Incandescence

19

Rakesh spooned chillied dhal into his mouth with an urgency that had nothing to do with hunger. The longer he spent among the Arkdwellers, the more he needed to reinforce his sense of presence in his own neglected body, and the familiar taste and aroma brought him back to himself like nothing else did.

“I’m going mad,” he announced. “One more month of this, and you can erase me and break the news to my backup.”

Parantham said, “Don’t expect my sympathy. Just because the Arkdwellers’ culture turned out to be resilient, it doesn’t mean you were right to take a risk with it.”

“Resilient? I think the word you’re looking for is catatonic.” Sweat was pouring down the back of his neck from the spices, but he kept eating without pause, and without diluting the heat with bread or rice.

Each time his Arkdweller colleague Saf slept, Rakesh took his senses out of his avatar, leaving it dormant in a crack in the rock close to the one she’d chosen. Each time Saf stirred, his avatar would notice and summon him back. It was a summons he was beginning to dread.

His job had allowed him to tour the Ark, and at first the experience had been fascinating. The Ark’s biosphere was bottom-heavy in fungi and bacteria, but it had a few niches for larger organisms. A genetic analysis of the five varieties of herd animals the Arkdwellers farmed showed that they’d been created by selective breeding from an earlier inventory of just two species. Whether the Arkmakers had initially stocked the place with more and the others had been lost at some point was unclear; it was also unclear just when the Arkdwellers had lost their ancestors’ ability to engineer the animals’ genomes, and had to revert to patient observation of traits and restrictive mating or manual fertilization. Both the larger animals and the Arkdwellers themselves reproduced in more or less the same way, which involved excruciating pain for all fertile males and more pity than pleasure on the part of the harassed females who put them out of their misery. Rakesh fervently hoped that it was something the ancestors had passed down from their own biology only because it was too technically difficult to change. The possibility that they might have freely devised such a scheme didn’t bear thinking about.

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.

It was the role of the depot workers to unpack the cart while he and Saf stood by, offering occasional gratuitous complaints about the way the goods were being handled. As this was happening, Rakesh noticed one of the workers looking at him with surprise. Lacking anything corresponding to a primate’s mobile face, the Arkdwellers expressed their emotions in their posture, gait, and length and duration of gaze. Rakesh’s odd appearance had occasionally caused an involuntary moment or two of staring, but this worker kept looking back, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

Rakesh introduced himself, and the worker, Zey, did the same. After these pleasantries the conversation went no further, but when the cart was unloaded Zey emerged from the depot’s chamber and approached them.

Saf drummed softly, “Be careful, I think they might be looking for recruits.”

Rakesh didn’t want to break the news to her that, grateful as he was that she’d employed him, he really wouldn’t mind moving on. “I’ll be careful,” he promised.

Zey said, “Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing the differences inside you.”

“There’s nothing to forgive. I know how strange my appearance must be.”

Saf said, “Ra tells us he was hatched ‘outside the world’. This is not his real body, he just wears it to get along with us.” Rakesh still couldn’t quite gauge the intent behind her tone of amusement; he didn’t know if she was inviting Zey to mock him, or imploring her to deal gently with his delusions.

“Are you our cousin, then?” Zey asked.

Rakesh felt goose bumps rise on the back of his arms, back in the control room; there were some things he simply wasn’t equipped to feel viscerally through the avatar itself.

He replied carefully, “It depends what you mean by that.” Although the Arkdwellers had terms to describe the relationships between adults and their offspring, they rarely knew who their various relatives actually were. You could respectfully call any stranger of the appropriate age “father”, “mother”, “brother”, “sister”, “daughter”, “son”. The term he was mentally translating as “cousin” was—as far as the data the probes had gathered could reveal—a negation of siblinghood that carried a connotation of distance. It was not unfriendly, but if someone had traveled from the other side of the Ark for the first time, you were more likely to call them “cousin” than “brother” or “sister”, as if to acknowledge that it really was stretching plausibility to suppose that you might have shared a parent.

Zey said, “I heard that once there were six worlds, not one. People used to travel between them, but then something happened to the cousins, and all the journeys stopped.”

Rakesh was torn between pressing her for details of this story, and taking care not to misrepresent himself as something he was not.

“My people have never been here before,” he said. “I don’t know the whole history of this world, but I believe I’ve traveled farther than the cousins you describe.”

Zey took a few moments to digest that.

“You don’t know the six worlds?”

“Far away there are many more than six. But I haven’t seen any world, nearby, from which a traveler could have reached this one.” Rakesh hesitated, then added, “The worlds you mention might have been closer, in the past. But I have no direct knowledge of these matters; I can only guess what the fate of these worlds might have been.”

“I see.” Zey seemed confused and disappointed, but then she said, “You’ve been outside, though?”

“Of course.”

“What is there to see?”

“Bright lights. Long distances.” Rakesh had never reached the point of someone asking him even this much before. “Where I come from, we live on the outside of the world, the surface of the rock.”

“Everyone would get sick and die!” Saf scoffed.

“It’s different, it’s safe.”

Saf was growing impatient. “We need to sleep, then reload for the return journey.” She started walking away.

Rakesh said, “You should look for someone new to go with you.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to stay here a while and talk with Zey,” he explained.

“Talk with Zey?” Saf seemed to find this suggestion far more surreal than any of Rakesh’s baroque cosmic fantasies. “You’re going to join this team, after three words with one member? When were you hatched?”

“I’m sorry to let you down,” Rakesh said, “but this is part of my job, part of my duty.”

Saf rasped a word with no simple translation, but the gist of it was that Rakesh was a damaged infant simpleton who could not be relied upon to perform any task, and his loyalty was so promiscuously offered and so easily withdrawn that he might as well have been a flake of excrement drifting on the wind.

Zey said, “We have all the workers we need.”

Saf drummed contemptuously, “They don’t even want you, you fool!”

“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.