Psychicians (a Hyllis family story #5) Page 5

  Daussie bent down to the sheet of glass again. “Let me cut some lenses with less convexity.” After five seconds, she leaned back up and looked down at five more lenses. “They really are pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Uh-huh,” Eva said, picking up the farthest one to the right—which had a barely detectable curvature. She held it up at arm's length and looked through it. “Damn, I can’t see anything through this one.”

  Daussie said, “Try it for reading.” She’d picked up the next one with a little more curvature and was looking at the page through it. She said, “This one makes the print bigger.”

  Eva leaned down and looked at the page. “Yes, it does. Oh, I think this would make reading easier. How about you?”

  Daussie shrugged, “I don’t have any trouble reading. I’m not sure how it could be any easier.”

  Eva snorted, “Are you trying to say I’m getting old?”

  “No, never that,” Daussie said with a grin. She leaned down closer to the sheet of glass again, “I’m going to try making some of the concave lenses.”

  While Daussie was cutting concave lenses, Eva was peering through the other thicknesses of the convex lenses. She mused, “With the stronger ones, I have to lean my head down closer to the page or everything’s blurry. I don’t think they’re worth it since I can read without them and they seemed to make things worse when I tried to use them to look at something far away.”

  Daussie lifted her head and looked at the concave lenses she’d just cut. They weren’t rocking since they rested solidly on their thicker peripheral edges. She picked up the weakest one and looked at the page of the book. “This one doesn’t do much.” She moved it in and out of her line of sight. “I guess it makes the print a little smaller. I guess it’s not what you’d want for reading, but I could still read.” She lifted it up and looked out the window at the mountains in the distance. “Oh my God! The… the mountain’s clearer!” She set that lens down and picked up the next one. “Oh! Even better! The mountain’s really sharp!” She tried the next one, “Nope, this one’s not any better.”

  She turned her attention back to the book for a moment. Speaking slowly she said, “I must be nearsighted, or myopic. So, things in the distance are blurry because they aren’t focused correctly on my retina. The concave lens focuses it better. This… is amazing!”

  Eva had been trying the concave lenses. She grinned down at Daussie, “I must be nearsighted too. Do you want to mount some lenses on your face like Mr. Roper with his glasses?”

  Daussie made a face, “No.” She shrugged, “But maybe I’d carry a lens around with me in case I needed to see something better.” Then she frowned, “I guess that sounds pretty vain, doesn’t it?”

  Eva grinned again, “I don’t think it sounds vain at all. Because I don’t want to wear them either and I’m sure I’m not vain.” Then she smiled at her daughter, “Besides, if you were vain you’d wear clothes that fit and let us cut your hair nicer.

  Daussie laughed. “I’m going to try making a bigger lens. One that might fit into spectacles like Mr. Roper’s. She picked up the concave lens that’d given her the best distance vision and laid it carefully on top of the broken piece of glass she was using as a source. Leaning down over them, she used her ghirit to examine the one she’d liked and fixed its curvature in her mind. Then she focused on the sheet of glass and pictured a larger lens with the same curvature. Hmm, if it’s going to have a bigger diameter, it’s going to have to be thicker at the edges, or thinner in the middle.

  She decided to make it a little thinner in the middle and a little thicker at the edges and focused on cutting it. Because she was making a lens three centimeters in diameter, it took several seconds. She lifted the lens and, holding it just in front of her eye like Mr. Roper’s spectacles, looked at the mountain through it. Wow! she thought, That really looks a lot better… I can see so much more detail. She wondered whether, in time, she might actually decide to wear glasses like Roper’s, just so she’d be able to see that well all the time.

  Laying the lens she’d just made down on the broken window pane, she cut another one like it. Picking them up, she held them one in front of each eye and looked at the mountain. It looked much better than it had without the lenses, but not quite as good as when she’d just been holding one up before her right eye. She tried closing her right eye and saw that the image with her left eye was a little bit fuzzy. She moved the lens away and looked at it, wondering if the glass was fogged or scratched. There wasn’t any fogging and like everything she’d cut with teleportation, its surface looked perfect. She tried looking through the first lens with her left eye and saw it was still a little blurry. Do I need a little more curvature in the lens for my left eye than I do for my right? she wondered.

  Once again she bent over the broken window pane, this time cutting another three-centimeter lens, but with slightly more concavity.

  This time, when she looked through the two lenses, holding the more concave one before her left eye, the image of the mountain seemed absolutely perfect. As she turned to tell Eva what she was seeing, she noticed something move across the mountain. When she turned back for another look, it moved the other way. The window’s dirty, she thought, walking over to it. She unlatched the window and swung it open, then looked through her lenses again. I only thought the mountain looked perfect before—because I’d never seen it like this!

  Daussie turned excitedly to her mother, “Come look at the mountain through these lenses.”

  Eva walked over, frowning, “Close the window. It’s getting cold in here.”

  “First look at the mountain without that dirty window in the way.”

  Eva held the lenses up to her eyes, “Oh my!” She turned to stare at Daussie while Daussie closed the window. She made a face, “I think I might actually like to have some of those spectacles for when we’re out and about.”

  Daussie made more small test lenses of both the concave and convex types, including ones that were partial steps between the curvatures of the ones she’d already made. She cut these new ones so they had stems on them, allowing a person to use the stem as a handle when they held it up to their eye. As she cut each one in order, Eva numbered them by scratching the numbers on their stems with the diamond in her ring. They followed the ancient tradition from the book, giving negative numbers to the concave ones and positive numbers to the convex types. Unfortunately, they didn’t know how to tell the actual number of diopters a lens had, so they had to just stick to numbering them in order.

  Daussie and Eva each went through the small test lenses, choosing the ones that let them see the best at a distance.

  Using the information from the test lenses, Daussie bent over the pane of glass and started cutting three-centimeter lenses for spectacles for Eva.

  Daum came in. He took one look at the test lenses and said, “Some of those’re pretty.” He pointed at the convex lenses, “I like these a lot better than those,” he said, indicating the concave ones. He frowned, “What are they? They might be pretty, but I don’t think they’re pretty enough that there’d be a market for them.”

  Soon Eva had him holding various lenses up to his eyes. He proved to be mildly nearsighted which fit with his old complaints that he couldn’t see well at a distance. Although he could see distance better with a concave lens and could read without difficulty, he said he found reading fine print easier if he used a convex lens. He didn’t think lenses were necessary for either one though.

  After listening to Eva and Daussie’s excited discussions, Daum gave an exasperated sigh and said, “I’d better get down to the kitchen and help get things going for lunch… Since you ladies are so busy playing with your little glass baubles.”

  “Send Kazy up here so we can see if she’d like some lenses.”

  Daum snorted, shaking his head as he went out the door.

  Eva looked after him and said, “I think he has trouble on both ends because his lenses are getting stiff. The ancients call
ed that presbyopia.”

  ~~~

  Kazy was also farsighted and had no need for lenses because of her youth. Tarc proved to be nearsighted and quite excited to get lenses.

  Vyrda was farsighted but, being older, she was also presbyopic and having more difficulty than Daum with fine print. “I’d really like some magnifying glasses,” she said. “You know, like the person in your caravan who you said had a way to mount the lenses in front of his eyes on some kind of frame?”

  Eva nodded, “It was made of some kind of wire or something. I was thinking I should go look at the antiquities dealers here in town. Maybe one of them not only has lenses but even the wireframe to mount them. We could use theirs as a model.”

  Vyrda, who seemed to be related to half the town, said, “I have a cousin who’s a jeweler. Maybe he could make some frames.”

  “They don’t need to be made out of gold or silver.”

  “No, but my cousin knows how to work with small pieces of metal, shaping them to fit jewels. Shaping them to fit lenses shouldn’t be too difficult for him. He also knows which metals don’t make your skin turn colors.”

  ***

  Twisting back and forth on the screwdriver he’d jammed into the key slot, Tarc leaned his head down close to the lock and once again tried to move the last two pins with his ghirit. He’d repeatedly considered asking Daussie to come out and cut the pins in this lock, but he’d abstained. His ghirit showed him a long hallway starting on the other side of the door. Uniquely, it took off at an oblique angle and didn’t have any rooms on either side of it.

  Also, rather than having one of the flat knobs on the other side of the door with which to latch and unlatch the bolt, this one had another key slot. So, you’d have to have a key no matter which side you approached the door. The door was so different from the other doors in the underground complex that Tarc really wanted to preserve the ability to lock it in case that turned out to be important.

  But the pins weren’t moving. In frustration, he pounded the door with the heel of his fist, then tried it one more time. One moved…! Then the other did as well. He used his ghirit to line up the breaks in the pins with the shear plane of the plug cylinder and turned it.

  Picking up his lantern, he pulled open the door. Yep, a long hallway, he thought. Really long. The hallway was so long it faded into the darkness beyond the reach of his lantern’s beam.

  Of course, he’d known it was going to be a long hallway. By “long,” he meant a hallway that stretched beyond the eighty meters his ghirit could sense things that weren’t warm.

  Out of habit, he checked the fuel level in his lantern. Of course, if the lantern went out, he’d still be able to find his way back using his ghirit, but he’d let his lantern run dry a number of times down here and he didn’t like being in utter darkness. The lantern had plenty of fuel so he strode off down the hallway.

  Tarc had once tried to follow the hallway to its destination by walking on the ground above and sensing it with his ghirit. Unfortunately, it went under a hill and he hadn’t been able to find it coming out on the other side. As he walked down the hallway, the ground rose above him. Must be the hill, he thought. The ground fell again on the other side of the hill but remained substantially above the hallway. Oh, he thought, the ground level’s higher here. I just didn’t notice it because of the hill I guess. He could still sense the ground from down in the hallway, but it was high enough that he would have had to strain to sense the hall from above and he hadn’t. He hadn’t tried to sense so deep because he’d had the impression that he was five to fifteen meters above the hallway, not the thirty meters or so he actually was.

  For a moment, he wondered if the hall was actually going down into the ground. He turned to look behind him. The hall seems straight as an arrow and felt level.

  Tarc kept walking. The ground above slowly fell until it was only about three meters above him. There aren’t any trees up there, he realized. He knew the hallway pointed toward Clancy Vail. Now he realized there weren’t any trees up there because he was currently walking under the caravan grounds. A little farther on, he noticed a little embankment on the surface and then detected some small buildings, probably the ones that were outside the walls of the city.

  The hallway came to an end in a high ceilinged chamber. There were several doors around the periphery. One of them didn’t have a lock and readily opened into a stairwell, dusty like everything else. The stairs went up and down. Tarc ignored the ones going down and climbed upward instead, keeping a careful eye on the structure of the stairs with his ghirit. It’d be a disaster if the stairs collapsed beneath him while he was in there—no one would know where he was to come rescue him.

  The top of the stairway was about a meter and a half underground. There was another doorway that didn’t have a lock. He was able to open it, but only a few inches. It was blocked by a jumbled mess of metal and concrete. He suspected this was intended to be another exit from the underground facility—perhaps for emergencies—but the building it’d exited into had collapsed around it.

  He climbed back down and continued down the stairs as they went three levels below the main level. The farther down he went, the colder it got. He was almost shivering on the bottom floor. The cellar under their tavern in Walterston had been cool, but this seemed significantly cooler. Makes sense, he thought, this’s much deeper.

  Each level had what he assumed had been a storeroom. Perhaps they’d stored food down there after their power went out, but if so, it’d degraded long ago despite the cold temperatures.

  At the lowest level, a concrete tube continued still deeper. It had ladder rungs mounted in the concrete as if they’d contemplated someone climbing down there. Tarc wasn’t going to climb possibly rusty rungs when he was by himself, but he sent his ghirit down. Water! It was only about eight meters below that lowest floor. It’s a well, he realized.

  Back up on the main level, he tried the other three doors. They all had locks that were too tight for him to open. I’ll have to get Daussie to come inject some lubricant, he thought.

  He sent his ghirit through the doors and found more underground rooms. Several were small rooms that seemed to be for supplies. One went into a short hallway that connected to big rooms. Much bigger rooms than in the other facility. He shook his head in wonder at how the ancients had built so much, so large. Momentarily he wished for windows so the place would have light. Of course, if there’d been windows, they’d have been broken hundreds of years ago and all the salvage would’ve been carried away already.

  He headed back down the long hallway to continue his lonely explorations of the underground facility. On his way, he counted his steps, deciding the two facilities were about 250 meters apart.

  ~~~

  On his way home that day, Tarc stopped off in the area. Many of the buildings outside the walls of the city were the simple shacks of a shantytown. Others belonged to less prosperous small businesses. Ones that—in order to pay the lower rents outside the walls—were willing to take the risk their buildings would be demolished in a conflict or robbed by bandits.

  His ghirit found the top of the stairwell under a rough patch of ground about fifty meters from the wall. As he cast about with his senses he realized the ground was uneven because the collapsed remains of the building were buried beneath the head. We could build a new building right over the top of it, he thought. Then dig a cellar down to the stairwell and have access to the facility right here outside the city. He laughed at himself. That’s the last thing we need, the expense of another building and more rent to pay on its land.

  He looked in the direction of the big underground rooms and to his surprise realized they were approximately underneath the huge cylindrical concrete tower that stood outside the city walls. The cylinder had a tilted mushroom cap and was braced with concrete buttresses that arced up to it on four sides. The tower could be seen from most places in Clancy Vail, so it served as a local landmark—even though no one knew its ori
ginal purpose. Tarc walked over and around the base of the tower. Apparently, its walls were very thick. They were pockmarked here and there just above ground level. Those pocks looked as if some people had tried to break their way into the tower but none of the holes had penetrated to the interior. Tarc’s ghirit showed him that there were hollow tubes going up and down deep inside the concrete, including one that spiraled up around a central tube, but the attempts to break into the tower hadn’t come close to any of them.

  Sending his ghirit down, he found there were actually four of the big rooms. One underneath each of the four buttresses that braced the tower.

  Maybe I’ll be able to figure out what the tower was for when I get into the rooms beneath it, he thought. He decided it was most likely a small version of the ancient ‘water towers’ he’d seen in some other towns—Though I really don’t understand what the water towers were for either.

  ***

  It was late afternoon, before the dinner rush. This day things were particularly slow. Knowing she’d be swamped during the actual dinner and for the evening while she helped Daum in the bar, Kazy made herself a sandwich and took it out back to the porch behind the kitchen. She sat on the steps, leaning against a post with her eyes closed, savoring the flavors in her sandwich on a cool afternoon.

  Nylin sat down beside her. Kazy almost said “Hi Nylin” before she opened her eyes. She remembered in time and blinked them open so Nylin wouldn’t wonder how Kazy’d known who she was talking to. As she opened them, Nylin said, “Sorry to bother you…”

  Kazy smiled, “It’s no bother. How can I help?” Since Nylin sat down so close to her, Kazy had to resist the temptation to pluck Nylin’s concerns from her mind. Kazy felt like she’d be irritated if someone listened in on her thoughts without asking permission, so she strove hard not to listen to what other people were thinking—excepting when there seemed to be an urgent reason to do so.