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The Steel Orb
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When I regained consciousness, I was in a room. There was a man whose hand was on my heart; he looked familiar, I thought. A woman handed him a cup, which he placed to my lips.
Time passed. I could feel warmth and coolness moving through me. My thoughts slowly quickened. He reverenced me, making on himself the great sign, bowing, and kissing me. I went to stand, but he held me down. "Take a time of rest now. In a day I will introduce you to the city."
I looked at him. The blue robe looked familiar. A question did not arise in my mind; I only wondered later that I did not ask if he had been expecting me, or if he knew I wanted to be a Teacher. Something in his repose kept the question from arising.
The woman looked at me briefly. "My name is Pool. What languages do you know?"
If anything, I sank further back into my chair. I wished the question would go away. When she continued to listen, I waited for sluggish thoughts to congeal. "I... Fish, Shroud, Inscription, and Shadow are all languages that are spoken around my island, and I speak all of them well. I speak Starlight badly, despite the fact that they trade with our village frequently. I do not speak Stream well at all, even though it is known to many races of voyagers. I once translated a book from Boulder to Pedestal, although that is hardly to be reckoned: it was obscure and technical, and it has nothing of the invisible subtlety of 'common' conversation. You know how--"
The man said, "Yes; something highly technical in a matter you understand is always easier to translate than children's talk. Go on."
"And--I created a special purpose language," I said, "to try to help a child who couldn't speak. I did my best, but it didn't work. I still don't understand why not. And I--" I tried to think, to remember if there were any languages I had omitted. Nothing returned to my mind.
I looked down and closed my eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm not very good with languages."
The woman spoke, and when I looked up I noticed her green veil and the beautiful wrinkles about her eyes. "You novices think you know nothing and need to know everything. When I was near your point in life, I knew only six tongues, and I'm still only fluent in four." She reverenced me, then stepped out the window. Her husband followed, although their spirits still seemed to blow in the wind through the window.
I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, and I awoke with a start. The man was just stepping into the window, and I could hear a clink of silver. "Will you come to the marketplace? I want you to find the Galleria."
He still had not told me his name, nor I mine, but as we walked, I told him about the great storm; it was wild on land but wilder at sea. He wondered that I survived the storm, let alone that I washed up; he quoted the proverb, "Where the wind blows, no one knows." We came to a merchant with dried fruits; he looked at some oranges. "Have you seen Book since you came back?"
"Yes, but I didn't get to talk with him long."
"What did he say?"
"He only said two things. The first was, 'Put my little daughter down!' Then the second was... let me see if I can remember. He began to say, 'No, don't throw her in the--' But I couldn't hear the rest of what he hoped to say, because he threw a bucket of salt water at me. Which reminds me, I don't have salted fish today, but I have some of the finest oranges from the four corners of the world. This orange grew in an orchard where it is said that the trees once bore jewels. I could sell you this fine assortment for two silver pieces each."
My host sounded astonished. "Two silver pieces each? You are a dear friend, of much more value than the wares you sell. I doubt if you paid two silver pieces for this whole lot of fruit--look at this one! It must have rotted before it was dried. I can talk a bit, but I'm only buying wheat today." He turned away.
The merchant grabbed his arm. "Don't go yet. I'll give you a friend's price." I think he said something else impressive, but their haggling could not hold my interest. The market was pungent with strange smells. I recognised the smell of spices, but what else was there? Something strange. I could hear a tantalizing sound of gears, but that was not it. There was a soft sound of wind. What was evading my mind?
I realised my host was walking, holding a bag with some dried oranges. I hastened to follow him.
"My name is Fortress," he said.
"I am Unspoken."
"Unspoken... That's an ambiguous name. You seem to be shrouded in mystery. Have you seen the Galleria?"
We stopped in the Temple, drinking the flow of chant and incense, and reverencing the holy icons. Then we walked out. Fortress showed me a hedge maze in a public park, with a great statue in the centre. I looked at the pedestal, and something caught my eye. "There's a passage down hidden in the pedestal to the statue. Where does it go?"
He laughed. "You're subtle."
I waited for him to continue.
He remained silent.
I asked him, "Will it help me find the Galleria?"
He said, "It helps me find the Galleria. It will only distract you from it. The far wall of the pedestal opens to a passage down, but it only reaches a network of caves where boys play. There is nothing in there that will interest you."
"Then what," I asked, "am I to do to find the Galleria?"
"Why don't you search? The Galleria is not outside the boundaries of this little labyrinth. Only beware of the first solution you want to latch onto. That is often a distraction, and if you are to find a solution you are looking for, you need to be able to grasp something slippery in a place you are not looking."
I knocked on earth with my ear to the ground; I looked at the cracks between stones; I even scraped a piece of chalk someone had left on the stones, trying to see if its trace would show me a different stone. I found a few loose items; someone had forgotten a brush, and I pushed a lot of earth aside. I searched and searched, but I found no sign of a passage, no sign of anything unusual save the echoes of a hollow shaft in the stone beneath the statue. It was easy for me to find the mechanism to open the pedestal; indeed, I saw a boy emerge from it. I looked around near the statue: could I be missing a second passage nearby? Yet here the search was even more frustrating.
Fortress gave me a slice of orange, and I searched, hot, parched, the whole day through. I was near the point of tears; nothing in the ground offered the faintest trace of a way down.
I sat back in desolation. I rested my back against a hedge; I could see the sleepy sun's long golden fingers sliding across the hedge. I closed my eyes for a few minutes to rest; I opened my eyes, and could see that the sun's fingers had shifted. My bleak eyes rested on a funny bulge in the hedge. That was odd; it looked almost as if--I stared. Standing out from the hedge, illuminated in stark relief, was a bas-relief sculpture.
Someone in a robe--what color robe?--swam in the ocean. He swam down, down, down, down, deeper than a whale can dive, and still deeper. Something about the picture filled me with cool, and I began to see through it, began to see the web that it was--I felt a touch on my head. "You've found the Galleria. Would you like to go home now?"
I looked. Past Fortress I saw another picture of a swordsman wielding the great Sword, slicing through darkness and error. The Sword swung around him, slicing through monsters around him, and then with no less force slicing through the monsters inside him. I could see--what? It hurt him to cut at errors inside him, but he wielded the Sword against the darkness without and within. I looked entranced.
"Stand up." Fortress was looking at me. "You've seen enough for now; I normally only look into one picture, and you have looked into two after finding the entrance into the Galleria. We will see more of the city later; now, you are tired."
It wasn't until I began walking home that I realized how exhausted I was. I ate my meal in silence, lay in my bed, and sunk into sleep. I awoke, still tired, and was relieved when Fortress told me that he had one proper lesson for me but he would need several days' mundane work for me after that, and it would be a while before anything else exciting happened.
There was one workroom, one that had a forge, an unstable stack of cups with gears and levers, and a box of silt for drawing. There were several mechanical devices in various states of disassembly; Fortress picked up one of them, and turned a crank. I could see gears turning, but the white bird on top moved very erratically.
Fortress looked at me. "Does it work?"
"Not very well."
"What part is causing the problem?"
I turned the device over in my hands, pushed and pulled at one axle, and turned the crank. After some time, I said, "This gear here isn't connecting. It's worn and small."
"So if I replace that gear, it will work better?"
I hesitated and said, "No."
"Then what is the problem?"
"The entire device is loose. The teeth aren't really close enough anywhere; there's room for slipping."
"Then is that one gear the problem?"
"No. It is only the easiest thing to blame."
"Then you did not help yourself or me by telling me that it was that one gear."
I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up his hand and said, "People will often ask you treacherous questions like that, and they usually won't know what it is that they're doing. A Teacher, such as you seem to want to be--"
"How did you know I wanted to be a Teacher?"
"How could I not know you wanted to be a Teacher? A Teacher, such as you seem to want to be--" he continued, "gives an answer that will help the other person, even if that answer is not expected, even if the other person doesn't want to hear it."
Fortress shook the clockwork and said, "What would make it work?"
I said, "You could replace all the gear heads with something larger?"
He said, "What if you couldn't do that? What if the gear heads were made of delicately crafted gold?"
I hesitated, and said, "I can't think of anything that would help."
"Anything at all?"
I hesitated again, and said, "If you made the casing smaller, it would work. But how would you--"
He reached down and pulled two metal plates, plus some other hardware and tools, setting them before me. I took the tools, disassembled the original device, and reassembled the new device with a slightly smaller frame.
It worked perfectly.
He asked, "Is there any way for the bird to bob up and down, as well as turn?"
I tried to think of how to answer him, but this time I really could think of nothing. My sense of mental balance, my sense that my understanding was big enough to encompass his Lesson, was wavery. I was unsure.
He took a metal rule, and smoothed the surface of the silt inside the box. He then began drawing with a stylus.
"What if the rod were not solid, but had a cam and inner workings like this? Wouldn't that work?"
I looked at him, slightly dazed. "You must be a great metalworker. Can you do that?"
He paused a moment and said, "I might be a great metalworker, and I might be able to do that, but that is not why I am asking. Would it work?"
"Yes."
"Could you make it roll?"
"Yes. Put it in a hollow round casing and then it would roll as part of the casing."
He laughed and said, "Could you have the front move forward and the back stay in place--without it breaking?"
I cleared the silt's surface, and began to work diagrams--rejecting several as they failed, working one almost to completion--and then saying, "But that would require a shell that is both strong and elastic, and I have not heard of any who can make a shell like that."
He seemed unconcerned. "But would it work?"
"If I had such a shell, yes, it would work."
"Then you have created it. Could you make one that gives birth to another like itself?"
I sketched a descending abyss of machines within machines, each one smaller than its parent.
"Could you make one that gives birth to another machine, just like itself?"
"Yes, if they were all constantly expanding. By the time a child gave birth, it would be the size of its parent when the child gave birth."
He seemed impressed, not only at what I said, but at how quickly. He closed his eyes, and said, "I will only ask you one more question. How would you design a machine that could design machines like itself?"
I looked at him, at the disassembled machines, at the silt, and then to a place inside myself. "I can't, and I can't learn now."
He looked at me, opened his mouth, and closed it. He said, "We can move to another Lesson. For now, I want you to look at the gears, separating the worn ones from the ones that are new, so that I can melt down the worn ones. You've got a meticulous day ahead of you."
He left, and I began to work through the gears. The work began to grow monotonous. He returned with a leather sack over his shoulder. "I just acquired a number of broken clockwork devices which I want you to disassemble and separate into parts that are usable and parts that need to be melted down. I'll be back shortly with some metal to melt down and forge new gears out of." He set down the sack, and I looked in disbelief at the intricate machines with innumerable small parts. I had a bleak sense of how long a stretch of dullness was ahead of me. I started to lay them out so I could disassemble them.
He returned, holding a pike in his hands. "You seem strong, and you've had some time to recover. Come with me. Thunder has spotted a bear."
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The Steel Orb
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