Harvest Time

12 - Signs of New Worlds

"Can you read this stuff?" Emla asked of Elcanah. "I recognise a few numbers but not a lot else."

We were sitting around a table upon which were spread several of the plastic books. Each book was filled with patterns in a grid formation. I didn't need telling that each grid consisted of nineteen rows each made up of either thirty-seven or forty-one blocks, with some blocks filled in and others empty. But, alongside each grid, there was writing and I understood not a single word of it, though many of the symbols that made up each word were similar to those we used back on Nervanna. If any of the words had a meaning, then it was lost on me.

Elcanah had explained that, when she'd first come across the pattern books, the layout of the grid had been familiar to her, though she couldn't remember where from.

"I had obviously seen them in the Harvester depot when I first came here. But I'd forgotten that in the intervening years. Unlike you, Emla, I never went back inside the depot, even though Dakka and I got close and peered through the windows once."

"But what does the writing mean?" Emla asked.

"There's a number at the top..."

"Yes, it changes by one on each page."

"Correct. As for the rest, I think it's just a list of things," Elcanah said.

"What things?"

"This word means air, I think. That one means bad things."

"Bad? In what way?"

"That I cannot fully answer, but I have come across it before in their books but, other than negative connotations, I could never fully translate it. I can see that their language and ours have common roots, but each of them has strayed far from that root over time. Possibly, this set of symbols means 'gravity' and there is a numeric value beside it that, on some sheets, is a fractional value of less than one, while other sheets, such as this one, have a value of more than one."

"Why do only the bottom rows of the pattern change?" I asked.

The others glanced momentarily at me and then back at the patterns.

"He's right," Elcanah said. "The rows in the top half are the same in all cases."

"They're not the same at the depot," Emla said. "There, the bottom lights are all the same and only the top rows change."

"Are these upside down?" I said.

"No, it's only the top rows that have thirty-seven lights."

"I've noticed something else," Elcanah said. "Each pattern differs from the previous one by only a few blocks on the last row. It's like we're looking at a binary sequence."

"What's binary?" I asked, noticing that Emla had also frowned at that word.

"A simple number system based on only two states – zero and one, or true and false."

I was none-the-wiser but Emla nodded as if she understood.

"If each sheet is showing different values for air and gravity then these must be the different worlds they discovered," Emla said.

"Possibly," Elcanah agreed, nodding her head.

"In that case," Emla continued, "it explains why all the bottom row patterns in the Harvester depot are all the same."

"Ah, I see where you're going," Elcanah said.

I frowned.

"They all go to Nervanna," Emla explained, seeing the expression on my face. "I wonder. Does that mean that the top patterns are all locations on Nervanna itself?"