Incandescence

«I'm fine,» he rasped. «Just a few pangs, nothing unusual.» After a moment he added, «I can still remember when we first calculated the period of the looping stones. The square of the inverse period was proportional to four times the spin weight minus the garm-sard weight. But I assumed that that quantity would always stay positive. I never considered the possibility that it might change sign, or what the consequences would be.»

«Let me get you out of here.» Roi started clearing a path for him.

Zak said, «Wait.» He forced his pain aside and looked up at her. «Let me speak to the meeting first.» Roi drummed a call for silence, and when it was finally heeded Zak addressed the team.

«Neth's work changes everything,» he declared. «We are a long way from predicting the ratios of weights all the way down to the Hub, and even if we did find some beautiful templates that seemed to fit the handful of numbers we have, we would be foolish to trust them absolutely. We can't rule out reaching a ratio of four, so we have to be prepared for that possibility.

„I believe that we have two priorities now, both of them equally urgent. The first is to continue the experiments, the calculations, and the philosophical speculations that have brought us this far. This is the work that led us to Neth's insight. We must do our best to map the dangers that lie ahead, even if our foresight can never be perfect.

„Our other priority must be to strengthen our ability to act on whatever insights we can gain. We need to recruit, we need to educate, we need to start the whole Splinter talking about these dangers.

"A few heartbeats ago, I declared that Bard's plan would take several lifetimes to achieve. That might or might not be true, but it's no longer an excuse to delay taking it seriously. If we can devise an easier, less contentious way to move the Splinter out of danger, that would be the greatest achievement we could hope for. If we can't, then we need to prepare ourselves to accept the reality: the lives of all our descendants might depend on whether we can recruit enough workers, and win enough support, to carve a tunnel from one side of the Splinter to the other."

11

In the center of the bulge, a billion and a half stars wheeled around in a disk fifteen hundred light years wide. The astronomers of the Amalgam called this the NSD — the Nuclear Stellar Disk — and had long ago resigned themselves to observing it from afar, as just one more example of the kind of structure seen in a billion other galaxies. It was a telescopic object, not a destination for travelers.

Many of the stars in the NSD were infant prodigies: hot, bright, fast-burning giants born a few tens of millions of years ago in the clouds of gas swept inward by the complex dynamics of the galactic core. Others were older, smaller stars that had wound their way in over billions of years, their orbits slowly decaying as they lost energy to chance encounters.

The meteor that the Aloof had captured had managed to climb just beyond the edge of the NSD. Given that the rock had not been melted by the impact that had sent it on its way, there were limits to the speed with which it could have been blasted free of its parent world. If that world had been bound to a star at the time, meteor and star could not have parted company too quickly.

Over fifty million years, the two might have completed as many as ten laps around the galactic center, with their orbits gradually diverging as they came under the sway of different neighbors. However, if the star in question was assumed to be the Interloper that had scrambled the system of the planet that Rakesh had named Touched-by-Steel, then the possibilities became much more tightly constrained. Many of the stars that might have been close enough to the meteor itself certainly hadn't traveled far enough from the galactic center at any time in the last two hundred million years to have kidnapped the Steelmakers' world. According to the models Rakesh ran, only forty-six stars could have captured the planet, sunk down into the NSD, and then been in the right place fifty million years ago to make sense of the meteor's trajectory.

When the remaining siblings of Touched-by-Steel, the three gas giants and their moons, proved to be untouched themselves, Parantham asked the map to take Lahl's Promise to the first of the forty-six stars.

This time, the Aloof's hidden travel agent delivered no pleasant twist to their itinerary. The jump-cut in their consciousness filled the sky with hot blue stars that far outshone the sun they now orbited, but as the seconds ticked by and the cabin window completed its three hundred and sixty degree pan, no planet swam into view.