“I cannot believe you volunteered to be shuffled off to some savage wilderness outpost,” his colleague, Astronomer Fa, said in disbelief..

Astronomer Wu did not bother to look up from his work, organizing his files and papers and deciding which would be vital to the project and which could be left here in storage. Paper, inkwells, and tools floated and fluttered through the air, packing themselves into cubbies and shelves in their office. Outside on the balcony, the sky was growing dark as the thin clouds drifted by under the Astronomical Ministry building.

“Some of us are not afraid of fieldwork, Fa,” he noted, eyeing a copy of Grandmaster Po’s Complete History of Stellar Objects. Hmmm, he could likely call it luggage relevant to his work.

“Pfah, fieldwork. The Observatory of Xiangmen is only rivaled by the Imperial Observatory in the capital,” Astronomer Fa said snidely, leaning against the wall of the office. He was a tall willowy man with a feminine face, every inch the imperial noble in the current style. “You will not find anything on some freezing mountain that our instruments could not detect as easily if you were willing to dedicate yourself.”

“I could continue to sit on a fifty year waiting list for use of the primary observatory certainly, or I could go south and observe directly the irregular seasons which will prove Elliptical Theory correct once and for all,” Astronomer Wu shot back, straightening up with the last of his papers held against his chest. “Unlike you, my name will be remembered for all time.”

“Arrogance!” exclaimed the other man, nostrils flaring in anger. He shook out his sleeves and straightened up as well. “You know perfectly well that the equations which disprove Wobble Theory are dubious at best!”

His fellow astronomer shaped his proof, hard light and scouring numbers shimmering in the air. Astronomer Wu replied in turn, his own meticulous proofs and observations appearing. The air hummed, and the office chairs vibrated their way across the floor as they presented their arguments without words, pure mathematics and proofs clashing in the cool evening air.

The longer held belief, Wobble Theory, proposed that the the orbital path of the sun and moon were mathematically perfect circles as befitting the Heavenly Objects and their spheres. The small variations which seemed to exist in their path were put down to imperfections in the rotation of the Terrestrial Sphere or “wobbles.” It was a somewhat undignified term, but it was the one which Grandmistress Ba had coined when establishing the theory.

The more modern theorem was the Elliptical Theory, which proposed that the paths of Heavenly objects were irregular, elliptical rather than circular, which observed calculations purported to bear out.

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It was obvious to Astronomer Wu, as he traded theorems with his rival, that the Elliptical Theory was correct. Fools who claimed they were disrespecting Grandmistress Ba were merely that, fools. The Grandmistress could not be blamed for lacking modern tools.

“Feh, enough of this,” Astronomer Fa grumbled, waving a hand and erasing the shimmering geometrical and numerical flashes from the air. “We both know that we will not convince each other like this. Honestly, you are so bullheaded, Wu, chasing these new theories. Will you go haring off into Heliocentrism next?”

He met Fa’s gaze with an incredulous look, and his rival smirked. They broke eye contact and laughed.

“If I thought you were serious, I’d have told you to just challenge me to a duel if you wanted to fight so badly,” Wu said haughtily. “Honestly, I’m a modernist, not a crackpot.”

While one could quibble about the details, anyone with access to proper astronomical tools could easily see that the Terrestrial Sphere was at the center, orbited by the Moon, and then further out, the Sun. The Herald and the Hound, which trailed along ahead and behind the Sun, were further out on their own spheres, and beyond that was the porous and punctured Outer Sphere through which the stars peeked. How in the world would they be protected from the Outermost Sphere if the sun were at the center?

“You speak as if one is not just a shade of the other,” Fa retorted, but it was without heat. “I suppose I should be happy to have one less name competing for a slot.”

“You should,” Wu agreed. “Although given the reports, I do believe accompanying me would advance your project on the studies of solar shedding.”

“Bah, I can study any objects Her Grace acquires in the comfort of the observatory,” Fa dismissed. “I’ll not get frostbite huddling with some barbarians on the ice plains beyond the Wall. Besides, those children’s reports didn’t tell us anything new. We were already near certain that most shed objects were battle debris from the Sun’s clashes with the Outer Sphere.”

“Though it seems these foreigners are more fortunate with what falls upon them,” Wu said, turning back to his papers. “I’ve never heard of debris so large reaching the Terrestrial Sphere in the modern day.”

“There may be something to your theory in that the poles suffer from a thinness of the heavens.” Fa looked as if he had swallowed a frog to admit even that much. “But this doesn’t require your nonsense about ellipticals.”

"If the orbits were perfect circles, would our polar peoples even know the sun as more than a dim and distant thing?” Wu chided.

“No, as I have told you a hundred times, the variations in the Terrestrial Sphere’s rotation accounts for that, you daft fool,” Fa replied.

Things were silent for a moment as Wu finished packing away the rest of his things.

“Just… try not to get eaten by barbarians or something. You may be a fool, but you’d not deserve that,” the other man finally huffed, turning to leave.

“I will try.” Wu chuckled. ”I’ll be careful not to get sloppy in your absence, Fa.”

“You’d better, else I shall humiliate you at the next symposium,” his rival and sometimes friend dismissed with a wave.