My father had established the workshop, as he called it, in one of the rooms of the palace. Theoretically it was open to the public, but few had interest. He had collected several lenses, rare and precious and made a microscope and even a non-portable telescope for studying the sky. He had measuring devices of every sort, many specially imported from Thensapolis itself. For me, it was a place of reason, of logic, of knowledge. We could measure balance, hardness, volume and measurements were not as open to debate as politics.
The silence of the heavy palace walls was broken only by the drip-drip of the water clock. I lit an oil lamp, illuminating the shelves on the other side of the room with the mineral samples, specimen jars, and instruments.
I cleared the workbench, putting away the half-finished map of the southern desert I had been working on and placed the two stones: the white dodecahedron and the black tridecahedron. They looked like paperweights. "You are real." I said to the stones. "And since you are real, you can be measured. Let's start with that."
I opened my journal to a fresh page, dipped my quill in the ink vial and wrote the data. If these stones were special, I would figure out how. I started with the physical geometry of the white stone. I got out the calipers and began measuring the sides. Pentagons. Perfect as I could measure them. No variance to record in the journal, well, even a null result required a note.
I got out the microscope and had to pull part of it off to scrutinize it. Every rock has a fine structure. Grains, flaws in the crystalline structure. Elias wrote that the ancients believed crystals were made of perfect arrangements of indivisible grains into structures that gave rise to chemistry, but it was a supposition that could not be proven definitively, still the model worked well enough. The way the light from the window and from the oil lamps interacted with the transparent mineral of the stones was remarkable. The microscope showed nothing. They looked the same as they did through it as they did with the naked eye, but worse due to the flaws in the lenses. I frowned. Every gem, no matter how beautifully carved, has flaws. With these stones I could find none.
A perfect dodecahedron is not common in nature. A pomegranate seed has this shape but quite warped. Bubbles in a bath have this shape but the interaction of one bubble with another of a different size makes their sides irregular too. This was perfect.
A tridecahedron is a chaotic shape. This one had ten faces that were equilateral triangles and four square faces. I had never done the math, but that seemed the simplest of all possible tridecahedrons. A certain elegance to that.
"Artificial?" I wrote in the journal. Yet nothing of the kind had ever been manufactured. What tools could produce anything like it? Just the talent of an unrivaled, and probably no longer living master. There was no sign of wear, yet everything else in the Qulomban wagon seemed like the journey had been long and the old woman hadn't handled them with great care. I noted all these facts in the journal. Just facts now, and hypotheses, no conclusions.
Density. I got out the balance scale and the carefully manufactured weight set. I placed the stones in the brass pan on one side of the scale and added weights until it was perfectly balanced. Impossible. It felt as heavy as stone, but the scale said it was light as wood, as if its weight had vanished the moment it left my hand. We needed to know density.
I took one of our precious clear glass beakers, imported many years ago by my father at great cost, like the other instruments, from the Scholarchy of Thensapolis, and filled it with water to a graduation line. I saw what it rose to, did the subtraction using our abacus then did the division by weight. About the same as a heavy wood, far less dense than any stone aside from the varieties of volcanic ones that floated, or nearly so. The microscope had revealed no porosity at all.
My heart hammered in protest. "No!" They were rocks, just rocks, but like no other rocks I had ever seen. Clearly cut into very specific geometric shapes. But there was no material that they matched, no stone cutter could make jewels so perfect, certainly none so large and flawless.
I grabbed an ordinary iron awl. These were priceless artifacts. I was about to damage them and it hurt my heart to do so. I hesitated. But we cannot fear the truth. Knowledge was most important. I took the awl and examined the white stone. There was no spot on its perfect surface where a scratch would not show. I took the awl and drew it aggressively across the surface of one face of the white stone. The screech set my teeth on edge.
A streak of iron dust was left, I wiped it off with my thumb. The stone was unblemished, though the same could not be said for the awl. I tried to gouge harder. Still nothing. Same with the black stone. I took a piece of quartz. No scratch was possible. I wrote the test results in the journal.
I wanted to scream that it was an anomaly, to prove it to my parents. But it was not. Harder minerals existed to test with, diamond, topaz, corundum, but we didn't have them. All the family jewels had been sold to pay back tribute to the Empire. My parents refused luxury to show respect for ordinary people, even avoiding gems for research purposes.
Next I checked for magnetism. I brought my strongest lodestone. It hung to the black stone on the finest thread we had. Nothing. It didn't spin. Magnetically inert.
I spent the next four hours waging a war against the stones. I held them up to the light to check for refraction. None. Reflection: None. The way they interacted with the light was strange. It appeared to be glowing, but when the sun set, I hid the oil lamp and it gave off no light.
I heated the black stone over the lamp to see if color change was visible. Nothing. Cooling rate was the same as stone. I tasted it, as inert as glass.
I reviewed my journal. Everything had been a failure. No useful data. Nothing objective that couldn't be explained.
I dropped the quill, splattering ink across the page. I had failed. My father was right. I slumped in the chair. The stones mocked me with their perfection. The City needed a Prince, not a geologist. I had claimed that the stones were important but I had brought home rocks that were not more useful than gravel for defending the city.
The old woman was dying. The mind breaks when the body fails. Oxygen deprivation, shock, pain. She was probably hallucinating. She had spoken in some obscure tongue that was probably just gibberish. I was desperate for these stones to be something special and I had deceived myself. Fool. Wise people endeavor to see clearly, not blinded by their own desire to feel special.
As gems, could I sell them? They were interesting, but not exactly pretty. They wouldn't fetch enough. The money would be spent, my city would fail, and our people and families would starve to death or end up as Spartovan slaves trying to escape.
I looked at the map on the wall, all the trade routes that came to our city. I wondered just where the caravans had disappeared on their way. I thought of the ledger listing them out in the marketplace. The boys who wanted to be working but who were now eating bread from the palace. This was the reality we were facing. The city was dying and I sat here playing with rocks.
My hand tightened on the white stone. I would throw them both in the rubbish heap and never think about them again.
But the feeling of the stone in my hand was strange. The way the heat transferred into my hand. It should have been cool. The whole room was cool. It vibrated with energy. I could feel it in my bones.
I closed my eyes and heard the old woman muttering her gibberish incantation over the drip drop of the water clock. "Aiy hehr-biy bii-qwee"
The stones couldn't be nothing. The woman didn't seem to be hallucinating; she was too coherent. She used my name. She knew my father's name. The stones were obviously not ordinary. The immunity to the damage that I tried to inflict on them. The way they interacted with the light. The perfection in the manufacture.
My parents had made Elias seem so real that I could hear his voice in my head. "What we know is a single grain of sand. What we don't know is the desert." Which volume had he written this in? I had read them all, but I couldn't remember all of the old man's wisdom.
"My data on you is incomplete." I said to the stones. "If my instruments cannot figure out what you are, then the instruments are the weak link in the chain. You cannot measure the stars with a ruler. Not all that can be measured matters and not all that matters can be measured."
I didn't have proof. No measurement would back me up. If I went back to my father, I would be armed only with a feeling. He would look at me with exhausted eyes and again tell me to be a Prince. But being a Prince isn't about following orders like the ancient automata in Elias' myths, it is about doing what is necessary for the good of the city. Even if the King couldn't see it yet.
I put out the lamps and stepped out into the darkness of the palace. All good theories start with an anomaly, not measurements. A scholar doesn't abandon his hypothesis just because his first experiment doesn't yield the expected results. He does another experiment.
It was a frightful thing to do, going to a man of logic with just intuition, but it was time to go back to see the King of Heliqar.