by Greg Egan
His fingers hit metal. Jubilantly, he moved his hands apart to try to span the edges, but the surface just went on and on. The treasure chest was more like a vault, at least a few meters wide.
He probed the metal beneath the mound of bones, scanning back and forth with his fingertips. Streaks of light flashed behind his eyes, followed like thunder by a bludgeoning pain. Finally he held out the key itself and scraped it blindly over the vault's unyielding surface.
Something gave, and his hand moved. Probably the key had just slipped. Rakesh waggled it, disbelieving. It had entered a keyhole, and it fitted snugly.
He tried to plow some of the mound aside, but he soon gave up. He doubted that he'd have the strength to lift the vault's huge door even if he could clear it first. Still, there was something satisfying about getting this far. Let Csi paint his not-quite-triumphant skeleton into the scape and leave it as a signpost for the next traveler.
He turned the key, and felt a click.
The door dropped away beneath him. Mud, bones, Rakesh, and a geyser of water erupted from an opening in the floor of the ocean, into an endless space full of stars.
4
The sense of attachment Roi felt toward her work team had never been a constant, unwavering force. Even in the absence of recruitment efforts it rose and fell, following its own internal rhythm. So it was only when it had reached one of its peaks and she felt confident that her loyalty could survive a few missed shifts that she decided to take a break and travel to the Null Line.
Zak had invited her to come and see his «contraptions» as soon as she'd handed him her first batch of weight measurements, and each time since then when they'd met he'd reminded her that she was welcome to visit, though he'd never made her feel that she was under any pressure. It was, of course, conceivable that he had a team waiting at the Null Line ready to enact a full-blown recruitment, but Roi had made a point of quizzing people for any news they'd heard from the Calm, and she'd turned up no evidence of any such threat. It was hard to believe that an entire team indulging in activity as strange as Zak's could have escaped notice. For a lone, unrecruited person to behave oddly was only to be expected.
When Zak had first invited her, she'd told him an old joke: the easy way to reach the Null Line from the garm quarter was to travel to the shomal quarter, and from there the journey would be downhill all the way. Rather than expressing amusement or irritation, Zak had responded by showing her yet another of his maps.
«These lines are paths that lead neither up nor down,» he'd explained. «I call them 'levels'. I've arranged their spacing so that climbing from one level to the next is an equal effort in each case. Counting the lines to be crossed will tell you how much work any journey requires.»
In fact, counting the lines told Roi nothing new; the whole point of the joke was that everyone knew it would take at least as much effort to reach the shomal quarter from the garm as to travel to the Null Line itself. Still, the map made this fact clear at a glance, because the Null Line was level with the boundary between the quarters.
Zak insisted that he'd drawn this second map, not by laboriously measuring the weight lines on the first map and marking off increments of effort, but by a kind of reasoning that started with the underlying mathematical rule that described the pattern of weights, and led to a new rule describing the shape and spacing of these levels. Roi was astonished, but when she'd asked for more details she'd found his explanation impenetrable. «When you come to the Calm, when you have time to ponder these ideas at leisure, it will all make sense,» he'd promised.
Roi planned the journey to take twelve shifts in all: four spent traveling up to the Null Line, five visiting Zak, and three for the easier return leg. She'd been with the team long enough for an absence like this to be acceptable; everybody needed to recuperate sometimes, and travel was a common form of recreation. If it also made you vulnerable to recruitment, the unspeakable truth was that a certain amount of turnover kept the teams fresh, and if a tired or restless worker was ambushed it was not the end of the world.
It was easy to ponder these matters as abstractions, but when Roi woke in the shelter of her crevice and faced the reality of setting out in the opposite direction to all of her team-mates, she realized that she'd chosen the hardest time to leave. By the end of each shift she craved solitude, but on waking all she could think about was company and cooperation. She'd made no close friends in this team, but that wasn't the point: it gave her the same sense of accomplishment to work beside the most taciturn stranger as it did beside someone sociable and garrulous whose history she knew inside-out. Work was work; everything else was superfluous chatter, however delightful that could be.
As she eased herself out of her resting place, she resolved to follow her plan regardless. The more difficult it was to begin the journey, the more she would feel reassured that her attachment to the team was secure.
Zak had given her a series of maps that showed the way between their usual meeting place and a rendezvous point that he'd chosen near the Null Line. Roi had decided not to follow his suggested route precisely; whether she trusted him or not, it would be more enjoyable to take a few detours and keep the journey unpredictable. She'd been in the Calm a few times, and had even worked for a while in the sard quarter, but Zak's haunts were further rarb along the Null Line than she'd ever gone, and there would be plenty of territory along the way that she'd never seen before.
In the first tunnel she entered, she encountered a crowd of workers descending for the start of their shifts. She deferred to their numbers and climbed along the matted ceiling, trying to exhibit an uncomplicated purposefulness with her gait even as she struggled to keep her footing. The tangle of vegetation seemed imbued with malice; among the crops at the edge the same weeds would be proliferating luxuriantly in the unfiltered wind, and she would not be there to keep them in check. Five of her team-mates passed her below, oblivious to her presence. She was alone and useless; no wonder she was invisible to them.
What was she doing? Taking a rest. Satisfying her curiosity. Scratching an itch so she could keep on working, with all the more energy and dedication.
Taking a rest, and walking into an ambush. Zak was probably just the healthiest member of his team, the only one who still possessed enough strength to travel deep into the garm quarter. Once Roi arrived in his territory all the others would float around her, weakened and deformed by their countless shifts of weightlessness, ready to induct her into their deranged schemes.
The crowd below her thinned, but the anxieties and self-accusations kept coming. She was a traitor, an unrecruitable freak. She would bring on a famine with her selfishness and perversity. Roi didn't argue with any of it. She just stared straight ahead and kept moving.
The tunnel led into a chamber that was almost empty, except for a group of children playing with their tutors. Roi kept her distance, still feeling guilty and tainted, not wanting to infect these young minds with her treachery. Listening to their exuberant shouts, though, began to lift her spirits. Everyone remembered stumbling into a team like this: their first ever recruitment. She now knew that hatchlings rarely spent more than eight or nine shifts wandering and grazing alone before finding a group of willing tutors, but in her memory it was as if an eternity of desperate searching had preceded that first moment of fulfillment.
Watching the children mimicking pointless, stylized poses and movements for the sheer joy of acting in unison, Roi began to feel, paradoxically, more at ease with her own truancy. The simple truth was that there would always be a team somewhere that would welcome her. She fervently hoped that she would return safely to tend the crops again, but whatever changes her journey wrought, the sight of these contented infants seemed like a promise that there would always be a place for her in the world.
The chamber opened into a larger space, where susk and murche were grazing. The adult susk were about half Roi's size, with a general body shape very much like a person's, each male having six ordinary li
mbs while the females carried an extra, shorter pair for mating. From certain angles they looked eerily like children. They even made a range of plaintive sounds, scraping their limbs against the underside of their carapace just like an inconsolable child. The murche, in contrast, were barely the size of Roi's claws, and swarmed around the field on twelve busy legs. If the crops ever failed, Roi decided, she would have no qualms about eating them.
Herders moved quietly among the flock, gently encouraging them to graze on the plants that people found least palatable. Roi had heard it claimed that the best herders controlled the susk by a process akin to recruitment. The murche ate what they pleased, but fortunately that included susk droppings.
The ground here was tiered, rising up in small steps along countless jagged edges. To Roi it looked as if one large, continuous sheet of rock had come crashing down, with pieces breaking off the edge where it collided at an angle with whatever lay beneath it. The marks of this kind of violence could be found everywhere, but Roi had never seen the ground fall. If the Splinter really had been torn from a larger world — and if weight had always grown with distance — that world might have encompassed more powerful forces than any to be found in the present.
If all of this was true, though, how had that mother world itself come to be? That was the trouble with any question about the history of things: how could you ever reach an end to it?
The wind was brisk, but it blew from behind her as she climbed the steps of the field. The light from the rock ahead of her was a gentle glow; she was leaving the raw intensity of the garm-sharq edge behind.
Roi had grown hungry, so she surveyed the area ahead of her for food, and finally settled on a solid patch of kahu to munch on. As she ate, two of the herders approached, unaccompanied by any susk.
«To your life and strength,» each bid her encouragingly.
«And yours.» Roi watched them warily as they ate beside her. If they wanted a new team-mate, she was outnumbered and surrounded, with nowhere to run.
«What do you do?» one of the herders inquired.
«I tend the crops at the edge.»
«Valuable work.»
«As is yours.»
«Where are you headed?» the other asked.
«To the Calm.»
«That's a long journey.»
Roi said, «I need to spend a few shifts seeing the world. It will make me a better worker.»
Both herders chewed on this in silence for a while.
«Travel safely,» said the first, moving away, firing a pellet of faeces deftly into a clump of weeds.
«Thank you.»
The second herder lingered. «Work is what makes better workers,» he opined.
«Perhaps,» Roi replied.
He rasped disapproval, but followed his team-mate.
Upon leaving the field, Roi came across a series of chambers where teams worked to render susk carcasses into a variety of products. The soft skin that lined the internal cavities made an ideal surface on which to write and draw. The hard cuticle of the carapace was tough and durable, but when soaked in plant extracts it could be softened enough to work into different shapes. Some inner organs were edible, and Roi saw a couple of workers consuming them fresh from the carcass, but most were dissolved and processed into inks and paints, glues and resins, specialized plant foods, medicines, and an assortment of unappealing liquids and powders and gums whose purpose she didn't feel inclined to inquire about.
The end result of Roi's labor spread naturally throughout the garmside as seeds on the wind, but these products required teams dedicated to their transport. As she passed the processing chambers, Roi saw couriers coming and going, traveling in twos or threes depending on the size of their load. Roi introduced herself to one pair, Zud and Sia, who were hauling a cart packed with diverse products that had been ordered by a depot almost halfway to the Calm.
«How long will it take you to make the delivery?» Roi asked. Despite their burden, they were easily matching her pace as they ascended a steep tunnel.
«The cargo will be there in two shifts,» Zud replied, «but we won't take it all the way ourselves. Our highest depot is less than one shift away; we only work between there and the edge.»
«We're used to the range of weights,» Sia added. «It's easier than trying to work everywhere.»
Roi felt no sense of threat from this pair; their team-mates were widely scattered, and given the nature of their work it seemed likely that they encountered travelers far too often to treat them all as potential recruits.
She asked them what news they'd heard from the Calm.
«The food supply's been low,» Sia said.
«But the reservoir's healthy,» Roi protested.
«Perhaps there's an excess of mouths,» Zud suggested. «Though we're bringing them a remedy for that.» It took a moment before Roi realized what he meant; as well as susk products, they were carrying a stack of contraceptive leaves. The plant that produced them was a variety that could only grow in a strong, nutrient-rich wind. Since she was traveling downwind as well as up into the Calm, she was heading for the most barren part of the Splinter. She should stock up next time she had the chance.
«Any other news?» she asked. «No word of new work teams?»
«New teams?» Zud sounded baffled.
Roi couldn't think of an easy way to characterize the notion of a team of which Zak might be a member. «Doing new jobs. Jobs you'd never heard of before.»
Without breaking his pace, Zud diverted three legs to a drumbeat of amusement. «Jobs I'd never heard of? Jobs someone made up from thin air?»
In the face of such mirth from a team-mate, Roi's habit was to retreat graciously into silence, but in her new role as a traveler she felt emboldened. «Do you think every job we do now always existed?»
«They're all necessary,» Sia said. «If there ever was a time when they weren't being done, it would have been disastrous.»
«They're all useful,» Roi countered. «But we might have done something different in the past, to meet the same needs. Or our needs might have been different.»
«Different needs?» Zud had a way of making her perfectly reasonable conjectures sound like oxymorons.
«Is your cargo the same for every trip?»
«Of course not,» Sia replied. «But it doesn't change so much that you could say our job has changed. And it all evens out in the long run.»
«What if there's a serious famine? Then my own job would certainly change: I'd have to keep people from storming the reservoir.»
Sia disagreed. «It's still the same basic function: keeping the food supply healthy and intact, whether it's saving it from mites, or from starving hordes.»
Roi was exasperated. «What if the ground fell? What if tunnels collapsed? What if the world was ripped in two? Would that be enough to change anything?»
Both her companions fell silent. Roi couldn't decide whether they were tacitly conceding the argument, or whether she'd offended them by speaking so forcefully. Perhaps she'd overstepped the mark.
After a while, Sia explained gently, as if to a child, «Life is hard, things aren't perfect. So we speak of living in a broken world. It doesn't mean that the Splinter was really part of something larger that was literally torn apart. That's just a story, Roi. The world has always been this way, and it always will be.»
Roi stayed with the couriers until they reached their depot, then she looked around for a place to rest. She was as tired as she'd ever been after a shift at the edge; even with nothing to carry, she had found it hard work keeping up with Zud and Sia, who were used to following a tight schedule and completing the ascent in a fixed time. The wind was already so much weaker than she was accustomed to that she felt no need to hunt for a sheltering lode; she simply slipped into the first empty crevice she found, and shut off her vision.
Upon waking, Roi's first thought was that she didn't understand the wind. In the garmside, it blew in from the Incandescence at the sharq edge and battered its way thro
ugh the porous rock of the Splinter, finally escaping at the opposite edge. In the sardside, the flow was reversed. Between these opposing winds lay the Calm. The pattern of the wind was somehow related to the pattern of weights, but the nature of the connection was far from obvious: the wind certainly didn't blow the way things fell. The Null Line lay in the middle of the Calm, but the Calm extended far beyond it, encompassing a whole plane that stretched out in the shomal and junub directions, as well as the Null Line's rarb and sharq.
Roi roused herself and resolved to make an early start, all the sooner to discuss this problem with Zak.
Even here, her cycle seemed to be synchronized with many of the locals, but the workers heading for their shifts inspired no feelings of guilt in her. The softness of the light made everything seem slightly unreal, until she made a conscious effort to adjust her vision; she'd accommodated to the change as she'd traveled, but on waking she'd reverted out of habit to the minimal sensitivity more suited to the edge.
There was a pattern to the light too, of course. It seemed only reasonable that everything should be brightest where the wind from the Incandescence struck the Splinter with the greatest force, though she'd heard that the sard-rarb edge was not as bright as the garm-sharq. Was the wind there weaker, or was there another reason? Perhaps Zak would follow up his survey of weights with one of wind, and another of light.
As she continued her ascent, Roi pictured the levels of Zak's map embedded in the world around her, a succession of intangible layers to be crossed before her journey could end. She wasn't carrying a copy of that map, but from her memory of it she could imagine herself picking up pace, each step carrying her further than the last as the burden of weight gradually eased.
Near the end of the second shift, Roi came across a work team taking metal from a vein in the rock. The vein ran neatly along the wall of a chamber, although it was possible that this team, or their predecessors, had shaped the chamber expressly for the purpose of extraction.
