Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  I sought a stick or a pencil and could find nothing but the piece of charcoal I had sharpened against the gears of the roof-engine. I inserted this into the lip of the tube and found it was actually blocked by something hard. In an effort to discover whether the blockage was complete, I managed to break the charcoal in the declivity and fill it, whether-or-no. I peered into the brass ring stuffed with gray dirt and was no wiser. Most heavy guns, the Morbin Harbor cannon among them, are barrel-loaders, and this thing had no obvious juncture between the large bore section and the end section. But it was possible that strength inherent in the unbroken nature of this instrument was worth the extra trouble inherent in a long muzzle-loader. Perhaps such a cannon might be easier to drill to specifications. More accurate.

  Though a ladder would be very necessary… Powl’s parting words, that this place operated better without candles, now seemed heavily significant. The man certainly didn’t want to give me any opportunity to shoot off the huge gun at random, or to blow up the emplacement. I began to consider breaking open the crates in the storage rooms in search of black powder or gun cotton.

  Destroying things seemed beyond the scope of my assignment here, and though I was more and more alarmed each minute and less at one with the purposes of a man who kept a dog with such terrible teeth, still I could not be sure. I determined to go slowly and be certain.

  Next I discovered something that excited me strongly, and that was that the single attaching strut of the tube to the platform was no mere support but a complex levered pipe that would raise and lower the tube along the slot in the roof. To prove true sane intent in the construction of this mad machine, nothing more was necessary than to find that there was an awning of canvas that followed the tube down, covering the fault in the roof entirely, so that if the thing were laid flat against the bottom of the dome, the roof was impervious to rain and dew, if not to wind.

  It seemed likely that the blockage in the end of the tube was a fuse, broken off below level, as so often happens with fuses. The endpiece did seem to be threaded, but I did not manage to get it entirely off to check my suppositions, and I feared to break such an intricate piece of machinery—whether good or evil as I feared, it was obviously quite expensive.

  There remained one more test for what was becoming a fond theory: If the building was a huge, immovable cannon, it must be aimed at something.

  In the last light of the sun and the first light of the moon I went out again to examine the hill’s horizon. It was trees and blackness, except in one direction: the direction of the road whence I had come. I returned to the “rack,” worked prodigiously, and looked again.

  The next morning I was awake when Powl arrived, for I had not slept. He clearly did not expect the accusation written in my eyes. He dropped a large pack, under which he had been sweating.

  “So you know?” he asked me, dry and ironic.

  “It is fearful,” I replied. “It is fearful and traitorous and I wish I had not seen it pointed straight for my city and home.”

  “That’s where I thought you had pointed it,” he answered. “It is what I would expect from a lad your age—to look straight at the lights of the city. There are higher targets, believe me.”

  I was very angry. “Higher? There is Vestinglon itself, and the palace, I suppose. But to have a cannon this size pointed at the second city of Velonya and its military capital is enough. I had hoped”—and here I was stuck between anger and a strange embarrassment—“I had hoped that you had only found this place, had overcome the traitorous element and—”

  Powl’s jaw dropped and his eyebrows rose commensurately. “As a matter of fact, I had no hand in this construction. It was Adlar Diskomb himself who had it built, and who hanged himself from this very ceiling, though whether he was a traitor to do so is more than I can say. But for the rest of your accusation, Nazhuret, son of—of Sordaling School, I am totally bemused.

  “A cannon? Do you think you are living in a gun bunker of some kind?” He climbed the platform in two steps and dragged the chair over to the end of the tube. He looked closely into the brass lip and cried out like a bird.

  “Deity! What have you done, boy? Idiot! Hooligan! You’ve broken the eyepiece, and how I am ever going to remove it, let alone grind a replacement…” I was about to tell him I was glad if I had, but his attitude was so much that of outraged innocence that I was losing faith in my own inductions, and I merely stood stubborn. If this were not a brass gun aimed at Sordaling, I could not guess what it was. Then the charcoal fell out from where I had wedged it and Powl gave a great groan of relief. He put his eye to and made the sort of face one makes when looking hard. He twisted the adjustment.

  He began to laugh, with great good humor. Then he bade me look through. At last he told me what an astronomical observatory was.

  So I failed my first test and failed it spectacularly, and by all rights Powl should have booted me out the door then and there. He was always an inexplicable man, however, and as soon as he assured himself that my monkeying had not destroyed either the telescope nor the roof mechanism, he sat down on the platform steps and asked me to explain to him how I had concluded that the thing was a cannon aimed at the city. I remember, sitting lower, as I was, that his shoes were glossy, caramel brown with gold threads in the laces.

  I showed him the marks on the gears and explained how the sun’s disappearance from its obvious path of descent had clued me to the dome’s movement, and how the blockage (opaque, once past the test of charcoal) had led me to understand that the tube was hollow but closed at this end, and how the geography of the hill conspired to allow the tube to point straight down at the lamps of Sordaling and almost nowhere else, except at the empty sky. It had seemed obvious that no man would build such an enormous thing to look up into the empty sky.

  Powl congratulated me at having been so brilliantly wrong. In this he seemed (most unlike him) not ironical at all. That morning he set me the task of sitting still and thinking seriously about the twin concepts of what was obvious and what was empty.

  Perhaps if I had been easier to live with, Powl might have stopped more in the observatory with me, but I was nineteen, and the joints of my body were so fluid (so it seems, looking back) that it was less difficult to keep moving than it was to pause. Besides, I was totally unpracticed in the art of sitting still and very used to being kept hopping. I would begin the morning before light, getting wood for the stove, and by the time my teacher came to the five-hundred-weight door, I would have bathed and had breakfast ready—Powl’s second breakfast, I suspected, though I did not dare ask.

  Then he would set me to some bodily endeavor: sword forms or dancing strapped with meal sacks fore and aft or beating three over four on my knees, while he sat in the doorway and read a book brought with him for that purpose. Afterward, with the noon sun squeezing in through the high windows to whiten the dusty air, he would lecture on the subject of optics. I was not to take notes, but to remember.

  My responses to this branch of his curriculum were predictable. First I would twitch, then I would wiggle, and finally I would fall asleep. If free, I would paw the prisms and sample blanks from hand to hand and roll them down my knees until they were so covered with finger grease and woolen lint they were useless for illustration, and if tied (Powl resorted to tying me to the platform banister), I found myself subject to loud, distracting spells of asthma.

  My teacher was alarmed, and though I do not blame him, I think he must have had very little experience with boys. By the end of the first week he had shelved optics in favor of teaching me to sit still and listen. Another few days and he decided to concentrate further: on sitting still.

  “Nazhuret, I have a simple assignment for you,” he said, “I can guarantee you success in it.” We had been sparring with sword balks wrapped in rags when a sudden shower had caught us and driven us indoors.

  Though I had looked forward to the bout, I was equally glad to be distracted from it, for there is only so much sa
tisfaction to be won being rapped silly or knocked down repeatedly. I told him I was at his service.

  “This is not my service, but your own. I want you to sit down here—I’ll carry the chair into this comer here, facing right in to the bricks. Now I will lash your wrists to this very finely carved ornament and your feet to the little lion feet.”

  Having trussed me to his satisfaction, he leaned his head over my shoulder, ascertaining that my view was dull indeed, and clapped me on the shoulder. “There. Now I will leave you for exactly half an hour there, and you can shuffle and pant and

  wheeze to your heart’s content. I will trust to God you don’t stop breathing, but after all, that’s your business.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait, sir,” I called after. “What about my assignment? What is it I am to do while I sit here and wait for you?”

  I couldn’t turn enough to see Powl behind me, but I could hear him clear his throat, “Your assignment?”

  There were some moments of silence, and then he spoke. “You remember the country tale about the black wolf of Gelley that had nothing in its belly? Good. Well, your assignment is to consider all things in nature and without nature, but not the black wolf of Gelley. Understood: You do not think about that tale at all—anything else is acceptable. Pretty easy, hey?”

  I had one more question: “What if there’s a fire while you’re gone?” “Then you are a martyr to science,” said my teacher, and he walked out into the rain.

  I was tied in that spot every day for three weeks. The period of time was supposed to be half an hour, but I doubt it was ever that short. The observatory boasted no clock except the heavens. I can still close my eyes and see bricks before me, though at this remove I cannot say they are the same bricks. My breathing panics came and went, outlandish hungers came with their concomitant growls, spots wandered before my eyes, and always, always my thoughts made a regular, endless revolution around the black wolf of Gelley.

  I saw this ludicrous nursery rhyme as a large dusty thing, with a triangular face, many white triangular teeth, and a ballooning stomach, clear and hollow like sausage casing. Sometimes it was being outmaneuvered by the old wife, as in verse two, and sometimes being chased by the young smith with the pincers, as in the penultimate verse. Usually, however, it had already eaten the dickeybird, which was now peck-pecking a hole out of its glassine stomach. I felt a strong sympathy with this shaggy, unsuccessful beast, for every day Powl hauled up a day’s fresh provisions on his back or in a satchel under his arm, and every day it was not quite enough to fill me. He always seemed surprised.

  In my third week of residence I admitted my total failure to keep the damned black thing out of my thoughts, and suggested that extra nutrition might help me to concentrate. If it were the exchequer that was short (I felt diffident about suggesting this), I could gather and sell wood in the nearby townships.

  But Powl wanted me in the observatory for the next little while, he said. He would make the task easier. I need only avoid thinking of that hard, clear, and empty stomach itself; the rest of the wolf was free to me, along with the old wife, the young smith, and the dickeybird. Such riches.

  One morning I found I had ceased to care whether I was bound to the chair or not, for it was all the same by the end of the half hour, and as though at that signal, Powl stopped tying me. But I had no such luck as far as the essentials of the study were concerned. From the moment I applied buttock to brocade, my attention dove into the thwarted empty stomach of the black wolf. I strove against it, and the experience was not restful. I rose from the chair ready to sit myself right down again, but free of the wolf’s stomach.

  At the end of another week my hands were shaking. Had I had a mirror that was not concave, I’m certain it would have shown me looking much older. Then Powl, with a great show of concern, admitted he had misspoken himself and probably caused all my confusion. What he had meant to say was that I was forbidden only the nothing in the belly of the wolf; the membrane itself was fair play.

  In this manner I learned to sit still. It was a frightening thing, but I learned to live in the belly of the wolf. Ofttimes I wish there was still someone who would tie me up.

  We had an early winter. It seems all the large changes of my life take place at the year’s failing.

  Rain ate away all the colors of the leaves. The ground beneath the trees turned soggy black and then white with frost. I wore both my peasant shirts at once and was still blue-fingered, for no ingenious stove could heat a place with a slot in the roof covered only by canvas.

  Powl would come up the hill with his lantern like a small star through the woods. It might be as late as eight and a half o’morning, but it would still be dark in here. That yellow star was nearly the only one we saw that first season, as he was teaching me the nature of lenses and of the sky. I had to take his lessons (all his lessons) with a great deal of faith.

  He ground lenses in the weak daylight and I watched him, and then I ground mirrors for him (they are easier) as he lectured. I found it easier to grind and listen than just to listen. We tested the glass I worked by its spectra and convergence against a sheet of white paper glued to the wall, and sometimes my work ended as a telemetric mirror and sometimes it was a paperweight. Either way, Powl packed it all up and took it away again, down the hill, where I couldn’t follow.

  My first foreign language under Powl’s tutelage was Allec, the language of the arts, which (he explained) is the language of no one alive and therefore equally unfair to all students. I had thought I knew some Allec, since all the vocabulary of armory and court ménage is in that rusty tongue, but to Powl Allec was not a series of identifying nouns but a language like

  Zaquash or Modern Velonyie, in which one might haggle over fish, or describe where one found the bird sitting, which was not native to these inland hills.

  For three months we spoke nothing but Allec in the observatory. Powl became a different person in that language. Where in Modern Velonyie he was smooth and ironical, when he spoke Allec he became quick, rattling, pressing, acquisitive, even rapacious. One might sell carpets, having an intonation like Powl’s Allec intonation, and make a very good living at it, too.

  But Allec is the universal language of studies, and perhaps what was revealed there was only Powl’s character as a student rather than as a man of the world.

  My Allec personality was mute for many weeks.

  After the first few days of trying to translate everything in my mind into the damnable, shower-of-pebbles sounds, I suddenly began to think in Allec, and since I knew so very few Allec words, I could scarcely think, let alone communicate my simple desires. I remember standing in front of my teacher with tears in my eyes and a frying pan in my right hand, trying to tell him I could not get the burned egg off without some of his jeweler’s rouge, without knowing the word for egg or for washing. I would have used Velonyie, but at this point I had lost the use of the first language and not gained the second.

  It was about then that Powl brought me the bag of colored glass marbles—in illustration of some point of optics, no doubt—and I grabbed on to them with childish fervor. I carried marbles with me everywhere and kept a close record of my successes at eightsie and yard circles. I made charts of distance rolled according to color and to size. When I lost one—a red one—in the detritus of the earth closet Powl had me digging, I went into a panic that all my work would be invalidated.

  By New Year I had to be chided for talking to myself. In Allec. I was breaking down.

  Remember how alone I was, sir, with no company but that of Powl, and he there only from morning till midafternoon. I had thrown my future away without reflection and now lost the language of my mind as well. In return, what did I have? Only beginnings. I could grind lenses and only half needed to be thrown out. I could dance about seven exotic dances, but only alone, of course. I had a little bit of chattering Allec.

  I could listen and remember. Much better. Those, at least, much better.

 
Now that I no longer writhed like a cat in a bag when I sat in a chair, Powl no longer had to take his half-hour walks in the wintry woods. Mostly I practiced my attention after he had gone. I was very used to it, and in this one manner, at least, felt in command of my own mind. After a few weeks of this routine I felt a cramp in my leg calf and massaged it away, and was bucked up to find I felt as in command of myself in movement as I was on my buttocks. I got up and walked around the telescope platform, feeling very light and free and on top of things. I adjusted the telescope down to the horizon and experimented with observation in this state of mind.

  The next day I did not sit down at all, but set the clock to impose the state of attention upon myself and went directly to my Allec studies. After a few days of this I forgot the clock completely, and when Powl walked in on me, late one afternoon right after New Year, he found me on my knees with the marbles again, talking to myself and making noises with every strike.

  I felt him beside me just before he spoke. I looked up, feeling alarm and not knowing why; I had so completely forgotten what I was supposed to be doing.

  “I was afraid it was a mistake from the beginning,” he said. He walked to the storeroom, where he had stored my gentle clothes in a wax-lined box, like perishable fruit. “Take these. Go.

  “Out.”

  I was too shocked to remonstrate. I felt the blood drain from my face and hands so completely I could scarcely stand. Some small part of me wondered where it went. Only when dressed as a town buck again, standing in two inches of snow outside the steel-wrapped door, did it occur to me that I was ill used. That the punishment in no way fit the crime.

  I had nowhere to go; I was destitute. I had traded my future away, and if it was a very mediocre future, it was all I had, and had placed myself in that man’s power as completely as a dog. After five minutes I was shivering and I hadn’t moved.