Far-Seer qa-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Every day, ship’s priest Det-Bleen led a service. As the sun rose higher, the Face grew darker and darker, until only a crescent sliver was illuminated on the side toward the rising sun. A little before noon, with the sun arcing high across the sky and the crescent of illumination all but gone, the pilgrims would begin to chant.

  The sun, a tiny point compared to the great mauve circle of the unilluminated Face, came closer and closer and closer to the vast curving edge, and then, and then, and then…

  The sun disappeared.

  Gone.

  Behind the Face of God.

  God was dark and featureless.

  The whole sky dimmed.

  Moons, normally pale in the light of day, glowed with their nocturnal colors.

  Bleen would lead the pilgrims in prayers and songs, urging the sun to return.

  And it always did, about one and a quarter daytenths after it had vanished. The brilliant blue-white point emerged from the other side of the Face of God, lighting the sky again.

  Afsan watched this spectacle every day. As the sun slid toward the horizon, toward dusk, the Face, rock-steady at the zenith, would grow more and more illuminated, waxing from the side nearest the sun in the bowl of the sky. By the time the sun touched the waves of the River, the Face of God was more than half lit again.

  Afsan was always amazed by the beauty.

  And puzzled.

  But he knew he’d be able to figure it out.

  He knew it.

  *13*

  There has to be a way, Afsan said to himself, pacing the length of his tiny cabin. There has to be a way to make sense of my observations.

  Stars, planets, moons, the sun, even the Face of God itself. How did they fit together? How did they interrelate?

  Afsan tried grouping them into categories. The sun and the stars, for instance, were apparently self-illuminating. The planets, the moons, and, yes, the Face of God, seemed to shine by reflected light. No, no, it wasn’t that easy. Some of the planets seemed not to be self-illuminated, judging by the fact that they went through phases. But others, notably those highest in the night sky, did not go through phases. Perhaps those planets were self-illuminated. But that didn’t seem right. Two types of planets? Surely it was more likely that they were all the same.

  And what about the moons, those fast-moving disks in the firmament? They all went through phases, and with the far-seer every one of them showed surface details, even tiny Slowpoke.

  Afsan strained to think. In all his life, the only sources of light he’d ever observed were things aflame. Even the sun appeared to have the heat and brightness of a burning object. Candles, lamps, fires produced by campers for heat — on none of these had he ever observed surface details. No, the moons must be shining by reflected light. And what could the source of that light be? The sun seemed the only candidate.

  The thirteen moons were spherical — of that much Afsan was sure. He could see surface features that rotated around. Indeed, even without the far-seer, such details were obvious. Saleed had a globe of the Big One in his office, after all, made by Haltang, one of Afsan’s predecessors, from naked-eye observations.

  And the planets? Although still indistinct in the far-seer, they seemed to be spherical, too.

  Well, if the planets and moons were all ball-shaped, and all illuminated by the sun, then the phases must be simply the effect of seeing part of the lit and unlit sides simultaneously.

  He clenched his hand into a fist and held it up to the cabin’s flickering lamp. Moving it back and forth, left and right, he could indeed alter the amount of the visible portion that appeared to be illuminated, ranging from none, if he rose to his feet and placed the fist between his face and the lamp, to almost all, if he interposed the lamp between his eyes and hand.

  Afsan let himself down onto the floor, laying his belly against the reassuring solidity of the wooden planks. Why, he asked himself again, do only some of the planets go through phases?

  He stared at his cabin wall, the timbers creaking slightly, as they always did, under the tossing action of the waves. In one of the timbers was a knot, a darker swirling pattern of grain. Over time, it had dried and shrunk away from the surrounding wood so that it almost floated freely within the wall plank. Afsan had grown fond of this knot over the 130 nights he’d spent in this cabin. It wasn’t exactly a piece of art, but it did have a random aesthetic quality to it, and the swirling grain reminded him of the patterns across the Face of God.

  But, of course, unlike the Face of God, the knot was always completely visible. It didn’t go through phases…

  …because it was farther from the source of illumination than Afsan himself was!

  Of course, of course, of course. Afsan felt his blood surging. He pushed himself up to his feet again. Some of the planets were nearer to the sun than he was and some were farther away. That made perfect sense.

  Except.

  Except, how could it be thus? The perspective was all wrong. Surely it must be, rather, that in order of increasing distance from the great mass of Land we had some planets, and then the sun, and then some more planets.

  The paths they traveled in must be closed loops — probably circles — since astrological charts showed that the planets always came back to the same point in the sky, each in its own time. And those that underwent phases completed their circular paths more quickly than those that did not.

  Further, those that underwent phases never varied from their circular paths, whereas those that didn’t show phases would periodically go into a backwards motion. They would move in the opposite direction across the sky for a space of many days before returning to forward motion.

  Afsan headed up on deck, the great circle of the Face of God almost fully illuminated overhead, even though it was the middle of the night. He’d wanted to get something from the galley to help him visualize all this, but the spectacle made him stop in his tracks, lean back on his thick tail, and stare at the zenith, at the banded sphere covering a quarter of the sky.

  It was the middle of the night.

  The Dasheter and the River were in darkness.

  The sun was invisible, having set many daytenths ago, off to the west.

  It was the middle of the night.

  And the Face of God was fully illuminated.

  Afsan stared and stared and stared, his brain churning like the waters around the boat.

  The middle of the night.

  The Face aglow.

  God eyes moving up the widest part.

  Like shadows…

  He broke away from the mesmerizing sight, and, rubbing the base of his neck, headed off to the galley. All sorts of kitchen equipment were lying around: tools for scraping meat from bones — none could go to waste aboard a sailing vessel; metal basins for washing those tools; cutting boards and cleavers; salting trays; mallets with hundreds of metal teeth, used to tenderize the salted meats; racks of spices, important on long voyages to hide the taste of meat past its prime; devices for scaling fish; and so on. No one was in the galley, though, so Afsan simply helped himself to what he needed. In a storage trough he found glass flasks holding hard-boiled wingfinger eggs in brine. He grabbed a couple of flasks and headed back to his chamber. As he crossed the deck, he again looked up at the enigmatic, swirling Face.

  Once back in his cabin, he removed his lamp from the brass hook that normally held it in place. Gingerly, for Afsan knew how careful one must be with any source of flame on a wooden boat, he set the lamp on the creaking timbers in the center of the floor. He got pieces of decorative clothing out of his storage trough, including his prayer neckband, the multi-pouched waistband he used for carrying things, the red leather cap he’d received after his first day’s chores, symbolizing his honorary membership in the Dasheter’s crew, and three of his apprenticeship sashes. The leather sashes showed signs of alterations by the palace tailor. Pog-Teevio, the previous apprentice astrologer, who had lasted all of thirty days before Saleed had sent him back to Chu’
toolar, had been older and much stockier than Afsan.

  Afsan set these pieces of material at various places on the floor. He then opened a flask and pulled out a wingfinger egg. He wiped off the brine and put the egg on one of the pieces of clothing he had placed on the floor, the folds of fabric preventing the egg from rolling despite the pitching of the ship. He continued until he had nine laid out. Some he put near the lamp, some far away, some toward the port side of the chamber, some along the starboard. Afsan then stood in the center of his collection of eggs, towering over the flickering lamp, and looked down.

  By the prophet’s claws, it made sense! He could see that no matter where it was in the tiny room, exactly half of each egg was illuminated, just as he suspected half of each planet was illuminated by the sun. Afsan then lay on the floor, the timbers cool beneath him. Although Afsan sanded the part of the floor he slept on from time to time, most of the rest was ticked and scarred by his footclaws and those of previous pilgrims.

  He felt the ship swaying slowly back and forth beneath him, felt his stomach rise and fall on the crest and troughs of waves. Taking care not to get slivers from the boards, Afsan positioned himself next to one of the tiny eggs, his muzzle flat on the floor. From this point of view, those eggs between him and the lamp representing the sun were almost invisible — at most a narrow crescent was illuminated. That one over there, perpendicular to the lamp from him, was a gibbous shape, more than half lit up. And there, another egg gibbous in the opposite way. And that one, on the other side of the lamp, illuminated almost fully. And that one, all but lost in the glare of the flickering flame.

  Could it be? Could it be? The sun at the center of the planets? But that made no sense. If the sun was at the center, then the planets would have to move in circular paths around it, not around Land. That was absurd.

  Absurd.

  The ship groaned beneath him.

  Afsan then thought about the moons. This model would not work for them, could not explain their appearance. The moons had to be illuminated by the sun, too, just as the planets were. But they couldn’t be moving in circular paths around the sun. They were so big, so much closer, apparently, to Land than the planets, and completed their phase cycles in a matter of days, not kilodays. But they must be traveling in circular paths, too, for did they not endlessly move across a narrow band of the sky? What could they be revolving around?

  Afsan slapped his tail against the deck. The eggs jumped. What could it be?

  He got up, moved to his workbench, pulled out a few of his precious writing leathers and his pots of ink and solvent, and began to scribble notes, sketch configurations, try various calculations. It was long, long after the sun had risen, its bluish-white rays jagged around the edges of the leather curtain over Afsan’s porthole, that he finally rinsed off his middle fingerclaw, washing away the ink, and stared at what he’d drawn, at the only arrangement that seemed to work.

  Sun at the center.

  Planets moving around the sun.

  Moons moving around one of the planets, casting small round shadows on it.

  And Land itself on one of those moons!

  It all fit.

  He knew he was right, knew this must be the truth. He clicked his teeth in satisfaction. But then the Dasheter’s bells-and-drums identification call split the air. Suddenly he realized what time it was and he ran off to perform his shipboard chores.

  *14*

  The Dasheter’s four sails had been furled upon the ship’s arrival here, directly beneath the Face of God. The great sheets, each with a symbol of the prophet, were now rolled into tight bundles tied against horizontal booms at the top of each mast. The brass pulleys and pivots of the rigging were lashed down so that they wouldn’t endlessly clink together.

  Webbings of rope ran up the side of each mast, the interweave loose enough to allow a hand or foot easy purchase. Standing on the ship’s foredeck, wooden planks creaking beneath him, Afsan looked up at the lead mast. Although he knew it to be of constant thickness from top to bottom, the mast seemed to taper as it reached for the sky. The rope webbing hung loosely to one side, the breeze only occasionally strong enough to move the heavy cords. The mast swung dizzyingly from port to starboard and back again, the topmost part slicing through the sky like an inverted pendulum. At the pinnacle was the lookout’s bucket, so tiny, so far way.

  And behind it all, gloriously, the Face of God, now slightly less than half lit in the morning sun. Bands of orange and beige roiled across its oblate shape.

  Now that they’d arrived at the halfway point of their voyage, new lists of chores had been distributed. For the duration of the trip, Afsan would be responsible for a shift in the lookout’s bucket every ten days. Today was his first.

  The climb up to the bucket looked arduous and frightening. Still, whoever was up there now — Afsan half closed his nictitating membrane to cut the glare from the Face high above — Mar-Biltog, it looked like — would already be mad that Afsan was late in relieving him. Given the tight confines of the ship, displeasing another was never prudent, and Biltog was particularly short-tempered. Afsan reached out to grab the web of ropes.

  By hand and foot, he pulled himself up. His tail lifted from the deck, and he felt the weight of it dangling behind him. He tilted his head up to counterbalance it.

  The climb was indeed difficult; Afsan was not used to such effort, and having been aboard the Dasheter for over 130 days now, with no room to run, he was perhaps a tad out of shape. The sun, bright over his shoulder, felt good on his back as he continued up. But with each successive body-length of height, the mast swayed through wider and wider arcs. It was uncomfortably like scaling the neck of that giant thunderbeast. Afsan briefly closed his inner and outer eyelids, trying to fight vertigo. He’d resisted motion sickness throughout the voyage so far; he’d be strung up by his tail sooner than give in to it now — especially since, with the swaying of the mast, he’d probably leave a wide swath of vomit on the deck below.

  Higher and higher still. The mast, brown and old, still showed the chopping marks of the blades that had hewn it. Afsan decided it was better to focus on those marks rather than on the sight of the bucket swinging wildly back and forth between the lit and unlit hemispheres of the Face of God. Unlike the thunderbeast’s weaving neck, the rocking back and forth of the Dasheter was fairly regular. With an effort of will, Afsan found that he could anticipate it, and that helped quell his stomach.

  His hands were getting tired and sore from the climb. His feet were too callused to be hurt by the ropes, but Afsan had forgotten just how heavy his own tail was. Still, he pressed on and at last made it to the top of the mast.

  The webbing came right up to the lip of the bucket. The bucket itself was made of vertical planks arranged in a circle. Biltog, standing within, did not look happy.

  "You’re late," he said.

  Afsan couldn’t execute a proper bow while still holding on to the climbing web, but he dipped his head as much as he could. "My apologies. I simply lost track of time."

  Biltog snorted. "If there’s one skill I’d expect an astrologer to have, it would be precise timekeeping." Afsan dipped his head again. "I’m sorry." Biltog nodded curtly and hauled himself out of the bucket, grabbing onto the web of ropes next to Afsan. For his part, Afsan swung first one leg and then the other into the bucket. It was good to be able to lean back, putting all his weight on his tail.

  His job up here was simple: scan the horizon for anything out of the ordinary. The view was spectacular. Far below were the twin diamond hulls of the Dasheter, connected by the thick joining piece. He could see Quintaglios moving about the deck. Even at this late date, it was easy to tell crewmembers from pilgrims, for only the former walked with complete steadiness across the swaying deck.

  Afsan was amused by the dances of the individuals, how each changed course to give everyone else wide clearance as they passed. He had never seen it from this perspective before. The smaller — and therefore younger — Quinta
glios always started to veer out of the way first, but even the oldest would also make at least a token effort to move aside as well. The pattern wasn’t as smooth as that drawn by objects in the sky, but it seemed to be nearly as predictable.

  Looking out to the horizon, there was nothing but water, an endless liquid vista, waves moving from east to west. There was something soothing about the unembellished vastness.

  Afsan rotated slowly in the bucket, scanning the horizon through a complete circle. Nothing broke the waves anywhere. So simple, so uncomplicated.

  And yet, as he looked, it seemed, perhaps, that the horizon fell off to his left and right. It didn’t matter which direction he looked, the effect was the same. Perhaps, maybe, hard to say. But it looked like it curved away. Or is that just me seeing what I want to see? Afsan thought. Last night, he’d convinced himself of something new: that the world was round. Now he was even claiming that he could see the roundness.

  And yet. And yet. The effect was persistent. No matter how hard he tried to force his eyes not to see the gentle sloping, it was always visible, always there just at the edge of certainty.

  Overhead, though, was the most glorious sight of all. In the time it had taken Afsan to climb the mast, the Face of God had gone from almost half lit to a fat crescent, a vast sickle of orange and yellow and brown arcing across a fourth of the sky.

  Afsan tilted his head back, his tail bowing under the shift in weight, and looked straight up. What are you? he wondered.

  Are you God?

  The Prophet Larsk had certainly thought so. When he’d been a child, Afsan, like all his age, had memorized Larsk’s original proclamations, the speeches the prophet had made in the central square of what is now Capital City. "I have gazed upon the Face of God," Larsk had said. "I have seen the very countenance of our creator…"