She hissed. “Be careful.”
He ignored her. He nodded to his host. Atahualpa waved him away, uncaring.
Atahualpa had begun a conversation with Darwin on the supposed backwardness of European science and philosophy. Evidently it was a dialog that had been developing during the voyage, as the Inca tutors got to know the minds of their students. “Here is the flaw in your history as I see it,” he said. “Unlike the Inca, you Europeans never mastered the science of the sky. To you all is chaos.”
Jenny admired old Darwin’s stoicism. With resigned good humor, he said, “Isn’t that obvious? All those planets swooping around the sky—only the sun is stable, the pivot of the universe. Do you know, long before the birth of Christ-Ra a Greek philosopher called Aristotle tried to prove that the sun revolves round the Earth, rather than the other way around!”
But Atahualpa would not be deflected. “The point is that the motion of the planets is not chaotic, not if you look at it correctly.” A bowl of the chicken’s blood had been set before him. He dipped his finger in this and sketched a solar system on the tabletop, sun at the center, Earth’s orbit, the neat circles of the inner planets and the wildly swooping flights of the outer.
Servants brought plates of food. There was the meat of roast rodent and duck, heaps of maize, squash, tomatoes, peanuts, and plates of a white tuber, a root vegetable unknown to Europe but tasty and filling.
“There,” said Atahualpa. “Now, look, you see. Each planet follows an ellipse, with the sun at one focus. These patterns are repeated and quite predictable, though the extreme eccentricity of the outer worlds’ orbits makes them hard to decipher. We managed it, though—although I grant you we always had one significant advantage over you, as you will learn tonight! Let me tell you how our science developed after that …”
He listed Inca astronomers and mathematicians, names like Huascar and Manco and Yupanqui, which meant nothing to Jenny. “After we mapped the planets’ elliptical trajectories, it was the genius of Yupanqui that he was able to show why the worlds followed such paths, because of a single, simple law: The planets are drawn to the sun with an attraction that falls off inversely with the square of distance.”
Darwin said bravely, “I am sure our scholars in Paris and Damascus would welcome—”
Atahualpa ignored him, digging into his food with his blood-stained fingers. “But Yupanqui’s greatest legacy was the insight that the world is explicable: that simple, general laws can explain a range of particular instances. It is that core philosophy that we have applied to other disciplines.” He gestured at the diffuse light that filled the room. “You cower from the light of the sun, and fear the lightning, and are baffled by the wandering of a lodestone. But we know that these are all aspects of a single underlying force, which we can manipulate to build the engines that drive this ship and the farspeakers that enable the emperor’s voice to span continents. If your minds had been opened up, your science might be less of a hotchpotch. And your religion might not be so primitive.”
Darwin flinched at that. “Well, it’s true there has been no serious Christian heresy since Martin Luther was burned by the Inquisition—”
“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!”