation signs painted on the walls of all the main tunnels at regular intervals, and Zak had devised a set of rules for choosing points on them to orient the apparatus.

«You should ask some members of the signage teams,» Roi suggested. «They go everywhere.»

«I did. They refused.»

When she'd completed a successful measurement for herself, Roi folded up the device and stored it in her fallow right cavity, along with a roll of skin for recording the results.

They parted, promising each other that they'd meet in the same place after thirty-six shifts.

As Roi searched for a resting spot, the encounter began to seem increasingly remote and implausible, as if she'd heard about it from a friend of a friend, not experienced it for herself. Zak had spoken of plans to look for other helpers, but she didn't think much of his chances. Even now, her own conviction that she could spare the time to indulge in this charming, pointless activity was beginning to waver. Then again, she was tired, and even the thought of tending the crops with her team-mates made her feel weary.

She found an empty crevice near the end of the tunnel, and slid into the welcoming fissure. She could still hear the constant susurration of the wind, but the mass of dense rock behind her was strong enough to divert the flow away from her weathered carapace.

With her eyes pressed against the rock, her vision was filled with a shapeless radiance. Everything in the Splinter glowed with the warmth of the Incandescence; sheltered or not, she was always bathed in that same light.

Roi relaxed and let her eyes grow unresponsive. The radiance began to fade, dissolving into a colorless absence. Images of the weeds she'd sought throughout her shift marched across the emptiness. Then her body became numb, and her mind quiet.

3

Csi had organized the departure, designing a scape to suit the occasion with versions tailor-made for every participant. Rakesh found himself on an ocean-going vessel some fifty meters long, surrounded as far as the eye could see by heavy, gray-green seas. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was low and the wind relentless. There were five other people assembled on the deck: Parantham, Csi, Viya, and two old friends of Parantham, Jafar and Renu.

«We are gathered here to bid farewell to Rakesh and Parantham,» Csi declaimed, «who have heard the song of the sirens, and decided, against all of our wise counsel, to follow it.» Parantham smiled, perhaps at the very same reference; her own cultural background was such a mosaic that the human legend was probably just as meaningful to her as any alternative.

Rakesh tried to stay focused on the details of Csi's parting gift. The timber beneath his feet was warped, as if by decades of humidity. The salt in the air was pungent. The bodily parameters that he'd ceded to his friend's design guaranteed that the relentless swaying of the deck left him mildly queasy. All this theater was not so much a distraction as an adornment, refracting the strange truth of the event without ever trying to conceal it.