“It sounds complicated, and I can’t think why any scholars would bother to do it.”

“I can’t either. But what if they were willing?”

“It’s worth suggesting to Flacommo.”

“Tell him that my father was a remarkable man. Being educated by him was like attending the finest college in the wallfold.”

“You mean the finest college in the Republic,” said Mother.

“The borders are identical.”

“But someone might think you were saying ‘wallfold’ to avoid saying ‘the Republic.’”

Rigg suddenly grew grave. “Oh, I never thought—yes, I will always say ‘the Republic’ from now on. Let no one think I wish to forget or show disrespect to the Revolutionary Council. I think of the Council and the Wall as being equally everlasting.”

“I have one other concern,” said Mother. “Your father—your real father, my husband, my beloved Knosso Sissamik—was obsessed with the Wall, with the science around the Wall. He spent his life in pursuit of a theoretical way through the Wall. He died in an attempt to cross it.”

“I never heard of the Wall killing anybody,” said Rigg.

“He thought of passing through the Wall in a boat.”

“Surely that’s been tried a thousand times—by accident, if no other way—as fishermen got carried off in a storm.”

“You know the Wall puts a madness on people who try to pass through. The nearer they get to the Wall, the madder, until they either flee from it screaming, or completely lose their minds and wander around in a stupor from which they never emerge. Fishermen who get swept through the Wall are almost certainly madmen when their boat reaches the other side—none have returned.”

“You shared my father Knosso’s interest?”

“Not at all,” said Mother. “But I loved him, and so I listened to all his theories and tried to serve him as I’m serving you now—by raising objections.”

“Then tell me how Father Knosso thought he might solve the problem?”

“His idea was to pass through the Wall unconscious,” said Mother. “There are herbs known to the surgeons. They create distillations and concentrations of them, and then inject them into their patients before cutting them. They can’t be aroused by any pain. And yet in a few hours they wake up, remembering nothing of the surgery.”

“I heard that such things were possible in the past,” said Rigg. “But I also heard that the secrets of those herbs had been lost.”

“Found again,” said Mother.

“In the Great Library?” asked Rigg.

“By your father Knosso,” said Mother. “You see, you weren’t the first royal to think of becoming a scholar.”

“Well, there it is!” cried Rigg. “Did they let Father Knosso have access to the library?”

“They did,” said Mother. “In person. He would walk there—it wasn’t far.”

“And now the surgeons of Aressa Sessamo—and the wallfold, too—I mean, the Republic—have benefitted!”

“Your father lay down in a boat, which was placed in a swift current that moved through the Wall in the north, far beyond the western coast. He injected himself with a dose that the surgeons agreed was right to keep a man of his weight deeply asleep for three hours. There were floats rigged on the boat so it couldn’t capsize, even if it ran into shore breakers before he could wake up. And he brought along more doses, so he could row himself to an inflowing current and repeat the process and return to us.”

“Did he make it through?” asked Rigg.

“Yes—though we have no way of knowing if he was made insane by the passage through the Wall. Because he died without waking.”

“And you know this because he never returned?”

“We know this because no sooner was he beyond the Wall on the far side than his boat sank into the water.”

“Sank!”

“Trusted scientists watched through spyglasses, though he was three miles away. The floats came off and drifted away. Then the boat simply sank straight down into the water. Knosso bobbed on the surface for a few moments, and then he, too, sank.”

“Why would a boat sink like that?” asked Rigg.

“There are those who say the boat was tampered with—that the floats were designed to come loose, and a hole was deliberately placed in the boat with a plug in it that was soluble in salt water.”

“So he was murdered,” said Rigg.

“There are those who say that,” said Mother. “But one of the scholars who was observing it—Tokwire the astronomer—was using a glass of his own making, which was filled with mirrors, so the other scholars did not trust his observations. But he swears it let him see the sinking of your father’s boat much more clearly than anyone else, and he says he saw hands rising up out of the water, first to tear the floats away, and then to pull straight down on the boat.”

“Hands? Human hands?”

“No one believed him. And he quickly dropped the matter, for fear that insisting on the point would ruin his reputation among scholars.”

“You believe him.”

“I believe we don’t know what’s on the other side of the Wall,” said Mother.

“You think there are people there who live in the water? Who can breathe underwater?” asked Rigg.

“I don’t think anything. I neither say ‘possible’ nor ‘impossible’ to anything,” said Mother.

“But he passed through the Wall.”

“And never woke up.”

“Why is the story not known throughout . . . the Republic?”

“Because we didn’t want a thousand idiots making the attempt and meeting the same fate,” said Mother.

“What if there are water people in the next wallfold?” asked Rigg. “They’ve never crossed the Wall, either! Would they even understand what our boats were? What kind of creature Father Knosso was? They might think that because he’s shaped like them, he could breathe underwater as they did.”

“We don’t know how they’re shaped,” said Mother.

“We know they have hands.”

“We know that what Tokwire saw he called hands.”

“Mother, I can see that Father’s plan should not be tried again,” said Rigg. “I would love to see anything he wrote, or failing that to read everything he read from the library. So I can know what he knew, or at least guess what he guessed. But I swear to you most solemnly that I am not fool enough to attempt to cross the Wall myself, certainly not unconscious, and equally not in a boat. If I’m too stupid to learn from other people’s experiences, I’m no scholar.”

“You relieve me greatly. Though you must know how it strikes terror in my heart that within a day of your arrival, you’re already talking about duplicating your father’s fatal research.”

“I was already interested in the Wall before you told me the story of Father Knosso, Mother. Duplicating his research may save me time, but I have ideas of my own.”

“I’ll ask Flacommo what is possible concerning the library. But you must promise me to let me serve you as I served your father. Come and tell me all you learn, all you wonder about, all that you guess.”

“Here?” asked Rigg. “This is your place of privacy, Mother. I’m uncomfortable even now, knowing that I should not be here.”

“Where else, if we’re not to bore the rest of Flacommo’s house with our tedious scholarly conversation?”

“The garden,” said Rigg. “Walking among the trees and bushes and flowers. Sitting on benches. Isn’t it a lovely thing, to be among the living plants?”

“You forget that it’s open to the elements, and winter is almost here.”

“I spent many a winter in the highest mountains of the Upsheer, sleeping outdoors night after night.”

“How will this keep me warm in the garden this winter?” asked Mother.

“We’ll talk together only on sunny days. Maybe my sister will join us, and we can share a bench with you between us—we’d keep you warm enough then, I think!”

“If your sister ever consents to come out of her seclusion.”

“A seclusion that excludes her only brother, lost so long and newly come home, is too much seclusion, I think.”