Nightless days leaked away, and Jing and his companions almost forgot about Keepfire, because every time they went to the observatory some new miracle presented itself.
At first Jing had thought it enough that, in the vicinity of the bright outer planets, there should suddenly appear new starlets which—as time passed—clearly proved to be satellites of what Shine had been the first to recognize as actual discs. But then they looked at the Bridge of Heaven, otherwise the Sling, and save at its midline it was no longer a band of uniform light; it was patently a dense mass of individual stars.
And there were so many stars! Even when the lenses were directed towards the dark square surrounding the New Star, at least a quarter-score (Shine claimed eight) other points of light appeared. At the zenith, near the horizon, it made no odds: wherever they looked, what had always been lightless zones turned out to be dotted with tiny glowing specks.
The New Star itself resolutely refused to give up any secrets. Even Shine’s keen vision, which far surpassed the others’, failed to reveal more than a bright spot with a pale blur around it, a cloud lighted as a fire might light its smoke from underneath. Was it a fragment of the Maker’s Mantle, the aurora which at unpredictable intervals draped the sky in rich and somber colors? In Jing’s view that was unlikely. Before coming to Castle Thorn he had only heard of aurorae. Now, having witnessed several, he was satisfied they must partake more of the nature of clouds than of stars, for they affected the weather-sense, as stars did not; moreover they did not necessarily move in the same direction as the rest of the sky. Were they then looking down on starfire from above? The image came naturally to folk whose ancestors had been the top-dwelling predators, but by the same token “up” and “down” meant one thing to them: towards or away from the ground underpad.
Jing and Rainbow debated long about the matter as soon as they realized that the little stars shuttling back and forth beside the planets must in fact be revolving around them, moon-fashion. By that stage Jing’s prized star-charts were little more than memoranda; he already knew there was a lifetime’s work in filling the gaps the unaided eye had left. The perspectives opened up to him were terrifying. Because if there were any number of different up-and-downs, then not only must the planets be worlds like the world, with their own—plural!—moons, but the sun, whose planets circled it like moons, might be circling something greater yet, and … and … It was dizzying to contemplate!
At least the moon lent them clues. Observations at the full showed that the sparkles visible on the dark part of its disc were only a fraction of what was actually going on. Flash after brilliant flash came and went seemingly at random, lacking even the momentary trace which followed a meteor. And here again Keepfire proved to possess unexpected insight. Shown the moon through his original lenses, he said at once, “It’s like when I make a fire!”
And it was. By this time they had all watched his trick of striking rocks together and catching a spark on a tuft of shredded calamar.
Striking…
Jing felt he was being not so much struck as battered. It had been hard enough to accept the distances he had been taught about in childhood, necessary to let Sunbride race around the sun, the world stride around it, and the outer planets follow at their own respective speeds. What to make of a cosmos in which scores-of-scores-of-scores-of-scores (but it was pointless to try and count the stars in the Sling) of not just suns but their accompanying planets must be allowed for? If the sacerdotes were right in claiming that their sacred stones had fallen from heaven, and they were so tiny, could those brilliant lights above also be minute? Shine suggested as much, for he desperately wanted not to forsake all his former beliefs; in particular he clung to the notion that the New Star must indicate some great event in the world below. During a late snowstorm, however, Jing set him to making calculations based on the new observations, couched in the Ntahish symbols which were wieldier than what obtained in the north, and the results overwhelmed the poor exsacerdote, even though he had been properly fed for moonlongs past and learned to separate dream from fantasy as never before in his young life. They demonstrated beyond doubt that in order to leave room for planetary motions the lights in the sky must be not only far off but enormous. Did not a lantern fade to imperceptibility, no matter how skillfully you bred your gleamers, almost before its bearer was out of hearing? And when one added in an extra fact which Shine himself had drawn to their attention—that Swiftyouth sometimes appeared out of round, as though attempting phases like the moon’s—there was precisely one explanation which fitted the evidence. The universe must be full of suns, and therefore presumably of planets too faint and far away for even their precious lenses to reveal.