A Schubert curve
The following is a combinatorially-defined covering space (details are
in my
paper):
The bottom curve is a stable curve of genus 0 with four marked
points, labeled with partitions. The top curve is a solution to a
Schubert problem with one degree of freedom.
The top curve is also a covering space
of the curve below it! I have labeled the fibers over the bolded
points, and also described bijections (called sh
2,
sh
3, esh
2 and esh
3), which describe
how the label changes if we follow a dashed arc or a solid arc.
We can desingularize the central curve, which corresponds to
moving away from the boundary point of the moduli space
M0,4. There
are two ways to do this: either the dashed lines
join each other and the solid lines join each other (this gives the
curve on the right), or the lines can cross (this gives the curve on the
left).