Other Earths (collection)

“If only you had not been so afraid of the sky! But then,” he said, smiling, “our sky always did contain one treasure yours did not.”

Jenny was growing annoyed with the Inca’s patronizing treatment of Darwin, a decent man. She said now, “Commander, even before we sailed you dropped hints about some wonder in the sky we knew nothing about.”

As his translator murmured in his ear, Atahualpa looked at her in surprise.

Darwin murmured, “Mademoiselle Cook, please—”

“If you’re so superior, maybe you should stop playing games and show us this wonder—if it exists at all!”

Dreamer shook his head. “Oh, Jenny. Just wait and see.”

The officers were glaring. But Atahualpa held up an indulgent hand. “I will not punish bravery, Mademoiselle Cook, and you are brave, if foolish with it. We like to keep our great surprise from our European passengers—call it an experiment—because your first reaction is always worth relishing. We were going to wait until the end of the meal, but—Pachacuti, will you see to the roof?”

Wiping his lips on a cloth, one of the officers got up from the table and went to the wall, where a small panel of buttons had been fixed. With a whir of smooth motors, the roof slid back.

Fresh salt air, a little cold, billowed over the diners. Jenny looked up. In an otherwise black sky, a slim crescent moon hung directly over her head. She had the sense that the moon was tilted on its side—a measure of how far she had traveled around the curve of the world in just a few days aboard this ship.

Atahualpa smiled, curious, perhaps cruel. “Never mind the moon, Mademoiselle Cook. Look that way.” He pointed south.

She stood. And there, clearly visible over the lip of the roof, something was suspended in the sky. Not the sun or moon, not a planet—something entirely different. It was a disc of light, a swirl, with a brilliant point at its center, and a ragged spiral glow all around it. It was the emblem she had observed on the navigational displays but far more delicate—a sculpture of light, hanging in the sky.

“Oh,” she gasped, awed, terrified. “It’s beautiful.” Beside her, Archbishop Darwin muttered prayers and crossed himself.

She felt Dreamer’s hand take hers. “I wanted to tell you,” he murmured. “They forbade me …”

Atahualpa watched them. “What do you think you are seeing?”

Darwin said, “It looks like a hole in the sky. Into which all light is draining.”

“No. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It is the source of all light.”

“And that is how you navigate,” Jenny said. “By the cloud—you could pick out the point of light at the center, and measure your position on a curving Earth from that. This is your treasure—a beacon in the sky.”

“You’re an insightful young woman. It is only recently, in fact, that with our farseers—another technology you lack—we have been able to resolve those spiral streams to reveal their true nature.”

“Which is?”

“The cloud is a sea of suns, Mademoiselle. Billions upon billions of suns, so far away they look like droplets in mist.”

The Inca sky-scientists believed that the cloud was in fact a kind of factory of suns; the sun and its planets couldn’t have formed in the black void across which they traveled.

“As to how we ended up here—some believe that it was a chance encounter between our sun and another. If they come close, you see, suns attract each other. Our sun was flung out of the sea, northward

, generally speaking, off into the void. The encounter damaged the system itself; the inner planets and Earth were left in their neat circles, but the outer planets were flung onto their looping orbits. All this is entirely explicable by the laws of motion developed by Yupanqui and others.” Atahualpa lifted his finely chiseled face to the milky light of the spiral. “This was billions of years back, when the world was young. Just as well; life was too primitive to have been extinguished by the tides and earthquakes. But what a sight it would have been then, the sea of suns huge in the sky, if there had been eyes to see it!”

There was a commotion outside the stateroom. “Let me go!” somebody yelled in Frankish. “Let me go!”

An officer went to the door. Alphonse was dragged in by two burly Inca holding his arms. His nose was bloodied, his face powder smeared, his powdered wig askew, but he was furious, defiant.

Archbishop Darwin bustled to the side of his charge. “This is an outrage. He is a prince of the empire!”

At a nod from the commander, Alphonse was released. He stood there massaging bruised arms. And he stared up at the spiral in the sky.

“Sir, we found him in the farspeaker room,” said one of the guards. “He was tampering with the equipment.” For the guests, this was slowly translated from the Quechua.