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With Cooper gone, the general’s demeanor changed. “Well, my young friends, how have you been enjoying the city of O?”
“It’s very big,” said Rigg.
The general chuckled. “You’re from upriver, of course, and this is certainly the first real city you’ve encountered. But I can assure you that there are fourteen cities larger than O within the People’s Republic. No, big as it is, O’s real claim on the attention of the wise is its great age. The artifacts of an earlier time, whose wisdom we have not yet recovered, and may never recover.”
Rigg nodded. “You mean the globe of the world inside the tower?”
The general walked in silence for a few moments, and it occurred to Umbo that perhaps the general had never realized that the thing was a map of the world both outside and inside the Wall. “The whole tower is a miracle,” said the general, finally. “The ribs of stone up inside the tower seem to be structural, but they aren’t.”
“They aren’t holding up the walls and the dome?”
“The stone pillars are not attached to the walls in any way. They hold up the lights and the globe, but there was an earthquake once, more than three thousand years ago, and three of the pillars collapsed inside the tower. The great chronicler of that time, Alagacha—which is as close as we can come to pronouncing his name in our tongue—reported that as they restored the pillars, they discovered that there was no way to tie them to the walls. It’s as if the tower was there before anyone thought to add the stone ramps and pillars, the lights and the globe.”
Rigg did not seem impressed. “What does that have to do with the great age of the city?”
“Nothing at all. Except that legend has it that the tower was here before the city of O, and nothing else.”
“Then the tower is very old,” said Rigg.
And Umbo thought: How can you arrest us and then talk to us as if we were children at school?
But Rigg had said his life with his father was like this—walking along, discussing things. So maybe Rigg found this natural. Maybe the general was already some kind of father to him.
Well, he’s a father to me, too, thought Umbo. The difference is that to me a father is a punisher, unreasoning and unstoppable, not someone to chat with about history.
“In every other city, wherever someone digs to lay the foundation of a new construction, the workmen turn up stones and bones—old walls, old floors, old burial grounds. Everything is built on the foundation of something else. No matter where we go in the floodplain of the Stashik, and all around the coast of the sea, someone has been there before, layer on layer of ancient building. But that doesn’t happen in O.”
“You can’t tell me that those buildings in the port are thousands of years old!” scoffed Rigg. “The timbers would be ten thousand years of rotten by now, so close to the river.”
“Oh, I’m not talking about the wooden structures, yes, those are built and replaced. But the stone buildings and the great wall—they’re the original. Every thousand years or so the great buildings fall into such decay that they have to be rebuilt. And when they do it, they find there’s nothing under the foundations. When the city walls and the great white buildings were originally built, they were on virgin ground. It’s here in O that we feel all the eleven thousand years of history.”
Then, suddenly, the general’s grip on Umbo’s hand tightened a little and Umbo looked up to find the general gazing at him—but with a slight smile. Of mockery? Or sympathy? “Your young friend, Master Rigg, seems uninterested in history.”
“He’s a year older than I am.”
Umbo waited for the general to make some comment about his height. Instead, the man said, “Eleven thousand years of history, that’s what we have. To be precise, 11,191 years plus eleven. They say there’s a stone at the base of the Tower of O which, when you pull it out of place during repairs, bears an inscription: ‘This stone laid in the year 10999.’ Of course it’s in a language that only scholars can read, but that’s what they say.”
“So the world was only 192 years old when the stones of the tower were laid?” asked Rigg.
The general was silent again for a few moments. “So it seems. The oldest building in the world.”
“The tour guides are missing a bet not to tell folks that,” muttered Umbo.
“They’d say it, I’m sure, if they knew. But only a few people care enough about the deep past to root through the old records and learn the ancient languages and then write new books about old things, and only a few of us bother to read them. No, the only history that matters these days is the story of how wonderful our lives are since the People’s Revolution deposed the royal family, and how rapacious and cruel the royal family were when they ruled the World Within the Walls.”
“And how happy we all are that they were deposed,” said Rigg.
The general stopped walking. “I’m trying to decide if your tone was sarcastic.”
To which Rigg’s only answer was to make the identical statement with the identical intonation—which is to say, no discernible intonation at all. “And how happy we all are that they were deposed.”
The general chuckled. “Now I see what that asinine banker meant about you. By the Fixed Star, my boy, it’s as if you were a bird singing the same song, over and over, never varying.”
“I know nothing about the royal family, sir,” said Rigg, “or perhaps I would have known that there was something wrong with the name my father said was mine in his will.”
“There we are,” said the general.
Umbo looked around—they didn’t seem to be anywhere in particular.
