The Luck of Brin's Five by Cherry; Wilder Page B

“I am a man. My name is Scott Gale.”
    â€œWhere do you come from?”
    â€œFrom another world.”
    It was an odd formula we had worked out while teaching him our language. Diver went on to repeat his identification in his own tongue. By now I recognized it pretty well. The learning went in two ways—we all had a few words of his speech.
    â€œScott Gale 20496, Lieutenant Navigator, World Space Service/Satellite Station Terra-Sol XNV34, Biosurvey Team One, Planet 4, 70 Ophiuchi A.”
    Beeth Ulgan peered heavily at Diver. Finally she turned away, shaking her grand loops of hair as she flicked through a bundle of silk scrolls and fixed one on the rack. I could see that it was a chart of some kind, finely woven, like all the Diviner’s scrolls, and overstitched in black thread on the cream and gold body of the work. Diver stepped close and looked very hard, turning his head to find a direction. Then he pointed. I saw with a thump of excitement that it was a star chart with the constellations traced out in black, and red points inwoven for the stars themselves.
    There was the Sun and the Far Sun. There were the sibling worlds of Torin: Derin or Far-World and the twins Thune and Tholen and the strange distant world that we called Derindar, Even-Further-World, but which astronomers call Veer. Beyond our web of worlds were the constellations: Eenath, the spirit warrior, with her bow; Vano, the great bird; the Spindle; and the Box-Harp. There was the great constellation of the Loom; Diver had pointed to a star in the loom bench, where the great weaver sits.
    He brought out a chart of his own and other objects from his pocket vest and laid them on the Diviner’s worktable. Beeth Ulgan examined everything with an intense concentration, poised over the worktable with a solemn face and hands hovering, as if she were working a conjuration for some grandee. Roy stood by and acted as interpreter, although Diver used the words that he had pretty well. He displayed and demonstrated his wonders; we knew some of them already. There was the flat box, no bigger than the palm of my hand, that tells again what is spoken into it. There was a thin, fine apparatus like a silkbeam . . . and Diver was surprised in his turn when the Ulgan showed him a box of silkbeam copies.
    There was the terrible weapon that he had turned on the Pentroy vassals in our glebe. He aimed it at a tall vase, and I cringed, but the vase toppled gently onto a cushion . . . the power of the thing could be altered from a stunning blow to a feather touch. There were the lightsticks and a set of metal tools and the tiny buzzer that Diver used to shave his face and something called a recharger to make all the marvellous engines well again when their power diminished.
    While the Ulgan marvelled at all these things, Diver asked for a map of Torin, and she gave him a colored “Fortune Map” on good willow paper, the kind she had made up by the printmaker two doors away, to sell in her booth. He stared at it sadly and compared it with a map of his own. Then Beeth Ulgan produced larger maps, one on silk, one on parchment, but on these maps also the islands were no clearer, and the distances, though vague, were just as great.
    The Diviner looked at Diver’s map and shook her head. “As I thought,” she said. “We know nothing about the islands.”
    The islands on her maps, beyond the western edge of the land of Torin, were huge patches of green, coastlines unfinished or fantastically drawn into bays and sounds. On the old silk map there were the sea sunners, giant water beasts embroidered, and strange beasts on land too. There were five mountains breathing red fire that had split the world asunder in ancient times. Diver could still hazard a guess. He pointed on all the maps to a place on the largest island, the one called Tsabeggan or Nearest Fire.
    There were his people—three of his own kind—and they might as well