Incandescence

"I'm staying here," Rakesh replied firmly. "I'll find work somewhere nearby." For a moment he caught himself worrying about his prospects, as if he actually needed a job. Still, it was the right thing to say; Zey had been beginning to look alarmed, and the news that at least he wouldn't try to foist himself upon her team seemed to reduce her anxiety.

Saf walked away, rasping to herself.

Zey said, "There's work for me to do, I should join my team-mates."

Rakesh said, "I'm going to rest here, but I don't feel like sleeping. When you're finished, if you want to talk—"

Zey turned away and went back into the chamber. Rakesh waited, wondering what was going on in her mind. His strange appearance and unlikely claims had been met with little more than indifference before. No one else had been curious enough to question him about his origins, let alone make an effort to fit his answers into some larger framework. How reliable these fragments of oral history were was beside the point; what mattered was that Zey remembered the story, and could conceive of it as more than a myth. She could imagine the cousins returning. She could believe in other worlds, and accept the idea of traveling between them.

She might not provide a link to the past, but she could still help build a bridge to the Ark's future.

20

As the Calculation Chamber filled, Roi realized that she barely knew the names of half the people around her. It was an encouraging sign. While Bard and Neth, Ruz and Gul were all busy with their own work, Tan and the other theorists had managed to keep recruiting. Even as people grew hungry, they had been driven not to ransack the diminished crops at the edge, but to gather around the seeds that Zak had planted, to tend and protect a very different crop.

Tan approached her. "Are you ready?"

Roi felt sick. She remembered the time at the junub edge, when Zak had gone silent. If they failed now, it would be the very same feeling played out in slow motion for everyone in the Splinter. Worse than a new division, worse than anything that had happened before.

"Absolutely," she said.

In silence, side by side, she and Tan plunged into the world of geometry.

This time, there were not two but five unknown templates to feed through every step of the calculations. One was tied to the way the symmetries slanted around the Hub; another to the freedom they needed to express the size of orbits; another to the way the shape of space-time varied as you moved out of the plane of the Incandescence. Along with the other symbols they needed to wrap the whole space-time in unknown numbers, the total was so great that Gul's beautiful frames had all needed to be hastily rebuilt.

Roi lost herself in the process. She worked slowly, satisfying herself that every step she took was valid before moving on to the next, so that when it came time to pass each frame to her checkers she felt no hesitation. As the dark phases approached, the newest recruits wound the light machine and kept the work going.

The stones clicked gently, the templates grew longer and more intricate. The third of her checkers called an error to her; she accepted the frame back, and corrected the mistake.

As well as the Splinter's old circular orbit, it would be necessary to apply Zak's principle to at least three other paths through space-time in order to unravel all the unknowns. To provide an extra degree of confidence in their results, she had not conspired with Tan on the choice of paths; the two of them would make their own separate decisions, and then see if their final answers still agreed.

Final answers? The prospect still seemed impossibly remote. The templates thickened like weeds. Someone brought Roi some food. She had lost count of the number of dark phases they had passed through. She finished her first analysis of the Splinter's orbit, and chose the next path: an orbit that went backward around the Hub. In the simple geometry that would have told her nothing new, but with the strange new twist they'd added, it became an entirely different kind of motion.

Tan called a break; they all needed to sleep. Roi clipped protectors over the wires of her frame to keep the stones in place. She didn't speak to Tan, to anyone, she just found a crevice in the wall of the chamber and shut off her vision.

When they resumed, she felt refreshed, but the intervening time melted away; it was if she'd never put the frame down at all. The templates were too big to be considered beautiful, but she was beginning to recognize similarities in some of the ugly knots writhing around within them, and she clung to the hope that these knots might meet up in a way that would allow them to untangle each other.

A chance came to use her own tool to unravel some of the ugliness: the free template linked to the size of the orbits. She hesitated, wondering if she was acting too soon; how could she know if a different choice, delayed, might not spare her even greater effort?