Incandescence

"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."

"That sounds reasonable," Gul said cautiously. "The gap itself might be moving around, complicating things, but if it's moving slowly then everything should repeat about once every orbit."

Just a few heartbeats later, the walls began to brighten. Roi tensed, preparing herself for a recurrence of the violence that had preceded the onset of darkness, but the light from the rock climbed calmly and steadily back to its normal strength, and the wind resumed its usual susurration, unaccompanied by any sudden shifts of weight or blinding flashes.

The strange creaking and rasping from the rock did not abate, though.

"Half a shomal-junub cycle," Roi said. "Almost exactly half."

Some of the hatchlings began to stir. Gul made soothing noises and drew them close to his body. "Why would a void in the Incandescence be half the size of our orbit?" he said. "That seems like too much of a coincidence."

Roi took advantage of the normal light to survey the chamber. All the hatchlings were accounted for, and the basic structures around her were intact — the entrances to the chamber were clear, the ceiling hadn't fallen — but there were some cracks in the walls that she was sure she'd never seen before. The rock continued its maddening groan. If she could feel no change in weight, what was tormenting it?

She could hear people in the distance, calling to each other, fearful and confused. "Where should we go for safety?" she asked.

Gul said, "We're as safe here as anywhere. There's nowhere to go."

The light and the wind began to fade again. Why were some things repeating themselves, while the flash and the jolt had happened only once?