Foreigner

*12*

Back aboard the Dasheter, old Biltog tended to Toroca’s injuries. There was nothing major. Toroca was irritated by the glee his shipmates took in his story of the attack by the fish-lizard, but, after enduring his disdain for the hunt for so long, they were entitled to some fun at his expense now that he’d single-handedly killed a formidable predator.

And, of course, everyone was interested in the Others.

“Tell us, Toroca,” demanded Keenir, “what were they like?”

Toroca, still exhausted, supported himself by leaning against the foremast. “They are good people,” he said. “I hope that, despite our differences, there is some way that we can become friends.”

Keenir looked out over the water, perhaps thinking of the slaughter he’d been part of back on the Others’ island. He made no reply.

“Tell me more about the murders of your two children,” said Mokleb.

Afsan shifted uncomfortably on his rock. “Both of them were killed the same way,” he said. “Their throats were slit.”

“Slit? With a knife?”

“No, with a broken piece of mirror.”

“Broken mirror,” said Mokleb. “And they were killed by their brother, Drawtood, correct?”

Afsan clicked his teeth, but it was a forced gesture, with little humor behind it. “Yes. Even I saw the symbolism in that, Mokleb. Broken mirrors, distorted reflections of oneself.”

“Where did the killings take place?”

“In their apartments. The killings occurred several days apart. Haldan was murdered first. Drawtood snuck up on each of them, or otherwise was able to approach them closely, and then he did the deed.”

“Snuck up on them?”

“So I presume, yes.”

“Fascinating,” said Mokleb, and then: “You discovered one of the bodies.”

“Yes.” A long pause. “I found Haldan. If anything should have given me nightmares, that should have been it. In fact, I can’t think of a more terrifying scenario for a blind person than slowly coming to realize that the room he’s in isn’t empty but rather contains a horribly murdered body.”

“And you say Drawtood snuck up on his victims?”

“Well, he was doubtless let into the apartments by them. They did know him, after all. But to manage the close approach, yes, I presume he did that by stealth.”

“Fascinating,” said Mokleb once more. She wrote furiously on her notepad.

It was the end of the day. Novato was ambling back toward the camp, located a few hundred paces from the base of the blue pyramid supporting the tower. Garios had caught up with her and was now walking about ten paces to her left.

There was some small talk, then Garios asked, in a tone of forced casualness, “What will happen to your eight egglings if you mate with Afsan? Will they be spared the culling of the bloodpriest again?”

Novato turned her muzzle sideways, making clear that her gaze was on Garios. She held it just long enough to convey that she felt he was stepping into her territory. “I doubt it,” she said at last. “I mean, there are a lot fewer people who think Afsan is The One today than there were twenty kilodays ago.”

“Ah,” said Garios, again with a tone that would have been offhand where it not for the slight quaver underlying the words, “so you’ve been contemplating the question.”

“Not really, no.”

“But you didn’t hesitate before answering,” he said.

“I’m a bright person.” Novato clicked her teeth. “I can answer questions without meditating on them for daytenths on end.”

“Oh, then you haven’t been contemplating this issue.”

“Not directly.”

“Afsan already has four children.”

“He had eight,” said Novato, a little sadly. “Four survive.”

“Still, I’ve had but one.”

“Well, if this is a contest, I win,” said Novato gently. “I’ve had nine, five of whom still live. I’m the mother to more adult Quintaglios than anyone else alive.”

“Granted,” said Garios. The sky overhead was rapidly growing darker; a few stars already pierced the firmament. “But I’m talking about just Afsan and me. He’s had four. I’ve only had one.” He held up a hand. “Yes, there are those who would argue that Afsan is a great person, that our species is enriched by having more of his offspring. Still,” he said, and then, a little later, “still…”

“I’m not the only female around,” said Novato. “Delplas will be in heat in another two kilodays.”

“Oh, I know, but…”

“In fact, there are many tens of females who might choose you at some point during the remainder of your life. You’re a male; you can breed whenever called upon to do so. Me, I’ve got one or maybe two more opportunities to lay eggs.”

“True,” said Garios.

“I’m hardly your only chance.”

“Oh, I know. Still…” he said again.

“I am flattered by your interest,” said Novato. “But as to whom I’ll call for, even I don’t know. Believe me, though, it’ll be either you or Afsan; I have no doubt about that.”

“You do have four children already by him,” Garios said again.

“I know.”

“And, after all, those children weren’t necessarily that great. Oh, yes, one became a hunt leader and another directs the Geological Survey, but, well, one was a murderer, too.”

“Eat plants, Garios.”

“I only meant—no, forgive me! I’m sorry! I just—I didn’t intend to say that. Oh, Novato, forgive me! Roots, your pheromones are everywhere. I, ah, I’m just going to go away now, go for a little walk. I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”

“You know, Mokleb,” said Afsan, his voice sharp, “you remind me of my old teaching master.” Mokleb lifted her muzzle. “Oh?”

“Yes. Tak-Saleed. Not as I came to know him at the very end, but as I first knew him.”

“Indeed.”

“ ‘Indeed.’ He’d talk just like that, too. You’d never know what he was thinking. Only one thing was clear. He was judging you. He was evaluating you. Every day, every moment, he was watching your every move. I wasn’t his first apprentice, you know. He’d had many others before me.”

“But you were the one that survived,” said Mokleb.

“He sent all the others back, dispatching them home.”

“Dispatching.”

“You know—sending.”

“The word has no other connotations for you.”

“What word? ‘Dispatching’? No.”

“It’s the euphemism used by bloodpriests for what they do: in order to keep the size of the population in check, seven infants are killed. But the process is referred to as ‘dispatching,’ not killing.”

“I suppose I knew that,” said Afsan, “but that’s not my point. Saleed judged each of us, each of his young apprentices. And all of them, save me, were sent back to the Packs from which they’d come.”

“And that disturbed you?”

“It was frightening—not knowing if I’d be sent back next; whether I was the one he’d been looking for, or whether he’d get rid of me, too.”

“But you never met any of the other apprentices?”

“No.” A pause. “Saleed used to talk about them from time to time, though. Always in disparaging terms. The fellow before, his name was Pog-Teevio. I had to wear his leftover sashes. But he’d been older than I was, so the sashes had been altered to fit me. You could tell where material had been removed—since the sashes were tapered, the pieces didn’t line up properly and had to be trimmed.” A pause. “God, how I hated those sashes.”

“How many apprentices did Saleed have before you?”

“Well, let’s see. There was Pog-Teevio. Before him was Adkab. Before him was, um, Rikgot. Before her, Haltang. You know, as an aside, I wish I hadn’t known their names. It made it a lot harder, contemplating what had happened to them, knowing their names.”

“Was Haltang the first?”

“No, there were two before him. Females both: Lizhok and—oh, what was it now?—Tasnik.”

“That’s a total of six before you.”

“Yes.”

“And you were number seven.”

Irritated. “That follows, doesn’t it? Yes. The seventh.”

“It bothered you that your future at the palace was unsure.”

“Wouldn’t it bother you? When I’d been summoned to Capital City, I’d had no idea that Saleed had had all those previous apprentices, all of whom had proved unsuitable.”

“But as your time at the palace grew longer and longer, surely the fear that you’d be sent back must have diminished?”

“Diminished?” Afsan clicked teeth derisively. “That shows how little you know, Mokleb. It grew worse. I kept waiting for the eighth apprentice to arrive.”

“How did you know there would be an eighth?”

“Well, of course, it turned out there wasn’t, but I felt sure, sure in my bones, that there would be one more.”

“Six before you, you as the seventh, and one more, for a total of eight,” said Mokleb.

“And they call me a mathematical genius.”

“Eight, of whom seven would be sent back.”

“Yes.”

“Of whom seven would be dispatched.”

“As you say.”

“And Saleed sat in constant judgment of you.”

“Yes. Just like you do.”

“I don’t judge you at all, Afsan. It’s not my place. But you felt judged by Saleed. Six had already been sent back. If you failed, you’d be sent back, too.”

“It wasn’t so much a question of ‘if.’ I eventually became sure I’d be sent back; I knew there had to be one further apprentice.”

Mokleb was quiet for a time, waiting to see if Afsan would offer anything further. At last she said, “Do you see the pattern you’re describing?”

A sneer. “What pattern?”

“Eight youngsters, judged by a vastly older authority figure. Seven of them dispatched—your word, that—and only the eighth surviving.”

“Yes. So?”

“It sounds precisely like the culling of the bloodpriest. Seven out of eight hatchlings in every clutch are devoured.”

Afsan clicked his teeth derisively. “You’re way off base, Mokleb. By God’s own tail, I knew this whole process was a waste of time. Roots, you see patterns in everything! For your information, Doctor, I knew nothing at all about bloodpriests until after I’d left Saleed to go on my journey around the world. It wasn’t until I was on my return trip to Capital City, when I stopped off in Carno for a visit, that I first learned about the bloodpriests. For God’s sake, Mokleb, the nonsense you spout!”

Bos-Karshirl, a young female engineer Novato had requested some time ago from Capital City, arrived by boat on a foggy even-day. The two of them stood on the pebbly beach and looked up at the massive blue pyramid and the tower rising out of its apex. The tower disappeared after a short distance into the gray gloom.

“Incredible,” said Karshirl. She turned and bowed to Novato. “I agree: this is a fascinating thing for an engineer to study. Thank you for requesting me—although I’ll admit I’m surprised you asked for me. I’m young, after all; there are much older and more experienced engineers who would enjoy a chance to examine this.”

“You’re not that young, Karshirl,” said Novato. “You’re eighteen or so; I was just eleven, an apprentice glassworker, when I invented the far-seer.”

“Still…” said Karshirl, then, evidently deciding not to press her good fortune, “Thank you very much. I do appreciate the opportunity.” The younger female leaned back on her tail and looked up at the tower, lost in the fog. “How tall is the tower?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” said Novato.

Karshirl clicked her teeth. “Good Novato, have you forgotten your trigonometry? All you have to do is move a known distance from the tower’s base—a hundred paces, say—then note the angle between the ground and the top of the tower. Any good set of math tables will give you the height.”

“Of course,” said Novato. “But that’s predicated on the assumption that one can see the top of the tower. But we can’t, even on the clearest of days. The tower simply goes up and up, straight to the zenith. I’ve seen it pierce right through clouds, with the cloud looking like a gobbet of meat skewered on a fingerclaw. The tower is sufficiently narrow that it fades from view before its summit is reached. The best time to view it is on clear mornings just before dawn, when the tower itself is already illuminated by the sun, but the sky is still dark. Still, I can’t make out its apex. I’ve looked at its upper reaches with a far-seer, and, again, it fades from view rather than coming to a discrete end.”

“That’s incredible,” said Karshirl.

“Indeed.”

“But wait—there’s another way to measure it. You’ve said there is a vehicle of some kind moving up its interior?”

“Several, as it turns out. We call them lifeboats.”

“Well, all you have to do is mark one of the lifeboats, so you can be sure to recognize the same one later. Measure the distance between two of the tower’s rungs—you can do that, at least, with trig, even if you can’t actually reach the rungs. Choose a couple of rungs that are a good distance apart and also are a good ways up the shaft so that the lifeboat will be up to speed by the time it passes them. Then simply see how long it takes for a lifeboat to traverse that distance. That will give you its traveling speed. After that, all you have to do is wait for the lifeboat to make a round trip up and down the shaft. Assuming the lifeboats do indeed go all the way to the top, and assuming they travel at a constant speed, you’ll be able to calculate the tower’s height by dividing half the total elapsed time by the lifeboat’s known speed.”

If Karshirl had been looking at Novato, instead of tipping her muzzle up at the tower, she’d have stopped before getting to the end of her explanation, since Novato’s face made it clear that she’d already thought of all this. “We tried that, of course,” said Novato. “The lifeboats accelerate quickly at first, but almost immediately seem to reach their maximum velocity. It seems the lifeboats are moving at something like one hundred and thirty kilopaces per day-tenth.”

“Good God!” said Karshirl, her eyelids strobing up and down. “That’s faster than even a runningbeast can manage.”

“Twice as fast, to be precise,” said Novato. “And it takes the lifeboats—wait for this—twenty days to make the round trip. Now, granted, there’s a lot of room for error—these are just back-of-a-sash calculations—but if you do the math, that would imply that the tower is on the order of thirteen thousand kilopaces tall.”

“But, good Novato, our entire world has a diameter of only twelve thousand kilopaces,” said Karshirl. “You can’t be seriously suggesting that the tower is taller than our world is wide. Something must be going on that we can’t see. The lifeboats must stop at the top for days on end, or else slow down once they get out of sight.”

Novato felt slightly surprised. She’d selected Karshirl for her own reasons, but was beginning to regret the choice. “Surely you wouldn’t discard data just because it doesn’t fit your expectations.”

“Oh, indeed,” said Karshirl, somewhat piqued. “I’m a good little scientist, too. However, I am also a structural engineer, which is something you are not. And I tell you, Novato, based on well-established engineering principles, that the tower cannot be as tall as you say. Look: stability is a real concern when building towers. You know the old story of the Tower of Howlee, told in the—the fiftieth, I think—sacred scroll? That was a tower that would reach up to the sky so that one could touch the other moons.” Novato nodded.

“But Howlee’s Tower is utterly impossible,” said Karshirl. “A sufficiently long, narrow object will buckle if it is held straight up.” She raised a hand. “Now, I know you’ve said that this tower is made out of stuff that’s harder than diamond. That’s irrelevant. No matter how great its compressive strength, such a tower will buckle if the ratio of its length to width goes above a certain value. In the old scroll, which was written long before we knew just how far away the other moons were, Howlee’s Tower was said to be twenty-five kilopaces tall, and had a base fifty paces on a side. You couldn’t build a tower like that out of any material. In fact, one can’t even build a scale replica of Howlee’s Tower, at any scale. It will buckle and collapse.”

“Because of the buffeting of the wind?” asked Novato.

“No, it’s not that. You can’t even build a scale model of Howlee’s Tower inside a sealed glass vessel, in which there are no air currents at all.”

“Why not?” said Novato.

Karshirl looked around vaguely, as if wishing she had something to draw a picture on. Failing to find anything, she simply turned back and faced Novato. “Let’s say you build a tower that’s a hundred paces tall and has a base of, oh, one square centipace.”

Novato’s tail swished in acceptance. “All right.”

“Well, visualize the top of this structure: it’s a flat roof, one square centipace in area.”

“Yes.”

“Consider the corners of that roof. There’s no way they will be perfectly even. One of them is bound to be a small fraction lower than the others. Even if they are all even originally, as the ground shifts even infinitesimally under the tower’s weight, one corner will end up lower than the others.”

“Ah, I see: the tower, of course, will lean toward the lowest corner, even if only very slightly.”

“Right. And when the tower does lean, that makes the lowest corner even lower, and the tower will lean some more, and on and on until the whole thing is leaning over like a tree in a storm—no matter how strong the building material is.”

“So the tower can’t be thirteen thousand kilopaces high,” said Novato.

“That’s right. Indeed, it can’t be anywhere near that high.”

Novato leaned back on her tail. “Obviously the pyramidal base gives the tower some stability, but the actual tower itself is only fourteen paces wide. How high could a tower that wide be?”

“Oh, I’m no Afsan,” said Karshirl. “I’d need to sit down with ink and writing leather to figure that out.”

“Roughly, though. How high? Remember, this tower extends well above the clouds.”

“And how high up are the clouds?” asked Karshirl.

“Oh, it varies. Say ten kilopaces. Could a tower fourteen paces wide be even that tall without collapsing in the manner you’ve described?”

Karshirl was silent for a time. “Ah, well, um, probably not,” she said at last.

Novato nodded. “So some other factor is at work here.” She gestured at the vast blue pyramid and the narrow four-sided tower thrusting up from its apex toward the vault of heaven. “Somehow, impossible as it seems, this tower does stand.”