The Book of All Skies, page 4
“Now I realize I’ve kept you at your post,” he said. “In compensation, can I buy you a meal?”
Del was silent for longer than she’d intended; she should have replied at once that such a favor was unnecessary.
“There’s also a matter I’m hoping to discuss with you,” Montano admitted.
“What’s that?”
“I might have an offer of employment, for someone with your language skills.” He gestured at the pages on her desk. “You speak Tollean?”
“I read it,” she said. “I don’t think anyone really knows how it sounded.”
“My mistake. But even knowing its structure is sure to be of use.”
Of use for what? She had no interest in searching the mountains of Sadema for secret Tollean inscriptions. But apparently neither did Montano. Whatever he had in mind, he deserved a fair hearing.
“I’ll need to lock you out while I tidy up,” she said, apologetically. “But it won’t be long.”
When she joined Montano, they set off down the hill into town. “Do you like Ereman food?” he asked, as they approached a cluster of restaurants.
“I don’t think I’ve ever tried it,” Del confessed. “But why not? At least the place should be well-lit.”
Montano led the way. The restaurant turned out to be hidden down an alley, but its windows really did shine brighter than any of its competitors.
Inside, the place wasn’t crowded, and they were quickly seated at a good table and handed menus. Del had no idea what any of the dishes were, but she was too ravenous to waste time quizzing the staff, so she asked Montano to order two of whatever he liked himself.
While they waited for the food, he fidgeted with his portfolio, then finally placed it on the floor, resting against a table leg.
“Did you get what you needed from the maps?” Del asked him.
“I think so,” he said. “I would have bought one of the atlases myself if I could, but the publisher made so few that they’re almost unobtainable.”
Del wasn’t surprised. “Celema is a nub. There are geologists with an interest in every corner of the world, but beyond that there’s not much demand for maps of an uninhabited region that doesn’t even lie on the route to ... well, anywhere.”
Montano smiled. “And you know all the routes? Without exception?”
Del hesitated, but then decided she wasn’t willing to retract her claim just to accommodate an overly generous definition of anywhere. “I don’t doubt that you could keep passing through the Hoops beyond Celema, if you had some means of moving safely through the void. But even if you ended up beneath new skies, what good would that do you with no land beneath your feet?”
“How do you think the world formed?” Montano asked.
Del shook her head. “Don’t ask me to choose between competing theories. Maybe the Hoops collided with a huge body of rock, and the pressure in its interior squeezed it through the apertures, over and over, until it was spread so thinly that it lost the force to keep going. Or maybe the Hoops wandered into a dust cloud, and the dust drifted through, coming together into a solid body much later. But either way, the rock we see now shows no sign of going on forever. If we follow any path, we get to a nub eventually.” Well, any path that didn’t strike the obstruction in Sadema, but clearing a way through the mountains would surely just reveal the same situation on the other side.
“I have no quarrel with any of that,” Montano replied. “But now, tell me how you think the Hoops work.”
“If I knew how the Hoops worked,” Del retorted, “I’d be famous in every land.”
“You know what I mean,” Montano insisted. “Not some deep secret concerning their nature or origin: just the practical matter of discerning when two travelers end up beneath the same sky.”
Del grew a little self-conscious. “I know what my mother taught me, what every child I know was told. Take a ball of clay and embed two rings in it, so that parts of each ring emerge from opposite sides of the ball. The ball is like a map of the world as it would be if the Hoops were just ordinary rings – but there’s also a simple way to show their true effect. If two travelers set out from the same town, and you trace the routes they take on the surface of the ball, you can’t conclude that they’ll meet up with each other just because their paths meet on the clay. Instead, you need to take two reels of thread, slip the ends of both of them through a needle that you stick into the clay to mark the home town, and then unwind the thread along each traveler’s path. If their paths seem to cross at some point, cut the threads free of the reels there and tie their ends together, making a loop between the start and end of the journey. If you can pull that whole loop through the eye of the needle, without it getting snagged on the rings, then the two travelers must have passed through the Hoops in exactly the same way – so they really did end up beneath the same sky. But if the loop gets stuck on a ring, that will prove that the travelers took such different routes that they ended up at different destinations.”
The food arrived. Montano had chosen a dish of fish and vegetables; Del sampled it warily. The flavor from the spices was unusual, but not unpleasant.
“Is it all right?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” Del assured him. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with my folksy ball of clay and its threads?”
Montano laughed. “It’s exactly the metaphor I learned myself. I’m not going to disparage anyone for putting their trust in it, when it’s served us so well. But I do claim that it hasn’t been tested quite as extensively as it might have been.”
Del said, “Everywhere we’ve been, the Hoops have behaved the same way: if your path passes through them in a manner that would tangle up a thread, you find yourself beneath a different sky whenever the thread is differently tangled. If we could get through the mountains of Sadema, we could see if the same holds true in all the other lands – but you’re not interested in those mountains, are you? You want to go to the nub at Celema, and ... what? Travel through the void?”
“Not immediately,” Montano said. “Not without encouragement or reason. Not without evidence that the journey would succeed.”
“Oh, that’s all right then.”
He smiled, but then his demeanor became solemn. “I had a sister, Natasha. She died in the plague.”
“I’m sorry,” Del said. “It took both my parents.”
Montano winced. “Everyone I know has lost someone. It was a horrible time.”
“Yes.” Del waited for him to regain his thread.
He said, “My sister was a student of the natural sciences. More than a student, though she was young when she died and not much heeded by more experienced colleagues. You’re familiar with the law of universal gravity?”
“I was born beneath two moons,” Del replied. “Whatever people with unchanging skies might believe, I’m convinced by the evidence of my own eyes.”
“Natasha studied that law,” Montano said, “and the way it should be applied in the presence of the Hoops. The Hoops hide some land that we could see were they not present, but also reveal new land in its place. When the land that is obscured and the land that is revealed are more or less equivalent, in shape and constitution, the Hoops make very little difference, and the gravity that pulls on Takya and Bradya is almost the same as if they were circling a simple ball of clay.
“But at the nubs, those two things could not be less in balance. The land ends, and through the Hoop there is only void. The precise way the influence of gravity passes through the Hoops can’t be neglected anymore, if you wish to understand the situation properly.”
“That makes sense,” Del agreed.
“My sister wrestled with the mathematics of the problem,” Montano said, “and she believed she found the answer. In the presence of the Hoops, gravity does not spread out uniformly; it follows a more complicated rule of disbursement that only yields the familiar law when the contributory masses are suitably balanced. I plan to travel to the nub at Celema and measure the strength of gravity there, to see if her ideas are in accord with the reality.”
It was clear from his tone that his aim, in part, was to honor his sister’s memory. But that couldn’t be the whole story.
“Even if you prove Natasha right,” Del pressed him, “where does that leave you?”
“Suppose,” Montano replied, “that a twisted thread need not stay twisted. Suppose that if you circled the edge of the same Hoop again and again in the same direction, instead of finding yourself ever more tangled, you reached a point where the thread came free. Or in plainer terms: you found yourself back where you started.”
Del frowned. “So you travel to the nub at Celema, and then keep going – somehow – through the void. In the hope that, eventually ... you end up where you began?”
Montano said, “Not literally, though – not if you began somewhere like Thena. We need to imagine a traveler who does nothing but go round and round the same part of the same Hoop.”
“All right.” Del pictured such a traveler. If you traced their journey backward, eventually you arrived at ... Sadema. “The path you’re talking about would need to have come through the mountains from Sadema.”
“Exactly.” Montano beamed at her as if the two of them were now in perfect agreement.
“But those mountains are still impassable,” Del complained.
“Yes. But they only block the path at that point. If the path joins up with its own beginning, it’s no different from any other circle. You can’t block a circle at one point; you can always avoid the obstruction by going the other way around.”
“Oh.” So the journey through the void beyond Celema would lead, first, to another nub that no contemporary traveler had ever seen, and from there, across some unknown number of new lands ... all the way to whatever lay on the far side of the mountains of Sadema.
“I think I understand,” Del said. “But what if the thread just grows more tangled? What if you can go around and around forever, never ending up where you began?”
“That’s conceivable,” Montano admitted. “But that’s where my sister’s work offers us the means to decide if the journey is worth taking. If all there is beyond Celema is void, her law will give one answer for the gravity there. But if, beyond the void, there lies a great mass of land, stretched out toward us but not quite closing the circle, we should be able to discern its influence. Then we can head toward it – blindly in a sense, in that we have no hope of seeing it at the moment of departure – but as confident of its existence as we are of the far shore of any river or ocean.”
Chapter 4
“Who would carry out your duties, in your absence?” the director asked.
“I wouldn’t be leaving for a while yet,” Del replied. “If we could bring in someone to train for the role, it shouldn’t take long for them to learn the most pressing tasks. Dealing with the public, and so forth.”
“And what about the rest?” the director demanded. “Proper handling of the artefacts? Conditions of storage? Restoration techniques? Your own mentor stood by you patiently, while you learned those skills.”
Del lowered her gaze. The director’s office was always brightly lit, but now it seemed to be impossible to face her interlocutor while avoiding the glare of the lamps spread out behind him. “When I come back, I’d be happy to do the same for my replacement.”
“But you can’t even say when that would be!” he protested.
“I can’t,” she admitted. “Montano’s expedition will be subject to all manner of uncertainties.” But there were no new acquisitions on the horizon, or other urgent tasks requiring her attention. It was not as if she was abandoning the museum forever, or walking out in the middle of some elaborate project that would fall apart without her supervision.
“You do know they’re all charlatans,” the director said bluntly. “All these so-called explorers. Of course there are ‘uncertainties’. If they were forced to tell the truth without prevaricating, no one would invest in them at all.”
Del wanted to speak in Montano’s defense; he’d made it clear that he had no need of secrecy, and she was at liberty to expound on his sister’s ideas and his own plans in as much detail as she wished. But she couldn’t imagine the director finding any of it persuasive; better that he assume she was running off to Sadema with all the other fortune hunters who thought they could dig their way through a mountain.
“I’m resolved to do this,” she said. “I’ll help in any way I can to reduce the difficulties that might be caused by my absence, but I won’t be dissuaded from the choice I’ve made.”
The director regarded her with an expression Del took to be a kind of morose acceptance. She had wondered if he would start haranguing her about the opportunities she’d been given, and the ingratitude and disloyalty she was now displaying. But perhaps he knew as well as she did that at the first invocation of the word loyalty, everything she’d restrained herself, so far, from saying about Jachimo’s dismissal would start tumbling out, and then there’d be no unsaying it.
“I have no wish to replace you,” he said. “Not until you’re a great deal closer to retirement – at which point I expect to be long gone, myself. I’ll find someone who can act as a stopgap while you’re off on this misadventure.”
“Thank you.” Del felt a twinge of guilt; this was exactly what she’d hoped for, but now her own treatment stood in even starker contrast to Jachimo’s.
She left the office and returned to her desk. Varro, who’d been watching over the map room queue, departed to make his usual rounds of the building.
Del glanced over at the line of hopeful cave diviners, mountain pass aficionados, and subterranean river devotees. It was easy to mock their conviction that they’d be the ones to find a route that everyone else had missed for the last thousand generations, but at least they weren’t demanding anything more of the world than the unarguable fact that a large body of rock might contain hitherto uncharted passages from one side to the other. An ant might be disappointed when it ran up and down a wall searching for a crack, but it was not deluded merely for having tried.
There was really only one thing that nudged her own assessment of Montano’s chances very slightly in his favor. She looked down again at the troublesome passage in the commentary on The Book of All Skies, where an anonymous author asked: could a knot be broken? They seemed to believe that it could – but in the context, what exactly did that mean? That a traveler meandering across a mountainside might stumble on a path that cut through the range from one side to the other? Or that a thread that seemed hopelessly tangled from winding around the edge of a Hoop dozens of times could suddenly be pulled free?
The writer didn’t say. The meaning of the language and its metaphors relied on clues and shared assumptions that had long since vanished. She might well be hallucinating any connection with Montano’s ideas, as surely as the other prize-hunters were ascribing unearned significance to every ambiguous line or cross-hatching on the maps of Sadema.
And even if Montano had stumbled on precisely the notion that had raised such excitement across the Tollean world, that wouldn’t prove that he, and the Tolleans before him, were correct. But the chance to walk in their footsteps, and to see a new test of an idea that they might have struggled to prove or disprove themselves, was too alluring a prospect to resist.
If the expedition came to nothing, she could return to her job, duly humbled, and go back to puzzling over the same infuriating ambiguities, scattered across the same few fragile pages.
But if it came to fruition, anything was possible. Who knew what was waiting, on the far side of the void?
Chapter 5
When Montano invited Del to a gathering at his house to meet her fellow expeditioners, she arrived expecting a crowd. After all his talk of struggling to raise the capital needed for the journey, she’d imagined they’d be setting out with dozens of crates of equipment and supplies, borne by twice as many carriers.
“This is Silvio, our navigator and surveyor,” Montano said. “Clarissa, our architect. And Imogen, who’s an experienced diver.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Del said. There was no one else in the room. She turned to Montano to ask if he was snubbing the less skilled laborers, but then caught herself in time; it probably made sense for them to acquire any bulky materials they’d need much closer to Celema, and to hire a workforce locally, once they knew exactly what was required.
Montano showed her to her seat and lit a second lamp.
“You’ve walked under the ocean?” Del asked Imogen. She’d heard of such feats, but she’d never met anyone who’d actually performed them.
“Many times,” Imogen assured her. “Surviving in the void would be a different challenge, but I believe a diving suit could be adapted to meet it.”
“I see.”
“Silvio will be in charge of the gravitational measurements,” Montano explained. “And Clarissa will design the bridge we need to travel across the gap.”
Del decided not to risk a joke about their respective likelihoods of turning out to be dead weight, though she was clearly ranked lowest by that measure. Only Silvio was sure to have a job to do, but clearly Montano considered it worth paying the rest of them to tag along, to spare himself the delay of having to come back and fetch them.
“I suppose I’m here as punishment for losing The Book of All Skies,” she said wryly. “I would have been content just to read what the Tolleans believed about the way to reach the Bounteous Lands, but now that that’s impossible, what choice do I have but to try to make the same journey?”
“I was raised to believe that the Bounteous Lands were just a myth,” Clarissa replied. “Even now, if I argue with my parents about it, they say there are hot springs hotter than the warmest air, so what need is there to invoke an unseen star just to warm us?”
“I thought those hot springs relied on tidal forces from that unseen star to keep the world’s core molten,” Silvio said.
