Other Earths (collection)

Still, the ship’s sights were spectacular. Jenny was shown the great smelly hold where the llamas were kept during the journey. And she was shown around an engine room. Jenny’s family ran steam scows, and she had expected Watt engines, heavy, clunky, soot-coated iron monsters. The Viracocha’s engine room was a pristine white-walled hall inhabited by sleek metal shapes. The air was filled with a soft humming, and there was a sharp smell in the air that reminded her of the seashore. These smooth sculptures didn’t even look like engines to Jenny, and whatever principle they worked on had nothing to do with steam, evidently. So much for her father’s fond hopes of selling coal to the mighty Inca empire!

Despite such marvels, Jenny chafed at her confinement below decks. What made it worse was that she saw little of her friends. Alphonse was whisked off to a program of study of Inca culture and science, mediated by Darwin. And in his free time he monopolized Dreamer for private language classes; he wanted to learn as much Quechua as he could manage, for he did not trust the Inca.

This irritated Jenny more than she was prepared to admit, for the times she relished most of all were the snatched moments she spent with Dreamer.

One free evening Dreamer took her to the navigation bay. The walls were covered with charts, curves that might have shown the trajectory of the sun and moon across the sky, and other diagrams showing various aspects of a misty-gold spiral shape that meant nothing to Jenny. There was a globe that drew her eye; glowing, painted, it was covered with unfamiliar shapes, but one strip of blue looked just like a map of the Mediterranean.

The most wondrous object in the room was a kind of loom, rank upon rank of knotted string that stretched from floor to ceiling and wall to wall—but unlike a loom it was extended in depth as well. As she peered into this array, she saw metal fingers pluck blindly at the strings, making the knots slide this way and that.

Dreamer watched her, as she watched the string. “I’m starting to think Alphonse is using the language classes as an excuse to keep me away from you. Perhaps the prince wants you for himself. Who wouldn’t desire such beauty?”

Jenny pulled her face at this gross flattery. “Tell me what this loom is for.”

“The Inca have always represented their numbers and words on quipus, bits of knotted string. Even after they learned writing from their Aztec neighbors, whom they encountered at the start of the Sunrise.”

“The Sunrise?”

“That is their modest name for their program of expansion across the world. Jenny, this is a machine for figuring numbers. The Inca use it to calculate their journeys across the world’s oceans. But it can perform any sum you like.”

“My father would like one of these to figure his tax return.”

Dreamer laughed.

She said, “But everybody knows that you can’t navigate at night, when the sun goes down, and the only beacons in the sky are the moon and planets, which career unpredictably all over the place. How, then, do the Inca find their way?” For the Europeans this was the greatest mystery about the Inca. Even the greatest seamen of the past, the Vikings, had barely had the courage to probe away from the shore.

Dreamer glanced at the strange charts on the wall. “Look, they made us promise not to tell any of you about—well, certain matters, before the Inca deem you ready. But there’s something here I do want to show you.” He led her across the room to the globe.

That blue shape was undoubtedly the Mediterranean. “It’s the world,” she breathed.

“Yes.” He smiled. “The Inca have marked what they know of the European empires. Look, here is Grand Bretagne.”

“Why, even Europe is only a peninsula dangling from the carcass of Asia.”

“You know, your sense of wonder is the most attractive thing about you.”

She snorted. “Really? More than my eyes and teeth and neck, and the other bits of me you’ve been praising? I’ll believe that when a second sun rises in the sky. Show me where you come from—and the Inca.”

Passing his hand over the globe, he made the world spin and dip.

He showed her what lay beyond the Ottoman empire, the solemn Islamic unity that had blocked Christendom from the east for centuries: the vast expanses of Asia, India, the sprawling empire of China, Nippon, the Spice Islands. And he showed how Africa extended far beyond the arid northern regions held by the Ottomans, a great pendulous continent in its own right that sprawled, thrillingly, right across the equator.

“You can in fact reach India and the east by sailing south around the cape of southern Africa,” Dreamer said. “Without losing sight of land, even. A man called Columbus was the first to attempt this in 1492. But he lacked the courage to cross the equator. Columbus went back to the family business of trouser-making, and Christian Europe stayed locked in.”