And he stretched forth his hand towards Heaven, and there was a thick darkness in all the land for three days.
—Exodus 10:22
Age had slowed him, but the High Inquisitor still liked to walk the streets of Charity, and he did so every day. It was healthy, and it got him among his people and away from the immediate cares of governance. He went down from the manuscript room tower and let the trading road lead him from the steel of the Inquisitory aftward. The road was lined with tall dougfir and spruce, and the air was moist and rich with their scent. As he walked, the suntube began to peek through the cloud overhead, and he looked up to see the brilliant line pointing the way aftward. The road trended gradually downhill, and curved as it emerged from the treed area and opened into the forefield pastures. Sheep and goats grazed contentedly, and before long he found himself in the city itself. A few people greeted him as he walked, and he stopped to talk with anyone who seemed so inclined.
It's a mark of good leadership, to know your people. He listened to a butcher voice concern about the rising price of slaughter cattle, complimented a new mother on her twins, encouraged a young man in his studies for the Inquisitory tests.
Eventually he came to the park that marked the center of the city. It had not always been a park. A very long time ago there had been a fire, and the buildings that had occupied the area had been destroyed. Rather than rebuild, the High Inquisitor of that era had decreed that the space be opened to the public. The trading road bordered it on the spinward side, and the elevated spillways that supplied Charity with running water ran through its middle. To antispinward the city's main church rose in a confection of spires and gables. It was gardened with low shrubs of blackberry and raspberry planted around symmetrically winding paths, an arrangement both decorative and functional. He left the main path as soon as he could, and made his way to the waterclock in the garden's center.
The clock was a brilliantly simple design. Water piped from the spillway fell to turn a steel waterwheel. Cogs on it spun a freewheel that sat in a clever frame, built so the freewheel's axis of rotation could be rotated three hundred and sixty degrees while its cogs stayed engaged with the waterwheel. The freewheel's axis was perpendicular to the suntube, and because of that its rotational momentum kept it aligned with the stars as they rotated in the foredome. Every two minutes the freewheel revolved all the way around the waterwheel's outer edge, and on every revolution a peg on the frame engaged the huge time-wheel that was the clock's reason for being, and rotated it one seven hundred and twentieth of the way around. The time-wheel was faced in thin-hammered steel, with a stylized representation of the foredome's star pattern etched onto its face and the numerals one to twenty-four surrounded its rim. The clock's heavy time-bell hung from the top of the frame, waiting patiently as the timewheel crept around to eighteen. The spilled water formed a small pool around the clock, then burbled away to join the main canal that connected Charity to the Silver River.
It was a pleasant scene, and the High Inquisitor sat down on a bench to enjoy it. The steady motion was almost hypnotic, and contemplating the clock was a good way to meditate on what he had heard from his citizens and the state of his world. Everything depends on perception. To him it appeared as if both the stars and the freewheel's axis of rotation was turning, but what was really happening was that the freewheel's axis was fixed in space by its rotational momentum, and the stars were fixed by their nature. The world and everything in it rotated around the suntube, and so for anyone standing inside it the stars and the wheel appeared to turn instead. It was a result only subtly different from the intuitive conclusion that the stars turned and the world was fixed, but it explained everything from the path of a thrown object to the fact that down was a local phenomena, and so wherever you happen to stand appeared to be at the bottom of the curve of the world. And that's important, in more than one way. It was as though the world was designed to underscore that basic fact of the human condition. The butcher had not been concerned about the difficulty of the Inquisitory tests. The mother had eyes only for her beautiful children, and the aspirant wasn't worried about the scarcity of cattle. Although he will be soon enough, if he makes the grade. It was the role of the inquisitors to understand the nature of the world, and to worry about such things if that was what was required. It was the role of the High Inquisitor to understand human nature, and so wisely adjust law to reflect both nature and humanity.
The freewheel's frame completed another revolution, and the peg on its frame pushed the time-wheel past the last notch to eighteen. That released an arm which swung to ring the time-bell. Its sonorous peal rolled out, only to be overtaken by the quieter, but deeper and richer sound of the bells at Charity church, where the time-priests carefully counted the turning stars in the foredome. The High Inquisitor smiled. The two bells were never farther apart in their sounding then they were today, synchronized exactly despite the fact that the source of the forewall bells remained a mystery, lost in the mists somewhere up that vertical kilometer of steel. It was said that once angels rang bells at the forewall, and that was considered proof of God's existence. But those bells are silent now, if they ever existed, and the waterclock proves they don't have to be rung by angels. Now the world still held many mysteries, but he was sure that all of them would fall to human reason, given enough time.
"High Inquisitor."
The High Inquisitor looked up to see an old friend. "Bishop, what brings you here?"
Charity's senior clergyman sat down on the bench. "The knowledge that I'd find you here."
"I'm not usually that hard to find." The bishop sat in silence for a moment, and there was a tension in his face. "Is there anything the matter?"
"Nothing the matter, but something . . . important. We've found a book."
"That doesn't sound very ominous."
"Its portentous . . ." The bishop paused, seeming unsure of how to proceed. "Well, I'd like your opinion. We've been working to translate it. . . ."
The Prophet's eyebrows went up. "What does it say?"
"Prophet, it says . . ." The bishop chewed his lower lip. "It says that our world is a ship, quite literally Noah's Ark." He could scarcely keep the excitement from his voice. "Noah was real, and this is proof."
The High Inquisitor laughed. "You had me concerned for a moment, but I'm hardly surprised to hear that. Your Bible says as much, doesn't it? What's another book that says the same thing?"
"Nothing says it like this. This book isn't written, or even pressed. The binding, the paper, they are all unique, and of a quality I've never seen before. And the content—it describes how our world was built. Not created by God, but by men and women. Certainly one of them must be Noah. Must be. He had tremendous power, I can barely grasp how much." An excited light came into the bishop's eyes. "God's power, you understand. They speak of the tools they used to build the foredome, and the suntube." The bishop spread his arms wide. "I can barely comprehend what they are talking about, yet they speak of it so casually. They built this world, this ship, this Ark if you will, and then they set off on a voyage from their own world, a world so large that all of ours is like a dust speck beside it."
The High Inquisitor put a hand to his chin, thinking. "You're surprised by this? You only have to look at the Inquisitory to realize our world was built to order—buildings of solid steel, fused directly to the forewall. Look at the forewall itself, and the foredome. Dig beneath the water table and you'll find a floor smoother than polished steel, and so hard that a steel hammer can't scratch it. Nature doesn't produce things like that, people do. I've never doubted that our world was a constructed thing."
"Did you imagine that it was a ship?"
"I considered it of course; the Bible story had to come from somewhere. Proof though, that's something else."
"It's true. This book confirms it."
"Not so fast. You have a book which agrees with another book. Nothing says they're both right."
"Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean He doesn't exist."
"Very true, but neither does belief imply proof."
"Belief costs me little, and Heaven's reward is eternal."
"Belief doesn't cost you at all, it costs your parishioners—but even if it did, what you have still isn't proof, it's only expediency." The High Inquisitor chuckled. "And if what you say in sermon is true, I don't think your Bible's God would would reward a faith so calculating anyway."
"I pray for your soul every day, my friend."
"And I appreciate it." The High Inquisitor stood up. "But no matter which of us is right about the ever-after, I'm sure your book is important today. Come and show it to me."
"Of course, I have it in the church." The bishop got up and the High Inquisitor followed him. As he turned away from the waterclock it clattered, and he looked up sharply. At first he couldn't locate the cause of the noise, but then it stopped and he saw that the freewheel had completely disconnected from the waterwheel. The clattering sound had been the cogs banging against each other as they de-meshed. There was something strange about that and it tugged at the edges of the High Inquisitor's awareness, but he couldn't quite place his finger on it. And I have a book to look at.
"Where did you find it?"
"A merchant was digging a well and found a box. There were several books in it, but most weren't intact enough to translate, the rest had crumbled. They must be thousands of years old. Even the box is miraculous, like nothing I've ever seen."
"I'd like to see the box first, if I may."
"Of course." The bishop led the High Inquisitor across the park and into the church, and then through a door into the small set of rooms set aside for living quarters of the lower clergy. From there a set of stairs led up the steeple tower. On the top floor was the observatory, where a series of wooden tubes were aimed at the foredome. Once upon a time the priests had kept time by careful observation of the rotation of the stars in the foredome. One room had been emptied and a low shelf installed around its perimeter, and it was here that the book was being worked on. Sheaves of paper and ink pots were carefully organized into workplaces where inksetters labored on duplication and translation.
"You must've found this some time ago."
"We've had it for a month. I wanted to be sure of what it was before I told you." The bishop went to a separate shelf. "This is what we found it in," said the bishop.
The box was built in two nearly identical halves, rectangular, and it was immediately obvious that it was like nothing the High Inquisitor had ever seen before. Its symmetry was perfect, and the material it was made from was unlike anything he'd ever seen. It wasn't wood, wasn't baked clay, wasn't steel. It was a milky, almost translucent material that felt more like beeswax than anything else, but though it flexed where he pressed on it, it didn't yield to a fingernail the way wax would. It was somewhat porous, to judge from the way the dirt had stained its outer surface, but the inside was glossy and clean, save for a darkened square on the bottom where the slow decay of the paper inside it had left its mark. He picked up one half and fitted it to the other. The seam where the two joined with so precisely made that he could feel them sealing together. The join would certainly be waterproof, even air-proof. There were four simple latches, one on each side, and two recessed handles on the shorter sides.
Experimentally the High Inquisitor closed the latches. They shut easily, with a satisfying click. He lifted the box with a certain kind of awe. It was robust, easy to carry, obviously built to protect something vulnerable against water, dirt, and rough handling. What was stunning was that someone would build something so finely for such a mundane purpose. What must they have been capable of when they set their minds to it? To ask the question was to answer it. The bishop believed that their world was Noah's Ark, and whether you accepted the story of Noah as literal fact or embroidered fiction it was no great leap to see that their world had been built by someone.
And yet to see the evidence. The box was far less impressive than the foredome, less impressive even than the Inquisitory, yet precisely because he could hold it in his hands it seemed a far more tangible miracle. He put it down almost reverently, and turned to the bishop. "May I see the book?"
The bishop nodded and showed the High Inquisitor to a chair at the shelf. As with the container it had been found in, it was immediately obvious that the book was different from anything else he'd ever seen. The illustration on its cover was faded almost to invisibility, but it was so precise, so sharp in its representation that it seemed he was looking at a real scene and not just a drawing of it. There was a textured cylinder in front of a larger sphere, a pair of human figures in strange armor that seemed to float above them.
"Careful," said the bishop as the High Inquisitor went to open it. "It's tremendously fragile."
The High Inquisitor carefully opened the cover. The first page was cracked down the middle, as brittle as a dry leaf. The title was A History of the Ark Project, but it was the lettering that drew his eye. It was as precise and clear as the picture on the cover, without a waver or uneven margin, without a misplaced smear of ink or uneven line of text. It was awesome in its perfection, even in something so mundane as the printing of words on paper. He turned to the next page, and found many of the letters familiar, if strangely different from modern script, and he could even make sense of the occasional word.
"You said you were translating it," he said.
"We are. There are a lot of words we don't know, but we got the sense of it, at least for the first chapter." The bishop put a hand on a stack of pages next to the book. "I've had my inksetters copy it all precisely, and we've been working from that."
"But you'd have to know the original language."
The bishop laughed. "I do know it—it's the Bible's language, written in the hand of God. All clergy learn it, so we can read His word. A lot of the smaller words are the same as we speak today, and many of the larger ones are recognizable. It's the written form that's difficult, the letter shapes have changed. If you're not trained to read the Bible you wouldn't recognize them."
The High Inquisitor nodded slowly. "So what does it say?"
"We came from a world called Earth, a place immensely larger than ours, and we're traveling to Heaven. The purpose is to bring human life to Heaven. The journey is supposed to take over ten thousand years; for some reason they couldn't do it faster. That's why they had to build us a world-ship, so that we could farm and raise families and keep the humanity alive until we got there." The bishop couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice. "We're Noah's children, quite literally."
The High Inquisitor looked up sharply. "The Prophetsy has been dead a thousand years, old friend. Let's not bring it back."
"The Prophets' claim to power was that they alone were Noah's descendents. This book says we all are." The bishop held out a sheaf of pages, more familiar rice paper with handwritten lines. "Here's what we've managed to translate."
"Simple math tells me we all share the same ancestors." The words came out more dismissively then the High Inquisitor meant them to be. He turned his attention to the translations. "Still, this is an incredible find." He leaned closer to read what was written, but found it difficult to focus. The first paragraphs had a great many words that he didn't understand, but they seemed to be talking about the goal of reaching from the world of Earth to the world of Heaven, at a place called Iota Horologi. It talked about a ship called Ark, but so many of the words were alien that he could only follow the gist of the text. He turned the page and it seemed the words written there were less clear. He squinted to read it, then looked up to the bishop.
"It seems dark in here."
"It does, let me open another shutter." The bishop moved to a closed window, pulled back the curtains and opened it. He was silent a long moment and the High Inquisitor could tell something was wrong. "The suntube . . ." the bishop said.
"What is it?"
"Come and see . . ."
The High Inquisitor put down the pages and went to the window. His friend's cause for concern was immediately apparent. The light outside was tinged orange, and the suntube's radiance was notably lower than it was supposed to be. Others had noticed the same thing. Beneath the window, people had spilled into the square below, standing and looking upwards, an excited buzz going through the crowd.
"What's happening?" asked the bishop.
The High Inquisitor shook his head. "I don't know."
There was a sudden knocking at the door. It opened to reveal a young man in clergy's robes.
"Bishop, the suntube . . ." The young man's voice quavered.
"We see it."
"People are coming in, they are afraid . . ."
"I'll talk to them." The bishop went out with his junior, leaving the High Inquisitor to watch the phenomenon by himself. There was no longer any doubt, overhead the suntube had perceptibly faded. Up the curve of the world the details of the houses and fields had become less distinct. At the same time it was possible to make out details almost directly overhead, details that had previously always been hidden by the suntube's glare. The process, like the rotation of the timewheel's frame in the waterclock, was so slow that it it was imperceptible from moment to moment. Only by extended observation was the change observable. What could be happening? The timewheel's disengagement tugged at his awareness. He had thought it a simple fault in the mechanism, but the more he thought of it the more that seemed unlikely. There was no obvious link between the two events, and yet it seemed too much a coincidence that they should occur simultaneously.
The suntube was still fading, and the crowd was growing anxious. In the distance he could hear the bishop's voice as he tried to calm his flock. The High Inquisitor went back to the sheaf of translations and brought them to the window where there was still enough light to read by. The book, whatever its contents, had been written by the world's creators, and perhaps it contained an explanation for what was happening. The effort was frivolous. There were too many words he just didn't know, and only the first chapter had been translated anyway. He put the pages down in frustration, and looked across the room at the book itself. If only I had more time . . . That realization brought home the reality that time might well be running out, not just time to translate the mysterious book, but time for the entire world. Plants would die, people would starve, the world would end.
The bishop came back in, visibly shaken. "I think we'll be safe, for now."
"For now?"
"They're scared, some of them are angry. That's a dangerous combination." As if to underscore his words a fight broke out in the crowded square below. It was over quickly, but a ripple had spread through the throng. The thrum of voices was louder, and the mood edgier. The potential for violence was established, and the next disturbance would set it off. "The suntube can't go out. It can't."
"I hope you're right." The High Inquisitor bit his lip. "What did you tell them?"
"I told them to have faith, to trust God's plan, and to pray."
"Good. That might buy us some time."
"For what? If the suntube fails we'll all die anyway."
"In which case it won't matter if they riot and burn the city, but if it comes back then it will matter very much."
"Do you think it will come back?"
The High Inquisitor shook his head. "I don't know. If the world is a ship it's a thing made by humans, and so it can break. Even fishing rafts break up sometimes."
"God couldn't allow that." The bishop looked worried. "He couldn't."
"Have faith," said the High Inquisitor, with a trace of irony in his voice. High up on the curve of the world he could see a flare of fire in what must have been the town of Hope. The panic had already started there. He turned away from the window. "I need to think."
He walked over to the book, and delicately closed its cover. There was barely enough light left to see the illustration there, the sphere, the cylinder, the two human figures floating there. What could that mean? It was impossible to get any sense of scale from the illustration. The center of the end of the cylinder was a lighter color than its edge, and he leaned closer to see what details he could make it.
All of a sudden the scene snapped into focus. I'm looking at the world from the outside! The cylinder was the world, the lighter circle was the foredome, lit from the inside by the suntube. The sphere could be anything, but the human figures could only be builders. He leaned closer, scrutinizing the image in the fading light, trying to find some clue that might explain what was happening. Whether the ancient book was proof of the existence of Noah or not, it was a link to the builders, and it might provide a clue as to what was happening. If only I could read it. He couldn't read it, and as the light continued to fade he knew he wouldn't get time to learn.
"In Noah's name, look," the bishop cried from the window. "The stars . . ."
The High Inquisitor looked up sharply. "What's happening?"
"They're changing," the bishop's voice held something close to awe. "They're changing."
"What do you mean?" The High Inquisitor was already on his way to the window. He immediately saw what the bishop was talking about. The suntube had faded to a dull red, and its reflection in the center of the foredome had faded as well. No longer overwhelmed by its glare the stars twinkled in the great black expanse more clearly than he had ever seen them. Not only were they brighter but there were more of them, and as the suntube slowly dimmed more were becoming visible, fainter stars which had never before managed to shine past suntube's radiance. At first the High Inquisitor thought that was the change his friend meant. There were so many new stars that at first he didn't notice the more important difference in the brightest ones, the ones that had always been visible. They were still rotating steadily around the axis of the suntube, but their position was steadily shifting. Stars which had once been near the center of the axis had drifted to the edge. Some had drifted right over it and vanished, and there were new ones, not faint dots that would vanish again if the suntube ever rekindled itself, but bright-burning points as visible as any of the stars he'd known all his life. He became aware that he was staring open mouthed and closed his jaw with a conscious effort. What can this mean?
And all at once he understood, the image on the front of the book, and more importantly the failure of the waterclock's freewheel. The image on the front of the book was the world seen from outside, and the world was a ship, just as the bishop and the Bible believed. And it's changing course. The freewheel's axis was fixed in space by its rotational momentum, which was how the clock kept time and why the wheel stayed aligned with the stars, but the stars were not simply some part of the foredome that for some reason didn't rotate with the rest of the world. They were actually outside the world! He had a sudden vision of the world's cylinder inside a much larger sphere. The inside of the sphere was set with stars, and which stars were visible in the foredome depended on where the world—the ship—was headed. The ship was changing course, its axis was moving, and so the freewheel had twisted away from the waterwheel that drove it and the stars were changing. He raced back to the book in the fading light and peered again at the cover. Sure enough there was a faint scattering of faded white dots in the background of the image, certainly stars, and the large sphere behind the cylinder could well be a star seen right up close. And if our world is a ship, then perhaps that's where we left from. It was possible that every star in the sky was a world like Earth. Heaven would be a star as well, and . . .
Angry shouts rose from the crowd outside, and there was a crashing sound as something was overturned. The young clergy came back into the room, looking scared. "Bishop, there's fighting . . ."
"Where are the sentinels?"
"They're gone, fled."
The bishop had stepped back from the window, and more shouts and the flicker of flames followed him. "We have to go too. We'll go to the Inquisitory, we'll be safe there."
The young man didn't wait for an answer, and the sound of his fleeing footsteps echoed briefly in the hall. The High Inquisitor looked up from the book. "We can't go there, this book would never survive the trip."
"The book?" The bishop looked at his friend in stunned amazement. "I'm talking about our lives. That mob will be a flame riot before much longer."
"This book is more important than your life or mine. As for the crowd, you're right, and we can't let them burn this building, or the rest of the city either for that matter. You have to stop them, talk to them. They'll listen to you if they'll listen to anyone."
"What will I say? That the suntube is dying, that God is punishing us? They can see that, and they're looking for someone to blame. They'll kill me if I try it. We have to get out of here."
"We're not leaving, and I'll tell you what you're going to tell them." The High Inquisitor spoke quickly, his voice strong. "You're going to tell them the world is Noah's Ark, and it's changing course. Tell them the suntube will come back when we're on the new course. Tell them that we're halfway to Heaven and they'd better behave like angels."
"How do you know that?"
"I don't know it, but I believe it. If there was ever a time for faith, this is it. Whether you die or I die doesn't matter, because that's going to happen sooner or later anyway. What matters is what happens to our people, and I believe this book holds the key to that question." The High Inquisitor locked eyes with his old friend. Outside the window the light had faded to a dull red the color of fire, and the mob's shouting had risen to a crescendo. "That crowd is your flock. They will listen to you, they'll believe you, they'll follow you. Now go out there and do what you know you have to do."
The bishop opened his mouth, then closed it. An expression of grim determination came into his face and he left the room. The High Inquisitor looked again to the work-shelf where the fragile book still lay, reassuring himself that it was still intact. Outside the shouting grew louder still, and then fell away to a dull murmer. A single voice rose over the throng, and he recognized the bishop, though he couldn't quite make out what he was saying. But the words aren't important, so long as they listen to him. If they did, everything would be fine. If not . . . He's a brave man. Perhaps it was his faith that made him so.
For now the mob was listening, and that was a good thing. He looked around the darkening room for something he could use as a weapon, just in case they stopped listening. He found a heavy wooden ink-roller. It would serve if he needed it to, though he hoped very much that he wouldn't need it to. He hefted it experimentally, and then went back to the window to await the coming of the light.