With the seven main moorings locked to the dark rock bedrock, the floor of the Genesis Well had ceased to be an open deep pit of swirling chaos.
It had become a shipyard. An ancient, underwater dry-dock running at twenty-seven thousand six hundred deep-water lengths below the surface of the universe, under a water-pressure load that would have flattened a royal ironclad like a dry leaf.
Yet anchoring the basal foundation caisson was only the first phase of the restoration. A foundation without an upright truss was merely a heavy stone resting in the mud. To transmit the huge stabilizing mass of the three-thousand-arm-length redeemed bronze carcass upward into the lower hull of the Primordial Ark, Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu had to establish the upright load-paths that connected the seafloor to the stars.
They had to weave the Star-Threads.
“The foundation is unmoving, Zhiqiu,” Qiao Ming said, his coral-jade skin catching the emerald glow of the circulating seed-waters. “Now we must raise the rigging. If the Ark’s bottom spine-beam rises when the seed-waters reach full volume, it will pull against the anchor with eight hundred thousand tons of floating force. If that upward thrust is not distributed across forty-eight balanced vectors, the bottom spine-beam will snap its spine.”
