Lens of the World by R. A. MacAvoy Read Free Book Online Page B

sun was still in the sky, and the path exactly where I’d left it that afternoon.
    I was inspired to leave, to return to Sordaling School with a story of sudden illness, amnesia, attack from townies. Now that I think back, sir, I doubt there was a day in my peculiar education that I was not overcome at least momentarily by an impulse to drop the effort and run. Except for three days, which I shall describe after this is done.
    I went back in and poured another beer. It was very dark inside now, and only the swinging brass buttons of the ceiling caught sunlight through the clerestory windows. I glanced out through the crack in the roof and beheld the first stars, and only then did it become obvious to me that the pole, the slot, the entire roof of the building had moved—that the squat dome, the crowded clerestories, and the clumsy key frieze were no chance ornaments of a builder without artistic taste but instead the inevitable concomitants of a roof designed to spin like a top.
    A very slow, cumbersome top.
    Questions are never really answered, but only replaced by larger questions. Why on earth would a man want to move the roof of his house in a circle? That under certain circumstances he might want to move the house itself over the ground I could accept. That he might want to replace the roof to the left or the right according to rain or wind direction also was comprehensible, though practically speaking it was enough that it merely cover the floor well. This pierced, flawed, and ponderously mobile dome seemed beyond reason.
    Yet one thing had led to five or six others in my researches, and I was inclined toward faith in the reasonableness of this ugly brick building. I left off beer and conjecture and mounted the platform.
    The great tube ended in a smaller, polished tube, which in its turn was completed by a round lip of brass like the neck of a bottle. It occurred to me that perhaps Powl’s intent was to capture dew or rain, but when I inserted my finger into the hole I thought I felt it blocked by something hard. It was a tiny opening anyway, and hard to feel with the fingers. The tube itself rang hollow to knuckles; it made a shivery, almost sweet sound.
    On the Zaquashlon southern coast, at Morbin Harbor, there stands a cannon as long as this very tube, and like it, the cannon is made of brass. It can carry a ball of iron for three miles out to sea, and its purpose is to terrify the pirates of Felonk, who harry the shores. Though the Felonkan are a round people, however, their ships are light and wasplike and balanced on wasp-legged pontoons, and never has this fearsome weapon managed to hit a ship clean on or even to swamp one, though I am told men have been washed off the decks and drowned. If ever it did hit a ship, I’m sure the destruction would be total.
    On its way to emplacement on the harbor cliffs, the Morbin Harbor cannon was paraded through Vestinglon and afterward Sordaling, pulled by thirty chestnut brewery horses. We of the school were brought to examine it, and I remember that the barrel of the cannon was very heavy, so that it made little ring when beaten by the fists.
    There was a chair on the platform, placed not under the tube but to one side. Its brocade seat was well and particularly worn, as by the posterior of a single man applied many times. I sat on that chair (feeling a slight sense of sacrilege) but found no virtue in the act, nor was there anything to be seen or heard there. Of course, the chair was not attached to the tube but to the platform by its own weight. If the tube moved (as it must) with the roof…
    I sought a stick or a pencil and could find nothing but the piece of charcoal I had sharpened against the gears of the roof-engine. I inserted this into the lip of the tube and found it was actually blocked by something hard. In an effort to discover whether the blockage was complete, I managed to break the charcoal in the declivity and fill it, whether-or-no. I peered into the