Equilateral (6 page)

Ten

The brothel operates invisibly, though its presence is as palpable as the chill of the desert night. Thayer knows the brothel, the bagnio, is here, even if he’s ignorant of its precise location within the encampment. The girls are never witnessed outside its doors, neither in the dining halls nor within the labyrinth of paths and alleys that emanate from Vertex BAC. Smoking with Ballard, who can’t help vexing them both with talk of war and politics, Thayer believes that he hears a sigh, or a grunt, or a rustle behind the fabric of things, but these sounds can easily have been made by Daoud Pasha, who stares into space while he cleans a glass or pipestem. Thayer listens deeply, trying to gain information from these whispers, yet the brothel remains no more than a speculation. In the darkness we speculate. From the darkness we draw hypotheses that conform less to observation than they do to our needs, especially our need for companionship. We presume every desire is complemented by its object, somewhere.

But eventually, as the night deepens, Thayer’s observations are confirmed and the hypothesis is proven.

The engineer stands abruptly and hitches his trousers. He
returns his glass to the table with force, as if unsure that it will stay there. When he winks he betrays uncharacteristic embarrassment. His face colors. Without another word he strides off through a canvas flap, opposite the tea room’s entrance. A few moments later Thayer hears a girl’s bright, explosive laugh.

Other girls dwell in the shadows beyond, scores of them within the dormitory located a few hundred yards away, one of Point A’s few buildings constructed of stone, at Miss Keaton’s insistence. The Equilateral’s labor force is overwhelmingly male, but women have been brought to the points to do char work and serve in the infirmaries. Bint presumably retires there when she’s not caring for Thayer. The entrance to the residence hall is protected by a detachment of Nubian guards, who regularly draw on the honor they are meant to protect. In any event these unchaperoned, unmarried females will be considered no less ruined than their sisters in the bagnio once the Equilateral is completed and they are sent back to their villages.

Sipping the tea, which has gone cold, and touched by a corresponding chill in the small of his back, Thayer anticipates the return of his fever. Ballard’s departure has taken the last of his vitality with him. In return the engineer has left Thayer the dervishes. The dervishes are known to infiltrate themselves among the fellahin, watching, waiting, striking once our guard is down. The dervishes will slit our throats and then vanish into the night, leaving no tracks in the sand. Thayer has never met or spoken with a dervish, nor, for certain, seen a dervish, but their existence has been conclusively established.

He must have fallen asleep because his next moment of awareness
comes abruptly, threatening stark revelation, even though the hand that touches his shoulder is a gentle one.

“Effendi.”

It’s Bint. Framed in a white headdress, her face is small, dark, and oval. Her eyes dart nervously like little birds.

Daoud Pasha stands behind her, showing concern, yet his lips curl. He has learned one or two things in the last few hours. “She will take you back to your apartments, sir.”

Bint has been dispatched by Miss Keaton, who, as a lady, would not be welcome in the tea room. Miss Keaton will later ask herself if she has cause to regret this expedient.

Now the astronomer suspects that he’s smoked hashish in the pipe with Ballard; when he tries to stand his lower body gives way. He leans against Bint. She’s a slight, almost frail girl, but she takes his weight without complaint. The body beneath the folds of her gown is warm, soft, and pliant. The two stagger from the tea room, past the fellahin waiting near the entrance to the hammam. The men turn away as they leave, as if to deny seeing Thayer impaired.

Thayer and the girl move forward several hundred feet and the lights and sounds of the hammam recede. Thayer is gradually refreshed by the night air, making him even more aware of an excitement that has begun to churn through his clotted being, radiating from Bint’s touch. The time in the tea room, with its talk of troops and dervishes, evaporates as quickly as a desert puddle. Although he’s aware that their closeness has already come up against the borders of propriety, he doesn’t pull away.

The stars are out, as they’ve been every night for the past
two years and in the hushed ages before them, dependably in their places as the seasons rotated through the crystal empyrean. Now it’s the month of April, well into the night. The Great Bear has begun to lumber beneath the horizon, making way for the Virgin and the lush lactic wash of the Milky Way. The planets tumble through their epicycles. The moon has already set. That makes it just past three. The seeing is excellent, eight or nine of ten on the Douglass Scale, marred only by some shifting currents in the upper atmosphere. Nights like these always intoxicate him with their possibility. Half the universe hangs above the desert floor, each star its own sun, each sun circled by worlds composed of the same elements that animate matter on Earth. The sky may be as alive as a deep warm pond in a sunny glade.

In the east the luminous star in Aquila draws his attention. He lifts his arm to it.

“That is Alpha Aquilae,” he says. “Otherwise known as Altair.”

He’s surprised when this provokes an open smile, as strong an expression of Bint’s sentiments as he’s ever witnessed. As she puts his things in order or brings him his meals, her gestures are more likely to be demure and self-contained. She tends to hover into visibility and then, before he can establish her presence, she vanishes. Now she repeats the star’s name, casting it with a foreign inflection, “Al-
tair
.”

“That’s originally Arabic,” Thayer concedes. “Altair, ‘the flying eagle.’ Or vulture.”

“
Al-nasr al-tair
,” she declares. This is the star’s full appellation, in Arabic. She raises her arm abruptly and points not far from Altair, to an even brighter star. “Wega,” she says.

Bint speaks so rarely that the sound of her voice is like the disclosure of a secret. The syllables emerge softly and resonant. He gazes with her at the second star, white with a touch of sapphire, so radiant they can almost be warmed by it.

“Vega,” he confirms. “So you know some of the sky.”

She extends a long finger with clipped, unvarnished nails at another blue-white first-magnitude star, about twenty degrees from Vega. It’s the most prominent object in Cygnus and also commands an ancient name that has survived intact its passage through the Greek and Latin cosmologies. “Deneb,” she says.

How many Arab girls in camp, or fellahin in the work crews dozing tonight alongside their excavations, can identify the vertices of the conspicuous, nearly equilateral triangle, Altair-Vega-Deneb, that dominates the Northern Hemisphere’s sky on spring mornings and summer evenings? For the most part they never look upward, their attention fixed on the immediate and the mundane, the terrestrial.

“That’s right, Bint. Very good.”

Grinning now, he shows her the pale yellow light in the southwest, burning steadily close to Spica. This is a trick. It’s not a fixed star.

Thayer says, “Saturn. The planet Saturn.”

Bint repeats, “Saturn.” She hesitates for several moments before she adds, “Zuhal.”

He’s astounded. “Zuhal?” He didn’t know the Arabic name for the planet.

She smiles back, shyly. His sudden attention is intimidating. Thayer rarely has occasion to look at the girl directly. “Zuhal,” she asserts.

Saturn: one of the torrid giants like Jupiter, still solidifying into planetary form, a vast seething cauldron of vapors, impossibly hostile to life. But as the spheres cool over the next hundreds of thousands or millions of years, according to the principles of planetary evolution as laid out by Kant and Laplace, and then developed by Chamberlain and refined by Thayer, each sufficiently large planet will get its turn. The evolution of worlds is no less inevitable than the evolution of the species inhabited by them, followed by the evolution of those species’ intelligences.

Thayer and Bint continue several yards toward his compound and then stop. He turns due east and looks across the wastes to a point just above the Egyptian horizon, past the temples at Luxor and the Mohammedan’s holiest places. The night has gone cold. Some fine grains are swirling up from the Sudan. He softly touches her arm.

They both see it rising, our most beguiling planetary neighbor, red like a pomegranate seed, red like a blood spot on an egg, red like a ladybug, red like a ruby or more specifically a red beryl, red like coral, red like an unripe cherry, red like a Hindu lady’s bindi, red like the eye of a nocturnal predator, red like a fire on a distant shore, the subject of his every dream and his every scientific pursuit.

“Mars,” he says.

“Merrikh,” she tells him.

He repeats after her: “Merrikh.”

He admires the sound of it, biblical and arid and altogether strange.
Merrikh
.

She says the word again, emphasizing the final voiceless velar fricative, so favored in the East.

“Merrikh,” he says, indicating the planet again, and then he points to the ground. “Earth.”

She says, “Masr.” Masr is the Arabic word for Egypt. She pronounces it with a Bedouin drawl.

He corrects her gently. “Earth.”

“
Urrth, Masr. Masr, Urrth
.” She smiles again, believing that she’s learned another word of English.

Perhaps if Thayer knew the Arabic name for our planet he would set her right. But he doesn’t know it and the thought occurs to him that a separate word for Earth, analogous to other planetary names, presumes an awareness that Earth, Mars, and Saturn are analogous entities, similar spheres similarly hurtling through the same celestial environment, an airless, matterless medium known as “space.” It also presumes an awareness that other political and national entities have been established on Earth, apart from Egypt.

Δ

There’s too much to presume or explain. He doesn’t know what she knows, he can’t. He allows her to take him to his quarters, a faint glow five hundred yards farther. They walk without speaking, several feet apart now despite the fallen temperature, keenly sensible that their footfalls in the soft sand are weightless.

The lamp is lit in his secretary’s bureau. He frowns briefly before he opens the door.

“You needn’t have waited up, Dee! I appear to be in good hands.”

Miss Keaton is fully dressed and at her desk, schematics of the pipeline equipment laid out around her. She’s been contemplating a new difficulty. In a diplomatic maneuver to share the Concession’s contracts across national borders, the manufacture of the thirty-inch cylinders that will carry the petroleum to the taps along the Sides has been allocated to individual companies in Germany, Belgium, and France, while the two-ton brass taps come from Britain—and each has apparently manufactured them to slightly different specifications. A supply of Belgian pipes that arrived at Point C last week is proving to be entirely unusable. She sits back in her chair now, smiling wanly at Thayer and Bint.

“Sanford, if you fall ill again …”

She had observed his pallor when he left with Ballard. She now distrusts the animation with which he has announced his return from the hammam.

“The girl knows the sky! It’s extraordinary, I doubt she reads a word, but she can identify the stars and planets. I should test her on the constellations.”

“It’s late!”

“Yes, it is, past three. Mars is already over the horizon. It’ll be well placed by the time we open the shed.”

She calculates what has transpired. The girl’s eyes luster against the hour and some color has been raised upon her dusky cheeks, certainly brought there by Thayer’s courtly attentions. She’s not even pretty, not by any familiar measure, but Miss Keaton can never guess which female from the lower classes,
which serving girl or scullery maid or artist’s model, will next draw the astronomer’s gaze.

Thayer says, “Think of it, she’s never looked through a telescope.”

It’s been weeks since Thayer has. Miss Keaton understands, however, that he will allow no mention of his illness. Also, that they are not yet done with the night.

Δ

They leave the office, Bint following them several hundred yards down a smooth, swept sidewalk, one of the first fixtures of civilization introduced to Point A two years before. It leads directly into the desert, where, at the end of the path, stands a twelve-sided clapboard structure with a conical, shuttered roof. The door to the building is locked. Only Thayer and Miss Keaton have the keys. Every time they unlock the door they’re relieved to discover that the nine-inch refracting telescope, built by Alvan Clark & Sons of Boston, is still there, neither blown away nor dematerialized by the
khamsin
, nor carried off by the dervishes.

The dervishes would have had to dismantle the ninety-six-inch light green steel tube, which stands on a cast-iron pier, and all its accessories. With the equatorial mount and clock drive that compensate for the stars’ relentless whirl around the axis of the earth, the telescope weighs eleven hundred pounds. Thayer and Miss Keaton themselves have dismantled it, knowing its every mechanical intricacy, taking it apart and putting it together several times in several distant lands. With a single practiced motion, the astronomer now pulls on a lever below
the rail on which the roof sits and half the shutters slide away to open the instrument to the sky.

Saturn lingers above the horizon in the west, its rings beyond the capacity to imagine for someone who hasn’t already seen their pictures in a book, a fantastic confection, a miracle, but he doesn’t make Bint the gift. He sweeps the telescope across the sky to the Red Planet, which is just now cresting over the shed’s eastern wall. Running a closer, faster track around the sun, the Earth is gaining on Mars, so that every morning the planet rises several minutes earlier than the morning before, preceding the stars with which it sojourned the previous night.