Incandescence by Greg Egan Read Free Book Online Page B

The pattern of the wind was somehow related to the pattern of weights, but the nature of the connection was far from obvious: the wind certainly didn't blow the way things fell. The Null Line lay in the middle of the Calm, but the Calm extended far beyond it, encompassing a whole plane that stretched out in the shomal and junub directions, as well as the Null Line's rarb and sharq.
    Roi roused herself and resolved to make an early start, all the sooner to discuss this problem with Zak.
    Even here, her cycle seemed to be synchronized with many of the locals, but the workers heading for their shifts inspired no feelings of guilt in her. The softness of the light made everything seem slightly unreal, until she made a conscious effort to adjust her vision; she'd accommodated to the change as she'd traveled, but on waking she'd reverted out of habit to the minimal sensitivity more suited to the edge.
    There was a pattern to the light too, of course. It seemed only reasonable that everything should be brightest where the wind from the Incandescence struck the Splinter with the greatest force, though she'd heard that the sard-rarb edge was not as bright as the garm-sharq. Was the wind there weaker, or was there another reason? Perhaps Zak would follow up his survey of weights with one of wind, and another of light.
    As she continued her ascent, Roi pictured the levels of Zak's map embedded in the world around her, a succession of intangible layers to be crossed before her journey could end. She wasn't carrying a copy of that map, but from her memory of it she could imagine herself picking up pace, each step carrying her further than the last as the burden of weight gradually eased.
    Near the end of the second shift, Roi came across a work team taking metal from a vein in the rock. The vein ran neatly along the wall of a chamber, although it was possible that this team, or their predecessors, had shaped the chamber expressly for the purpose of extraction.
    The exposed vein made a striking sight. Metal shone with an eerie uniformity that made it unlike any other substance Roi knew: it was impossible to discern any structure within it, or even behind it. If people's carapaces had been made of metal, their inner organs would have been completely invisible, reducing their appearance to an inscrutable surface sheen.
    The team was using an assortment of tools to prise the metal from one end of the vein. Roi could see a long, empty cavity extending away from the point where they were working, a roughly hemicylindrical indentation colored with vegetation that grew thicker with distance. There must have been a time when the whole formation had glistened with metal, and perhaps there'd be a time when the entire vein would be empty. People diligently scavenged the rare material, but that never seemed to be enough to fill the need.
    There were people who insisted that these veins replenished themselves, by some process too slow for anyone to witness, rendering any shortage a temporary inconvenience. Roi was skeptical about that theory, but even more so about the supposed corollary. Plants were undeniably replenished by the wind, but if the wind carried metal into the Splinter not only was the process too slow to witness, it was too slow to be of any use.
    If metal didn't grow from the rock like a weed, though, then there must have been a time when nobody had been extracting it. Regardless of the certainties Zud and Sia had expressed, there must have been a time when no one had heard of such a team.
    How long could that time have lasted? There had to be some limit to how long the metal could have lain untouched in the rock before someone had realized how to make use of it. Perhaps a thousand generations, perhaps a million, but the era in which people had failed to use metal could not stretch back forever.
    So, what had come before that? If metal couldn't grow, the vein itself must have always been there.
    Which meant there must have been a time