graduation ceremony? You know who Lily is, don’t you?”
“Yes. I know who she is,” I said shortly.
I was thinking that Victor had been to see Lily Lilac on every occasion that the Headmaster would allow. She was fair haired and fine boned, with a breezy, insincere manner I found exasperating.
Her father owned the fish cannery, and was counted as being one of the more influential people, among the working class, in town. Lily owned her own outboard motor, and she went boating on every possible occasion.
From time to time I had seen Victor watching Lily Lilac from the sea cliff. He would stand among the rocks with a telescope, and watch her fly by, her boat bouncing along the waters of the bay, her blond hair bouncing in the wind. She was always with a different boy each time. She seemed to be able to do what she liked, and go where she liked, when she liked. I do not recall hating any other living being so fiercely.
“I know her,” I said with a sniff. “So you’ve been invited to a graduation. I doubt Headmaster will allow you off the grounds.” I remember I was being fiercely loyal to Headmaster Boggin in those days, and thought he could do no wrong.
Victor favored me with another one of his withering glances.
“What?” I said. “What?”
“Logic. How young do you think a person has to be to not know her letters and numbers? And I must have been old enough to know mine. Let’s assume I was unduly precocious, and she was unduly slow.”
“Yes, let’s do,” I said, perhaps with a note of venom in my voice.
“I could have been what, three? Have you ever heard a child know his letters at two? How late could she live and not know her letters? Let’s say five. She would be nineteen when she graduated. If she skipped a grade, eighteen. That makes me how old now?”
“Fifteen.”
“But suppose the numbers were reversed. What if I had been around five when I taught a two- or three- year-old? How old does that make me?”
I said, “If you were twenty-and-one, you’d be an adult. They would have let you out of here. They’d have let you out three years ago.”
“Would they have?”
“Why would they keep you?”
“Perhaps they get money from the trust for my upkeep. Who knows?”
“But how could they tell such a lie, and not get caught?”
“Who is to catch them? The townspeople are afraid of the Headmaster.”
The idea that anyone could be “afraid” of the kindly old headmaster, with his gentle smile and mild humor, was beyond belief. Had it been anyone other than Victor, I would have laughed aloud.
But I didn’t laugh. “Someone would tell. They can’t just go on keeping us here forever.”
“Who is to tell?” he said. “Who will question their statements? Suppose they say I am fifteen. Don’t I look it? Who questions them? Who doubts them? Who is skeptical enough to go to the trouble to check?”
At that moment, a timer on the instrument bleeped.
Victor leaned in and looked at the eyepiece. He clicked the red button with his thumb. A moment later the LED readout lit up. 3.3214…
He said grimly, “The difference between the reading now and the reading at dusk is merely the angular momentum of the turning of the Earth. Light shot forward, tangentially to the turn, has the velocity of the Earth added, and travels faster. Light shot at a right angle, away from the axis, has no velocity added, and is slower. If we wait till dawn, the component of Earth’s rotation will be subtracted, and the velocity will be slower yet.”
“There must be a mistake,” I said slowly. “The instrument must be off.”
“Is that the most reasonable explanation?”
He turned and squinted. The light in the boys’ bathroom off the dormitory was flickering off and on, off and on. That was the signal that Mr. Glum had been seen leaving his little house on the back grounds, no doubt to pull a surprise inspection of the boys’ dorm.
There was no light in the girls’ bathroom. Either Mrs. Wren had not stirred and the girls’ dorm was safe, or else Vanity had fallen asleep at her post.
Victor stood. “I must run. Don’t let the equipment get damaged when you carry it back down the rocks.”
“Yes, master,” I said sarcastically. But he did not hear me, because he was already jogging down-slope.
Now I was alone, in the cold, with no one but the moon to look after me.
Well, there was no need to delay. I started doing, in my mind, that trick I had learned that made all burdens seem lighter than they were when I hoisted them, and I put my hands out toward the instrument.
I was thinking: it was impossible.
The angular momentum of the Earth’s rotation was so small a fraction of the speed of light, I know, that no possible instrument could detect a difference; and surely not a difference of nearly half a second over the (relatively) short distance between Earth and Moon. To be a valid experiment, the second reading would have to be taken half a month later, not half a day later, so that the velocity component added would have been that of the Earth’s motion around the sun.
So, instead of lifting the instrument just yet, I put my eye to the eyepiece, made sure the instrument was still centered on the same crater of the moon as it had been at dusk, reached, and hit the red switch.
The dish hummed as a radar beam was sent out, bounced off the moon, came back.
The LED readout lit up. 2.8955.
I had little trouble getting the tripod folded and the instrument case packed up, and getting the whole thing hidden under the bushes, where Victor would sneak them back into the lab in the morning, while he had cleanup duty.
But I had a great deal of trouble falling asleep that night. Surely it was just a quirky reading from a misaligned instrument, right?
Either that, or the speed of light acted differently when I was watching it than it did when Victor was watching it. Which is impossible, isn’t it? That is not what the Theory of Relativity means. Our notions of reality can change as we learn more; but reality itself, the great unknown, cannot change.
But if reality was unknown, how did I know it could not change?
I had a dream about the ship again that night. The man holding me overboard, holding a sword to my throat, was Dr. Fell.
3
1.
How did we all start debating about boundaries? When did we become convinced we were all something other than human? Every starting point has an earlier starting point before it. Some of the roots of how it came about, I remember. Others have become misty and autumn-colored with time.
If I had to choose a starting point, there were three I would select, not one. I remember when Victor made us all put our hands together and promise. I remember when Vanity found the notes, which had our lost tales in them. And then, many years later, Quentin discovered the secret.
2.
I don’t know how old I was. Vanity (or Tertia, as she was called then) only came to my shoulder, and Quentin was small enough that Victor (Primus) could carry him in his arms. When he stood up, Quentin’s head only