by Brian Aldiss
“I can’t explain the why; I’m only just learning to explain the how,” Vry said, casting a sympathetic glance at the old woman. “And if I’m correct, the next eclipse will be of much greater duration than the last, with Freyr totally concealed for over five and a half hours, and most of the day filled with the event, which will have begun when the suns rise. You can imagine the kind of panic that may ensue.”
Rol Sakil and Dol started to howl. Dathka ordered them abruptly to be quiet, and said, “A day-long eclipse? In a few years, we’ll have nothing but eclipse and no Freyr at all, if you’re right. Why do you make such claims, Vry?”
She faced him, looking seekingly at his dark countenance. Fearing what she saw, she answered deliberately in terms she knew he could not accept. “Because the universe is not random. It is a machine. Therefore one can know its movements.”
Such a deeply revolutionary statement had not been heard in Oldorando for centuries. It went entirely over Dathka’s head.
“If you are sure, we must try to protect ourselves with sacrifices.”
Without bothering to argue, Vry turned to the others, saying, “The eclipses will not last for ever. They will go on for twenty years, getting shorter after the first eleven. After number twenty, they will not return.”
Her words were meant to reassure. The expression on their faces showed the pain of their inward thought: in twenty years, none of them was likely to be alive.
“How can you know what’s going to happen in the future, Vry? Even Shay Tal couldn’t do that,” Laintal Ay said heavily.
She wanted to touch him, but was too shy. “It’s a matter of observation and gathering old facts, putting everything together. It’s a matter of understanding what we know, of seeing what we see. Freyr and Batalix are far apart, even when they appear close to us. Each balances on the edge of a great round plate. The plates are tipped at an angle. Where they intersect, there eclipses happen, because our world is in line with Freyr, with Batalix between. Do you understand that?”
Dathka strode up and down. He said impatiently, “Listen, Vry, I forbid you to speak of such mad notions in public. The people will kill you. This is what the academy has led you to. I’m not going to listen to any more.”
He gave her a dark look, bitter, yet oddly imploring. She was transfixed. Dathka left the room without further word. Silence was what he left behind.
He had been gone only a couple of minutes when there was a commotion in the street outside. Laintal Ay ran down immediately to see what was happening. He suspected Dathka’s intervention, but his friend had disappeared. A man had fallen from his mount and was crying for help—a foreigner by his garb. A crowd gathered round him, among them faces Laintal Ay knew, although none went to help the traveller.
“It’s the plague,” a man told Laintal Ay. “Anyone who aided this knave would be sick himself by Freyr-fall.”
Two slaves were brought up, and the sufferer was dragged towards the hospice.
This was the first public appearance of the bone fever in Oldorando.
When Laintal Ay returned to Oyre’s room, she had removed her hoxneys and was washing herself over a bowl, calling out from behind a curtain to Dol and Vry.
Dol’s dimpled face was for once registering expression. She uncoupled Rastil Roon from her breast and passed him to her mother, saying, “Listen, my friend, you must act. Call the people together and speak to them. Explain. Never mind Dathka.”
“You should do that, Laintal Ay,” Oyre called. “Remind everyone of how Aoz Roon built Oldorando, and how you were his faithful lieutenant. Don’t follow Dathka’s plan. Assure everyone that Aoz Roon is not dead, and will return soon.”
“That’s right,” Dol said. “Remind people how they fear him, and how he built the bridge. They’ll listen to you.”
“You’ve sorted out our troubles between you,” said Laintal Ay. “But you are mistaken. Aoz Roon has been gone too long. Half the people here scarcely know his name. They’re strangers, traders passing through. Go to the Pauk and ask the first man you meet who Aoz Roon is—he won’t be able to tell you. That’s why the question of power is open.” He stood solid before them.
Dol shook her fist at him. “You dare say that! It’s lies. If—when he comes back, he’ll rule as before. I’ll see that he kicks out Faralin Ferd and Tanth Ein, too. Not to forget that reptile, Raynil Layan.”
“Maybe go, maybe not, Dol. The point is, he is not here. What about Shay Tal? She’s been gone just as long. Who speaks of her nowadays? You may still miss her, Vry, but others don’t.”
Vry shook her head. She said quietly, “If you want the truth, I miss neither Shay Tal nor Aoz Roon. I think they blighted our lives. I believe she blighted mine—oh, it was my fault, I know, and I owe her much, I being the daughter of a mere slave woman. But I followed Shay Tal too slavishly.”
“That’s right,” old Rol Sakil piped, bouncing the baby. “She was a bad example to you, Vry—too virginal by half, was our Shay Tal. You’ve gone the same way. You must be fifteen now, near middle age, and still not laid. Get on with it, afore it’s too late.”
Dol said, “Ma’s right, Vry. You saw how Dathka marched out of here, furious because you argued with him. He’s in love with you, that’s why. Be more submissive, that’s a woman’s job, isn’t it? Throw your arms round him and he’ll give you what you want. I should think he’d be quite lusty.”
“Throw your legs round him, not your arms, that’s my advice,” Rol Sakil said, cackling with laughter. “There’s pretty women passing through Oldorando, now—not like when we was all young, when flesh was in short supply. The things they get up to in the bazaar nowadays! No wonder they want a coinage. I know the slot they’ll stuff it in…”
“That’s enough,” Vry said, her cheeks red. “I’ll manage my own life without your crude advice. I respect Dathka but I am not at all fond of him. Change the subject.”
Laintal Ay took Vry’s arm with a consoling gesture, as Oyre emerged from behind her curtain, her hair piled on the top of her head. She had discarded her hoxney skins, which were now regarded as somewhat outmoded among a younger set in Oldorando. Instead, she wore a green woollen dress which trailed almost to the ground.
“Vry’s being advised to take a man soon—just like you,” Laintal Ay told her.
“At least Dathka’s mature and knows his own mind.”
Laintal Ay scowled at this remark. Turning his back on Oyre, he said to Vry, “Explain to me about the twenty eclipses. I didn’t understand what you were saying. How is the universe a machine?”
She frowned and then said, “You’ve heard the elements before, but would not listen. You must be prepared to believe that the world is stranger than you give it credit for. I’ll try to explain clearly.
“Imagine that the land-octaves extend into the air high above us, as well as into the ground. Imagine that this world, which the phagors can Hrl-Ichor, follows its own octave regularly. In fact, its octave winds round and round Batalix. Hrl-Ichor goes round Batalix once every four hundred and eighty days—hence our year, as you know. Batalix does not move. It is we that move.”
“What when Batalix sets every evening?”
“Batalix is motionless in the sky. It is we that move.”
Laintal Ay laughed. “And the festival of Double Sunset? What moves then?”
“The same. We move. Batalix and Freyr remain stationary. Unless you believe that, I can explain no further.”
“We have all seen the sentinels move, my dear Vry, every day of our lives. So what follows, supposing I believe both of them to be turned to ice?”
She hesitated, then said, “Well, in fact Batalix and Freyr do move as Freyr grows brighter.”
“Come—first you’d have me believe that they didn’t move, then that they did. Stop it, Vry—I’ll believe your eclipses when they happen, not before.”
With a scream of impatience, she raised her scrawny arms above her head. “Oh, you’re such fools. Let Embruddock fall
, what difference would it make? You can’t understand one simple thing.”
She left the room even more furiously than Dathka.
“There are some simple matters she don’t understand either,” Rol Sakil said, cuddling the small boy.
Vry’s old room showed the change that had come to Oldorando. No longer was it so bleak. Oddments gathered from here and there decked the room. She had inherited some of Shay Tal’s—and hence Loilanun’s—possessions. She had traded in the bazaars. A star chart of her making hung near the window, with the paths of the ecliptics of the two suns marked on it.
On one wall hung an ancient map, given her by a new admirer. It was painted in coloured inks upon vellum. This was her Ottaassaal map depicting the whole world, at which she never ceased to wonder. The world was depicted as round, its land masses encircled by ocean. It rested on the original boulder—bigger than the world—from which the world had sprung or been ejected. The simple outlined land masses were labelled Sibornal, with Campannlat below, and Hespagorat separate at the bottom. Some islands were formally indicated. The only town marked was Ottaassaal, set at the centre of the globe.
She wondered how far away one would have to be to see the actual world in such a way. Batalix and Freyr were two other round worlds, as she well understood. But they had no support from original boulders beneath them; why then did the world need one?
In a niche in the wall beside the map stood a little figurine which Dathka had brought her. She lifted it down now, cradling it in her palm rather abstractedly. It depicted a couple enjoying coition in a squatting position. Man and woman were carved out of one stone. The hands through which the object had passed had worn them into anonymity, age had rendered them both featureless. The carving represented the supreme act of being together, and Vry regarded it longingly as it rested in her hand. “That’s unity,” she murmured, in a low voice.
For all her friends’ teasing, she wanted desperately what the stone represented. She also recognised, as Shay Tal had before her, that the path to knowledge was a solitary one.
Did the figurine portray a pair of real lovers whose names had been lost far in the past? It was impossible to tell.
In the past lay the answers to much that was in the future. She looked hopelessly at the astronomical clock she was trying to construct from wood, which lay on the table by her narrow window. Not only was she unused to working in wood, but she still had not grasped the principle that maintained the world, the three wandering worlds, and the two sentinels in their paths.
Suddenly, she perceived that a unity existed among the spheres—they were all of one material, as the lovers were of one stone. And a force as strong as sexual need bound them all mysteriously together, dictating their movements.
She sat down at her table, and commenced wrenching the rods and rings apart, trying to rearrange them in a new order.
She was thus engaged when there was a tap at her door. Raynil Layan sidled in, giving hasty looks about him to see that nobody else was in the room.
He saw her framed in the pale blue rectangle of window, the light brooding on her profile. She held a wooden ball in one hand. At his entrance, she half started up, and he saw—for he watched people closely—that her habitual reserve had left her for once. She smiled nervously, smoothing her hoxney skin over the definitions of her breast. He pushed the door closed behind him.
The master of the tanners had assumed grandeur these days. His forked beard was tied with two ribbons, in a manner he had learned from foreigners, and he wore trousers of silk. Recently, he had been paying Vry attention, presenting her with such items as the Ottaassaal map, acquired in Pauk, and listening closely to her theories. All this she found obscurely exciting. Although she mistrusted his smooth manners, she was flattered by them, and by his interest in all she did.
“You work too hard, Vry,” he said, cocking a finger and raising an eyebrow at her. “More time spent outdoors would put colour back into those pretty cheeks.”
“You know how busy I am, running the academy now Amin Lim’s gone with Shay Tal, as well as doing my own work.”
The academy flourished as never before. It had its own building, and was largely run by one of Vry’s assistants. They engaged learned men to speak; anyone passing through Oldorando was approached. Many ideas were put into practical operation in the workshops under the lecture room. Raynil Layan himself kept a watch on all that was happening.
His eye missed nothing. Catching sight of the stone figurine among the litter on her table, he scrutinised it closely. She flushed and fidgetted.
“It’s very old.”
“And still very popular.”
She giggled. “I meant the object itself.”
“I meant their objective.” He set it down, looking archly at her, and settled his body against the edge of the table so that their legs were touching.
Vry bit her lip and looked down. She had her erotic fantasies about this man she did not greatly like, and they came crowding back to her now.
But Raynil Layan, as was his style, had changed tack. After a moment’s silence, he moved his leg, cleared his throat, and spoke seriously.
“Vry, among the pilgrims just arrived from Pannoval is a man not as blinded with religion as the rest of his crowd. He makes clocks, working them precisely from metal. Wood is no good for your purpose. Let me bring this craftsman to you, and you can instruct him as you will to build your model expertly.”
“Mine’s no mere clock, Raynil Layan,” she said, looking up at him as he stood against her chair, wondering if she and he could in any way be regarded as being made of the same stone.
“That I understand. You instruct the man about your machine. I’ll pay him in coin. I shall soon take up an important post, with power to command as I will.”
She stood up, the better to assess his response.
“I hear you are to run an Oldorandan mint.”
He narrowed his eyes and surveyed her, half-smiling, half-angry. “Who told you that?”
“You know how news travels.”
“Faralin Ferd has been blabbing out of turn again.”
“You don’t think greatly of him or Tanth Ein, do you?”
He made a dismissive gesture and seized her hands. “I think of you all the while. I will have power and, unlike those other fools—unlike Aoz Roon—I believe that knowledge can be wedded to power to reinforce it… Be my woman and you shall have what you wish. You shall live better. We will discover all things. We will split open the pyramid that my predecessor, Datnil Skar, never managed to do, for all his prattle.”
She hid her face, wondering if her thin body, her torpid queme, could entice and hold a man.
Pulling her wrists from his grasp, she backed away. Her hands, now free, flew like birds to her face to try to conceal the agitation she felt.
“Don’t tempt me, don’t play with me.”
“You need tempting, my doe.”
Narrowing his eyes, he opened the purse at his belt, and brought forth some coins. These he extended towards her, like a man tempting a wild hoxney with food. She came cautiously to inspect them.
“The new currency, Vry. Coins. Take them. They’re going to transform Oldorando.”
The three coins were improperly rounded and crudely stamped. There was a small bronze coin stamped “Half Roon,” a larger copper coin stamped “One Roon,” and a small gold coin stamped “Five Roons.” In the middle of each coin was the legend:
O L D
O R A N
D O
Vry laughed with excitement as she examined them. Somehow, the money represented power, modernity, knowledge. “Roons!” she exclaimed. “That’s rich.”
“The very key to riches.”
She set them on her worn table. “I’ll test your intelligence with them, Raynil Layan.”
“What a way you do court a man!” He laughed, but saw by her narrow face that she was serious.
“Let the Half Roon be our world, Hrl-Ichor. The bi
g One Roon is Batalix. This little gold one is Freyr.” With her finger, she made the Half Roon circle about the Roon. “This is how we move through the upper air. One circle is one year—in which time, the Half Roon has revolved like a ball four hundred and eighty times. See? When we think we see the Roon move, it is we who move on the Half Roon. Yet the Roon is not still. There’s a general principle involved, much like love. As a child’s life revolves about its mother, so does the Half Roon’s about the Roon—and so also does the Roon, I have decided, about the Five Roons.”
“You have decided? A guess?”
“No. Simple observation. But no observation, however simple, can be made except by those predisposed to make it. Between winter and spring solstices, the Half Roon moves its maximum to either side of the Roon.” She demonstrated the diameter of its orbit. “Imagine that behind the Five Roons there are a number of tiny sticks standing to represent fixed stars. Then imagine you are standing on the Half Roon. Can you imagine that?”
“More, I can imagine you standing there with me.”
She thought how quick he was, and her voice shook as she said, “There we stand, and the Half Roon goes first this side of the Roon, then the other… What do we observe? Why, that the Five Roons appears to move against the fixed stars behind it.”
“Only appears?”
“In that respect, yes. The movement shows both that Freyr is close compared to the stars, and that it is we who really move and not the sentinels.”
Raynil Layan contemplated the coins.
“But you say that the two small denominations move about the Five Roons?”
“You know that we share a guilty secret. There’s the matter of your predecessor illegally presenting Shay Tal with information from your corps book… From King Denniss’s dating we know that this is the year he would call 446. That is the number of years after someone—Nadir…”
“I’ve had a better chance than you to puzzle that dating out, my doe, and other dates to compare it with. The date Zero is a year of maximum cold and dark, according to the Denniss calendar.”