As the
Dasheter
continued east, the Face appeared to rise slowly, the part intersecting the horizon growing narrower and narrower as the vast circular form lifted higher into the heavens. Gorgeous colors rolled up and down it in loose vertical stripes.
The top-to-bottom cycle of phases fascinated Afsan. When the entire dome was lit up, as it was each midnight, it seemed, paradoxically, like a false dawn. The sky should have been at its blackest. Instead, all but the brightest stars on the western horizon were drowned out by the eastern rising of the Face.
When the Face was a waxing crescent, the illuminated top part rose from the waves like an archway, beckoning the pilgrims to enter.
But when it was a waning crescent, only the lower part lit, the points of the crescent rose up from the horizon like the curving horns of some great beast lurking below the edge.
Mixed signals.
Inviting.
Threatening.
The
Dasheter
sailed toward the Face of God, Afsan wondering what they would find.
Afsan saw that the Face did have features, after a fashion. No nostrils, no earholes, no teeth. But there were the famed God eyes, black circles as dark and round as Quintaglio orbs, spaced randomly in a tight vertical band up the center of the rising sphere.
And perhaps there was a mouth, for a huge white oval, measuring a fifth of the Face’s total height, crawled up the right side each day.
Finally, three dekadays after they had first seen the Face of God, its trailing tip broke free from the watery horizon. It was after dark, the Face half full, its bottom lit up. The glowing curved edge lifted from the waves. Afsan had stopped breathing, waiting for the moment of separation. When it happened, he gulped cool night air.
Lovely. Afsan had never had cause to use that word to describe anything in his life, but the sight of the Face of God was indeed lovely. He stared at it, its lower half aglow, its upper half a vast purple dome against the night, the whole circular object floating just above the edge of the water, its reflection on the waves a rippling yellow arm reaching out to the pilgrims.
No, thought Afsan, no, the Face was not quite circular. Even discounting the fact that it was only partially illuminated, it still wasn’t perfectly round. It was narrower than it was tall, squished horizontally.
Egg-shaped.
Of course! What better form for the creator of all life?
Sunrise was breathtaking. The Face was a thin crescent on its bottom half as the searing point of the sun rose from the waves just below it, then the whole sky dimmed again for more than a daytenth as the sun was hidden behind the great dark bulk of the Face. Then a second dawn occurred as the brilliant blue-white light finally rose out of the top of the Face, its upper edge now a bright crescent.
Afsan was always circumspect when using the far-seer. He recalled the trouble he’d gotten into at the palace when he’d suggested to Saleed that he might use such a device to examine the Face of God. Whenever Det-Bleen was on deck, Afsan did no observing. He occasionally overheard other pilgrims and members of the crew making derisive remarks about his obsession with looking through the brass tube, but Afsan didn’t care. The sights were glorious.
Through the far-seer, in close-up, there seemed almost infinite detail in the swirling bands of color that ran up the illuminated part of the Face of God. The bands weren’t sharply defined. Instead, they faded away into little eddies and curlicues. The mysterious God eyes were just as round and black and featureless as they appeared without the far-seer. Under magnification, though, the great mouth, that swirling white oval sometimes visible moving up the Face, looked like a whirlpool.
It was wondrous. Each tiny circular segment of the Face was intricate, each band of color complex and fascinating.
Actually Afsan quickly became convinced that he wasn’t seeing a solid surface. Not only did the Face go through phases, but its visible details shifted from day to day, the configurations flowing, structures drifting. No, Afsan suspected he was seeing either clouds of tinted gas or swirls of liquids — or something, anyway, other than a solid object.
Again he tried to reconcile this with his expectations. Earlier he’d thought of the Face as a great egg, but now it seemed immaterial, fluid. And yet was not the spirit a diaphanous thing? Was not the soul airy and insubstantial? Wouldn’t God Herself simply be a great immaterial spirit?
Wouldn’t She?
The
Dasheter
continued to sail east day after day, its identification call — a semi-ten of drums, a pair of bells, loud then soft, time and again — hailing the Face of God. As the ship moved on, the Face rose farther. At last, eighty days after it had first been sighted, the heart of the great circular form, cycling through its phases once each day, stood at the zenith. The Face, sprawling across a quarter of the sky, inspired awe in Afsan and the other pilgrims.
It was overpowering, compelling, hypnotic. Afsan could not help but stare at it, and, when so doing, he lost track of time. The colors swirling in broad bands were like nothing he had ever seen.
No, he reflected, no, that wasn’t quite right. He had seen similar colors, similar vibrancy, once, kilodays ago. Lost in the deep woods of Arj’toolar province, upriver from where Pack Carno was roaming, he had eaten a strange fungus growing only on the north sides of trees. A Quintaglio does not eat plants, he had reminded himself at the time. But he had been unable to catch any small animal, and, lost for three even-days and two odd, his belly was rumbling and he could taste his own gastric acid at the back of his throat. He’d need something to take the pain off, something to sustain him, until he found his way back to Carno or until someone found him.
He’d seen small scaly creatures nibbling at the fungus, chewing it, rather than swallowing it whole. He’d tried to grab the little lizards but, to Afsan’s humiliation, they scampered away every time he tried to sneak up on them. Even worse, they didn’t scamper very far — just enough to be out of reach of a single lunge.
Children do silly things, and Afsan, like many others, had tried eating grass and flowers in his youth, only to become terribly sick, his stomach cramped for days.
But this fungus, this strange beige lump growing on the side of the trees: it wasn’t a regular plant, it wasn’t green. Perhaps it wouldn’t pain him so to eat it. And, by the prophet, if he didn’t eat something soon, he would die. The lizards seemed to manage it well enough.
Eventually hunger got the better of him. Afsan crouched down beside the tree and snapped off a piece of the fungus. It was cold and dry and had a crumbly texture along its broken edge. He brought it up to his muzzle. It smelled musty, but otherwise innocuous. Finally he placed it in his mouth. The taste was bitter, but not too unpleasant. Still, he was a hunter, not an armorback. He had no molars to grind the plant with, but he used his tongue to bounce it around in his mouth, perforating and tearing it with his pointed teeth. Perhaps working it thus would make it pass through his digestion better than the grasses he’d tried when he was even younger.
At first, everything seemed fine. The fungus did seem to take the edge off his hunger.
But then, suddenly, Afsan felt light-headed. He rose to his feet, but found he couldn’t keep his balance. He staggered a few steps, then decided he’d be better off lying down. He let himself down to the ground, and lay on his side on the cool dirt, a blanket of dead leaves beneath him, discrete shafts of fierce white sunlight coming through the canopy of treetops above his head.
Soon, the sunlight began to dance, the beams sliding back and forth, intertwining, coalescing, fragmenting, changing colors, now blue, now green, now red, now fiery orange, shifting, undulating, rainbows incarnate, swinging back and forth. He felt as if he was floating, seeing colors as he’d never seen them before, brighter, cleaner, more powerful, impinging directly on his mind like thoughts crisp and clear, pure and lucid.
It was similar to the delirium that accompanies fever, but with no pain, no nausea, just a cool sense of tranquillity, of liquid peace.
He lost all track of time, of place. He forgot he was in a forest, forgot his hunger, forgot that night would soon be here. Or, if he knew any of that, it did not seem to matter. The colors, the lights, the patterns — they were all that mattered, all that had ever mattered.
At last, he did come out of it, late into the night. It was cold and dark, and Afsan was very, very afraid. He felt physically weak, mentally drained. The next morning, a hunting party from Carno came across him. They gave him a leather cloak, and individual hunters took turns carrying him back to the village on their shoulders. He never told anyone about the fungus he had eaten, about the strange hallucinations he had experienced. But that event, six kilodays in the past, was the only thing he could compare to the hypnotic effect of staring into the swirling, roiling Face of God.
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.