“Oh! Oh, yes! But very indistinct! Rainbow, what do you see?”
She disposed herself carefully, leaning all her weight on her crippled side. Having gazed longer than either of them, she said, “Two stars beside the planet. Sharp and clear.”
Turning, she sought Stolidchurl, and did the same, and exclaimed. “Not two more stars, but three! At least I think three … I—Shine, you look. Your sight is very keen, I know.”
His mandibles practically chattering with excitement, the young sacerdote took his turn. “Three!” he reported. “And—and I see a disc! I always thought the planets were just points, like the stars! But I still see them as points! And what do you make of the colored blurs these lenses show?”
“Could it be that we’re seeing a very faint aurora?” Rainbow ventured. “Jing, what do you think?”
Jing ignored her, his mind racing. If one put such lenses in a viewing funnel—no, not a funnel, better a tube—of pliobark, or whatever was to be had here in the north, and made provision for adjustment to suit different observers…
He said soberly, “Twig, this is a very great invention.” “I know, I know!” Twig clapped his claws in delight. “When I turn it on the sun, come spring—”
“You’ll burn out what’s left of your sight,” Rainbow interjected flatly.
“Making the sun as much brighter as the stars now appear will blind you.
But there must be a way. Apply your genius to the problem, while the rest of us get on with finding unknown stars. Perhaps they hold the key to what’s amiss with cripples like me.”
VI
For the rest of the winter all four of them were embarked on a fabulous voyage of discovery. The world receded until they could wander through it unheeding, like a thin mist; all that mattered was their study of the sky. Shine abandoned his duties altogether, and his superiors threatened to kill him, but he put himself under Rainbow’s protection and with Sturdy and her other prongsmen ready to spring to his aid they dared not touch him.
Growing frightened because his ruptures would not heal, the Count occasionally sent for them to demand how their work was progressing, but during their eager attempts at explanation his mind tended to stray, and he invariably wound up by raging at them because they cared more for star-lore than medicine. Nobody else in the castle—not even Twig’s aides like Hedge and Bush, who refused to venture forth when the wind was bitter enough to build frost-rime on one’s mandibles—seemed to care that a revelation was in the making. Twig said it was because the cold weather had sent their minds into hibernation, like the dirq and fosq which were so abundant in the summer and vanished into burrows in the fall.
There was one signal exception: the peasant Keepfire.
Throughout his life he had scarcely seen the stars. It was a tradition in his family that at winter sunset they should retreat to their cavern until spring reawoke the land. Twig, however, was sure it could not always have been so, and because he was so excited by what the lenses were revealing he patiently taught Keepfire how to store warm air under his mantle and persuaded him to the observatory at a time when the air was so clear the brilliance of the heavens was almost hurtful.
Such was Keepfire’s amazement on learning that the glass he had melted from sand could show sparks of light where to the naked eye was only blackness, he returned home full of enthusiasm to improve on what he had already done. It being impossible to find fuel for new and hotter fires at this season—and hard enough at any time—he set about collecting every scrap of glass he could, whether natural or resulting from their experiments. For hours on end he sat comparing them, wondering how each differed from the rest. At last, in what the jubilant Twig termed a fit of genius, he thought of a way to shape the ones which were nearly good until they outdid those which were excellent.
Using the skin of a fish which was sown with tiny rough crystalline points, hunted by people but scarcely preyed on in the wild because swallowing it tail-first as it fled was apt to rasp the predator’s gullet, he contrived to grind a poor lens into a good one, at least so far as form was concerned. But then it was seamed with fine scratches. How to eliminate them? There was no means other than rubbing on something softer than the glass, until the glass itself shed enough spicules to complete the task. This he set himself to do.