Six Letters on the Wanderer

Six letters, dated across eleven years, from an unnamed star-watcher to a colleague who never replies, tracking the Wanderer's drift from a routine correction to a personal reckoning.

FIRST LETTER To my colleague, Forgive the correction — I mean it kindly. Your transit for the Wanderer last season sat eleven days early against the old imperial tables, and I believe I can show you why: you measured against the Wanderer's rising over the Rampart, and the Rampart is not fixed. Four centuries of settling have moved it more than either of us would like to admit. Measure instead against the transit over Aelvyrenn — whatever else may be said of that floating city, it does not move. I enclose my own figures for the last three transits. They agree with the old imperial tables to within half a day, which I take as some comfort: the Far House, as the creeds have it, keeping to its road as faithfully as it ever did, whatever else in the Vale has stopped keeping to anything. Forgive an old pedant his corrections. It is the only kind of usefulness left to men like us. SECOND LETTER [three years on] Colleague, Three years and no reply, which I choose to read as agreement. I write again because I have kept the transits since, and something in them wants explaining, though I cannot yet explain it. The star runs a half-day early against my OWN figures now, not the old tables — the ones I told you were reliable. I have checked the instruments twice and the arithmetic more times than that. I do not yet think this is anything but an observer's error. I am not as young as I was when I learned to hold a sighting-glass steady. But I keep the figures, and I would rather you had them than not. THIRD LETTER [two years further] Colleague, I no longer apologize for writing into silence; the writing has become useful to me on its own account, whether read or not. The half-day has become most of a full one. I have taken to checking my figures against the tide-tallies the Sunken Stair folk keep without knowing they are doing astronomy, and their count agrees with mine more closely than I would like. Their oldest tide-keeper, asked whether the water was coming in strange, looked at me the way you look at a man who has finally noticed what everyone nearby stopped mentioning years ago, and said only: fatter, and sooner, every year I've kept count. FOURTH LETTER Colleague, I have done what you would have told me to do, had you ever written back — stopped trusting one method and measured the same claim three ways. Against Aelvyrenn's transit: early. Against the imperial tables, corrected for four centuries of drift: early, by more than the correction accounts for. Against the tide-count, which knows nothing of my worries and simply counts water: early, and worsening faster than either other measure shows. Three fixed points, three independent errors, all leaning the same direction, all larger than the year before. I do not know what a star does that makes it early to its own road. I did not think a star could do such a thing. I know exactly how this letter reads. I am sending it anyway, because you are the only man I know who might read it and not conclude I have spent too many nights alone with a glass and a cold roof. FIFTH LETTER [a year on] Colleague, The dry summer everyone blames on bad luck fits the pattern too well to be luck. The ground under the old college shivered twice this spring — the kind of shiver a man convinces himself he imagined until his neighbor mentions the same thing, unprompted. I asked a Vyr passing through on college business whether the sky troubled anyone at Aelvyrenn. He said he could not speak to it. I said I only meant the weather. He said, again, that he could not speak to it, and changed the subject with the smoothness of a man trained to change subjects. I have not been able to stop noticing since: at no point in a conversation about weather and sky did he once look up. SIXTH LETTER [eleven years after the first] I am not writing about the star tonight. Eleven years, and I no longer much care whether you answer — I have made my peace with writing into a silence longer than most of what I was once certain of. What I find myself thinking, on the nights I let myself think honestly, is not the Wanderer at all. It is that I am an old man now, and whatever the star is doing will very likely finish doing it after I am gone, and someone else — you, perhaps, if this reaches you — will be the one left to finish the arithmetic. That does not frighten me the way I expected. What frightens me is smaller: that I have spent eleven years measuring something enormous and far away, and never once gone down into the town below the college to ask the people living under the same sky whether they had noticed anything — because I assumed, the way our trade always assumes, that if it mattered it would show up first in a number, and not in the quiet way a room goes when someone finally says the word aloud. I no longer think silence was the wise choice. Write back, if you are able. I would like, once, to hear that someone else kept the same watch.

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