The audience rapped politely on any available flat surface, and Macao made her entrance. To Digger’s eyes she was pretty much indistinguishable from the other females. She wore a bright yellow blouse with fluffy sleeves. Green leggings. And animal-hide boots. A gold medallion hung on a purple ribbon about her neck.
“Well,” she said, “this looks like a desperate bunch.” And they were off and running. Macao, it seemed, had just returned from a long overland journey to the north. Through the desert and beyond the jungle where, she claimed, it grew cooler again. She regaled her audience with tales of the mystical Lyndaia, where the gods had placed the first Goompahs; of attack bobbos and the flying groppe, and a giant falloon, which had half a dozen slithery tentacles, and “only last year, as we all know, dragged a full-masted ship to the bottom.” And finally she spoke of Brissie, the city on the edge of forever. “From its towers, one can see the past and the future.” She recognized a hand in the audience. “Please give us your name,” she said.
“Telio. And what did you see, Macao?”
“Do you really wish to know, Telio?”
The questioner had a smashed ear. It was the same Telio he’d seen on the isthmus road what now seemed a long time ago.
“Yes,” he said. “Tell us.”
“Be aware first that I looked to the west, to the past. What’s past is done, Telio. There’s no point gazing that way.”
“So what did you see?”
“Well.” Feigning reluctance. “In the east, I saw a world filled with gleaming cities. Where our ships crossed the seas, and no part of the Intigo was hidden from us. Where travelers could find (something) wherever they went.”
Digger and Kellie were off to one side, but at the edge of the stage. They were getting everything—Macao, Telio, and the audience reaction. Dave Collingdale’s people would love this.
“Orky,” said someone in the audience. A female. “Crossed the seas to where?”
“Oh, yes,” Macao said. “That is the question, isn’t it?” She hadn’t sat down yet in the chair. She was using it instead as a prop. She circled it, gazed at her audience from behind it, leaned on its arm. Played to the expectant silence. “What do you think is on the other side of the sea?”
“There is no other side,” the questioner said. “The sea goes on forever. There may be other islands out there somewhere, but the sea itself has no end.”
“How many believe that?”
About half the hands went up. Maybe a bit more than half.
Macao fastened her gaze on the questioner. “The sea is (something),” she said. “It never stops. That sounds like a lot of water.”
Orky made the rippling sound that passed for laughter among Goompahs. A few pounded on chair arms. “If the sea has an end, what kind of end is it? Does the water simply stop? Is there a place where you can fall off, as Taygla says?” Macao, obviously enjoying herself, flowed across the stage. “It’s really an interesting question, isn’t it? It almost seems there is no satisfactory answer to these things.” She got up, opened the roll of animal skin, and withdrew a map, which she put on the frame. This was an attempt at cartography on a much larger scale than anything they’d seen at the library, which had been limited to the area in and around the isthmus. Her map showed icy regions in the south and deserts to the north, both correct. But it showed a western continent much closer than it actually was, and the big pole-to-pole continent a few thousand klicks east was missing altogether.
But the map contained a shock. “Wait here,” he told Kellie.
“What?” she whispered. “Where are you going?”
He was already up on the stage, moving behind Macao, until he stood directly in front of the map. It reminded him of those sixteenth-century charts that showed personified clouds blowing in different directions, or whales spouting. There were no whales or animated winds on this one. But it did have what appeared to be a graphic of a human being. A male.
It was at the bottom of the chart, riding a winged rhino.
It wasn’t done in sufficient detail to know for sure that it was human. But it was close. Eyes, mouth, and ears were all smaller than a Goompah’s. It had pale brown skin, and it looked a lot better than the natives. Its clothing was standard, a loose-fitting shirt and leggings. And it carried something that looked like a harpoon.
“The sad thing is,” Macao was saying, “we really don’t know whether Orky is right or wrong. We don’t know whether this map is right or wrong.” She advanced without warning in Digger’s direction and he had to scramble clear. Damned things were quicker than they looked.
“It’s one of us,” Digger told Kellie.
“What is?”
“On the chart.”
Macao paused in front of the map, pretending to study it, but they could see her eyes look away while she considered what came next. “In fact, we don’t even know what lies beyond the Skatbrones.” Digger had heard the term before and believed it referred to the mountain range that sealed off the northern continent from the Intigo.
“We come here and talk about all manner of curious beasts, some of which I’ve actually seen, and some of which not. But not one of you knows which is true and which an imagining. And I put it to you that that is not a supportable state of affairs.”
“It’s not a perfect representation,” Digger continued. “Arms are too long. Feet are too much like their own. But it’s close.”
A cup of water and an oil lamp stood on a table beside Macao. Digger decided she looked good in the glow of the lamp. Large malleable ears. Supple arms. Cute in the way, maybe, that a giraffe was cute. If her features were less than classic, they were nonetheless congenial and warm. Her eyes swept across him and seemed for a heart-stopping moment to linger. As if she knew.
More hands were going up. She recognized one.
“I’m Koller. It’s true we can’t see far, Macao; but it’s impious to talk the way you do. The gods (something, something) these things for a reason.”
“And what is the reason, Koller?”
“I don’t know. But we should (something) the will of the gods. You come here and make up these wild tales, and I wonder whether the gods laugh to hear what you say. I’m not sure I want to be sitting this close to you when we all know that a bolt could come through the roof at any moment.”
She smiled at him. “Koller, I think we’re safe.”
“Really? Have you looked at the sky recently?” And with that Koller got up, made his way into the aisle, and left the building.
“Well,” Macao said. “I hope nobody gets (something, but probably ‘singed’) when it happens.”
The audience was silent, except for a couple of nervous laughs.
“The thing is,” said Digger, “it looks like us, but not quite. And it’s sitting on one of those rhinos. But the rhino has wings.”
She had to go look for herself. When she came back she touched his arm. “Never see the day one of those things could get off the ground,” she said.
“That’s what I’m wondering about.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s obviously a mythological beast.”
“So you think—”
“—The guy that looks like us is a mythological beast, too.”
“Hey,” she said, “he looks like you, not me.”
So the next question was, what sort of mythological beast? Considering the way everyone had panicked whenever they’d caught a glimpse of Digger, he thought he could guess.
“I actually have done a fair amount of far traveling,” Macao was saying. “There are a lot of strange things out there. Some strange things in here, too.” She said it lightly, and they pounded their appreciation. “If you go out the front door of this place and turn left, and walk a few hundred paces, there’s a park. It’s called Binlo, or Boplo—”