And then—a final incredible act in the cosmic drama—the sky had… died.
The same word—died—had been employed over and over again. It sprang spontaneously to the lips of untutored observers who had spent their lives under heavens which were extravagantly patterned with light, spilling over with astronomical jewels of every kind.
The sky had appeared to die when Land simply blinked out of existence—along with the Great Wheel and a myriad of lesser silver spirals; countless thousands of stars, the most brilliant of which had formed the constellation of the Tree; the irregular streamers of misty radiance strewn like delicate tresses among the galaxies; the comets whose glowing and tapering fans partitioned the universe; the darting meteors which had enlivened the dome of night, briefly linking star to star.
All of these had disappeared in an instant, and now the sky seemed dead—all the more so because of the cold, aloof and infinitely remote points of light which, instead of illuminating the sky, served only to emphasize its lack of light.
Toller Maraquine, supported by his crutches, was watching the sunset from the south-facing balcony of his family’s home. He had a hot drink positioned within reach on the wide stone balustrade, but it was forgotten for the time being as he saw the sky assume deeper and more somber colors. He repressed a shiver as the alienness of the darkening celestial dome made itself more and more apparent, and it was not merely the aching absence of the sister world from its ordained station directly overhead which disturbed him. He had spent a fair amount of time on the “outside” of Overland—where most of the inhabitants could not even visualize having the detailed convexity of another planet suspended above them—and had quickly become accustomed to the changed environment.
His present sense of alienation, he had to admit to himself, was caused by the stark emptiness of the night sky. Doing his utmost to be pragmatic, calm and reasonable he had tried to shrug the whole thing off. What did it matter, he had asked himself, if the irrelevant and uncaring night sky contained a billion stars or only a scattered handful? Would either condition affect the yield of a harvest by so much as a single grain?
The trouble was that the reassuring negative answer failed to provide sufficient reassurance. He had no idea of what fate had overtaken Land or Dussarra—for all he knew those worlds no longer existed anywhere—but he understood with a bleak and sterile exactitude that Overland had been, to use Steenameert’s phrase, cast out. This was an alien region of the space-time continuum. It had a heart-sinking quality to it. Somehow, within the blink of an eye, Overland had been flung into a decayed universe which had grown old and cold… old and cold… and the paramount question was posed: Could human life—individually and collectively—go on just as it had always done?
Physically, there appeared to be no obstacle to prevent the men and women of Kolcorron living out their lives in the same manner as their forebears had done since the beginnings of history. But was it possible that the drear sense of isolation, of inhabiting an outpost in the black wastes of infinity, could alter the racial outlook?
Land and Overland—sister worlds, so close that they were linked by a bridge of air—might have been designed by some cosmic Planner to coax and lure their inhabitants into becoming interplanetary travelers. And, once that critical first step had been taken, there had beckoned a universe laden with astronomical treasures—so obviously charged with the forces of life—that it would have been impossible for the adventurer to turn back. Toller’s people had been predisposed by their spatial environment to look outwards, to believe that their future lay in moving outwards into a fertile and welcoming universe—but how would they feel now? Would there ever appear a hero with sufficient vision and courage, sufficient stature, to gaze at the remote and icy stars of Overland’s bleak new sky and vow to make them his own?
Unwilling to confront abstracts any longer. Toller turned his back on the red-gold sunset and took a sip of his mulled brandy. As well as being heated, the liquor had been spiced and buttered to offset the coolness of the twilight air. He found its calorific familiarity deeply comforting as he watched his father and Bartan Drumme fuss over the telescopes which had been set up on the balcony. In his eyes the two older men had become granite pillars of intellectual fortitude and good sense in a quicksand universe, and his respect for them had been enhanced beyond measure. They were discussing a strange scientific anomaly, a quirky lesion in the fabric of the new reality, which thus far had been noticed by relatively few people.
“It is quite ironic,” Cassyll Maraquine was saying. “It would be no exaggeration to say that, taking the state factories as a whole, there are at least a gross of highly qualified engineers and technicians who are directly answerable to me. They spend much of their time peering at the most accurate measuring instruments we can devise—but none of them saw anything*.”
“Be fair,” Bartan murmured. “There is no change in the way in which circles relate to circles, and most of your—”
Cassyll shook his graying head. “No excuse, old friend! It took a humble employee of the Cardapin brewery—a cooper!—to fight his way to me through all the cursed barriers that bureaucracies insist on erecting in spite of one’s doughtiest efforts to prevent them. I have since plucked the man out of his lowly occupation and appointed him to my personal staff, where—”
“Tell me, father,” Toller cut in, his curiosity aroused. “What is this to-do concerning rings and circles and wheels and the like which perplexes you so? What can be so strange and intriguing about an ordinary circle?”
“A circle has always had certain fixed properties, just like any other geometrical figure, and now those properties have suffered a sudden change,” Cassyll said in solemn tones. “Until now, as you very well know, the circumference of a circle has been exactly equal to three times its diameter. Now, however—if you care to put the matter to the test—you will find that the ratio of circumference to diameter is slightly more than three.”
“But…” Toller tried to assimilate the idea, but his mind baulked at the task. “What does it mean?”
“It means we are a long way from home,” Drumme put in, with a twist of the lips which hinted that he had said something very profound.
“Yes, but will it make any difference to our lives?”
Cassyll snorted as he took the lens cap off a telescope. “There speaks a man who has never had to earn his crusts in commerce or industry! The re-design and re-calibration of certain classes of machinery is going to cost the state a veritable fortune. And then there will be clerical costs, and accountancy costs, and—”
“Clerical?”
“Just think of it, Toller. We have twelve fingers, so we naturally count to the base of twelve. That, coupled with the fact that the circumference of a circle used to be precisely three times the diameter, made whole areas of computation absurdly easy. From now on, however, everything in that line is going to be more difficult—and I am not talking about matters as rudimentary as a cooper having to learn to make longer straps for his barrels. Take, for example, the—”
“Tell me,” Toller said quickly, anxious to forestall one of his father’s rambling discourses, “what is the new ratio? I ought to know that much, at least.”
Cassyll glanced significantly at Bartan. “There has been a certain amount of discussion on that point. I have been too busy—what with the distressing events at the palace and so forth—to take measurements in person. Some of my staff are claiming that the new ratio is three-and-a-seventh—which, of course, is nonsense.”