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not-quite-triumphant skeleton into the scape and leave it as a signpost for the next traveler.
    He turned the key, and felt a click.
    The door dropped away beneath him. Mud, bones, Rakesh, and a geyser of water erupted from an opening in the floor of the ocean, into an endless space full of stars.

4
    The sense of attachment Roi felt toward her work team had never been a constant, unwavering force. Even in the absence of recruitment efforts it rose and fell, following its own internal rhythm. So it was only when it had reached one of its peaks and she felt confident that her loyalty could survive a few missed shifts that she decided to take a break and travel to the Null Line.
    Zak had invited her to come and see his «contraptions» as soon as she'd handed him her first batch of weight measurements, and each time since then when they'd met he'd reminded her that she was welcome to visit, though he'd never made her feel that she was under any pressure. It was, of course, conceivable that he had a team waiting at the Null Line ready to enact a full-blown recruitment, but Roi had made a point of quizzing people for any news they'd heard from the Calm, and she'd turned up no evidence of any such threat. It was hard to believe that an entire team indulging in activity as strange as Zak's could have escaped notice. For a lone, unrecruited person to behave oddly was only to be expected.
    When Zak had first invited her, she'd told him an old joke: the easy way to reach the Null Line from the garm quarter was to travel to the shomal quarter, and from there the journey would be downhill all the way. Rather than expressing amusement or irritation, Zak had responded by showing her yet another of his maps.
    «These lines are paths that lead neither up nor down,» he'd explained. «I call them 'levels'. I've arranged their spacing so that climbing from one level to the next is an equal effort in each case. Counting the lines to be crossed will tell you how much work any journey requires.»

    In fact, counting the lines told Roi nothing new; the whole point of the joke was that everyone knew it would take at least as much effort to reach the shomal quarter from the garm as to travel to the Null Line itself. Still, the map made this fact clear at a glance, because the Null Line was
level with
the boundary between the quarters.
    Zak insisted that he'd drawn this second map, not by laboriously measuring the weight lines on the first map and marking off increments of effort, but by a kind of reasoning that started with the underlying mathematical rule that described the pattern of weights, and led to a new rule describing the shape and spacing of these levels. Roi was astonished, but when she'd asked for more details she'd found his explanation impenetrable. «When you come to the Calm, when you have time to ponder these ideas at leisure, it will all make sense,» he'd promised.
    Roi planned the journey to take twelve shifts in all: four spent traveling up to the Null Line, five visiting Zak, and three for the easier return leg. She'd been with the team long enough for an absence like this to be acceptable; everybody needed to recuperate sometimes, and travel was a common form of recreation. If it also made you vulnerable to recruitment, the unspeakable truth was that a certain amount of turnover kept the teams fresh, and if a tired or restless worker was ambushed it was not the end of the world.
    It was easy to ponder these matters as abstractions, but when Roi woke in the shelter of her crevice and faced the reality of setting out in the opposite direction to all of her team-mates, she realized that she'd chosen the hardest time to leave. By the end of each shift she craved solitude, but on waking all she could think about was company and cooperation. She'd made no close friends in this team, but that wasn't the point: it gave her the same sense of accomplishment to work beside the most taciturn stranger as it did beside someone sociable and