The suns of Scorpio Read Online Free PDF Page A

suns-shine.
    “And of Vallia?”
    He nodded quickly. “Of Vallia we know well, for their world-encompassing ships bring us strange and wonderful things from far lands.”
    I was as good as back with my Delia of the Blue Mountains. For a moment I felt faint. What of the Star Lords’ intentions now — if in truth it had been the Star Lords, the Everoinye?
    Akhram was talking on and out of politeness, that which had been so earnestly drummed into my head by my parents, I forced myself to listen. He was talking about the tide they expected that afternoon. As he spoke, I understood what went on here and what was the service in which these Todalpheme were engaged. The Todalpheme, in brief, calculated the tides of Kregen, kept accounts, and reckoned up with all the old familiar sailor lore I had learned back on Earth. I felt a wonder at the kind of calculations they must do. For Kregen has, besides the twin suns, the red and the green, her seven moons, the largest almost twice the size of Earth’s moon. I knew that with so many heavenly bodies circling the tidal motions would to a very large extent be canceled out, the very multiplicity of forces creating not more and higher tides but fewer and less. Except when bodies were in line, when they spread evenly; then the spring or neap tides would be marvelous in their extent. Back in Zenicce I had seen the tidal defenses, and the way in which the houses along the canals had been built well above the mean water level. When tides ravaged through Zenicce tragedy could result, so the barrages, defenses, and gates were kept always in good repair, a charge on the Assembly.
    Akhram told me that a great dam stood at the seaward end of the Grand Canal that connected this inner sea with the outer ocean. There were closable channels through the dam. The dam faced both ways. It had been constructed, so Akhram said, by those men of the sunrise — he said sunrise, not suns-rise —
    in the distant past as they had faced and leveled the canal itself, so as to control the tidal influx and efflux from the inner sea.
    “We are an inward-facing people, here on the inner sea,” he said. “We know that outside, in the stormy outer ocean, there are other continents and islands. Sometimes ships sail through the regulated openings in the Dam of Days. Vallia, Wloclef from whence come thick fleeces of the curly ponsho, Loh from whence come fabulous, superbly cut gems and glassware of incredible fineness: these places we know as they trade with us. Donengil, also, in South Turismond. There are a few others; otherwise, we remain willingly confined to our inner sea.”
    Later I was allowed to visit the observatories and watch the Todalpheme at work. Much of what they did with ephemeris and celestial observation was familiar to me; but much was strange, beyond my comprehension, for they used what seemed almost a different kind of logic. They were as devoted to their work as monks to theirs. But they laughed and were free and easy. They showed a certain respect for my own understanding of the movements of heavenly bodies and the predictable movements of bodies of water, with tides and currents and winds and all the hazards thereto attached.
    This inner sea was practically tideless. There was little wonder in this, of course (the Mediterranean tides never exceed two feet), and these dedicated men spent their lives calculating tide tables so that they might warn the custodians at the gates of the dam to be ready when the outer ocean boiled and seethed and roared in with all its power. I gathered there was no other navigable exit from the inner sea.
    “Why do you live here, on the inward end of the Grand Canal?” I asked. Akhram smiled in a vague way and swung his arm in a gesture that encompassed the fertile soil, the orchards, the smooth sea. “We are an inward-facing people. We love the Eye of the World.”
    When Akhram referred to the dam he called it the “Dam of Days.” I realized how much it meant.