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“And we can’t be the first to figure it out if it is,” said Rigg. “Why haven’t we heard about this?”
“Well, we have,” said Loaf. “I have, I mean. Why do you think the pilgrims say, ‘The Tower of O lets you see the whole world’?”
“I thought they meant you could see really far from the top of it,” said Umbo.
“But they also say, ‘All of the world is inside the tower,’” said Loaf.
“I thought that was mystical booshwa,” said Rigg. “Or maybe just talking about how many pilgrims come here.”
“It’s weird to think of the world that way. Very disturbing. I mean, the world is the land inside the Wall—that’s what the word means. How can there be more of the world than the whole world itself? How could anybody know what’s outside the world?”
Rigg had been counting. “There are nineteen of them—nineteen lands surrounded by yellow lines. And quite a bit of land that isn’t inside any of the yellow lines.”
“So there are nineteen worlds on this same globe?” asked Loaf. “Is that what the Tower of O is saying?”
“No wonder people don’t talk about it after coming here,” said Umbo. “It’s just too crazy. Even if they think of it this way—and Rigg’s father was no fool and no liar, either, so if he says that we live on the surface of a ball, it’s probably true. Somehow. Even if they think of this as a map of nineteen worlds on the face of a globe, who’s going to believe them? People would think they were crazy.”
“I think you’re crazy,” said Loaf. “Except the map of the world—of our world—is accurate enough. The military keeps maps like that—all the world inside the walls, all the roads and towns. It’s illegal for anyone else to make them, though. So I wonder how you knew it was a map, Umbo.”
“Our schoolteacher showed us a map. Smaller than this, but it had the river on it, and Aressa Sessamo at the mouth of it, and the big bay. And the line of the Wall.”
“It was against the law for the schoolteacher to have a map like that,” said Loaf.
“Oh, he drew it himself, I think. On a slab of wood. With chalk. And . . . then he went away.”
“How long after he showed you that map?” asked Loaf.
“I don’t know. After. He only showed it to us the once.”
Rigg had been scanning the walls while he listened. “There a
re nineteen pillars of stone holding up the walls. Nineteen ribs to the tower. A map with nineteen lands surrounded by walls. Nineteen isn’t a convenient number to work with mathematically. To divide the circle of the tower by nineteen—that’s just crazy, unless they were doing it to have the same number as the number of lands.”
“Do you think if these really are other wallfolds,” said Umbo, “there might be people in them?”
“There are red dots and white dots and blue dots in all of them,” said Rigg.
“Boys,” said Loaf, “you have no idea how illegal this conversation is.”
“You’ve been to the Wall,” said Rigg. “Were there people on the other side?”
“Nobody goes right up to the Wall,” said Loaf. “The closer you get, the more fearful and sad and desperate you get. You have to get away. You’d go crazy if you didn’t. Nobody gets close. Even animals stay away—on both sides.”
“So you only saw it from a distance?” asked Rigg.
“We patrol the edge, because that’s where a lot of criminals and traitors and rebels like to go—close enough to the Wall that other people stay away, but not so close they actually go crazy. In a way, it’s a fitting punishment for them, living with the dread and grief and despair. But it was our job to go into the zone of pain and force them out. So they wouldn’t keep coming out and foraging or raiding or recruiting.”
“If it’s the same way on the other side,” said Rigg, “then even if there are people there, they won’t come any nearer the Wall than you did. So they wouldn’t see anybody on our side and we wouldn’t see anybody on theirs.”
Loaf drew them closer, his hands tight on their shoulders. “You’ve been talking way too loud. Now I think I know why your future self came back to warn us.”
“No,” said Umbo. “If we got arrested for talking, I would have told myself and Rigg to just shut up.”
“Well, I’m telling you to do that,” said Loaf. “Your teacher probably came here and thought about what he saw and memorized the map as best he could. I’m betting that’s what happened. Because any soldier—well, any sergeant or higher officer—might recognize this map for what it is, if he happened to come to this side of the sphere. And then he might memorize it. But soldiers would know to keep their mouths shut. And never, ever to draw an unauthorized copy.”
“Why not?” asked Umbo.
“Because,” said Rigg, putting things together the way Father had taught him, “the army doesn’t want any of its enemies to have an accurate map of the world.”
