'They'll be out to talk to you about these.'

Bahram hiked along with the box balanced on his head. He took breaks from time to time to case his head, and fortify himself with more wine. By the time he got back to the compound it was late and his head was swimming, but the lamps were lit in Khalid's study, and Bahram found the old man in there reading and dropped the box triumphantly before him.

'More to read,' he said, and collapsed on a chair.

The End of Alchemy

Shaking his head at Bahram's drunkenness, Khalid began going through the box, whistling and chirping. 'Same old crap,' he said at one point. Then he pulled one out and opened it. 'Ah,' he said, 'a Frengi text, translated from Latin to Arabic by an Ibn Rabi of Nsara. Original by one Bartholomew the Englishman, written some time in the sixth century. Let's see what he has to say, hmm, hmm…' He read with the forefinger of his left hand leading his eyes on a rapid chase over the pages. 'What' That's Ibn Sina direct!… And this too!' He looked up at Bahram. 'The alchemical sections are taken right out of Ibn Sina!'

He read on, laughed his brief unamused laugh. 'Listen to this! "Quicksilver", that's mercury, "is of so great virtue and strength, that though thou do a stone of an hundred pound weigh upon quicksilver of the weight of two pounds, the quicksilver anon withstandeth the weight. – 'What?'

'Have you ever heard such nonsense? If he was going to speak of measures of weight at all, you'd think he would have the sense to understand them.'

He read on. 'Ah,' he said after a while, 'Here he quotes Ibn Sina directly. "Glass, as Avicenna saith, is among stones as a fool among men, for it taketh all manner of colour and painting." Spoken by a very mirrorglass of a man… ha… look, here is a story that could be about our Sayyed Abdul Aziz. "Long time past, there was one that made glass pliant, which might be amended and wrought with an hammer, and brought a vial made of such glass before Tiberius the Emperor, and threw it down on the ground, and it was not broken, but bent and folded. And he made it right and amended it with a hammer." We must demand this glass from Iwang! "Then the Emperor commanded to smite off his head anon, lest that this craft were known. For then gold should be no better than clay, and all other metal should be of little worth, for certain if glass vessels were not brittle, they should be accounted of more value than vessels of gold." That's a curious proposition. I suppose glass was rare in his time.' He stood up, stretched, sighed. 'Tiberiases, on the other hand, will always be common.'

Most of the other books he paged through quickly and dropped back in the box. He did go through 'The Emerald Table' page by page, enlisting Iwang, and later some of the Sher Dor mathematicians, to help him test every sentence in it that contained any tangible suggestion for action in the shops, or out in the world at large. They agreed in the end that it was mostly false information, and that what was true in it was the most trivial of commonplace observations in metallurgy or natural behaviour.

Bahram thought this might be a disappointment to Khalid, but in fact, after all that had passed, he actually seemed pleased at these results, even reassured. Suddenly Bahram understood: Khalid would have been shocked if something magical had occurred, shocked and disappointed, for that would have rendered irregular and unfathomable the very order that he now assumed must exist in nature. So he watched all the tests fail with grim satisfaction, and put the old book containing the wisdom of Hermes Trimestigus high on a shelf with all its brethren, and ignored them from then on. After that it was only his blank books that he cared about, filling them immediately after his demonstrations, and later through the long nights; they lay open everywhere, mostly on the tables and floors of his study. One cold night when Bahram was out for a walk around the compound, he went into Khalid's study and found the old man asleep on his couch, and he pulled a blanket over him and snuffed most of the lamps, but by the light of the one left burning, he looked at the big books open on the floor. Khalid's lefthanded writing was jagged to the point of illegibility, a private code, but the little sketched drawings were rather fine in their abrupt way: a crosssection of an eyeball, a big cart, bands of light, cannonball flights, birds' wings, gearing systems, lists of many varieties of damasked steel, athanor interiors, thermometers, altimeters, clockworks of all kinds, little stick figures fighting with swords or hanging from giant spirals like linden seeds, leering nightmare faces, tigers couchant or rampant, roaring at the scribbles from the margins.

Too cold to look at any more pages, Bahram stared at the sleeping old man, his father in law whose brain was so crowded. Strange the people who surround us in this life. He stumbled back to bed and the warmth of Esmerine.

The Speed of Light

The many tests of light in a prism brought back to Khalid the question of how fast it moved, and despite the frequent visits from Nadir or his minions, he could only speak of making a demonstration to determine this speed. Finally he made his arrangements for a test of the matter: they were to divide into two parties, with lanterns in hand, and Khalid's party would bring along his most accurate timing clock, which now could be stopped instantly with the push of a lever which blocked its movement. A preliminary trial had determined that during the dark of the moon, the biggest lanterns' light could be seen from the top of Afrasiab Hill to the Shamiana Ridge, across the river valley, about ten h as the crow flies. Using small bonfires blocked and unblocked by rugs would no doubt have extended the maximum distance visible, but Khalid did not think it would be necessary.

They therefore went out at midnight during the next dark of the moon, Bahram with Khalid and Paxkator and several other servants to Afrasiab Hill, Iwang and jalil and other servants to the Shamiana Ridge. Their lanterns had doors that would drop open in an oiled groove at a speed they had timed, and was as close to an instantaneous reply as they could devise. Khalid's team would reveal a light and start the clock; when Iwang's team saw the light, they would open their lantern, and when Khalid's team saw its light, they would stop the clock. A very straightforward test.

It was a long walk to Afrasiab Hill, over the old east bridge, up a track through the ruins of the ancient city of Afrasiab, dim but visible in the starlight. The dry night air was lightly scented with verbena and rosemary and mint. Khalid was in good spirits, as always before a demonstration. He saw Paxtakor and the servants taking pulls from a bag of wine and said, 'You suck harder than our void pump, be careful or you'll suck the Buddhist void into existence, and we will all pop into your bag.'

Up on the flat treeless top of the hill, they stood and waited for Iwang's crew to reach Shamiana ridge, black against the stars. The peak of Afrasiab Hill, when seen from Shamiana, had the mountains of the Dzhizak Range behind it, so that Iwang would see no stars on top of Afrasiab to confuse him, but merely the black mass of the empty Dzhizaks.

They had left marker sticks on the hill's top pointing to the opposite station, and now Khalid grunted impatiently and said, 'Let's see if they're there yet.'

Bahram faced Shamiana Ridge and dropped open the box lantern's door, then waved it back and forth. In a moment they saw the yellow gleam of Iwang's lantern, perfectly visible just below the black line of the ridge. 'Good,' Khalid said. 'Now cover.' Bahram pulled up his door, and Iwang's lantern went dark as well.

Bahram stood on Khalid's left. The clock and lantern were set on a folding table, and fixed together in an armature that would open the door of the lantern and start the finger of the clock in one motion. Khalid's forefinger was on the tab that would stop the clock short. Khalid muttered 'Now,' and Bahram, his heart pounding absurdly, flicked the armature tab down, and the light on Iwang's lantern appeared on the Shamiana Ridge in that very same moment. Surprised, Khalid swore and stopped the clock. 'Allah preserve us!' he exclaimed. 'I was not ready. Let's do it again.'