Incandescence

21

Shift after shift, Rakesh returned to the depot and waited for Zey to finish work. Sometimes she was too tired to speak with him, but more often she would spend a few minutes chatting before she went to find a crevice to rest in.

Zey talked about her life, and the things she’d heard about the history of her world, and the cousins’. The various jobs she’d done had all been important to her at the time, but she had little to say about them; even the time she spent in the depot moments before they met seemed to pass in a kind of pleasant daze, and left almost no impression once the shift had ended.

She talked about the ideas that had crept into her life in the cracks between these episodes of dutiful sleepwalking. The story of the six worlds had been passed on by a fellow worker as idle chatter, three jobs past, but it had resonated deeply with Zey, and since that time she had viewed her surroundings in a new light, always trying to guess the age and origin of things, always trying to fit them into a coherent picture. Who built the first cart? Who carved out the tunnels? What kind of machine could carry you between worlds?

It was not that her fellow Arkdwellers were simpletons in comparison. They could all master complex tasks, and juggle equally sophisticated concepts, if and when the need arose. They were, however, monumentally indifferent to their history, their circumstances, and their prospects. Every question that to Rakesh seemed most compelling struck them as, at best, a frivolous diversion.

As they traded stories, Rakesh tried to find a balance between misleading Zey and confusing her. How could you tell someone who had never seen the stars about the size of the galaxy, or the scale of the journey he’d made? He spiraled out gently from the things she knew or imagined—her guesses about the cousins, criss-crossing the all-enveloping warmth and light of the accretion disk—into the swarming emptiness beyond. She was interested to hear about the way he’d lived, on the surface of a rock that was far from its own source of warmth and light, but what really galvanized her were the hints he’d found of her people’s history. As he unwound the story, all the way back to the Steelmakers’ fossilized spacecraft and their missing world, Zey soaked up every word, every detail, and begged him for more. That this was a need no one around her shared, let alone had the power to fulfill, only made the situation more poignant. Rakesh had never seen anyone lonely in quite this way before.

Parantham watched through the probes that filled the Ark, though she really didn’t need to spy on them that way; if she’d asked, Rakesh would have let her take the data stream straight from his avatar’s senses.

“So where exactly is this seduction leading?” she demanded.

“Seduction? If you want to call it anything, call it a recruitment.”

“Instead of dreaming about her long lost cousins, now Zey can spend her life dreaming about the Amalgam. And this has helped her. how?”

Rakesh said, “If she wants, she can come with us to the disk. Imagine seeing ten thousand new worlds with fresh eyes, after spending all your life buried in a rock.” And never mind that their own ability to return to the disk was far from certain.

“You want her to trade one kind of loneliness for another?” Parantham retorted.

That had not been Rakesh’s plan. He did not want to tear Zey out of her world; he hadn’t even offered to take her to visit Lahl’s Promise. He wanted to kindle her innate curiosity and excitement to the point where it began to spread to those around her; he wanted to use her as an ambassador, as a bridge between their cultures.

The trouble was, however successfully he engaged with her, it was the gap that separated Zey from her fellow Arkdwellers that remained the hardest to bridge. Her instinct, she’d told him, had been to keep his revelations to herself, because she knew how they’d be received, but she hadn’t been able to control herself. Her instinct had been right: nobody wanted to hear about her “distant cousin”, or the thirty-six times thirty-six worlds. Nobody wanted to discuss the perils that their ancestors had survived, or to debate their options for evading the unknown catastrophes that the future might bring. They wanted to listen to inconsequential chatter as they worked, and when they were finished working, they wanted food, sex and sleep.

“Why am I sick?” Zey asked Rakesh. “Why is my mind so damaged?” They were doing their usual circuit of tunnels close to the depot, walking and talking until she needed to sleep.

It would be meaningless to reassure her that most of the galaxy was on her side, that the qualities that made her an anomaly here were almost universally valued and admired.

“I don’t know,” Rakesh said. “But if you allow me, I can try to find out.”

“How?”

“If you let me take a small part of your body, I can study it carefully. I might not be able to answer your question, but there’s a chance I can tell you something about the reasons that you’re different.”

Zey was alarmed. “I’m using every part of my body. I’m not a male, to offer a portion to be removed.”

Rakesh chirped amusement. “I’m talking about a part so small that you lose thirty-six times thirty-six in every shift, without even noticing.”

“I lose parts of my body without noticing?” However dazzled she’d been by Rakesh’s stories, Zey retained a healthy skepticism toward his wilder claims.

“Absolutely. They’re too small to see.”

“Then how will you study them?”

“With machines too small to see.”

“So all of this happens, invisibly, and you believe what these machines whisper to you at the end?”

“That’s about it.”

“I think your mind is damaged more than mine.”

This wasn’t banter; Zey was deadly serious. Rakesh had to spend the next four of their meetings explaining the atomic nature of matter, and trying to make it plausible without setting up a demonstration in chemical stoichiometry. Then they moved on to cellular biology, and the eleven known molecular replicators. If Rakesh had had any qualms about her ability to give informed consent to being sequenced, she seemed determined to make it clear that she would not allow him to perform his technological magic and then pronounce upon her nature like an oracle. When she understood his proposal well enough for his claims to seem plausible, she would consider it, but not before.

As they toured the basic sciences, Rakesh could see Zey building a picture far bigger than the subject at hand, integrating everything piece by piece into an ever more sophisticated world view. It was firmly anchored to the familiar things around her, but her mind was stretching to encompass the distant, the small, the abstract. Shift after shift, he was making her “sickness” worse, “damaging” her even more. Her co-workers didn’t care; they might tease her when she couldn’t keep quiet about her strange ideas, but they wouldn’t ostracize her as long as she kept doing her job. This was not a culture that could be scandalized by her dalliance with Rakesh, or her heterodox notions of history and reality; the only sacred thing was work. Zey was the one who would feel the separation; it didn’t have to be imposed on her by her peers. If Rakesh failed to bring the other Arkdwellers along with her on this intellectual journey—if he transformed her and then abandoned her, with nobody else who thought the same way—she would be lonelier than ever.

Thirty-six times thirty-six.