Incandescence

"My name is Ra," Rakesh said.

"I'm Neb," the farmer replied.

"I've come from outside the world," Rakesh announced boldly.

"We have enough workers," Neb explained. "We're not seeking recruits right now."

"I want to talk with you, that's all."

"You didn't hear me?" Neb admonished him. "You should return to your own team, or find another one. We have all the workers we need here."

Neb moved away from him, sifting purposefully through the fungus.

Rakesh kept trying, but each time he received the same perfunctory response. The fact that he could speak and was roughly the right shape seemed to be enough for the Arkdwellers to treat him as one of their own kind, but having made that categorization they had no interest in his actual words. If the team had been short-handed perhaps they would have sought to recruit him, but it was not, so he was irrelevant. Beyond the curt exchange of greetings that even a stranger merited, conversation served only as an adjunct to social bonding, and they had no need, or wish, to form any kind of bond with him.

Rakesh stood motionless in the chamber and let the farmers pass him by. Nobody took it upon themself to say a word to him, to ask him where he was from, how he had arrived, what he wanted. A walking scarecrow from beneath the edge of the world was surplus to requirements.

So be it. These farmers were not the only team in the Ark; there had to be one that would welcome a new recruit.

Rakesh left the chamber by a tunnel opposite the one he'd come in by. At first there was no one else in sight, but as he ascended deeper into the Ark he started glimpsing people moving in the distance, crossing ahead of him through side tunnels. He thought of running after them, but he'd observed enough of the Arkdwellers' normal behavior to know that the hot pursuit of strangers, followed by begging for recruitment, lay right off the spectrum. The strangeness of his body had not proved to be the icebreaker he'd hoped; eccentric behavior was unlikely to open any more doors.

He reached a T-junction in the tunnel he'd been following; he took a right turn, since that was the branch that continued to slope upward. Ahead of him was a female Arkdweller, pulling a wheeled cart loaded with animal hides.

He greeted her, and introduced himself. Her name was Saf, and she proved to be far more responsive than the farmers; when he asked where she was going, she explained that she was carrying the hides to a depot about one shift's journey away.

"Can I travel with you?" Rakesh asked.

"Why should I stop you traveling wherever you wish?" she replied.

Rakesh trudged beside her in silence. He was less inclined than before to blurt out a declaration of his origins, and risk rupturing this tenuous relationship.

Saf said, "You don't look very healthy, but you move as fast as I do with very little effort. I can't even see your heartbeat."

"I'm much healthier than I look," Rakesh agreed.

"What work do you do?"

"I have no team. I'm looking for a new one."

"I see." Saf fell silent. Rakesh was beginning to wonder if it was a bad thing to admit to being unemployed; he had never actually seen an Arkdweller ejected from a team, and it would be understandable if that lowered his chances as a potential recruit. If he wanted to be headhunted, he should have claimed some high-status occupation that would have had everyone trying to poach him.

"My colleague was recruited by susk herders on the way down," Saf confided. "If you want to pull the cart with me, we can be team-mates."

Rakesh emitted a whoop of delight from his real mouth, then calmly and politely accepted the offer. Saf stopped and showed him how to take the cart's second harness, then they continued together.

18

"Seventy-two more shifts and we'll be done!" Bard said proudly.

Roi stared down the length of the giant tunnel. It vanished into the distance, the far end lost in the glow from the walls. She could hear the din of workers chipping away at the rock face, but she couldn't see them, and it probably would have taken her half a shift to reach them. There might have been other tunnels in the Splinter as long as this, but there were none as wide, or as straight. In a way, she found the sight of it stranger than anything she'd seen in the void; you expected to be shocked when you climbed outside the world, but in this ordinary place the simple rearrangement of rock and empty space had created something unprecedented: a structure with the power to move the Splinter itself.

"Just seventy-two? Are you sure?" They were standing in the middle of the tunnel's longest segment, but there were a dozen others still growing out from their starting points, reaching toward each other but yet to join up.

Bard retreated slightly. "Something close to that. I can't say exactly. The team's been growing steadily ever since the Jolt, but if the numbers level off we might take longer to complete it. We have as many workers as we can fit at the rock face, but we can always do with more shifting rubble."