Vertical Pupils

The pupils of the pottery figures are carved as a single vertical line — like a cat's, like a snake's, anything but a man's. The sockets sit flat, with none of the sculpted layering of eyelids and no incised line for the lids; the 2 vertical lines are cut straight onto a flat surface.

Something that gives off light is set into the cuts. Kill the headlamp and the vertical lines come up, with a delay of about half a second; the reflection off ordinary silver, off a bronze mirror, off crystal keeps pace with its source, while these 2 lines lag a beat behind. Light them with the reddish long-wave glow of a fire-spill instead and the brightness roughly doubles.

The order in which they light has a pattern. After the lamp goes out, the pair nearest the man lights first, and it spreads in 2 directions at once at roughly 5 meters per second; within 2 seconds it has run 10 meters each way and 6 to 7 pairs have come up with it. The figures along the whole tunnel behave as though wired into one signaling system, each of them a node of some larger device.

Worse, the light has a bearing. The cuts are dead things, and a line carved on a flat surface cannot turn on its own; yet the brightest shaft coming out of the vertical line aims at wherever the man was just standing. He crouches to take notes and the shaft points at that paving stone; he moves around behind a figure and the shaft changes direction with him. Whatever is glowing is focusing.

The pottery trade has its own account of vertical pupils. The rule handed down by the old kiln men is that pupils must be carved round, since only round ones can hold a human presence; the vertical kind is taboo in a kiln yard, and if one came out of a firing the whole batch was smashed along with the mold. Yet the vertical lines in this figurine array are cut deep and true, not one of the 62 out of shape, and the mold was plainly used more than once.

A potter does not carve that way for no reason. Either he was carving from something that actually existed, or he was told to carve it so. Either way it means the people who made this batch had seen a thing whose pupils were vertical, and judged it worth burying in an imperial tomb.

The vertical pupils are the quietest hint this tomb left for whoever came after — what is buried here does not have the pupils of a man.