Equilateral: A Novel Part 2

The girl doesn't stir.

"The pencil, Bint?" Thayer says, and he recalls, as he must several times a day, that the girl speaks no English. Daoud Pasha offered to replace her with one who does, but Thayer has never accepted or rejected the proposal, not even making a gesture to indicate his indifference. Now, with his hands still on the compa.s.s, he dips his head toward the carpet and asks for the pencil again.

She doesn't follow the movement of his head. He looks into her eyes and then down at the pencil, then back at the warm deep pools of her eyes and again at the pencil. When he returns to her face, she's still looking directly into his. She offers the faintest, most respectful suggestion of amus.e.m.e.nt. Perhaps it's there, perhaps it's not.

Thayer laughs despite his frustration. He puts down the compa.s.s and goes to his knees. He'll have to redraw the diagram from scratch.

"Pencil," he says, holding it up to her face. "Pencil."

Perhaps she has now learned the word for pencil. Or perhaps she believes she's learned the word for raising an object before someone's face, or the word for the color of the pencil, which is in fact vermilion, or the word for recovering an object that has fallen, or the word for the flush that the exertion has brought to Thayer's temples, or the word for laughing in frustration. She doesn't repeat the word.

But she holds his stare. He studies her face with the idea that he will see it for the first time. He doesn't succeed. Something veils her aspect, a cloud or a shadow.

Nine.

Thayer's health continues to improve, but Miss Keaton keeps her office near his quarters. Through one of the dragomen, she instructs Bint that he must take his quinine without fail.

Having returned from Point B, Ballard sourly notes the secretary's protectiveness, which reminds him why he doesn't like having ladies involved in engineering projects. Even when they don't interfere directly in the endeavor, they project their fears and weaknesses onto their men. Thayer will benefit from an evening without Miss Keaton's company.

Ballard suggests that he join him after dinner. A severely water-rationed hammam has been established on the far side of the encampment, hard by the diggers' quarters, within a complex of mud-brick structures that tend to the laborers' necessities, including their basest. Parallel facilities for white men lie adjacent and include a tea room that serves as the Club, some of whose furnishings Ballard has seen to himself: Anatolian kilims, water pipes, and a Bedouin saddle hung on the wall alongside an antique astrolabe. The engineer knows the astronomer usually enjoys an evening among men, whether they're the world's most distinguished astronomers or, at Point A, the Equilateral's engineers and overseers, some of whom have been under Ballard for decades and took heroic part in the construction of the great new barrage-dam at Aswan.

When they arrive at the tea room, Ballard and Thayer receive respectful, if wary, acknowledgments from the men, followed by a deep bow from the proprietor, Daoud Pasha. The Turk serves the new guests himself, attentive to information or any gesture or sign that he might turn to profit. Besides tending to the hammam and the tea room, Daoud Pasha has his hand in most of the Equilateral's provisioning, under arrangements that remain obscure.

Ballard thinks the astronomer's health has been compromised by too many nights in his tent with his astronomical charts and tables. His solicitations are sincerely tendered, but he also knows that his friend's fatigue and pallor threaten the project's completion as much as the marshes on Side AC do. The lavish expenditures of capital, the stupendous tonnage of machinery hauled to this wasteland, and the exhaustive outlay of physical effort dedicated to the excavations depend on immaterial theory and desire: Thayer's. The Concession's real investment lies primarily in the flesh-and-blood astronomer. Keeping him whole is the chief engineer's responsibility, no less than it is Miss Keaton's.

Thayer in turn likes Ballard but suspects that for him the Equilateral is no more than another civil engineering project and, preoccupied with the impediments, he fails to regard its grandeur. Ballard is an unreflective man. His decades in the desert haven't left him with much of an affinity for quietude-he smokes, but not for him the contemplative drag on the hookah. Now he leans over his tumbler of gin, about to make a point. He's had too much to drink already. Thayer wonders whether, in a life under cloudless night skies, Ballard has ever thought about the stars and their secrets. As they led him across the burning sands of the Empty Quarter, did he listen to their murmurings? Did he dwell on their hidden and contradictory desires? Thayer is baffled that for modern men astronomy has lost its ancient status as the princ.i.p.al art, on which depend all other occupations, including engineering. Those who raised the pyramids knew the stars and kept in their good graces.

Yet Ballard has succeeded in driving the project forward, when the most renowned engineers of his age were intimidated by its ambitions. Sir John Hawkshaw declared that without a railroad it would be impossible to transport the necessary equipment into the Western Desert. Istvan Turr predicted that windblown sands would obscure the figure long before it was completed. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Le Grand Francais, the Builder of Suez, announced that the Equilateral could not be accomplished, neither for twice the price nor with five times the number of laborers. The single task of keeping nine hundred thousand men alive in the Western Desert, bringing them their every swallow of water and morsel of food, had daunted the greatest military men of the world's greatest powers. Ballard has shown them that it can be done. Thayer recognizes that history will regard the Equilateral as much Ballard's achievement as his own.

Now the engineer declares, "Sanford, I've heard rumors of war. It was a blunder to stop at the Atbara River, thank Whitehall, but reinforcements are on the way. Warwicks and the Cameron Highlanders. Surely this year's campaign will strike directly at Omdurman. The khalif will be ground into dust, don't you think?"

"I suppose," Thayer says vaguely. Fatigued by his illness, he's drinking only tea tonight. "I haven't seen the newspapers."

"This isn't in the newspapers," Ballard says, further deepening the creases around his sun-damaged eyes. "This is confidential information, the troops have been seen disembarking in Alexandria, and it has some bearing on our enterprise. The troops are welcome, if the reports are true, for there's not a single regiment between us and the Sudan. I don't think you'd fancy having a thousand of those dervish boys showing up in camp tomorrow."

"No, I wouldn't," Thayer concedes. "Not unless they come with spades."

Ballard's nod is grim. They had come with rifles to the Aswan Barrage-antiques, no match for the Maxims, but still, it was a nasty business, horses and men dead in the Nile, so bloated in the heat they could barely be distinguished from each other. Ballard has no Maxims here.

In the concluding decade of the nineteenth century, Egypt is a land where political power rests on semiviscous sands. The long-dying Ottoman Empire's suzerainty has given way to British occupation. While the British consul general, Lord Cromer, exercises his nation's control of Suez and the shipping lanes to India, just beyond Egypt's borders the Sudan remains unsettled, under the sway of fanatics devoted to the Messiah they call the Mahdi. For years the Mahdists have been making trouble, but now rifles have been brought into play and railroads and telegraphs have hastened the spread of religious infection. Europeans in Khartoum face brazen hara.s.sment. Raiders from the rebel capital, Omdurman, cross the Twenty-second Parallel without impediment. The savage beheading of General Charles Gordon and the destruction of his troops, sent to Khartoum to restore order, still aggrieves civilized sentiment nine years later.

In feverish, corrupt Cairo, the Khedive Abbas Hilmy II, technically an Ottoman viceroy, maintains a palace and an army under Lord Cromer's supervision. He has granted the Mars Concession in exchange for certain material considerations and in the private belief that Egypt's destiny enfolds the Equilateral. At dusk the military-trained son of Tewfik and the great-great-grandson of Mehmet Ali, the first khedive, steps from his palace chambers onto a marbled terrace and gazes upon the distant Platonic solids in Gizeh, their stones as soft as halvah in the guttering light. The strength and ambition of youth run in his blood on these melancholy evenings; he also senses, coursing through him, his people's millennia, majestic and submissive, enigmatic and frequently catastrophic.

Ten.

The brothel operates invisibly, though its presence is as palpable as the chill of the desert night. Thayer knows the brothel, the bagnio, is here, even if he's ignorant of its precise location within the encampment. The girls are never witnessed outside its doors, neither in the dining halls nor within the labyrinth of paths and alleys that emanate from Vertex BAC. Smoking with Ballard, who can't help vexing them both with talk of war and politics, Thayer believes that he hears a sigh, or a grunt, or a rustle behind the fabric of things, but these sounds can easily have been made by Daoud Pasha, who stares into s.p.a.ce while he cleans a gla.s.s or pipestem. Thayer listens deeply, trying to gain information from these whispers, yet the brothel remains no more than a speculation. In the darkness we speculate. From the darkness we draw hypotheses that conform less to observation than they do to our needs, especially our need for companionship. We presume every desire is complemented by its object, somewhere.

But eventually, as the night deepens, Thayer's observations are confirmed and the hypothesis is proven.

The engineer stands abruptly and hitches his trousers. He returns his gla.s.s to the table with force, as if unsure that it will stay there. When he winks he betrays uncharacteristic embarra.s.sment. His face colors. Without another word he strides off through a canvas flap, opposite the tea room's entrance. A few moments later Thayer hears a girl's bright, explosive laugh.

Other girls dwell in the shadows beyond, scores of them within the dormitory located a few hundred yards away, one of Point A's few buildings constructed of stone, at Miss Keaton's insistence. The Equilateral's labor force is overwhelmingly male, but women have been brought to the points to do char work and serve in the infirmaries. Bint presumably retires there when she's not caring for Thayer. The entrance to the residence hall is protected by a detachment of Nubian guards, who regularly draw on the honor they are meant to protect. In any event these unchaperoned, unmarried females will be considered no less ruined than their sisters in the bagnio once the Equilateral is completed and they are sent back to their villages.

Sipping the tea, which has gone cold, and touched by a corresponding chill in the small of his back, Thayer antic.i.p.ates the return of his fever. Ballard's departure has taken the last of his vitality with him. In return the engineer has left Thayer the dervishes. The dervishes are known to infiltrate themselves among the fellahin, watching, waiting, striking once our guard is down. The dervishes will slit our throats and then vanish into the night, leaving no tracks in the sand. Thayer has never met or spoken with a dervish, nor, for certain, seen a dervish, but their existence has been conclusively established.

He must have fallen asleep because his next moment of awareness comes abruptly, threatening stark revelation, even though the hand that touches his shoulder is a gentle one.

"Effendi."

It's Bint. Framed in a white headdress, her face is small, dark, and oval. Her eyes dart nervously like little birds.

Daoud Pasha stands behind her, showing concern, yet his lips curl. He has learned one or two things in the last few hours. "She will take you back to your apartments, sir."

Bint has been dispatched by Miss Keaton, who, as a lady, would not be welcome in the tea room. Miss Keaton will later ask herself if she has cause to regret this expedient.

Now the astronomer suspects that he's smoked hashish in the pipe with Ballard; when he tries to stand his lower body gives way. He leans against Bint. She's a slight, almost frail girl, but she takes his weight without complaint. The body beneath the folds of her gown is warm, soft, and pliant. The two stagger from the tea room, past the fellahin waiting near the entrance to the hammam. The men turn away as they leave, as if to deny seeing Thayer impaired.

Thayer and the girl move forward several hundred feet and the lights and sounds of the hammam recede. Thayer is gradually refreshed by the night air, making him even more aware of an excitement that has begun to churn through his clotted being, radiating from Bint's touch. The time in the tea room, with its talk of troops and dervishes, evaporates as quickly as a desert puddle. Although he's aware that their closeness has already come up against the borders of propriety, he doesn't pull away.

The stars are out, as they've been every night for the past two years and in the hushed ages before them, dependably in their places as the seasons rotated through the crystal empyrean. Now it's the month of April, well into the night. The Great Bear has begun to lumber beneath the horizon, making way for the Virgin and the lush lactic wash of the Milky Way. The planets tumble through their epicycles. The moon has already set. That makes it just past three. The seeing is excellent, eight or nine of ten on the Dougla.s.s Scale, marred only by some shifting currents in the upper atmosphere. Nights like these always intoxicate him with their possibility. Half the universe hangs above the desert floor, each star its own sun, each sun circled by worlds composed of the same elements that animate matter on Earth. The sky may be as alive as a deep warm pond in a sunny glade.

In the east the luminous star in Aquila draws his attention. He lifts his arm to it.

"That is Alpha Aquilae," he says. "Otherwise known as Altair."

He's surprised when this provokes an open smile, as strong an expression of Bint's sentiments as he's ever witnessed. As she puts his things in order or brings him his meals, her gestures are more likely to be demure and self-contained. She tends to hover into visibility and then, before he can establish her presence, she vanishes. Now she repeats the star's name, casting it with a foreign inflection, "Al-tair."

"That's originally Arabic," Thayer concedes. "Altair, 'the flying eagle.' Or vulture."

"Al-nasr al-tair," she declares. This is the star's full appellation, in Arabic. She raises her arm abruptly and points not far from Altair, to an even brighter star. "Wega," she says.

Bint speaks so rarely that the sound of her voice is like the disclosure of a secret. The syllables emerge softly and resonant. He gazes with her at the second star, white with a touch of sapphire, so radiant they can almost be warmed by it.

"Vega," he confirms. "So you know some of the sky."

She extends a long finger with clipped, unvarnished nails at another blue-white first-magnitude star, about twenty degrees from Vega. It's the most prominent object in Cygnus and also commands an ancient name that has survived intact its pa.s.sage through the Greek and Latin cosmologies. "Deneb," she says.

How many Arab girls in camp, or fellahin in the work crews dozing tonight alongside their excavations, can identify the vertices of the conspicuous, nearly equilateral triangle, Altair-Vega-Deneb, that dominates the Northern Hemisphere's sky on spring mornings and summer evenings? For the most part they never look upward, their attention fixed on the immediate and the mundane, the terrestrial.

"That's right, Bint. Very good."

Grinning now, he shows her the pale yellow light in the southwest, burning steadily close to Spica. This is a trick. It's not a fixed star.

Thayer says, "Saturn. The planet Saturn."

Bint repeats, "Saturn." She hesitates for several moments before she adds, "Zuhal."

He's astounded. "Zuhal?" He didn't know the Arabic name for the planet.

She smiles back, shyly. His sudden attention is intimidating. Thayer rarely has occasion to look at the girl directly. "Zuhal," she a.s.serts.

Saturn: one of the torrid giants like Jupiter, still solidifying into planetary form, a vast seething cauldron of vapors, impossibly hostile to life. But as the spheres cool over the next hundreds of thousands or millions of years, according to the principles of planetary evolution as laid out by Kant and Laplace, and then developed by Chamberlain and refined by Thayer, each sufficiently large planet will get its turn. The evolution of worlds is no less inevitable than the evolution of the species inhabited by them, followed by the evolution of those species' intelligences.

Thayer and Bint continue several yards toward his compound and then stop. He turns due east and looks across the wastes to a point just above the Egyptian horizon, past the temples at Luxor and the Mohammedan's holiest places. The night has gone cold. Some fine grains are swirling up from the Sudan. He softly touches her arm.

They both see it rising, our most beguiling planetary neighbor, red like a pomegranate seed, red like a blood spot on an egg, red like a ladybug, red like a ruby or more specifically a red beryl, red like coral, red like an unripe cherry, red like a Hindu lady's bindi, red like the eye of a nocturnal predator, red like a fire on a distant sh.o.r.e, the subject of his every dream and his every scientific pursuit.

"Mars," he says.

"Merrikh," she tells him.

He repeats after her: "Merrikh."

He admires the sound of it, biblical and arid and altogether strange. Merrikh.

She says the word again, emphasizing the final voiceless velar fricative, so favored in the East.

"Merrikh," he says, indicating the planet again, and then he points to the ground. "Earth."

She says, "Masr." Masr is the Arabic word for Egypt. She p.r.o.nounces it with a Bedouin drawl.

He corrects her gently. "Earth."

"Urrth, Masr. Masr, Urrth." She smiles again, believing that she's learned another word of English.

Perhaps if Thayer knew the Arabic name for our planet he would set her right. But he doesn't know it and the thought occurs to him that a separate word for Earth, a.n.a.logous to other planetary names, presumes an awareness that Earth, Mars, and Saturn are a.n.a.logous ent.i.ties, similar spheres similarly hurtling through the same celestial environment, an airless, matterless medium known as "s.p.a.ce." It also presumes an awareness that other political and national ent.i.ties have been established on Earth, apart from Egypt.

There's too much to presume or explain. He doesn't know what she knows, he can't. He allows her to take him to his quarters, a faint glow five hundred yards farther. They walk without speaking, several feet apart now despite the fallen temperature, keenly sensible that their footfalls in the soft sand are weightless.

The lamp is lit in his secretary's bureau. He frowns briefly before he opens the door.

"You needn't have waited up, Dee! I appear to be in good hands."

Miss Keaton is fully dressed and at her desk, schematics of the pipeline equipment laid out around her. She's been contemplating a new difficulty. In a diplomatic maneuver to share the Concession's contracts across national borders, the manufacture of the thirty-inch cylinders that will carry the petroleum to the taps along the Sides has been allocated to individual companies in Germany, Belgium, and France, while the two-ton bra.s.s taps come from Britain-and each has apparently manufactured them to slightly different specifications. A supply of Belgian pipes that arrived at Point C last week is proving to be entirely unusable. She sits back in her chair now, smiling wanly at Thayer and Bint.

"Sanford, if you fall ill again ..."

She had observed his pallor when he left with Ballard. She now distrusts the animation with which he has announced his return from the hammam.

"The girl knows the sky! It's extraordinary, I doubt she reads a word, but she can identify the stars and planets. I should test her on the constellations."

"It's late!"

"Yes, it is, past three. Mars is already over the horizon. It'll be well placed by the time we open the shed."

She calculates what has transpired. The girl's eyes l.u.s.ter against the hour and some color has been raised upon her dusky cheeks, certainly brought there by Thayer's courtly attentions. She's not even pretty, not by any familiar measure, but Miss Keaton can never guess which female from the lower cla.s.ses, which serving girl or scullery maid or artist's model, will next draw the astronomer's gaze.

Thayer says, "Think of it, she's never looked through a telescope."

It's been weeks since Thayer has. Miss Keaton understands, however, that he will allow no mention of his illness. Also, that they are not yet done with the night.

They leave the office, Bint following them several hundred yards down a smooth, swept sidewalk, one of the first fixtures of civilization introduced to Point A two years before. It leads directly into the desert, where, at the end of the path, stands a twelve-sided clapboard structure with a conical, shuttered roof. The door to the building is locked. Only Thayer and Miss Keaton have the keys. Every time they unlock the door they're relieved to discover that the nine-inch refracting telescope, built by Alvan Clark & Sons of Boston, is still there, neither blown away nor dematerialized by the khamsin, nor carried off by the dervishes.

The dervishes would have had to dismantle the ninety-six-inch light green steel tube, which stands on a cast-iron pier, and all its accessories. With the equatorial mount and clock drive that compensate for the stars' relentless whirl around the axis of the earth, the telescope weighs eleven hundred pounds. Thayer and Miss Keaton themselves have dismantled it, knowing its every mechanical intricacy, taking it apart and putting it together several times in several distant lands. With a single practiced motion, the astronomer now pulls on a lever below the rail on which the roof sits and half the shutters slide away to open the instrument to the sky.

Saturn lingers above the horizon in the west, its rings beyond the capacity to imagine for someone who hasn't already seen their pictures in a book, a fantastic confection, a miracle, but he doesn't make Bint the gift. He sweeps the telescope across the sky to the Red Planet, which is just now cresting over the shed's eastern wall. Running a closer, faster track around the sun, the Earth is gaining on Mars, so that every morning the planet rises several minutes earlier than the morning before, preceding the stars with which it sojourned the previous night.

Mars! The mythmakers have a.s.sociated it with armed conflict, poets have sung of it, and, finally, in this century, astronomers have identified the sphere as home to living organisms, the solar system's only other world known to be inhabited, a world with bodies of water and an atmosphere. Astronomers have recognized seasonal variations in its flora. They've observed the artifacts under construction by Martian intelligence. Now, as it crosses Capricornus night by night toward Aquarius, the planet fairly pulses, fairly breathes, fairly glowers with life. Yet it presents a featureless, dimensionless crimson disk when Thayer first slides it into the view of the eyepiece, which projects from the bottom of the tube. Patience is required. The eye must accustom itself. Light pools on the retina, building an image in the brain. The disk is still tiny, a single carat on a bed of velvet even when enlarged 450 times, as high a magnification as the Clark's objective lens makes practical.

And still Mars withholds its charms. The disk remains empty of meaning. At the time of the solar system's murky origins and in accordance with the unforgiving equations of celestial mechanics, the planet was inserted into an orbit just a few million miles beyond the range of man's best, most confident scrutiny. It will always beckon him, tantalize him, seduce him, and then remain chaste to his advances, before dancing out of sight into the void.

"The wind's picked up," Miss Keaton remarks.

Thayer adjusts his chair to bring it closer to the eyepiece. The seeing has been degraded. There's an extra twinkle in the stars.

Hoping to find at least one familiar Martian feature, Thayer fixes his study on the southernmost edge of the planet, at the upper part of the inverted image. It's early spring in the southern hemisphere. Very gradually over several silent, motionless minutes, the glare subsides. First the polar cap becomes visible, pale against the disk, extending to about sixty-five degrees south lat.i.tude.

Then, before he's fully conscious of it, he discerns something stirring on the surface of the planet; no, it's beneath the surface, bubbling up. Vague ripples. Shadows. Shadows of shadows. They're there and then they're gone and then they're back, more emphatically. The lines shudder before they take the positions where he knows they will be, according to the maps he has drawn himself. The ca.n.a.ls. Deeper he looks into the disk and he's rewarded, for a moment, by a glimpse of the thin gray lines horizontally traversing the circular, elevated h.e.l.las region. This is Peneus, the waterway named after the great river whose waters were employed by Hercules to flush the Augean stables. The vernal melting of the southern ice cap has likely filled the south-central ca.n.a.ls, irrigating the adjacent land. This area at the edge of Mare Australe pullulates with the spring crops, whatever strange vegetable matter they may be.

Thayer teases out the outline of Mare Australe. It's just more than a month since France-Lanord reported developments in the southern hemisphere.

"Shadowing? Possibly, I'm not sure they're new," Thayer murmurs after several minutes, his face still at the eyepiece. For years Thayer and Miss Keaton have spoken to each other in these postures, one stooped at the instrument, the other a few steps back, watching, never looking face-to-face, while they shared their most important observations. "He believes it's around Peneus."

"Yes."

"Yes," he echoes. After a long while he says, "d.a.m.n. d.a.m.n the air."