Incandescence (2 page)

«Perhaps the Aloof were showing you their cousins,» Parantham suggested. «Perhaps this was their first attempt to introduce themselves.» It was widely assumed that the Aloof had been born in the disk, like everyone else, and migrated to the bulge before any other civilization had traveled widely enough to encounter them.

Lahl shrugged. «If they'd wished to convey something like that, they could have made themselves clearer. They deciphered my transmission and embodied me; there was nothing mysterious to them in my nature to stand in the way of communication.»

Csi said, «I don't doubt that they deciphered you, but are you sure you were embodied?» He spread his arms, taking in the five of them and the whole elaborate scape. The node, in reality, was a few cubic meters of processor, drifting through interstellar space. There was no mesa, there was no jungle, nor any of the alternatives that any of them were perceiving.

«Of course I'm not sure,» Lahl conceded. «And even if I was embodied, the meteor itself could have been a carefully manufactured fake, or the instruments I was supplied with could have been contrived to mislead me. But I can't see the point in that kind of deception. Why spread misinformation about the DNA panspermia among people to whom you're largely indifferent?»

«Why spread valid information, either?» Rakesh mused. «I'm surprised they didn't just lob this out of the bulge, muttering about yet another incursion by those awful disk people.»

«Lob it where, though?» Csi replied. «And if the planet it came from really does lie in the bulge, this 'incursion' probably predates their own presence.»

Lahl regarded them both reprovingly, as if she considered these comments to be willfully obtuse. She said, «I believe they felt obliged to tell someone, to get the word out. In spite of their refusal to communicate with us on any other topic, I believe they considered it their duty to pass this information on to us, to make of it what we will.»

«As you considered it your own duty to hand the message on to a descendant of the appropriate replicator?» Rakesh suggested.

«Exactly.»

Rakesh was on the verge of pointing out that it was somewhat parochial of her to assume that the Aloof would share her sense of obligation, but then it struck him that, out of all the travelers who'd taken the short cut, the Aloof might have chosen Lahl precisely because she was the most likely to understand, and act upon, their intentions.

Whatever the original cues being translated, Lahl's face had taken on a subtly challenging aspect, as if she was waiting for Rakesh to make clear to her whether or not she'd been wasting her time.

Rakesh was still unsure of the verdict himself.
Was this his calling?
He had never thought of the bulge as a place of genuine mysteries. Many individual citizens of the Amalgam were every bit as private as the Aloof; he had no idea what went on inside their homes, but his ignorance hardly transformed those places into unexplored territory. The higher the gate, the more manicured the garden.

That was the wrong comparison to make, though. The fact that the Aloof fastidiously repelled any physical intrusion into the bulge was no proof that they'd transformed, visited, or even catalogued every last one of the millions of worlds within their domain. If their refusal to engage with the cultures of the disk had its origins in paranoia, they might have adopted a policy of hypervigilance, scrutinizing every last rock for signs of life lest some interloper arise in their midst. Equally, though, stumbling across the DNA-infested meteor might have been sheer bad luck, an unwelcome find imposing obligations that they would never have actively sought.

He said, «If I took this on, where would I pick up the thread? I can't cross the bulge and simply hope to be singled out to be shown what you were shown.»

«I have the habitat's address,» Lahl said. «The Aloof appended it to my transmission. When you reach the bridge to their network, you could simply name that as your destination.»

«With no guarantee that the request would be honored,» Csi said. He was staring at Rakesh as if his friend had lost his mind.

Rakesh said, «I haven't come to any decision yet.»

Now it was Parantham who was showing disbelief. She turned to Lahl. «If he won't take the address, give it to me! And none of this DNA bigotry. I can only trace my own ancestry back fourteen generations — to a
de novo
created by a rather hazily documented collaboration — so I can't promise you any mystical molecular affinity. But if the Aloof want someone to hunt down this lost world for them, I'll do it!»

«Hunt it down how?» Csi asked bluntly.

«They recorded the meteor's velocity when they captured it,» Lahl said. «And they provided me with detailed maps of the region. I couldn't literally wind all the dynamics back fifty million years; the region is so densely packed with stars that their motion becomes chaotic on that time scale. But it was possible to generate candidates for closer exploration.»

«How many?» Csi demanded.

«About six hundred.»

Csi groaned and leaned backward on the bench, as if to extract himself from the gathering. «This is insane!»

Rakesh could not deny that, but it was an increasingly enticing folly. Uncharted or not, the center of the galaxy was an exotic, bejewelled place, and if its self-appointed guardians really were inviting outsiders in for the first time ever, that alone was a remarkable opportunity. If the reason for the invitation turned out to be a wild goose chase, or even a complete misunderstanding, that need not render the voyage worthless; it was impossible to rule out danger and disappointment, but at the very least he'd be risking much less than the galaxy-hoppers. How many millennia might he while away before another prospect the equal of this came along?

He said, «I'll take the address.» He glanced at Parantham. «I assume I'm not required to go alone?»

Lahl said, «Take an entourage. Take a caravan.» She held out her hand, the fist closed, then opened her fingers to reveal a glass key sitting on her palm, an icon for all the data she wished to convey to him. As Rakesh reached for it, she said sharply, «This is
your
duty now. Your burden. You do understand that?»

He hesitated. «What exactly are you asking me to promise? I can't be certain that I'll find this planet.»

«Of course not.» Lahl frowned, perhaps wondering what distortions her perfectly lucid chemical emanations were suffering in translation. «Succeed or fail, though, you'll see it through?»

Rakesh nodded gravely, reluctant to press her for details lest they transform this reasonable-sounding commitment into some far more rigorous obligation.

He took the key from her, and she stood.

«Farewell then, Rakesh.» The scape drew her as almost literally unburdened, her bearing visibly more relaxed and graceful, as if she'd been freed of a physical load.

The four friends rose. As Lahl walked away across the mesa, Rakesh peeked at her version of the scape. A long, translucent, segmented creature pushed its way briskly through a dense carpet of decaying vegetable matter, beneath an overcast sky.

Csi called after her, «Enjoy the reunion!»

Rakesh restored his normal vision and looked around the table. Parantham was jealously eyeing the key in his hand.

Viya smiled. «You're not really going to do this?» She sounded as if she'd be unsurprised if he shook his head and casually pitched the key over the edge of the mesa.

«Of course I am,» Rakesh replied. «I gave my word.»

«To whom, exactly?» Csi asked. «For all you know, she was just some
de novo
that the Aloof created and spat out as bait.»

«
Bait?
If they wanted visitors, all they had to do was stop turning us away. We never needed luring.»

«We never would have gone in this way by choice,» Csi said. «With no guarantee of integrity. Once you're in, they can send you wherever they like, and do whatever they want with you.»

Rakesh said, «Why would they want to harm me? Anyway, people taking the short cut have been checked, and there have never been any violations found.»

«What proportion have been checked?» Viya asked. «One in a thousand? And the data passing through the network is classical, remember. Even if the original transmission comes through intact, that doesn't prove it hasn't been copied. If you go in without encryption, there'll be nothing they can't do to you.»

«All right, it's a risk, I admit it. The Aloof might be deranged sadists who clone travelers in order to torture them for eternity.» Rakesh was disappointed. He had no shortage of doubts about the wisdom of his decision, but he'd expected more from Viya and Csi than this timidity masquerading as sophistication.

None of them had come to the node with the intention of staying for a tenth as long as they had. Half their time was spent debating the best way to move on, inventing one fanciful scheme after another, hunting for ways to build up momentum lest they end up stranded, or worse: slinking back to their home worlds with nothing to show for the millennia, or simply drifting aimlessly on through the network.

He held up the key. «This is what I came here for. I'm not going to sit at this table for another century, waiting for something better.»

Csi adopted a conciliatory tone. «We all get bored, Rakesh. We all get frustrated. But that's no reason to fall for the first scam artist who comes along.»

Parantham said, «If it's a prank, what happens? We cross the bulge, the Aloof ignore us, and we end up on the other side of the galaxy. We lose fifty millennia, but we gain new surroundings, and the minor daredevil status that comes from having taken the short cut.»

«And if it's a trap?» Viya asked. «If the Aloof really do mean you harm?»

Parantham hesitated before replying; Rakesh waited gleefully to hear her pour scorn on the idea.

She said, «That's what backups are for.»

As the work party dispersed, Roi headed for the nearest tunnel. The warm buzz of cooperation was fading, giving way to a faint sense of melancholy, and she needed to get away from the wind and the weight to a place where she could rest.

She'd lost count of the number of shifts she'd spent with this team, tending the crops at the garm-sharq edge of the Splinter. It was important work, killing the mites and weeds, keeping the crucial reservoir of food healthy and abundant. If the edible plants prospered here, where the hot, fertile wind blew in from the Incandescence, the seeds that ended up scattered throughout the garmside would give rise to enough secondary growth to feed everyone. If that ceased to happen and people were driven by hunger to feed on the reservoir itself, the initial shortfall could spiral out of control. Roi was too young to have lived through a famine, but some of her fellow workers had survived two or three. The visceral sense of satisfaction that came from acting in unison was enough to keep her working at almost any task, but this one easily stood up to the scrutiny of conscious reflection.

The tunnel dipped and weaved erratically as it wound its way up. The wind was strong but steady, a nuisance but no great complication. Away from the well-trodden path that marked the easiest ascent, a riot of vegetation colored the light of the underlying rock. Roi resisted the urge to reach out and crush the inedible varieties; most of them had their uses, and as long as they didn't crowd out the food crops they deserved to be left to grow in peace. It was a familiar part of the winding down process to be aware of the weeds everywhere, without responding to the sight of them in the manner that was second nature when she was working.

The tunnel ended in a crowded chamber, where six routes leading up from the garmside edge converged. People were coming up out of the wind after finishing a variety of tasks, and while there was no need for most of these shifts to be synchronized, some kind of social cue seemed to have nudged the timing into a rather inconvenient lockstep. Roi recognized a few members of her own team crossing the chamber, but felt no desire to rejoin them.

At the edge of the flow of bodies a group of wretched males clung to the rock, begging to be relieved of their ripeness. Roi approached them to inspect their offerings. Each male had separated the two hard plates that met along the side of his body, to expose a long, soft cavity where five or six swollen globes sat dangling from heavy cords. Not all of the seed packets were plump and healthy, but Roi made a conscious effort not to be too finicky. With her own carapace split open along her left side, she used her mating claw to reach into the males' bodies, snip the globes free, and deposit them inside herself.

She stripped all the packets from the first three donors, and they shuddered with gratitude and disappeared into the crowd. When she took two globes from the fourth male and found that she was full, she muttered a few consoling words and left him wailing for further assistance.

The ripe seed packets secreted a substance that the males found extremely unpleasant, and while unplucked globes did shrivel up and die eventually, waiting for that to happen could be an ordeal. There were tools available for severing and discarding them, but that method was notoriously prone to spilling an agonizing dose of irritant. Something about a female's mating claw — something harder to mimic than its shape and its mechanical action — sealed the broken cord far more effectively than any tool.

As Roi continued across the chamber, a pleasant haze of contentment washed over her. The seed packets were battling for supremacy, but the poisons they were using against each other had a thoroughly positive effect on her. The battle was rendered more intense by a weapon of her own: a small quantity of crushed plant material that she replenished regularly. All of her competing suitors would die, valiantly trying to out-poison this thoroughly sterile rival.

Roi left the chamber by the least crowded route, intent now on finding a quiet crevice in which to recuperate. The wind would never fall completely silent unless she traveled all the way to the narrow calm space that divided the garmside from the sardside, but it wouldn't take long to reach some veins of less porous rock that offered a degree of shelter. There was no shelter from the geographical certainties of weight, but after so long working at the Splinter's edge she didn't need much lightening in order to feel unburdened.