The first lens came out of the fire the colour of weak tea and with a bubble in it the size of a lentil.
"It's no good," said Ezra the glassmaker.
"It's very good," said John. "It's just no good for this."
Ezra was a thin man of fifty with burn scars to the elbow, from a family of Jewish glassmakers in the Delta quarter who had been making cups and bottles and cheap beads for Alexandria for six generations, and who had, in the last three weeks, been asked by the queen's foreigner to make something that wasn't a cup, a bottle or a bead. A disc of glass as clear as water, as thick as a thumb at the middle and thin as a fingernail at the edge, and so smooth on both faces that you couldn't feel the curve with your eyes shut.
"Why?" Ezra had said, the first day.
"So the queen can see the stars closer."
Ezra had looked at him with the polite face of a man who has been asked by a lunatic to make a ladder to the moon, and has decided that the lunatic is paying well.
They made fourteen. The fourteenth was clear. John ground it himself for nine days in the courtyard of Ezra's workshop with emery and water and a cast-iron tool Ezra's son had beaten out to a pattern, and then polished it for three more with rouge on a pad of felt, until his shoulders were ruined and his fingers were stained red to the knuckle.
The eyepiece was easier. It was smaller.
* * *
Those weeks were the best he had in Egypt, and he knew it while they were happening, which almost never happens.
The water lifts were going up along the canals by fifties now. The timber came down from Syria in Cleopatra's ships, under Caesar's truce. The print shop had moved out of the kitchens into a warehouse and was cutting the first books, small ones, a primer for scribes' children in Greek and Egyptian side by side, five hundred copies, that sold out in the agora in a morning. He'd been out along the Canopic road with Achillas's engineers, showing them how to lay a road on a bed of broken stone with a camber for the rain, like the roads behind the lines at Arras, and Achillas had grumbled for a mile and then started measuring the camber himself.
In the shipyards he'd drawn them a new kind of hull. Nothing magical. Just a better shape, from a book about clipper ships he'd read at thirteen, and a stern rudder on a hinge instead of the steering oars, which the shipwrights had argued about for a week and then copied onto everything.
And in the evenings he went to the palace roof with Cleopatra, and they talked.
Not as queen and adviser. That was in the mornings, in the study, with Charmion and the rolls and the steward. In the evenings it was something else, though neither of them said what. She'd come up after the last audience in plain linen with her hair down and her feet bare on the warm stone, carrying a jug of watered wine and two cups, and sit on the parapet with her knees up, and ask him things.
Not the future, mostly. Lisa had wanted the future. Cleopatra wanted how.
"How does it work? Your trick. Not what it does. How."
"I don't know."
"You're a scholar. You must have an idea."
"I've got several. They contradict each other." He tried to explain resonance to her, Hartley's coil, the frequencies, a wave and the shape of a wave, using the cups and the jug and his hands. She followed it far further than he'd expected. She stopped him with questions that made him stop and think, and twice she asked one he couldn't answer at all.
"So you don't really know what you are," she said.
"No."
"Neither do I." She drank. "I'm supposed to be a god, you know. Isis on earth. The priests say it and the people believe it. And I sit on that throne with the cobra on my head, and I think about the price of barley." She laughed, quietly. "We'd make a pair of very bad gods."
* * *
He set it up in the theatre.
Not the great theatre of the city, but the small one inside the palace walls, a half circle of white marble seats facing out to the harbour, where the queen's father had had flute players perform for his guests. The stage faced north. There was nothing between it and the sky.
The tube was cedar, made by the shipwrights, a hand's breadth across and as long as a man, lined with black felt inside and mounted on a cradle of bronze that could swing up and down and round. Ezra's lens was at the top end in a brass ring. The eyepiece at the bottom. It had taken John six nights alone up here, the last week, to get the two in line and the focus right, and on the sixth night he'd looked through it at the moon and sat down on the marble for a long time.
He'd told her to come at the third hour of night. He'd told her nothing else.
She came alone, without Charmion, without a lamp. He heard her bare feet on the steps.
"You said it was a surprise," she said. "I've had Achillas tell me about your roads all afternoon. If it's another road I'll have you thrown in the harbour."
"It's not a road."
He'd already found Jupiter. It was low over the sea in the east, the brightest thing in the sky after the moon, a hard yellow-white point. He'd put it in the middle of the lens and locked the cradle.
"Put your eye here," he said. "Don't touch the tube. Close the other eye."
She bent to the eyepiece. He watched her. He'd thought about this moment for a month, in Ezra's courtyard with emery to the elbow, and he still wasn't ready for her face.
For a long while she didn't move at all.
"It's a ball," she said at last. Very quietly. "Not a star. A ball. Like a pearl." A pause. "There are stripes on it. Brown stripes."
"Yes."
"And there are..." She stopped. He heard her breathe in. "There are little stars beside it. In a line. One, two, three. Four." She straightened up suddenly and looked at him with her eyes wide, then bent back to the lens as if afraid it would go away. "They weren't there. With my eyes they're not there. What are they?"
"Moons," said John. "Jupiter has moons. Like ours. Those four go round it, the way ours goes round us. If you look tomorrow night, they'll have moved."
She was silent again. Then she said, "Show me something else."
He showed her the moon. The craters, the mountains with their long black shadows, the flat grey seas. He showed her the Pleiades, the seven sisters, and how through the lens they were not seven but forty. He swung the tube to the Milky Way and let her see that the cloud was made of stars, more stars than there were grains of wheat in all the granaries of Alexandria. He talked, a little, about what they were. Suns. Far away. Some with worlds of their own.
He stopped talking when he realised she was crying.
She wasn't making any sound. She was standing by the tube with her face turned up to the real sky, the naked one, and the tears were just running.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean..."
"Be quiet," said Cleopatra. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "You idiot. You stupid man." She laughed, and it came out broken. "Do you know how long I've been the most important thing in the world? Since I was eighteen. Every priest in Egypt has told me so every day. And you put a stick to my eye and show me that I'm standing on a grain of sand in a heap of sand that goes on for ever." She turned and looked at him in the starlight. "Do you know what a gift that is? Nobody's ever given me anything that made me smaller."
He couldn't say anything.
She came across the marble to him, barefoot, and stopped very close, and put her hand flat on his chest, the way Lisa had on the stair. He waited for the Branches.
They didn't come.
Or they came, but faintly, like a drawing in pencil that someone had rubbed half out. He could see shapes in it, rooms, years, a city, but nothing clear. It was the first time he'd touched her since he'd started changing things, he realised. Since the granaries. Since the canal and the lifts and the roads and the Library and Caesar. All of it a stone thrown into her water, and the rings spreading out and fogging everything.
He couldn't see what would happen to her.
He'd thought that would frighten him. Standing there with her hand on his chest, it was the most restful thing he'd ever felt.
"You've gone somewhere," she said. "Behind your eyes."
"I can't see your future."
"Good," said Cleopatra, and kissed him.
* * *
He woke at dawn in a room he didn't know, with grey light on a painted ceiling of blue lotuses, and her asleep with her face in his shoulder and her hair everywhere.
He lay very still for a long time so as not to wake her, and thought about nothing at all.
Then he thought about Lisa, and about the lodger in him that was her hurt, which he'd carried from Florence and felt sometimes at night like a stone in a shoe. He thought about Moira's tired face in the gully. In thirty branches you go to Egypt and make it into something it never was. He thought about his own face in the bronze, and what the priests said about it in the temple of Serapis when they thought no one was listening.
I'm not going to be able to leave, he thought. Not for years. It didn't feel like a thought. It felt like a fact he'd checked.
Cleopatra said, without opening her eyes, "Stop thinking. You're so loud."
* * *
It was Charmion who came at the second hour, knocking at the queen's door and then not waiting, with her tall face set and a wax tablet in her hand.
She looked at the two of them, and at the room, and her expression didn't change by a hair.
"Majesty," she said. "Achillas is in the study. You'll want to come now."
"What's happened?"
"The grain fleet for Rome. The forty ships that sailed for Ostia eight days ago." Charmion held out the tablet. "Off the coast of Africa. Pompey's men came out of the harbour at Carthage, the old one, the ruins. They've built a fort there. They had twenty warships. They burned twenty-six of ours and took the rest." She swallowed. "There's a letter. From the Pompeian admiral. He says Egypt chose Caesar, so Egypt starves with Caesar. And that he'll do the same to every grain ship that leaves this harbour, until there's a queen in Alexandria who knows her friends."