The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy) (3 page)

No man is an island, entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

“I need not persuade you of his words. We have learned them to be true. We have seen, after the Great Disruption, the great impoverishment of our world as pieces fell away, washed into the seas of time—the Spanish Empire fragmented, the Northern Territories lost to prehistory, the whole of Europe plunged into a remote century, and many more pieces of our world lost to unknown Ages. It was not so long ago—fewer than one hundred years; we remember that loss still.

“My father’s mother Elizabeth Elli—Lizzie, to those who knew her well—lived through the Great Disruption, and she saw that loss firsthand. Yet it was she who inspired me to become a cartologer by telling me the story of that fateful day and reminding me, every time, to think not of what we had lost but what we might gain. It took us years—decades—to realize that this broken world could be mended. That we could reach remote Ages, and overcome the tremendous barriers of time, and be the richer for it. We have perfected our technologies by borrowing from the learning of other Ages. We have discovered new ways of understanding time. We have profited—profited greatly—by our trade and communication with nearby Ages. And we have given.

“My good friend Arthur Whims at the Atlas Press,” he said, holding up a slim leather-bound volume, “has reprinted the writings of John Donne, so that his words can be known to others beyond our Age. And this learning across the Ages is not at an end—much of the New World is still unknown to us. Imagine what treasure, be it financial”—he looked keenly at the members of parliament—“scientific, or literary, lies beyond the borders of our Age. Do you truly wish to wash that treasure away into the sea? Would you wish our own wisdom to fall out of this world, imprisoned within our borders? This cannot be, my friends—my fellow Bostonians. We are indeed tolerant, and we are industrious, as Mr. Middles claims, and we are a part of the main. We are not an island. We must not behave like one.”

The clock ran out of time just as Shadrack stepped away from the dais, and the timekeeper, caught up by the stirring words, somewhat belatedly rang his bell into the still silence of the State House. Sophia jumped to her feet, clapping loudly. The sound seemed to rouse the audience around her, which broke into applause as Shadrack returned to his seat. Miles pounded him heartily on the back. The other speakers sat stone-faced, but the cheers from the balcony made it clear that Shadrack had been heard.

“That was a good speech, wasn’t it?” Sophia asked.

“Marvelous,” the woman replied, clapping. “And by so handsome a speaker, my dear,” she added somewhat immaterially. “Simply stupendous. I only hope it’s enough. Four minutes isn’t very much time, and time weighs more than gold.”

“I know,” Sophia said, looking down at Shadrack, entirely unaware of the heat as the members of parliament withdrew to their chamber to make a decision. She checked her watch, tucked it back into her pocket, and prepared herself to wait.

—9-Hour 27: Parliament in Chambers—

T
HE HALL WAS
stuffy with the smell of damp wool and peanuts, which the audience members bought from the vendors outside. Some people went out to get fresh air but quickly returned. No one wanted to be away when the members of parliament returned and rendered their decision. There were three options: they could take no action at all, or recommend one of the plans for review, or adopt one of them for implementation.

Sophia looked at the clock over the dais and realized that it was ten-hour—midday. As she checked to see if Shadrack had returned, she saw the members of parliament filing into the hall. “They’re coming back,” she said to her benchmate. Several minutes of rushed scurrying ensued as people tried to find their seats, and then a hush descended over the audience.

The head of parliament walked to the dais, carrying a single sheet of paper. Sophia’s stomach seemed to knot of its own accord. If they had voted for no action—as Shadrack recommended—they would not need a sheet of paper to say so.

The man cleared his throat. “The members of parliament,” he began slowly, emphasizing that he, for one, did not pay for his time, “have voted on the proposed measures. By a vote of fifty-one to thirty-nine we have approved for immediate implementation”—he coughed—“the Patriot Plan proposed by Mr. Rupert Middles—”

The rest of his words were lost in an uproar. Sophia sat, dazed, trying to comprehend what had happened. She pulled her satchel strap over her shoulder, then stood and peered over the balcony railing, anxious to find Shadrack, but he had been swallowed by the crowd. The audience behind her was expressing its collective disappointment by means of missiles—a crust of bread, a worn shoe, a half-eaten apple, and a rainstorm of peanut shells—hurled down at the members of parliament. Sophia felt herself being pressed up against the lip of the balcony as the enraged crowd pushed forward, and for a terrible moment she clung to the wooden ledge to avoid being pushed over it.

“Down to chambers, down to chambers!” a timekeeper cried in a piercing tone. Sophia caught a glimpse of the members of parliament hurrying past him.

“You’ll not get away so easily, cowards!” a man behind her shouted. “Follow them!” To her relief, the crowd suddenly pulled back and began clambering over the benches for the exits. Sophia looked around for the woman who had sat beside her, but she was gone.

She stood for a moment in the thinning crowd, her heart still pounding, wondering what to do. Shadrack had said he would meet her in the balcony, but now he would surely find it impossible.
I promised to wait
, Sophia said to herself firmly. She tried to steady her hands and ignore the shouts from below, which seemed to grow more violent by the second. A minute passed, and then another; Sophia kept her eye on her watch so that she would not lose track of time. Suddenly she heard a distant murmur that became clearer as more people chanted in unison: “Smoke them out, smoke them out,
smoke them out!
” Sophia ran to the stairs.

On the ground floor, a group of men was battering the doors of the parliament chambers with the overturned dais. “Smoke them out!” a woman shrieked, feverishly piling chairs as if preparing for a bonfire. Sophia ran to the front doors, where seemingly the entire audience had congregated, choking off the entrance. “Smoke them out, smoke them out, smoke them
out!
” She hugged the satchel tightly against her chest and elbowed her way through.

“You bigot!” a woman in front of her suddenly shouted, flailing her fists wildly at an older man in a gray suit. Sophia realized with shock that it was Augustus Wharton. As he swung out with his silver-tipped cane, two men with the unmistakable tattoos of the Indies threw themselves against him, one of them wrenching the cane from his hand and the other pulling his arms back behind him. The woman, her blue eyes fierce, her blonde hair clinging to her face, spat at Wharton. Suddenly she crumpled into a pile of her own skirts, revealing a police officer behind her with his club still raised. The officer reached for Wharton protectively, and the two tattooed men melted away.

There was a shout followed by a cascade of screams. Sophia smelled it before seeing it: fire. The crowd parted, and she saw a torch being hurled toward the open doors of the State House. Screams burst out as the torch landed. She pushed her way into the crowd, trying vainly to catch a glimpse of Shadrack as she inched down the steps. The smell of smoke was sharp in her nostrils.

As she neared the bottom, she heard a shrill voice cry out, “
Filthy pirate!
” An unshaven man with more than a few missing teeth suddenly toppled against her, knocking Sophia to the ground. He rose angrily and threw himself back against his assailant. Sophia pushed herself up from hands and knees unsteadily; seeing a clear path down to the street, she hurried down the remaining steps, her knees trembling. There was a trolley stop right by the corner of the State House, and as Sophia ran toward it a car was just arriving. Without stopping to check its destination, she jumped aboard.

2

The Wharf Trolley

S
OPHIA
TOOK
A
deep breath as the trolley pulled away from the State House to circle Boston Common. She pinned her trembling hands between her knees, but her scraped palms felt hot and began to sting. She could still hear the crowd, and all around her on the trolley the agitated passengers were discussing parliament’s shocking decision.

“It won’t stand,” a portly man with a gleaming pocket watch said, shaking his head. He stamped his patent-leather boot indignantly. “So many in Boston are foreigners; it’s entirely impractical. The city will not stand for it.”

“But only some of them have papers and watches,” objected a young woman beside him. “Not every foreigner does.” Her nervous hands crumpled the lap of her flowered skirt.

“Is it true that deportations will begin on July fourth?” an older woman asked, her voice quavering.

Sophia turned away and watched the passing city streets. The great clocks of New Occident with their twenty hours stood on every street corner. They perched on the lampposts; they loomed from every building facade; they gazed over the city from countless monuments. Ponderous bell towers dominated the skyline, and at the city center the chiming could be deafening.

And every New Occident citizen carried a watch that mirrored the movement of these great monuments: a pocket watch inscribed with the moment of its wearer’s birth, bearing constant witness to a life unfolding. Sophia often held the smooth metal disc of her lifewatch, taking comfort from its dependable ticking, just as she took pleasure in the reassuring chime and ring of every public clock. Now it seemed that these clocks, which had always been her anchor, were counting down to a disastrous end: July 4, a mere three weeks away. The borders would close and then, without the papers they needed to return, the two people she most wanted to see in the world might be stranded forever.

Sophia could hardly remember her father, Bronson Tims, or her mother, Wilhelmina Elli. They had vanished on an expedition when she was barely three years old. She had one precious memory of them, which she had worn out to a thin, faded, insubstantial thing: they walked on either side of her, each holding one of her hands. Their laughing faces looked down from a distance with great tenderness. “Fly, Sophia, fly!” they called out in unison, and suddenly she was lifted from the ground. She felt her own laugh welling up, joining her mother’s trill and her father’s deep chuckle. That was all.

Wilhelmina—Minna, for short—and Bronson had been first-class explorers. Before their daughter was born, they had traveled south to the Baldlands, north to the Prehistoric Snows, and even as far east as the Closed Empires; and afterwards they planned to travel with Sophia—once she was old enough. But an urgent message from a fellow explorer, deep in the Papal States, had forced them to leave sooner than expected, and they had struggled terribly with the problem of whether to take their daughter or not.

It was Shadrack who had persuaded his sister Minna and her husband to leave Sophia with him. The message they had received suggested unpredictable dangers for which even he could not prepare them. If Shadrack Elli, Doctor of History and Master Cartologer, could not ensure that the route would be a safe one, surely it posed too many risks for a child of only three years. Who better to understand the potential of those risks? Who better to leave her with than her beloved uncle Shadrack? They had finally departed, anxious but determined, for what they hoped would be only a brief journey.

But they had not returned. As the years passed, the likelihood of their reappearing alive diminished. Shadrack knew it; Sophia sensed it. But she refused to fully believe it. And now the anxiety Sophia felt at the thought of the borders’ closing had, in fact, little to do with the grand ambitions of exploration described in Shadrack’s speech. It had everything to do with her parents. They had left Boston in a far more lenient age, when traveling without papers was commonplace, even wise, in order to avoid theft or damage on a dangerous voyage. Bronson’s and Minna’s paper were safely stowed in a little bureau in their bedroom. If New Occident closed itself off to the world, how would they get back in? Lost in somber speculation, Sophia closed her eyes, her head resting against the seat.

With a start she realized that the air around her had grown dark and oddly cold. Her eyes snapped open.
Is it night already?
she thought, panic rising in her chest. She reached for her watch, looked around quickly, and realized the trolley had stopped in a tunnel. Far behind them she could see the bright entryway. So it was still daytime. But when she squinted at the watch, she discovered that it was already fourteen-hour. Sophia gasped. “Four hours!” she exclaimed out loud. “I can’t believe it!”

She hurried to the front of the trolley and saw the conductor standing on the tracks a few meters ahead of the car. There was a sharp metallic clang, and then the man lumbered back toward her.

“Still here, are you?” the conductor asked amiably. “You must like this loop to sit through it twenty-three times. That, or you like my driving.” He was heavyset, and despite the cool air in the tunnel, sweat poured off his forehead and chin. Smiling, he wiped his face with a red handkerchief as he sat down.

“I lost track of the time,” Sophia said anxiously. “Completely.”

“Ah, no matter,” he replied with a sigh. “On such a bad day—the sooner it ends the better.” He released the brake and the trolley began to roll slowly forward.

“Are you going back into the city now?”

He shook his head. “I’m heading out to the yard. You’ll have to get off at the wharf and look for a trolley heading back through downtown.”

Sophia had not been to this part of Boston in years. “Is it the same stop?”

“I’ll point you to it,” he assured her. They picked up speed as they made a sudden sharp turn to the left. Then they emerged from the tunnel, the light dazzling Sophia’s eyes. The trolley stopped once again almost immediately, and the conductor shouted, “Wharf trolley. Final stop. No passengers.” A waiting crowd looked impatiently at the tunnel for the next trolley to emerge. “Walk about fifty paces that way,” he said to Sophia, pointing past the crowd. “There’s another stop there that says ‘inbound.’ You can’t miss it.”

— 14-Hour 03: At the Wharf—

N
EWS
OF
THE
borders’ closure had already reached Boston harbor. People rushed this way and that through a confusion of carts, improvised market stands, and piles of crates, shouting orders, hurriedly unloading cargo, and making hasty arrangements for unexpected journeys. Two men were arguing over a broken crate full of lobsters; claws reached feebly through the cracked wooden slats. Seagulls cried out from every corner, dipping lazily, snapping at the stray pieces of fish and bread. The smell of the harbor—brine, tar, and the faint, enduring scent of something spoiling—wafted by on waves of hot air.

Sophia tried to get out of the way and found herself repeatedly pushed aside. As she struggled to find the trolley stop, she gave in to that familiar sense of defeat that always came with losing track of time. Their housekeeper, Mrs. Clay, would be worried sick. And Shadrack—he might still be looking for her at the State House and fear the worst when she failed to appear. As she stumbled along, Sophia suppressed the tears of frustration that threatened to spill over.

It was a frustration she felt all too frequently. Sophia, to her infinite mortification, had no internal clock. A minute could feel as long as an hour or a day. In the space of a second she might experience a whole month, and a whole month could pass in what felt to her like a second. As a young child, she had fallen daily into difficulties as a consequence. Someone would ask her a question, and Sophia would think for a moment and suddenly find that everyone had been laughing at her for a full five minutes. Once she had waited for six hours on the steps of the Public Library for a friend who never arrived. And it seemed to her that it was always time for bed.

She had learned to compensate for her missing internal clock, and now that she was thirteen she rarely lost track of time during conversations. She observed the people around her to know when it was time to eat or finish school or go to bed. And she had become accustomed to keeping a tight hold on her watch, which she checked constantly. In the drawing notebook that was always in her satchel she kept careful records of her days: maps of past and future that helped guide her through the vast abyss of unmeasured time.

But having no sense of time still troubled her in other ways. Sophia took great pride in her competence: her ability to navigate Boston and even places farther afield, as she grew older and traveled with Shadrack; her carefully disciplined work at school, which made her popular with teachers, if not always with classmates; her capacity to order and make sense of the world, so that all of Shadrack’s friends commented that she was wise beyond her years. These mattered deeply to her, and yet they could not compensate for the flaw that made her seem, in her own eyes, as flighty and absentminded as someone who had none of these abilities.

Being from a family famous for its sense of time and direction made it all the more painful. Her parents reputedly had inner compasses and clocks worthy of great explorers. Shadrack could tell the time down to the second without looking at his watch, and no amount of encouragement on his part could persuade Sophia to forget the piece of herself she felt was missing. Their joint creation, Clockwork Cora, made light of a problem that Sophia only pretended to take lightly.

She never spoke of it to her uncle, but she had a dreadful suspicion of how she had come to lose her sense of time. She pictured herself as a very young child, waiting for her parents at a dusty window. The little Sophia’s clock had ticked on and on, patiently and then worriedly and finally desperately, counting the seconds as her mother and father failed to come back. And then, when it became clear that the waiting was futile, the little clock had simply broken, leaving her without parents and without any sense of time at all.

However much Shadrack loved his niece, he could not spend every second of every day with her, and the steady stream of graduate students whom he hired to assist with the combined tasks of cartology and child care were prone to the same distractions he was. While her uncle and his assistants pored over maps, the three-year-old Sophia had spent plenty of time alone and had, in fact, sometimes waited for her parents with hands and face pressed up against a window. In her memory—in her imagination—those moments contained long hours of endless waiting. The sun rose and set, and people passed the window in a constant stream, but still she waited expectantly. On occasion, the figure of her imagination blurred, and it seemed that not a near-infant but an older child—one who had waited for many years—stood at the window. And in fact her uncle sometimes found the grown Sophia sitting at her window, lost in thought, her pointed chin tucked into her hand and her brown eyes focused on something far out of sight.

Now she stood on the busy wharf, wiping her eyes angrily and trying hard to compose herself. Then, amidst all the shouts and the bustle, she spotted about a dozen people standing in line. With a monumental effort, she drew her thoughts away from the four hours she had lost.
That must be the line for the inbound trolley
, she thought. As she approached, she heard, over all the other noise, the sound of a man shouting through a megaphone. She tapped the shoulder of the woman ahead of her. “Excuse me, is this the line for the inbound trolley?”

The young woman shook her bonneted head excitedly. She was clutching a flyer, which she pushed into Sophia’s hand. “No such thing. They’ve brought creatures from the other Ages,” she said breathlessly. “We’re going in to see them while we still can!” Her laced glove pointed to a sign that stood only a few feet away.

Beside the sign stood the man who was shouting into the megaphone. He was small and sported a small, pointy beard and a tall hat that made his head look tiny. He flourished a silver-topped cane. “Wild men, monsters, creatures that defy your imagination!” he cried, his cheeks red with heat and exertion. He spoke with the accent of the western Baldlands; it made all his vowels sound bow-legged. “Discovered by the intrepid Simon Ehrlach and displayed here for the entertainment and instruction of visitors!” He pointed to a heavy velvet curtain that covered the entryway to the warehouse behind him. A woman even smaller than he was sat to his left, deftly counting money and dispensing and stamping tickets, her small forehead creased with concentration, before ushering each visitor into the curtained warehouse.