THE UNBLINKING EYE
Stephen Baxter
Under an empty night sky, the Inca ship
stood proud before the old Roman bridge of Londres.
Jenny and Alphonse, both sixteen years old, pressed
their way through grimy mobs of Londres. As night closed in, they
had slipped away from the dreary ceremonial rehearsals at Saint
Paul’s. They couldn’t resist escaping to mingle with the excited
Festival crowds.
And, of course, they had been drawn here, to the
Viracocha, the most spectacular sight of all.
Beside the Inca ship’s dazzling lines, even the
domes, spires and pylons of the Festival, erected to mark the
anniversary of the Frankish Conquest in this year of Our Lord
Christus Ra 1966, looked shabby indeed. Her towering hull was made
entirely of metal, clinkered in some seamless way that gave it
flexibility, and the sails were llama wool, colored as brilliantly
as the Inca clothes that had been the talk of the Paris fashion
houses this season.
Jenny Cook was from a family of shipowners, and the
very sight excited her. “Looking at her, you can believe she has
sailed from the other side of the world, even from the
south—”
“That’s blasphemy,” Alphonse snapped. But he
remembered himself and shrugged. What had been blasphemy a year
ago, before the first Inca ships had come sailing north around the
west coast of Africa, was common knowledge now, and the old
reflexes did not apply.
Jenny said, “Surely on such a craft those sails are
only for show, or for trim. There must be some mighty engine buried
in her guts—but where are the smoke stacks?”
The prince said gloomily, “Well, you and I are
going to have months to find that out, Jenny. And where you see a
pretty ship,” he said darkly, “I see a statement of power.” Jenny
was to be among the party of friends and tutors who would accompany
sixteen-year-old Prince Alphonse during his years-long stay in
Cuzco, capital of the Inca. Alphonse had a sense of adventure, even
of fun. But as the second son of the Emperor Charlemagne XXXII, he
saw the world differently from Jenny.
She protested, “Oh, you’re too suspicious,
Alphonse. Why, they say there are whole continents out there we
know nothing about! Why should the Inca care about the Frankish
empire?”
“Perhaps they have conceived an ambition to own us
as we own you Anglais.”
Jenny prickled. However, she had learned some
diplomacy in her time at court. “Well, I can’t agree with you, and
that’s that,” she said.
Suddenly a flight of Inca air machines swept over
like soaring silver birds, following the line of the river, their
lights blazing against the darkling night. The crowds ducked and
gasped, some of them crossing themselves in awe. After all, the
Viracocha was only a ship, and the empires of Europe had
ships. But none of them, not even the Ottomans, had machines that
could fly.
“You see?” Alphonse muttered. “What is that but a
naked demonstration of Inca might? And I’ll tell you something,
those metal birds don’t scare me half as much as other tools I’ve
seen. Such as a box that can talk to other boxes a world away—they
call it a farspeaker—I don’t pretend to understand how it works.
They gave one to my father’s office so I can talk to him from
Cuzco. What else have they got that they haven’t shown us? . . .
Well, come on,” he said, plucking her arm. “We’re going to be late
for Atahualpa’s ceremony.”
Jenny followed reluctantly.
She watched the flying machines until they had
passed out of sight, heading west up the river. When their lights
had gone the night sky was revealed, cloudless and moonless,
utterly dark, with no planets visible, an infinite emptiness. As if
in response, the gas lanterns of Londres burned brighter,
defiant.
The Inca caravan was drawn up before the face of
Saint Paul’s. As grandees passed into the building, attendants fed
the llamas that had borne the colorful litters. You never saw the
Inca use a wheel; they relied entirely on these haughty, exotic
beasts.
Inside the cathedral, Jenny and Alphonse found
their places hurriedly.
The procession passed grandly through the cramped
candlelit aisles, led by servants who carried the Orb of the
Unblinking Eye. These were followed by George Darwin, archbishop of
Londres, who chattered nervously to Atahualpa, commander of the
Viracocha and emissary of Huayna Capac XIII, Emperor of the
Inca. In the long tail of the procession were representatives from
all the great empires of Europe: the Danes, the Germans, the
Muscovites, even the Ottomans, grandly bejeweled Muslims in this
Christian church. They marched to the gentle playing of Galilean
lutes, an ensemble supplied by the Germans. It was remarkable to
think, Jenny reflected, that if the Inca had come sailing out of
the south three hundred years ago, they would have been met by
ambassadors from much the same combination of powers. Though there
had always been border disputes and even wars, the political map of
Europe had changed little since the Ottoman capture of Vienna had
marked the westernmost march of Islam.
But the Inca towered over the European nobility.
They wore woollen suits dyed scarlet and electric blue, colors
brighter than the cathedral’s stained glass. And they all wore
facemasks as defense against the “herd diseases” they insultingly
claimed infested Europe. The effect was to make these imposing
figures even more enigmatic, for the only expression you could see
was in their black eyes.
Jenny, at Alphonse’s side and mixed in with some of
the Inca party, was only a few rows back from Atahualpa and Darwin,
and she could clearly hear every word they said.
“My own family has a long association with this old
church,” the bishop said. “My ancestor Charles Darwin was a country
parson who, dedicated to his theology, rose to become dean here.
The Anglais built the first Christian church on this site in the
year of Christus Ra 604. After the Conquest the emperors were most
generous in endowing this magnificent building in our humble,
remote city . . .”
As the interpreter translated this, Atahualpa
murmured some reply in Quechua, and the two of them laughed
softly.
One of the Inca party walking beside Jenny was a
boy about her age. He wore an Inca costume like the rest but
without a face mask. He whispered in passable Frankish, “The
emissary’s being a bit rude about your church. He says it’s a
sandstone heap he wouldn’t use to stable his llamas.”
“Charming,” Jenny whispered back.
“Well, you haven’t seen his llamas.”
Jenny had to cover her face to keep from giggling.
She got a glare from Alphonse and recovered her composure.
“Sorry,” said the boy. He was dark skinned, with a
mop of short-cut, tightly curled black hair. The spiral tattoo on
his left cheek made him look a little severe, until he smiled,
showing bright teeth. “My name’s—well, it’s complicated, and the
Inca never get it right. You can call me Dreamer.”
“Hello, Dreamer,” she whispered. “I’m Jenny
Cook.”
“Pretty name.”
Jenny raised her eyebrows. “Oh, is it really?
You’re not Inca, are you?”
“No, I just travel with them. They like to move us
around, their subject peoples. I’m from the South Land . . .”
But she didn’t know where that was, and the party
had paused before the great altar where the emissary and the
archbishop were talking again, and Jenny and Dreamer fell
silent.
Atahualpa said to Darwin, “I am intrigued by the
god of this church. Christus Ra? He is a god who is two
gods.”
“In a sense.” Darwin spoke rapidly of the career of
Christ. The Romans had conquered Egypt but had suffered a sort of
reverse religious takeover; their pantheon had seemed flimsy before
the power and sheer logic of the Egyptians’ faith in their sun god.
The sun was the only point of stability in a sky populated by
chaotic planets, mankind’s only defense against the infinite dark.
Who could argue against its worship? Centuries after Christ’s
execution His cult was adopted as the empire’s official religion,
and the bishops and theologians had made a formal identification of
Christ with Ra, a unity that had outlasted the empire itself.
Atahualpa expressed mild interest in this. He said
the worship of the sun was a global phenomenon. The Incas’ own sun
god was called Inti. Perhaps Inti and Christ-Ra were mere
manifestations of the same primal figure.
The procession moved on.
“ ‘Cook’,” Dreamer whispered. He was more
interested in Jenny than in theology. “That’s a funny sort of name.
Not Frankish, is it?”
“I don’t know. I think it has an Anglais root. My
family are Anglais, from the north of Grand Bretagne.”
“You must be rich. You’ve got to be either royal or
rich to be in this procession, right?”
She smiled. “Rich enough. I’m at court as part of
my education. My grandfathers have been in the coal trade since our
ancestor founded the business two hundred years ago. He was called
James Cook. My father’s called James too. It’s a mucky business but
lucrative.”
“I’ll bet. Those Watt engines I see everywhere eat
enough coal, don’t they?”
“So what do your family do?”
He said simply, “We serve the Inca.”
The procession reached a chapel dedicated to Isaac
Newton, the renowned alchemist and theologian who had developed a
conclusive proof of the age of the Earth. Here they prayed to their
gods, the Inca prostrating themselves before Inti, and the
Christians kneeling to Christ.
And the Inca servants came forward with their Orb
of the Unblinking Eye. It was a sphere of some translucent white
material, half as tall as a man; the servants carried it in a rope
netting and set it down on a wooden cradle before the statue of
Newton himself.
Atahualpa turned and faced the procession. He may
have smiled; his facemask creased. He said through his interpreter:
“Once it was our practice to plant our temples in the chapels of
those we sought to vanquish. Now I place this gift from my emperor,
this symbol of our greatest god, in the finest church in this
province.” And, Jenny knew, other Inca parties were handing over
similar orbs in all the great capitals of Europe. “Once we would
move peoples about, whole populations, to cut them away from their
roots and so control them. Now we welcome the children of your
princes and merchants, while leaving our own children in your
cities, so that we may each learn the culture and the ways of the
other.” He gestured to Alphonse.
The prince bowed, but he muttered through his
teeth, “And get hold of a nice set of hostages.”
“Hush,” Jenny murmured.
Atahualpa said, “Let this globe shine for all
eternity as a symbol of our friendship, united under the Unblinking
Eye of the One Sun.” He clapped his hands.
And the orb lit up, casting a steady pearl-like
glow over the grimy statuary of the chapel. The Europeans applauded
helplessly.
Jenny stared, amazed. She could see no power
supply, no tank of gas; and the light didn’t flicker like the flame
of a candle or a lamp but burned as steady as the sun itself.
With the ceremony over, the procession began to
break up. Jenny turned to the boy, Dreamer. “Are you sailing on the
Viracocha?”
“Oh, yes. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me. The
emissary has one more appointment, a ride on a Watt-engine train to
some place called Bataille—”
“That’s where the Frankish army defeated the
Anglais back in 1066.”
“Yes. And then we sail.”
“And then we sail,” Jenny said, fearful, excited,
gazing into the dark, playful eyes of this boy from the other side
of the world, a boy whose land didn’t even exist in her
imagination.
Alphonse glared at them, brooding.
The dignitaries were still talking, with stiff
politeness. Atahualpa seemed intrigued by Newton’s determination of
the Earth’s age. “And how did this Newton achieve his result? A
study of the rocks, of living things, of the sky? I did not know
such sciences were so advanced here.”
But when Archbishop Darwin explained that Newton’s
calculations had been based on records of births and deaths in a
holy book, and that his conclusion was that the Earth was only a
few thousand years old, Atahualpa’s laughter was gusty, echoing
from the walls of the cramped chapel.
Alphonse’s party, with Jenny and other companions
and with Archbishop Darwin attached as a moral guardian, boarded
the Inca ship.
The Viracocha, Jenny learned, was named
after a creator god and cultural hero of the Inca. It was as
extraordinary inside as out, a floating palace of wide corridors
and vast staterooms that glowed with a steady pearl light. Jenny
was quite surprised when crew members went barreling up and down
the corridors on wheeled carts. The Inca embraced the wheel’s
obvious advantages, but for ceremonial occasions they walked or
rode their animals, as their ancestors had done long before their
age of exploration. The wheeled carts, like the ubiquitous lights,
had no obvious power source, no boiler or steam stack.
The Frankish and Anglais were allowed to stay on
deck as the great woollen sails were unfurled and the ship pulled
away from Londres, which sprawled over its banks in heaps of smoky
industry. Jenny looked for her family’s ships in the docks; she was
going to be away from home for years, and the parting from her
mother had been tearful.
But before the ship had left the Thames estuary the
guests were ordered below deck, and the hatches were locked and
sealed. There weren’t even any windows in the ship’s sleek hull.
Their Inca hosts wanted to save a remarkable surprise for them,
they said, a surprise revealed to every crew who crossed the
equator, but not until then.
And they were all, even Alphonse, put through a
program of inoculation, injected with various potions and their
bodies bathed with a prickly light. The Inca doctors said this was
to weed out their “herd diseases.” All the Europeans resented this,
though Darwin marveled at the medical technology on display.
At least you could see the Incas’ faces, however,
now that they had discarded their masks. They were a proud-looking
people with jet black hair, dark skin, and noses that would have
been called Roman in Europe. None of the crew was particularly
friendly. They wouldn’t speak Frankish or Anglais, and they looked
on the Europeans with a kind of amused contempt. This infuriated
Alphonse, for he was used to looking on others in precisely that
way.
Still, the ship’s sights were spectacular. Jenny
was shown the great smelly hold where the llamas were kept during
the journey. And she was shown around an engine room. Jenny’s
family ran steam scows, and she had expected Watt engines, heavy,
clunky, soot-coated iron monsters. The Viracocha’s engine
room was a pristine white-walled hall inhabited by sleek metal
shapes. The air was filled with a soft humming, and there was a
sharp smell in the air that reminded her of the seashore. These
smooth sculptures didn’t even look like engines to Jenny, and
whatever principle they worked on had nothing to do with steam,
evidently. So much for her father’s fond hopes of selling coal to
the mighty Inca empire!
Despite such marvels, Jenny chafed at her
confinement below decks. What made it worse was that she saw little
of her friends. Alphonse was whisked off to a program of study of
Inca culture and science, mediated by Darwin. And in his free time
he monopolized Dreamer for private language classes; he wanted to
learn as much Quechua as he could manage, for he did not trust the
Inca.
This irritated Jenny more than she was prepared to
admit, for the times she relished most of all were the snatched
moments she spent with Dreamer.
One free evening Dreamer took her to the navigation
bay. The walls were covered with charts, curves that might have
shown the trajectory of the sun and moon across the sky, and other
diagrams showing various aspects of a misty-gold spiral shape that
meant nothing to Jenny. There was a globe that drew her eye;
glowing, painted, it was covered with unfamiliar shapes, but one
strip of blue looked just like a map of the Mediterranean.
The most wondrous object in the room was a kind of
loom, rank upon rank of knotted string that stretched from floor to
ceiling and wall to wall—but unlike a loom it was extended in depth
as well. As she peered into this array, she saw metal fingers pluck
blindly at the strings, making the knots slide this way and
that.
Dreamer watched her, as she watched the string.
“I’m starting to think Alphonse is using the language classes as an
excuse to keep me away from you. Perhaps the prince wants you for
himself. Who wouldn’t desire such beauty?”
Jenny pulled her face at this gross flattery. “Tell
me what this loom is for.”
“The Inca have always represented their numbers and
words on quipus, bits of knotted string. Even after they learned
writing from their Aztec neighbors, whom they encountered at the
start of the Sunrise.”
“The Sunrise?”
“That is their modest name for their program of
expansion across the world. Jenny, this is a machine for figuring
numbers. The Inca use it to calculate their journeys across the
world’s oceans. But it can perform any sum you like.”
“My father would like one of these to figure his
tax return.”
Dreamer laughed.
She said, “But everybody knows that you can’t
navigate at night, when the sun goes down, and the only beacons in
the sky are the moon and planets, which career unpredictably all
over the place. How, then, do the Inca find their way?” For the
Europeans this was the greatest mystery about the Inca. Even the
greatest seamen of the past, the Vikings, had barely had the
courage to probe away from the shore.
Dreamer glanced at the strange charts on the wall.
“Look, they made us promise not to tell any of you about—well,
certain matters, before the Inca deem you ready. But there’s
something here I do want to show you.” He led her across the room
to the globe.
That blue shape was undoubtedly the Mediterranean.
“It’s the world,” she breathed.
“Yes.” He smiled. “The Inca have marked what they
know of the European empires. Look, here is Grand Bretagne.”
“Why, even Europe is only a peninsula dangling from
the carcass of Asia.”
“You know, your sense of wonder is the most
attractive thing about you.”
She snorted. “Really? More than my eyes and teeth
and neck, and the other bits of me you’ve been praising? I’ll
believe that when a second sun rises in the sky. Show me where you
come from—and the Inca.”
Passing his hand over the globe, he made the world
spin and dip.
He showed her what lay beyond the Ottoman empire,
the solemn Islamic unity that had blocked Christendom from the east
for centuries: the vast expanses of Asia, India, the sprawling
empire of China, Nippon, the Spice Islands. And he showed how
Africa extended far beyond the arid northern regions held by the
Ottomans, a great pendulous continent in its own right that
sprawled, thrillingly, right across the equator.
“You can in fact reach India and the east by
sailing south around the cape of southern Africa,” Dreamer said.
“Without losing sight of land, even. A man called Columbus was the
first to attempt this in 1492. But he lacked the courage to cross
the equator. Columbus went back to the family business of
trouser-making, and Christian Europe stayed locked in.”
Now he spun the globe to show her even stranger
sights: a double continent, far to the west of Europe across the
ocean, lands wholly unknown to any European. The Inca had come from
a high country that ran north to south along the spine of the
southernmost of the twin continents. “It is a place of mountains
and coast, of long, long roads, and bridges centuries old, woven
from vines, still in use . . .”
Around the year 1500, according to the Christian
calendar, the Inca’s greatest emperor Huayna Capac I, had emerged
from a savage succession dispute to take sole control of the
mountain empire. And under him, as the Inca consolidated, the great
expansion called the Sunrise had begun. At first the Inca had used
their woollen-sailed ships for trade and military expeditions up
and down their long coastlines. But gradually they crept away from
the shore.
At last, on an island that turned out to be the tip
of a grand volcanic mountain that stuck out of the sea, they found
people. “These were a primitive sort, who sailed the oceans in
canoes dug out of logs. Nevertheless, they had come out of the
southeast of Asia and sailed right to the middle of the ocean,
colonizing island chains as they went.” The Inca, emboldened by the
geographical knowledge they took from their new island subjects,
set off west once more, following island chains until they reached
southeast Asia. All this sparked intellectual ferment, as
exploration and conquest led to a revolution in sky watching,
mathematics, and the sciences of life and language.
The Inca, probing westward, at last reached Africa.
And when in the early twentieth century they acquired lodestone
compasses from Chinese traders, they found the courage to venture
north.
Jenny stared at the South Land. There was no real
detail, just a few Inca towns dotted around the coast, an interior
like a blank red canvas. “Tell me about your home.”
He brushed the image of the island continent with
his fingertips. “It is a harsh country, I suppose. Rust-red, worn
flat by time. But there is much beauty and strangeness. Animals
that jump rather than run, and carry their young in pouches on
their bellies. Don’t laugh, it’s true! My people have lived there
for sixty thousand years. That’s what the Inca scholars say, though
how they can tell that from bits of bone and shards of stone tools
I don’t know. My people are called the Bininj-Mungguy, and
we live in the north, up here, in a land we call Kakadu.”
Jenny’s imagination raced, and his strange words
fascinated her. She drew closer to him, almost unconsciously,
watching his mouth.
“We have six seasons,” he said, “for our weather is
not like yours. There is Gunumeleng, which is the season before the
great rains, and then Gudjewg, when the rain comes, and then
Banggerreng—”
She stopped up his mouth with hers.
After a week’s sailing the Viracocha crossed
the equator. Atahualpa ordered a feast to be laid for his senior
officers and guests. They were brought to a stateroom that, Jenny
suspected from the stairs she had to climb, lay just under the deck
itself. Tonight, Atahualpa promised, his passengers would be
allowed on deck for the first time since Londres, and the great
secret that the Incas had been hiding would be revealed.
But by now Dreamer and Jenny had shared so many
secrets that she scarcely cared.
While the Inca crew wore their customary llama-wool
and cotton uniforms, George Darwin wore his clerical finery,
Alphonse the powdered wig and face powder of his father’s court,
and Jenny a simple shift, her Sunday best. Dreamer was just one of
the many representatives of provinces of the Inca’s ocean-spanning
empire aboard ship. They wore elaborate costumes of cloth and
feather, so that they looked like a row of exotic birds, Jenny
thought, sitting there in a row at the commander’s table.
In some ways Dreamer’s own garb was the most
extraordinary. He was stripped naked save for a loin-cloth, his
face-spiral tattoo was picked out in some yellow dye, and he had
finger-painted designs on his body in chalk-white, a sprawling
lizard, an outstretched hand. Jenny was jealously aware that she
wasn’t the only woman who kept glancing at Dreamer’s muscled
torso—and a few men did too.
The Inca went through their own equator-crossing
ritual. This involved taking a live chicken, slitting its belly and
pulling out its entrails, right there on the dinner table, while
muttering antique-sounding prayers.
Bishop Darwin tried to watch this with calm
appreciation. “Evidently an element of animism and the
superstitious has survived in our hosts’ theology,” he
murmured.
Alphonse didn’t bother to hide his disgust. “I’ve
had enough of these savages.”
“Hush,” Jenny murmured. “If you assume none of them
can speak Frankish, you’re a fool.”
He glared defiantly, but he switched to Anglais.
“Well, I’ve never heard any of them utter a single word. And they
assume I know a lot less Quechua than I’ve learned, thanks to your
bare-chested friend over there. They say things in front of me that
they think I won’t understand—but I do.”
He was only sixteen, as Jenny was; he sounded
absurd, self-important. But he was a prince who had grown up in the
atmosphere of the most conspiratorial and backstabbing court in all
Christendom. He was attuned to detecting lies and power plays. She
asked, “What sort of things?”
“About the ‘problem’ we pose them. We Europeans. We
aren’t like Dreamer’s folk of the South Land, hairy-arsed savages
in the desert. We have great cities; we have armies. We may not
have their silver ships and flying machines, but we could put up a
fight. That’s the problem.”
She frowned. “It’s a problem only if the Inca come
looking for war.”
He scoffed. “Oh, come, Jenny, even an Anglais can’t
be so näve. All this friendship-across-the-sea stuff is just a
smoke screen. Everything they’ve done has been in the manner of an
opening salvo: the donation of farspeakers to every palace in
Europe, the planting of their Orbs of the Unblinking Eye in every
city. What I can’t figure out is what they intend by all
this.”
“Maybe Inca warriors will jump out of the Orbs and
run off with the altar silver.”
“You’re a fool,” he murmured without malice.
“Like all Anglais. You and desert boy over there
deserve each other. Well, I’ve had enough of Atahualpa’s droning
voice. While they’re all busy here, I’m going to see what I can
find out.” He stood.
She hissed. “Be careful.”
He ignored her. He nodded to his host. Atahualpa
waved him away, uncaring.
Atahualpa had begun a conversation with Darwin on
the supposed backwardness of European science and philosophy.
Evidently it was a dialog that had been developing during the
voyage, as the Inca tutors got to know the minds of their students.
“Here is the flaw in your history as I see it,” he said. “Unlike
the Inca, you Europeans never mastered the science of the sky. To
you all is chaos.”
Jenny admired old Darwin’s stoicism. With resigned
good humor, he said, “Isn’t that obvious? All those planets
swooping around the sky—only the sun is stable, the pivot of the
universe. Do you know, long before the birth of Christ-Ra a Greek
philosopher called Aristotle tried to prove that the sun revolves
round the Earth, rather than the other way around!”
But Atahualpa would not be deflected. “The point is
that the motion of the planets is not chaotic, not if you
look at it correctly.” A bowl of the chicken’s blood had been set
before him. He dipped his finger in this and sketched a solar
system on the tabletop, sun at the center, Earth’s orbit, the neat
circles of the inner planets and the wildly swooping flights of the
outer.
Servants brought plates of food. There was the meat
of roast rodent and duck, heaps of maize, squash, tomatoes,
peanuts, and plates of a white tuber, a root vegetable unknown to
Europe but tasty and filling.
“There,” said Atahualpa. “Now, look, you see. Each
planet follows an ellipse, with the sun at one focus. These
patterns are repeated and quite predictable, though the extreme
eccentricity of the outer worlds’ orbits makes them hard to
decipher. We managed it, though—although I grant you we
always had one significant advantage over you, as you will learn
tonight! Let me tell you how our science developed after that . .
.”
He listed Inca astronomers and mathematicians,
names like Huascar and Manco and Yupanqui, which meant nothing to
Jenny. “After we mapped the planets’ elliptical trajectories, it
was the genius of Yupanqui that he was able to show why the
worlds followed such paths, because of a single, simple law: The
planets are drawn to the sun with an attraction that falls off
inversely with the square of distance.”
Darwin said bravely, “I am sure our scholars in
Paris and Damascus would welcome—”
Atahualpa ignored him, digging into his food with
his blood-stained fingers. “But Yupanqui’s greatest legacy was the
insight that the world is explicable: that simple, general laws can
explain a range of particular instances. It is that core philosophy
that we have applied to other disciplines.” He gestured at the
diffuse light that filled the room. “You cower from the light of
the sun, and fear the lightning, and are baffled by the wandering
of a lodestone. But we know that these are all aspects of a single
underlying force, which we can manipulate to build the engines that
drive this ship and the farspeakers that enable the emperor’s voice
to span continents. If your minds had been opened up, your
science might be less of a hotchpotch. And your religion might not
be so primitive.”
Darwin flinched at that. “Well, it’s true there has
been no serious Christian heresy since Martin Luther was burned by
the Inquisition—”
“If only you had not been so afraid of the sky! But
then,” he said, smiling, “our sky always did contain one treasure
yours did not.”
Jenny was growing annoyed with the Inca’s
patronizing treatment of Darwin, a decent man. She said now,
“Commander, even before we sailed you dropped hints about some
wonder in the sky we knew nothing about.”
As his translator murmured in his ear, Atahualpa
looked at her in surprise.
Darwin murmured, “Mademoiselle Cook, please—”
“If you’re so superior, maybe you should stop
playing games and show us this wonder—if it exists at
all!”
Dreamer shook his head. “Oh, Jenny. Just wait and
see.”
The officers were glaring. But Atahualpa held up an
indulgent hand. “I will not punish bravery, Mademoiselle Cook, and
you are brave, if foolish with it. We like to keep our great
surprise from our European passengers—call it an experiment—because
your first reaction is always worth relishing. We were going to
wait until the end of the meal, but—Pachacuti, will you see to the
roof?”
Wiping his lips on a cloth, one of the officers got
up from the table and went to the wall, where a small panel of
buttons had been fixed. With a whir of smooth motors, the roof slid
back.
Fresh salt air, a little cold, billowed over the
diners. Jenny looked up. In an otherwise black sky, a slim crescent
moon hung directly over her head. She had the sense that the moon
was tilted on its side—a measure of how far she had traveled around
the curve of the world in just a few days aboard this ship.
Atahualpa smiled, curious, perhaps cruel. “Never
mind the moon, Mademoiselle Cook. Look that way.” He pointed
south.
She stood. And there, clearly visible over the lip
of the roof, something was suspended in the sky. Not the sun or
moon, not a planet—something entirely different. It was a disc of
light, a swirl, with a brilliant point at its center, and a ragged
spiral glow all around it. It was the emblem she had observed on
the navigational displays but far more delicate—a sculpture of
light, hanging in the sky.
“Oh,” she gasped, awed, terrified. “It’s
beautiful.” Beside her, Archbishop Darwin muttered prayers and
crossed himself.
She felt Dreamer’s hand take hers. “I wanted to
tell you,” he murmured. “They forbade me . . .”
Atahualpa watched them. “What do you think you are
seeing?”
Darwin said, “It looks like a hole in the sky. Into
which all light is draining.”
“No. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It is the
source of all light.”
“And that is how you navigate,” Jenny said. “By the
cloud—you could pick out the point of light at the center, and
measure your position on a curving Earth from that. This is your
treasure—a beacon in the sky.”
“You’re an insightful young woman. It is only
recently, in fact, that with our farseers—another technology you
lack—we have been able to resolve those spiral streams to reveal
their true nature.”
“Which is?”
“The cloud is a sea of suns, Mademoiselle. Billions
upon billions of suns, so far away they look like droplets in
mist.”
The Inca sky-scientists believed that the cloud was
in fact a kind of factory of suns; the sun and its planets couldn’t
have formed in the black void across which they traveled.
“As to how we ended up here—some believe that it
was a chance encounter between our sun and another. If they come
close, you see, suns attract each other. Our sun was flung out of
the sea, northward, generally speaking, off into the void.
The encounter damaged the system itself; the inner planets and
Earth were left in their neat circles, but the outer planets were
flung onto their looping orbits. All this is entirely explicable by
the laws of motion developed by Yupanqui and others.” Atahualpa
lifted his finely chiseled face to the milky light of the spiral.
“This was billions of years back, when the world was young. Just as
well; life was too primitive to have been extinguished by the tides
and earthquakes. But what a sight it would have been then, the sea
of suns huge in the sky, if there had been eyes to see it!”
There was a commotion outside the stateroom. “Let
me go!” somebody yelled in Frankish. “Let me go!”
An officer went to the door. Alphonse was dragged
in by two burly Inca holding his arms. His nose was bloodied, his
face powder smeared, his powdered wig askew, but he was furious,
defiant.
Archbishop Darwin bustled to the side of his
charge. “This is an outrage. He is a prince of the empire!”
At a nod from the commander, Alphonse was released.
He stood there massaging bruised arms. And he stared up at the
spiral in the sky.
“Sir, we found him in the farspeaker room,” said
one of the guards. “He was tampering with the equipment.” For the
guests, this was slowly translated from the Quechua.
But Alphonse interrupted the translation. He said
in Frankish, “Yes, I was in your farspeaker room, Atahualpa. Yes, I
understand Quechua better than you thought, don’t I? And I wasn’t
tampering with the equipment. I was sending a message to my father.
Even now, I imagine, his guards will be closing in on the Orb you
planted in Saint Paul’s—and those elsewhere.”
Darwin stared at him. “Your royal highness, I’ve no
idea what is happening here—why you would be so discourteous to our
hosts.”
“Discourteous?” He glared at Atahualpa. “Ask him,
then. Ask him what a sun bomb is.”
Atahualpa stared back stonily.
Dreamer came forward. “Tell him the truth, Inca. He
knows most of it anyhow.” And one by one the other representatives
of the Inca’s subject races, in their beads and feathers, stepped
forward to stand with Dreamer.
And so Atahualpa yielded. A sun bomb was a weapon
small enough to fit into one of the Incas’ Orbs of the Unblinking
Eye yet powerful enough to flatten a city—a weapon that harnessed
the power of the sun itself.
Jenny was shocked. “We welcomed you in Londres. Why
would you plant such a thing in our city?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Alphonse answered. “Because
these all-conquering Inca can’t cow Franks and Germans and Ottomans
with a pretty silver ship as they did these others, or you
Anglais.”
Atahualpa said, “A war of conquest would be long
and bloody, though the outcome would be beyond doubt. We thought
that if the sun bombs were planted, so that your cities were held
hostage—if one of them was detonated for a demonstration, if a
backward provincial city was sacrificed—”
“Like Londres,” said Jenny, appalled.
“And then,” Alphonse said, “you would use your
farspeakers to speak to the emperors and state your demands. Well,
it’s not going to happen, Inca. Looks like it will be bloody after
all, doesn’t it?”
Darwin touched his shoulder. “You have done your
empire a great service today, Prince Alphonse. But war is not yet
inevitable between the people of the north and the south. Perhaps
this will be a turning point in our relationship. Let us hope that
wiser counsels prevail.”
“We’ll see,” Alphonse said, staring at
Atahualpa.
“We’ll see.”
Servants bustled in, to clear dishes and set
another course. The normality after the confrontation was
bewildering.
Slowly tensions eased.
Jenny impulsively grabbed Dreamer’s arm. They
walked away from the rest.
She stared up at the sea of suns. “If we are all
lost in this gulf, we ought to learn to get along.”
Dreamer grunted. “You convince the emperors. I will
speak to the Inca.”
She imagined Earth swimming in light. “Dreamer,
will we ever sail back to the sea of suns, back to where we came
from?”
“Well, you never know,” he said. “But the sea is
farther away than you imagine, I think. I don’t think you and I
will live to see it.”
Jenny said impulsively, “Our children might.” “Yes.
Our children might. Come on. Let’s get this wretched dinner over
with.”
The stateroom roof slid closed, hiding the sea of
suns from their sight.