Far-Seer

He broke away from the mesmerizing sight, and, rubbing the base of his neck, headed off to the galley. All sorts of kitchen equipment were lying around: tools for scraping meat from bones—none could go to waste aboard a sailing vessel; metal basins for washing those tools; cutting boards and cleavers; salting trays; mallets with hundreds of metal teeth, used to tenderize the salted meats; racks of spices, important on long voyages to hide the taste of meat past its prime; devices for scaling fish; and so on. No one was in the galley, though, so Afsan simply helped himself to what he needed. In a storage trough he found glass flasks holding hard-boiled wingfinger eggs in brine. He grabbed a couple of flasks and headed back to his chamber. As he crossed the deck, he again looked up at the enigmatic, swirling Face.

Once back in his cabin, he removed his lamp from the brass hook that normally held it in place. Gingerly, for Afsan knew how careful one must be with any source of flame on a wooden boat, he set the lamp on the creaking timbers in the center of the floor. He got pieces of decorative clothing out of his storage trough, including his prayer neckband, the multi-pouched waistband he used for carrying things, the red leather cap he’d received after his first day’s chores, symbolizing his honorary membership in the Dasheter’s crew, and three of his apprenticeship sashes. The leather sashes showed signs of alterations by the palace tailor. Pog-Teevio, the previous apprentice astrologer, who had lasted all of thirty days before Saleed had sent him back to Chu’toolar, had been older and much stockier than Afsan.

Afsan set these pieces of material at various places on the floor. He then opened a flask and pulled out a wingfinger egg. He wiped off the brine and put the egg on one of the pieces of clothing he had placed on the floor, the folds of fabric preventing the egg from rolling despite the pitching of the ship. He continued until he had nine laid out. Some he put near the lamp, some far away, some toward the port side of the chamber, some along the starboard. Afsan then stood in the center of his collection of eggs, towering over the flickering lamp, and looked down.

By the prophet’s claws, it made sense! He could see that no matter where it was in the tiny room, exactly half of each egg was illuminated, just as he suspected half of each planet was illuminated by the sun. Afsan then lay on the floor, the timbers cool beneath him. Although Afsan sanded the part of the floor he slept on from time to time, most of the rest was ticked and scarred by his footclaws and those of previous pilgrims.

He felt the ship swaying slowly back and forth beneath him, felt his stomach rise and fall on the crest and troughs of waves. Taking care not to get slivers from the boards, Afsan positioned himself next to one of the tiny eggs, his muzzle flat on the floor. From this point of view, those eggs between him and the lamp representing the sun were almost invisible—at most a narrow crescent was illuminated. That one over there, perpendicular to the lamp from him, was a gibbous shape, more than half lit up. And there, another egg gibbous in the opposite way. And that one, on the other side of the lamp, illuminated almost fully. And that one, all but lost in the glare of the flickering flame.

Could it be? Could it be? The sun at the center of the planets? But that made no sense. If the sun was at the center, then the planets would have to move in circular paths around it, not around Land. That was absurd.

Absurd.

The ship groaned beneath him.

Afsan then thought about the moons. This model would not work for them, could not explain their appearance. The moons had to be illuminated by the sun, too, just as the planets were. But they couldn’t be moving in circular paths around the sun. They were so big, so much closer, apparently, to Land than the planets, and completed their phase cycles in a matter of days, not kilodays. But they must be traveling in circular paths, too, for did they not endlessly move across a narrow band of the sky? What could they be revolving around?

Afsan slapped his tail against the deck. The eggs jumped. What could it be?

He got up, moved to his workbench, pulled out a few of his precious writing leathers and his pots of ink and solvent, and began to scribble notes, sketch configurations, try various calculations. It was long, long after the sun had risen, its bluish-white rays jagged around the edges of the leather curtain over Afsan’s porthole, that he finally rinsed off his middle fingerclaw, washing away the ink, and stared at what he’d drawn, at the only arrangement that seemed to work.

Sun at the center.

Planets moving around the sun.

Moons moving around one of the planets, casting small round shadows on it.

And Land itself on one of those moons!

It all fit.