eyes she found difficult to comprehend, “no student of mine has ever had the brazen effrontery to contradict me with such abysmal insults. You, Master Heslop, may take your leave, and you needn’t bother to come to future lectures of mine.”
This was confusing. “I’d rather stay. I mean, a lot of the things you talk about are pretty obvious, but there’s also lots that I’ve never thought about before.” She felt that something more was expected of her. “It’s interesting to be here.”
Without a word, the doctor stalked down the aisle between the benches and out of the room.
Immediately, the silence in the room was broken by the rush of dozens of voices. The pressure she felt broke with it, mercifully, but people were still looking at her.
“Can you believe it?”
“What on earth was he talking about? Angles aren’t different on spheres.”
“Whether they are or no, Volney has had that coming for a long time.”
It was all too loud and she turned, mute, panicked, to Rafe.
“You,” he said, with a grin on his face as wide as the river that flowed past Uncle Amos’s farm, “are a prince among men; nay, a king, an emperor, a god. This calls for kidney pie. And a great deal of beer.”
“No,” said Micah.
“Oh?”
“Not kidney pie. Tomato.”
“As long as the beer comes with it.”
• • •
Kaab pushed open the dark, weathered tavern door. Chuleb’s office was passably clean, but when she’d gone back to Riverside in search of Tess the Hand, the sun-haired girl had still been nowhere in evidence. “She might be up at the University buying paper,” someone had said, so here Kaab was at the Ink Pot. Not unlike a Riverside tavern: the same dark, heavy beams hanging overhead, the same tables scarred from years of abuse, though what littered these was just not mugs but also tiny bowls that looked to contain spices of various kinds: cumin, aniseed, fennel. This place was much fuller—only appropriate, given the time of day—and its clientele was composed almost entirely of long-haired young men wearing black robes in varying degrees of repair talking very, very seriously. The serving girls here were also less attractive.
Tess was nowhere to be seen, but there was the amusing boy, the merchant’s son she had met on the day of her welcome banquet a week earlier, along with his friend, the short, stocky, easily flustered girl Kaab had met at the protest the same day.
“Ho, there, Kaab!” the boy called, and leapt up so enthusiastically as she walked to his table that he might have been a dancer at the Festival of the Silent Ones. “Micah has just answered the greatest conundrum of the age!”
Kaab slid onto the bench as Micah moved down to make room for her. “What’s that? Discovering why you Landers prefer your food without flavor?” She looked around her. Two boys at the next table were staring at each other, rapt, and talking softly as if every word were a treasure. One of them had hair almost as red as that of Tess the Hand.
“Funny. No. He has solved the mystery of the heavenly bodies!” It still wasn’t clear to Kaab why he might be referring to Micah as “he”—perhaps it involved some strange Xamanwiinik custom with which Kaab was unfamiliar.
“I do not understand.”
“Well.” Rafe’s brow creased. “This will be difficult to explain.”
“Try.” Without ordering me a beer, she thought.
“All right,” he said. “But you need a beer.” Kaab sighed as he waved to the barmaid. “A beer for my friend!” He turned around, spoke to the boy at the next table who did not have red hair, accepted something he offered, turned back to her, and began to speak. “It may be hard to conceptualize,” he said, holding up the orange he’d taken, “but, though we seem to be walking on flat ground, the earth itself, taken as a whole, is a three-dimensional body.” He began turning the orange this way and that. “Now, my professors at the University believe, as has been thought for three hundred years and more, that the sun is also such a body, and that it, along with the other fixed stars, orbits the earth. I have recently come to think, however, that—”
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