Again he tried to reconcile this with his expectations. Earlier he’d thought of the Face as a great egg, but now it seemed immaterial, fluid. And yet was not the spirit a diaphanous thing? Was not the soul airy and insubstantial? Wouldn’t God Herself simply be a great immaterial spirit?
Wouldn’t She?
The Dasheter continued to sail east day after day, its identification call — a semi-ten of drums, a pair of bells, loud then soft, time and again — hailing the Face of God. As the ship moved on, the Face rose farther. At last, eighty days after it had first been sighted, the heart of the great circular form, cycling through its phases once each day, stood at the zenith. The Face, sprawling across a quarter of the sky, inspired awe in Afsan and the other pilgrims.
It was overpowering, compelling, hypnotic. Afsan could not help but stare at it, and, when so doing, he lost track of time. The colors swirling in broad bands were like nothing he had ever seen.
No, he reflected, no, that wasn’t quite right. He had seen similar colors, similar vibrancy, once, kilodays ago. Lost in the deep woods of Arj’toolar province, upriver from where Pack Carno was roaming, he had eaten a strange fungus growing only on the north sides of trees. A Quintaglio does not eat plants, he had reminded himself at the time. But he had been unable to catch any small animal, and, lost for three even-days and two odd, his belly was rumbling and he could taste his own gastric acid at the back of his throat. He’d need something to take the pain off, something to sustain him, until he found his way back to Carno or until someone found him.
He’d seen small scaly creatures nibbling at the fungus, chewing it, rather than swallowing it whole. He’d tried to grab the little lizards but, to Afsan’s humiliation, they scampered away every time he tried to sneak up on them. Even worse, they didn’t scamper very far — just enough to be out of reach of a single lunge.
Children do silly things, and Afsan, like many others, had tried eating grass and flowers in his youth, only to become terribly sick, his stomach cramped for days.
But this fungus, this strange beige lump growing on the side of the trees: it wasn’t a regular plant, it wasn’t green. Perhaps it wouldn’t pain him so to eat it. And, by the prophet, if he didn’t eat something soon, he would die. The lizards seemed to manage it well enough.
Eventually hunger got the better of him. Afsan crouched down beside the tree and snapped off a piece of the fungus. It was cold and dry and had a crumbly texture along its broken edge. He brought it up to his muzzle. It smelled musty, but otherwise innocuous. Finally he placed it in his mouth. The taste was bitter, but not too unpleasant. Still, he was a hunter, not an armorback. He had no molars to grind the plant with, but he used his tongue to bounce it around in his mouth, perforating and tearing it with his pointed teeth. Perhaps working it thus would make it pass through his digestion better than the grasses he’d tried when he was even younger.
At first, everything seemed fine. The fungus did seem to take the edge off his hunger.
But then, suddenly, Afsan felt light-headed. He rose to his feet, but found he couldn’t keep his balance. He staggered a few steps, then decided he’d be better off lying down. He let himself down to the ground, and lay on his side on the cool dirt, a blanket of dead leaves beneath him, discrete shafts of fierce white sunlight coming through the canopy of treetops above his head.
Soon, the sunlight began to dance, the beams sliding back and forth, intertwining, coalescing, fragmenting, changing colors, now blue, now green, now red, now fiery orange, shifting, undulating, rainbows incarnate, swinging back and forth. He felt as if he was floating, seeing colors as he’d never seen them before, brighter, cleaner, more powerful, impinging directly on his mind like thoughts crisp and clear, pure and lucid.
It was similar to the delirium that accompanies fever, but with no pain, no nausea, just a cool sense of tranquillity, of liquid peace.
He lost all track of time, of place. He forgot he was in a forest, forgot his hunger, forgot that night would soon be here. Or, if he knew any of that, it did not seem to matter. The colors, the lights, the patterns — they were all that mattered, all that had ever mattered.
At last, he did come out of it, late into the night. It was cold and dark, and Afsan was very, very afraid. He felt physically weak, mentally drained. The next morning, a hunting party from Carno came across him. They gave him a leather cloak, and individual hunters took turns carrying him back to the village on their shoulders. He never told anyone about the fungus he had eaten, about the strange hallucinations he had experienced. But that event, six kilodays in the past, was the only thing he could compare to the hypnotic effect of staring into the swirling, roiling Face of God.
Every day, ship’s priest Det-Bleen led a service. As the sun rose higher, the Face grew darker and darker, until only a crescent sliver was illuminated on the side toward the rising sun. A little before noon, with the sun arcing high across the sky and the crescent of illumination all but gone, the pilgrims would begin to chant.
The sun, a tiny point compared to the great mauve circle of the unilluminated Face, came closer and closer and closer to the vast curving edge, and then, and then, and then…
The sun disappeared.
Gone.
Behind the Face of God.
God was dark and featureless.
The whole sky dimmed.
Moons, normally pale in the light of day, glowed with their nocturnal colors.
Bleen would lead the pilgrims in prayers and songs, urging the sun to return.
And it always did, about one and a quarter daytenths after it had vanished. The brilliant blue-white point emerged from the other side of the Face of God, lighting the sky again.
Afsan watched this spectacle every day. As the sun slid toward the horizon, toward dusk, the Face, rock-steady at the zenith, would grow more and more illuminated, waxing from the side nearest the sun in the bowl of the sky. By the time the sun touched the waves of the River, the Face of God was more than half lit again.
Afsan was always amazed by the beauty.
And puzzled.
But he knew he’d be able to figure it out.
He knew it.
*13*
There has to be a way, Afsan said to himself, pacing the length of his tiny cabin. There has to be a way to make sense of my observations.
Stars, planets, moons, the sun, even the Face of God itself. How did they fit together? How did they interrelate?
Afsan tried grouping them into categories. The sun and the stars, for instance, were apparently self-illuminating. The planets, the moons, and, yes, the Face of God, seemed to shine by reflected light. No, no, it wasn’t that easy. Some of the planets seemed not to be self-illuminated, judging by the fact that they went through phases. But others, notably those highest in the night sky, did not go through phases. Perhaps those planets were self-illuminated. But that didn’t seem right. Two types of planets? Surely it was more likely that they were all the same.
And what about the moons, those fast-moving disks in the firmament? They all went through phases, and with the far-seer every one of them showed surface details, even tiny Slowpoke.
Afsan strained to think. In all his life, the only sources of light he’d ever observed were things aflame. Even the sun appeared to have the heat and brightness of a burning object. Candles, lamps, fires produced by campers for heat — on none of these had he ever observed surface details. No, the moons must be shining by reflected light. And what could the source of that light be? The sun seemed the only candidate.
The thirteen moons were spherical — of that much Afsan was sure. He could see surface features that rotated around. Indeed, even without the far-seer, such details were obvious. Saleed had a globe of the Big One in his office, after all, made by Haltang, one of Afsan’s predecessors, from naked-eye observations.
And the planets? Although still indistinct in the far-seer, they seemed to be spherical, too.