Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  “‘By my hand,’” read Carmen, “‘I have caused these letters to be writ. Blessings on the Department of Agriculture and on you, Dean. Blessings on Jesus Sower, the Christ you serve.’”

  “Skip to the end, dear.” Sandy had little patience for the formalities of academic correspondence, and less for the pretense at holiness the Agriculturalists made with their little fruiting Christ.

  “‘So, then, it is seen in these texts that Cartography has corrected the error so far as in our power, and now the burden is passed to you and your brethren to complete this holy task, and return the land to that of Jesus’s vision.’” Carmen paused. “Then you promise to remember the Dean in your prayers and all the rest of the politesse.”

  “Good. Everything observed. Make two copies and bring the original to me for sealing when you’re done.”

  Carmen turned to her work and Sandy to hers. The ashen landscape extending up the valley was still except for some ribbons twisting in a light breeze. The ribbons were wax sealed to the parchment banner her students had set at first light, the new map of the valley floor drawn in red and black against a cream background. Someone had found the blackened disc of the Forestry student’s medallion and leaned it against the base of the banner’s staff, and Sandy wondered if it had been Carmen, prone to sentiment, or perhaps Lucas, prone to vague gestures.

  By midmorning, the students had readied their gear for the march up the ridge line and Carmen had dropped Sandy’s package for the university in the mailbox by the bus stop. Before they hoisted their backpacks, though, Sandy gathered them all for fellowship and prayer.

  “The gymnasiums at the University have made us fit enough for this task,” and here she made a playful flex with her left arm, earning rolled eyes from Lucas and a chuckle from the rest. “The libraries have given us the woodscraft we need, and the chapels have given us the sustenance of our souls.”

  Sandy swept her arm north to south, indicating the ridge. “When I was your age, oh so long ago—” and a pause here for another ripple of laughter, acknowledgment of her dual status as youngest tenured faculty member at the university and youngest ordained minister in the curia. “When I was your age, I was blessed with the opportunity to go to the Northeast, traveling the lands beyond the Susquehanna, searching out error.”

  Sandy smiled at the memory of those times—could they be ten years gone already? “I traveled with men and women strong in the Lord, soldiers and scholars of God. There are many errors in the Northeast.”

  Maps so brittle with age that they would flake away in the cold winds of the Adirondack passes, so faded that only the mightiest of prayers would reveal Jesus’s true intentions for His world.

  “But none here in the heartlands of the Church, right? Isn’t that what our parish priests told us growing up?” The students recognized that she was beginning to teach and nodded, murmured assent.

  “Christians, there is error here. There is error right before our eyes!” Her own students weren’t a difficult congregation to hook, but she was gratified nonetheless by the gleam she caught in most of their eyes, the calls, louder now, of “Yes!” and “I see it! I see the lie!”

  “I laid down my protractor, friends, I know exactly how far off north Jesus mapped this ridge line to lay,” she said, sweeping her arm in a great arc, taking in the whole horizon, “And that ridge line sins by two degrees!”

  “May as well be two hundred!” said Carmen, righteous.

  Sandy raised her hand, stopped them at the cusp of celebration instead of loosing them. “Not yet,” she said. “It’s tonight. It’s tonight we’ll sing down the glory, tonight we’ll make this world the way it was mapped.”

  The march up the ridge line did not go as smoothly as Sandy might have wished, but the delays and false starts weren’t totally unexpected. She’d known Lucas—a country boy after all—would take the lead, and she’d guessed that he would dead-end them into a crumbling gully or two before he picked the right route through the brambles. If he’d been some kind of natural-born hunter he would never have found his way to the Lord, or to education.

  Ford and his friends—all of them destined for lecture halls and libraries, not fieldwork—made the classic, the predicted mistake she’d specifically warned against in the rubric she’d distributed for the expedition. “If we’re distributing 600 pounds of necessities across twenty-two packs,” she asked Ford, walking easily beside him as he struggled along a game trail, “how much weight does that make each of us responsible for?”

  “A little over twenty-seven pounds, ma’am,” he said, wheezing out the reply.

  “And did you calculate that in your head like a mathematician or did you remember it from the syllabus?” Sandy asked. She didn’t press too hard; the harshness of the lesson was better imparted by the straps cutting into his shoulders than by her words.

  “I remembered it,” Ford said. And because he really did have the makings of a great scholar and great scholars are nothing if not owners of their own errors, he added, “It was in the same paragraph that said not to bring too many books.”

  “Exactly,” she said, untying the leather cords at the top of his pack and pulling out a particularly heavy-looking volume. She couldn’t resist looking at the title page before dropping it into her own pack.

  “Unchurched Tribes of the Chiapas Highlands: A Bestiary. Think we’ll make it to Mexico on this trip, Ford?” she asked him, teasing a little.

  Ford’s faced reddened even more from her attention than it had from the exertions of the climb. He mumbled something about migratory patterns then leaned into the hike.

  If most of the students were meeting their expectations of themselves and one another, then Carmen’s sprightly, sure-footed bounding up the trail was a surprise to most. Sandy, though, had seen the girl in the gym far more frequently than the other students, most of whom barely met the minimum number of visits per week required by their advising committees. Carmen was as much an athlete as herself, and the lack of concern the girl showed about dirt and insects was refreshing.

  So it was Carmen who summitted first, and it was she that was looking northeast with a stunned expression on her face when Sandy and Lucas reached the top side by side. Following Carmen’s gaze, Lucas cursed and called for help in taking off his heavily laden pack before he began unrolling the oilcloth cases of his instruments.

  Sandy simply pursed her lips and began a mental review of her assets: the relative strengths and weaknesses of her students, the number of days’ worth of supplies they carried, the nature of the curia-designed instruments that Lucas exhibited a natural affinity for controlling. She began to nod. She’d marshaled more than enough strength for the simple tectonic adjustment they’d planned; she could set her own unquestionable faith against this new challenge if it revealed any deficiencies among her students. She would make a show of asking their opinions, but she already knew that this was a challenge she could meet.

  Ford finally reached the top of the ridge line, not so much climbing as stumbling to the rocky area where the others were gathering. Once he looked up and around, he said, “The survey team that found the error in the ridge’s orientation, they didn’t come up here.”

  “They were specifically scouting for projects that the university could handle,” said Sandy. “If they’d been up here, they would have called in the Mission Service, not us.”

  Spread out below them, ringed in tilled fields and dusted with a scattering of wooden fishing boats, was an unmapped lake.

  Sandy set Ford and the other bookish scholars to cataloguing all of the texts they’d smuggled along so they could be integrated into her working bibliography. She hoped that one of them was currently distracted by waterways the way that Ford was distracted by fauna.

  Lucas set their observation instruments on tripods in an acceptably devout semicircle and Sandy permitted two or three of the others to begin preliminary sight-line measurements of the lake’s extent.

  “It turns my stomach
,” said Lucas, peering through the brass tube of a field glass. “I grew up seeing the worst kind of blasphemy, but I could never imagine that anyone could do something like this.”

  “You need to work on that,” said Sandy. Lucas was talking about the landscape feature crosshaired in the glass, a clearly artificial earthworks dam, complete with a retractable spillway. “Missionaries see worse every day.”

  Lucas didn’t react. He’d never abandoned his ambition, even after she’d laughed him down. Our sisters and brothers in the Mission Service, she’d said with the authority that only someone who’d left that order could muster, make up in the pretense of zeal what they lack in scholarship and access to the divine. Anyone can move a mountain with whips and shovels.

  The sketchers showed her their work, which they annotated with Lucas’s count and codification of architectural structures, fence lines, and crops. “Those are corn cribs,” he said. “That’s a meeting house. That’s a mill.”

  This was the kind of thing she’d told him he should concentrate on. The best thing any of them had to offer was the overlay of their own personal ranges of unexpected expertise onto the vast body of accepted Cartography. Lucas’s barbaric background, Ford’s eidetic memory, Carmen’s cultured scribing. Her own judgment.

  “They’re marmotas!” said Ford. They all looked up at where he’d been awkwardly turning the focus wheel on one of the glasses. “Like in my book!” He wasn’t one to flash a triumphant grin, which Sandy appreciated. She assented to the line of inquiry with a nod and he hurried over to the makeshift shelf that some of his friends had been using to stack books while they wrote their list.

  The unchurched all looked alike to Sandy, differing only in the details of their dress, modes of transportation, and to what extent the curia allowed interaction with them. In the case of the little drivers, for example, tacit permission was given for commercial exchange because of their ancient control of the bus lines. But she’d never heard of marmotas, and said so.

  “They’re called ‘rooters’ around here,” said Lucas. “I don’t know what Ford’s on about. I’ve never heard of them having a lake, but they’ve always come into the villages with their vegetables, so far as I know.”

  “Not always,” said Carmen. “There’s nothing about any un-churched lineages in the glosses of the maps we’re working from. They’re as new as that lake.”

  Sandy recognized that they were in an educable moment. “Everybody come here, let’s meet. Let’s have a class.”

  The students maneuvered themselves into the flatter ground within the horseshoe of instruments, spreading blankets and pulling out notebooks and pens. Ford laid his bestiary out, a place marked about a third of the way through with the bright yellow fan of a fallen gingko leaf.

  “Carmen’s brought up a good point,” said Sandy, after they’d opened with a prayer. “There’s no cartographical record of these diggers, or whatever they’re called, along the ridge line.”

  “I don’t think it matters, necessarily, though,” said Carmen. “There’s no record of the road up to the bus stop, either, or of Lucas’s village. ‘Towns and roads are thin scrims, and outside our purview.’”

  Sandy recognized the quote as being from the autobiography of a radical cleric intermittently popular on campus. It was far from writ, but not heretical by any stretch of the imagination and, besides, she’d had her own enthusiasms for colorful doctrinal interpretations when she was younger. She was disappointed that Carmen would let her tendency toward error show so plainly to the others but let it pass, confident that one of the more conservative students would address it.

  “Road building doesn’t affect landscape?” asked Lucas, on cue. “The Mapmaker used road builders to cut canyons all over the continent. Ford, maybe Carmen needs to see the cutlines on your contour maps of the bus routes.”

  Before Ford, who was looking somewhat embarrassed by the exchange, could reply, Carmen said, “I’m not talking about the Mapmaker, Lucas, I’m talking about your family, back in the village we passed yesterday.”

  “Easy, Carmen,” said Sandy. “We’re getting off task here. The question at hand isn’t whether there’s error. The error is clear. We can feel the moisture of it on the breeze blowing up the hill right now.” Time to shift directions on them, to turn them on the right path before they could think about it.

  “The question,” she continued, “is how much of it we plan to correct.” Not whether they’d correct; don’t leave that option for them. The debate she’d let them have was over the degree of action they’d take, not whether they’d take any at all.

  The more sophisticated among them—Ford and Carmen, sure, but even Lucas, to his credit—instantly saw her tack and looked at her with eyebrows raised. Then Lucas reverted to type and actually dared to say something.

  “We haven’t prepared for anything like this. That lake is more than a mile across at its broadest!”

  “A mile across, yes,” said Sandy dismissively. “Carmen? What scale did you draw your sketch of the valley in?”

  Carmen handed her a sheaf of papers. “24K to one. Is that all right?”

  “Good, good,” said Sandy. She smiled at Ford. “That’s a conversion even I can do in my head. So . . . if I compare the size of the dam—” and she knitted her eyebrows, calculating. “If I compare the dam to the ridge, I see that the ridge we came to move is about three hundred times the larger.”

  Everyone began talking at once and at cross purposes. A gratifying number of the students were simply impressed with her cleverness and seemed relaxed, sure that it would be a simple matter now that they’d been shown the problem in the proper perspective. But Carmen was scratching some numbers in the dirt with the knuckle of her right index finger and Ford was flipping through the appendix of one of his books and Lucas . . .

  Lucas stood and looked down over the valley. He wasn’t looking at the lake and the dam, though, or even at the village of the unchurched creatures who had built it. He was looking to his right, down the eastern flank of the ridge they stood on, down the fluvial valley toward where, it suddenly occurred to Sandy, he’d grown up, toward the creek-side town they’d stopped in the day before.

  Ford raised his voice above an argument he’d been having with two or three others. “Isn’t there a question about what that much water will do to the topography downstream? I mean, I know hydrology’s a pretty knotty problem, theologically speaking, but we’d have a clear hand in the erosion, wouldn’t we? What if the floodwaters subside off ground that’s come unwrit because of something that we did?”

  “That is a knotty problem, Ford,” said Sandy, looking Lucas straight in the eye. “What’s the best way to solve a difficult knot?”

  And it was Lucas who answered her, nodding. “Cut through it.”

  Later, while most of the students were meditating in advance of the ceremony, Sandy saw Carmen moving from glass to glass, making minute focusing adjustments and triangulating different views of the lake and the village. Every so often, she made a quick visual note in her sketchbook.

  “It’s not productive to spend too much time on the side effects of an error, you know,” Sandy said.

  Carmen moved from one instrument to the next. “I don’t think it’s all that easy to determine what’s a side effect and what’s . . . okay,” she said.

  Sandy had lost good students to the distraction she could see now in Carmen. She reached out and pivoted the cylinder down, so that its receiving lens pointed straight at the ground. “There’s nothing to see down there, Carmen.”

  Carmen wouldn’t meet her eye. “I thought I’d record—”

  “Nothing to see, nothing to record. If you could go down and talk to them you wouldn’t understand a word they say. If you looked in their little huts you wouldn’t find anything redemptive; there’s no cross hanging on the wall of the meeting house, no Jesus of the Digging Marmots. When the water is drained, we won’t see anything along the lake bed but mud and whatever garbage th
ey’ve thrown in off their docks. The lake doesn’t have any secrets to give up. You know that.”

  “Ford’s books—”

  “Ford’s books are by anthropologists, who are halfway to being witch doctors as far as most respectable scholars are concerned, and who keep their accreditation by dint of the fact that their field notes are good intelligence sources for the Mission Service. Ford reads them because he’s got an overactive imagination and he likes stories too much—lots of students in the archive concentration have those failings. Most of them grow out of it with a little coaxing. Like Ford will; he’s too smart not to. Just like you’re too smart to backslide into your parents’ religion and start looking for souls to save where there are no souls to be found.”

  Carmen took a deep breath and held it, closed her eyes. When she opened them, her expression had folded into acquiescence. “It is not the least of my sins that I force you to spend so much time counseling me, Reverend,” she said formally.

  Sandy smiled and gave the girl a friendly squeeze of the shoulder. “Curiosity and empathy are healthy, and valuable, señorita,” she said. “But you need to remember that there are proper channels to focus these things into. Prayer and study are best, but drinking and carousing will do in a pinch.”

  Carmen gave a nervous laugh, eyes widening. Sandy could tell that the girl didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the unexpected direction of the conversation, which was, of course, part of the strategy for handling backsliders. Young people in particular were easy to refocus on banal and harmless “sins” and away from thoughts that could actually be dangerous.

  “Fetch the others up here now,” Sandy said. “We should set to it.”