The Rossem Project

Return to Kronosia - Part 2

     Time passed slowly. Karog won every game they played until Gunther was sick of it and refused to play any more. "I should have brought a set of dice," he muttered grumpily as he put the Klann board back among his possessions. "I never knew a trog who could play well at dice."

     "I also wish you had brought your dice," replied the trog in amusement. "Watching you trying to throw dice in this gravity would make the time pass like nothing else."

     Gunther glared, and the trog chuckled under his breath, the loose, pale skin of his cheeks quivering with his amusement. Gunther turned to the window to watch the view and Karog pulled out his bryvol pad again. The sound of his busy, scratchy scribbling brought Gunther's attention back again and he looked to see the pad rapidly filling up with formulae and equations, as incomprehensible to him as the contents of a spellbook would have been to the trog.

     Karog hummed a tune to himself as he scribbled, a tune Gunther recognised as being from a song in praise of Caratheodory. The trog seemed to be in a state of religious fervour as his fingernail scratched its way back and forth across the pad, as if he was in direct communication with the deity he worshipped. Maybe he is, thought the wizard, and he leaned over to watch closer, fascinated despite himself. If, as the clerics of Caratheodory believed, all forms of mathematics and calculation were a form of prayer, then maybe what he was seeing really was a form of communication between a man and his God.

     Whether or not Karog really was communicating with Caratheodory, though, Gunther knew enough about this strange religion to know that the 'conversation' was almost surely one way. Caratheodory was the one God who, more than any other, truly seemed not to care what went on in the material universes. Even his followers and worshippers frequently felt that they were nothing more than a bothersome distraction to Him, but they prayed and worshipped nonetheless because, to them, the subtle manipulation of numbers had a purity and simplicity that they had failed to find in the outside world.

     It was a never ending source of wonder to them that such simple things as numbers were capable of such endlessly wonderful combinations and permutations, and that it could all be done by the application of just a few simple rules, and yet all that they had done so far, all the theorems and hypotheses that had so far been formulated and solved by clerics across the world over thousands of years, were as nothing compared to the staggeringly advanced mathematics performed by the God of Numbers Himself. They worshipped Him, therefore, for no better reason than sheer breathless admiration of His accomplishments, and although the God for the most part ignored their comparatively feeble efforts, every so often a priest would suddenly gain a particularly brilliant insight that would momentarily gain Caratheodory's attention.

     When that happened, the God would reward him by posing him a mathematical puzzle of his own; a morsel tossed to a particularly entertaining pet that would keep the cleric, and most likely his descendants for generations to come, busy for the rest of their lives. It was what every priest of Caratheodory lived for, and although it hadn't yet happened to Karog he thought it possible that it might happen during the course of this journey if he used these hours of free time to good use. Most of what he was doing was well explored territory, but there was always the possibility that he might run across a root of an equation that everyone else had considered trivial but which would turn out to open the door into a whole new field of discovery. It had happened before.

     Gunther watched him enviously. He'd brought a couple of books along, hoping they would keep his mind occupied during the long journey, but his nagging fears, fueled by the occasional creak and groan that kept coming from the weld between the two chambers, made it impossible for him to concentrate on them. He tried looking out at the planet spread out below instead, but that only reminded him of how high up they were, and getting higher by the second. He tried talking to Karog, but the trog was too involved with his mathematics and only grunted his replies. And Saturn, down on Tharia, was never in the mood for small talk even at the best of times.