Greg Egan: Incandescence

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 herself 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.»

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.