They were coming into a harbour full of Unmer warships. Maskelyne could hear the droning of the ironclad’s engines, the rush of the sea against the hull and the pounding of metalworkers’ hammers from the shore. The orange flames of welders’ torches flickered on a score of docked vessels, while other – more sorcerous – lights danced here and there on ship and shore. They were refitting the fleet. After a moment, he recognized the city behind the water’s edge. It was Losoto, but not as it existed now. The sea was blue, as yet untainted, and perhaps thirty yards lower than current levels. Tiers of fine white buildings covered a steep hill above the harbour, the streets curling around the rocky headland where Hu’s City Palace now stood. The great winged shapes of dragons looped through the skies above, held in thrall by their Unmer masters.
The Unmer were preparing to meet the Haurstaf fleet at Awl, which meant Argusto Conquillas had already betrayed his kin. His lover, Queen Aria, would now break the Haurstaf’s pledge of neutrality and bring her Guild to war against those who had enslaved the East. And yet Maskelyne suspected Conquillas hadn’t given a damn about mankind. The legendary hunter loved nothing but himself and his precious dragons.
Maskelyne turned the wheel again, moving further back in time. The spectacles crackled as days and nights fluttered across his vision.
He found himself walking through an oak forest, most likely the Great Anean Forest to the north of Losoto. Emperor Hu had built his Summer Palace on a lake among these hills. The trail meandered down a slope towards a wooden shack with a stone chimney stack, from which Maskelyne could see smoke rising.
When he reached the porch, the door opened, and an old Unmer woman came out. She was wearing simple peasant clothes. She looked up at him and smiled. And then she hugged him fiercely.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said in Unmer. ‘Your father is down by the river, fishing, always fishing. Don’t you dare go and join him until you’ve eaten something.’
She ushered him inside. The interior was simple, but tidy: a few stools around a table, a bed with a colourful woollen blanket, a kettle sitting on a iron wood stove. A collection of small glazed animals stood on a shelf under the window. The old woman opened a cupboard over the sink and took out two cups.
Maskelyne turned the wheel again, forwards this time. The image of the shack blurred into pulsing shadows and lights. He heard a sound like gunfire, followed by a gravelly roar. He turned the wheel all the way forwards, to the present.
Blinding white light assailed his eyes. The noise rose to an intolerable screech. Maskelyne cried out and tore the lenses from his face again.
Gods in Hell.
It was as if some universal force or barrier prevented the dead sorcerer from viewing the present through Maskelyne’s eyes. Maskelyne could look back, but the sorcerer could not look forward beyond his own time. The cosmos would not allow a paradox. The spectacles were of little use to anyone but a historian.
Evidently Ianthe had never turned the wheel all the way forwards. Maskelyne thought about giving them back to her. She’d soon learn not to tamper with Unmer artefacts.
Later, perhaps later. He looked down at his notes, and added:
If Space is the distance and the difference between two objects, what happens in places when Space is zero?
Maskelyne rummaged through the box on the workbench until he found a matched pair of magnets. He pulled them apart, then pushed the north poles towards each other, until he felt them repelling each other. Then he turned one magnet around and noted the attraction between unlike poles. It seemed to him that the material in one pole was identical to the other. He picked up his pen again.
Can Space be stretched and compressed? Are the forces of attraction and repulsion witnessed between poles merely the tendency for such stressed spaces to reach an equilibrium determined by the mean variance of the surrounding universe? As the variance between two points is reduced, the energy required to further compress Space increases exponentially, until that space is compressed to zero. The energy contained in such minutiae must be considerable indeed. Is there a horizon where forces of attraction and repulsion no longer apply?
Could our universe have once been a single invariant point, perhaps one of many such points, containing vast amounts of Space in ultra-compressed form? What if the expansion and contraction of Space continues? Do tiny knots of super-compressed Space still remain in the heart of everything? Such knots must contain identical particles, trapped together and yet unable to repel each other until variance is introduced. Opposing particles would gather at the horizon (or horizons – if space is truly waveform), and yet be unable to come any closer. Furthermore, if compressed Space has no physical quantity, then each of these knots would act like a vacuum pump, drawing a constant flow of uncompressed Space (created by variant particles) into itself. What if we called this force gravity?
Maskelyne set down his pen again and gazed out of the window. The old ship creaked and groaned around him, rocked by the sea. He thought of the ocean currents, and it seemed to him that Space might flow in a similar fashion. It was all degrees of variance. He lifted one of the magnets and let it drop. It hit the workbench with a thud.
One wonders if it is possible for enough knots of super-compressed Space to gather together and thus provide an overwhelmingly powerful force of attraction? Such an object would become progressively larger as it sucked more and more of the cosmos into itself – stabilizing only when it reached a point of true invariance.
Is it possible to release the energy within these knots – within the heart of matter itself? The sudden expansion of Space must surely be absorbed by the particles around it, radiating outwards over time until equilibrium is achieved once more. If this assumption is correct, then these radiation waves created by the birth of the universe itself must still be detectable. Indeed, the universe must continue to expand wherever knots of super-compressed Space are split apart. To an observer at any point of expansion, it would seem that that point was itself the heart of the cosmos. Ultimately, variance might only exist between a few massive knots of ultra-compressed Space. Space will thin as the universe dies. But as long as a trace of variance remains between the last dark leviathans, then a breath of Space remains. Like massive ships sailing a vaporous and ever-diminishing sea, it is not inconceivable to imagine a collision between them. Were such a collision to occur, these ships might break apart, spilling their holds and thus creating a new sea through which the remaining vessels might continue to sail.
Maskelyne set down his pen and rubbed his temples. He was making too many assumptions, sailing down too many channels without stopping to look around him. How did any of this account for the electrical fluids used by the Unmer? Were they merely the propagation of variance? And what about the expansion of heated gas? Did adding energy to a system expand Space only when there was Space to expand? He lacked any mechanism aboard this vessel with which to test his theories. Such sorcery belonged only to the Unmer.
He gazed out of the window at the setting sun, marvelling at the ferocity of its fires, which now turned the sky and sea to blood. It was just one of countless stars in a cosmos he could not understand. The universe was so vast and unknowable, so far beyond imagination. Had the Unmer even fully understood what they were doing?
Lucille didn’t come to bed that night. Maskelyne lay in his bed and could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw Unmer warships in a harbour that no longer existed. The old wooden ship pitched and growled, as gales whipped rags of spume from the Mare Lux and flung them against the cabin windows. It was growing cold.
At some point he must have slept, because he woke in the dark before dawn, gasping and terrified, certain that someone had placed the Unmer spectacles over his eyes. He could not shake the feeling that someone had been watching him.