The Time Surgeons

Frenislan sent his best students, along with some guards, to accompany Tamorabi to the place they were already calling Godsnest, while he sent himself deeper into the Concord carrying Tamorabi’s treasures. He could have sent couriers with a message, but thought secrecy was best at this stage; all others who knew about Godsnest were with Tamorabi and under strict instructions to tell nobody else. And there was one particular Sage he wanted to approach, and she was unlikely to answer a summons by a courier from the edge of the Concord.

A score of days after he left his home, he sat on his horse before the gates of the fabulous town of Riverbend. Along the way he had stayed in several towns, but to the polite enquiries of his host Sages he had spoken merely of confidential dealings he could not discuss. Sages were used to open sharing of knowledge, but they were also used to rivalry and secrecy; if they suspected the latter was the truth of it they remained friendly, restricting themselves to subtle probing in an attempt to discover clues to his secret. After all, they reasoned, if he was holding some great secret from them, their best route to sharing in it was to remain his friends.

Riverbend had been planted in the fertile soils deposited in a bend of the mighty Snowmelt River. Over the years it had grown in wealth from the increasing trade along the convenient thoroughfare the river provided. Its wealth had allowed the establishment of a great center of learning, and it was to its current head Sage that Frenislan had come.

Sage Cherigaline felt no need to expand her name with ‘the’ anything. Though several such epithets had been offered to her along the course of her distinguished career, none had stuck.

One that had never been offered was ‘the Patient’. Yet here she found herself, seated at her desk, eyeing a visitor from some spot she had never heard of at the edge of the Concord, patiently waiting for him to speak.

Frenislan found himself finally standing before the great Sage Cherigaline, suddenly too nervous to speak. When he had entered her august presence and been introduced as Frenislan the Wise, he had inwardly flinched.

He saw a middle-aged woman, with brown hair cascading in waves that framed her still handsome face, whose main feature was its pair of large dark eyes, alive with an arresting intelligence. He knew that what she saw was a man of similar age but undistinguished appearance, partly balding, in clothes that could not match the fineness of hers even before he had ridden a horse for weeks in them.

But though her eyes had flickered at his name, and darted over his clothes, beyond a faint gleam of amusement in her eyes and an even fainter upward curve to the corners of her mouth, she had not laughed or given any other sign of dismissal of his person. But nor had she spoken, and he knew she was testing him. Suddenly he wished he had left ‘the Wise’ at home where it belonged. But he knew his words and name would be the least important thing he was bringing her.

“Greetings, Sage Cherigaline. Thank you for seeing me so quickly.”

She smiled, just a little. “Greetings, Frenislan the Wise. It would be impolite of me not to, since you have come so far. It must be a matter of some importance to bring you all this way to me.”

“You know of my humble village?”

“I know how to find out what I need to know, if I do not,” she replied ambiguously. At that moment a servant entered carrying a tray of refreshments, and placed it on the surface between them. “Sit, Sage Frenislan. Take food and drink. And tell me your important matter.”

“Thank you, Sage Cherigaline,” he said, sitting, but too nervous to reach for the delicacies. Then instead of speaking, he took three items from his pouch, and laid them before her.

Her eyes widened, and she examined each in turn. She looked down the tube, and seemed to jerk slightly. Then she held it up to her eye, turned around, and scanned the gardens of her domain.

She put it back down, her hand shaking slightly, and stared at the objects for a while. Then she stared at him, as if he were as mysterious as them.

“Where did you find these?”

“I did not. A hunter found them and brought them to me.”

“When?”

“Two ten-days ago.”

“You either have an extremely fast horse, or you must have left that very day.”

“The next.”

“You know what these are, I presume?”

“They are artifacts of the Ancients, astoundingly well preserved.”

She regarded him speculatively. “Forgive me if I speak frankly. You are a minor Sage from nowhere. I don’t know any Sage who would not give their eye teeth for a discovery like this. It could make your name! Give you entry to the highest reaches of society! Anyone else I know would keep this to themselves, study these objects to glean as much as they could from them, and only then amaze the world with a discovery already neatly wrapped in their own erudite analyses! Yet you do none of this. You rush straight off to a more famous Sage, like a student who has found a strange new bug! Do you not believe your own name, Frenislan the Wise?”

“Perhaps I am living up to it. Or maybe proving it false instead.”

She regarded him silently with those dark eyes of hers, before replying, “What do you mean?”

He hesitated, his mouth suddenly dry. He reached over and took one of the drinks she had offered, gulping it down. Then he looked directly at her. “I do not know this for a fact, so I may be proving I am a fool. But I believe the hunter’s tale. If he speaks the truth these are just a token. He has found, not three items of astonishing value, but a whole room of such objects. And not merely a whole room, but several rooms. And not merely a treasure trove filled with random jewels, but a trove with a design: the design to teach us, long after their deaths, the secrets of the Ancients themselves!”

“Is this some joke?” she asked, barely audible. But her eyes were drawn to the objects and stayed there.

“That is why I came,” he continued. “To enlist your help. To enlist everyone’s help. If I am right, what we have here is the key to everything!”

She said nothing for long moments, and Frenislan waited silently. Finally she lifted her eyes back to his.

“Yes,” she said hoarsely, then grabbed a drink herself and tossed it down in one action. “Yes. You have done well, Frenislan the Wise. But first we must be sure it is true. Where is your hunter now?”

“I sent my best students, with guards, to return with him to the place he found. When they have seen it with their own eyes they will send their fastest courier to me here with the news. That will take some days, however.”

She nodded. “You have done well.”

Then she laughed. “If this is true, I have just uttered the greatest understatement in history.”

She picked up the globe, examining it closely. “Remarkable. Truly remarkable. No doubt you have not been idle when you stopped to rest on your long journey. What do you think this is?”

“We know the Earth is a sphere. We know little of other lands but we know the shape of most of ours. See this place here: it is a similar shape. Not the same, as if the sea has drained from the edges of the land since this globe was made. I think this is a model of the entire world.”

“How do you think these objects are so well preserved? Are the rest like this, or are these the only ones?”

“The hunter said that when he opened what he calls the egg, for inside he could see it is rounded like one, there was a great inrushing of air. Perhaps the Ancients sealed it and removed all the air, so the metals inside would not rust, and no life could feed upon its contents. It was not mere luck that these things were preserved. It was by design. The hunter is not an educated man, not by our standards, but nor is he completely ignorant. He says he could puzzle out things that show the history of the world, and other things that instruct in mathematics. He thinks the Ancients knew they were dying and built this place with the best of their arts, so that it might survive the eons until men were ready for their rebirth.”

Cherigaline held the globe a moment longer, then extended it toward him, though she seemed to have trouble letting it go. “These are rightly yours, Frenislan the Wise. We shall await news from your people. Until then my house is your house, and my School is your School. Study these things, and learn what you can from them.”

He nodded his head gravely. “Thank you, Sage Cherigaline. It is a great honor. An even greater honor would be if you would help me in this task.”

Cherigaline smiled, and reached over to clasp his forearm. “Then let it be so. I think, in this case, that the honor is all mine.”

Cherigaline and Frenislan were in conference. They had spent several days in productive labor and had had frequent meetings to discuss and argue their findings.

“Look at this,” Cherigaline said. She opened a box, and Frenislan gasped when he saw it contained the viewing tube, nestled safely in the soft velvet cloth lining the box: safely, other than the fact that it now lay in pieces.

“What happened?” he cried.

She smiled. “Don’t worry. I examined it closely and it seemed designed to be taken apart then put back together. You see these threads? The parts unscrew. It is quite an ingenious design. I admit I felt fearful about doing it, but your hunter’s theory about the Ancients wanting us to learn from these things gave me courage. Would they leave it to us just to display their own cleverness? Or in a way that lets us divine its secrets? How better to learn from a complicated device like this than to take it apart and discover how it works? And so it seems.”

“So what did you learn!?”

“Have you noticed how light shining through something clear but curved may be brighter in some places, dimmer in others? Like the shadows of light and dark you see under ripples in clean water?”

“Yes… yes, I know what you mean.”

“Well, look at this. I call this clear part a ‘lentile’, because it is shaped rather like a lentil seed, don’t you think?” She carefully picked up one of the clear end pieces by its edges, held it in the sunshine above her desk, and moved it over a piece of pale wood resting on its surface. The shadow of her fingers was normal, but that of the lentile was odd. It had a brighter area inside a darker ring, and as she moved the lentile closer to the wood the dark border became wider and darker, while the central circle became smaller and brighter: until it became a very bright, almost point of light. After a moment, smoke began to curl from where the point of light touched the wood, and she placed the lentile back in its box.

“If you look closely at the lentile, you can see it is very clear, symmetrical and finely ground. I’ve never heard anyone speak of it this way, but if we’d been paying attention to our own eyes we would have noticed: the direction of light can change when it passes through something curved. The lentiles take advantage of that to actually focus the light to a point. I haven’t really worked out how or why yet, but evidently if you put two lentiles the right distance apart, they work together to magnify a distant view.”

“Yes… remarkable. But why did the wood burn?”

“I’m not sure. But everyone knows sunlight is warm. Perhaps light is warm, or perhaps warmth and light are somehow the same thing and both are focused by the lentile. In any case, just as the point is very bright, so it is very hot. But that’s as far as I’ve got. What have you discovered?”

He grimaced. “As far as you’ve got, eh? You make me feel I should change my name to ‘Frenislan the Slow’, for I have found nothing so dramatic as the nature of light and heat, and how to see into the mountains with it.”

He softened his sigh with a smile, then steepled his fingers under his chin and began his own report. “First I decided to examine the metal sheet covered in markings. As we guessed, it is almost certainly some kind of mathematics, but I cannot understand it. I can make guesses about the meaning of several of the symbols, but not enough to work out the rest or even be certain of my guesses. So I put that aside, as from what Tamorabi said, the Egg has much more in it to guide us.

“So to the globe. Look here, at the top and bottom.”

He handed it to her, and she examined the poles closely.

“I think the top one represents the northern ice fields, and I suppose that if the north is capped with ice so is the south. But they are too far to the north. I think that means that in the time of the Ancients there was much less ice. The Earth must have been warmer, and the ice correspondingly restricted to more distant regions. That also fits the strangeness of the map. If we assume the total amount of water on Earth is fixed, then if we have more ice on the land, surely there must be less water in the oceans. So our oceans are lower and therefore the land extends further out into them. That would also explain why there are no Ancient ruins near our coastline. And another thing. There are remains of primitive people in places now under the sea. This globe gives us a simple explanation: the Earth is again warming, the ice is melting, and the seas are rising again.”

She nodded slowly, turning the globe over in her hand. “Yes. Yes, that makes sense. And we know there is land far to the south of us… that also fits this large landmass here. But there is so much land… over the ocean. A whole world…”

A chime sounded and was followed by the appearance of an assistant. “Eminences, a rider has arrived asking for Sage Frenislan. As you ordered, I have brought him straight here. He awaits just outside.”

Frenislan and Cherigaline looked at each other. “Show him in.”

A young man entered, and Frenislan recognized one of the guards, a youth from his town known for his skill at horsemanship. His eyes were wild, and he forgot the niceties of permissions and greetings, saying only, as his eyes met Frenislan’s:

“It is true! It is all true!”

And he tumbled more artifacts onto the floor.