Four Small Moons

On their last night on Mount Selk, Teo looked through the eye of the dome.

He had not meant to. The great white dome on the summit was the Observatory itself — the place where the Makers had watched the sky — and he had spent nine days so buried in the hall of books below it that he had never once gone inside. It was Mira, in the end, who dragged him there, on the evening before they left, with a lamp in one hand and a look on her face that brooked no argument.

"You have spent your whole life," she said, "staring at the dead. Tonight, you're going to look at something else."

The inside of the dome was vast and dark and echoing. Most of it was filled by the great telescope... a colossal tube of dark metal and white struts, as long as a barge and as thick as a tower, tilted up toward the long slit in the roof. Teo walked all the way around it, slowly, staring. It was broken. He could see that at once. At its base, where its great eye should have been, there was a round hollow as wide as a cart-wheel, and inside it, a ruin of shattered silver glass. Some ancient tremor of the mountain, perhaps, or simply the weight of six hundred years.

But Ruth Anand had left a note on that, too.

It was taped to the door of a tall cabinet at the edge of the dome. For visitors. The big one hasn't worked since before I came. Use these. And inside the cabinet, wrapped in soft cloth, there were three small telescopes, each one a slim tube of brass and black metal about as long as Teo's arm, with a lens like a clear dark eye at one end and a small eyepiece at the other.

Teo carried one of them outside onto the summit, under the stars, with hands that would not stay steady. He set it up on its folding legs, the way the label on the cabinet explained. He pointed it at the moon.

And looked.

He did not say anything for a very long time.

He had looked at the moon his whole life. Everyone had. It was a disc of pale silver, sometimes whole and sometimes cut in half, sometimes a thin curl of light like the paring of a fingernail. It had faint dark patches on it, which the Chantry said were the shadows of the Flame's anger, and which the children of the Sump said were the face of a sad old man.

Through the telescope, the moon was a world.

It filled the whole round field of the eyepiece, enormous and bright and impossibly close. Its surface was grey and white and pale gold, and it was covered — absolutely covered — in craters. Round pits of every size, from vast shallow basins wider than the whole Calder valley down to tiny dimples at the very edge of sight, overlapping one another, crowding together, scattered across the plains like raindrops on dust. There were mountains. Real mountains, long jagged ranges of them, and Teo could see their shadows, long and black, stretching away across the grey ground on the side of the moon where its light ended and its darkness began. At that edge, in the dark, he could see the very tips of the highest peaks catching the sun, like points of fire floating in the night.

It was not a disc. It was not a lamp. It was not the Flame's anger, or a sad old man.

It was a place.

"...Teo?" Mira said softly, after a while.

He stepped back from the telescope without a word, and let her look.

She was silent for a long time too. When she finally straightened up, her face was wet.

"There are mountains on the moon," she said, in a small, wondering voice. "There are mountains on the moon."

But Teo was already looking at something else.

Low in the east, there was a bright star. He had seen it on the very first night out of the Fens, and every night since... much brighter than all the others, a steady, creamy white, and it did not flicker the way stars flickered. He had wondered about it. He had thought it was perhaps the Pole Star's larger brother, or a star that had come closer to the world than the others.

He swung the telescope toward it, and found it, and looked.

It was not a star.

It was a small, round, perfect disc. Creamy white, with faint bands of colour across its middle, pale brown and gold, like the stripes on a bead. And beside it... on either side of it, in a straight line, like beads on a thread...

Four tiny points of light.

Teo stared at them. He counted them twice. Three on one side, one on the other. Four.

He looked up from the telescope, at the bright light in the sky with his naked eye. A single point. Then back through the eyepiece. A disc, and four small lights beside it, in a row.

"Mira," he said, in a strange voice. "Come and look at this. Tell me what you see."

She looked for a long time.

"A little round thing," she said slowly. "With stripes. And four... sparks. Next to it. In a line." She frowned. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Teo said. "But I think I know how to find out."

He did not sleep that night. He sat beside the telescope on the cold stone of the summit and watched the four small lights, every hour, until dawn. And every hour, they had moved. Not a lot. Not so that he could have seen it with his eyes alone. But one of them had crept closer to the striped disc, and another had swung further out, and by the middle of the night, one of the four had vanished entirely — gone behind the disc, or in front of it, he could not tell which — and then, a few hours later, came out again on the other side.

They were going around it.

Four small moons, circling a world of their own.

In the morning, red-eyed and stiff and trembling with something that was not cold, he went down into the hall and found it in the index in less than an hour. It was on shelf 311, in a thin grey book about the history of the sky.

In January 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei turned one of the first telescopes toward the planet Jupiter and observed what he at first took to be three small stars near it, and later a fourth. Watching over several nights, he saw that they moved, and concluded that they were moons orbiting Jupiter itself.

This was a discovery of enormous importance. At the time, most educated people in Europe believed that the Earth stood still at the centre of the universe, and that every heavenly body circled around it. Galileo had now seen, with his own eyes, four bodies that circled something else. It was strong evidence for the idea, proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus decades earlier, that the Earth was not the centre of everything, but one planet among several, circling the Sun.

Galileo's support for this idea brought him into conflict with the Church authorities of his day. In 1633, he was tried, forced to publicly renounce his views, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. A later story claimed that, as he rose from his knees after recanting, he muttered "And yet it moves." Historians doubt that he really said it. But the moons of Jupiter kept circling, whatever anyone said. Anyone with a telescope could see them. Before long, everyone did.

Teo read it twice. Then he closed the book and sat in the dim yellow light for a while, thinking.

'Anyone with a telescope could see them.'

That was the thing. That was the thing that Valdris Kahl was really afraid of. Not the Makers' machines, or their flying, or their great burning cities. It was this. A man looks through a tube of glass, and sees four small lights going around a planet. And then he hands the tube to someone else, and says: don't believe me. Look for yourself.

And then nobody needs a Voice of the Flame to tell them what is true.

Teo went back up to the summit, and took the little brass telescope down from its legs, and wrapped it carefully in its cloth. He put it in his pack, next to the red book and the brass button and Ruth Anand's twenty-seventh notebook.

He did not think she would mind.

They were loading the mule that afternoon... with as many red books as Turnip could carry, which was nowhere near enough, and Turnip made his feelings about it very clear... when Bram, who was standing at the edge of the summit, looking out over the plain, said:

"Riders."

Teo came and stood beside him.

There was dust on the plain below the mountain. A long, pale plume of it, moving fast, coming from the west. Shapes in the dust. Tall, humped shapes, moving at a lumbering, swaying run.

The salt people.

It took them until sunset to climb the mountain road. There were five of them, on five camels, and at their head rode Sefa's grandson... the boy whose hand Mira had saved, his palm now healed into a thick pink scar... with his grandmother's sharp eyes and a face that was grey with dust and exhaustion.

He slid down off his camel at the top of the road and did not waste time on greetings.

"From the Fens," he said, in his broken valley speech, breathless. "A message. Your mother's people." He looked at Bram. "My grandmother says, ride fast. Ride day and night."

Bram's face went very still.

"What message?"

The boy swallowed.

"A sickness," he said. "In the city of the wall. Since the end of the summer. A red sickness. Fever, and then the skin..." He made a gesture over his own face, his hands, a gesture of something erupting, blistering. "Red blisters. Everywhere. They burn the dead in the streets. They have closed the gates. No one goes in. No one comes out." He looked at Teo. "The message says, the old blind man and the girl are still inside."