Nation

gods.
    In his memory he could hear the spirit of Ataba, roaring, “That doesn’t mean a thing, demon boy! The gods themselves guided their tools.” And Mau thought, Well, it means something to me. Yes, it means a lot.
    “Your land was a big place, as big as Crete, I think,” said the ghost girl behind him. “I’ll show you Crete on the map later. Your people went everywhere! Mostly Africa and China and the middle Americas, and you know what? I think Jon Croll’s theory about the ice sheets is right! I went to his lecture at the Royal Society. That’s why so much of Europe and North America is just not there—er, not because he gave his lecture, I mean, but because it was covered in ice! Do you know what ice is? Oh. Well, it’s when water goes very cold until it becomes like crystal. Anyway, the other end of the world was a snowball, but down here it was still warm, and you did amazing things!”
    “Ice,” murmured Mau. He felt as if he was on an unfamiliar sea, with no map and no familiar smells, while her voice washed over him. The globe was a kind of map, like the Judy ’s charts. Where his island was now, where all the islands in the chain had been, it showed a mighty land, made of gold. People from here had sailed everywhere. And then…something had happened. The gods got angry, as Ataba had said, or as the ghost girl said, the crystal world of the trousermen melted. It meant the same thing. The sea rose.
    If he closed his eyes, he could see the white buildings under the sea. Had it come in a rush, that great wave? Did the land shake and the mountains catch fire? It must have been sudden, because the water rose and the land became a pattern of islands, and the world changed.
    “When the world was otherwise,” he whispered.
    He sat down on the edge of what everyone was calling the god pool. His mind was too full of thoughts; he needed a bigger head. The…ancestors had brought the milk stone here and used it to make steps and wall carvings and gods, perhaps all out of the same piece of stone. And there was the broken statue of Imo. His head was probably in the depths of the pool. Imo had fallen, and so had the world.
    Something had been returned. The Nation had been old, older than the reef, she was saying. The people of the Nation had sailed beyond the seas they knew, under unfamiliar stars.
    He looked up and saw unfamiliar stars. The light shifted as groups of people moved around the hall. The roof glittered, just like statues. They were made of glass, she’d said. They looked like stars in the night sky, but they were not his stars. They were crystal stars, stars of a different sky.
    “I want the right people to see this,” said Daphne behind him.
    “The right people are seeing it,” said Mau.
    After a few moments’ silence he heard the girl say, “I’m sorry. I meant that there are learned men in the Royal Society who could tell us what it means.”
    “Are they priests?” asked Mau suspiciously.
    “No. Very much no! In fact some of them don’t get on with priests at all . But they search for answers.”
    “Good. Send them here. But I know what this place means. My ancestors wanted to tell us that they were here—that’s what it means,” said Mau. He could feel the tears welling up, but what was propelling them was a fierce, burning pride. “Send your wise trousermen,” he said, trying not to let his voice shake, “and we will welcome the brothers who traveled to the other end of the world, and came back at last to the place they had left behind. I am not stupid, ghost girl. If we sailed to those places long ago, wouldn’t we have settled there? And when your learned men come here, we will say to them: The world is a globe—the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.”
    He could barely see Daphne in the gloom, but when she spoke her voice was shaking. “I will tell you something even more amazing,” she said. “All around the world people have carved stones into gods. All around the world. And all around the world people have said that the planets are gods, as well. But your ancestors knew things that nobody else knew. Mau, the god of Air has four little figures sitting on his shoulders. They are his sons, yes? They raced around their father to see which of them would court the woman who lives in the Moon? It’s in the beer song.”
    “And what do you want to tell me about them?”
    “We call the Air planet Jupiter. Jupiter has four moons that race around it.