"Rhys Hughes - The Folded Page" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Rhys)

drawn up afterwards. But a serene retirement was not to be his, for a neighbouring lord had
viewed this paper citadel with jealous eyes and now decided to attack it with steel and fire.

"The battle raged all day. Flames licked the lofty walls but a sudden shower extinguished
them. Arrows cut notches in the sheer sides, swords slashed them. The old lord repelled the
invaders but the strain proved too much for him. He collapsed and died within the week. The
castle was abandoned and fell into ruin. Nobody knew what to do with the folded page and so
it was left where it was. It sagged in the rains and dried stiffly in the sun.

"One day an enterprising merchant came to collect it. The descendants of the lord had
apparently sold it to him for a trifling sum. He carted it down to the northern shore of the
Inland Sea. There he began the task of unfolding it. Suspended on high poles the original page
exactly covered the island dotted expanse of water. And now fishermen and other sailors
might travel between Shikoku, Kyushu and Honshu in the shade during the hot summer
months.

"But there were unforeseen consequences. When you fold a piece of paper and then cut out
little pieces along the crease, what do you get when you unfold it? A pattern of holes! The
more folds and the more irregular the cuts, the more complex the pattern. The steel and fire
of the attackers all those years earlier had created an amazing pattern in this unfolded sheet.
But in fact the fishermen and other sailors were able to use it as an aid to navigation from
island to island.

"During the day, the sun shone through the holes in the paper sky and formed new
constellations with distinctive characters. Men on ships have always looked at the stars to
determine direction. But these artificial constellations were deceitful and many sailors arrived
at the wrong destination or failed to arrive at all. The problem was that the same groups of
stars appeared in different parts of the sky. Identical constellations were found in the north,
south, east and west!

"When you fold a page many times, cut into it along the edges and then unfold it, the
resulting pattern is a regular whole no matter how irregular it may seem in parts. The individual
constellations that a sailor might use to guide him to Shodo or Setoda were mirrored or
duplicated in other directions and he often ended up in Omi or Yashiro by mistake. Business
suffered as a result and the merchant who bought the folded page was reviled. He had
provided a defective sky.

"Anything can fall into a state of disrepair, even the heavens! Birds pecked at the page,
storms lashed it. Within a few generations it hung in tatters and eventually it was gone
completely. Not a shred of evidence remains to prove it was ever really there. The names of
the lord and the merchant have been forgotten. Yet nobody has ever duplicated the feat of
folding a page so many times. Eight has once again become the limit, eight times only. That is
the truth."

Aguri stopped speaking and gazed hopefully at Mikiko.

Then he added, "What do you think of that?"

"I don't like it," said Mikiko without hesitation. "I expected something better. It won't do, I'm
afraid. You've failed the test."