Incandescence

by Greg Egan

  The exposed vein made a striking sight. Metal shone with an eerie uniformity that made it unlike any other substance Roi knew: it was impossible to discern any structure within it, or even behind it. If people's carapaces had been made of metal, their inner organs would have been completely invisible, reducing their appearance to an inscrutable surface sheen.

  The team was using an assortment of tools to prise the metal from one end of the vein. Roi could see a long, empty cavity extending away from the point where they were working, a roughly hemicylindrical indentation colored with vegetation that grew thicker with distance. There must have been a time when the whole formation had glistened with metal, and perhaps there'd be a time when the entire vein would be empty. People diligently scavenged the rare material, but that never seemed to be enough to fill the need.

  There were people who insisted that these veins replenished themselves, by some process too slow for anyone to witness, rendering any shortage a temporary inconvenience. Roi was skeptical about that theory, but even more so about the supposed corollary. Plants were undeniably replenished by the wind, but if the wind carried metal into the Splinter not only was the process too slow to witness, it was too slow to be of any use.

  If metal didn't grow from the rock like a weed, though, then there must have been a time when nobody had been extracting it. Regardless of the certainties Zud and Sia had expressed, there must have been a time when no one had heard of such a team.

  How long could that time have lasted? There had to be some limit to how long the metal could have lain untouched in the rock before someone had realized how to make use of it. Perhaps a thousand generations, perhaps a million, but the era in which people had failed to use metal could not stretch back forever.

  So, what had come before that? If metal couldn't grow, the vein itself must have always been there.

  Which meant there must have been a time when there were no people at all.

  Early in the third shift of her journey, Roi stopped near a fork in the tunnel and took a weight measurement. The navigation sign told her the lengths of the tunnel's three branches, and where they led. Her measurement told her that she was slightly more than halfway to the Null Line.

  At first she thought this meant that she was roughly on schedule, but on reflection she realized that the news was far better: by Zak's count of levels crossed, she was well ahead. She reviewed the maps Zak had given her to guide her to their meeting place. She'd wandered away from his suggested route, but she wasn't far off course. She set off again with her energy redoubled.

  Though her eyes were adapting to the ever softer light, they couldn't render the change imperceptible. Roi was used to the rock around her being noticeably brighter when she looked in the garm-sharq direction, with a characteristic drop in intensity as she turned away from that all-pervading beacon. Here, the distinction had become much subtler, and every contrast that depended on it was equally diminished. It was not that people or plants had ceased coloring and complicating the light, but many of the cues she had grown accustomed to were missing. When her team-mates working in the crops came to the edge of a field and changed direction, she could see patches of brightness temporarily imprinted on their carapaces, a record of their earlier orientation that took a few heartbeats to fade.

  The vegetation was unmistakably sparser now, but so were the people. Roi could see none of the signs of a serious food shortage, such as unpalatable plants lying around half-eaten; desperate people would chew on anything, but most weeds tasted so bad that it was impossible to swallow them. She had to stay alert to spot enough food for herself, but that was only to be expected when she was moving through unfamiliar territory, away from the abundance she was used to.

  As the shift wore on, the pleasant buoyancy she'd felt since the halfway mark began to mutate into something disconcerting. It was no longer just implausibly easy to ascend a steep tunnel; she noticed herself beginning to grip the floor by making her claws adhere slightly, in the same way she would grip the ceiling in order to walk upside-down. Sometimes her lightness even felt like the product of an upward force, the pull of an invisible assailant opposing her weight and attempting to dislodge her. When this happened she'd freeze on the spot, waiting for the bizarre tugging sensation to subside.

  She was not yet in the Calm as cartographers defined it, but the air was still and silent to the limits of her senses. The tunnels were not quite barren or deserted, but the flatness of the light magnified the sense of solitude and rarefaction.

  As Roi encountered strangers, usually in twos and threes, she greeted them and tried to guess their purpose. Few people stayed long in the Calm. Couriers and other travelers passed through by necessity, and the sick and injured sometimes spent time close to the Null Line in the hope that the conditions there would speed their recovery. The couriers crossing between the quarters were easy to identify, and she met one male limping along with a gash across his side, but many of the travelers remained difficult to categorize. No doubt some were briefly escaping their own work teams and had decided to experience the restorative powers of the region, or even just its novelty. In one small chamber she saw a trio of youths simply playing, clambering around on the ceiling and then releasing their hold and slowly drifting down.

  As she approached the rendezvous point, Roi began to wonder how she might locate Zak, given that she'd be arriving a full shift earlier than he was expecting her. Despite having started the journey doubting the motives behind his invitation, she was eager to see him now, and she couldn't bear the thought of merely killing time while she waited.

  When she passed through the intersection he'd nominated she was unsurprised to find it deserted. She traveled to the far end of the tunnel along which she'd approached, then doubled back and explored each of the cross branches. There was no one in sight.

  She took out the last of the guide maps that Zak had given her. The invisible abstraction of the Null Line was clearly marked, and a chamber that it crossed was just a few dozen spans away. Roi knew that Zak wasn't here for his health; he'd admitted to her that his prolonged stay had actually weakened him. However, he claimed that the absence of weight simplified his search for its nature and origins, which sounded as paradoxical to Roi as striving to learn about the lives of susk by making sure that none of the creatures were around to distract you. Knowing Zak, merely being close to the line of weightlessness would not be enough for him. Whatever he was measuring, he would be measuring at the Null Line itself.

  Roi headed for the chamber.

  As she approached the entrance, her eyes caught a faint glint of metal, and she thought there might be a vein running along the far wall. After a few more steps, though, she realized that the perspective was wrong. A strand of metal, much thinner than any vein, ran through the middle of the chamber, far from any of the walls.

  She reached the entrance and looked around. A fine web of the same material criss-crossed the chamber, supporting the central thread. Anchored at points in the web were various small, intricate devices; at this distance she couldn't hope to fathom their detailed construction, let alone their purpose.

  Suddenly she noticed a figure moving across the far wall. Maybe Zak had been resting in a crevice, or perhaps she'd simply been slow to spot him in the chamber's uniform light.

  Roi drummed out a greeting with all the legs she could spare without losing her grip. Zak didn't reply, and for a moment she thought he hadn't heard her. Then he sprung into the air and floated gracefully across the chamber toward her. As he approached, Roi saw that he'd given himself a slight spin, and it was soon apparent that this was not an accident but a carefully judged manoeuvre, because he landed nimbly beside her.

  «Welcome to the Null Line,» he said. «How was your journey?»

  «Safe and happy. I'm sorry I'm early.»

  «Don't apologize! I'm glad to see you. We have a thousand things to discuss.»

  Roi had never seen him so excited, and she wasn't prepared to flatter hersel
f into thinking it was due solely to her arrival. She said, «You've found something, haven't you? Something simple?»

  Zak hesitated. «Perhaps. I've discovered something interesting. But there's a problem as well.»

  «What have you found?»

  «I think I can explain the weights on the map,» he said. «I think I've made sense of the pattern.»

  «How?» Roi was elated. She had suspected that he would succeed eventually, but she'd never imagined it would come so quickly.

  «That will take some care to explain properly,» Zak said. «You'll have to be patient with me.»

  «Of course. But.»

  «How can there be a problem, if I've done what I say I've done?»

  «Yes.»

  Zak said, «It's beginning to look as if the map is wrong. I think I can explain the weights on the map, but I don't think the map matches up with reality.»

  5

  Twelve thousand years after walking the plank, Rakesh woke on the floor of his tent. He was lying face-down on a blue and gold sleeping mat; he drew in a deep breath to savor the rich scent of its fibers. This was the tent he'd carried with him on all his travels on Shab-e-Noor, and it remained with him wherever he went. His first sight upon waking after any journey was the interior of this elegant cocoon.

  He rolled on to his back and gazed up at the apex. As he moved, his joints and muscles felt subtly different than they had back in the node; a proprioceptive cue he'd chosen to let him know when he was not embodied was unmistakably absent now. It was both disturbing and exhilarating to be reminded that this was the first time since he'd left home that he'd taken on material form. Instead of being software linked into a scape, his body — and his tent — had been built to order by this planet's machinery, and left to engage with the physical world. He held a hand up in front of his face; there was no difference to be seen, but when he turned his palm away the tendons in his forearms repeated the message.

  Dawn was still a couple of hours away, but the finely woven mesh of the tent's fabric admitted a tantalizing blue-white sheen. It was like the starlight he'd seen before falling asleep while traveling on his home world, except that this light was brighter. Shab-e-Noor's sky was a blaze of spectacular globular clusters. Rakesh tried for a moment to picture the stars that could outshine those desert skies at midnight, then gave up and simply willed the tent to reveal them.

  He smiled uneasily, dazzled by the beauty at the same time as his chest tightened with a kind of vertigo. The sheer number, density and brightness of the stars were staggering. Perhaps the wisps of ionized gas that shone in the clusters over Shab-e-Noor were more delicately beautiful, but that was like comparing a handful of flowers with a looming forest. The difference in scale was impossible to ignore; anything that was close enough could fill the sky this way, but there was a richness, a detailed, endlessly varying texture to the bulge that no mere cluster could have mimicked. Rakesh had no trouble believing that he was gazing into the heart of the galaxy, an empire of stars twenty thousand light years wide.

  He left the tent and looked around for Parantham, but there was no one in sight. He was in the middle of a grassy field, and the only sound he could hear was a nearby stream. He found it easily in the starlight, splashed his face and took a few mouthfuls of sweet, icy water. He had lived embodied for his first thousand years, and the time he'd spent in the scapes of the node had been less than a tenth of that, but the return to the flesh was still disorienting. This body, like the one he'd been born with, was efficient and flexible, with very modest material needs, so being subject to the laws of physics would not amount to much of an inconvenience. Nevertheless, it felt odd to be on such intimate terms with the physical world again, without a single layer of simulation, mediation, or obfuscation. It was like being naked for the first time in a century.

  Rakesh called out to Parantham, and she responded with her location: she was in a small town called Faravani, fifteen kilometers away. Rakesh had never traveled the Amalgam's network with a companion before, and it hadn't occurred to him that their transmissions might end up being routed to different locations upon landfall. It was lucky that the planet, Massa, had been able to fulfill their individual requests for congenial environments without putting them on opposite sides of the globe. He could have asked the local transport facility to take him apart and reassemble him in the town, but he was in no hurry. He pocketed the tent, then closed his eyes, pictured his location on a map of the area, and set out on foot.

  Tramping across the dew-soaked fields, Rakesh felt a strange pang of homesickness. It wasn't that the smells and sounds of this unfamiliar world evoked any sharp resonance with particular memories, but the simple act of walking a few kilometers through such prosaic terrain in the predawn light was redolent of embodied life. He had walked for pleasure in the scapes of the node, but his surroundings — whether they were spectacular, soothing, or deliberately difficult to traverse — had always been contrived, chosen with a purpose in mind. Taking this mundane, slightly muddy trek just to get from A to B was a quintessentially corporeal experience.

  He reached Faravani just after sunrise. Massa had no native life; its first settlers had traveled four thousand light years, from a world that belonged to the P2 panspermia. Most of the locals still wore the ancestral phenotype, a quadruped with hairless, leathery skin, their backs about as high as Rakesh's chest. They communicated with sounds well within his own range of hearing and vocalization, so he chose to comprehend and speak their language himself, greeting the quads who were emerging from their shelters for some early morning exercise. In the node he'd grown lazy and simply perceived everyone to be speaking in his own tongue, but it was far more satisfying to deal directly with these real-time hisses and clicks, hearing all of the genuine sounds and knowing exactly what they meant, instead of wrapping the whole experience in an auditory hallucination of an approximate translation.

  When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.

  «I see you've made yourself at home,» he teased her.

  «Flesh is flesh,» she hissed through her quad mouth. «The shape makes no difference to me.»

  Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from software that had ultimately been authored — rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence — she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles.

  «So have you picked up any worthwhile gossip yet?» he asked. The whole point of pausing at Massa rather than just routing their transmissions straight into the bulge was to find out if anything had happened to the state of play between the Aloof and the Amalgam in the time they'd spent in transit. Rakesh had already asked Massa's planetary library to brief him on any developments, but there'd been nothing on the official record. That included nothing about Lahl's experience, which showed how much the official record was worth.

  «I've told everyone in sight that I'm heading into the bulge,» she said, «but then all they want to talk about is Leila and Jasim.»

  Rakesh emitted a quad laugh, which involved more saliva leaving his mouth than he was entirely comfortable with. Leila and Jasim were the pioneers of the bulge. After discovering that it was possible to eavesdrop on the gamma rays spilling out from the Aloof's communications network, and to inject data of their own into the system, they had made the first ever crossing, traveling from Tassef to Massa.

  That had been three hundred millennia ago. Since then, though nothing had changed in the basic principles, the machinery that bridged the networks had been extensively refined. The bulge was now encircled by gamma ray transmitters that could hit the nodes of the Aloof's network with pinpoint accuracy, and receivers that monitored the small portion of every communications beam that overshot its target node and spilled out of the Aloof's territory into the galactic disk, making it possible to extract the p
iggybacked data once it reached its destination. And though Lahl had been faced with the choice of traveling unencrypted or taking the slow road, most travelers had been able to avail themselves of quantum keys, stockpiled over the millennia, ready to be used as the need arose.

  The Aloof could not have failed to be aware of this blatant technological parasitism, yet they had acted neither to stamp it out, nor to facilitate the process. Rakesh couldn't help admiring the sheer consistency of their response. They had balanced their wish for privacy with a truly cosmic indifference: swatting probes and spores back into the disk without the least sign of impatience or intemperance, and placidly accepting this trickle of foreign data because it was, quite simply, harmless and irrelevant. Whatever their strange arm's-length interaction with Lahl implied, Rakesh was in no rush to mistake it for the start of some larger, more generalized thaw. If history meant anything, the Aloof would be rigidly pursuing the same dictates as ever, and it was only the extraordinarily rare contingency that the DNA-infested meteor represented that had caused them to drag a couple of citizens of the Amalgam in as bit players. That the invitation was a rarity was undeniable, but nothing more could be read into it: there was no evidence that the Aloof's isolation was an act of fanaticism that would only be compromised in the direst of emergencies, or that their contact with Lahl represented some kind of wilting of long-held cultural norms in the face of an otherwise insoluble crisis. The one pattern to the Aloof's actions, in as much as any could be discerned, was that they appeared to make carefully measured responses, designed to meet very clear goals. If recruiting the help of outsiders for the first time in one and a half million years was necessary to meet those goals, why would they hesitate? Stubbornness? Timidity? Inertia? It was comforting to imagine that only such petty and irrational reasons could have caused them to spurn their neighbors for so long, but a far more humbling possibility remained: they had simply never found the Amalgam the least bit useful or relevant before.