Ruler of the Cosmos
Ines Varga had worked in the basement of the City Planning Office of Port Hollis for nineteen years, and in all that time, she had never once been promoted, praised, or invited to the office summer picnic. She did not mind. She liked the basement. It was quiet, and it had a good drafting table.
She was the last person in the department who still drew by hand. Everyone else used computers now. But Ines had a slanted oak drafting board, a steel compass, a set of rulers worn smooth at the edges, and a box of pencils she sharpened every morning with a small brass sharpener: graphite gray, and one red, for corrections. She drew the city. Water mains and sewer lines. Bridges and zoning maps. Long, fine, perfectly measured lines on cream-colored paper, every one exactly where it ought to be.
She was forty-one. She lived alone in a small apartment on the eleventh floor of an old building at the edge of downtown, with a window that looked out over the skyline and, beyond it, the sky. She had no cat, because the building did not allow cats. She had a fern, which she had named Gerald.
The only unusual thing about Ines Varga was that she could not stand a mistake.
A crooked picture frame in a doctor’s waiting room. A misspelled word on a restaurant menu. A map in the subway station that put the library two blocks too far north. She noticed them all, and she could not rest until they were fixed. She carried a red pencil in her coat pocket for exactly this reason. Her coworkers thought it was strange. Her mother had thought it was strange. Ines thought it was simply the right thing to do. If a line is wrong, you fix the line.
On a Saturday in early October, she went to the flea market down by the river, as she did most Saturdays, looking for old drafting tools. In the very back corner, at a table run by a tiny, wrinkled old man with no teeth and one cloudy eye, she found the chart.
It was rolled up in a cracked leather tube, tucked behind a box of rusty keys. When she unrolled it, she forgot to breathe.
It was a star chart. The most beautiful one she had ever seen. Drawn by hand, in black ink and red, on paper so old it was soft as cloth and stained the color of weak tea. Circles within circles, planets and moons, long sweeping orbits traced with a compass. Fine measuring lines ran across it in every direction, marked with tiny notations in an alphabet she did not recognize. In the corners, faint and ghostly, someone had sketched cities: towers and spires rising like the skyline outside her own window.
“How much?” she asked.
The old man looked at her for a long moment with his one good eye.
“For you?” he said. “A dollar.”
She gave him a dollar. He took it with a strange, satisfied little smile, as if a very long errand had finally been run. When she turned back a moment later to ask where the chart had come from, his table was empty. Just a bare board and a box of rusty keys. She assumed he had gone for coffee.
She took the chart home and pinned it to her drafting board, and that night she could not sleep.
This was not unusual. Ines often lay awake. But tonight something kept nagging at her, the way a crooked picture frame nags. At two in the morning she gave up, made a cup of tea, and sat down at the drafting board with the lamp on, looking at the chart.
And then she saw it.
In the lower left corner, there was a small red planet, with a single gray moon. The moon’s orbit was drawn as a long, thin ellipse around it. But the ellipse was wrong. Not badly. Just a hair. The center point was off by a fraction of a millimeter, so the curve bulged slightly on one side, swinging the moon too close to its planet at one end and too far away at the other.
Anyone else would have missed it. Ines could not stop looking at it.
She told herself it was none of her business. It was an antique. A decoration. Probably no one had looked at it closely in a hundred years.
She lasted eleven minutes.
Then she took her steel compass out of its case and her red pencil out of its box. She measured. She found the true center. She set the point of the compass down, very lightly, on the old paper, and with one slow, careful sweep of her hand, she drew the orbit again, correctly, in a thin clean line of red.
The moment the circle closed, the lamp on her desk flickered.
Outside her window, the whole skyline of Port Hollis went dark for a single heartbeat, every tower, every window, every streetlight. Then it all came back on.
And somewhere very far away, farther away than anyone on Earth had ever imagined, a small gray moon that had wobbled in its orbit for nine thousand years settled gently into a perfect circle. On the red planet below it, the great tides that had drowned its coasts every season for ninety centuries grew quiet. Two ancient peoples on opposite shores of its one great ocean, who had fought over the high ground for as long as anyone could remember, looked out at the calm water and slowly, wonderingly, lowered their weapons.
In the drafting room of the eleventh-floor apartment, Ines Varga looked at her neat red line with deep satisfaction, finished her tea, and went to bed.
She slept better than she had in years.
She had no idea that, according to a law older than the stars, she had just become Ruler of the Cosmos.
She found out at eight o’clock the next morning, when she walked into her living room in her bathrobe and found three strangers kneeling on her rug.
The first was a column of soft white light, roughly the height of a man, that hummed faintly like a refrigerator. The second was a very tall woman whose skin was gray and pitted like the surface of the moon, wearing a robe that seemed to be made of slowly turning stars. The third was a small, perfectly round orange creature, about the size of a beach ball, that floated a few inches above the carpet and was trembling with what looked like nerves.
All three of them had their foreheads pressed to the floor. Or, in the case of the light, its general top end.
In her surprise, Ines said the only thing she could think of.
“Please don’t kneel on the rug. I just had it cleaned.”
The three beings scrambled to their feet at once.
“Forgive us, Majesty,” said the moon-skinned woman. Her voice was low and echoing, like a voice at the bottom of a well. “I am Selene of the Outer Spheres, First Speaker of the Conclave. This is the Herald of the Ninth Light. And this,”she gestured at the orange sphere, which bobbed in a little bow, “is Pim. He is new.”
“Hello,” squeaked Pim. “I love your fern.”
“Thank you. His name is Gerald.” Ines pulled her bathrobe tighter. “I’m sorry. Did you call me Majesty?”
Selene pointed one long gray finger past her, toward the drafting board, where the old star chart still hung, with a thin red circle drawn neatly around a tiny red planet.
“You corrected the Draft,” she said.
And she explained.
Long ago, before there were stars, there was the Architect. Nobody knew what the Architect had been. A god, a mind, a law of nature with a sense of humor. But the Architect had drawn the cosmos, every galaxy and sun and orbit, on a single great chart. The First Draft. And when it was finished, the Architect had made one small, deliberate mistake, and left it there, and written a single law in the margin.
Whoever corrects my error shall hold the pen. And the pen holds all.
Then the Architect had vanished. And the cosmos had been without a ruler ever since.
“For nine thousand years,” said Selene, “the greatest powers in the universe have searched for the First Draft. Emperors. Sorcerers. Warlords with fleets that could swallow suns. They all wanted to find it, to fix the error, and to rule.”She paused. “The Archivist kept it hidden from all of them. He was charged with giving it only to one who would correct the flaw for no reason at all except that it was wrong.”
Ines thought of the tiny, wrinkled old man at the flea market, with his one good eye and his strange satisfied smile.
“A dollar,” she said faintly. “He charged me a dollar.”
“He has been waiting a very long time to retire,” said the Herald of the Ninth Light, in a voice like a chime.
“But I didn’t want to rule anything,” said Ines. “I just couldn’t sleep. The center point was off.”
“Yes,” said Selene, and for the first time she smiled. “That is exactly why it worked.”
There was a sudden, enormous crash from the hallway.
The front door of the apartment flew off its hinges. Into the doorway, ducking low to fit under the frame, stepped a huge armored figure, seven feet tall, in plates of black iron etched with burning red runes. A cape of what appeared to be living shadow swirled around his shoulders. His helmet was crowned with spikes. Behind him, out in the eleventh-floor hallway, Ines could see Mrs. Kowalski from 11C peeking out of her door in her hair curlers, with her mouth hanging open.
“KAVROS,” boomed the figure, “THE UNENDING!”
“Oh dear,” said Pim, and hid behind Gerald.
“Conqueror of the Western Reaches,” rumbled the armored giant. “Devourer of Worlds. For three thousand years I have hunted the First Draft across the cosmos. I have tracked it to this miserable little planet. And I have come to claim it, and the throne of all creation with it!” He raised one enormous gauntleted fist. “WHERE IS IT?”
Everyone in the room looked at the drafting board.
Kavros the Unending followed their gaze. He saw the chart. He saw the small red planet, and the neat, thin, perfect red circle around it. He went very still.
There was a long, terrible silence.
“When,” he said, in a much smaller voice, “was that done?”
“About two fifteen this morning,” said Ines. “I had insomnia.”
Kavros the Unending, Conqueror of the Western Reaches, Devourer of Worlds, stood frozen in the doorway of a small eleventh-floor apartment. Then, slowly, with a grinding of iron joints and an air of profound and bitter disappointment, he got down on one knee.
“Majesty,” he said, through his teeth.
“You broke my door,” said Ines.
“…I will fix your door, Majesty.”
“Thank you. And please apologize to Mrs. Kowalski.”
He went to apologize to Mrs. Kowalski.
It took the rest of the morning to sort things out. There were, it turned out, a great many questions. Did she wish to move to the Crystal Throne at the center of the galaxy? She did not. Did she wish to dissolve the Conclave, or declare war on the Western Reaches, or have her face carved on a moon? No, no, and absolutely not.
“What do you wish, then, Majesty?” Selene asked at last, a little desperately.
Ines thought about it. Then she went to the drafting board and looked at the First Draft for a long time. And she saw, now that she knew what to look for, a great many small things that were not quite right. An orbit a hair too wide in one corner. A star drawn slightly off its line in another. A comet’s path that crossed a planet’s at a careless angle.
None of them were the Architect’s deliberate error. They were just nine thousand years of nobody paying attention.
“I wish,” she said, “to keep my job. I like my job. I’ll do this in the evenings, and on weekends.” She picked up her red pencil and turned it over in her fingers. “And my first decree is that nobody conquers anybody. It makes a terrible mess of the paperwork.”
Selene bowed so low that her robe of stars swept the floor.
On Monday morning, Ines Varga went to work in the basement of the City Planning Office of Port Hollis, exactly as she always did. She sharpened her pencils. She drew water mains and sewer lines. At eleven o’clock her supervisor, Mr. Dunleavy, came by and complained that she was using far too much red pencil on her corrections, and that it was making the drawings look messy.
“Some lines,” Ines said mildly, “matter more than they look.”
Mr. Dunleavy did not understand what she meant. He went back upstairs.
That night, she sat at the drafting board in her eleventh-floor apartment, with the lamp on and a cup of tea at her elbow and Gerald on the windowsill. Outside, the skyline of Port Hollis glowed against the dark. Pim floated near the ceiling, humming softly. Kavros the Unending was in the hallway, very carefully rehanging her door.
Ines closed her eyes for a moment, the way she always did before a delicate line, and breathed.
Then she opened them, picked up her compass, and fixed a star.
Far out in the deep dark, a small sun that had been flickering for a thousand years steadied, and burned clean and bright. On the worlds around it, people stepped outside and looked up, and wondered why the sky suddenly seemed so much kinder.
The cosmos had waited nine thousand years for a ruler.
It had finally found one who simply could not stand a mistake.
It had never been so well run.
___________________________________________________________________
All of my stories can be found here in my stories collection. Please consider subscribing to it.