This man is good,
she thought, excited, and applauded madly when he was done.
There were a pair of purses flung from the audience; Campas picked them up, bowed again, and stepped from the light. A fussy grey-haired man introduced the mimes of Fastias. Fiona was next, so she slipped backstage again, made certain she was ready, and waited for the introduction.
Backstage watching the mimes, she felt the blood pounding in her ears, and realized that, oddly, it was not fear she felt, but simple excitement. At last these people would know who she was, and why she had come.
She started with standard tricks, clear glass jars of water disappearing, reappearing empty, the water itself appearing inside a cap she had acquired from a member of the audience — good stuff, guaranteed to start the act with laughter. There were more tricks along those lines, then she began to cut things up and make them whole again, and this was followed by the first major spectacle. A small icon, the Amil-Deo, was placed on a table, and suddenly it appeared, much enlarged, on the curtain behind her. She could hear the audience shifting in their seats, and a sudden murmur of astonishment: then enthralled gasps as the Amil-Deo began to move, raising kings on high, each more splendid than the last, before casting them down again. When the trick faded the applause was deafening, and she felt the thud of purses landing on the stage. She ignored them, instead picking from her table a pair of gleaming hollow tubes. She brandished them over her head, feeling her back arch as she crossed them, rapping one on the other.
“Good people, I beg your leave to tell a story,” she cried. “A story that may seem strange, a story full of wonders, a tale that may even seem impossible.” She lowered her arms, standing plainly in front of them; she lowered her voice as well, making them listen. “It is a story, however, that is absolutely true.” Her quiet voice, her simple stance — it was all guileless, without artifice or staginess, the more to convince them of her sincerity. Fiona raised the tubes again and a white mist shot from them, spouting high into the air as her audience gasped in wonder. The fog hung between the audience and the rounded arches of the ceiling, a pale translucency that obscured the candles that flickered there; and then, as Fiona lowered the tubes and switched on her projectors, it seemed to those below as if the roof suddenly opened to reveal a cloudless, pitch-black sky, ablaze with the great glittering stars. The audience moaned in wonder.
“Behold the stars!” Fiona called. “The stars as the dragons first made them, the stars as they first glittered in the vault of the heavens on the first night of the new-born world. Here they sparkle, new-made, as they move in their courses.” The stars were registered at local perspective: any navigator in the audience would have recognized them. They began to rotate, as if with the motion of the planet.
The Arrandalla were good astronomers and navigators; a hundred years ago they’d abandoned the Demro-centered concept of the universe and adopted the notion of their planet circling a star, with the laws of gravitation and planetary motion springing up a generation later, discovered simultaneously in half a dozen places. This understanding would make Fiona’s explanation easier.
The stars slowed again, then stopped. The stars faded, and dawn began to blaze across the eastern sky. The sky lightened, turned to day. There was some scattered applause from people thinking it was the end of the trick.
“Let us take to ourselves the wings of the mallanto,” Fiona said, stifling the applause before it could begin. “Let us take wing, and soar into the sky.” And suddenly the perspective of the display changed; there was a lurching sensation, and then, coming into view, was the horizon, with Acragas’ palace squatting recognizably in the foreground, the city stretching beyond, and after that the blue, gleaming water. There were cries from the audience, an audible buzz; and there was suddenly movement as a number of them bolted for the exits, making the sign against the evil eye.
The perspective swung dizzyingly as the view gyred, circling higher over the Acragas palace, catching here a glimpse of sky, of cloud, of the city walls, of the plains and rivers beyond. “Let us mount higher with the wings of the mallanto,” Fiona chanted. “Let us climb into the sky and look down upon the creation of the dragons and of man.”
The viewpoint looked down, at the shrunken palace and the city; and then it suddenly pulled back, the city fading away into a mosaic of brown plains, green wetlands, blue sea, all dotted with a scattering of cloud. There was a low moan from the audience, some overcome with vertigo — and there were the snowcapped peaks to the south, and lying across the smoking sea the greybrown land of the Brodaini, broken by mountain-teeth and the snaking white forms of glaciers. Still the perspective drew back until all of Demro hung in the void, snow-capped north and south, the white cloud contrasting with seas of the deepest blue, the dull-brown continents almost insignificant in the display of shocking colors. And around the glowing bluewhite globe burned the steady, suddenly nonflickering stars.
“Here we have mounted, above the world,” Fiona said. “From here we can see the dragons’ creation, all of Demro laid out below us. The creation of mankind, all the great cities, all the fields and nations and alliances — from here they are invisible, lost in the totality of the universe.”
The perspective began to move again, Demro fading away into the midst of the stars, Demro’s sun appearing in a blaze of white, both fading now with distance. “We journey now among the stars,” Fiona said. “Higher even than the wings of the mallanto can take us. Here only the encompassing mind of the dragon can bring us. Demro fades to a distant speck of blue, and vanishes. Even the sun fades in the cold distance, until it is no more than a star. The dragon’s dream is cold and lifeless, here in the barren spaces between the stars.”
In a slow moment the perspective changed again, rotating through 180 degrees until the viewpoint was dead ahead, the stars moving past as the simulation forged onward. This was not, Fiona knew, how the starfield moved at near-light speed — the reality was more spectacular, the stars refracting as they bent around the speeding mass of the ship — but this was straining her audience’s understanding enough, without her delivering a disquisition on relativity physics.
A star moved into center view, growing brighter, its white light somehow bluer, fiercer. “Here,” Fiona said, “a small star, another star of the dragons’ making. But even at this immeasurable distance the dragons build true — for around this other star circles a world, another world. And it is a world where the dragons have, as here on Demro, created humanity.”
The new world appeared, a brown speck at first, hardly visible in the hard glare of the new star, then growing rapidly until it filled the display. There was much less water here, that was obvious: the brown areas greatly outnumbered the blue, and the patches of white around the poles were much smaller.
“The dragons made a harsher world here,” Fiona said, “a warmer world, where water is rare, and greatly prized. Here the humans, battling the harsh conditions of the land, were forced to dig great networks of canals to water their land — not canals as they have here, to regulate the flood and speed commerce, but canals to bring water to thirsty crops.” She showed her audience scenes of the other world: the great flatlands; the giant, branching canals reflecting the ruddy hues of the sky; the grey upthrust stone of the mountains, cleft with black shadow; the deserts and semi-deserts with their strange beasts.