Incandescence

Ruz said, "We might not have that much time."

17

Rakesh said, "There's no question that they're sentient. And there's no question that the bulge is a dangerous place. The question is, would they understand what it is we have to offer them?"

Parantham gazed back at him across the control room. "Probably not. Not straight away. Perhaps we could work up to it over time."

"How much time do we have?"

"This Ark's not in any kind of imminent danger."

Rakesh said, "We can't do much for them if we're exiles here ourselves."

"You mean Csi's story? You're afraid the Amalgam won't take us back if we don't get out before the news about Lahl spreads around the inner disk?"

"Do you think I'm being paranoid?"

"I don't know." Parantham thought it over. "The Amalgam has a strong tradition of hospitality, but it also has a strong tradition of cutting off those who abuse it. I think it will come down to whether or not people will believe that Lahl was an act of bad faith by the Aloof, or just a genuine traveler who covered her tracks."

"Or in the absence of conclusive evidence either way," Rakesh suggested, "it will come down to where they want to place the benefit of the doubt, how they want to weigh the risks."

"What risks? The Aloof have no more power to harm us by posing as citizens of the Amalgam than they have skulking down in the bulge."

"Maybe, but they shouldn't have lied to us. That's the part that's hard to forgive. That's the part that makes it hard to trust them."

"Maybe they had to lie." Parantham spread her arms. "Is this my body? Was I born with it? Am I lying to you by pretending to inhabit it the way you inhabit yours?"

"If they were capable of pretending to be Lahl, surely they were capable of saying, 'By the way, we're not quite who we seem to be.'"

"Just because we can imagine Lahl saying that doesn't mean they were capable of doing it — or capable of understanding why we wish they had."

Rakesh put his head in his hands. "Forget the Aloof. What are we going to do about the Arkdwellers?"

Parantham said, "Keep studying them until things become clearer. If you'd let me run some simulations—"

"They're sentient, they have a right to privacy. We can't do anything like that without informed consent."

"But we can spy on them as much as we like?"

"There's a difference," Rakesh protested heatedly, "between sending avatars in discreetly to observe their public behavior and stealing DNA samples in order to run simulations."

"Public behavior, as distinct from what? They don't seek privacy from each other for anything they do."

"It's about consent, it's not about social taboos."

Parantham raised her hands in a gesture of resignation. "You're their cousin, you're the child of DNA. You decide, I'll just keep my mouth shut."

Rakesh knew he was being inconsistent, but he had to defend the compromise he'd struck. If they had ruled out clandestine observations, then there was simply no point being here; making their presence known to the Arkdwellers without studying them first would have been ineffectual at best, and at worst disastrous. But he would not countenance sequencing them without their permission; that would be treating them like animals.

The Arkdwellers had language, spoken and written. They had tools, they had agriculture, they had industries. They had specialization: each one of them performed a particular role to keep the Ark running smoothly. Rakesh had at first suspected that these roles were innate biological castes, but that had turned out not to be the case. Rather, workers were inducted into teams by a kind of socially mediated bonding mechanism, which was powerful but not irreversible; they could be press-ganged into another team, if the right circumstances arose.

Similarly, their agricultural and technological practices seemed to be culturally transmitted rather than genetically hardwired. The cultural legacy included a small amount of written material along with the predominant mix of oral instruction and learning by imitation, but did not contain anything that Rakesh recognized as history, or natural science. They did not seem to know about the Arkmakers, or to have any comprehension of what lay outside the Ark.

How could he invite them into the Amalgam, when they had never even seen the nearest stars? How could he offer them sanctuary, when they had no idea how close to extinction their ancestors had come? They were not in any immediate danger; even in this crowded, chaotic place, it was possible to predict that nothing would tear them from their orbit in the next few millennia, and given how long they'd survived already they might remain unscathed for millions of years.

In the long run, though, they couldn't rely on the Ark's design to protect them from all the perils of the bulge. Should they be left to live in peace, then, isolated and ignorant, until the inevitable finally happened and they were incinerated in a supernova or ferried by some new Interloper all the way to the singularity at the heart of Goudal-e-Markaz?