Page 9 of Middlegame

All he has to do is wait, and his cuckoos will spread their wings, and the universe will be his.

THE ASTROLABE

Timeline: 10:22 CST, July 3, 1986.

Alone, Asphodel’s astrolabe turns. The planets spin through their fixed and finite orbits; the jeweled stars move, charting a course as precise as the heavens themselves. Forward and back they go, revolving, twirling, avoiding collision by millimeters, so that it seems impossible that anything so intricate could possibly exist in physical space, unbound from the actuality of the cosmos. By looking into the mechanism, it is almost possible to see time itself modeled inch by inch and day by day, transcribed according to a human being’s limited perceptions.

When it stops, even for a moment, creation trembles. When it spins, time resumes.

There are too many days between germination and growth to chart them all, and so the astrolabe spins on and on, faster and faster, until seven years have passed and the Doctrine—split between six bodies, six potential hosts, two by two and separated as far from one another as geography allows—is mature enough to make its presence known.

The Impossible City is at hand.

The girl was very pale, with waterweeds in her hair and tangled around her toes. Her feet were bare, and all of her glistened with a silvery sheen, like she had been dusted in glitter and set out into the world to see what could be seen.

“What are you?” asked Zib, forgetting her manners in the face of her awe. Avery stuck an elbow in her side, but it was too late: the question had been asked.

“My name is Niamh,” said the girl. “I come from a city deep beneath the surface of a lake, in a place so cold that the ice only thaws once every hundred years.”

“People don’t live under lakes,” said Avery. “There’s no air. Only water. People don’t breathe water.”

“Oh, but you see, the people where I’m from don’t breathe at all.” Niamh smiled, showing teeth like pearls. “And only when the ice melts do we come up to the surface to see how other people live. But while I was on the shore gathering stones, a storm came, and the Page of Frozen Waters appeared, and snatched me up, and carried me to the King of Cups. He’s a very cruel king, and he kept me so long that the ice froze solid again, and now I’m just a drowned girl with no city at all, until the next time the thaw comes.”

“A hundred years is a very long while,” said Avery. He couldn’t let himself think too hard about the way her skin glistened, or her claims to come from a place where people didn’t breathe. Surely she was kidding. “Won’t you be too old then to swim?”

“Not at all. When I’m home, I don’t breathe, and when I’m here, I don’t age. That way, I can always make it back to the ice, if I’m clever.”

Zib, though, had what felt like a more important question. “Who is the Page of Frozen Waters?”

Niamh sobered. “She is the worst of all the King’s subjects, because she loves him and hates him at the same time, and she would do anything to please him. She commands the crows, and they do her bidding. For him, she gathers every strange thing that comes into the Up-and-Under. She’ll gather you, if you’re not careful.”

Avery and Zib exchanged a glance and stepped closer together, suddenly afraid of this glittering girl, and of everything her presence might entail.

—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

Book II

The Doctrine Matures

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos.

—Mary Shelley

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

—Edward Sapir

INTRODUCTION

Timeline: 16:22 EST, April 9, 1993 (seven years post-embodiment).

“Have you finished your homework?”

“No,” says Roger, hiding his book under his desk before his mother sees. She likes the way he reads. She likes that he’s smart. He’s heard her bragging to her friends about her “little professor,” and how he’s going to change the world someday, just you wait. But she doesn’t like the way he reads when he’s supposed to be doing homework, and lately—after a few dismaying conversations with his teacher—she’s started confiscating his books when she thinks he’s using reading to get out of doing something else.

Which, technically, he is. This worksheet should have been done an hour ago. But he was at a good place in his book (they’re all good places), and reading a little further seemed more important than multiplying a few stupid numbers. The numbers don’t need him to give them meaning the way the words do. Words don’t mean anything without someone to understand them. Numbers just are. He’s extraneous to the process. “Extraneous” is one of his new words.

Roger Middleton is seven years old and so in love with language that there’s no room in his world for anything else. He doesn’t play sports or go on adventures in the nearby woods; he doesn’t want a dog or to spend the weekend at a friend’s house. He just wants to read, to listen, to expand his understanding of the syllables making up the universe around him.