Incandescence

The flow of stellar winds into the neutron star's accretion disk was a powerful and relatively constant source of energy, and even the tiny portion siphoned off by the Ark was enough to allow a technologically unsophisticated culture to rise above subsistence agriculture. A range of simple goods was manufactured, mainly from animal products, but also from a small amount of scrupulously recycled metal. Services ranged from courier rounds like Saf's to the curating and restoration of repositories of documents, written on animal skin, bearing recipes for such things as inks and glues, and drawings of useful tools and machines.

It was all very practical, but it seemed a long way removed from the kind of knowledge their ancestors must have possessed. Though born on the surface of an ordinary planet, the Arkmakers had mastered the plasma hydrodynamics of a neutron star's accretion disk in sufficient detail to construct a whole world that could flourish in this radically new environment. Rakesh couldn't see the current inhabitants coping with even the mildest disruption to their routine.

Parantham said, "It need not be pathological, to respond to stability with stasis. Perhaps this is what the Arkmakers longed for: after all the turmoil they'd faced, they didn't want to have to look over their shoulders for the rest of eternity. They didn't want to be fretting about how they'd escape the next unpredictable disaster."

"This is the bulge," Rakesh replied. "You have no choice but to look over your shoulder."

"In the long run, maybe not, but they've managed to survive for fifty million years. Perhaps they calculated the odds, and said, if we burrow down deep into this neutron star's gravity well, it will be a long, long time before anything else wanders by that's strong enough to prise us out." Parantham spread her hands. "Once you make that decision, what's the point in being outward-looking, or in seeking constant change? Some cultures have thrived on uncertainty, but for some species there's nothing more stressful than the need for vigilance."

Rakesh could see her point, but he didn't like where she was heading. "So when the Arkmakers faced the prospect of the neutron star tearing up their home world, you think they willingly rid themselves of the very traits that allowed them to survive that event? They resented the unpredictable universe so much that they consciously stripped away all their curiosity, all their powers of abstract reasoning, and gave birth to this nest of sleepwalkers?"

"Are they happy?" she asked.

"They're not miserable," he replied, begrudgingly. "But only because they don't know what they're missing."

"Are they happier than you were back at the node?" Parantham countered. "Going mad with frustration because the whole galaxy had been tamed a million years before your birth, and there was nothing left for you to do with your own redundant curiosity and vigilance? Is that what the Arkmakers should have wished upon their children? Fifty million years of safety — tainted by fifty million years of resentment because their sanctuary was not exciting enough?"

Rakesh closed his eyes and let the sweat from his forehead trickle down and sting his eyelids. He said, "I don't know if their way of life is a good thing or not, but if they want to reject the outside world, let them make a conscious choice about it. The Arkmakers had very few choices; I'm not giving up on these people just because their ancestors faced some hard decisions fifty million years ago, and did what they thought was best. I don't want to force any changes on them, but I'm not leaving until I find a way to get through to them."

By the time Rakesh and Saf reached the depot, he was worn out. As part of a new program to improve his social skills in this milieu — with nothing in the library to guide him, let alone the usual package of time-tested tweaks to provide instant cultural fluency — he had decided to experiment with plausible feelings of fatigue induced by his avatar's actions. While he couldn't conclude anything with certainty without sequencing and simulating the Arkdwellers themselves, studying the physiology of the larger animals had provided him with some reasonable clues. The tidal gravity was quite small even at the Ark's periphery, but a sustained "uphill" slog like the one they'd just completed seemed to leave Saf in need of recuperation, so it looked as if he'd set his response at about the right level.