Here

[first lines]

Storyteller:
Scientists and dreamers, they travel the world with watchful eyes, and guzzle hope like water. Their journeys were separate, but their purpose was common - to map the world. One begged for money and pencils. Another tore his shirt to strips, carefully wrapping his shredded feet. Yet another, thirsty, near starving, suckled the sap from plants. None had an easy road.

Storyteller:
Though utterly dependent on one another, most found the other's maps unsettling. They denied one's perspective by charting the land incomprehensibly, calling into question one's very being. Still, when they met on the lonely roads, the explorers would present one another with their maps. Some seemed to say so plainly, directly, the world is like *this*. Others were more oblique; skating, impressionistic, unstable. They froze mere slivers of the infinite earth as is skittered by in orbit. If ever these maps could be gathered together, they would comprise an atlas of unsettling vision. A final proof that truth is conjecture.

Will Shepard:
[second encounter] Small world.

Gadarine Nazarian:
Big world, small country.

Storyteller:
The light captain travels the land as points of light. His voyage is possessed the effortless speed of planetary orbit. He makes it possible to slip into darkness like slamming a door. His maps are like snapshots taken in cruel flashes of light. There's no room for ambiguity. The world exists in sharp plains. Mountains cast no shadows. Trees stand as still as dead stones.

Storyteller:
Sometimes he had with him his daughter, who looked only to the sides and never straight ahead. She missed the many slashes of land her father captured and froze. At night, around the fire, she drew her own maps, like a tunnel. Sky at the end, land down the sides. To the captain these were near simpleton drawings. She may as well have been screwing clouds into jars.

Garadine's Mother:
Gadarine, let me see the pictures.

Gadarine's Father:
You have everything outside - out in the world. I don't understand why you come back here like this. We dream of the worlds you live in.

Garadine's Mother:
I don't. I don't dream of the world. My dreams stay here.

Jirair Gargosian:
[toasting] May the new lines on our maps bring wisdom to this world.

Will Shepard:
I wanted to find the edge of the world.

Storyteller:
The astronomer carries a veil of pure darkness. Dawn is a disorienting agent, he says. The stars are there all the time. He embroiders maps on massive blankets threaded with spider webs and cocoon casings. Gemstones form planets. Satin tassels are meteors. He builds a dome over the turf to trap the darkness, marking the circle of horizon, then lashing sticks to form a frame. Over this he carefully drapes his heavy black blankets, painstakingly pierced with April's constellations. When it rains, the stars strip into shining puddles on the Earth. The needle grows slick and dangerous in his hand.

[last lines]

Storyteller:
One famous month, the explorers gathered together to map the same difficult terrain. They were utterly dependent on one another to survive. They struggled with the unusual proximity. Each evening they made their maps while sitting on the ground, backs to the fire, elbows crooked over their papers. The flames shrunk in the cruel lands they came to. And the explorers, used to cold hands and faces, now worked with cold back as well.

Storyteller:
As the journey eked on they took to walking in an outward-facing circle, taking turns moving forward, backwards, and sideways. With supplies supportability low, the direction wheel whirled into a small unnamed town where it finally spun out and scattered. The small plot of land in which they had arrived was fenced off. It remains blank on every globe, every atlas, in every roaming heart.