Greg Egan: Incandescence

The chamber opened into a larger space, where susk and murche were grazing. The adult susk were about half Roi's size, with a general body shape very much like a person's, each male having six ordinary limbs while the females carried an extra, shorter pair for mating. From certain angles they looked eerily like children. They even made a range of plaintive sounds, scraping their limbs against the underside of their carapace just like an inconsolable child. The murche, in contrast, were barely the size of Roi's claws, and swarmed around the field on twelve busy legs. If the crops ever failed, Roi decided, she would have no qualms about eating them.

Herders moved quietly among the flock, gently encouraging them to graze on the plants that people found least palatable. Roi had heard it claimed that the best herders controlled the susk by a process akin to recruitment. The murche ate what they pleased, but fortunately that included susk droppings.

The ground here was tiered, rising up in small steps along countless jagged edges. To Roi it looked as if one large, continuous sheet of rock had come crashing down, with pieces breaking off the edge where it collided at an angle with whatever lay beneath it. The marks of this kind of violence could be found everywhere, but Roi had never seen the ground fall. If the Splinter really had been torn from a larger world — and if weight had always grown with distance — that world might have encompassed more powerful forces than any to be found in the present.

If all of this was true, though, how had that mother world itself come to be? That was the trouble with any question about the history of things: how could you ever reach an end to it?

The wind was brisk, but it blew from behind her as she climbed the steps of the field. The light from the rock ahead of her was a gentle glow; she was leaving the raw intensity of the garm-sharq edge behind.

Roi had grown hungry, so she surveyed the area ahead of her for food, and finally settled on a solid patch of kahu to munch on. As she ate, two of the herders approached, unaccompanied by any susk.

«To your life and strength,» each bid her encouragingly.

«And yours.» Roi watched them warily as they ate beside her. If they wanted a new team-mate, she was outnumbered and surrounded, with nowhere to run.

«What do you do?» one of the herders inquired.

«I tend the crops at the edge.»

«Valuable work.»

«As is yours.»

«Where are you headed?» the other asked.

«To the Calm.»

«That's a long journey.»

Roi said, «I need to spend a few shifts seeing the world. It will make me a better worker.»

Both herders chewed on this in silence for a while.

«Travel safely,» said the first, moving away, firing a pellet of faeces deftly into a clump of weeds.

«Thank you.»

The second herder lingered. «Work is what makes better workers,» he opined.

«Perhaps,» Roi replied.

He rasped disapproval, but followed his team-mate.

Upon leaving the field, Roi came across a series of chambers where teams worked to render susk carcasses into a variety of products. The soft skin that lined the internal cavities made an ideal surface on which to write and draw. The hard cuticle of the carapace was tough and durable, but when soaked in plant extracts it could be softened enough to work into different shapes. Some inner organs were edible, and Roi saw a couple of workers consuming them fresh from the carcass, but most were dissolved and processed into inks and paints, glues and resins, specialized plant foods, medicines, and an assortment of unappealing liquids and powders and gums whose purpose she didn't feel inclined to inquire about.

The end result of Roi's labor spread naturally throughout the garmside as seeds on the wind, but these products required teams dedicated to their transport. As she passed the processing chambers, Roi saw couriers coming and going, traveling in twos or threes depending on the size of their load. Roi introduced herself to one pair, Zud and Sia, who were hauling a cart packed with diverse products that had been ordered by a depot almost halfway to the Calm.

«How long will it take you to make the delivery?» Roi asked. Despite their burden, they were easily matching her pace as they ascended a steep tunnel.

«The cargo will be there in two shifts,» Zud replied, «but we won't take it all the way ourselves. Our highest depot is less than one shift away; we only work between there and the edge.»

«We're used to the range of weights,» Sia added. «It's easier than trying to work everywhere.»

Roi felt no sense of threat from this pair; their team-mates were widely scattered, and given the nature of their work it seemed likely that they encountered travelers far too often to treat them all as potential recruits.

She asked them what news they'd heard from the Calm.

«The food supply's been low,» Sia said.

«But the reservoir's healthy,» Roi protested.

«Perhaps there's an excess of mouths,» Zud suggested. «Though we're bringing them a remedy for that.» It took a moment before Roi realized what he meant; as well as susk products, they were carrying a stack of contraceptive leaves. The plant that produced them was a variety that could only grow in a strong, nutrient-rich wind. Since she was traveling downwind as well as up into the Calm, she was heading for the most barren part of the Splinter. She should stock up next time she had the chance.

«Any other news?» she asked. «No word of new work teams?»

«New teams?» Zud sounded baffled.

Roi couldn't think of an easy way to characterize the notion of a team of which Zak might be a member. «Doing new jobs. Jobs you'd never heard of before.»

Without breaking his pace, Zud diverted three legs to a drumbeat of amusement. «Jobs I'd never heard of? Jobs someone made up from thin air?»

In the face of such mirth from a team-mate, Roi's habit was to retreat graciously into silence, but in her new role as a traveler she felt emboldened. «Do you think every job we do now always existed?»

«They're all necessary,» Sia said. «If there ever was a time when they weren't being done, it would have been disastrous.»

«They're all useful ,» Roi countered. «But we might have done something different in the past, to meet the same needs. Or our needs might have been different.»

«Different needs?» Zud had a way of making her perfectly reasonable conjectures sound like oxymorons.

«Is your cargo the same for every trip?»

«Of course not,» Sia replied. «But it doesn't change so much that you could say our job has changed. And it all evens out in the long run.»

«What if there's a serious famine? Then my own job would certainly change: I'd have to keep people from storming the reservoir.»

Sia disagreed. «It's still the same basic function: keeping the food supply healthy and intact, whether it's saving it from mites, or from starving hordes.»

Roi was exasperated. «What if the ground fell? What if tunnels collapsed? What if the world was ripped in two? Would that be enough to change anything?»

Both her companions fell silent. Roi couldn't decide whether they were tacitly conceding the argument, or whether she'd offended them by speaking so forcefully. Perhaps she'd overstepped the mark.

After a while, Sia explained gently, as if to a child, «Life is hard, things aren't perfect. So we speak of living in a broken world. It doesn't mean that the Splinter was really part of something larger that was literally torn apart. That's just a story, Roi. The world has always been this way, and it always will be.»

Roi stayed with the couriers until they reached their depot, then she looked around for a place to rest. She was as tired as she'd ever been after a shift at the edge; even with nothing to carry, she had found it hard work keeping up with Zud and Sia, who were used to following a tight schedule and completing the ascent in a fixed time. The wind was already so much weaker than she was accustomed to that she felt no need to hunt for a sheltering lode; she simply slipped into the first empty crevice she found, and shut off her vision.