Incandescence Read Online Free Page A

believe it
must
be four.»
    They'd reached a junction in the tunnel. Roi moved toward the left branch, which she knew was a cul-de-sac ending in some comfortable crannies.
    «Before we part,» Zak said, «can I show you something?» He opened his carapace and reached into the empty seed bed to remove a rolled-up sheet of cured skin, which he proceeded to spread out before her. «This is my favorite map of the Splinter.»
    Roi was unimpressed. The single cross-section portrayed was covered with an absurdly regular hatching of short, straight lines which bore no resemblance to any routes she knew. And there was no hint of anything really useful, such as vegetation patterns or the lodes of dense, sheltering rock.
    «Are you telling me I can get from
here
to
here?»
she asked, gesturing at two endpoints of one of the peculiar markings. But it wasn't even clear where these points were meant to be, since there were no cues to indicate how far along the Null Line, rarb or sharq, the cross-section was taken.
    «It's not a map of tunnels,» Zak replied. «It's a map of weights.»

    It took a moment for his meaning to become clear. The longest lines were drawn at the edge of the Splinter, where the weight was greatest. The lines' varying lengths, and the way they gradually rotated as you followed them around the center of the map, offered a plausible rendering of the way weight changed from place to place. A small crossbar on each one distinguished the bottom end from the top.
    «You drew this yourself?» she asked.
    «No, I copied it from a map I found in a library. That had nothing to indicate its provenance, though, and it could easily have been a copy itself. For all I know this could be the seventh or eighth generation.»
    Roi pondered the strange task the original cartographer had embarked upon. «Everybody knows that weight increases as you move away from the Null Line. What's the need for a map like this?»
    «In what manner does it increase?» Zak demanded. «How quickly, as you move in different directions? And which way, exactly, is down, as you move between the quarters?»
    Roi couldn't imagine why anyone would need to know these things with more precision than she already knew them herself. Still, there was something compelling about the stretching and shrinking and rolling of the lines. Each individual mark conveyed nothing new to her, but seeing the totality displayed in this way was curiously satisfying.
    «It's pleasing to the eye,» she conceded. «Like the pattern of seeds on a leaf.»
    «Oh, it's far simpler than that,» Zak replied. «I can characterize it very easily. Suppose you travel three hundred spans shomal or junub from the Null Line. The weight there will be one vazn, back toward the Null Line. If you travel twice as far, the weight will be two vazn; three times as far, three vazn; and so on, in proportion to the distance.»
    «If you travel garm or sard instead, your weight will point
away
from the Null Line, and it will grow three times as fast. You only need to go one hundred spans before it reaches one vazn.»
    «What if you travel in none of those directions?» Roi gestured at the map. «The weight twists around. It's no longer so simple.»
    «It remains simple,» Zak insisted, «if you know one more trick. Think of weight as a line, as it is on this map. Put aside for a moment the length and direction of that line, and ask instead for its extent along two axes: shomal-junub, and garm-sard. However far you are shomal or junub of the Null Line determines the weight line's extent along the shomal-junub axis. However far you are garm or sard determines its extent along the garm-sard axis. That's all you need to know in order to draw the line. Its extent in each direction has a simple prescription, and that fixes the line as a whole.»
    Roi absorbed this, then re-examined the map, which seemed to bear out Zak's claim. But if his recipe for combining the effect of travel in different directions seemed