“Green,” Grant said. “Lots of it. Inland.”
“That’s a lot of algae,” I said.
He stared at me. “You get algae mats on oceans, not on land. We’re looking at vegetation. We’re looking at plants!”
It was then that I saw what I was looking at: a rocky terrestrial with a multicellular biosphere, the first in fourteen thousand years.
“Another Earth,” Grant breathed.
I struggled to place the word, then remembered. It’s an archaic name for the Moon’s primary.
“Oh,” I said.
Horrocks Mathematical had a gene complex that processed iron molecules in his head. It lined them up in a delicate tracery that intercepted electromagnetic waves and transmitted electrical currents to his occipital lobes, where they stimulated neurons that formed images in his visual system. The gene complex was activated at puberty and the resulting structure reached maturity several years afterwards. It was not considered suitable for children and adolescents. It was called television.
He also had natural neural connections formed out of experience, like everyone else. His experiences, also like everyone else’s, were unique. Something in that background of experience — it could have been his studies of biology, his fascination with terrestrial planets, his skills at habitat construction, his gambler’s eye on the markets, or all of them together or something altogether else — was bugging him. Whenever he looked at a representation of the signals from the rocky world, he felt a sensation in his head akin to an itch, or to an incipient sneeze, or to the feeling that you have forgotten or overlooked something vital and can’t for the life of you imagine what.
6 — The Queen of Heaven’s Daughters
The University Museum was a tall cylindrical structure, ringed within by galleries and bristled without by tubes of wood and ceramic that regulated the humidity of its air circulation. Inside, the drip and sigh of this great battery of devices merged to a single vast whisper like a giant librarian’s hush. The air was clean and clear, scented of timber and water, and carried the merest whiff of the green algae that flourished under the runoffs of the pipes.
Darvin paced along the Gallery of the Southern Rule, glancing at the treasures of leatherwork and metalwork, of chiselled stone and hammered steel on display. The single great continent south of the equator, on the other side of the Middle Channel’s hot, stormy, narrow sea, had laid the basis for an antiquity and continuity of civilization denied by a more fragmented geography to the reaches and realms of the north. No Long Night — and no Dawn Age, either — had interrupted its protracted and undivided day. Nature itself seemed grander and older there. Gigantic predators, similar to the long-extinct monsters whose log-sized, stone-soaked bones sometimes weathered out of the north’s ravines, still haunted its uplands, and preyed on horizon-darkening, earth-shaking herds of likewise gargantuan grazers, likewise long gone elsewhere.
At the cabinets of literature and painting — the distinction was contested, even by experts — Darvin stopped. Parchment scrolls many wingspans long were the main display; every day or two, a museum attendant would wind every scroll forward, to avoid excessive exposure to the daylight. Intricate and colourful, crowded with figurative scenes that sharpened into structures of glyphs before the eye, and with lines of lettering that rioted into characters and animalcules in lush symbolic landscapes even as one tried to descry their rhythm, they glittered with a sensibility at once grave and gay, an outlook solemn and frivolous, a theology horrific and humorous, a philosophy perceptive and pedantic. Darvin hurried past them, seeking another exhibit which he recalled having noticed on his introductory tour.
There it was, a broad dark backdrop to a tall glass-fronted case of astrolabes and orreries. Of a fine, hard-wearing and unfading opaque black cloth, three wingspans across by three high, it was worked with a multitude of minute, separate stitches of coloured wire — silver mostly, some copper, a few gold, and a whole palette of precisely coloured alloys and anodised metals. It could have been a banner, or a wall hanging, or a wrap. It was something altogether different, and more astonishing than even its breathtaking beauty might suggest. It was a map of the night sky, from the northern and the southern hemispheres both, a seamless rendition of an unseeable scene. Its construction must have taken spans of moons; its preparation, eights of eights of years. From a distance — from the opposite side of the gallery, across the well of the museum tower — it would have looked like a breath of fog, a silver shimmer; in the wrong light, a dull pewter grey.
Darvin peered at the label, a yellowed scrap of curling paper in the corner of the case, the Selohic words lettered in a shaky Gevorkian script, ink faded to brown. The map, looted in some raid on a temple on the northern coast of the Southern Rule back in the Long Night, was as nearly as could be determined one thousand and seven hundred and fifty years old. He nodded to himself and examined the celestial embroidery. The blue-green stars of the Daughters were quite distinct, as were their copper, gold, or silver neighbours. He searched for any wayward stitch that might represent a comet, and found none. As he assimilated this small disappointment, a quite different anomaly struck him. He knew that patch of sky well by now, and it looked wrong. He took a sheet of paper and a pen from his belt pouch and copied with great care the area of the Daughters, noting the colour of each prominent star. There were only twenty-seven green stars; he knew there were many more.
He gazed at the display for a long time, then folded away the paper, sheathed the pen, and vaulted off the gallery railing. His long swoop across the ground floor and out of the door was accompanied by indignant yells from the attendants, but he didn’t care. He flew back to the Department of Astronomy and stalked to his office. His hands were trembling as he riffled through the photographic plates, shaking as he compared one with his sketch. The plate was, of course, black and white, so he had to look the stars up in the ephemeris. He circled them, one by one, on the sheet of thin translucent paper that protected the photograph, and forced himself to count with great care. Of the most visible stars in the Daughters, fifty-eight were classified as green. On his sketch, the other thirty-one were marked as red, or yellow, or white. He telephoned Orro.
“This must have been noticed before,” said the Gevorkian.
“It has,” said Darvin, hunched over an old encyclopaedia of astronomy he’d tugged from a high shelf. “ ‘Southern Rule, astronomy of,’ ” he read out. “ ‘Impressive in the detail of its observations, especially of comets (q.v.) and the sophistication of its instruments (q.v.) but vitiated by its traditional association with astrology (q.v.) and the religious and symbolic basis of its systems of celestial classification, a characteristic instance of which can be seen in the Temple Sky Map (q.v.) with its misleading rendition of the Daughters.’ ”
Darvin flipped over pages, dislodging dust. “ ‘Temple Sky Map: Booty of glorious battle of’ blah blah… ‘astounding workmanship’ blah blah… ‘despite this the colours used for stars in some instances, e.g. the Daughters (q.v.) apparently chosen for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, related to astrology (q.v.)’ blah blah… ‘superstition’ blah blah… ‘sad instance of scholastic dogmatism reminiscent of Seloh’s own Long Night’ blah blah… ‘benighted priesthood’ blah blah… ‘nevertheless of great historical interest and remarkable beauty, currently on display in Five Ravines,’ etc.” He looked up. “Tickets, sweets and souvenirs at the door.”
Orro laughed. “ ‘A sad instance of scholastic dogmatism,’ indeed,” he said. “Even in the Long Night, it was believed that the Queen passes Her green gift to other gods, who become the Daughters.”