Chapter 137 Optics

“Not out here,” said Risa.

Toby had his ear against the glass. The dawn was over. The spine was quiet again, and Dot's rivers had begun to move, slowly, as if she was still trying to put something in order.

“I can't hear it now,” he said.

“Then you can fail to hear it over breakfast.”

He looked up at her. She held out her hand.

After a moment, he took it.

That was how we began trying to understand the first thing Halvard Crane had said without a microphone. With Toby being taken away from it and given bread.

I thought Halloway would have approved.

Dot remembered the pattern.

That didn't mean she knew what it meant. She explained this three times, standing outside the dome while Toby drew marks in his notebook and Luna stood behind his shoulder with her slate.

“This unit can repeat it,” she said. “This unit cannot explain it.”

“Don't repeat the sound,” said Risa.

“No,” said Dot. “This unit remembers what happened to Toby Marsh.”

She reached through the doorway with her fine arm and took the pencil instead.

She drew a short line. A gap. Two short lines. A gap. Three.

Then something crowded, crossed out, and drawn again underneath.

Toby leaned closer.

“How many there?”

“This unit is uncertain. The end was faint.”

“Then leave it uncertain,” said Luna.

Dot put a small circle round the crowded part.

I looked at the first three groups. At the gaps between them. At a thing that might be the beginning of counting, or might be nothing like counting at all.

“Tomorrow,” said Toby.

“From inside your wall,” said Luna.

“Dot hears it. Dot can draw it. I don't have to.” He looked up at her. “I know.”

Luna watched him for a moment. Then she nodded.

I wanted it to be a sentence. I wanted it to say Mother's hands were still, and the twins were well, and Miss Pell had made a cake because somebody had finally told her where Juno was.

It was three groups of marks and a circle round a thing we didn't know.

I had breakfast.

Afterward I went to the forge.

The optics notes were still on the shelf where I'd left them. Beside three lenses, a curved mirror with a chip out of its rim, and a little square of silvered glass that had nearly put me on my back for changing one grain in the tower.

I'd been meaning to finish them for weeks.

Then somebody needed bringing home. Then somebody's heart stopped being their own. Then the sky went quiet.

The notes had stayed on the shelf.

Sera looked at them under my arm, and then at my face.

“Something you can mend?” she said.

“Possibly.”

She moved a tray off the bench.

“Good. Sit down.”

The first thing I tried was wrong.

So was the second.

By the third, Liam had come to watch, which made it much worse.

“I thought you could make glass,” he said.

“I can.”

“That looks like glass.”

“It is glass.”

“Well done.”

Sera pointed at the door. He went through it, carrying two of the failed lenses and looking pleased with himself.

I sat with the third one in front of me and tried to understand why a piece of glass I could see every grain of was better at giving me a headache than at showing me a bolt.

The bolt stood on the far side of the forge, behind my right shoulder. I was looking at it through the mirror and the lens. Its head had three edges where there should have been one.

If I looked harder, all three became very clear.

That wasn't helpful.

Dot came when Sera asked her.

She stood outside the forge and reached in, carefully avoiding the hot tray, and took the lens between two fine grips.

“The curvature is accurate,” she said.

“I know.”

“The composition is not uniform.”

I stopped.

She turned it toward the doorway. The daylight went through it and made a pale oval on the bench.

“Here,” she said. “And here. The operator made it clear. Clear is not always the same.”

I looked.

She was right. A little more of one thing on this side. A little less on the other. Nothing that mattered if all you wanted was a window. Enough to matter if you wanted every part of what passed through it to arrive together.

I'd made something that looked like a lens.

Garnet's first bread had looked like bread.

I laughed, once, and put my face in my hands.

“What?” said Sera.

“Sand.”

She waited.

“I'll tell you later.”

We started again.

Dot made the glass. Slowly. From material I'd separated out for her, weighed and checked, instead of whatever I'd persuaded the red floor to become while thinking about a man eleven light-years away.

Sera kept the heat even while it settled. No bright flare. No cold corner. Her hand rested beside the chamber, fingers open, and the orange stayed the same orange for an hour.

I did the shapes afterward, with Dot checking them. Then the silver.

The old mirror had its silver behind the glass. I tried putting it on the front instead, where the line from my eyes wouldn't have to go through the glass, turn, and come back through it again.

Dot made a cover to keep fingers off it.

“Liam,” said Sera, when she saw the cover.

“Dust,” said Dot.

“Both.”

By late afternoon, the bolt had one head.

I looked into the mirror. Through the lens. At the iron behind my shoulder.

The other sight went out. Bent. Gathered.

There.

Still weaker than looking straight at it. Still a weight behind my eyes. But the threads held apart from one another, instead of swimming together, and I could find the small rough place on the head where Liam had dropped it.

I asked that place to smooth.

It did.

I stayed in the chair.

Sera, standing beside me with a cloth already in her hand, waited.

“Well?”

“I'm still sitting.”

“I can see that.”

“I haven't fallen out of it.”

She looked at the bolt. At my nose. Back at the bolt.

Then she put the cloth on the bench.

“Show me again.”

I didn't do it again that evening.

Matthias was waiting.

He lay on the middle bed with his enormous hands folded over his stomach, while Lena sat beside him and Toby put the things he needed within reach. Holt had taken the chair by the door.

“This one's a small bit,” I told Matthias. “The same as last night. The bone round here first. Nothing stands on it yet.”

“I heard you.”

“I'm going to keep saying it.”

“I've noticed.”

Lena smiled toward his voice.

I sat down. Put the optics notes away. Looked properly.

Old bone wasn't badly made glass. It had done the best it could with what it had. It had held a man together while he crawled to a hill, and while a blind woman dragged him up it, and for eighteen months afterward.

I went slowly.

When we finished, Matthias's shirt was wet through. Toby wiped his face, and Lena found his hand, and nobody asked him whether it had hurt.

“Still a week?” he said at last.

“To rebuild it, if it goes well. Then we see what the muscles can do.”

He nodded.

“Right.”

Holt waited until Toby had covered him before he spoke.

“Your father took six hours on my leg.”

“I know.”

“Told me what every bit was called. While he was doing it.” Holt shifted his stick against the chair. “Couldn't answer him. Obviously. He said that was the best part.”

Matthias laughed. Very briefly. Then stopped and swore.

Toby pointed at Holt.

“No more being funny.”

“First time anybody's had to tell him,” said Lena.

On Day 418, the one said it again.

Dot drew it while we ate. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Five groups. Each one larger than the last by one mark. Then the little rising shape she had drawn after Crane's name before.

“Hello,” said Toby. “After it?”

“Yes,” said Dot. “Asking.”

Holt looked at the paper for a long time.

“He's starting with sums.”

“We think,” said Luna.

“Aye. We think.” Holt pushed the page back toward Toby. “He always liked sums. They stayed where he put them.”

“Can we answer?” I asked.

Dot's rivers moved.

“This unit can ask the deep to carry the pattern. This unit does not know whether it will.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow,” said Dot.

Five numbers. No word for Mother. No word for well.

But if they were numbers, and we could agree they were numbers, there might be a way to ask how many. There might be a way to say nineteen. Or two. Or Juno Pell, alive, if we learned enough things first.

I wrote the five groups in my notebook.

Then I went back to the forge.

Wren brought the problem with her.

She put a mirror on the bench and stood over my shoulder while I drew a long tube with two lenses in it.

“Twenty-two was faint this morning,” she said. “There was mist down in the west. I got the number. I couldn't get anything after.”

“Still one?”

“Still one. I think. That's what I don't like.”

I looked at the tube on the page.

“How much farther could you read with a telescope?”

“How good a telescope?”

“I don't know yet.”

She pulled up a stool.

“Then I'll stay.”

By noon, there were two problems on the bench.

One was bringing a distant flash close enough for Wren to read it without guessing. The other was turning my sight far enough round the canyon that I could reach the north path without having to climb out of the south terraces first.

Dot's screen could show me the path. It couldn't let me touch it. We'd learned that the hard way.

Mirrors could. Badly, before.

Better, now.

But two bends cost more than one. A third was worse. Magnifying something didn't make it free, and pointing a telescope into a hillside didn't make the hillside stop being there.

Luna arrived while I was drawing the fourth bend.

“No.”

“You haven't heard what it is.”

“I can count the mirrors.”

She took the pencil and crossed out two of them. Drew a straight line to the rim. Another down to the terrace.

“Move the chair.”

I looked at the drawing.

“Oh.”

“Yes,” said Luna.

We built it over the next two days.

Not a great glittering wall. A set of small, careful paths. Mirrors on covered brackets along the rim, each one turned toward a place I couldn't reach from the terrace. Tubes to gather the view. Shutters to close the paths I wasn't using.

Dot and her hands carried the pieces. Sera fitted the brackets. Wren checked the western view, then checked it again. Luna wrote down every place the rock still hid.

Old Son came down from the tower after its noon flash and stood beside the bench.

“Query. This unit can hold an angle.”

“Would you like to?” I asked.

“Yes.” A pause. “Until dusk.”

“Until dusk.”

It held the western mirror while Dot fixed the bracket. Perfectly still. The image in the tube stopped trembling.

I thought about eight hundred and seventy-two days.

“That's very good,” I said.

“Operator Dunmore required the light to reach the next hill.”

“He was right.”

Old Son's third color came up, faintly, under the other two.

At dawn on Day 419, Dot asked.

I couldn't hear what she sent. Toby stayed inside his wall. Risa watched him, and I watched her watching him, while the deep breathed under us and Luna counted the same eleven seconds.

Thirty-one. A gap. One.

Then the spine went quiet.

“Did he get it?” I said.

“This unit does not know.”

We waited a whole day to find out.

I fitted shutters. Checked lenses. Took a little more old bone away where Toby told me Matthias could bear it, and helped the good bone find the place it ought to be.

I slept badly.

On Day 420, Crane counted to six.

Dot drew the extra group. Carefully. Six marks after five.

Toby looked at them with both hands flat on the table.

“He heard.”

“Or he was going to do six anyway,” said Luna. Very gently.

Toby thought about that.

Then he turned the page over.

“Three,” he said. “Send three. Tomorrow. Just three. If he sends three back, we'll know he can hear us.”

Luna nodded.

I looked at the six marks. For once, I didn't try to make them say anything else.

“Three,” I said.

We opened the last shutter that afternoon.

I sat on the first terrace with the valley in front of me, in pieces.

The western slope. The eastern gully. The north path. The green beyond the bend, where I'd never been able to look from down here before.

Not all at once. I had to choose. Turn the tube, set the catch, look. The view narrowed when I gathered it close. The other sight still cost. Dot had put a chair there, and Sera had checked that it couldn't tip backward.

I didn't comment on that.

On the north path, Wren had left a strip of iron with three scratches in it.

Through the glass, I found it.

Through the turn in the silver, I found what it was made of.

I changed the middle scratch into a little ridge.

Wren bent over it. Ran her thumb across it. Looked down at me from the path.

Then she lifted her hand.

One finger.

Luna made a mark on the slate. Sera took a breath beside me that she'd been holding longer than I'd realised.

“Again?” I said.

“After you've eaten,” said both of them.

Lena came up while I was eating.

Juno walked beside her, saying where the step was, although Lena had already found it with the end of her shoe. They stopped by the bracket, and Lena held out a hand.

“May I?”

I guided her fingers to the tube. She followed it down to the catch, then along the bracket, learning the shape.

“So you can sit here,” she said, “and do something over there.”

“Some things. Small ones, to start.”

“And everybody can see through it?”

“Everybody who—” I stopped.

“Who can see,” said Lena. “Yes, Dask. I know.”

My face went hot. Juno looked at the sky.

Lena found the shutter and closed it. Opened it again. Her thumb stayed on the little handle.

“Then put a different notch on each one,” she said. “So I can learn which is which. If you ask me to open the east, I don't want somebody having to point.”

“I can do that.”

“Good.”

She let go. Juno took her arm, and they went back down the terrace together.

I made the notches before I finished eating. One for north. Two for east. Three for south. Four for west.

Then I closed my eyes and found each of them with my thumb.

Sera watched me do it.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” She pushed the bowl closer. “It's getting cold.”

Wren took her telescope up before dusk.

She came down after the flashes with the slate held against her chest.

“Twenty-two,” she said. “One. Still one.”

She swallowed.

“And WAITING.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Luna reached for the map.

We still had people to bring home. All the mirrors in the world didn't do that part for us.

It was Sera who saw them going under.

She'd taken the eastern tube while I ate, leaning over it with one eye shut and her hand on the catch.

“Dask.”

I put the bowl down.

“Come and look at this.”

Beyond the gully, where the hill folded over itself, the Teeming were walking into the ground.

Not digging. There was already a way in. A dark slit under a shelf of rock, almost hidden by the fronds. One after another, they reached it, lowered their heads, and disappeared.

I'd seen them in that valley before. Running beside Maris. Standing in the green with their faces turned up.

Now the green stood empty behind them.

“How long?” said Luna.

“Since I opened it,” said Sera. “Could've been all afternoon. We couldn't see round that bit before.”

Risa stood beside the bracket with her eyes shut.

“Still hello,” she said. “The ones I can feel. Nobody's chasing anything.”

The last one stopped at the entrance.

It turned its head toward the canyon. Toward the little covered mirror on the rim.

For a moment it looked straight back at me.

Then it folded its legs and went below.

I followed the passage as far as the light went. Rock. A bend. Darkness, and the old confused weight of earth beyond it.

Nothing I could change safely.

Luna marked the place on her map.

“We look tomorrow,” she said. “From outside.”

I closed the shutter.

Above us, Old Son flashed thirty-one from the tower, and Wren answered the people still waiting in the west.

Day 417–420.

Crane's list. Perhaps numbers. One to five. Dot drew what she heard. Circled what she didn't know.

Toby stays inside his wall. Dot listens. He can read the answer afterward.

The optics notes were still on the shelf.

Clear isn't the same as uniform. I'd made Garnet's bread, in glass.

Dot made the material. Sera held the heat. Silver on the front. One bolt. One head. Changed it without falling out of the chair.

Two turns cost more than one. Luna: “Move the chair.”

Mirrors on the rim. Lenses. Shutters. A valley in pieces. Still blind places. Luna wrote them down.

Old Son: “This unit can hold an angle. Until dusk.”

Matthias. A little each night. Bone first. Muscles afterward. Nobody stands yet.

Day 419: Dot asked the deep to carry the count.

Day 420: Crane counted to six. Maybe an answer. Maybe not. Tomorrow we send three.

Wren, through the telescope: F-22. One. WAITING.

We're still coming.

The eastern gully. Teeming going below. Still hello. The last one looked back at the mirror.

I can see round the hill now.

I still can't see round the bend underneath it.