Toward a Vessel
_Notes to myself.
Five parts, near as I can tell. Two wait on others. Confidence noted against each, because I keep catching myself reading last week’s guesses as findings.
(exotic) = not to be had in these islands by ordinary means. I have not solved these. I have only named them.
Observations to date
Everything below rests on these. Nothing else.
- Small objects near the crystal shift a few inches without crossing the space between.
- Two marked objects have twice exchanged positions with one another.
- Measurements taken from opposite sides of the crystal disagree about the distance. Not by instrument error. I have checked.
- Reflections appear at angles where nothing reflective stands.
- A suspended pendulum completed part of its swing somewhere its path could not have carried it.
- Objects taken out of the room are sometimes found turned, displaced, or bearing frost and an air-residue that is not the estate’s.
- The effects strengthen during certain astronomical alignments, and when the crystal is ringed in particular metals and geometries.
I will not call this what the storytellers would call it. There is no such thing and there never has been. The honest term is “discontinuous positional translation”, and the honest reading of it is this:
“Separation is not a property of the universe. It is a relationship imposed between two locations and this stone can alter it.”
If the Thesis holds, every natural philosopher, dead or alive, has been wrong about the shape of everything for millennia. A ship is the smallest consequence of that. I write it here so that I stop pretending the ship is why I am doing this.
I. The Cradle
The seat of the stone, and the geometry set around it.
Confidence: good. The part I feel settled about.
Function. Observation 7 is the whole of it. The effect answers to metal and to arrangement, so the vessel does not merely carry the stone, it is built as an instrument around it. Bronze rings at measured radii, the hull’s own frames set to the same geometry, the stone suspended free at the centre of the whole. Get the geometry right and the vessel becomes one continuous apparatus, and when the separation is altered, it is altered for the whole of it at once.
The stone must go with the ship. Obviously it must. That is only a question of scale. I have watched small things translate around the stone at these feeble magnitudes, and it stands to reason that at sufficient power the stone is carried along with everything else.
How the stone was seated in the thing at the crash site would settle this in an afternoon. One sketch. One line about what held it and what stood near it. I understand the circumstances were not favourable to note-taking. I do understand that. There is no use getting angry about it, and I have got angry about it twice this week, which is twice more than is useful.
Materials.
- Bronze, drawn in rings. Foundry work, unremarkable to order.
- Sullen iron — the dull grey sort that takes no enchantment — for the frames that must not participate.
- True-grade sullen iron, poured only in Dominion foundries. A problem for another week. (exotic)
Expert hand. Yes. A seat must be cut into the stone itself and I will not be attempting that.
II. The Throne
Wait on the Cradle.
Confidence: poor. I know what it must do. I have no notion how.
Function. By the Thesis, to travel is to select a far location and reduce its separation from here to nothing. So the control is an aiming: fix the line, choose the magnitude, collapse the gap. A wheel will not answer, the stone has no parts, no surfaces, nothing to grip or lever or turn. There is nowhere to attach a mechanism. Whatever governs it cannot be mechanical, and the only ungoverned thing I can name that acts on the world without touching it is will.
_Whether the thing at the crash site had controls of any kind is, frustratingly, unknown to me. A return to the island may be necessary. The current Dominion presence complicates the matter.
Note to self: the operator must sit close in. Within the working radius, certainly. I see no way around it and it does not much trouble me — the stone has never once so much as warmed the bench.
Materials.
- Silver drawn in one unbroken thread. Any silversmith; tell them it is for a reliquary.
- Amber and loadstone, in quantity sufficient for a bench trial I have not yet built.
- A true conductor of intent — bone of a thing that flew by will rather than by wing, or silk from a spinner of thought. Both are guesses. (exotic)
Expert hand. Yes. An enchanter of rank willing to set a mind inside an apparatus.
III. The Voidsheath
Confidence: fair on the principle. None on the specification.
Function. A hull that survives arriving. Observation 6 again, is the only measurement anyone alive has ever taken of elsewhere, and it is three grains of residue in a stoppered jar on my shelf. I have kept every sample. They do not all match one another, which I have not accounted for and should.
So: build as one builds a ship, but stronger. Deep frames, doubled planking, sheathed. Where a ship needs strength against sea, this needs strength against something I cannot picture, which makes specifying it an embarrassment.
I cannot reason this out and I have stopped trying. Send something up empty first. A small hull, unmanned, out and back, and whatever returns tells us what to build. It is the only honest instrument I have.
A single sketch of a hull section would spare me a year of this. Thickness, framing, whether it was even shaped as a ship is shaped. I am told there was no time and I believe it. But I would give a great deal for the fifteen minutes nobody had.
Materials.
- Seasoned timber, pitch, copper sheathing, oakum. This is a ship. Buying ship’s timber here is the most ordinary act there is.
- Ironwood for the frames, from the fey groves. Must be given; cannot be taken. (exotic)
- One small hull, unmanned, and the nerve to lose it.
Expert hand. Yes, and harder than the shipwright, a dry dock nobody looks into.
IV. The Astrolabe
I think this one is more urgent than its place on the list suggests, and I cannot say why.
Confidence: good on what is needed. Poor on how much.
Function. Fixing position with no shore in sight. On water you steer by coast, by star, and by knowing the water; up there the first is gone and the third does not exist, which leaves the stars, and it means treating them as bodies at distance rather than lights on a dome.
Two things I have written down and cannot make follow from anything:
- Observation 7 says the alignments strengthen the effect. But my mirrors and sighting frames are in the room for measurement only, and Observation 4 says reflections come from where no mirror stands. Why should an instrument that only observes be part of what happens?
- I keep feeling the tolerances here want to be finer than any voyage would need. Get it wrong and you do not go the wrong way, you arrive inside something. I have no argument for that sentence. It has sat in my notes a fortnight and I cannot strike it out.
Materials.
- Brass instrument work, gearing, index arm. Any quay.
- Truesilver for the mirrors. Buyable, and remembered.
- A lens ground from one flawless crystal. The chart houses own the only one. (exotic)
- The star-tables themselves. (exotic)
Expert hand. Yes. A cartographer-astronomer, but the guild may be resistent.
V. The Aperture
Wait on the Astrolabe. No sense reaching for a place you cannot specify.
Confidence: none. This is not a design. It is a hole where a design should be.
Function. Every separation I have altered has been a separation beneath our own sky, one side of a room to the other. The sky is different. Whatever relation holds between here and beyond, it does not yield; I have leaned on it with everything I have and it does not so much as flex.
I do not think this is a wall. I think it is a separation of a different kind, one that resists alteration by whatever means I have, and perhaps by any means available under our sky.
And yet, the stone is not of this world. I have set it against every mineral in the catalogue and it answers to none of them; there is no bed it could have come from, no process I can name that would make it. It is here and it did not begin here. Something crossed. So it can be done, and it was done by hands that could regard our sky from the outside, which nobody under it can.
I have been picturing a gate. Something one opens and passes through. I admit this is picturing rather than reasoning. It is only the shape my mind keeps offering.
What I keep arriving at, and dislike: whatever brought the stone across came with it, and it is not on this desk. It is somewhere I have never been and am unlikely to be invited.
Could this be related to Kraw’s Guest? I set the two notebooks side by side this evening and could not make myself put either away. Two things under my roof that answer to no catalogue on earth, arrived within a year of one another, and I have been treating them as separate studies because it did not occur to me to do otherwise. That is not a reason. That is only how the pages happened to be filed.
Ask him whether it dreams of anywhere.
Materials.
- Unknown. (exotic)
Expert hand. Certainly, but one who may not exist.