Ysol did not touch the notebook. She could not; she was light. But she looked at it lying closed on the console below her, and then she looked at Mara, and she began to talk.
“You want to know about the sign,” she said. “Then you’ll have to know what the sign is for. Sit down. This is not short.”
There was nowhere to sit. Mara stayed standing at the table with her pencil over Eshel’s survey. Sera stayed by the door. Eshel sat down on the floor, cross-legged, against the console’s base, with his slate on his knee. Anwen leaned on the table’s far end with her arms folded, and Doss stayed by the cable, one hand on it as if it might wander.
“The Founders found a tear,” Ysol said.
She said it plainly, the way Cant read a figure.
“Not a metaphor. A tear in physical space. A place where the ordinary shape of things had come apart, and something behind it was pressing through. Energy. A great deal of it. More every year. The region you saw on the Custodian’s model, the violet, the folded thing inside the lattice: that is what was behind the tear. The Founders built the lattice to hold it. And then, because the pressure kept growing, they built the lamps.”
