After the moving walkway delivered Sola and Alvin to the center of the park, they walked for yet another hour until the first light of the moon rose over eastern towers. Its brilliant white bathed the savannah and its patches of camel thorn trees in a twilight of shadows and shimmering leaves.
Behind them, the city of the elephants lay dark, and Sola was glad of that. Before long devotions would come to an end and the towers would light up, but if they could find their spot soon, they might count on an hour or more of clear viewing.
Sola stepped lightly over the soft grass, her thick pads making almost no sound as she guided Alvin deeper into the parkland.
“Do you think they’ve missed us?” Alvin asked.
“Not yet,” Sola said, snorting slightly. “Not until it’s time for someone to put away the dreamcatchers or clean the dining hall.”
“We’re almost there,” she said, her thoughts touching Alvin’s mind like a brush of the wind. She kept her trunk raised, testing the air for scents of strangers, like males roaming the parkland in musth.
As they walked, Alvin absently traced his trunk along his unmarked forehead. “Sola, when you got your first marks, did it hurt?”
Sola paused. “It’s almost that time for you, isn’t it?” Her own intricate patterns stood out in the moonlight—delicate spirals that began at her crown and flowed down toward her trunk, still incomplete but already beautiful. “You’re thinking about the tatau ceremony now? While we’re stealing a sacred telescope?”
“I just... I keep wondering what design the masters will choose for me.”
“Signs of daring and rebellion,” Sola said with a gentle rumble of laughter. “The tatau masters will find your place in the Herd. Master Temba once told me that the most intricate patterns go to those who question the most.”
“Why are yours unfinished?”
“Because they said I question too much!”
Alvin hesitated near a low pergola, his ears flicking nervously. “Maybe we shouldn’t be out here. If the matriarch finds out—”
“She won’t,” Sola interrupted, her thoughts sharp but laced with warmth. “Besides, what’s the motto of a Star-Foot?”
“That we seek the truth,” Alvin answered.
“The other one,” Sola corrected.
“Umm... risk is our business?”
“That’s the one! Now, see that Provider station ahead. That’s what I was looking for. If we get in its shadow, the city lights will be less of a problem when they come on. But we still have some good dark viewing, so let’s get to it!”
She glanced back, her tusks gleaming faintly in the moonlight. “You believe me, don’t you? The way the stars move, the lights on the moon. They’re not messages, Alvin. They’re something more.”
Alvin sighed, his trunk curling protectively around the case strapped to Sola’s side. Inside lay the telescope—scratched, worn, and sacred to the herd. Its very presence felt heavy, like carrying a storm in his thoughts. “We shouldn’t have taken it,” he murmured, though his steps quickened to match hers.
“The Matriarch had this one taken down from Ceremony,” Sola explained for the second time. “It was boxed in the alcove, waiting for the providers to repair, and they come on half-moon days. When we return it, no one will even know it was gone.”
Sola stopped as they rounded the side of the little building. From here the rarely seen Providers who cared for the herd did their work, well, the few who probably maintained the park anyway. “Here.” She lowered herself to her knees, gesturing with her trunk for Alvin to help her set the case down. “This is perfect.”
Alvin did as she asked, though unease prickled his thoughts. “What if our ancestors are up there,” he sent, his mental voice trembling. “Won’t they tell on us?”
“No,” Sola said with impatience, breaking wind with a lift of her tail and a derisive snort. “The moon is not what they say,” Sola replied, her confidence beyond question. “Tonight, you’ll see for yourself.”
Together they worked to open the case, their trunks moving in harmony to release weathered clasps and lift the scuffed lid. Within lay the components of a treasured instrument, nestled in worn velvet, each piece a testament to Provider craftsmanship. Sola lifted the main tube and instructed Alvin in setting up the tripod. Their movements were precise and careful, despite their haste.
As Alvin reached into the case again, his trunk hovered briefly over several brass components. He seemed to look closely at the case, then selected a curved piece with threaded ends—a lens mount.
“How did you know to pick that one?” Sola asked, pausing after securing the main tube to the tripod.
Alvin’s ears flicked modestly. “The case,” he replied, gesturing with his trunk toward the open lid. Etched into the lid interior and the worn velvet lining were diagrams and symbols—faded with age but still discernible—showing the assembly sequence with lines connecting each piece to its proper position.
“Such good eyes,” Sola admitted, leaning closer to examine the etchings. “Hard for me to tell even under this bright moon.”
“It just seemed obvious,” Alvin said, already fitting the piece into place with surprising precision. His trunk traced along another diagram showing how the mounting rings should be secured. “It shows everything.”
“Old Wynn taught me,” Sola said, “when I first started training as an acolyte, before I earned my lunar marks.”
“Are you still going to be a Moon-Watcher?” Alvin asked.
“It’s the only way anyone will listen,” Sola answered. “Maybe, if I’m a Moon-watcher, they’ll listen.”
It was a wistful thought and Sola put it aside for the moment. She watched with growing interest as Alvin moved confidently from one component to the next, figuring out the visual instructions as if he’d built telescopes all his life.
“What about this?” Alvin asked, pointing to an inset in the case where a round, disc shaped object lay waiting.
“That’s the thing that isn’t working,” Sola answered. “It makes the telescope move and puts the pictures on the big screen for the Gathering. We won’t need it tonight. We can point this scope to the moon ourselves all right. If there’s time, we’ll have Otik take a look at that before we put things back. If they lie about the moon, they probably lie about that too.”
“Quick now,” Sola whispered, adding a soft rumble that Alvin felt more than heard. Her excitement moved through the ground between them, a tremor of anticipation that mere thoughts could not convey but infrasound could. It made Alvin’s own heart race despite his misgivings.
As they continued to assemble the scope, their trunks twined together in tip-to-tip coordination. Their cooperation came as naturally as breathing. Where other trunk-twins might fumble and hesitate, Sola and Alvin moved like a single being, threading the mounting rings and tightening the brass fittings with skillful precision.
“You said they lie, but you mean the Matriarch,” Alvin said, returning to the case to pick up the strange puck out of curiosity. It had both trunk holds and thin, splayed indentations that Alvin associated with Provider finger and hand shapes.
“I mean the Matriarch and her Court,” Sola said.
“Ahh!” Alvin dropped the puck as though it had seared his trunk.
“You alright, Alvin?”
“It was talking to me. Whispering something.”
Turning away from the nearly complete telescope, both Sola and Alvin stood over the place where the puck had stopped rolling after Alvin dropped it. Sola touched it with her trunk.
“Almost with us,” it said, though the words came like a soft voice almost lost to the wind.
Sola stepped back and snorted, rolling the puck over in the dirt with the tip of her trunk.
“Across waters, they draw near.” It repeated the phrase several times before Sola could hear all of it and repeat the phrase to Alvin.
“Umm,” said Sola, “I don’t think it’s supposed to do that.”
“Why would the telescope want to talk to us?” Alvin asked, his voice quaking.
“I don’t know,” Sola explained. “That’s... that’s an Interoquitor, Wynn called it, and she’s near to the head Moon-Watcher. It’s a control for really old things, like the telescopes. From before the City obeyed our thoughts, you know.”
“Before the City obeyed us?” Alvin asked with skepticism. “Otik told you that, didn’t he? What if it’s our ancestors talking to us for stealing the telescope.”
“I’m sure it’s not, Alvin. Now, put it back and close the case and it will stop talking. It’s just another broken thing for the providers to fix, like the walkway lights through the baobabs or the water fountain behind the schoolyard.”
Alvin did as he was told but his ears flicked nervously at every night sound. “Are you sure the ancestor spirits won’t see us?” he asked.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Sola assured him.
“They’ll tell the matriarch.”
A sharp trumpet from Sola cut him off, though it was barely louder than a whisper. Her trunk caressed the telescope’s worn surface. “This is a tool for learning,” she thought to him. “It was meant for study, for science—not to divine what some ancestor has to say about whether your tusks will come in this year.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do, Alvin. And you will too.”
The final piece clicked into place, and both elephants stepped back to admire their work. The telescope stood complete against the star-filled sky, its brass fittings glinting in the moonlight. A small inset lay bare where otherwise the talking puck would go.
Sola moved first, adjusting the attitude wheel with her trunk. “Without that crazy puck, we have to do this ourselves. Help me center the moon in the viewer,” she sent, and Alvin complied, their trunks working in concert to gentle the telescope into a better position.
“Too high,” Alvin cautioned as he watched for light to appear across the large viewing lens. “We need to—there!”
The moon swam into view, and Alvin forgot to breathe. Captured in the large view-lens, it wasn’t just a disk of light—it was a world. Clouds sailed over blue waters. Mountains cast shadows across dark plains, and there, unmistakable in their geometric precision, the lights of Provider cities gleaming in the lunar night.
“Sola,” he sent, his thought-voice trembling. “I don’t think that’s heaven anymore.”
His trunk remained steady on the controls, but his ears flapped in excitement as Sola crowded close to take her turn at the eyepiece.
“When did you know?” Alvin asked after a time. His trunk coiled gently into Sola’s mouth as he sought her reassurance. The unspoken context was ‘that the matriarch and the entire council were lying.’
Sola inhaled slowly, hesitantly, before answering. “When I was just a calf,” she replied. “The matriarch said we couldn’t look through the telescope. Only the council elders could. Something about that felt... wrong.”
Alvin flapped an ear to swat away a mosquito. “But they see the messages from the ancestors,” he insisted.
Sola stood away from the telescope, inviting Alvin to look again. “I can only say what we see. We see the same thing, don’t we?”
He nodded, his trunk brushing hers in a timid gesture. Through the lens, the moon became a world, not a beacon of prophecies, but a place of intimate geographies. But if the matriarch was wrong—if the moon was not the harbor of elephant souls—then what was this place in the sky?
Alvin’s eyes shone. “There must be elephants up there—maybe more than our herd. Even if they aren’t our ancestors... we should talk to them.”
“Well,” said Sola, “that’s suddenly ambitious.” She giggled, a contagious high-pitched rhythm ending in a brief snort. “No one has left the city in Matriarch’s memory, and as far as we know in the memory of all matriarchs before her.”
“If they could see us?”
“It’s too far, Alvin. We can see lights that look like cities, but not the herds that might live in them. But the Star-Foot have found pictures...”
“Why Star-Foot?”
Interrupted, Sola raised her tail a bit in frustration. Not for the first time, she wished Alvin were just a little older. She stomped her foot instead of saying the word.
“Why not call yourselves ‘Moon-Foot?’”
Flaring one ear, Sola pointed her trunk toward the center of the great white band that crossed the sky. “Do you see the stars the Matriarch calls escorpia, after the stinging bug that hides beneath the leaves?”
“The stars where the raven ancestors live?” Alvin asked. He looked up, but it was hard to spot even Shaula, the bright stinger in the tail of the constellation. Few among the herd had the gift of such long, clear sight, and Alvin did not. He turned back to the beautiful clarity of the telescope.
“What if all those points of light in the sky are worlds?” Sola posed the ultimate question. “What if the moon is just the closest one?”
Alvin’s ears began to move slowly, as the deepness of Sola’s questions set in. “Ahhh... Star-Foot,” he said at last, realizing more than ever before the why Sola’s mysterious group of friends had taken on such a silly name. “Wait, you said something before about pictures. Did you mean pictures of moon people? Of the other worlds?”
“Not quite. Pictures of sky-things that can fly to the moon.”
Already overwhelmed by the revelations of the evening, Alvin dropped his head in awe at Sola’s words, but after he remained very still, the telescope and the brilliant vistas it revealed holding him spell-bound.
“Sky-things.” He repeated softly.
“Things that fly,” Sola explained. “Like buildings that can jump up and then climb into the clouds. Jump as high as the moon even.”
“Do they have wings, like the Kori and the Ravens?”
“Sort of. I could show you, Alvin, but you’ll have to be accepted by the other Star-Foot. By all of us. Risk is our business, but if the Matriarch finds out, she may have the Council expel every Star-Foot.”
“Sola, do you really have a star tattoo on the bottom of your foot? Did it hurt?”
“All tattoos hurt,” she replied. “And the Star-Foot tatau master is the worst, but maybe one day, you too will have a sore foot and a star to walk on, little rebel.”
Together they laughed, while behind them the towers began to light up, windows coming to life with white light until it seemed the whole eastern horizon was ablaze.
“Devotions are over,” Sola grumbled. “We’d better head back soon if we want to return this telescope before morning.”
“Just a bit longer,” Alvin pleaded as he moved the telescope on its swivel, keeping up with the swift passage of the moon across the sky.
“Just a bit,” Sola agreed.
Sola lowered herself to the ground, her tusks resting lightly against the earth as she watched Alvin. The way his trunk moved, so sure yet so reverent, reminded her of the first time she’d peered through a telescope (a stolen moment during her training as an acolyte to the Matriarch’s bond group). Viewing the sky this way was like touching the stars with her thoughts, breaking the boundaries the herd had always known.
“Alvin,” she murmured, her thought-voice soft yet resolute. “The Matriarch isn’t just wrong. She’s hiding something. The moon, the stars, those lights—they’re part of something bigger.”
Alvin glanced at her, the uncertainty in his gaze fading, replaced by wonder. “I believe you.”
Without warning, lights flared on in the west, an intense band that made a few of the darkened towers in that direction visible. Neither Sola nor Alvin could have imagined such a light, for none had been seen in the memory of the Matriarch.
Alvin trumpeted without thinking, then stumbled back into the shadow of the nearby building. Sola stood her ground as her eyes adjusted to the shock; it was like walking out of a Harmony or an Arch Haven and into the noon-day sun.
“The Providers!” Alvin cried. Sola could feel her trunk twin’s fear as vibrations, bridging the short distance between them.
Sola felt her markings tingle—an old wives’ tale said that happened when the ancestors were watching. For a moment, she wavered. What if the Matriarch was right? What if disturbing the Providers brought consequences not just to her, but to her whole lineage?
Then she straightened, saying to herself “The tatau masters say our marks show our journey. Well, this is mine.”
Laid out as a huge rectangle, the Eternal City was anchored at its eastern and western ends by grand neighborhoods of habitable towers. To the east lived the herd. To the west rose the silent world of the Providers. Between these lay parklands, while the sides of the rectangle were comprised of colossal, interlocking monoliths forming kiloms long walls with wind and solar collectors bristling along their heights. Imposing and seamless, the northern and southern walls formed a barrier even the most determined outsiders couldn’t penetrate.
“They’re just lights, Alvin,” said Sola. “I don’t think they have anything to do with us.” Though her heart was pounding in her throat, she fought to convey calm and reassure Alvin that they were not suddenly in some unfathomable trouble. She paused to think. As she considered her options, other lights in the body of the tower began to wink into life.
“Help me adjust the scope, Alvin. Quick.” Shuffling timidly out of the shadows, Alvin only moved to grasp her tail with his trunk. She gave it a mighty twitch and swatted him between the eyes. “Grow up, Alvin. You’re a Star-Foot now.”
“I thought there was a ceremony?”
“Quiet!”
Together they turned the viewing instrument toward the new, terrestrial target and lowered its azimuth until Sola could see the lights in the previously dark and unseen structure some kiloms away. After patiently tinkering with the focus, she could make out a balcony, a broken parapet, and some movement. A small shadow walking in the light.
The lights spread down the tower, igniting one floor after the next until the base of the tower showed dimly through the scope.
“Something’s definitely up over there,” Sola said. “Let’s go see.”
“No,” Alvin demurred. “What if... I mean, that’s a long way.”
“You can go back yourself,” Sola offered. She could tell she had already asked far too much of him. “We’ll pack up the scope and you can get it back before anyone enters the shrine.”
“By myself? I won’t even be able to loosen the straps!”
“Of course you can. If you need help, watch for Otik near the stream. He’s a Star-Foot, and he’s nearing musth anyway, so everyone’s steering clear of him. Even so, he knows you. He’ll help.”
“Otik is twice my size, and in musth. He’ll charge me.”
“Well, he might try to mate with me, so which is worse? Otik may be a young bull entering musth, but he’s a Star-Foot first. Look, Alvin, I’m going to get closer to that light. I have to. When has anything like that ever happened before? It’s exciting. Who knows what it means. A Star-Foot should investigate!”
“We could never make it there and back before mid-day.”
“True. We’ll have to find a moving walkway.”
“But...” Alvin was flummoxed by the idea. Everyone knew the walkways stopped in the center of the great park. “How?”
“I suppose you believe the walkways end at center park?” Sola asked. She shook her tusks in derision.
“Everyone knows...”
“What if they don’t know, Alvin. What if center park is just that, the center where walkways from all directions come and bring people to the center and then away again. We just don’t know that because no one ever goes past center park.”
“We’re not allowed, Sola.”
“We’re not allowed to steal telescopes either.”
“The Matriarch is going to be awfully angry.”
“Look, Alvin. We’ll pack up the scope and take it with us. No one knows we took it, so even if it turns up missing, why would they think we did it? We weren’t even home. We were out picking loambells for a snack, saw the light, and went off to check it out. On our way back, we’ll hide the telescope in this Provider station, and if no one notices it’s gone, we’ll return it tomorrow night.”
Alvin hesitated, his trunk curling around one of the telescope’s legs as if reluctant to let go.
“Go or stay, Alvin. But you have to pick one right now.”
“It’s not just the Matriarch I’m worried about,” he murmured, glancing toward the distant lights. “What if those lights are our ancestors? They saw us looking and they’ve come back.”
Sola straightened, her gaze firm and unyielding. “It’s probably just Providers doing some maintenance or something. But what if the ancestors have come back? What if it’s something else? That’s exactly why we need to go. Remember the oath of a Star-Foot, Alvin.”
“Risk is our business,” he said weakly.
“No, the other one,” Sola corrected.
“We seek the truth?”
“That’s the one. Are you coming?”
Alvin’s ears drooped, but he nodded. Together, they began to disassemble the telescope, their trunks moving in harmony despite the tension now hanging between them.
Once they had the telescope and its tripod packed and the carry harness cinched around Sola’s middle, they started off toward the mysterious light on the tower. At least they had no trouble seeing where they were going with the moon now a beacon behind them and the light on the tower casting surreal silhouettes through the trees ahead.
They hadn’t gone far when something new reached them through the ground at their feet. It was a vibration, a low thrum they could feel passing beneath them. From their own nests in the city, they knew the sensation of a distant door, one of the great portal arches opening and then closing again.
Sola caught Alvin’s eye but said nothing. Instead, she watched for signs that they might be leaving the eastern range of center park. After nearly an hour of walking in silence, scattered trees and grassland gave way to a high barrier of sickle bush, its thorns sharp enough to pierce trunks and scratch the hides of even a bull elephant.
Alvin trumpeted at the formidable tangle, but Sola kept them moving along the wall of thorny branches until her eye caught shadows of what could be corners of massive stonework hiding within the sickle bush leaves.
Getting closer, and knowing the thorns would more than tickle, Sola carefully wrapped her trunk around a group of branches and pulled them down. Deliberate as she tried to be, she still got stung more than once by the legions of sharp barbs, but in the end a fair piece of the rock stood exposed.
“What does that look like to you, Alvin?” She reached over and tapped the stonework with the end of her trunk.
“It’s a walkway marker,” Alvin admitted. “That means...” He side-stepped quickly, measuring off the distance in his head. “That means there should be another one over here.” Approaching the sickle bush barrier until his forehead was right against a thick, dark branch, Alvin reached carefully through the thorns and—tap, tap—it was there! The second stone marker.
“This is the entrance to a walkway, leading right toward those Provider towers,” Sola said.
“But it’s... it must have broken a long time ago. Maybe the Providers couldn’t fix it.”
“Or it just sat here and these trees grew over. No one has used it in a long, long time. Look, Alvin, the bushes between the two stone markers are smaller and thinner than the rest. Their roots must be shallow. Let’s see.” Closing her eyes, Sola concentrated. She felt for the welcome signal, but nothing responded to her probe.
Alvin watched and paced as Sola tried to command the walkway with her thoughts. “What if,” he ventured, “it’s like a door in the old storage areas. Sometimes they don’t hear you when you walk up. You have to kind of wake them up first.”
With a slight snort and a bow of the head, Sola acknowledged a good idea. Instead of asking the walkway to accept them as passengers, she called to it as if to rouse it from its mechanical sleep. Nothing happened at first. She tried various mental pleas and prods to get the gears of the ancient system moving, all to no avail. Then, suddenly, the ancient walkway clicked into awareness and said ‘hello.’ Her ears flapped rapidly in surprise.
“Did you hear that?” she asked Alvin.
Before he could say, the sickle bush trees began to creak, as if some deep strain were twisting at their roots. Then came a snap, loud and frightening in the pale light beneath the moon. Finally, the bushes were swept away, as if they had fallen into a fast-moving stream, but there was no stream. The earth between the stones was simply moving. It moved as a single sheet, wide as the stone entrance and pointed east toward the towers and the strange light that still shone brightly. More loud and awful noise were coming from the darkness ahead: more wood giving way to overwhelming force, stones being crushed, and inches of hardened soil being sloughed off to the sides.
‘Welcome,’ said the walkway with a single thought, and Sola and Alvin knew what to do. They stepped aboard the moving path and soon found themselves accelerating toward the unknown.
Alvin pressed closer to Sola. “If we get in trouble, will they refuse to give me my marks? Will I be the only one in the Herd with baby-smooth skin?”
Sola’s trunk found his in the darkness, squeezing gently. “If we get in trouble for this, Alvin, we’ll probably end up with the most elaborate markings the Herd has ever seen. The tatau masters love a good story, and we’re about to give them an epic.”
“I don’t know. We stole a telescope. We’ll be exiled before they can even mix the inks,” Alvin muttered, but as the wind whipped past them he felt his fear transforming into something else: anticipation.