"Then it will not work," said Afsan.
Mokleb shrugged. "The loss is yours. I sleep well at night, Afsan, and I can see. I don’t expect you to envy me for
that, but I had been led to believe that you desired those same things yourself. I see that I was mistaken. My
apologies for taking up some of your precious time."
Mokleb began walking away. Insects buzzed. She passed three Rockscape boulders before Afsan spoke. "Wait," he
said. And then, a moment later, "Come back."
Mokleb walked back toward Afsan’s rock.
"I’m sorry," Afsan said. "I understand you are trying to help me. Please — I do want to be cured."
"Good," said Mokleb. "That brings us to the question of compensation for my labors."
"I have an unlimited imperial endowment," said Afsan. "Please talk with Dee-Laree at the palace; he’ll make sure you
are well looked after."
"I will speak to Dee-Laree," said Mokleb. "But simply having a third party provide me with recompense is insufficient.
We are about to embark on a long and difficult road, Afsan. There must be a contract directly between us. Normally, I
wouldn’t say this to a patient, but I’m sure you would figure this out for yourself — and I know that the moment I
leave, you will send an assistant to the library and have him or her bring back my writings and read them to you
anyway." She paused. "I have found that, as therapy progresses, patients begin to skip appointments. They wish to
avoid facing difficult questions. Therefore, I will charge you a personal fee for every session, to be paid whether you
attend or not, said fee to be dear enough to make you reluctant to waste it."
"A fee! On top of what the palace will give you?"
"Yes. You’ve already made clear how valuable your time is to you, Afsan. Mine is equally valuable to me, and I won’t
be trifled with."
"But a fee! Doctors don’t trade directly with patients, Mokleb. Surely you already receive a stipend."
"That’s irrelevant. You must be committed to the therapy, and a fee helps ensure that. Plus, there’s another reason to
charge you a fee. Again, I wouldn’t normally mention it, but you will be savvy enough to see it, anyway. During the
course of the therapy, you will have many different reactions to me. At times, those reactions will be ones of
aggression and hate. Paying me a fee will help assuage your guilt over having those feelings. You must have no
humiliating debt of gratitude to me for tolerating such outbursts; rather, you must feel that you have bought the right
to make them."
Afsan was silent for a time. Then: "Although Dybo looks after my needs, Mokleb, I personally own little. My
endowment is mostly to finance research. I have no precious stones, no percentage interest in any ship or caravan,
and only a few trading markers. How would I pay you?"
"What do you own that you value most?"
"I have few possessions. My greatest prize, I suppose, was the far-seer that Novato gave me. But that is in the
custody of my son, Toroca."
"What else do you treasure?"
Afsan’s tail, hanging off the back of the rock he was straddling, waggled back and forth. "Well, to my astonishment,
my old teaching master, Tak-Saleed, left me a complete set of his Treatise on the Planets, the most famous of his
works."
"What good are books to a blind person?" asked Mokleb.
"Oh, occasionally I have a student read passages from them to me. But simply owning them, running my fingers over
the kurpa leather binding, smelling the musty pages — that gives me pleasure."
"How many volumes are there?"
"Eighteen. Three per planet, other than the Face of God."
"Excellent," said Mokleb. "And how many times does eighteen go into five hundred?"
Afsan tipped his head. "A little less than twenty-eight: 27.778, to be precise."
"Very good. You will pay me in advance. Today, you will surrender the first volume of the treatise. After every twenty
eight sessions, you will surrender another volume. If you are still being treated after five hundred sessions, we will
renegotiate the contract. Agreed?"
"I cherish those books," Afsan said softly.
"Agreed?" said Mokleb harshly.
Afsan tipped his head down, blind eyes looking at the ground. "Agreed," he said at last.
Novato mentally whipped herself with her tail for not having come up with the idea. After all, it was a logical
extension of her own invention, the far-seer. The far-seer used lenses to make distant objects appear close, and this
device, the small-seer, used lenses to make tiny objects visible. The small-seer’s inventor, Bor-Vanbelk of Pack
Brampto in Arj’toolar, had discovered amazing things. Tiny lifeforms in a drop of water! Little disks within blood.
Minuscule chambers in the leaf of a plant!
Novato, balancing again on the side of the cliff, clinging with one hand to the rope web, was using a small-seer to
examine the spreading blueness.
Here, right at its very edge, she could see shifting patterns of dust. Even through the lenses, the grains were all but
invisible. But unlike the random jostling in a drop of water, these motes moved in regular patterns, back and forth, up
and down. It was as though Novato were watching a dance from the back of an impossibly high amphitheater, the
individual dancers virtually impossible to discern but the mathematical precision of their movements still a thing of
beauty.
Dancers, thought Novato. Dancers smaller than the eye could see.
But they weren’t just dancing. They were working, like ants building an anthill, moving with determined insectile
exactness.
Part of her said the little things must be alive, and part said that that was ridiculous, that nothing so ancient could be
living. But if they were not lifeforms, then what could they be?
Whatever they were, they were making phenomenal progress. Already, almost the entire cliff face was blue.
If further contact was to be made with the Others, Toroca would have to go ashore — and he would have to do so
alone. The Dasheter had sailed south and was now approaching the archipelago from a different direction so that the
ship’s arrival would not immediately be associated with the death on the westernmost island. The ship stayed below
the horizon, the islands out of sight.
This part of the world never knew real darkness. By day, the sun blazed overhead. True, for a good part of the day, the
sun was eclipsed by the Face of God (although they were far enough north of the equator that the sun’s path behind
the Face was a chord much shorter than the Face’s diameter). But even when the sun was eclipsed, and the Face was
completely unilluminated, the purple sky grew no darker than it did at twilight. And at midnight, when the sun shone
down on the other side of the world, the Face was full, covering a quarter of the sky, lighting up the waves in shades
of yellow and orange.
Because of this, there was no time at which the Dasheter could sneak in to let Toroca off. Toroca, therefore, was going
to swim to shore. He’d removed his sash; it would have interfered with swimming. But he was not completely naked:
around his waist he wore a swimmer’s belt, with waterproof pouches made from lizard bladders in which he carried
supplies.
Standing near him on the deck of the Dasheter were Babnol and Captain Keenir. There was no way for them to keep in
touch with Toroca once he left the ship. They’d simply agreed that the Dasheter would sail farther out, then return to
this spot in twenty days to pick up Toroca; if he did not rendezvous with them, Keenir would then set sail for home,