resume the journey that would take it out of the city, beyond the borders of
Carthogia, and across the Wilderness of Meracasine. Skerilliane,
Spy-with-a-Thousand-Eyes, would have much to report when he returned to his
royal master Eskenderom, the King of Kroaxia.
21
“CAN YOU IMAGINE A DISTANCE TWELVE TIMES GREATER THAN the greatest breadth of
Carthogia?” Thirg asked Lofbayel’s son, Morayak, who was sitting with his back
to the large table strewn with charts and sheets of calculations, in the room
that Lofbayel had given Thirg to use as a study while Thirg was residing with
the family.
“I think so, though I have never journeyed but a fraction of such a distance,”
Morayak said. “Why, it must be greater even than the size of the strange,
spherical world of which you and my father speak!”
“Not so, Young-Questioner-Who-Will-Become-Wise-by-Questioning,” Thirg said. He
picked up the Skybeings’ globe that the Wearer-of-the-Arm-Vegetable had
presented to him as a gift, and looked at it briefly. “In fact such a distance
would be a little less than half the diameter of our world, of which I am
assured this is a faithful representation.” He put the globe down and looked
back at Morayak. “And what of a distance yet twelve times that again—enough to
span six worlds side by side? Can your mind grasp that?”
Morayak frowned and stared at the globe while he concentrated. “I’m not sure. To
visualize the breadth of Carthogia requires but a simple extension of faculties
that are familiar to me, but where is the experience to guide my intuition in
attempting to judge a distance through a world rather than across it? But even
taxing my mind to that degree does not satisfy you enough, it seems, for now you
would have me grapple with conceiving six of them.”
“Then instead of worlds whose surfaces curve in space, let us take as our model,
time, which involves no complications from multiplicity of direction,” Thirg
suggested. “If the breadth of Carthogia be represented by a single bright, then
the distance to which I refer, being twelve times twelve, equates to one
Carthogia for every bright contained in the duration of twelve twelve-brights.
Now—can you visualize that?”
It took Morayak a few seconds to grasp, but in the end he nodded, at the same
time frowning intently. “That is vastness indeed, but it is not completely
unimaginable now you have described it thus. My mind is stretched, but I think
it can conceive of such a distance.”
“And what of twelve times that, yet again?”
Morayak stared at Thirg with a strained look on his face, then grinned
hopelessly and shook his head. “Impossible!”
Thirg paced across the room, swung around, and threw his hands wide. “Then what
of twelve times even that, and twelve times that yet again still, and then even
twelve times—”
“Stop, Thirg!” Morayak protested. “What purpose is served by uttering
repetitions of words that have ceased to carry any meaning?”
“But they do carry meaning,” Thirg said. He moved forward and raised his arm to
point. Morayak turned in his seat to look at the large chart on the wall above
the table, which Lofbayel had drawn from Thirg’s records of conversations with
the Skybeings. In the center it showed the huge furnace in the sky—large enough
to consume the whole world in an instant, the Skybeings said—and around it the
paths of the nine worlds that circled it endlessly, some of them accompanied by
their own attendant worlds, which in turn circled them. It had come as something
of a shock to learn that Robia, as Kleippur had named the robeing world, was not
even a member of the nine, but just one— although, true, the largest—of a
retinue of seventeen servants following at the heels of a giant. Dornvald had
remarked that the giant was surely the king of worlds, because of his ringlike
crown. But Thirg was pointing not at the giant, but at the third world out from
the furnace—a humble little world, seemingly, with just a single page in
attendance— which Lofbayel had labeled Lumia, since its sky shone with the heat
light that accompanied the Skybeings, or Lumians, as they were now more properly