Iterations and other stories (collection)

“Can you read the top row ofletters?” asked Doc Tadders, indicating the eye chart. She was about my age, with pale blue eyes and red hair just beginning to turn gray.

“Sure,” said Dalt. “Eet, bot, doo, shuh, kee.”

Tadders nodded. “What about the next row?”

“Hih, fah, roo, shuh, puh, ess.”

“Can you read the last row?”

“Ayt, doo, tee, nuh, tee, ess, guh, hih, fah, roo.”

“Are you sure about the second letter?”

“It’s a doo, no?” said Dalt.

If there’s any letter my son should know, it should be that one, since it was the first in his own name. But the character on the chart wasn’t a doo; it was a fah.

Dr. Tadders jotted a note in the book she was holding, then said, “What about the last letter?”

“That’s a roo.”

“Are you sure?”

Dalt squinted. “Well, if it’s not a roo, then it’s an shuh, no?”

“Which do you think it is?”

“A shuh… or a roo.” Dalt shrugged. “It’s so tiny, I can’t be sure.”

I could see that it was a roo; I was surprised that I had better vision than my son did.

“Thanks,” said Tadders. She looked at me. “He’s a tiny bit nearsighted,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.” She faced Dalt again. “What about the lights in front of your eyes? Do you see any of them now?”

“No,” said Dalt.

“None at all?”

“You can only see them in the dark,” he said.

Tadders pushed against the padded wall with her palm, which was enough to send her drifting across the room toward the light switch; the ancients had made switches that were little rockers, instead of the click-in/click-out buttons we build. She rocked the switch, and the lighting strips at the edges of the padded roof went dark. “What about now?”

Dalt sounded puzzled. “No.”

“Let’s give your eyes a few moments to adjust,” she said.

“It won’t make any difference,” said Dalt, exasperated. “You can only see the lights outside.”

“Outside?” repeated Tadders.

“That’s right,” said Dalt. “Outside. In the dark. Up in the sky.”

Dalt was the first child born after our group left the interior of the Dyson sphere. Our little town had a population of 240 now, of which fifteen had been born since we’d come outside. Dalt’s usual playmate was Suzto, the daughter of the couple who lived next door to my wife and me in a building that had clearly been designed by the ancients to be living quarters.

All adults spent half their days working on their particular area of expertise, which for me was translating ancient documents stored in the computers inside the buildings and the pyramid, and the other half doing the chores that were needed to support a fledgling society. But after work, I took Dalt and Suzto for a float. We drifted away from the lights of the ancient buildings, across the fields of crops, and out toward the access tunnel that led to the pyramid.

I knew that the surface of the sphere, beneath us, was curved, of course, and, here on the outside, that it curved down. But the sphere was so huge that everything seemed flat. Oh, one could make out the indentations that were hills on the other side of the sphere’s shell, and the raised plateaus that water collected in. Although we were on the frontier—the outside of the sphere!—we were still only one bodylength away from the world we’d left behind; that’s how thick the sphere’s shell was. But the double-doored portal that led back inside had been sealed off; the people on the interior had welded it shut after we’d left. They wanted nothing to do with whatever we might find out here, calling our quest for knowledge of the exterior universe a sacrilege against the wisdom of the ancients.

As we floated in the darkness, Dalt looked up again and said, “See! The lights!”

Suzto looked up, too. I expected her to scrunch her face in puzzlement, baffled by Dalt’s words, but instead, near as I could make out in the darkness, she was smiling in wonder.

“Can—can you see the lights, too?” I asked Suzto.

“Sure.”

I was astonished. “How big are they?”

“Tiny. Like this.” She held up her hand, but if there was any space between her finger and thumb, I couldn’t make it out.

“Are they arranged in some sort of pattern?”

Suzto’s vocabulary wasn’t yet as big as Dalt’s. She looked at me, and I tried again. “Do they make shapes?”

“Maybe,” said Suzto. “Some are brighter than others. There are three over there that make a straight line.”

I frowned. “Dalt, please cover your eyes.”

He did so, with elaborate hand gestures.

“Suzto, point to the brightest light in the sky.”

“There’re so many,” she said.

“All right, all right. Point to the brightest one in this part of the sky over here.”

She didn’t hesitate. “That one.”

“Okay,” I said, “now put your hand down, please.”

She drew her arm back in toward her body.

“Dalt, uncover your eyes.”

He did so.

“Now, Dalt, point to the brightest light in this part of the sky over here.”

He lifted his arm, then seemed to vacillate for a moment between two possible choices.

“Not that one, silly,” said Suzto’s voice. She pointed. “This one’s brighter.”