The Book of All Skies, page 1
The Book of All Skies
Greg Egan
First Edition, 2021
ISBN 978-1-922240-36-1
Copyright © Greg Egan, 2021. All rights reserved.
Supplementary material for this book can be found on the author’s web site, www.gregegan.net
Also by Greg Egan
Novels
Quarantine
Permutation City
Distress
Diaspora
Teranesia
Schild’s Ladder
Incandescence
Zendegi
The Clockwork Rocket
The Eternal Flame
The Arrows of Time
Dichronauts
Collections
Axiomatic
Luminous
Oceanic
Instantiation
Chapter 1
Del sat on the steps of the museum, looking east across the starlit city, waiting for the archaeologists to arrive. Takya’s gray disk was approaching the horizon, while Bradya hung seemingly suspended, halfway from the zenith, silhouetted against the constellation she’d always known as the Harp, though many of her friends called it the Crossbow.
The message had told her to expect a delivery no later than Takya’s ninth passage, but it was a good thing she had come out early; with the seventh barely over, she spotted the heat blotch of four people approaching together along the main road from the south.
“Jachimo!” she bellowed, a little ashamed of her discourtesy, but she couldn’t bring herself to go inside and fetch him if it meant losing sight of the travelers.
“I’m coming!” he called back. When he emerged from the building and joined her, he looked around, confused. “I thought they were already here.”
“Almost.” Del rose to her feet. “We need to make a good impression. I don’t want them thinking we’re lax with security.”
“Should I be carrying a sword?” he joked.
“I’m sure you’re imposing enough unarmed,” she replied. Though as the party came closer, she could see that the two guards flanking the archaeologists did in fact have daggers.
She walked down to the road, then forced herself to wait until everyone was in comfortable earshot before calling out a greeting. “Welcome to Apasa!”
“Thank you!” A woman strode forward and shook Del’s hand. “I’m Jessica.”
“Cordelia. Good to meet you.” Jessica was the archaeologist in charge of the excavation at Seena; she had been corresponding with the museum’s director ever since the book had been unearthed, but Del had only become fully involved when the last few messages had turned to questions that relied on a conservator’s advice.
Del motioned to Jachimo to join them, and they completed the introductions. Jessica’s colleague, Lucius, bearing the precious cargo in a sling against his chest, stayed aloof and nodded from a few paces away, as if he were carrying a sleeping infant he didn’t wish to risk waking, while the bladed escort, Audrey and Orsino, greeted their hosts with a kind of wary camaraderie that implied that they were all steadfast allies for now, but the situation was always open to reassessment.
Del spread her arms. “Please come in. You must be exhausted.”
They followed her and Jachimo up the steps and through the main entrance. When the director had told her there was no fuel to spare for celebratory lanterns to mark the occasion, Del had set about scrubbing the skylights, so at least the foyer’s usual gloom had been replaced by a cheerful airiness.
“I have some food prepared,” she said, turning to address the guests, “but I won’t be offended if you prefer to sleep first.” She gestured toward the accommodation wing. “Your quarters are through there; the rooms are all made up, and I’ve left two pitchers of water in each of them.”
Lucius said, “Thank you, but before any of that ... ” He glanced down at the box strapped to his body.
“Of course. This way.”
Del thought perhaps Lucius would follow her while the other three went to wash and settle in, but instead they set their packs down and accompanied her as she headed for the vault.
“How many people live in this building, normally?” Orsino enquired. They’d entered the corridor lined with statues from the Vitean period, most of them depicting the pets of wealthy families in the act of eviscerating vermin.
“Just Del and I,” Jachimo replied. “The other rooms are for visitors.”
“And how many entrances are there?”
“Besides the one we came through, two doors at the back.”
“They’re well protected?”
“Both sturdy, and triple bolted.” Jachimo shot Del an amused look, as if he was happy to humor this upstart, but wanted it known that he required no lessons in his job.
They’d come to the end of the corridor. Del took the key tied to her belt and inserted it, then stood aside as far as the string would let her to allow Jachimo to do the same. They turned the keys together, with considerable effort, until the lock squealed and retracted its five metal tongues.
“It could do with some oil,” Del admitted, pulling open the door to the vault. The dark within was impenetrable, and the temperature too uniform to be revelatory, but when she lit the lamp at the entrance the long racks of shelves materialized, their shadows flickering for a moment as the flame found its shape.
Audrey and Orsino hung back, taking up positions on either side of the doorway, as if a marauding enemy might charge down the corridor at any moment. Lucius and Jessica followed Del into the vault, and after some hesitation – perhaps worried that he might be seen to be ceding responsibility to the two earnest sentries – Jachimo came after them.
They walked past rows of figurines and pieces of pottery, many of them too mundane in appearance to have been chosen for public display, but nonetheless precious by virtue of their antiquity. Then there were the Palloran death-masks, dazzling works of unquestionable skill in beaten silver, but which were apparently too disturbing for the majority of visitors to stomach. Why the wearers had felt the need to be portrayed half-consumed by insects, when that fate generally ensued with or without an expensive symbolic invitation, remained a mystery.
“We have several Tollean works already,” Del said, as they approached the section reserved for manuscripts. “Some complete, some fragments. I can show you a few if you like, as a testament to the excellent conditions we maintain. The humidity in the vault hasn’t shifted by more than one part in fifty, for as long as we’ve been keeping records.”
“Maybe later,” Jessica replied. She didn’t sound as if she was in need of reassurance over her choice of a home for her own extraordinary find, but then, she must have established the museum’s reputation among her colleagues well in advance, or she wouldn’t even be here.
Del had already labeled the shelf she’d selected for the new acquisition, and she stood aside and let Lucius step forward and lower the box into place.
“Do you mind opening it?” she asked. “I need to make a brief inspection, before I can officially enter it into the catalog.”
“Of course.” Lucius produced a key and unlocked the box, then lifted up the hinged lid.
Del put on her gloves and took his place beside the shelf. The interior of the box was packed with protective cloth, and she lifted the interleaved layers and laid them to each side, like the pages of two blank books that had conspired to shield the third.
After a time, the cloth remaining grew flatter, and yielded less to the pressure of her fingers as she peeled it back. She slowed down, afraid that she might misjudge the care required at the end of the unwrapping if she allowed her actions to become rote.
Lucius said, “The last four sheets are white like the rest, but the fifth and sixth are vermillion.”
Del exhaled in a sigh of gratitude, and the markers soon showed themselves, telling her exactly how many steps remained. But when she raised the final piece of cloth to reveal what lay beneath, a part of her still felt a jolt of surprise, as if a far more likely scenario than the box containing what she had been told would have been an elaborate prank in which the unwrapping went on forever.
The front cover of the volume sitting before her was a piece of hardboard, cleaved by three deep fractures, crisscrossed by a dozen shallower cuts and crumbling at the corners, but otherwise more or less intact. The title was carved in grooves and pits that would have been dyed for the sake of contrast, but were always meant to be as amenable to reading by touch as by sight. Time and grit had bleached and scoured the surface, and Del was unwilling to lay even her gloved fingertips upon it, but as she moved one thumb back and forth in the space above the board and watched the shadows distorted by each dip, the letters took shape. This sequence of words in the Tollean language was not unfamiliar to her, even if she had only seen it before in citations. But this was it, the thing itself, as solid and present as it had been to those authors who had casually invoked it, to criticize or praise, a thousand generations ago. The Book of All Skies was here, sitting on a shelf in the Museum of Apasa, just waiting for her to render it into a fit state to be read, understood, valorised and disputed all over again.
“That’s enough,” she decided. Anything more, done in haste, might damage the book. She began replacing the wrapping.
“Now you can imagine how we felt when we found it,” Jessica said. “This was part of someone’s personal library, judging by what remained of the furniture, though the avalanche pretty much pulverized everything else.”
“Did yo
“No, but you know what scavenger worms are like.”
They withdrew from the vault.
“You mentioned food?” Lucius asked, almost shyly, as if he feared the warm welcome might evaporate now that the main purpose of their visit had been fulfilled.
“Of course,” Del replied. “Does anyone else ... ?”
Audrey said, “Believe me, we’re all famished.”
In the dining room, Del did her best to resist overwhelming the guests with questions, but once they’d slaked their thirst and started on the fish, Lucius and Jessica wanted nothing more than to talk about their find and the prospects for its restoration.
“Don’t ask me to say how long it will take,” Del pleaded. “With a book that size, I can’t even promise it will be finished in my own lifetime.”
“Aren’t you desperate to know where the Tolleans went?” Lucius asked. His tone seemed light-hearted, but not openly sarcastic.
“I’m agnostic on the question of whether they went anywhere,” Del replied. “Plenty of other cultures seem to have given way to successors, without anyone actually migrating.”
“But they talked about it more than anyone else,” Lucius persisted. “They seemed convinced they knew a way to reach the Bounteous Lands.”
“Some of them seemed convinced,” Jessica corrected him. “If there was ever a consensus, we’ve seen no record of it.”
“If there was a consensus,” Jachimo suggested, “wouldn’t we all be there right now? As their descendants?”
Lucius said, “Maybe the people who ended up knowing for sure never bothered coming back; they were more interested in keeping the territory for themselves than having to share it – even if that meant foregoing the satisfaction of telling the doubters they were wrong.”
“If they did find a passage, it can’t have stayed open for long,” Audrey declared. “If it was so hard to discover, it must have been narrow to begin with – and maybe it even depended on them digging their way through. All it would take would be one avalanche, one quake, one lava flow, to seal it up again.”
Del looked to Orsino, who was yet to offer an opinion. He was silent at first, but then he ventured, “Maybe the Tolleans were more resourceful than us, or more persistent. But just because no one’s repeated what they did, that doesn’t mean it’s become impossible.”
“Impossible or not,” Jessica said, “we should know soon enough. If there’s a map, we can compare it with our own maps. If there’s a strategy for finding a route, we can test it. If there’s even just a theory of the world that somehow points to the necessity of a persistent connection with the Bounteous Lands, we can judge it against all the evidence collected since. Whatever they found, or believed, or imagined, this will be the place where it was actually spelled out – not just invoked as something that everyone was assumed to know about already.”
Del smiled, still a little daunted, but exhilarated too. The Book of All Skies had always seemed like a mirage to her before, but now that it was in their hands, even the things it merely spoke of might turn out to lie within their reach as well.
She said, “I should probably sleep now, and make an early start.”
Chapter 2
Del woke, confused, unsure what had roused her. She was certain she hadn’t slept for as long as she’d intended, but when she closed her eyes and tried to drift away again, she found herself resisting.
She climbed out of bed and left her room, then walked down the corridor to the foyer. There were faint heat-prints lingering on the floor, leading to the exit; she supposed that one of her guests must have decided to go out for some air. But the fading trail didn’t seem to originate in the accommodation wing; whoever this was had wandered about a bit first.
Del crossed the foyer. The glass doors were unbolted, but she couldn’t see anyone outside. She went out onto the stairs and peered down the road. There was a figure in the distance, walking north, the coolness of a backpack separating their head from the heat of their arms and lower body. It was hard to be sure from a view like this, but she believed it was Orsino.
She felt for the vault key, and was relieved to find that it was still attached to her belt. But why would Orsino – or any of her guests – depart so abruptly? If a messenger had come, with news of a family emergency or whatever, she would have been the first to wake.
Del contemplated pursuing the retreating figure to ask politely for an explanation, but then it seemed wiser to check with the others first. She went inside and walked to Audrey’s room.
The door opened on the second knock; it seemed the cascade of activity was waking everyone.
“Did Orsino say anything to you about leaving?” Del asked.
Audrey scowled and walked past Del to Orsino’s door; she tried the handle and it opened, revealing an empty room.
“Why would he just go like that?” Del pressed her. He couldn’t have taken the book; the key had never left her side. She ran her fingertips over the thing anxiously, reassuring herself that it wasn’t some kind of substitute that had been left in place of the real one by sleight of hand. The shape was exactly right, every notch and protuberance familiar. There was a slight slipperiness to the normally rough surface, but perhaps she’d handled it so much now that she’d coated it with the oils of her own skin.
Jachimo emerged from his room. “What’s happening?”
“Do you still have your vault key?”
He followed the string from his belt to his pocket. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Orsino’s gone, and no one seems to know why.”
Jachimo nodded in the direction of the vault, and they jogged off together. “He couldn’t have opened it!” Jachimo insisted, as they passed the statue of an executioner bird tugging the intestines out of a plump harvest rat. “Pulled the keys off, then tied them back on again, all without waking us?” Del wanted to believe it was impossible too, but neither of them was convinced enough to turn back.
The door to the vault certainly hadn’t been left unlocked. They opened it, and Del lit the lamp. As she hurried between the shelves, she spotted the box up ahead, sitting exactly where Lucius had placed it.
She slowed a little as she approached, and turned toward Jachimo, moving aside so he could see what she’d seen. Then she put her hand on the box; Lucius had left her the key, but she’d seen no reason to hide it, and it remained hanging on a peg below the shelf. Any thief could have taken the box unopened, or just smashed it where it sat.
She unlocked the box and lifted the lid. Inside, there was nothing: the book and its wrapping were gone. If she’d taken the key away that would not have stopped the theft, but it might have made the loss visible sooner.
Del’s face burned, with shame as much as anger. Somehow, her carelessness had just lost the museum the greatest acquisition of her tenure by far.
“I’m going after him,” she said.
“I’ll go,” Audrey called from the doorway. “Even if you catch him, what can you do?”
Del approached her. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll catch him! When I saw him he was just walking down the road, trying not to draw attention to himself.”
“But when he sees you coming?” Audrey countered. “He’s not going to hold back once he knows he’s being chased.”
Jachimo laughed. “Del placed seventh in the last sky-to-sky; there aren’t many people who could outrun her at the best of times, and I’d be willing to bet that her fury right now is more of a prod than your ex-comrade’s greed.”
They started back down the corridor. “And what will you do if he draws his dagger?” Audrey asked.
“Keep my distance,” Del replied. “Maybe I can tire him out with the chase alone, without getting in harm’s way.” But then what? Even if he came to a halt, exhausted, far from his intended destination, there was no guarantee that there’d be helpful bystanders around, able to identify the two of them correctly as fugitive thief and righteous pursuer.
“I need to come with you,” Audrey said firmly. “If I can’t match your pace, at least I should be able to keep you in sight. Then if you can slow him down or corner him, you can wait for me to catch up.”
