The three brass plates inside Qiao Ming’s Folded brass star-compass were not flat discs. Each plate had been dished under a wooden mallet into a shallow, stereographic dome, engraved with the stereographic projection of an entire sky hemisphere. When he unfolded the instrument upon the red stone rim of the central well, the three plates nested together like nested copper scales, reflecting the single lantern flame in a triple curve of warm amber light.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu had laid out the sky-high indices from the first three chronicles. The columns of numbers, recorded in fine clerical script upon three different varieties of thick parchment, represented the angular map points of ninety-six main navigation stars as measured from the upper observatories of three successive universes.
“The pole star does not remain in the north,” Yan Zhiqiu said, her finger tracing the third column of Journal One. “In the First Epoch, the pivot of heaven was anchored to a brilliant blue star named the Crown of the Scribe. In the second, the pivot shifted south by forty-eight degrees to an iron dwarf called the Weeping Hearth. And in the third... The third universe had no fixed pole star at all. The entire stellar sphere rotated around an expanding void.”
