Incandescence by Greg Egan Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Upon waking, Roi's first thought was that
she didn't understand the wind
. In the garmside, it blew in from the Incandescence at the sharq edge and battered its way through the porous rock of the Splinter, finally escaping at the opposite edge. In the sardside, the flow was reversed. Between these opposing winds lay the Calm.