Chapter Five #2
Thankfully, they didn’t linger near the pleasure houses.
Instead, Delauney led Wes past the next bend, toward the other side of the small island.
The houses here were still busy with movement, but some of the windows were dark, and Delauney moved purposely past them toward a house perched on the edge of a small bluff.
A large, round building huddled next to the house, and Wes could just see a wisp of smoke rising from a hole in the roof.
“I’m seeing a glassmaker,” Delauney said. “His name’s Fern, and he’s a little... eccentric. Most geniuses are, I think.”
“What do you need with a glassmaker?” Wes asked, curious.
“Well, he was trained by Raul Vitrier,” Delauney said, “which means he can work metal as well as glass. And he can make a prism precise enough to avoid any significant inaccuracies."
Wes looked over at Delauney. He wasn’t speaking in the lighthearted, slightly self-deprecating way Wes had come to expect. He sounded confident, knowledgeable, and Wes thought of the numbers and diagrams scrawled in the discarded papers of his cabin.
Someone was already waiting for them on the porch of the old house as they approached.
He was a genteel middle-aged man with the light brown skin and dark eyes of someone from northern Katoikos, and he was dressed in trousers, a dark tunic, and fine black gloves with bright gold buttons.
He sat up when he saw them, and Wes slowed as he realized that his chair had wheels.
It was an invention Wes had only seen a handful of times on shore leave in Kallistos, but this one seemed less bulky and cumbersome.
The man propelled himself forward on the chair with hand cranks near the arm rests, coming to a stop only a foot away from Delauney.
“Hello, there, Lane,” he said. “You’re three and a half minutes late. That’s nearly fifteen minutes better than last time. Come in and I’ll show you the device.”
“Wes,” Delauney said, as the man turned his chair around without another word, “this is Fern. Fern, this is—”
“Wes,” Fern said, without looking back. “Yes, I heard. Is he another astronomer?”
Wes gave Delauney a pointed look. Another astronomer? Did Delauney have an interest in the stars? Surely Wes would have noticed by now.
“No, no, he’s a friend.” Delauney trotted ahead, keeping pace with Fern. “Is it done?”
“Of course it is. I told you it would be. Come in and don’t make yourself at home,” he added, pausing to push open his door. “I have apprentices sleeping upstairs and the cats have their routines.”
Wes cautiously stepped into the house. It was spacious and tidy, organized in a way that was clearly meant to fit Fern and his chair, with books and shelves all at reasonable heights and a wide work table with a much more comfortable, padded seat.
Little devices and tools lay in neat, meticulously-labeled trays, and Wes couldn’t help but appreciate the order that went into such a space.
It was like looking into his future, where everything would have its own, designated spot.
An enormous, three-legged black cat hopped out from under the work table, regarded Wes, and cried softly.
“Yes, I know,” Fern said. “They’ll be gone soon enough.”
Several other cats roused from their hiding spots as they moved through the house, watching Wes and Delauney with an unsettling intelligence in their wide eyes. One of them, a large orange cat with a striped tail, hopped onto Fern’s lap as he passed and started kneading his legs.
“How many cats do you have?” Wes asked.
“Not enough,” Fern said.
“You know, we have this man on the ship.” Wes bent to hold a hand out to a sleek tabby, who hopped to bump its forehead head against him. “Gregory. He quite likes cats, too.”
Fern interrupted him with a cry of disgust. If he were a dominant, Wes would have probably dropped to his knees.
“You mean the traitor,” he said. Too late, Wes caught Delauney making furtive gestures over Fern’s shoulder.
“If you see that no-good, back-stabbing scoundrel of a man again, tell him that I’m not thinking of him and I’ll never forgive him. ”
“Sir?” A girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen peered out from the loft over the first floor. She was in a Gerakian-style nightgown, traditionally dyed black to summon the god of dreams. “If this is about Gregory again, you know that he was just looking after you.”
“Go to bed, Serafina,” Fern said. “You have lessons tomorrow.”
“Yes, but he was so nice,” Serafina said. Fern scoffed again.
“Nice! Imagine this, young man,” he said, turning on Wes. “I’d shared the diagrams of an invention to Gregory in confidence, and he went behind my back to register it with the Gerakian patents office in my name!”
“And now you get two-hundred silvers a year,” Serafina said. “And ten coppers every time someone makes a new model.”
“Bed!” Fern demanded. “It’s the principle of the thing. He could have asked.”
“Fern,” Delauney said, a little desperately. “The device?”
“Oh. Right. Yes.” Fern paused to scratch the cat in his lap. “It’s next to the window. I tried to keep to your specifications, but your handwriting is terrible, Lane. If you’d like to file a patent, let me know and we can sign a contract.”
“It’s just a variation,” Delauney said, rushing to the window. Wes followed him, still reeling from the knowledge that Gregory had some connection with the irritable inventor. He’d been under the impression that Gregory didn’t care for people at all.
The device Delauney had commissioned looked a little like a telescope someone had split in two and angled in different directions, with a funny series of prisms and mirrors placed seemingly at random.
It didn’t seem to have any practical use to Wes, but it was clearly well-made, because Delauney was cooing over it like a newborn child.
“It’s magnificent,” Delauney said.
“I set it up so that you can test different chemicals,” Fern said as Delauney examined it, “and it works well enough at night if there aren’t too many lights nearby.”
“I could marry you,” Delauney said.
“Please don’t.” Despite his curt, stern tone, Fern was smiling. “Will this answer your questions?”
“Possibly,” Delauney said. He seemed to have forgotten that Wes was even there. “Quite possibly. Can I test it?”
“I’ll douse the lights,” Fern said, turning to go as Delauney opened a window. “The moon’s bright enough.”
Wes approached the device carefully, not wanting to startle this strange man wearing Delauney’s face. “Delauney... what exactly does this do?”
Delauney barely looked at him, too busy adjusting the various halves of the telescope.
“It refracts light into a prism, and the mirrors can adjust the light so that you can see the colored rays radiating from the spheres in the heavens,” he said.
“Like the sun,” he added, when Wes just stood there.
“Or the moon, but I think that the moon is like... like a mirror itself, but it’s imperfect, so it’s hard to explain.
If you measure the strands of color and determine what else makes those same strands, you can almost map out what the sun and the moon are made of. ”
“Aren’t they made of stone?” Wes asked. That was what his tutors had said, at least, in Wes’ dim recollection of his paltry science lessons.
“I think the sun might not be solid,” Delauney said.
“I’m almost certain that it’s rotating, in any case.
Look here, you can make out the light coming from the moon.
” He jostled Wes closer to the device, practically shoving him into position.
When Wes looked through the lens, he expected to see the moon reflected on a mirror or glass, but instead, he saw what seemed like hundreds of minuscule lines.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” he said carefully.
“It’s light,” Delauney said. “The same light you see from the moon with the naked eye, but translated into measurable lines that we might be able to replicate with elements on earth. That means we can determine what the moon and the sun are.” Delauney was practically shaking with excitement.
“With something like this, you could map the universe.”
Wes stepped back, examining Delauney’s flushed, bright-eyed expression. “That’s what those numbers and diagrams were on the ship. All those pages...”
Delauney blushed again, but the enthusiasm was still there, clearly stronger than his tendency to laugh off serious matters. “Oh, yes, but I was using imprecise means to measure them. You see, I have this theory. We know that the earth moves.”
“We do?” Wes asked.
“Well, yes,” Delauney said, as though it were common knowledge. “You’re a sailor, you’d know that. People in Katoikos figured it out eons ago. But if the sun also moves, which I’m fairly certain it does, then we can use tools like this to measure it.”
“Right,” Wes said, feeling more lost than ever.
“I learned about it when a professor from Gerakia came by our lands,” Delauney said, taking over at the helm of the bewildering device.
“Professor Monroe. He had a version of this that he could show children with a prism and a box, and I was fascinated by it. He teaches in the astronomy department of the Aviary, now. It’s a college in Gerakia. ”
“Did you study there?” Wes asked.
Delauney drew back, a shadow falling over his face. “Ah. No. No, I couldn’t get in.”
“But the way Fern put it, you practically designed this,” Wes said, gesturing to the device.
“Modified it,” Delauney said softly, already starting to shrink into himself. “It’s just a hobby, you know. Every gentleman needs one.”
“I don’t think it is,” Wes said.
“Don’t try to convince him, son.” Fern approached with a new cat in his lap. “It’s no use. I’ve certainly tried.”
“But it’s still an excellent piece of work,” Delauney said, smiling weakly at Fern. “Who knows what it could do in the hands of an expert.”