by Brian Aldiss
‘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 call 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 fidgeted.
‘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 big 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.’
‘Exactly what I believe. It is now 446 years since Freyr was at its feeblest. Batalix never changes its light intensity. Freyr does – for some reason. Once, I believed that it grew bright or dim at random. But now I think that the universe is no more random than a stream is random. There are causes for things; the universe is a machine, like this astronomical clock which seeks to imitate it. Freyr is getting brighter because it approaches – no, vice versa – we approach Freyr. It’s hard to shake off the old ways of thought when they are embedded in the language. In the new language, the Half Roon and the Roon are approaching the Five Roons …’
He fiddled with the little ribbons on his beard. Vry watched him thinking over her statement.
‘Why is the approach theory preferable to the dim-bright theory?’
She clapped her hands. ‘What a clever question to ask. If Batalix doesn’t fluctuate from dim to bright, why should Freyr? The Half Roon always approaches the Roon, though the Roon always moves out of the way. So I think the Roon approaches the Five Roons in the same way – taking the Half-Roon with it. Which brings us to the eclipses.’ She circulated the two lower denomination coins again.
‘You see how the Half Roon reaches a point each year where observers on it – you and I – would not see the Five because the One would get in the way? That is an eclipse.’
‘So why isn’t there an eclipse every year? It spoils all your theory if one part of it is wrong, just as a hoxney won’t run with only three legs.’
You’re smart, she thought – much smarter than Dathka or Laintal Ay – and I like clever men, even when they’re unscrupulous.
‘Oh, there’s a reason for it, which I can’t properly demonstrate. That’s why I am trying to build this model. I’ll show you soon.’
He smiled and took her slender hand again. She trembled as if she were down the brassimip tree.
‘You shall have that craftsman here tomorrow, working in gold to your specifics, if you will agree to be mine and let me publish the news. I want you close – in my bed.’
‘Oh, you’ll have to wait … please … please …’ She fell trembling into his arms as he clutched her. His hands moved over her body seeking her narrow contours. He does want me, she thought, in a whirl, he wants me in a way Dathka doesn’t dare. He’s more mature, far more intelligent. He’s not half so bad as they make out. Shay Tal was wrong about him. She was wrong about a lot of things. Besides, manners are different in Oldorando now and, if he wants me, he shall have me …
‘The bed,’ she gasped, tearing at his clothes. ‘Quick, before I change my mind. I’m so divided … Quick, I’m ready. Open.’
‘Oh, my trousers, have a care …’ But he was pleased by her haste. She felt, she saw, his rising excitement, as he lowered his bulk onto her. She groaned as he laughed. She had a vision of the two of them, one flesh, whirling among the stars in the grip of a great universal power, anonymous, eternal …
The hospice was new and not yet complete. It stood near the fringes of the town, extending from what had been called Prast’s Tower in the old days. Here came those travellers who had fallen sick on their journeyings. Across the street was the establishment of a veterinary surgeon which received sick animals.
Both hospice and surgery had a bad name – it was claimed that the tools of their respective trades were interchangeable; but the hospice was efficiently run by the first woman member of the apothecary’s corps, a midwife and teacher at the academy known to all as Ma Scantiom, after the flowers with which she insisted on decking the wards under her command.
A slave took Laintal Ay to her. She was a tall sturdy person of middle age, with plenty of bosom, and a kindly expression on her face. One of her aunts had been Nahkri’s woman. She and Laintal Ay had been on good terms for many years.
‘I’ve two patients in an isolation ward I want you to see,’ she said, selecting a key from a number that hung at her belt. She had discarded hoxneys in favour of a long saffron apron-dress which hung almost to the floor.
Ma Scantiom unlocked a sturdy door at the rear of her office.
They went thr
ough into the old tower and climbed the ramps until they were at the top.
From somewhere below them came the sound of a clow, played by a convalescent patient. Laintal Ay recognised the tune: ‘Stop, Stop, Voral River.’ The rhythm was fast, yet with a melancholy which matched the useless exhortation of the chorus. The river ran and would not stop, no, not for love or life itself …
Each floor of the tower had been divided into small wards or cells, each with a door with a grille set in it. Without a word, Ma Scantiom slid back the cover over the grille and indicated that Laintal Ay was to look through.
There were two beds in the cell, each bearing a man. The men were almost naked. They lay in locked positions, nearly rigid but never entirely still. The man nearest the door, who had a thick mane of black hair, lay with his spine arched and his hands clenched together above his head. He was grinding his knuckles against the stone wall so that they seeped blood, which ran down the blue-veined paths of his arms. His head rolled stiffly at awkward angles. He caught sight of Laintal Ay at the grille, and his eyes tried to fix on him, but the head insisted on its continued slow-motion movement. Arteries in his neck stood out like cord.
The second patient, lying below the window, held his arms folded tight into his chest. He was curling himself into a ball and then unrolling, at the same time waggling his feet back and forth so that the little bones cracked. His gaze, distraught, moved between floor and ceiling. Laintal Ay recognised him as the man who had collapsed in the street.
Both men were deathly pale and glistening with sweat, the pungent smell of which filtered out of the cell. They continued to wrestle with invisible assailants as Laintal Ay drew the cover across the grille.
‘The bone fever,’ he said. He stood close to Ma Scantiom, seeking out her expression in the thick shadow.
She merely nodded. He followed down the ramps behind her.
The clow was still wearily playing.