Greg Egan - Incandescence

Parantham said, «I've often wondered if the network we've mapped isn't merely a kind of decoy, which they built to make us think we understood them better than we really do.»

«You mean, not at all?»

«We've been telling ourselves that they use the same general communications technology as we do. Gamma rays modulated with data packets. Encryption keys separately distributed. All very cozy and familiar, as if it were the only conceivable way.»

Rakesh couldn't argue with her skepticism. Convergent technology was one thing, but in the Age of Exploration travelers had been amazed by the myriad ways other civilizations had found to solve identical problems, at least as often as they'd been startled to find their own culture's inventions eerily mirrored. «You think they were the ones who eavesdropped on our network first, and then they decided to build an imitation of it, as a sop to our curiosity?»

«As a sop to our curiosity. As a honey pot to lure us in. I don't know about their motives. But it wouldn't surprise me if all the 'traffic' we've been seeing over the last three hundred millennia has just been gibberish, and the Aloof's real highways are completely invisible to us.»

Rakesh said, «I don't know if that's good news or bad. Do you think they're going to let us ride the real highway?» He was past the point of feeling vulnerable, but he couldn't decide if it was somehow demeaning, or simply exhilarating, to imagine being whisked across the light years by a process he didn't even understand.

Parantham summoned up the first of their candidates on the chemistry-based list, a main-sequence star about four billion years old, two hundred and seventy-nine light years away. While it lay further from the crowded galactic center than their present location, the Amalgam's eye-view of it was still compromised by distance and obstacles. The presence of at least three gas giants had been deduced from the star's slight periodic motion, but no further details could be resolved from afar.

She said, «There's only one way to find out.»

Roi immersed herself in study, determined to reach the point where she could understand every detail of Zak's ideas. Excited as she was by the simplicity and grandeur of his vision, until she could test the fine points for herself she knew that her instinctive sense that he was on the right track needed to be treated with caution. Anyone could thump their carapace and invent a story so big that it seemed to swallow the world. The one thing that made Zak's account of weight and motion different was that anyone willing to make the effort could investigate the logic of his claims firsthand. On that, the whole thing would stand or fall.

Zak helped her to revise and extend her mathematical skills, starting with multiplication, then continuing all the way to something he called «template calculations»: manipulating abstract symbols as well as actual numbers, allowing her to perform a generic version of a sequence of computations without specifying all the quantities involved. After a while, it struck Roi that this was far more than a method for saving labor when she wished to repeat the same calculation many times on different sets of numbers. Just contemplating the template for the answer to a problem — without substituting any particular values for the symbols — could illuminate the relationship between all the quantities involved in a way that staring at endless lists of figures never would.

Zak was a patient teacher. Before she'd met him, Roi had thought of the unrecruited as pitiful creatures, lonely failures on the verge of death. Zak's time at the Null Line had certainly damaged his health, but in his own way he had worked far harder than anyone she'd ever known. Roi had rarely been so confident that the respect she felt for someone was deserved, and not just a product of the haze of camaraderie.

Between their lessons, Roi managed to extract some of his story. Like every hatchling, Zak had found tutors to provide him with a rudimentary education, but when the time came to join a work team, he'd drifted from one recruitment to the next. He'd felt the buzz of cooperation every time, but it had never been strong enough to hold him for long.

One shift, while working as a courier, he'd stumbled upon a library out in the sardside. The cargo he was carrying had had nothing to do with the place, but an accidental detour had been enough to capture his interest, and on the return leg of his journey he'd gone back for a closer look.

The library was full of maps, work notes, diagrams of strange machines, fragments of calculations, and scrawls in languages nobody understood. The librarians painstakingly copied the sheets of skin to preserve their contents from loss or damage, and constructed catalogs and lists of cross-references, trying to piece together a larger picture from these bewilderingly disparate parts. Every now and then, they explained to Zak, someone would bring in a new find, a page or even a bundle of pages that had never been seen before.

Wandering through the collection, overwhelmed by the aroma of long-dead susk, Zak had suffered a giddying shift in perspective. People had been thinking and writing for an unimaginable time, and here, right in front of him, lay countless samples of their labors. A whirlwind tour of history, a million tantalizing snatches of overheard conversations, had been etched into these skins. Zak felt the presence of the thousands of generations that had come before him, and understood that it might be possible to join them in a vast endeavor, a project spanning the ages that he could as yet only glimpse.

He'd begged the librarians to recruit him on the spot, and once they'd recovered from their surprise they had agreed, but they were not the ones who had truly captured his loyalty.

«I was recruited by the dead,» Zak said. «Not in any rush to join them in their silence, but from the urgent need to understand what they might have thought and done that could survive them, that could speak across the ages, that could be continued even now.»

There was no coherent history of the Splinter, no account of one time following another, but everywhere Zak looked he found evidence of change. The language he understood, the language of his contemporaries, accumulated curious additions and alterations as he moved from page to page into the past. Other pages were written in scripts that, so far as his fellow librarians knew, no living person could decipher.

There were stories of the birth of the Splinter, of the old world being torn apart, but like the stories that spread through the work teams they did not agree on the details, and they all had the sound of having been retold over and over, accumulating embellishments and omissions, before being put into writing. Some even spoke of the calamity recurring many times, stretching back into the unimaginably distant past. How vast, how grand, the mythical First World must have been, if after thirty-six divisions even one of the crumbs that remained was inhabitable!

Hard as it was to believe these stories, let alone know which ones to trust, for anyone who'd so much as crossed the Calm the undeniable fact remained that the weight in the garmside tugged the opposite way to that in the sardside, and the further one went in both directions the stronger this discord became. If the Splinter had suddenly been doubled in size, it was not at all preposterous to imagine that the weight might have been enough to tear rock from rock.

The trouble was, this raised the question of how the old world could have held itself together for more than an instant. The most reasonable answer, it seemed to Zak, was that it must have been born under a different regime of weights, which had only later become so powerful.