Page 29 of A Thousand Painted Hours

We stopped en mass, and as I squatted to take off my shoes, I looked at their feet to see why they weren’t struggling. Both of them wore soft leather slippers. Gurdaya said, “I shall bring you a pair tomorrow.”

We climbed and climbed and climbed—three stories? Four?—until we reached a short corridor that opened onto a flat roof surrounded by a stone wall. We tumbled into the small area, where a telescope was set up with a pair of chairs and a small table.

Tanveer flung out his arms as if he’d prepared the sky himself. “Look!”

The sky was enormous here, stretching horizon to horizon in a vast blackness that made me vaguely dizzy. An ocean of stars filled the canvas, bright and sharp, small and red, scatters and clusters and knots, some in swirls of haze, some in piercing points shining alone. I lifted my hands to my face, turning in a circle to look in all directions. “Oh!”

Tanveer stood close beside me. “Now think,” he said quietly. “There is nothing above us at all, only air and sky. Nothing between us and that star, right there. If we had a vehicle, we could simply fly there.”

My sense of wonder deepened. “What would we find, do you think?”

Gurdaya joined us. “Perhaps there is a place where elephants rule, and humans are made beasts of burden.” She was as fond of elephants as Tanveer was of tigers and cats.

“What could humans do for elephants?” he asked. “I do not see how we would be useful to them.”

“Maybe they would have no use for us,” she allowed, “but I would very much like to see a world where they reigned.”

“Mmm.” I peered into the river of the Milky Way. “What if there were roads between worlds, and people moved between the planets the way we move from country to country?”

“On sky ships!” Tanveer exclaimed.

“I would find a planet where precious jewels were like rocks on the beach,” Gurdaya said, and then lowered her chin to laugh and give me a wide-eyed grin. “Imagine that! A beach littered with rubies and emeralds!”

I had never seen a true beach, but imagined the shores of Nainital lake glinting with colored gemstones. “That would be beautiful.” I wondered if I could paint the vision for her.

“You have so many jewels already,” Tanveer said. “Why do you need more?”

“I don’tneedthem,” she retorted. “We are imagining what might be beautiful.”

“What would you want to find, Tanveer?” I asked.

He folded his arms, gazing off toward the horizon. “I am not sure. The places would not be the same as our world, would they? Maybe some planets have more than one sun or ten moons.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “How about you?”

In that little twinkle, I felt something living reach out and whisper over my cheek. As if he’d stepped closer, I was aware again of the fragrance of him, the faint sandalwood scent of soap, the oil he used in his hair. And something more, something deeper. For a moment, I closed my eyes, letting the pleasantness fill me, and imagined an evening sky with ten moons. “Do you think the moons would all rise at the same time? Or in a row?”

“In an arch, some brighter than others, perhaps.”

An invisible hand in my mind painted this vision. “Maybe the sky is not so blue, but some other color.”

“Pink!” Gurdaya said. “Yellow!”

I laughed. “That sounds beautiful.”

“It isn’t only about beauty, though,” Tanveer said. “What sort of people would live in those worlds? Do you remember when we read Flammarion? He speculated there could be many societies.”

It was one of my favorites of the books he’d challenged me to read, full of speculation on the flexibility of time, and the soul’s travels away from earth. Tanveer had liked the astronomy portions more, but we talked about it for weeks. “It seems logical,” I said. “There are so many societies on our world.”

Tanveer nodded. “If you could travel between worlds, there would likely be treaties. And almost certainly conquerors.”

“Why, though? Why not imagine cooperation, and peace? Maybe war gets left behind.”

“I have difficulty imagining how that would happen.”

I gave a little huff. “Perhaps it isn’t a terribly efficient way to solve conflict, with blood and death and destruction.”

He tucked his hands behind his back and turned my way. “And what instead?”

“How do humans who don’t want to kill each other navigate problems? We do not kill each other at the first disagreement, do we? Our fathers are not in agreement over politics, but they sit down to discuss answers to their problems and conflicts.”