The Year of Rice and Salt

Most of the other books he paged through quickly and dropped back in the box. He did go through 'The Emerald Table' page by page, enlisting Iwang, and later some of the Sher Dor mathematicians, to help him test every sentence in it that contained any tangible suggestion for action in the shops, or out in the world at large. They agreed in the end that it was mostly false information, and that what was true in it was the most trivial of commonplace observations in metallurgy or natural behaviour.

Bahram thought this might be a disappointment to Khalid, but in fact, after all that had passed, he actually seemed pleased at these results, even reassured. Suddenly Bahram understood: Khalid would have been shocked if something magical had occurred, shocked and disappointed, for that would have rendered irregular and unfathomable the very order that he now assumed must exist in nature. So he watched all the tests fail with grim satisfaction, and put the old book containing the wisdom of Hermes Trimestigus high on a shelf with all its brethren, and ignored them from then on. After that it was only his blank books that he cared about, filling them immediately after his demonstrations, and later through the long nights; they lay open everywhere, mostly on the tables and floors of his study. One cold night when Bahram was out for a walk around the compound, he went into Khalid's study and found the old man asleep on his couch, and he pulled a blanket over him and snuffed most of the lamps, but by the light of the one left burning, he looked at the big books open on the floor. Khalid's lefthanded writing was jagged to the point of illegibility, a private code, but the little sketched drawings were rather fine in their abrupt way: a crosssection of an eyeball, a big cart, bands of light, cannonball flights, birds' wings, gearing systems, lists of many varieties of damasked steel, athanor interiors, thermometers, altimeters, clockworks of all kinds, little stick figures fighting with swords or hanging from giant spirals like linden seeds, leering nightmare faces, tigers couchant or rampant, roaring at the scribbles from the margins.

Too cold to look at any more pages, Bahram stared at the sleeping old man, his father in law whose brain was so crowded. Strange the people who surround us in this life. He stumbled back to bed and the warmth of Esmerine.

The Speed of Light

The many tests of light in a prism brought back to Khalid the question of how fast it moved, and despite the frequent visits from Nadir or his minions, he could only speak of making a demonstration to determine this speed. Finally he made his arrangements for a test of the matter: they were to divide into two parties, with lanterns in hand, and Khalid's party would bring along his most accurate timing clock, which now could be stopped instantly with the push of a lever which blocked its movement. A preliminary trial had determined that during the dark of the moon, the biggest lanterns' light could be seen from the top of Afrasiab Hill to the Shamiana Ridge, across the river valley, about ten h as the crow flies. Using small bonfires blocked and unblocked by rugs would no doubt have extended the maximum distance visible, but Khalid did not think it would be necessary.

They therefore went out at midnight during the next dark of the moon, Bahram with Khalid and Paxkator and several other servants to Afrasiab Hill, Iwang and jalil and other servants to the Shamiana Ridge. Their lanterns had doors that would drop open in an oiled groove at a speed they had timed, and was as close to an instantaneous reply as they could devise. Khalid's team would reveal a light and start the clock; when Iwang's team saw the light, they would open their lantern, and when Khalid's team saw its light, they would stop the clock. A very straightforward test.

It was a long walk to Afrasiab Hill, over the old east bridge, up a track through the ruins of the ancient city of Afrasiab, dim but visible in the starlight. The dry night air was lightly scented with verbena and rosemary and mint. Khalid was in good spirits, as always before a demonstration. He saw Paxtakor and the servants taking pulls from a bag of wine and said, 'You suck harder than our void pump, be careful or you'll suck the Buddhist void into existence, and we will all pop into your bag.'

Up on the flat treeless top of the hill, they stood and waited for Iwang's crew to reach Shamiana ridge, black against the stars. The peak of Afrasiab Hill, when seen from Shamiana, had the mountains of the Dzhizak Range behind it, so that Iwang would see no stars on top of Afrasiab to confuse him, but merely the black mass of the empty Dzhizaks.

They had left marker sticks on the hill's top pointing to the opposite station, and now Khalid grunted impatiently and said, 'Let's see if they're there yet.'