Harvest Time

15 - Matches Made in the Search for Heaven

"This one," Emla shouted.

I picked up my candle and tried to locate Emla in the dark.

We were back in the city, examining the books in the library once more. Only Emla and I had made the trip this time. We'd left Elcanah back at the village trying to decode the rats and Harvester manuals, a task that seemed to occupy her most days.

I found Emla a couple of ceiling-high avenues along. We were two floors below the domed level and the entire floor was divided into alleyways of multiple shelves. Our own libraries in Hallandra were nothing more than a pale shadow of this place. This room alone might have once held more information than all of the libraries on Nervanna combined. All of the paper records were now dust, but more than a quarter of the contents had been etched on plastic. We had located three such alleyways dedicated to the storage of the grid patterns – there must have been thousands of them.

"Look," she said, holding one of the books up to compare it with a sheet she'd scratched the pattern on in the Harvester depot. I compared the sheet to the pattern in the book and could see the resemblance. All but the last of the bottom rows were identical.

Emla showed me where she'd pulled the book from.

"You pick one a bit further up and I'll pick another from further down," she instructed.

I did so and we compared the results.

"Yours is closer," she said, so we moved further in my direction until the first pages in two books next to each other seemed to be very close – only a few blocks on the last line differed.

"Okay," Emla said, "let's grab about ten more books, five either side of these two and take them all back up into the light."

"I think I've found Nervanna," I said, shortly later, staring at the sheet about two-thirds of the way through the book I was examining. Emla came across to my side of the table and, after double checking it, grinned.

"Yes," she said. "A perfect match."

She removed the page – something she had discovered could be done by pressing some tabs at each end of the spine – and laid it flat upon the table. Then she pulled out her metal pen and scratched 'Nervanna' at the top of the page, which reminded me of Elcanah doing the same when we had first come here. But, this time, it meant that we had found the entry in the books for our own world.

Emla grabbed a blank plastic sheet and scratched copies of all the symbols next to Nervanna's grid onto it. Then she copied in the values that, we were now sure, represented Nervanna's primary attributes such as gravity, air and temperature along with several that we had yet to determine.

"This symbol has a value of zero next to it – and it's underlined three times," Emla said.

"Could it represent something important?"

"Maybe – if we find other worlds where there is a non-zero value there, then it's possible they should be avoided."

I made a second copy of the symbols and we started the laborious task of sifting through the books for pages where the symbols and their values were identical or, at least, quite close.

It took days.

Twice a day, when it was cooler outside, we had to take breaks and go hunting in the forest for suitable food. Emla's skills with her bow and arrows were enough to enable us to live on meat, which we cooked on open fires, along with the various fruits, tubers and nuts that I foraged. We always hunted when the light was good to avoid the various places where slime had accumulated. The nights were spent sleeping up in the dome.

We had counted off more than fifteen of this world's short days when Emla asked, "Do you think we've found enough?"

On the table before us, there was a low pile of twenty-two sheets. Each of them had values that were very similar to Nervanna's. The most variation was that of gravity – some had a value as low as 0.5 while a couple went as high as 1.2. There were also three that had a value of exactly one. The sheet that we had identified as Nervanna had a value of 0.63, which tied in quite well with the rough estimate I had been told back at the village.

Sitting on its own was a single sheet upon which had been written, in large symbols, a word that Emla partially recognised, though she had not been certain. She had hunted through the library, combing several floors until she had found a whole book where those same symbols had been inscribed upon the spine.

After spending a while trying to understand even the tiniest portion of what the book was trying to tell us, she had come across a visual depiction of a world showing seas and continents.

"Earth," she said. "I think this whole book is about Earth. I've seen that picture before – on Nervanna. Maybe we can go all the way home to where humans first came from."

"Oh," I said, picking up the sheet with the grid and symbols, "but some of the values are way different to those of Nervanna."

"And, look, that one's been changed – I don't understand that at all."

She shrugged. "A lot of the different ones are those we haven't figured out yet. We need to take all this back to Elcanah. Maybe she will understand."

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