In the days that followed, Shadrack began his ambitious plan to teach Sophia about the cartology of the other Ages. She learned that these maps needed particular care; they had to be cleaned and stored carefully to ensure their safety. Mapmaking, Shadrack explained, was a science and an art practiced in every Age, all over the world. The dynamic memory maps had probably been invented in either the Baldlands or the Middle Roads. No one knew for certain, but he believed their invention would only have been possible in one of those regions where the various Ages had been so jumbled that past, present, and future were interwoven.
Shadrack had learned to make memory maps at the academy in Nochtland. The mapmaker’s guild was powerful there. The production and circulation of maps was carefully regulated; every Nochtland-created map had to bear the insignia that guaranteed its truthfulness—the tiny mountain range atop a ruler.
His collection of memory maps opened Sophia’s eyes even further to the wonders of cartology beyond New Occident. She saw parts of the world she had never imagined she would see. The maps varied in scale: some recalled only a few rooms, others an entire city; some contained memories from only a minute or an hour; others held the memories of a whole year. One map captured twenty-four hours in the Alhambra, in Granada. Another showed the passage of a year in the capitol of the Russias. And another recalled the crucial four months of rebellion that led to the creation of New Akan. It occurred to Sophia, as she studied the maps, that space and skill were the only constraints. On the third day of her studies she turned to Shadrack. “Shadrack, do you think there could be a memory map of the entire world?”
His face had an odd expression. “It would be unimaginably difficult to make such a map,” he finally said. “Though there are stories of something called the carta mayor, a hidden map that traces the memories of the whole world from the beginning of time to the present.”
“That would be incredible.”
For a moment, Shadrack’s face tensed. “Explorers have spent entire lifetimes pursuing the carta mayor. Some have lost themselves searching.”
“So it exists?”
“It almost certainly does not exist,” he said quickly. “I have always argued that it is a Nihilismian myth—one that serves their purposes well but has no basis in fact.”
“How is it Nihilismian?” Though there was a large following of Nihilismians in Boston, Sophia knew little about them beyond what she had learned in school.
Nihilismianism was one of the many religious sects that had sprouted in the wake of the Great Disruption. Many people still followed the old religions of the West, but a growing number believed in the Fates, whose temples depicted over the entryway the three goddesses, each holding the globe on a string. Others practiced Occidental Numism, or Onism, which held that all material and immaterial things were a form of currency to be bought and sold, exchanged and bartered with the higher powers. Sophia had seen an Onist’s account book once, when Dorothy—always more intrepid—had stolen a look at the private Book of Deeds and Debts that one of their teachers kept on his desk. It was filled with precise and, to Sophia, terrible calculations. One in particular often occurred to her when her mind wandered: “Twenty-one minutes of daydreaming about last year’s trip to the seaside with A, to be paid for with twenty-one minutes of housework.” It was said that the Onist lifestyle was wonderfully productive, but Sophia found the prospect dreadful.
And there were Nihilismians who believed that the true world had been derailed by the Great Disruption and replaced by a false one. It was unsettling to think that a world no longer in existence was thought by some to be more real than their own.
“The Nihilismians are sure that the carta mayor would show the true course of the world—not this one,” Shadrack said now. “But I fail to see how such a thing is even possible.”
Sophia squinted pensively, considering.
“It is a dangerous myth to believe in,” he concluded, with an air of finality.
Every so often during her studies, Sophia would wander over to the wall map, where the blue and green pins marked the voyage her parents never took and the places where they’d appeared. Shadrack told her everything he could. An explorer from Vermont believed he had traded food with them somewhere deep in the Prehistoric Snows. An explorer from Philadelphia had spoken to a street vendor in the Papal States who had sold salt to a pair of young adventurers in Western clothing. A cartologer from the university had spoken to a sailor who might have boarded a ship with them in the United Indies. All of the encounters were brief and vague and inconclusive. Shadrack had noted every one.
Sophia felt a terrible impatience when she contemplated the eventual purpose of her studies. Part of her wanted to leave at once, tracing the path of the green pins wherever they led. She had to remind herself that gaining the right store of knowledge for the journey posed a more significant and important challenge than any she might face later. Every moment of learning was essential. “Step by step,” Shadrack encouraged her, gesturing towards the wall map. “We have little enough time as it is, Soph. In truth, I wish we could work more slowly.”
While Sophia learned to work with the maps, Shadrack shuttled back and forth between the map room and his ground-floor study. He had managed to secure forged papers and a lifewatch for Mrs. Clay, but this task had been only the first of many. Desperate friends from every corner of New Occident began arriving at 34 East Ending Street with requests for maps and route-guides to other Ages. Explorers were leaving the states in droves, panicked by parliament’s decision. Shadrack barely had time to answer Sophia’s questions.
For her part, she became so engrossed in her studies that she hardly noticed how many days had passed, let alone hours and minutes. Her fascination with map-reading was genuine and all-absorbing; moreover, there were no competing distractions. Yes, it was summer, a time when ordinary schoolchildren spent all day swimming and wasting time and wandering with friends. But with Dorothy gone to New York, there was no one to knock on the door and drag her out into the sunshine.
At the end of the week, Shadrack descended into the map room after a long meeting with an explorer who was leaving for the Russias, and he looked with some concern at his niece, hunched over the leather-topped table. With her dark blonde hair messier than usual, her face pale from lack of sleep, and her light summer clothes uncharacteristically rumpled, she looked more like an overworked office clerk than a child.
Sophia was entirely unaware of Shadrack’s scrutiny; she was wrestling with a puzzle that she’d stumbled across while comparing two maps. From the shape and configuration of the islands rendered up them, she could tell that the maps depicted the exact same location. But one was labeled United Indies and the other Terra Incognita, and they seemed to show two different Ages.
The former held the sound of bells at midday in a quiet stone courtyard; a pair of nuns walked past Sophia in the memory, talking quietly to one another, and the smell of the sea was in the air. The latter showed a cold, stony landscape with no signs of life. The only clue to their difference lay in the fact that the Terra Incognita map had been made more recently: ten years after the United Indies map.