Incandescence

17

Rakesh said, “There’s no question that they’re sentient. And there’s no question that the bulge is a dangerous place. The question is, would they understand what it is we have to offer them?”

Parantham gazed back at him across the control room. “Probably not. Not straight away. Perhaps we could work up to it over time.”

“How much time do we have?”

“This Ark’s not in any kind of imminent danger.”

Rakesh said, “We can’t do much for them if we’re exiles here ourselves.”

“You mean Csi’s story? You’re afraid the Amalgam won’t take us back if we don’t get out before the news about Lahl spreads around the inner disk?”

“Do you think I’m being paranoid?”

“I don’t know.” Parantham thought it over. “The Amalgam has a strong tradition of hospitality, but it also has a strong tradition of cutting off those who abuse it. I think it will come down to whether or not people will believe that Lahl was an act of bad faith by the Aloof, or just a genuine traveler who covered her tracks.”

“Or in the absence of conclusive evidence either way,” Rakesh suggested, “it will come down to where they want to place the benefit of the doubt, how they want to weigh the risks.”

“What risks? The Aloof have no more power to harm us by posing as citizens of the Amalgam than they have skulking down in the bulge.”

“Maybe, but they shouldn’t have lied to us. That’s the part that’s hard to forgive. That’s the part that makes it hard to trust them.”

“Maybe they had to lie.” Parantham spread her arms. “Is this my body? Was I born with it? Am I lying to you by pretending to inhabit it the way you inhabit yours?”

“If they were capable of pretending to be Lahl, surely they were capable of saying, ‘By the way, we’re not quite who we seem to be.’”

“Just because we can imagine Lahl saying that doesn’t mean they were capable of doing it—or capable of understanding why we wish they had.”

Rakesh put his head in his hands. “Forget the Aloof. What are we going to do about the Arkdwellers?”

Parantham said, “Keep studying them until things become clearer. If you’d let me run some simulations—”

“They’re sentient, they have a right to privacy. We can’t do anything like that without informed consent.”

“But we can spy on them as much as we like?”

“There’s a difference,” Rakesh protested heatedly, “between sending avatars in discreetly to observe their public behavior and stealing DNA samples in order to run simulations.”

“Public behavior, as distinct from what? They don’t seek privacy from each other for anything they do.”

“It’s about consent, it’s not about social taboos.”

Parantham raised her hands in a gesture of resignation. “You’re their cousin, you’re the child of DNA. You decide, I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”

Rakesh knew he was being inconsistent, but he had to defend the compromise he’d struck. If they had ruled out clandestine observations, then there was simply no point being here; making their presence known to the Arkdwellers without studying them first would have been ineffectual at best, and at worst disastrous. But he would not countenance sequencing them without their permission; that would be treating them like animals.

The Arkdwellers had language, spoken and written. They had tools, they had agriculture, they had industries. They had specialization: each one of them performed a particular role to keep the Ark running smoothly. Rakesh had at first suspected that these roles were innate biological castes, but that had turned out not to be the case. Rather, workers were inducted into teams by a kind of socially mediated bonding mechanism, which was powerful but not irreversible; they could be press-ganged into another team, if the right circumstances arose.

Similarly, their agricultural and technological practices seemed to be culturally transmitted rather than genetically hardwired. The cultural legacy included a small amount of written material along with the predominant mix of oral instruction and learning by imitation, but did not contain anything that Rakesh recognized as history, or natural science. They did not seem to know about the Arkmakers, or to have any comprehension of what lay outside the Ark.

How could he invite them into the Amalgam, when they had never even seen the nearest stars? How could he offer them sanctuary, when they had no idea how close to extinction their ancestors had come? They were not in any immediate danger; even in this crowded, chaotic place, it was possible to predict that nothing would tear them from their orbit in the next few millennia, and given how long they’d survived already they might remain unscathed for millions of years.

In the long run, though, they couldn’t rely on the Ark’s design to protect them from all the perils of the bulge. Should they be left to live in peace, then, isolated and ignorant, until the inevitable finally happened and they were incinerated in a supernova or ferried by some new Interloper all the way to the singularity at the heart of Goudal-e-Markaz?

Rakesh had made a promise to Lahl, and whether she’d been a citizen of the Amalgam or some kind of construct sent out by the Aloof was beside the point; what he had accepted was an obligation to take the responsibilities of any discovery seriously, and not treat these creatures as a mere trophy, a curiosity to be catalogued and then abandoned.

He turned to Parantham. “I think we should leave before we risk getting stranded, but we should try to make contact with the Arkdwellers first. There’s a chance we’ll be able to come back eventually, but we have an opportunity now to plant some information that might help protect them, even if we can’t return.”

Parantham considered this. “Contact can be disruptive.”

“So can being blind-sided by a neutron star that you never even dreamed existed.”

“We could go out,” she suggested, “come to some arrangement with the eavesdroppers in the inner disk to normalise our status, then return to do this at our leisure.”

Rakesh said, “And will we come to some arrangement with the Aloof whereby they promise to let us in again? Or just take our chances and hope this wasn’t a once-in-a-million-year opportunity?”

Parantham wasn’t happy. “If you’re resolved to do this, I can’t stop you, but I’m not going to participate.”

“I see.” Rakesh was surprised by the strength of her disapproval. He hesitated, weighing up the options again.

Every choice was risky; there was no perfect solution. But he would not leave the bulge until he’d done his best to help the Arkdwellers understand their history, and regain control of their fate.

There were no cracks in the Ark large enough to admit his new avatar, so Rakesh took it through in pieces and assembled it in the tunnel. It was the size and shape of a typical adult Arkdweller, with the six legs of a male, but none of the Ark’s inhabitants would mistake it for one of their own. The imperfect imitation was intentional; he wanted to communicate with the Arkdwellers effectively, not deceive them about his nature. He wanted his strange body to act as evidence, to back up his extraordinary claims.

He and Parantham had gathered enough data on the Arkdwellers’ leg-drumming to assemble a comprehensive picture of the language, and Rakesh had tweaked his mind not only to enable him to speak and understand it, but also to acquire new vocabulary, and grasp any other nuances or novelties that had eluded their survey so far. When he switched his senses into the new avatar, he drummed a few phrases softly, accustoming himself to the mode.

“Wish me luck,” he said, in his native tongue with his real mouth, addressing Parantham across the control room. She didn’t reply, but Rakesh knew she would be watching everything. He would be glad to have her looking over his shoulder; even though she wouldn’t actively participate, he hoped he could rely on her to warn him if she thought he was pushing the Arkdwellers too hard. Sharing a replicator with these people gave him no special insight into their nature, and he’d welcome a second opinion any time she cared to offer one.

He set off down the tunnel.

As he approached the farmers’ chamber he slowed, and strained his hearing. The last time he’d been here the vibrations reaching his avatar had sounded like meaningless noise; now the hubbub was imbued with the unmistakable cadences of speech, even though he could not make out any individual words.

He reached the entrance to the chamber and stood in plain sight of the whole work team, waiting expectantly for a shocked silence to descend, or a commotion to arise. He was sure that if an ambulatory scarecrow had approached the edge of a field full of farmhands on Earth, in the days before machinery, there would have been a dramatic response.

The farmers ignored him. It was hard to judge their lines of sight, but Rakesh knew he was clearly visible in principle, and he believed that at least a dozen of the workers had looked his way and then continued tending the crops.

This was, he decided, an encouraging sign: the mere sight of him wasn’t going to spark a riot. If the Arkdwellers’ lack of curiosity was alien to him, their lack of volatility could only make it less likely that Parantham’s fears would turn out to be well-founded.

He clambered down the sloping wall of the chamber, into the thick of the crops, and approached one of the workers.

“To your life and strength,” he drummed.

“And yours,” the worker replied, continuing past him.

Rakesh turned and followed her. “Wait, please.”

“I’m busy.”

“Can’t we talk while you work?” The farmers talked among themselves all the time.

“I’m busy,” she repeated. To the extent that Rakesh understood her tone, it was not unusually cold or hostile, merely emphatic. He wondered what, exactly, she thought he was. Some kind of grossly deformed member of her own species? He did not belong to her current team, of course, and that was the most important distinction.

Another of the farmers was heading his way. Rakesh greeted him, and he received the same standard reply.

“My name is Ra,” Rakesh said.

“I’m Neb,” the farmer replied.

“I’ve come from outside the world,” Rakesh announced boldly.

“We have enough workers,” Neb explained. “We’re not seeking recruits right now.”

“I want to talk with you, that’s all.”

“You didn’t hear me?” Neb admonished him. “You should return to your own team, or find another one. We have all the workers we need here.”

Neb moved away from him, sifting purposefully through the fungus.

Rakesh kept trying, but each time he received the same perfunctory response. The fact that he could speak and was roughly the right shape seemed to be enough for the Arkdwellers to treat him as one of their own kind, but having made that categorization they had no interest in his actual words. If the team had been short-handed perhaps they would have sought to recruit him, but it was not, so he was irrelevant. Beyond the curt exchange of greetings that even a stranger merited, conversation served only as an adjunct to social bonding, and they had no need, or wish, to form any kind of bond with him.

Rakesh stood motionless in the chamber and let the farmers pass him by. Nobody took it upon themself to say a word to him, to ask him where he was from, how he had arrived, what he wanted. A walking scarecrow from beneath the edge of the world was surplus to requirements.

So be it. These farmers were not the only team in the Ark; there had to be one that would welcome a new recruit.

Rakesh left the chamber by a tunnel opposite the one he’d come in by. At first there was no one else in sight, but as he ascended deeper into the Ark he started glimpsing people moving in the distance, crossing ahead of him through side tunnels. He thought of running after them, but he’d observed enough of the Arkdwellers’ normal behavior to know that the hot pursuit of strangers, followed by begging for recruitment, lay right off the spectrum. The strangeness of his body had not proved to be the icebreaker he’d hoped; eccentric behavior was unlikely to open any more doors.

He reached a T-junction in the tunnel he’d been following; he took a right turn, since that was the branch that continued to slope upward. Ahead of him was a female Arkdweller, pulling a wheeled cart loaded with animal hides.

He greeted her, and introduced himself. Her name was Saf, and she proved to be far more responsive than the farmers; when he asked where she was going, she explained that she was carrying the hides to a depot about one shift’s journey away.

“Can I travel with you?” Rakesh asked.

“Why should I stop you traveling wherever you wish?” she replied.

Rakesh trudged beside her in silence. He was less inclined than before to blurt out a declaration of his origins, and risk rupturing this tenuous relationship.

Saf said, “You don’t look very healthy, but you move as fast as I do with very little effort. I can’t even see your heartbeat.”

“I’m much healthier than I look,” Rakesh agreed.

“What work do you do?”

“I have no team. I’m looking for a new one.”

“I see.” Saf fell silent. Rakesh was beginning to wonder if it was a bad thing to admit to being unemployed; he had never actually seen an Arkdweller ejected from a team, and it would be understandable if that lowered his chances as a potential recruit. If he wanted to be headhunted, he should have claimed some high-status occupation that would have had everyone trying to poach him.

“My colleague was recruited by susk herders on the way down,” Saf confided. “If you want to pull the cart with me, we can be team-mates.”

Rakesh emitted a whoop of delight from his real mouth, then calmly and politely accepted the offer. Saf stopped and showed him how to take the cart’s second harness, then they continued together.