Read Online Equilateral by Ken Kalfus - Free Book Online

the eyepiece. Miss Keaton reconsiders. The girl is slender and submissive, her skin is clear, and the very crudeness of her features impart an almost classical sensuality. Thayer could conceivably consider her attractive.
    “Merrikh,” the girl repeats, murmuring.
    She continues to ignore Thayer and Miss Keaton. Her only motion is a small, peculiar one: the light, absentminded passage of a finger from her right hand across the palm of her left.
    When she finally draws away from the telescope she turns to Thayer, smiling openly, in a womanly way, without the deference that he should expect. He doesn’t mind. She holds out her palm and traces a circle on it with a fingernail. Once that’s complete she draws another line across her hand, where the memory of the circle is imprinted. If the circle represents Mars, then the line’s termini may very possibly approximate the positions of Peneus and the arid patch of Martian ground known as Agyre.
    “You’ve seen something?” Thayer’s eyes light. “You’ve seen definite features!”
    Miss Keaton knows that Bint’s recognition of the new artifact is extraordinary. The first time laypeople observe the planet through a telescope they rarely see any landforms at all, not even the ice caps. Their impatience makes it difficult to convince skeptics of the canals’ reality: “ I didn’t see them, so they can’t be there! ” One would not then expect the ready detection of surface features by an unlettered Bedouin serving girl. Her confirmation of the shadowing gives substantial credence to the French astronomer’s claim. France-Lanord will have to be cabled in the morning, which is almost upon them.
    Bint gives up her place to the secretary, who’s at first presented with the usual blank crimson disk. Regardless of her long experience with the instrument, she too is obliged to wait for her eyes to adapt. Miss Keaton’s aware that in these several minutes, Thayer and Bint are in the position of having seen something that she has not. They stand behind her, waiting. Soon, though, the image appears, starting at the ice cap, an even gray line, something that wasn’t there during the 1892 approach. The new canal can only confirm that the inhabitants of Mars remain capable of grand construction. Their race is still a worthy audience for the spectacle of the Equilateral. But a disquiet tugs at her. Something she can’t quite make out.

Eleven
    The secretary requires the remaining hours before dawn to complete the report, which she signs with Thayer’s name, adding that the observation was joined by Miss A. Keaton. The second witness provides superfluous confirmation, for Thayer’s visual powers are unrivaled among his peers—he’s identified incipient squalls in the atmosphere of the sun before they became raging cyclones the size of the Earth; he’s mapped Himalayan peaks on the surface of Jupiter’s Ganymede—but the astronomer routinely asks her to share priority.
    The morning has not yet warmed when she steps from her tent on the way to the telegraphic bureau, the carefully typed paper in hand. The camp is still waking, and there’s still no bird-song. The embers of last night’s cooking fires are being stirred and reanimated. Men make their stiff-legged way toward the latrines. A fellahin work gang lingers in the distance, before departing for labors to be performed on Side AC. An unseen muezzin clears his throat, about to launch into the day’s first devotions.
    Miss Keaton’s strides across the packed sands are long and confident, whatever uncertainty from the night having dissipatedwith the night itself. She sees men falling to the ground. The repeated cries in the muezzin’s first line reach her now: Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! They’re a kind of comfort and a kind of thrill. She reflects on how awful the song would seem to the women who were her school friends a decade earlier, girls who were bright, sophisticated, and