Free Incandescence by Greg Egan Page A

else who cared about these things believed that three was correct. And three makes perfect sense, if the weights come from something simple.»
    He fell silent, brooding. He pushed against the wire he'd been holding and began to drift slowly away from Roi, back into the depths of the Null Chamber, but before he'd gone far he reached out and stopped himself.
    «And yet?» Roi prompted him.
    «And yet three is not what we found. What we found was
two and a quarter
.» Zak seemed torn between melancholy and excitement, as if he couldn't decide whether this strange result was simply a failure of his methods and reasoning, or a hint of some kind of deeper revelation, if only he knew how to decipher it.
    «I can't be sure that my measurements were correct,» Roi confessed. «I was as careful as I could be, but—
    Zak cut her off. „This is not down to you. I took many measurements myself. A few other people helped me, as well. Throughout the Splinter, whoever was doing the measuring, the result was the same: moving garm or sard increases your weight by two and a quarter times as much as moving shomal or junub. Not three times. Nowhere, never, is it three.“
    „Perhaps there's some error in the navigation signs,“ Roi suggested. „Perhaps the weight itself distorts the way the signage teams mark out their distances.“
    „No. I checked that. I found small, random discrepancies, not some systematic distortion. We all make errors: me, you, the signage teams. Enough to mistake two for two and a quarter, perhaps. But not three.“
    „Apart from the map, then,“ Roi said, „why can't the true value be two? If you had never found the map, would you be satisfied with two?“
    Zak made a chirp of wry admiration. „That's a good question. Maybe I've been fooling myself. Maybe I've let a mapmaker who I've never even met corrupt my idea of simplicity.“
    „Tell me,“ Roi begged him, „why you think it should be three. How can one answer be favored over another? How can anything in the world be more than chance?“ This was what she'd come here to learn: the answer to the impossible question that had dragged her away from her work team, away from everything she knew and trusted.
    „If I'm right,“ Zak said, „then weight is all about motion, and motion is all about geometry. That's where the simplicity comes from.“
    With these cryptic words hanging in the air, he led Roi along the wire, deep into the Null Chamber. She struggled to remain calm; it was hard enough being weightless anywhere, but at least in the tunnels there'd been rock all around her to assuage the feeling that she was constantly falling. Here, out in the middle of the chamber with only Zak's flimsy web to hold on to, the confusion and contradictions were starker. The fact was, Roi had no trouble supporting herself with the weakest of single-clawed grips, and even if she released that claw-hold accidentally she'd easily have time to regain it. She had probably never been in less danger of
falling
in her life. So why did the lack of weight, the very thing that guaranteed her safety, also make her feel that she was forever on the verge of being dashed against the walls of the chamber?
    „Here at the Null Line, with no wind and no weight to confuse us, how do things move?“ Zak took a stone from his carapace and tossed it gently away from them. „What do you see?“
    Roi said cautiously, „As far as I can tell, that stone moved smoothly in a straight line until it hit the wall.“
    „Good. I don't expect you to be certain about anything from one crude experiment, but for the sake of argument let's suppose that's true:
weightless things move smoothly in a straight line
. And I'll tell you something more from my own experience, which you can confirm for yourself when you feel more confident: once I've given myself a push and started moving across the chamber, it doesn't matter how fast I make myself travel; except for the slight touch of the air passing over me