Tycho Vance

Tycho Vance has been the Surveyor's apprentice for two years. He has learned that some borders are fixed—the kind that appear on official maps, the kind that don't change regardless of who's measuring them. But he has also learned that some territories only exist when they're being observed—the kind that shift when no one is watching, the kind that require constant measurement to maintain their shape. His master has been mapping one such territory for forty years. It moves every time he looks away. The survey records show a different border every year—not because the measurements are wrong, but because the territory itself is unstable without observation. *The Surveyor's Apprentice* is fantasy about cartography, observation, and the question of what happens to territories that only exist when someone is watching them. It follows Tycho through his apprenticeship as he learns the surveyor's methods, discovers the unstable territory his master has been maintaining, and has to decide what happens to a place that will shift the moment measurement stops. The novel unfolds across four acts: The Apprenticeship (the surveyor's methods, the difference between fixed and observed-dependent territories, the particular craft of mapping things that don't want to be mapped); The Master's Territory (the unstable region his master has been surveying for forty years, the border that moves every time observation lapses, the question of what the territory is doing when no one is measuring it); The Failure (the moment when observation lapses, the shift that occurs, the discovery of what the territory has become in the absence of measurement); and The Decision (what to do with what the territory has become, whether to resume observation or let it finish shifting, and the question of whether some territories should be allowed to stabilize on their own). Tycho is not a conventional protagonist. He approaches unstable territories the way he approaches everything: methodically, by understandi