Greg Egan - Incandescence

Parantham said, "So when we're finished here, and the time comes for us to leave—"

"It might not be as simple as you expected," the messenger said. "The Amalgam might not be willing to take you back."

"Thirty-three," Roi counted, vigorously waving her back left leg, followed by her front left leg.

"THIRTY-THREE!" the hatchlings replied in unison, mimicking her actions precisely.

"Thirty-four." Roi waved her back left leg, then her middle left.

"THIRTY-FOUR!" echoed the hatchlings.

"Thirty-five." Back left leg once, then once again.

"THIRTY-FIVE!"

"Thirty-six." Roi leaped off the floor as high as she could, struggling to wave her front right leg twice, clearly and distinctly, before she touched the ground again.

"THIRTY-SIX!" The hatchlings couldn't jump as high as she had, but they were all nimble and energetic enough to repeat her gestures before they had even begun to descend.

Roi rolled over on to her back, exhausted. The hatchlings, of course, copied even this unintended flourish. They really were infuriating sometimes.

"I'm getting too old for this," she rasped to Gul.

"You just need to spend less time at the Null Line."

"Maybe."

While she rested, Gul took over the class, pouring a fine colored powder on to the floor and scraping furrows in the shape of simple words. As Roi watched the hatchlings copy him, her tiredness and irritation faded. She knew it would be a joy to teach these children, to bring them to an understanding of the world.

It was also a daunting responsibility, but she believed she had grown better at the job. She had tutored seven groups of hatchlings so far, and from the last three groups she was sure that everyone had left her class with a clear understanding of the basic facts about the Splinter. They would carry that knowledge with them throughout their lives, and spread it among their team-mates.

The great tunnel that Bard had planned, to unbalance the force of the wind and drag the Splinter to safety, remained unbuilt. While Bard, Neth and a few dozen others continued to survey, and recruit, and try their best to explain the tunnel's purpose to the people of the sardside whose factories, storerooms and grazing areas they wanted to turn to rubble, so far they had failed to recruit a workforce large enough to make a scratch in the rock, and the locals remained largely hostile to the whole idea. Roi couldn't see the situation changing while the threat of the Splinter descending into an unstable orbit around the Hub remained an incomprehensible notion to most people. She suspected that it would take at least two generations for Zak's vision to permeate the culture to the point where everyone could understand the danger, but at least she and Gul, and a dozen other teams, were nudging things in the right direction. Move the people, and the rock might follow.

The hatchlings completed tracing the words for "left" and "right" and began smoothing the powder into its blank state again, ready for the next word. Suddenly the weight changed, and Roi, Gul, hatchlings and powder were flung high into the chamber. An instant later, the Incandescence brightened, sixfold, thirty-six-fold, searing everything into invisibility.

Roi thought: This is the end. So soon. No warning, just death—

She struck the floor, right way up. After a moment she flexed her legs cautiously; she was sore from the impact, but she had not been injured. She heard the hatchlings mewling in distress beside her; still blinded, she instinctively chirped out words of comfort and reassurance. "Everything is fine! We're safe! Don't worry!"

As her vision began to return, she could see that the walls around her still bore an afterglow from the burst of light, a lingering radiance far stronger than anything she'd witnessed before, even at the garm-sharq edge. She could feel the rock creaking ominously beneath her. Was the Splinter about to be broken in two? Or was it on the verge of plummeting into the Hub? This was not how she'd imagined either disaster beginning. As far as she could judge, once the disturbance that had tossed them from the floor had passed the weight had returned to normal.

Gul limped over to her. "Any idea what's happening?"

"None at all."

"Do you think we should head sardwards?" That was one plan that had been mooted as a response to an impending division: head for the sardside, in the hope that the sardwards fragment of the Splinter would end up further from the Hub.

"We're a long way from the Calm," Roi pointed out, "and the hatchlings can't move as quickly as adults. It would take us two shifts, at least. If we're breaking up, we might be heading into danger." If the Splinter divided symmetrically, the Calm was the last place you'd want to be when the halves violently parted company.

"That's true," Gul said. "And if we're going to get thrown around again, travel is probably unwise unless we're sure our lives depend on it. Let's wait and see if we can make sense of the situation." The hatchlings were milling around them making plaintive sounds, but their small bodies were resilient and none of them appeared to have been harmed by the fall. Gul chirped soothing words to them at his most reassuring pitch.

The walls around them were growing darker now. At first, Roi had thought it was just the afterglow from the flash continuing to fade, but as she increased the sensitivity of her vision to compensate, she realized that she was straining at the edge of her ability.

"Am I going blind?" she asked Gul. "Or is the Incandescence fading?" Maybe the flash had damaged her sight.

He said, "Either we're both going blind, or it's fading."

The hatchlings fell silent, as if the darkness itself was a source of tranquility for them. Perhaps it was lulling them to sleep, just as the voluntary cessation of vision induced drowsiness. Roi could think of no other experience with which to compare it; the Incandescence might penetrate the rock more weakly in the depths of the Splinter than it did at the edge, but for the all-pervading glow to change before her eyes was unprecedented.

As the darkness grew deeper, Roi tried to stay calm. Whatever was happening to the Splinter was not a fate that anyone had predicted, but it was better to be perplexed and alive than to face those long-anticipated cataclysms.

"Can there be a hole in the Incandescence?" Gul wondered. "A gap, a void?"

"If there is, why did we never pass through it before?"

"Perhaps it moves, perhaps it wanders around," he suggested. "And that flash of brightness was. a concentration of the Incandescence at the edge of the void, heaped up like the rubble dug from a hole."

Roi had no idea if that made sense; she had never thought of the Incandescence as something you could make a hole in by any method. "Can you feel the wind?" It was a measure of how disoriented she was that she had to ask, that she couldn't trust her own senses.

"No. There's nothing. The rock is making a sound I've never heard before, but it's not from the wind."

Roi was relieved by this small sign of consistency. "I suppose that means we're not simply going blind. Wind and brightness, gone together." With the Incandescence gone, how would they eat? How would they survive? If the hole they had entered was not too large they should emerge from it soon, as the Splinter continued its orbit around the Hub. If it enclosed their whole orbit, though, they would remain in darkness until it moved away of its own accord.

Roi said, "How long do you think it's been, since the darkness started?"

Gul rasped amusement. "My mind's not that clear. I wouldn't like to guess."

"Less than half a shomal-junub cycle, I'd say." Roi had watched the cycling stones so many times, the rhythm of it was stamped into her mind. "We don't know for sure that the Splinter's orbit has the same period, but that's what the simplest geometry implied. So if there's a gap in the Incandescence that's smaller than our orbit, we ought to emerge from it in less than one shomal-junub cycle."