“Well, not actually,” said Umbo.
Rigg sighed. “What, future-you came back in time to tell you to take it and put it in your own luggage?”
“Loaf’s luggage, actually,” said Umbo.
“I was joking,” said Rigg. “Are you telling me you already knew that some future version of you was paying social calls on us?”
“He-I-woke me up this morning and told me to do it and then disappeared before I could ask any questions. I think me-in-the-future isn’t very good at it and a few seconds were all I could manage. Anyway, I didn’t tell you because why would you believe that I wasn’t just stealing it? Then you got your warning and it seemed way more important than mine. I mean, that’s a fortune in jewels, and you gave it right to Loaf.”
“And if he had told you he took your knife, would you have trusted him when he told you to give me the jewels?” asked Loaf.
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Probably.” He thought a little more. “Maybe not.”
“I think he handled it right,” said Loaf. “Unless he is stealing stuff, but then why would he have you give the jewels to me, and put the knife in my luggage? No, I think whatever happens will make it so I’m the only one who doesn’t lose all my stuff.”
“What could make us lose our stuff?” asked Rigg.
“If the boat sinks,” said Umbo, “Loaf would lose his stuff, too.”
“If the boat sinks we all drown,” said Loaf.
“I can swim,” said Umbo. “So can Rigg. Like fish. Can’t you?”
“I’m a soldier. I was always wearing armor, I would have sunk right to the bottom. And since then why would I learn to swim?”
“It’s a useful skill,” said Umbo. “Especially for people who live by the river and might get tossed in by rivermen.”
“Most rivermen can’t swim either,” said Loaf.
“You still haven’t answered,” said Rigg. “Can you swim?”
“The idea is to stay in the boat,” said Loaf.
“Try again,” said Rigg.
“If you never admit you can swim,” said Loaf, “people think they can kill you by throwing you in the water.”
“Look,” said Umbo.
They had finally climbed up just higher than the balls of light and now the glare no longer prevented them from seeing the upper half of the tower. They could see that the stone ended not far above them, with a wide porch that ran all the way around the inside of the tower. It was crowded with pilgrims.
“Keep moving,” said a gruff man behind them. They walked on.
But glances upward told Rigg that from the platform ring, more than a dozen stone pillars rose to form vertical ribs that supported the metal walls. He remembered observing outside the Tower of O that from about the middle, the metal shell tapered in. So he was not surprised that the stone pillars leaned inward, right up against the metal, until the pillars were joined together by a metal-and-stone ring high above them. Beyond that, the metal formed a simple dome with no stone supporting it at all.
It was a marvel of engineering and design, making the stone support its own weight, and then the weight of the metal. It occurred to Rigg that the metal must be very, very thin, or it would be too heavy for the stone to support.
They got to the platform and moved far from the upward ramp. The beginning of the downward ramp was on the opposite side, and between them, hanging in the air, was an enormous ball. The globes from below and fewer globes from above lighted the entire surface of it. Now, though, they could see that wires from the top ring supported the globes of light, and probably there was some wire arrangement supporting the bigger ball.
The surface was painted in a way that Rigg did not understand. It didn’t seem to be a picture of anything, and the colors were drab and ugly and didn’t go together. There were brighter yellow lines making divisions on the largest areas of green and brown, and those seemed to shine. But the pattern of them made no sense. Perhaps a honeycomb made by drunken bees? “There’s the world,” said Umbo. “It’s a picture of the world right there.”
Umbo was pointing to a particular place on the surface of the big globe. “See? That spot of red, that’s where Aressa Sessamo is. And that white spot, that’s O. The blue line is the Stashik River. So Fall Ford would be a little lower down.”
“Then the yellow lines are the Wall,” said Loaf. “I’ve patrolled the Wall, and that looks about right. But what’s the rest of it?”
“The whole world,” said Rigg, understanding it now. “It’s a globe, round in every direction, just like this.”
“Everybody knows that,” said Loaf. “Even the most ignorant privicks.”
“That’s crazy!” said Umbo, in mock dismay. “We’d all fall off!”
Rigg made a joke of explaining it to him, as if to a little boy. “No, no, little Umbo, the center of the world pulls on us, holding us to the surface. ‘Down’ is really toward the center.”
“This map of the globe is impossible,” said Loaf. “Nobody knows what’s outside the Wall. No one in the whole history of the human race has passed through it to see.”
“But you can see through it, right?” said Rigg.
“Not far enough to know things as distant as this map shows. Not just the neighboring wallfolds, but all of them. If it’s a map.”
“It’s a map,” said Umbo. “Come on, it can’t just be random chance that they show the course of the river and O is a white dot and the capital is a red dot.”
“And we can’t be the first to figure it out if it is,” said Rigg. “Why haven’t we heard about this?”
“Well, we have,” said Loaf. “I have, I mean. Why do you think the pilgrims say, ‘The Tower of O lets you see the whole world’?”
“I thought they meant you could see really far from the top of it,” said Umbo.
“But they also say, ‘All of the world is inside the tower,’” said Loaf.
“I thought that was mystical booshwa,” said Rigg. “Or maybe just talking about how many pilgrims come here.”
“It’s weird to think of the world that way. Very disturbing. I mean, the world is the land inside the Wall-that’s what the word means. How can there be more of the world than the whole world itself? How could anybody know what’s outside the world?”
Rigg had been counting. “There are nineteen of them-nineteen lands surrounded by yellow lines. And quite a bit of land that isn’t inside any of the yellow lines.”
“So there are nineteen worlds on this same globe?” asked Loaf. “Is that what the Tower of O is saying?”
“No wonder people don’t talk about it after coming here,” said Umbo. “It’s just too crazy. Even if they think of it this way-and Rigg’s father was no fool and no liar, either, so if he says that we live on the surface of a ball, it’s probably true. Somehow. Even if they think of this as a map of nineteen worlds on the face of a globe, who’s going to believe them? People would think they were crazy.”
“I think you’re crazy,” said Loaf. “Except the map of the world-of our world-is accurate enough. The military keeps maps like that-all the world inside the walls, all the roads and towns. It’s illegal for anyone else to make them, though. So I wonder how you knew it was a map, Umbo.”
“Our schoolteacher showed us a map. Smaller than this, but it had the river on it, and Aressa Sessamo at the mouth of it, and the big bay. And the line of the Wall.”
“It was against the law for the schoolteacher to have a map like that,” said Loaf.
“Oh, he drew it himself, I think. On a slab of wood. With chalk. And… then he went away.”
“How long after he showed you that map?” asked Loaf.
“I don’t know. After. He only showed it to us the once.”
Rigg had been scanning the walls while he listened. “There are nineteen pillars of stone holding up the walls. Nineteen ribs to the tower. A map with nineteen lands surrounded by walls. Nineteen isn’t a convenient number to work with mathematically. To divide the circle of the tower by nineteen-that’s just crazy, unless they were doing it to have the same number as the number of lands.”
“Do you think if these really are other wallfolds,” said Umbo, “there might be people in them?”
“There are red dots and white dots and blue dots in all of them,” said Rigg.
