Incandescence by Greg Egan Page B

unmistakably absent now. It was both disturbing and exhilarating to be reminded that this was the first time since he'd left home that he'd taken on material form. Instead of being software linked into a scape, his body — and his tent — had been built to order by this planet's machinery, and left to engage with the physical world. He held a hand up in front of his face; there was no difference to be seen, but when he turned his palm away the tendons in his forearms repeated the message.
    Dawn was still a couple of hours away, but the finely woven mesh of the tent's fabric admitted a tantalizing blue-white sheen. It was like the starlight he'd seen before falling asleep while traveling on his home world, except that this light was brighter. Shab-e-Noor's sky was a blaze of spectacular globular clusters. Rakesh tried for a moment to picture the stars that could outshine those desert skies at midnight, then gave up and simply willed the tent to reveal them.
    He smiled uneasily, dazzled by the beauty at the same time as his chest tightened with a kind of vertigo. The sheer number, density and brightness of the stars were staggering. Perhaps the wisps of ionized gas that shone in the clusters over Shab-e-Noor were more delicately beautiful, but that was like comparing a handful of flowers with a looming forest. The difference in scale was impossible to ignore; anything that was close enough could fill the sky this way, but there was a richness, a detailed, endlessly varying texture to the bulge that no mere cluster could have mimicked. Rakesh had no trouble believing that he was gazing into the heart of the galaxy, an empire of stars twenty thousand light years wide.
    He left the tent and looked around for Parantham, but there was no one in sight. He was in the middle of a grassy field, and the only sound he could hear was a nearby stream. He found it easily in the starlight, splashed his face and took a few mouthfuls of sweet, icy water. He had lived embodied for his first thousand years, and the time he'd spent in the scapes of the node had been less than a tenth of that, but the return to the flesh was still disorienting. This body, like the one he'd been born with, was efficient and flexible, with very modest material needs, so being subject to the laws of physics would not amount to much of an inconvenience. Nevertheless, it felt odd to be on such intimate terms with the physical world again, without a single layer of simulation, mediation, or obfuscation. It was like being naked for the first time in a century.
    Rakesh called out to Parantham, and she responded with her location: she was in a small town called Faravani, fifteen kilometers away. Rakesh had never traveled the Amalgam's network with a companion before, and it hadn't occurred to him that their transmissions might end up being routed to different locations upon landfall. It was lucky that the planet, Massa, had been able to fulfill their individual requests for congenial environments without putting them on opposite sides of the globe. He could have asked the local transport facility to take him apart and reassemble him in the town, but he was in no hurry. He pocketed the tent, then closed his eyes, pictured his location on a map of the area, and set out on foot.
    Tramping across the dew-soaked fields, Rakesh felt a strange pang of homesickness. It wasn't that the smells and sounds of this unfamiliar world evoked any sharp resonance with particular memories, but the simple act of walking a few kilometers through such prosaic terrain in the predawn light was redolent of embodied life. He had walked for pleasure in the scapes of the node, but his surroundings — whether they were spectacular, soothing, or deliberately difficult to traverse — had always been contrived, chosen with a purpose in mind. Taking this mundane, slightly muddy trek just to get from A to B was a quintessentially corporeal experience.
    He reached Faravani just after sunrise. Massa had no