Equilateral (13 page)

She wonders what trifle Thayer will find to purchase for Bint, out here in the Western Desert. She amuses herself with the thought before recognizing that it’s the very irrelevance of pins and hats that lies at the core of his interest in the girl. He can never know what will please this strange, silent young woman from an anonymous Egyptian village, her mind sparking with references, assumptions, and personal histories that can’t be fathomed, but he can study her and draw conclusions. This is what he likes to do. What he discovers will never be proven
wrong, yet she will take the gift and may not even understand it’s a gift.

Bint looks up and catches Miss Keaton’s eye and the older woman smiles in candid admiration at her poise and elemental beauty. Bint’s gaze in return is sharply alert; the alertness unsettles her. Miss Keaton feels something move in her face, a kind of tidal tugging. The secretary’s smile fades, or becomes more complicated: part grimace, part frown, part grin. The new gesture is richer than she intends. It betrays her with a meaning, or a series of meanings, beyond admiration. They extend toward grief. She can’t stifle it. The wounded smile expresses what she can’t articulate to herself, yet in the girl’s profound dark eyes Miss Keaton recognizes the warming glimmers of compassion. Perhaps even pity.

Δ

That evening, alone in his tent, Thayer reads the article more than once, and again he studies the small rendering of Miss Keaton, admiring the anonymous artist’s talent. His touch is light but expressive, a rare balance of qualities for a newspaper illustrator. Thayer knows, as a principle of planetary astronomy, that the skilled hand may capture what lies beyond the eye’s perceptive capacity: minute differences in shading, patterns and then meaning in apparently unrelated features, developments in progress, the past hidden beneath the static visage of the present, sometimes even the future. The artist may excavate from the observation of shifting, disparate, hardly glimpsable lineaments the most profound elements of beauty.

Dee had first come to his observatory in Kent in a hired trap,
her expression direct, her eyes clear, with references that attested to her computational prowess. He had known her brother at Cambridge, a big-lunged sculler now a broker or lawyer in the City. When he met the young woman they did not speak of the brother, but only of objects millions of miles away, planets, stars, and nebulae. These were things they could know but never touch. She was prodigiously informed.

He puts down the
Times
. Under the lamp he observes that in the desert atmosphere the paper has already started to decay and its ink has begun to sublimate off the page, blurring the article’s illustrations as well as the type. By morning the image will be gone completely.

Twenty-Two

The excavations’ years of strife and disappointment are suddenly punctuated on May the sixteenth with news that Side AC has been completed, the pitch laid, and that the men, after receiving chits for their extra wages, will be dispatched to aid the crews on Sides AB and BC. Thayer knew that progress was being made, he saw the map being filled in every day, but the side’s completion startles and delights him. The surprise derives not from lack of confidence in the Equilateral, for which he has had ample cause, than from doubt in the progress of time, so mired has he been in these unyielding sands. Just as he struggled in opposition to the fellahin’s prejudices and the desert’s austerities, so did he begin to imagine that time strains against the bulwarks of a static existence. But the final closing of the gaps in the side proves that time flows forward, inundating everything in its path. After the boy who brought the report departs, Thayer drums at his desk in satisfaction. He feels the need to embrace someone; the absence of someone to embrace produces a sudden ache in counterpoint to the joy that has flooded his being.

When Ballard comes by the next morning, the astronomer
insists they ride out along the side. Flanked by a Nubian detachment, they set off in a caravan of camels and
arabas
on the packed dirt track. The track runs parallel to the excavated side, the level ridge where the removed sand has been banked, and the main petroleum line, stretching from the southern horizon to an unseen place precisely thirty degrees east of due north. Thayer is gratified by the care taken by the men in removing and packing the debris, which rises forty feet above the track. About fifteen miles out, the caravan stops at a place where their advance party has established a shaded observation pavilion on the top of the ridge. The men have carved steps up the steep slope and laid them with planks. In his excitement Thayer bounds the first several steps two at a time, before realizing that he barely has the strength. One of the porters has to take him by the arm, in a moment that Thayer will not recall.

There it is, the paved line beneath them, a great black oily river. Between the two ridges of debris across the five miles’ width of the side, the line extends left and right. A string is plucked in his heart. The Equilateral is real. It will be completed. All Europe is watching—if not literally, then at least through the dispatches of its correspondents, which even when they confuse the astronomical and engineering details never slight the grandeur and nobility of the enterprise. Photographs have been widely circulated. The consuls have cabled the reality of the undertaking to their governments.

The neatly paved ditch reradiates the heat of the sun. Djinnis and houris dance in the troubled air above it.

“The equilateral is the most visually satisfying, most inspiring
geometric figure of them all,” Thayer says. “Did you know, Ballard, that the equilateral was the Hittite symbol of life? Pythagoras connected it to the Goddess of Wisdom. The Christians discovered the Trinity in it. You may see equilateral forms within the Doric portico and in the greatest edifices of the Church. The equal-sided triangle combines the virtues of uniformity with those of variety; it can be rotated three ways and look the same, and turned another three ways and still look the same; it’s the component of all regular pyramidal solids, including of course the pyramids of antiquity; it demonstrates a completeness and harmony in itself. The equilateral is the basis for all human art and construction.”

“Bloody difficult to dig, though.”

Ballard draws on his cigar while Thayer looks into the trench, his eyes jolted by the contrast between the pitch and the embankment. A petroleum tap, connected to the main line by a spur buried under the ridge, gleams above the side’s surface.

The chief engineer adds in a murmur, “And I don’t know if it’s the truly fundamental figure.”

The climb has wearied Ballard perhaps more than it did Thayer. He smokes without pleasure, haggard.

“A case may be made for the primacy of the circle,” the astronomer agrees. “While the equilateral is the basis for man’s science and man’s works, the circle is the only geometric shape that occurs in nature. Drop a pebble in a puddle and it radiates perfectly circular waves; certain microscopic cells are impeccably round; at the other end of the scale, so are stellar clusters like Omega Centauri.”

For several minutes Ballard considers the paved side.

At last he says, “I wonder, Sanford. I wonder if we’ve excavated the wrong figure. The circle wouldn’t do either.”

“Pardon?”

“The equilateral triangle is an excellent thing, but I can think of an entirely different figure that is much more significant to most men. I speak of the cross. I appreciate that you favor basic geometric figures. I’m an engineer and I depend on them. But it’s the cross that unites the world’s civilizations. This is the symbol of our Savior’s sacrifice, our God’s love, the emblem of our faith. It’s the cross, not the equilateral, that would have been the clearest expression of man’s best nature to have been transmitted to Mars.”

Although he’s beginning to feel the effects of the day’s heat, Thayer smiles benevolently.

“The cross may not mean to them what it does to us. They may not be aware of the Crucifixion. Did Christ die for their sins, or did the inhabitants of Mars extirpate sin from their racial character eons ago? I don’t know. But I suspect that when a good Christian sits down with a Martian emissary, they will find they share the sentiments that we characterize as Christian: generosity, humility, and piety before the transcendent mysteries of the universe.” Thayer adds modestly, “We can’t rule out the notion that the traits we consider Christian today may be called Martian in the language of the twentieth century. Referring to your neighbor as a good Martian gentleman may prove the highest compliment.”

“And what of this lot?”

Frowning, Ballard tips his head at the men who accompanied
them to the site: porters, soldiers, drivers, diggers. They mill around the rampart, impatient to return to Point A. Some observe the paved side for the first time. Their hostility to it is barely disguised.

Ballard’s anger overflows. “They need the cross! The cross! I want to excavate
a cross
in the desert—let it extend from Mecca to Medina! That would show the blackguards. Ignite the petroleum an hour before dawn on Easter Sunday. Bask in the glory of the Resurrection!”

Thayer observes Ballard’s agitation. The engineer’s eyes water and his face is flushed.

“I’m pleased you haven’t lost your appetite for the excavations. AB and BC still need to be completed. But first let’s go down to the pitch. I want to stand on the surface of the side.”

Δ

Their dragoman objects: “Effendi, the temperature is more than a hundred degrees. The men are hungry and tired. If I may be permitted to make an observation, Professor, you appear fatigued as well.”

But a stairway is cut into the ridge’s other slope. As Thayer descends, the rising heat beckons to him like a newly discovered, life-giving star. When he reaches the pitch, just ahead of Ballard, he finds that the surface has baked hard and takes his weight without leaving a mark. The radiation burns through the soles of his boots. Acrid, tarry fumes swirl around him. Thayer stares at the sky, which is as solid as a piece of glass.

Even now Earth is emerging from the solar glare and Egypt’s Western Desert lies within the eyepieces of distant telescopes.
Peering through their thin, changeable atmosphere, Thayer’s colleagues on Mars wonder whether they’re truly observing artificial features on the surface of the third planet. They make sketches and compare them to drawings composed months earlier, before the pale blue-green sphere went behind the sun. As Thayer takes a few tentative steps along the side of Triangle ABC, they dispute whether the regular lines they thought they observed last terrestrial autumn have been extended to form a regular geometric shape. Theories are advanced that these are natural features and the most eminent (and pompous) Martian astronomers have come forth to prove that they’re the result of natural geologic or hydrologic processes. Other observers, with keener eyesight and more flexible intelligences, pursue their own happy hypotheses.

Δ

The dragoman’s concern for the astronomer’s durability in the heat proves justified. Ballard returns up the ridge and down to their carriage on his own steam, barely, but Thayer needs to be carried by the porters. He doesn’t recall anything of the return to Point A. His only memory is a womanly cry at the end of it, as he’s removed from the coach in blankets, shivering.

Now Bint feeds him broth. She speaks to Thayer often, in her own language, in reprimand, he thinks. He doesn’t understand what she says, but he hears reproof—also worry, also sorrow. Sometimes she expects a response, as when she asks a question, to judge from her inflection, and then she waits, her eyes wide. Miss Keaton stands by, speechless with fright and impotence.

Throughout this new illness, or relapse—the doctors’ diagnosis
is ambiguous—Thayer keeps track of the days passing. Awareness of the day’s date is the single fact he manages to keep in his head. He whispers it to himself when he sleeps and again when he wakes. If Side AC was completed on May the sixteenth, and it’s a week since he fell ill, then, as the Earth remains visible progressively later and higher in Mars’ western sky, they have hardly more than three weeks before maximum elongation.

Twenty-Three

Bint has made this journey before, slipping from Thayer’s quarters while he sleeps. She’s wrapped in a black shawl that has made her even more impervious to sight. She goes quickly from the administrative compound; taking an indirect path, since no direct path is available, she reaches one of Point A’s residential quarters, where all the men are fellahin and the Equilateral is no more than a myth or rumor. She stops at the door of a certain crooked mud-brick house, in an alleyway of similarly modest homes. The door opens. Bint knows precisely what to ask for.

She returns from an entirely new direction, never once crossing her previous path. She’s been gone for hours, but Thayer hasn’t stirred in that time, and Miss Keaton did not look in. When the girl next makes tea, she adds something to the infusion, as she’s done before, something colorless and tasteless and sustaining.

Δ

The doctors assemble. Thayer sleeps and they’re gone and then Thayer sleeps and they’ve come back. Earth approaches maximum
elongation; Thayer feels it in his blood. In one of the flickering interims of dark and light, he frames two whispered questions: “Side AB? Side BC?” The doctors don’t respond or speak among themselves or to Miss Keaton. They have each privately confirmed that Thayer’s affliction is not malaria; it is indeed Kharga Fever, which often results in loss of vision and sometimes a more complete state of blindness, namely death. Even when Thayer’s fever breaks, contrary to the illness’s usual course, they remain alarmed.

Yet Ballard arrives at the secretary’s bureau one morning in elevated spirits.

“Progress, my dear Miss Keaton, progress!”

She’s been looking at the reports. Once Side AC was completed, Ballard added teams to several segments on the rest of the triangle and has spurred the pitch factories into high production. Yet she distrusts the engineer’s show of optimism.