The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy) Page 2

  The audience, taken aback by this direct attack, clapped somewhat reluctantly. Shadrack sat silently, his eyes furious but his face calm and grim. Sophia swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, dear,” the woman murmured. “That was very much uncalled for.”

  “In sum,” Wharton went on, “I wish to add an amendment that will put into effect a complete closure of the borders not only for foreigners but for citizens as well. Middles has the Patriot Plan, which will protect us from foreigners. I say good—but not good enough. I therefore propose here, in addition, a measure to protect us from ourselves. The Protection Amendment: Stay home, stay safe!” The cheers that met this were few but enthusiastic. “I propose that foreign relations be restricted and trade with specified Ages be facilitated, respectively, as follows.” Sophia hardly heard the remainder. She was watching Shadrack, wishing desperately that she could be sitting beside him rather than gazing down from the upper balcony, and she was thinking about what would happen if Wharton’s plan passed and the Age of Exploration came to an end.

  Shadrack had warned her already that this might happen. He had done so again the night before, as he practiced his speech for the fifteenth time, standing at the kitchen table while Sophia made sandwiches. She had found it impossible to imagine that anyone would hold such a close-minded view. And yet it seemed, from the response of the people around her, that it was all too possible.

  “Does no one want the borders to remain open?” Sophia whispered at one point.

  “Of course they do, my dear,” her benchmate said placidly. “Most of us do. But we’re not the ones with the money to talk in Parliament, are we? Don’t you notice that all the people who clap for the likes of them are on the ground floor—in the pricey seats?”

  Sophia nodded forlornly.

  Finally, the bell rang and Wharton triumphantly left the stage.

  The timekeeper called, “Mr. Shadrack Elli.” There was a smattering of polite clapping as Shadrack strode to the dais. While the clock was being set to four minutes and thirteen seconds, he glanced up at the balcony and met Sophia’s eye. He smiled, tapping the pocket of his jacket. Sophia smiled back.

  “What does that mean?” her companion asked excitedly. “A secret sign?”

  “I wrote him a note for good luck.”

  The note was really a drawing, one of the many Shadrack and Sophia left for one another in unexpected places: an ongoing correspondence in images. It showed Clockwork Cora, the heroine they had invented together, standing triumphantly before a cowed Parliament. Clockwork Cora had a clock for a torso, a head full of curls, and rather spindly arms and legs. Fortunately, Shadrack was more dignified. With his dark hair swept back and his strong chin held high, he looked self-assured and ready. “You may begin,” the timekeeper said.

  “I am here today,” Shadrack began quietly, “not as a cartologer or an explorer, but as an inhabitant of our New World.” He paused, waiting two precious seconds so that his audience would listen carefully. “There is a great poet,” he said softly, “whom we are fortunate to know through his writing. An English poet, born in the sixteenth century, before the Disruption, whose verses every schoolchild learns, whose words have illuminated thousands of minds. But because he was born in the sixteenth century, and to the best of our knowledge England now resides in the Twelfth Age, he has not yet been born. Indeed, as the Fates would have it, he may never be born at all. If he is not, then his surviving books will be all the more precious, and it will fall to us—to us—to pass on his words and make certain they do not disappear from this world.

  “This great poet,” he paused, looking out onto his audience, which had fallen silent, “wrote:

  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—

  THE 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

  1891, June 14: 10-Hour #

  To the north lay a prehistoric abyss; to the west and south lay a chaos of jumbled Ages. Most painfully, the temporal chasm between the former United States of America and Europe became undeniably clear in the first few years after the Disruption. The Papal States and the Closed Empire had descended into shadow. It thereby fell to the eastern seaboard on the western edge of the Atlantic to maintain the glorious tradition of the West. The United States became known as New Occident.

  —From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident

  SOPHIA 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.