The old wooden puzzle was kept on the top shelf of the closet in my parents’ bedroom, a treasured family artifact that we were allowed to play with only when Dad was around. It featured a map of the world, with the continents and countries outlined in gold and silver ink, the capital cities marked by little golden stars, the oceans and seas painted a deep, turquoisey blue. It smelled, even many years after it was made by my great-grandfather, of varnish and paint and wood.
Dad said that he had always dreamed of traveling the world, and he told us about how he used to take it apart and put it back together, saying the names of the countries, imagining himself sailing across oceans to visit them. That puzzle was the world as he knew it.
And then, when he was ten, they told him that it was a lie.
He became a student at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences and studied all the new maps, the ones drawn with real ink on thick, beautiful paper, that included all of the New Lands that were added to the gold and blue and silver map he’d played with. He’d loved the puzzle, though, and he kept it for us.
“Did people really think there were only seven continents?” I would ask him skeptically when I played with it, picking the pieces up one by one, feeling the smooth wooden edges of Africa or North America. “Did people really not know about Deloia and the New North Polar Sea or Mount Anamata? Did people really think this map was right?”
“Be careful, Kit,” Dad used to say. “We Explorers have always been redrawing the maps. That map was no less correct when it was made than the ones made by Ortelius or Mercator. A map of the world isn’t a fixed thing. We know only what we can see.”
I was fascinated by that old puzzle and I was fascinated by the idea that one day, Dad and everyone he knew had woken up and found that everything was completely changed, that where everyone had always thought one country or continent ended was not an end at all, but a beginning of something new and strange and unexplored.