by Nadia Aguiar
A parrot squawked, bringing the conversation to a stop as everyone turned to look at Helix, who had come quietly down the stairs and had been listening to everything unfold. The señoras’ eyes lit up when they saw him.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said General Alvaro, taking off his hat. “There’s no mistaking your face.”
Dr. Bellagio was speechless for a moment. “I’m very glad to see you alive and well, young man,” he said finally. “Your aunts searched for you faithfully since the day you went missing. It—it’s been a very long time.”
Helix could not have looked any more uncomfortable. The señoras dabbed their eyes.
Seeing his opportunity, Dr. Bellagio cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt such momentous reunions, but I have important news. Word just reached Floriano that Isabella Obrado escaped from the Red Man—she’s raising an army and planning a revolt against the Outsiders! People say the army will be here today!”
Simon breathed a deep sigh of relief and smiled. Isabella was safe! Suddenly everything seemed more possible. Isabella was free and she was determined to stop the Red Coral. And a determined Isabella was a formidable ally. He remembered the look in her eye as she had pushed them over the waterfall.
“But that’s not all…” Dr. Bellagio went on. “I found this just inside the gate on my way up the hill,” he said, smartly handing Señora Rojo the newspaper that had been tucked under his arm. When she refused to take it from him, he opened it himself and everyone stepped forward for a closer look.
“It’s the Gazette Extraordinario,” said Maya wonderingly. “And it’s a brand-new copy!”
At first Simon thought Maya must be wrong. It couldn’t be a new copy—the señoras said no one had printed a newspaper in Tamarind for years. But it was. It was the same size, it had the same name and the same typeface, and it bore the unmistakable scent of fresh ink. There was nothing sensible printed in it, just a jumble of letters.
Señora Rojo examined it closely. “It’s from the old Printing House in Rivas, I’m sure of it,” she said excitedly. “The pattern on the edge of the paper is identical—it’s from the old machines!”
Milagros’s words returned to Simon again: What appears dead is alive. Someone was sending them a message, and he knew who it was.
“How far away is Rivas?” Simon asked.
“About ten miles, just northeast of here,” said Señora Rojo.
“Well, if no one else has any announcements or surprises we may as well go inside and figure out what to do,” said Señora Medrano.
They all trooped inside and settled around the long wooden table in the kitchen. Helix reported everything he had seen in the North of the island. The general listened intently to his accounts of the numbers and movements of the troops of Maroong. Simon updated the general and Dr. Bellagio about the ophallagraphs. “We know that it’s essential that we close Faustina’s Gate,” he said. “And we have all the tools now. But we still don’t know how to get to it or how it works.”
There was a sober pause. General Alvaro pressed his lips together and his jowls quivered; Dr. Bellagio stroked his silver moustache; and the señoras’ wrinkled walnut faces grew very serious.
“The Red Coral are supposed to open the new mine later today,” said Simon. “There’s hardly any time left. And we still don’t know where Faustina’s Gate is. General Alvaro, would you contact the colonels and mobilize the town? I’m sure that Isabella will make contact with us very soon. When she does we need to be able to tell her that Floriano is ready to join her in the fight. We know Dr. Fitzsimmons is looking for the Pamela Jane—we’ve got to get her somewhere safe as soon as possible. Helix, Milagros told us that if we really needed her again we could put a zala root in Seagrape’s talons and she would fly to her. I think we need her help now.
“Finally, this newspaper…” He slid the new copy of the Gazette to the middle of the table. “I’m pretty sure I know who printed it, and I’m sure he can help us figure out what we’re supposed to do at Faustina’s Gate and how we can get there. I propose that I leave right away for the Printing House in Rivas. This paper”—he tapped it—“is an invitation.”
General Alvaro looked at Simon with something akin to admiration. “That’s the soundest plan I’ve heard since Hetty’s Pass,” he said. “And I came up with that myself.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Mad Inventor • An Explanation, at Last • A Very Old Radio
There was a peculiar sallow cast to the air when Simon reached Rivas later that morning on the back of one of Señora Medrano’s ostrillos. The village was in a state of damp, lichen-chewed decay. Washerwomen beat laundry on stones down by the river and children sailed homemade toy boats in the lazy eddies. Lanky cranes waded on the shores of the river, and the sweet reek of low tide hung in the air. The cobblestone streets, smoothed by time and the traffic of cart wheels, were buckled here and there from tree roots, and the town, mossy in its shadowed bits, was slowly turning to rubble. Simon asked for directions and finally a bent old crone pointed him down a series of streets to a dilapidated brick warehouse on the far side of the town.
The building’s windows were boarded up and its doors locked and chained. The yard around it was deserted. The place looked abandoned. Simon tied the ostrillo to a fence post in the shade and left it eating weedflowers. He had to walk twice around the perimeter before he discovered that a door at the rear of the building was askance on its hinges. He pushed it to one side and, with a last deep breath of fresh air, turned his shoulders and slid inside.
It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The breeze that had entered with him was swallowed by the great vault of stale air, and Simon heard before he saw the warbling pigeons crowding the eaves. Their droppings frosted the tops of printing equipment, and the floor was littered with the broken shells of eggs that had hatched or fallen from nests in the rafters. A light snow of termite dust sifted down from the ceilings and spiders big as octopuses shifted in the corners.
Simon began to feel sure he had made a mistake. How could anything still be running here? It didn’t look as if anyone had even set foot in the place for years. He made his way past stacks of rotting paper and rusting hulks of machinery with unoiled wheels and turbines that hadn’t turned in decades. A thick cushion of dust covered everything. It looked as if the señoras had been wrong—the new copy of the Gazette must have come from elsewhere. When time was so precious, Simon had wasted hours getting here, and would now go back empty-handed. His disappointment was keen.
But then, to his surprise, he heard a soft scraping sound. He kept going, treading carefully on the rotting floorboards.
As he went farther into the building, he sensed that something was stirring. Some tremor of life traveled through the air. A turning of wheels and gears; the simmer of a Bunsen burner; the sound of paper rubbing against paper; of feet shuffling on a creaky floor.
Someone was deep in the Printing House.
Simon proceeded gingerly. When he reached a lighted doorway he stopped.
“Davies Maroner?” he asked.
* * *
The man standing in the room at the end of the Printing House was exactly what Simon would have expected a mad inventor to look like. His white hair was wild and frazzled, as if he had been playing with electricity. More hair spouted from his ears. He reminded Simon of a very old lemur. His clothes were streaked with grime and grit, and thick rims of dirt were buried deep beneath his fingernails. Long-ago chemical burns had healed patchily on his hands and arms. But deep in his wrinkled face his eyes were bright and lively. Though he moved with a limp, he was still spry, and he stepped quickly to Simon and shook his hand energetically.
“Pleased to see you, young Outsider,” Davies Maroner said warmly. “You’ve come from a world far away! It is my privilege to meet you!”
Simon had first suspected that Davies was alive when he kept hearing conflicting accounts of how the scientist-inventor had died, but it was
n’t until they received the new copy of the Gazette that he felt certain. Davies was the person the Dark Women of the Extraordinary Generation had turned to for help to find a way of hiding the secret they had kept hidden for hundreds of years. He had invented ophallagraphs and created the triptych, and Simon had high hopes that he would be able to shed light on Faustina’s Gate. Simon felt sure that only a scientist could answer the big questions he still had, and he was nearly trembling with excitement at the chance to talk to the clever and unusual man.
“When I learned you were pursuing clues in the ophallagraphs I hoped that we would have real time to speak with each other,” said Davies. “But we both know how little time is left, so I’ll share with you what I know as quickly as I can. Please, please, have a seat! You wish, I’m sure, to hear what I know about Faustina’s Gate.” Davies did not stand still as he spoke, but hopped nimbly here and there, fiddling with knobs and opening and shutting things.
Simon sat obediently on an overturned box. He wasn’t surprised that Davies somehow knew who he was, or that he had summoned him here—Davies seemed to be everywhere and know everything. Simon felt as if he already knew him. Even his voice sounded oddly familiar.
“Yes,” he said excitedly. “Faustina’s Gate. Do you know where it is?”
But Davies shook his head ruefully.
Simon’s heart sank. If Davies didn’t know, who did?
“I’ve gone in search of it many times, but never found it,” said Davies. “No one alive today—even Milagros—has ever been inside it. But never fear, never fear! I have found many smaller ophalla gates and I base my theories about Faustina’s Gate on those. Don’t worry, young Outsider. I wouldn’t have called you here today if I couldn’t help you.”
“I still don’t know how Faustina’s Gate can help Tamarind,” said Simon. “I still don’t even really know what it is.”
“Yes, yes,” said Davies cheerfully. “It took me many years to figure out. Let me try to explain my theory. Faustina’s Gate, you see, is one of many ‘gates’ in Tamarind that help control the amount of ophalla sediment that reaches the Blue Line. The Blue Line requires a high concentration of ophalla in order to remain stable and support the life of all the marine organisms specially adapted to Tamarind’s waters.”
Simon listened carefully.
“Faustina’s Gate isn’t a real gate,” continued Davies. “It’s actually just a deep hole. Like a very, very deep well made naturally out of ophalla. At the foot of the well are underground, water-filled tunnels that run for miles until they open into deep-sea vents. These vents release pure ophalla into the sea around Tamarind. When this free-floating ophalla reaches the open sea, a type of natural barrier is formed—the Blue Line—separating Tamarind’s waters from the Outside ocean.”
“So Faustina’s Gate acts as a direct conduit to the Blue Line,” said Simon.
“Exactly,” said Davies. “Now, the Blue Line isn’t really a line, it’s the outer edge of a gyre—a circular body of water that surrounds Tamarind. There is very little mixing of the water inside the gyre with the water outside it.”
In the corner something in a crude iron pot bubbled softly and Simon heard the low whine of a radio coming from behind a curtain.
“Usually this replenishment happens through a natural—if often slow—process of percolation,” explained Davies. “The ophalla in the earth in Tamarind breaks down naturally and percolates into a deep system of aquatic caves that run beneath the island, then it’s released offshore.”
In a flash Simon understood. “But all the mining means there’s not enough ophalla reaching the Blue Line!” he exclaimed.
Davies nodded.
“And the Blue Line is breaking down,” said Simon in amazement.
“Yes,” said Davies soberly.
Simon remembered the news reports back at home about the mysterious glowing sea creatures found dead. The Blue Line was weak: That’s how the creatures were getting through! Suddenly it was starting to make sense.
Davies leaned forward and spoke slowly to emphasize what he was about to say next. “The Blue Line is the key to the whole ecosystem of Tamarind,” he said. “Everything alive in Tamarind today relies on the health of the Blue Line. Even the relatively small amount of ophalla that the Red Coral have removed from the earth has severe repercussions on the concentration of ophalla in the Blue Line. And once the line is compromised, lifeforms on the Outside can breach Tamarind’s waters, causing destruction of species not equipped to withstand them. That’s why you’re seeing sea life dying. Life on land is beginning to follow. A domino effect gets set off through the whole ecosystem, including shifts in weather patterns—we’re only seeing the beginnings of this now. Because Tamarind is such a small system, really, the changes can happen very fast. The danger is that if the Blue Line finally collapses, it will be sudden, not gradual.”
Thunder grumbled ominously in the distance and just then the heavens opened and heavy rain pelted the tin roof of the Printing House.
“So destroying the Blue Line would destroy Tamarind,” said Simon gravely.
Davies nodded. “The best I can figure, the island would become a denuded rock. The intense variety and richness of life—all the native species, plant and animal, that have evolved here and exist nowhere else—everything would perish. Oh, over many hundreds of years, plants and animals from the Outside would colonize Tamarind, but then it would just be an ordinary island, like any other. Tamarind as we know it would cease to exist.”
“And at first it would all be like the Neglected Provinces,” said Simon.
“Yes,” said Davies. “Like the heart of the Neglected Provinces, where not even a sandbug can survive.”
They were silent for a moment.
“So,” asked Simon. “How can Faustina’s Gate help? You said that it’s only one of many gates?”
“That’s true,” said Davies. “It is, however, perhaps the oldest and biggest, made up of the most concentrated ophalla. The ancients knew about it long ago. Percolation, as you would imagine, is a very slow process, but the gate may offer us a way to speed up the release of ophalla from Tamarind to the Blue Line. Somehow—and I still haven’t figured out how—closing the gate triggers ophalla to be released into the sea.
“You see,” he said urgently, “it’s too late to just stop the Red Coral from mining—too much damage has already been done. The process must be reversed! Faustina’s Gate must be closed in order to release more ophalla into the sea to bolster the Blue Line!”
Simon listened intently. In the background he was dimly aware of the sound of static every now and then. “And somehow the tools we found that were hidden in the ophallagraphs will help us close the gate,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Davies. “Now, did you bring the triptych with you?”
Simon took the ophallagraphs out and their glow spilled into the dusty room, illuminating bracket fungi growing out of the floorboards and cobwebs thick as smoke in the corners.
“They did work!” said Davies, beaming. He regarded the ophallagraphs with the pride of an artist admiring his work. “I wasn’t convinced they would. It was quite a tricky process to refine the ophalla crystals enough to be able to use them. Then of course there was the problem of pigmentation. Not to mention the biggest thing—knowing if such small crystals would respond the way I wanted them to when the time came.”
“We have the tools now,” Simon said. “The mineral-fruits, the ophalla key, the stopwatch. But how do they work? What do we do with them?”
Davies Maroner shook his head. “Regrettably, I can’t help you with that,” he said. “I just don’t know. The secret of Faustina’s Gate was shared and passed down by the Dark Women over the centuries. Dark Women never tell ordinary Tamarinders their secrets. Milagros only told me parts of it, never the whole. People from the Extraordinary Generation who she had entrusted with parts of the secret came to me with pictures of the mineral-fruits, the umbrella, the Pamela Jane, and so on—a
ll the things you’ve already discovered in the images. I assembled these fragments without knowing their full significance. I never saw the actual tools that you’ve now found.”
He looked at the images. “I added the Blue Door myself because I knew whoever would eventually try to solve it would need help,” he said. “And the birds—yes, they were hints in honor of Milagros, who had risked her life to help me at a time that was very dangerous for Dark Women! The people who gave me parts of the secret told me that certain elements of the images were especially important, so I pointed the birds toward those things, but they never told me why they were important. After I had created the ophallagraphs, I had to go into hiding, which was my agreement with Milagros. That’s why I spread so many stories about my death.”
Simon sat quietly, processing everything Davies had told him.
Now he knew that Faustina’s Gate was linked to the Blue Line, and the Blue Line was responsible for the health and survival of everything in Tamarind. He knew that if the Blue Line was destroyed, Tamarind as they knew it would disappear.
What Davies hadn’t been able to tell him was where Faustina’s Gate was, or how to use the tools.
Simon heard the squeak of a pigeon’s wings overhead. He looked all around the room at tables set up with Bunsen burners and microscopes, scattered piles of notes, twisted bits of wire, chipped ophalla stones, and all sorts of other oddities.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” said Davies, picking up a piece of ophalla and looking at it reverently as he slid it under a microscope. “I find it utterly mesmerizing.”
He motioned for Simon to look. In the grainy, suffused light that the stone emitted, Simon could make out an irregular honeycomb pattern. For a second he thought he saw an almost imperceptible movement, then it was gone. It must be his tiredness. He rubbed his eyes.
Just then Simon heard the crackling again, followed by a hissing, whining noise. Davies must have some sort of radio back there. Suddenly Simon realized where he had heard Davies’s voice before: in his father’s study when he had gone to collect the compass right before they had left for Tamarind! Simon pulled the curtain aside and saw a very old radio purring on top of a table. He looked sharply at Davies.
