Greg Egan: Incandescence

«You only have to record a few numbers,» Zak assured her. «I'm not asking you to do any of the calculations.»

He set up the tripod and demonstrated. There were navigation signs painted on the walls of all the main tunnels at regular intervals, and Zak had devised a set of rules for choosing points on them to orient the apparatus.

«You should ask some members of the signage teams,» Roi suggested. «They go everywhere.»

«I did. They refused.»

When she'd completed a successful measurement for herself, Roi folded up the device and stored it in her fallow right cavity, along with a roll of skin for recording the results.

They parted, promising each other that they'd meet in the same place after thirty-six shifts.

As Roi searched for a resting spot, the encounter began to seem increasingly remote and implausible, as if she'd heard about it from a friend of a friend, not experienced it for herself. Zak had spoken of plans to look for other helpers, but she didn't think much of his chances. Even now, her own conviction that she could spare the time to indulge in this charming, pointless activity was beginning to waver. Then again, she was tired, and even the thought of tending the crops with her team-mates made her feel weary.

She found an empty crevice near the end of the tunnel, and slid into the welcoming fissure. She could still hear the constant susurration of the wind, but the mass of dense rock behind her was strong enough to divert the flow away from her weathered carapace.

With her eyes pressed against the rock, her vision was filled with a shapeless radiance. Everything in the Splinter glowed with the warmth of the Incandescence; sheltered or not, she was always bathed in that same light.

Roi relaxed and let her eyes grow unresponsive. The radiance began to fade, dissolving into a colorless absence. Images of the weeds she'd sought throughout her shift marched across the emptiness. Then her body became numb, and her mind quiet.

Csi had organized the departure, designing a scape to suit the occasion with versions tailor-made for every participant. Rakesh found himself on an ocean-going vessel some fifty meters long, surrounded as far as the eye could see by heavy, gray-green seas. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was low and the wind relentless. There were five other people assembled on the deck: Parantham, Csi, Viya, and two old friends of Parantham, Jafar and Renu.

«We are gathered here to bid farewell to Rakesh and Parantham,» Csi declaimed, «who have heard the song of the sirens, and decided, against all of our wise counsel, to follow it.» Parantham smiled, perhaps at the very same reference; her own cultural background was such a mosaic that the human legend was probably just as meaningful to her as any alternative.

Rakesh tried to stay focused on the details of Csi's parting gift. The timber beneath his feet was warped, as if by decades of humidity. The salt in the air was pungent. The bodily parameters that he'd ceded to his friend's design guaranteed that the relentless swaying of the deck left him mildly queasy. All this theater was not so much a distraction as an adornment, refracting the strange truth of the event without ever trying to conceal it.

Rakesh had not anticipated how hard it would be to cut his ties and move on. When he'd left Shab-e-Noor, his home world, he'd been preparing for a thousand years. Since his youth it had been his plan to remain in the local system for no more than a millennium, and by the time the self-imposed deadline approached all his family and friends were convinced of his sincerity and had worked to make things easier. Even so, the wrenching feeling that came from the realization that one step would separate him from everyone he knew — for at least six times longer than he'd known them — had been almost unbearable. It was like marching into a white-hot furnace and being seared to the bone, losing every nerve ending, every connection, every link to the world outside his skull.

The first node he'd reached had been three thousand light years away. He'd jumped again, twice, almost immediately, after finding that nearly everyone he met had either come directly from his home world, or had visited it not long before. At the third node, in contrast, the intersecting currents of travelers had seemed thoroughly cosmopolitan, rich with complex histories and anecdotes ready to be mined.

So he'd stayed, but he'd kept himself suitably aloof, eschewing all but the most pragmatic associations, priding himself on his readiness to depart in an instant with no goodbyes. If even one in a thousand of the travelers passing through had come from a place worth visiting, he'd reasoned, it would not take long to choose a destination.

In a sense that premise had been true, but many people were returning from ageless spectacles that Rakesh had known of since childhood. Whether it was a million-year-old jungle, the immaculately preserved city of an ancestral civilization, or some delicately beautiful nebula, detailed images had already reached Shab-e-Noor long before his birth. Witnessing such sights firsthand rather than in a scape might merit a local planetary hop, but not the burning of millennia and his alienation from everything and everyone he'd known.

Other travelers took their chances as they searched for less famous, more transient pleasures. By their very nature, though, such destinations could rarely be shared: after five or ten millennia, the most energetic social or artistic renaissance would certainly have faded. Sometimes the insights of these movements could be passed on, but away from the time and place that had given birth to them, most, far from being potent memes ready to spark new revolutions, were uninspiring. Rakesh hadn't traveled thousands of light years to return home with a handful of bland, second-hand slogans.

Eventually, he'd settled into a state somewhere between cynical resignation and injured bemusement. A logical strategy might have been to make the best of the imperfect information flowing through the node to build up a list of promising worlds, and then wait for that list to include a sequence of planets that could be visited efficiently in a single grand tour. Rakesh had known people who'd done just that, and after five or ten years of planning departed happily on a trip that would take them twenty or thirty millennia. He'd toyed with his own lists, and then set them aside. His heart wasn't in it. If he was ever to break free, he needed something more: a penetrating new insight into the intractable theory of travel.

Or, as it turned out, some sheer dumb luck.

«By your own free choice, you are abandoning your loyal companions for this dangerous folly,» Csi announced dryly, «so all we can offer you in return are these talismans to help you on your way.»

From an ornate chest sitting on the deck beside him, Csi extracted two weighty metal chains. With Viya's help, he tied one around Rakesh's upper body, while Jafar and Renu did the same for Parantham.

Two robust, seasoned-looking planks lay on the deck, neatly slotted through a convenient gap below the guard rail to protrude over the edge. Rakesh supposed they might have been carried on ships like this for the sake of repairs. That prospect struck him as somewhat cheerier than if they'd been brought along with only their present purpose in mind.

Parantham shot him an amused look and casually hefted herself over the guard rail. Rakesh clambered over more cautiously, then crouched down to lower his center of mass, wondering at the overpowering need he felt to keep his balance and stay out of the ocean until the very end.

He couldn't turn his head far enough to face the people watching from the deck, but he called back to them, «Don't think we'll never cross paths again. It's a small galaxy, and I plan to be in it for a very long time.»