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wait on the dock. Temperance floated back to her mother, all the while humming her rhyme and swinging her yellow flower like a maestro bringing the opera round in fantastic swells of passion.

  What had happened with the man on the path to the garden

  The beginning of the quarter, six days prior, Ravno had been on his way to the garden. The violet folds of his capa had swayed and bounced along his back, vivid in mid-morning sunlight. Rays reached forward on dew-peppered paths. It was the first phase of bulaniru, third month into the year and his new position as gardener with Kar and the others who worked Lurruna Island’s loamy soil at the base of Vorra Mound.

  As he walked, Ravno’s focus slid thirteen hundred meters up to the flats of Vorra Mound. He knew the highest part of the caldera, the last hundred meters of rock that stabbed the sky, stood beyond what he could see and dropped morning shadows on the mountain lake. He pictured Surya and Muna somewhere along the way up the slope with papyrus bundles strapped to a carrying stick between them. To help understand the entirety of the gardener’s realm in his first week of training, Ravno joined the seven-hour trek and shouldered a papyrus bundle himself to bring up to dry for seed. He usually kept to flat ground in the garden bed, maintaining the compost, and delivering produce on a bicycle and trailer to the mercato in nearby Phoyara. His pace quickened as he thought of all the early potatoes, beets, mescluns, collards and late kale that needed to be cycled to town within the quarter.

  Where the path split in a clearing around bare brush, Ravno noticed a man walking back toward the canal. The man wore a tense ugliness on his face and a red capa on his back; he wasted no time and hardly absorbed the sights he passed. He walked with the same hasty pace as Ravno. The man brushed his young beard, his breath audible across the clearing. Crows called in high branches and sunk swiftly to join the murder that picked through dirt off the path ahead. And suddenly, with a cold pinch deep at the top of his spine, Ravno was walking back to the canal with the sun on his face and Vorra Mound behind him. He kept on for some paces, brow scrunching as thought slowly turned to icy command. Ravno glanced back and saw a flurry of purple as the man stumbled and fell with arms lazily swooping for support. Then Ravno was face in the leaves and hands in the grass, the crows startled and cawing. A clump of dandelions lay flattened just under his naked belly; the flowers fought to spring back up. And he sprung up and looked back to the man and his red capa: The red and the man, and the sun on the man’s hand and his thick brow and eyes squinting back at Ravno.

  Ravno pushed his bottom lip up and into his teeth, and raised his thumb in the air and shook it. In this way he tried to persuade the young man that he was all right. Ravno waggled his convincing thumb at the man, urging the dark stubble and bright-red capa back toward the canal.

  The man dropped his hand from his brow and, with a slight nod, resumed his march out of the clearing. The crows cut through strands of sun that cast down on Ravno’s face as he stood staring until the trees consumed the red capa, and even after.

  Ravno puzzled, I was walking, and then I was still walking but… not here.

  He unintentionally mirrored the man’s forehead with his own: Shaped with shock and alarm, layered with fear and confusion, laced with excitement but shrouded with a sting of shame.

  He turned back to the garden, his thoughts reeling. Did the man give Ravno an example of what it was like to be walking the opposite way? But not walking that well, obviously…. Ravno grinned in the warming air that danced around his face. The purple capa fluttered through his brain. Did I switch us? Or did he, as some angry jest? The man was remarkable, with a definite presence, but Ravno was just a passer-by. Ravno wondered what had occurred and if the man was aware of it, too. Probably nothing happened, he realized. I fell, that’s all. I’ve fallen before.

  Presently, Ravno stood in the garden, first hand on the shovel and his second itching the back of his head. Kar stood with a questioning look on her face, one hand out and open, and a slight frown.

  Ravno made the sign for ‘sorry’, the first sign he had learned. Through gestures he tried to explain to Kar that he had been walking, back there, and someone else had been too, and then he had fallen. He tried, unsuccessfully, to show the way his head had felt with the cold pinch. Kar watched his staccato retelling with some concern and asked, through signs, ‘Do you have a headache now? I have some peppermint oil and you can take it easy today, or go home.’

  Ravno flicked his calloused finger up to the sky and shook his head to make the sign for the second phrase he had learned, ‘I don’t understand’. Kar gestured putting oil on her fingers and rubbing her temples, then sighed and leaned back with a look of heavy relaxation, her two forefingers becoming like legs outstretched. She pointed at him with her brows raised questioningly.

  ‘Oh, no, no, I….’ He let go of the shovel and laughed. He shot both thumbs up in the air to assure Kar that he was indeed fit to work. As he wondered how he should start his day, Ravno pointed to the compost pile with one hand and to the bicycle with the other and turned his hands, shoulders and brows upward. Kar smiled and pointed to the compost pile.

  ‘Thank you, take care of yourself.’

  He grinned, missing the last part of her comment, and tugged the coarse shovel from the soil. Even as the hot organic smells escaped top pockets of dark compost and struck his senses, Ravno couldn’t shake the colors, purple and red, that switched back and forth through his mind.

  The first historia forum, where Ravno meets Aron

  After the boto left the center of the island, where Temperance and Helena disembarked, it cut south off the Sunberry Trench toward the Olive Fork Canal. It paused at Pelajaran to land a small group of other passengers with Ravno. He guessed this would happen and stuck behind them; at the moment he wanted to avoid stale conversation about which island he was born on or the Eleven’s indiscretion. ‘Oh you were born on Theo? Did you spend much time on Bu?’ ‘I’ve heard Midden is the lushest province, but you have to put up with the watchful Gara, Varchapet, and her little pet Chivors.’ ‘Oh he doesn’t have much steam for all his romping around.’ At which they’d all laugh good-heartedly. Ravno did notice the man with the tomato stem-clamp on his wrist walking with the group, and thought to catch up to discover whether the man was an accomplice to, or nescient of, his about-face in the boto.

  But Ravno dawdled behind and inquired to himself whether the man actually had a similar experience when it happened. Could he see what I was seeing, when I was seeing through his eyes? He imagined how much more advanced the man must be, as he didn’t faint or cause such a scene. Ravno was curious if he could get better—and what he would use it for. He wondered if the man read people’s thoughts and whether he represented a secret force calling Ravno to action. Ravno was concerned that Kar wouldn’t allow him to stop gardening so soon, if he had to join the covert organization. Or must he go about normally but with this secretive purpose?

  These thoughts and more poured through his mind, streaming around tight bends and pooling in vagueness; they streamed around more canals and arms of his mind than stretched across Lurruna Island and among quicker mind-tides than lapped the island shores. Tiny shells of ideas grew and opened with gooey consequence and shattered along long lines of his mind-beach as the tide drew back. His tempest stilled only slightly when the Pelajaran forum porter stepped in the clearing and joined the circle of seats. Ravno, captain of the high seas, occupied one seat.

  The porter stopped before his own seat, placed his second hand over his heart, and swept their faces with his eyes. The seven or so replied to his greeting in a scattered, ‘Cahaya.’

  ‘We are here to talk about historia. That’s an enormous sea turtle of a topic to chase around the Pacific. One that hides its head sometimes and leaves you wondering if it’s really a turtle at all or just some coral with sea cucumbers waving in the current.’ The porter’s stern, round face broke into a sunshiny smile. His stubble gathered in dark bunches that grooved from the shadows of h
is chin to his squinting eyes. ‘The turtle will let you know with a powerful snap! what she truly is if you wrongly try to harvest her extremities, but of course historia isn’t quite so obliging.’ Others in the circle chuckled with him and settled in for the first in a series of forums meant to explore the passage of time until the present. Where the group would start in time was anyone’s guess, soon to be revealed by the bubbly porter.

  Ravno hardly chuckled at all as he focused on this turtle man; the same man indeed who had stood opposite him in the boto and who was possibly switching with each of them right then, jumping into their brains to see what they were thinking and pulling them all together in a chorus of discussion and exploration. What if the porter switched with someone else and Ravno switched with the porter at the same time, would Ravno see through the porter’s eyes or through those through which the porter had switched?

  Ravno shook his head and tried to focus as the porter finally introduced himself.

  ‘…But please, call me Mr. Sunshine as others before you have done—Aldrik Minerva is too stiff for me. Now, let’s consider the ancient peoples and how among the few things they gave us,