"Anathem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

Part 8
ORITHENA

The drive south went fast. We did it in four days and three nights. We were almost out of money, so we camped. Yul cooked our breakfasts and suppers. We saved our money for fuel and for lunch, passing through the mass-produced restaurants and fueling stations like ghosts.

During the first day or so, the landscape was dominated by endless tracts of fuel trees, relieved by small cities surrounding the plants where they were shredded and cooked to produce liquid fuel. Then we had two days of the most densely populated territory I had ever seen. The landscape was indistinguishable from that of the continent where we had started: the same signs and stores everywhere. The cities were so close that their fauxburbs touched one another and we never saw any open countryside, just pulsed along the highway-network from one traffic jam to the next. I saw several concents. They were always in the distance, for they tended to be built on hilltops or in ancient city centers that great highways swerved to avoid. One of these, by coincidence, happened to be Saunt Rambalf. It was built on an elevated mass of igneous rock several miles wide.

I thought about harrowing. When Alwash had used that word on me back on the ship, I’d thought it was funny. But after what had happened in Mahsht, I really did feel harrowed. Not in the sense of a weed that had been pulled out and burned, but in the sense of what was left after the harrowing had been finished: a plant, young, weak, survival still uncertain. But standing alone and alive, with nothing around it that might interfere with its growth or that could protect it from whatever blasts came its way tomorrow.

Late on the third day the landscape began to open up and to smell of something other, more ancient, than tires and fuel. We camped under trees and packed away our warm clothes. Breakfast the fourth day was made from things Cord and Yul had purchased from farmers. We drove into a landscape that had been settled and cultivated since the days of the Bazian Empire. Its population had, of course, waxed and waned countless times since then. Lately it had waned. The fauxburbs and then the cities had withered, leaving what I thought of as the intransigent strongholds of civilization: wealthy people’s villas, maths, monasteries, arks, expensive restaurants, suvins, resorts, retreat centers, hospitals, governmental installations. Little stood between these save open country and surprisingly primitive agriculture. Tufts of scrawny, garishly colored businesses sprouted at road-junctions, just to keep the riffraff like us moving, but most of the buildings were stone or mud with slate or tile roofs. The landscape became more sere and open as we moved along. The roads shed lanes, then insensibly narrowed, grew rougher and more tortuous, until without having noticed any sudden transitions we found ourselves driving on endless one-lane tracks and stopping to avoid flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.

Late on the fourth day we came over a little rise and beheld in the distance a naked mountain. Mountains for me had always borne dark green pelts, shaggy with mist. But this one looked as though acid had been poured on it and burned off everything alive. It had the same structure of ridges and cols as the mountains I was used to but it was as bald as the head of a Ringing Vale avout. The pink-orange light of the setting sun made it glow like flesh in candlelight. I was so taken by its appearance that I stared at it for quite a while before I realized that there was nothing behind it. A few more such mountains rose beyond it in the distance, but they rose from a flat and featureless geometric plane, dark grey: an ocean.

That night we camped on a beach beside the Sea of Seas. The next morning we drove the vehicles down a ramp onto the ferry that took us to the Island of Ecba.

The light through the tent-cloth roused, the surf on the beach lulled, and like a log rolling up and down in the breakers I’d rocked any number of times between sleeping and waking as I nursed a vague and uneventful dream about the Geometers. Some part of my mind had become obsessed with the remote manipulator arms on the probe that they had sent out to fetch the Warden of Heaven, and had been consuming vast dark energies dwelling on them, sharpening and embellishing my memories, building them up into a hybrid of seen and imagined, theorics and art, that encoded all sorts of weird ideas and fears and hopes. I fended off wakefulness as long as I could, since that would lose me the dream, and I lay there half-conscious, waiting for something to happen, willing the dream to move ahead, to reveal something; but I only grew more restless, for nothing occurred but what sprang from my own thinking: endlessly deeper study of the joints, bones, bearings, and actuators of those arms, which in my imagination had become as complex as my own arms and hands, and styled with the same organic curves as the parts of our clock that Cord used to make for Sammann. The only new thing that developed in that dreaming was that, at the very end, I turned my attention from the arms to the imaging devices that I guessed must be present on the bodies of those probes. But those lenses—supposing they were there—were guarded by clusters of spotlights, and when I tried to stare into them and meet the Geometers’ gaze, all I could see was explosions of glare held apart by utter blackness.

Frustration succeeded in waking me up where daylight, the smell of cooking food, and the others’ conversation had failed. I could not move matters forward save by waking up and doing something.

Ecba was beautiful, in a hot and harsh way. It had taken us a day simply to erect defenses against sun and heat. We’d found an east-facing cove north of a precipitous rocky headland that afforded us shade for much of the day, and Yul had showed us ways to anchor stakes deep in the sand, which enabled us to put up tarps that blocked the late afternoon sun. The only time we really got blasted with it was first thing in the morning, before the heat got too bad. A smaller island half a mile offshore broke and diffracted incoming surf, so waves here were small but unpredictable. The cove was too shallow and rock-bound to be of use to any but the smallest boats, so it had never, as far as we could tell, been settled or used for anything. We kept expecting someone to rush up, gaudy with insignias, and eject us, but it didn’t happen. The place did not seem to be private property. It was not a park. It was simply there. Ecba’s only real settlement (other than the math at Orithena) enveloped the ferry terminal, five miles away in a straight line, fifteen by the road that traversed the island’s shore. A desalination plant, powered by the sun, made and sold water there. Yul had filled a couple of musty-smelling military surplus water bladders when we had arrived. Between that and the food we’d bought from farmers on the mainland, we wouldn’t really have to make another supply run for a week.

The day after we’d made the camp and pitched the tarps had been, by unspoken, unanimous agreement, a time to rest. Beat-up books had appeared from bottoms of bags. Someone was always snoring, someone always swimming. I borrowed a pair of long-nosed pliers from Cord and yanked my stitches out, then sat in the surf up to my neck until the wounds went numb. There is more I could, but won’t, say about healing. Watching my body marshal its forces of regeneration was fascinating at the time, and probably accounted for the weird dreams I had been having about the metallic limbs and crystal organs of the alien probe. There was the temptation to ponder and philosophize about the relationship between mind and body. But the Lorite in me said it would be a waste of time. More efficient to find a library and read what better thinkers had written on it.

Late yesterday, Yul had shattered the calm of the place by starting the engine of Cord’s fetch, and some of us had gone for a dawdling, two-hour circumnavigation of the island. The location of the volcano was, of course, no secret; there was hardly a place from which it couldn’t be seen. It was steep, which, as Fraa Haligastreme had taught me, meant that it was dangerous. Some volcanoes produced runny lava that spread out quickly; these were lens-shaped and safe, provided you could walk faster than the lava. Others made thick lava that moved slowly and built steep slopes; these were dangerous because pent-up pressure had no outlet except for explosions.

This island was the last stop on a ferry route that ran generally south-southeast from the mainland, so we’d steamed into it from the north. The terminal and town were built around the island’s only surviving harbor, a bite chomped out of the northwest limb of the approximately round island. Our camp was in the northeast, in one of a series of closely spaced coves separated by fingers of hardened magma that had reached down from the caldera many centuries before Ecba had been settled. So all of our views, during those first few days, had been of the north face of the volcano, which looked regular and graceful—even if Haligastreme’s voice was in my ear telling me it was dangerously steep. Yesterday’s drive had taken us clockwise around the island, passing down its eastern shore, and after a few miles we had suddenly come in view of its south slope, which had exploded and collapsed in #8722;2621, burying the Temple of Orithena, and filling in and obliterating a harbor on the island’s southeastern coast into which the early physiologers—followers of Cno#252;s from all round the Sea of Seas—had once voyaged in their galleys and sailing-ships. Anyone could see at a glance that it was the result of an explosion. The ash and rubble sloped straight from summit to sea. So slow had Ecba been to recover that the road, even now, faltered as it came up on to the rubble-fan, and became an informal dirt track for several miles. There were no signs, no buildings or improvements. At one point, though, as we had slowly rounded the island’s southeastern curve, and had come to a place where we could look straight up into the yawning rupture in the volcano’s cone, we had seen a separate track, teed into the coastal road, that ran straight uphill for some distance, then veered off into the first of a series of switchbacks. These ascended a bare slope whose skyline was reinforced by a dark wall. We hadn’t needed Sammann’s satellite imagery to know that this was the math that had been a-building there since 3000.

Halfway between us and it, at the beginning of the switchbacks, a few low buildings struggled to keep their roofs above the drifting ash. We had gone up there and found several avout running a sort of checkpoint and souvenir stand. They had all worn bolts and chords openly. We had told them no lies, but behaved as if we were tourists. They had been pleased to sell us things (soap made with volcanic ash) but had let us know we could not drive any farther up the road.

Later, as we had paused in town to pick up supplies, I had again seen bolted and chorded avout walking around openly. They had not seemed like hierarchs. This had been, then, a violation of the Discipline—as was letting avout run a souvenir stand. But too it let us know that relations between avout and extras were much friendlier here than, say, in Mahsht. I had badly wanted to approach those avout and ask them if they knew of Orolo, but had checked myself, reasoning that they would still be here tomorrow, and it was better to sleep on it. And sleep on it I had, but this had booted me nothing but that endless, frustrating dream about remote manipulator arms.

Having slept so poorly, I didn’t say much at breakfast until I came out with: “Suppose there are no biological Geometers—creatures with bodies like ours, sitting at the controls of those machines. What if they died long ago and left behind ships and probes that run an automated program?”

This turned out to be an absolute conversation-killer except in the case of Sammann, who seemed delighted by the idea. “So much the better for us,” he said, which puzzled me for a moment until I perceived that by us he meant the Ita.

I considered it. “Makes you more useful to the S#230;cular Power, you mean.”

His face froze for a while and I knew I’d offended him. “Perhaps being useful to them isn’t the only thing we care about,” he suggested. “Perhaps the Ita can have other aspirations.”

“Sorry.”

“Think what a fascinating problem it would be, to interact with such a system!” he exclaimed. I had gotten off easy. He was so thrilled by this idea that he wasn’t going to dwell on my slur. “At its lowest level, it would be a fully deterministic syndev. But it would express itself only in certain actions: movements of the ship, transmissions of data, and so on. Observables.”

“We’d use givens, but go on.”

“To grasp the workings of the syntactic program by analyzing those givens would be a sort of code-breaking effort. We Ita would have to have our own Convox.”

“You could solve the Aboutness Problem once and for all,” I suggested, half serious.

He lowered his gaze from enraptured study of the sky and stared at me. “You’ve studied the AP?”

I shrugged. “Probably not as much as you have. We learn about it when we study the early history of the Split.”

“Between the followers of Saunt Proc and the disciples of Saunt Halikaarn.”

“Yeah. Though it’s a little unfair to call one group followers and the other disciples, if you see what I mean. Anyway, that’s what we call the Split.”

“Procians were more friendly to the syntactic point of view…or maybe I should have said Faanians…”

Sammann seemed a little shaky here, so I reminded him: “We’re speaking, remember, of Aboutness. You and I can think about things. Symbols in our brains have meanings. The question is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness—no meaning—”

“No semantic content,” Sammann said.

“Yes. Now, at the Concent of Saunt Muncoster, just after the Reconstitution, Faan was the FAE of the Syntactic Faculty—followers of Proc. She took the view that Aboutness didn’t exist—was an illusion that any sufficiently advanced syndev creates for itself. By this time Evenedric was already dead but he like Halikaarn before him had taken the view that our minds could do things that syndevs couldn’t—that Aboutness was real—”

“That our thoughts really did have semantic content over and above the ones and zeroes.”

“Yes. It’s related to the notion that our minds are capable of perceiving ideal forms in the Hylaean Theoric World.”

“Would you people mind!?” Yul bellowed. “We’re trying to have a campout here!”

“This is what we do to relax,” Sammann shot back.

“Yeah,” I said, “if we were working, we’d talk about things that were tedious and complicated.”

“It’s worse than listening to preachers!” Yul complained, but Gnel refused to rise to the bait.

“Let me explain it in words you can understand, cousin,” Gnel said. “If the aliens are just a big computer program, Sammann here can shut them down just by flipping one bit. The program won’t even know it’s being sabotaged.”

“Only if it does not have Aboutness,” I cautioned him. “If it’s capable of understanding that its symbols are about something, then it’ll know that Sammann is up to no good.”

“It would have to have crazy security measures built in,” Yul said, “what with all those nukes and so on.”

“If it lacks Aboutness, it is incredibly vulnerable, so yes,” Sammann said. “But systems with true Aboutness, or so the myth goes, should be much more difficult to deceive.”

“Nah,” Yul said, and looked at his cousin again. “You just have to deceive ’em in a different way.”

“Apparently the Warden of Heaven was not very convincing,” Gnel pointed out, “so maybe preaching isn’t as easy as you think.”

Cord cleared her throat and frowned at her bowl. “Uh, not that this isn’t fascinating, but what is the plan for today?”

This produced a long silence. Cord followed up with, “I like it here, but it’s beginning to feel creepy. Does anyone else think it’s creepy?”

“You’re talking to a bunch of guys,” Yul said. “No one here is going to validate your feelings.” She tossed sand at him.

“I’ve been doing some research,” Sammann said, “which was creepy in itself, because I didn’t understand why I should have such good Reticulum access in such a godforsaken place…”

“But you understand it now?” Gnel asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“What did you learn?”

“The whole island is a single parcel, owned by a single entity. Has been since the Old Mathic Age. Back in those days it was a petty principality. Got kicked back and forth between different empires from age to age. When kings and princes went out of style it would pass into the hands of a private owner or a trust. When they came back into fashion, it’d get a prince or a baron or something again. But nine hundred years ago it was purchased by a private foundation—that’s a thing like a Dowment. And they must have had ties to the mathic world—”

“Because the Orithena dig—the new concent we saw yesterday—was sponsored by them?”

“Sponsored, or something,” Sammann said.

“A single Apert—ten days—isn’t long enough to organize such a big project,” I pointed out. “This Dowment must have been a long time making its plans.”

“It’s not so hard,” Cord said. “The Unarians have Apert once a year. It’s easy to talk to them. Some graduate and become Tenners. Some of those become Hundreders, and so on. If these guys started working on it in 2800, by the time of the Millennial Convox of 3000 they could have had supporters everywhere except in Thousander maths.”

I was uneasy with Cord’s scenario because it sounded sneaky, but I couldn’t dispute the facts she’d stated. I guess what troubled me about it was that we, the avout, liked to believe that we were the only long-term thinkers, the only ones capable of hatching plans over centuries, and her scenario envisioned a Dowment in the S#230;cular world turning the tables on us.

Perhaps Sammann was harboring similar feelings. “It could just as well have worked the other direction,” he said.

“What—” I exclaimed, “are you saying that a bunch of avout created a Dowment in the S#230;cular world to buy them an island? That’s outrageous.”

But we all knew Sammann had won that exchange, because he was relaxed, satisfied. I was angry and off balance. Largely because this all fit so neatly into what I had been told, in recent weeks, about the Lineage.

Still, everyone seemed to be looking at me for a response. “If it’s like you say, Sammann, then they—whoever they are—know we’re here anyway. I think we should take the direct approach. Drive down there. I’ll just walk up to the gate, knock, and state my business.”

That got all of us on our feet, getting ready for the day, except for Gnel who just followed Sammann around. “There must be more information about what sort of entity bought the island. I mean, come on! How many things last nine hundred years in this world?”

“Lots of things,” Sammann said. “As an example, that ark you belong to has lasted quite a bit longer…” He turned and searched Gnel’s face. “That’s your point, isn’t it? You think this is some kind of religious institution?”

Gnel was a little taken aback, and seemed to back down. “I’m just saying, businesses don’t last that long.”

“But it’s quite a stretch to go from that to saying that Ecba is run by a secret ark.”

“When I see avout walking openly in the streets of the town,” Gnel said, “it tells me we need to ‘stretch’ beyond normal explanations.”

“We saw avout in the streets of Mahsht. Maybe the ones here just got Evoked or something,” said Yul, getting into the act.

I don’t think that this seemed plausible to any of us—Yul included—but it brought us to an impasse. “Many avout,” I said, “especially Procian/Faanian ones, think that belief in the Hylaean Theoric World is basically a religion anyway. And I have reason to believe that the avout down there at Orithena are the ultimate fringe of HTW believers. So whether it’s a religious community or not sort of depends on how you define your terms.” I faltered as I said that last bit, just imagining how Orolo would plane me if he heard me talking Sphenic gibberish. Even Sammann turned to fix me with an incredulous look. But he didn’t say anything, because I think he understood that I was just trying to get us moving. “Look,” I said to Gnel, “Sammann’s investigation just got started, and we’ve seen before that it can sometimes take a few days for him to get access to certain things. Whether or not they open the gates for me at Orithena, you’ll have plenty of time to ask around and learn more in days to come.”

“Yes,” Gnel said, “but whether they open those gates for you depends on what you say. And that depends on what you know. So maybe it’s better to wait for a couple of days.”

“I know more than I’m saying,” I said, “and I want to go there today.”

Two hours later I was standing alone at the gates of Orithena.

The wall was twenty feet high, made of blocks of fine-grained, grey-brown stone that were all the same size and shape. As I stood there, sweating in the sun, waiting for an answer to my knock, I had more than enough time to examine these and to conclude that they had been cast in molds, using some process that fused loose volcanic ash into a sort of concrete. Each was about the size of a small wheelbarrow, say the largest that a couple of avout could move around using simple tools. Anyway the courses were extremely regular, since all of the blocks were clones. Some were slightly browner, some slightly greyer, but on the whole the wall looked as if it had been snapped together out of a child’s building toy kit. The gates themselves were steel plates, which would last a good long while in this climate. After knocking, I stepped well back to get clear of the stored heat radiating from those panels, which were large enough to admit two of the largest drummons abreast. I turned and looked back at the souvenir stand, a few hundred feet down the hill. Cord, leaning back against the shady side of Yul’s fetch, waved at me. Sammann took a picture on his jeejah.

The gate was framed between a pair of cylindrical bastions perforated with small gridded windows. The one on the left sported a tiny door, also of steel. After some time had passed, I ambled over and knocked on it. Framed in its upper half was a hatch, just about the size of my hand. Ten minutes or so later, I heard movement on the other side. A door opened, then slammed shut within the bastion. A latch scrabbled. The little hatch creaked open. The room on the other side of it was dark and, I guessed, delightfully cool. But my eyes were adjusted to the blasting sun of an Ecba noon, and I could see nothing.

“Know that you address a world that is not your own and into which you may not pass save that you make a solemn vow not to leave it again,” said a woman’s voice, speaking in locally accented Fluccish. This was what she was supposed to do. Gatekeepers in places like this had been saying this, or some variant of it, since Cartas.

“Greetings, my suur,” I said, “let us speak in Orth if you please. I am Fraa Erasmas of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math of the Concent of Saunt Edhar.”

A pause, then the hatch closed and was latched. I waited for a while. Then the hatch opened again and I heard a deeper, older woman’s voice.

“I am Dymma,” she said.

“Greetings, Suur Dymma. Fraa Erasmas at your service.”

“That I am your suur, or you my fraa, is very much undecided in my mind, as you come so attired.”

“I have traveled far,” I returned. “My bolt, chord, and sphere were stolen from me as I made peregrin across the S#230;culum.”

“No Convox is summoned hither. We do not look for peregrins.”

“It seems inhospitable,” I said, “that Orithena, whence the first Peregrins departed, should not open her gates for one who has returned.”

“Our duty is to the Discipline, not to any custom of hospitality. There are hotels in town; hospitality is their business.” The little hatch made a noise as if she were getting ready to close it.

“What part of the Discipline permits avout to sell soap extramuros?” I asked. “Where does the Discipline state that bolted fraas may stroll about yonder town?”

“Your discourse belies your claim to be avout,” said Dymma, “as a fraa would know that there are variations in the Discipline from one math to the next.”

“Many avout would not know it since they never leave their own maths,” I demurred.

“Precisely,” Dymma said, and I could imagine her smirking in the dark at how deftly she had turned the point to her advantage—for I was on the outside, where no avout should be.

“I grant that your customs may differ from those of the rest of the mathic world,” I began.

She interrupted me. “Not so much so that we would admit one who had not sworn the Vow.”

“Did Orolo swear the Vow, then?”

A few seconds of silence. Then she closed the hatch.

I waited. After a while I turned back, waved to my friends, and pantomimed a big shrug. It was strangely difficult to reconnect with them, even in such a simple gesture, after having stared over the threshold of the math. I’d bid goodbye to them a few minutes ago as if I’d be back in time for lunch. But for all I knew I might end up spending the rest of my life there.

The hatch again. “State your business, you who style yourself Fraa Erasmas,” said a man in Orth.

“Fraa Jad, Millenarian, would know Orolo’s mind on certain matters, and sends me in quest of him.”

“Orolo who was Thrown Back?”

“The same.”

“One on whom the Anathem has been rung down may never more go into a math,” the man pointed out. “And for that matter, one who has been Evoked, and despatched to Convox at Tredegarh, may not suddenly present himself at a different math on the other side of the world.”

I had already suspected the answer before we reached Ecba. Certain clues had bolstered my hypothesis. But, strangely, what clinched it for me was the architecture of the place. No concessions to the Mathic style here. “The riddle that you pose is a trying one,” I admitted, “however, on reflection, its answer is clear.”

“Oh? What is its answer then?”

“This is not a math,” I said.

“What is it if not a math?”

“The cloister of a lineage that was born a thousand years before Cartas and her Discipline.”

“You are well come to Orithena, Fraa Erasmas.”

Heavy bolts moved and the door swung open.

I stepped forward into Orithena, and into the Lineage.

At Saunt Edhar, Orolo had grown a little doughy, though he kept in decent shape by working in his vineyard and climbing the steps to the starhenge. At Bly’s Butte, according to Estemard’s phototypes, he had lost some of that weight and gone shaggy-headed and grown the obligatory Feral beard. But when I picked him up at the gates of Orithena and spun him around five times, his body felt solid, neither fat nor emaciated, and when I finally let him go, tears were making wet tracks down his tanned and clean-shaven cheeks. That was all I saw before my vision was blurred with tears, and then I had to break away and walk to and fro in the shade of the great wall to get my composure back. The Discipline had taught me nothing of how to cope with such an event: throwing my arms around a dead man. Perhaps it meant that I too was now dead to the mathic world, and had moved on to a sort of afterlife. Cord, Yul, Gnel and Sammann had served as my pallbearers.

It took a powerful effort of will to remember that they were still out there, wondering what was going on.

There was a little fountain in the cloister. Orolo fetched me a ladle of water. We sat together in the shade of the clock-tower as I drank. It tasted of sulfur.

Where to begin? “There’s so much I would have said to you, Pa, if I could have, when you were Thrown Back. So much I wanted to say to you in the weeks following. But…”

“It all flows back.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Those things flow back in time and as they do they change—your mind changes them—so that they no longer need talking about quite so much. Fine. Let’s talk of what is fresh and interesting.”

“All right. You’re looking well.”

“You aren’t. Scars honorably earned, I hope?”

“Not really. Learned a lot though.” But I did not really feel like telling him the story. We made idle chitchat for a few minutes until we both realized how ridiculous it was, then got up and began to prowl around. A younger fraa—if that was the correct term for one who lived in a math-that-was-not-a-math—brought me a bolt and chord, which I traded for my S#230;cular clothes. Then Orolo led me away from the cloister along a broad path, beaten down by countless sandaled feet and barrow-wheels, to the edge of a pit big enough to swallow the Mynster of Saunt Edhar several times over. If we had built our monument by piling stone on stone, building up from the ground, they had built theirs by digging down, a shovel-load at a time. The walls of the hole were too steep, the soil too loose to be stable; they had shored it up using slabs of fused ash. A ramp spiraled down to the bottom. I started down it, but Orolo held me back. “You’ll notice there are no people down there. It gets hotter as you descend. We dig at night. If you insist on going for a hike, we’ll ascend.” And he gestured up the mountainside.

I already knew from Sammann’s pictures and from yesterday’s scouting trip that Orithena had two wall-systems, an inner and an outer. They coincided along the road, where the main gate stood. The huge twenty-foot wall enclosed the cloister where the avout lived, and the hole in the ground where they delved. The outer wall was much lower—perhaps six feet high—so, more symbolic than anything else. It reached thousands of feet up the mountainside, embracing a strip of ground that ran all the way to the volcano’s caldera. It was clear from the pictures that mine-works had been created up at the top, possibly to extract energy from the volcano’s heat. So there I reckoned it would be hot, foul-smelling, and dangerous. But the territory in between—what Orolo and I walked through—had been transformed into an oasis by the labor of the Lineage. Somehow they had found water and used it to raise vines, grain, and all manner of trees that yielded fruits and oils while casting dappled shade on the path up the mountain. The temperature dropped a little, the breeze freshened, with every step. The effort of climbing kept me warm, but when we reached a suitable altitude to stop, enjoy the view, and nibble at the fruits we’d pilfered along the way, my sweat dried instantly in the cool dry wind off the sea and I had to wrap myself up.

We passed beyond the upper limit of Orithena’s orchards and wandered through a belt of twisted, gnarled trees to a sloping meadow dusted with what had looked, from a distance, like frost. But it was actually a carpet of tiny white wildflowers that somehow found a way to grow here. Colorful insects flew around but there weren’t enough of them to be obnoxious. They were kept in check, I guessed, by the birds, who sang from perches in scrub-trees and bursts of spiky vegetation. We sat on the exposed root of a tree that must have been planted the spring after the volcano had gone off. Orolo explained that these trees, which were no taller than I, were in fact the oldest living things on Arbre.

Most of our conversation that afternoon consisted of such tour-guide stuff. In a way it was a great relief to chatter about birds and trees, and how many cubic feet of earth had been removed from the dig and how many of the Temple buildings had been excavated, rather than talking of such weighty affairs as the Geometers, the Convox, and the Lineage. Later we hiked down and supped at the Refectory with the hundred or so fraas and suurs who lived here. Their FAE, Fraa Landasher, the third of the three who’d interrogated me at the gate, formally bade me welcome and made a toast in my name. I drank more than my share of their wine, which was infinitely better than what Orolo made in his frostbitten vineyard at Saunt Edhar, and slept it off in a private cell.

I awoke sour, hung over, out of sorts, thinking it was late and that I’d overslept—but no, it was early, and the night shift of diggers were coming up out of the pit with their picks, trowels, brushes, and notebooks, singing hilarious marching-songs. They’d constructed a bathhouse where hot water was sluiced down from volcanic springs and routed through vertical shafts where you could get blasted clean in about ten seconds. I stood in one of those until I could no longer breathe, then stepped out and let my newmatter bolt pull the water off my skin. This helped a little. But what was really throwing me for a loop was the re-entry shock of being back in the mathic world, with its view of time so different from what I’d grown used to extramuros. Making it worse was that no one had explained the place’s rules to me yet. In most ways it was like a Cartasian math. But they’d not made me swear a vow, and I got the sense that I could walk out the door whenever I chose. They just pretended it was a math when they were dealing with anyone who might not understand. Being avout was their cover story. And yet it was no lie, for they were as dedicated to their work as any who lived in Saunt Edhar. Perhaps more so, in that they wouldn’t suffer that work to be impeded by rules, would not submit to the dictates of any Inquisition.

Fraa Landasher intercepted me coming out of the sluice-bath and introduced me to Suur Spry, a girl of about my age. Or rather reintroduced me, since she was the first person I’d spoken with yesterday at the gate. She reminded me disconcertingly of Ala. It was now or never, explained Landasher, for me to descend and see the ruins, for if we waited any longer it would be too hot. Suur Spry was to be my guide; she’d packed a basket of food that we could nibble on as we went. It was clear from the looks on their faces that they expected I’d be thrilled. And what would be more reasonable? Yet I had to feign gratitude because what I really wanted was to awaken Orolo and talk to him of pressing S#230;cular matters.

Not having known what might happen at the gate, I’d made the plan yesterday with Cord, Yul, Gnel, and Sammann that if I was allowed to go inside, they should wait for an hour and then, if nothing happened, come back three days later, at which time I’d try to get word out to them as to what ought to be done next. I felt that my three days were flying by, and so in truth I did not want to go on a long tourist hike with some girl I’d only just met. It was in a peevish mood that I began to descend the ramp, carrying Suur Spry’s picnic-basket on one arm.

It was in an altogether different mood, though, that I reached the bottom, kicked off my sandals, and felt under my bare feet the paving-stones on which Adrakhones had walked. The Temple steps where Diax had brandished his Rake. The Analemma where generations of physiologer-priests had celebrated Provener. And the tile-strewn Decagon where Metekoranes had stood, lost in thought, as the whole place was buried under ash.

“Did you find him?” I asked Spry, a few minutes later, as we were munching on some fruit and drinking water from the basket.

“Who—Metekoranes?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. He was the first one we—I mean they, my forerunners—looked for. They found, standing upright, a—” She balked, looking awed and disgusted.

“Skeleton?”

“A cast,” she said, “a cast of his whole body. You can look at it if you want. Of course it’s just speculation that it is the actual Metekoranes. But it fits perfectly with the legend. He even had his head bowed, you know, as if he were looking at the tiles.”

The plaza where we were enjoying our little picnic—the one where Metekoranes had been buried and cast in stone—was the Teglon made real. It was flat, decagonal, maybe two hundred feet across, paved in smooth slabs of marble. In ancient times the plaza had been plentifully supplied with tiles made of clay baked in molds. There were seven molds, hence seven different shapes of tile. Their shapes were such that it was possible to fit them together in an infinite number of patterns. That’s not possible with squares, or equilateral triangles; those fit together in repeating patterns, so there are no choices to make. But as long as you had more copies of the Teglon tiles, you could go on making choices forever. Hundreds of tiles were scattered around the place even now, and from place to place the modern-day Orithenans had been putting them together in little arrangements. I squatted down and looked at one, then looked questioningly at Spry. “Go ahead,” she said, “it’s a modern reproduction. We found the original molds!”

I picked up a tile for a closer look. This one happened to be four-sided: a rhombus. A groove was molded into its surface, curving from one of its sides to another. I carried it over to the nearest vertex of the Decagon and set it down; its obtuse angle fit perfectly into the corner.

“Ah,” Suur Spry teased me, “going straight to the most difficult problem of all, huh?”

She was talking, of course, of the Teglon. She turned away and walked to the opposite vertex and set a tile down there. Meanwhile I scavenged a few other tiles, getting samples of all seven shapes. I chose one at random and set it next to the first. This one also had a groove curving from one side to another—all of the tiles were so made—and I rotated it until its groove mated with, and became a continuation of, the one on the first tile. Into the angle between them I was able to place a third. That created opportunities to slide in a fourth, a fifth, and so on. I was playing the Teglon. The objective of the game was to build the pattern outward from one vertex and pave the entire Decagon in such a way that the groove formed a continuous, unbroken curve from the first vertex to the last—the one directly opposite, where Suur Spry had put down a tile. Along the way, the curve had to pass across every tile in the entire Decagon. For the first little while, it was easy—it came naturally. But beyond a certain point, the two objectives—that of tiling the whole surface, and that of keeping the curve going—began to conflict. I had to leave a stretch of groove hanging unconnected for a while, then work my way back to it, steering the groove around to make the connection. That was satisfying. But a few minutes later I found myself with three such segments of marooned groove in different parts of the pattern, and despaired of ever finding an arrangement that would connect them all. On one level, this was all about the shape of the outer boundary, and how it developed. Tiles trapped in the middle were of no further interest to the game—or so you might think. But on the other hand, the way in which an interior tile had been laid down ended up determining the location of every other tile in the whole Decagon.

The ancient Orithenans suspected, but didn’t know how to prove, that the tiles of the Teglon were aperiodic: that no pattern would ever repeat. Again, solving the Teglon would have been easy—it would have been automatic—with square or triangular tiles, or any tile system that was periodic. With aperiodic tiles, it was impossible, or at least very unlikely, unless you had some Godlike ability to see the whole pattern in your head at once. Metekoranes had believed that the final pattern existed in the Hylaean Theoric World, and that the Teglon could only be solved by one who had developed the power of seeing into it.

Suur Spry was clearing her throat. I looked up. I was squatting at the edge of a system of tiles fifty feet wide. It was getting hot.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Some people use sticks to push them around. Saves wear and tear on the back.”

“We should probably get out of here, huh?”

“Soon,” she allowed.

First, though, I followed her about as she showed me the remnants of the ancient buildings. All the roofs were gone, of course. Some pillars still stood, and a few courses of stone that had once been walls, now half-buried in blocks that had tumbled down from above. But mostly we were looking at foundations, floors, stairs, and plazas. Active parts of the dig were gridded with string, a geometric touch Adrakhones would have appreciated. The rocks were annotated with neatly brushed letters and numbers put down by diggers of centuries past. Up above, I knew, was a sort of museum where they’d placed many of the artifacts they had found, including presumably the cast of Metekoranes. I imagined that museum should be dark. Nicely ventilated. And cool. “Okay, let’s get out of this barbecue pit,” I proposed, and heard no argument from Suur Spry.

We had stayed later than expected. Partly because it had been fascinating. But—and this probably didn’t say much for my character—mainly because this was the one thing I could do on this journey that would seem almost as cool as Jesry’s space adventure.

My body had healed to the point where it was willing to cut me a little bit of slack, and so during the early part of the climb I was babbling about the Teglon just like all of those geometers of yore who’d gone crazy over it. Soon enough, though, my injuries began talking to me, and excitement was snuffed out by pain. The remainder of the hike was a long silent trudge. Another sluice-bath was called for. I fell asleep. When I woke up it was late afternoon. Orolo was on kitchen duty. I helped him. But we didn’t really get to talk about anything. So more than one of my three days had been gobbled up just like that. Before we retired that evening I warned Orolo we must speak of important things the next day. So after breakfast the next morning we hiked back up to the meadow.

“After I landed at Bly’s Butte,” Orolo said, “I was like one of those poor cosmographers, just after the Reconstitution, who couldn’t use his atom smasher any more.”

“Yes, I saw that telescope,” I told him, “the pictures you tried to take of the icosahedron…”

He was shaking his head. “I could not see a thing with that. So, my work concerning the aliens had to be based on what I could observe.”

This didn’t make sense to me. “All right,” I said, “what was that?”

He looked at me, mildly startled, as if it ought to have been obvious. “Myself.”

I was nonplussed. Which only showed that I was dealing with the same old Orolo. “How would self-observation help you understand the Geometers?” I asked. For I had already mentioned to him that this was the term people were now using to denote the aliens.

“Well…the Sconics are not a bad place to start. Remember fly-bat-worm?”

I laughed. “Just got a refresher on that a couple of weeks ago. Arsibalt was explaining it to an extra who wanted to know why we didn’t believe in God.”

“Ah, but that’s not what fly-bat-worm says,” said Orolo. “It says only that pure thought alone doesn’t enable us to draw any conclusions one way or another about things that are non-spatiotemporal—such as God.”

“True.”

“The same observations that the Sconics made about themselves must also be true of aliens’ brains. No matter how different they might be from us in other respects, they must integrate sensory givens into a coherent model of what is around them—a model that must be hung on a spatiotemporal frame. And that, in a nutshell, is how they come to share our ideas about geometry.”

“But they share more than that,” I pointed out, “they appear to share the idea of Truth and of Proof.”

“It is a reasonable enough supposition,” Orolo said with a cautious shrug.

“More than that!” I protested. “They emblazoned the Adrakhonic Theorem on their ship!”

This was news to him. “Oh, really? How cheeky!”

“Didn’t you see it?”

“I remind you that I was Thrown Back before I saw the last picture that I took of the alien ship.”

“Of course. But I assumed you had taken other pictures before then—had been taking them for a long time.”

“Streaks and blobs!” Orolo scoffed. “I was only learning how to capture a decent image of the thing.”

“So you never saw the geometric proof—or the letters—or the four planets.”

“That’s correct,” Orolo said.

“Well, there’s much more that you have to know, if you want to think about the Geometers! All kinds of new givens!”

“I can see how excited you are about those new givens, Erasmas, and I wish you all the best in your study of them, but I’m afraid that for me it would all prove a distraction from the main line of the inquiry.”

“The main line—I don’t know what you mean.”

“Evenedrician datonomy,” Orolo said, as if this ought to have been quite obvious.

“Datonomy,” I translated, “that would be study, or identification, of what is given?”

“Yes—givens in the sense of the basic thoughts and impressions that our minds have to work with. Saunt Evenedric pursued it late in his life, after he got locked out of his atom smasher. His immediate forerunner, of course, was Saunt Halikaarn. Halikaarn thought that Sconic thought was badly in need of an overhaul to bring it in line with all that had been discovered, since the time of Baritoe, about theorics and its marvelous applicability to the physical world.”

“Well—how’d he make out?”

Orolo grimaced. “Many of the records were vaporized, but we think he was too busy demolishing Proc and kicking away all the ankle-biters Proc sent after him. The work fell to Evenedric.”

“Has it been an important thing to the Lineage?”

Orolo gave me a queer look. “Not really. Oh, it’s important in principle. But notoriously unsatisfying to work on. Except when great alien ships appear in orbit around one’s planet.”

“So, then…are you finding it satisfying now?”

“Let’s be quite direct and say what we mean,” Orolo said. “You fear that I’m navel-gazing. That on Bly’s Butte I pursued this line of inquiry, not because it was really worthwhile, but simply because I didn’t have hard givens about the Geometers. And that now that we have evidence that they are, or were, physically and mentally similar to us, this line of inquiry should be dropped.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I think.”

“I happen to disagree,” Orolo said. “But things have changed between us. We are no longer Pa and Fid but Fraa and Fraa, and fraas disagree, cordially, all the time.”

“Thank you but it has certainly felt like a Pa/Fid conversation to this point.”

“Largely because I have a bit of a head start on you.”

I let this polite nothing pass without comment. “Listen, if I can tear you away from Evenedrician datonomy, we have to talk about S#230;cular stuff for a minute.”

“By all means,” Orolo said.

“Several of us were Evoked to a Convox at Tredegarh,” I said, for, unbelievably, Orolo had not yet expressed any curiosity as to why or how I’d turned up at Orithena. “One of the others was Fraa Jad, a Thousander. He accompanied me and Arsibalt and Lio to Bly’s Butte—”

“And saw the leaves on the wall of my cell there.”

“He—Jad—figured out quickly—weirdly quickly—that you had gone to Ecba and, I guess, that you had ideas about the Geometers that he wanted to know more of.”

“It was neither quick nor weird,” Orolo said. “All of these matters are connected. It would have been obvious to Fraa Jad as soon as he walked in.”

“How? Do you guys communicate? Violate the Discipline?”

“What do you mean, ‘you guys’? You are carrying around some melodramatic idea of the Lineage, aren’t you?” Orolo said.

“Well, just look at this place!” I protested. “What is going on?”

“If I got interested in meteorology,” Orolo said, “I’d spend a lot of time observing the weather. I would come to have much in common with other weather-watchers whom I’d never met. We would think similar thoughts as a natural result of observing the same phenomena. Nine-tenths of what you think of as mysterious Lineage machinations is explained by this.”

“Except that instead of watching the weather you’re thinking about Evendrician datonomy?”

“Close enough.”

“But there was nothing about Evenedric or datonomy on the wall of your cell for Fraa Jad to see. Just material pertaining to Orithena, and a chart of the Lineage.”

“What you identified as a chart of the Lineage was really a sort of family tree of those who have tried to make sense of the Hylaean Theoric World. And it turns out that if you trace the branches of that tree and, so to speak, prune off all the branches populated by fanatics, Enthusiasts, Deolaters, and dead-enders, you end up with something that doesn’t look so much like a tree any more. It looks like a dowel. It starts with Cno#252;s and runs through Metekoranes and Protas and some others, and about halfway along you encounter Evenedric.”

“So Fraa Jad, looking at your tree-pruned-down-to-a-dowel, would guess immediately that you must be working on Evenedrician datonomy.”

“And would assume I was doing so in hopes of gaining upsight as to how the Geometers’ minds must be organized.”

“What about Ecba? How’d he guess you went to Ecba?”

“This math was founded by people who lived in the same cells where Fraa Jad has spent his whole life. He would know or surmise that if I could get to this place they would let me in the gates and provide me with food and shelter—quite obviously a better existence than what I could manage at Bly’s Butte.”

“Okay.” I was feeling relieved of a burden I’d been carrying since that day above Samble. “So there’s not a conspiracy. The Lineage doesn’t communicate through coded messages.”

“We communicate all the time,” Orolo said, “in the way I mentioned.”

“Meteorologists watching the same cloud.”

“That’s good enough for this stage of our conversation,” Orolo said. “But you haven’t yet unburdened yourself of whatever terribly important-seeming message or mission you brought in the gates with you. What errand has Fraa Jad sent you on?”

“He said ‘go north until you understand.’ And I guess that part of the mission is accomplished now.”

“Oh really? I’m pleased that you understand. I’m afraid I am still full of questions about these matters.”

“You know what I mean!” I snapped. “He also implied I was to come back to Tredegarh later. That he’d see to it I didn’t get in trouble. I guess he wanted me to fetch you. To bring you back to the Convox.”

“In case I’d developed any ideas, concerning the Geometers, that might be useful,” Orolo hazarded.

“Well, that’s the point of a Convox,” I reminded him, “to be useful.”

Orolo shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t have enough givens to work with, concerning the Geometers.”

“I’m sure that all the givens that there are to be had, are available at Tredegarh.”

“They are probably collecting exactly the wrong sort of information,” he said.

“So go there and tell them what to collect! Fraa Jad could use your help.”

“For me and Fraa Jad and some others of like mind to try to change the behavior of this S#230;cular/Mathic monstrosity called a Convox sounds like politics, which I am infamously bad at.”

“Then let me try to help!” I said. “Tell me what you’ve been doing. I’ll go back to the Convox and look for ways to use it.”

The most charitable way to interpret the look Orolo now gave me was affectionate but concerned. He waited for my brain to catch up with my mouth.

“Okay,” I said, “with a little help from some of the others, maybe.” I was thinking of the conversation I’d had with Tulia before Eliger.

“I can’t advise you on what to do at the Convox,” he finally said, “however, I am happy to explain what I’ve been up to.”

“Okay—I’ll settle for that.”

“It won’t help you—in fact, it’ll probably hurt you—at the Convox. Because it will sound crazy.”

“Fine. I’m used to people thinking that we are crazy because of the whole HTW thing!”

Orolo raised an eyebrow. “You know, on balance I think that what I’m about to discuss with you is less crazy than that. But the HTW”—he nodded in the direction of the Orithena dig—“is a cozy and familiar form of craziness.” He paused for a few moments, returning his gaze to me.

“Who are you talking to?” Orolo asked.

I was wrong-footed by this bizarre question, and took a moment to be certain I’d heard the question right. “I’m talking to Orolo,” I said.

“What is this Orolo? If a Geometer landed here and engaged you in conversation, how would you characterize Orolo to it?”

“As the man—the very complicated, bipedal, slightly hot, animated entity—standing right over there.”

“But depending on how a Geometer sees things, it might respond, ‘I see nothing there but vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves.’”

“Well, ‘vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves’ is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe,” I pointed out, “so if the Geometer was not able to recognize objects any more effectively than that, it could scarcely be considered a conscious being. After all, if it’s having a conversation with me, it must recognize me as—”

“Not so fast,” Orolo said, “let’s say you are talking to the Geometer by typing into a jeejah, or something. It knows you only as a stream of digits. Now you have to use those digits to supply a description of Orolo—or of yourself—that it would recognize.”

“Okay, I’d agree with the Geometer on some way to describe space. Then I’d say, ‘Consider the volume of space five feet in front of my position, about six feet high, two wide, and two deep. The probability waves that we call matter are somewhat denser inside of that box than they are outside of it.’ And so on.”

“Denser, because there’s a lot of meat in that box,” Orolo said, slapping his abdomen, “but outside of it, only air.”

“Yes. I should think any conscious entity should be able to recognize the meat/air boundary. What’s on the inside of the boundary is Orolo.”

“Funny that you have such firm opinions on what conscious beings ought to be able to do,” Orolo warned me. “Let me see…what about this?” He held up a fold of his bolt.

“Just as I can describe the meat/air boundary, I can describe how bolt-stuff differs from both meat and air, and explain that Orolo is wrapped in bolt-stuff.”

“There you go making assumptions!” Orolo chided me.

“Such as?”

“Let’s say that the Geometer you’re talking to has been inculcated in his civilization’s equivalent of the Sconics. He’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t really know, you’re not allowed to make statements about, things in themselves—only about your perceptions.’”

“True.”

“So you need to rephrase your statement in terms of the givens that are actually available to you.”

“All right,” I said, “instead of saying, ‘Orolo is wrapped in bolt-stuff,’ I’ll say, ‘When I gaze at Orolo from where I’m standing, I see mostly bolt, with bits of Orolo—his head and his hands—peeking out.’ But I don’t see why it matters.”

“It matters because the Geometer can’t stand where you are standing. It has to stand somewhere else, and see me from a different angle.”

“Yes, but the bolt wraps all the way around your body!”

“How do you know I’m not naked in back?”

“Because I’ve seen a lot of bolts and I know how they work.”

“But if you were a Geometer, seeing one for the first time—”

“I’d still be able to surmise that you were not naked in back, because if you were, the bolt would hang differently.”

“What if I got rid of the bolt and stood here naked?”

“What if you did?”

“How would you describe me to the Geometer, then? What would meet your eye, and the Geometer’s?”

“I would say to the Geometer ‘From where I stand, all I see is Orolo-skin. From where you stand, O Geometer, the same is likely true.’”

“And why is it likely?”

“Because without skin your blood and guts would fall out. Since I can’t see a puddle of blood and guts behind you, I can infer that your skin must be in place.”

“Just as you infer that my bolt must continue all the way round me in back, from the way in which its visible part hangs.”

“Yes, I guess it’s the same general principle.”

“Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first,” Orolo said. “One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of probability waves in a vacuum—”

“I.e., see stuff.”

“Yes, and perform the trick of integrating those givens into seemingly persistent objects that can be held in consciousness. But that’s not all. You perceive only one side of me, but you are all the time drawing inferences about my other side—that my bolt continues round in back, that I have skin—inferences that reflect an innate understanding of theorical laws. You can’t seem to make these inferences without performing little thought experiments in your head: ‘if the bolt didn’t continue round in back it would hang differently,’ ‘if Orolo had no skin his guts would fall out.’ In each of those cases you are using your understanding of the laws of dynamics to explore a little counterfactual universe inside of your head, a universe where the bolt or the skin isn’t there, and you are then running that universe in fast-forward, like a speely, to see what would happen.

“And that is not the only such activity that is going on in your mind when you describe me to the Geometers,” Orolo went on, after a pause to swallow some water, “because you are forever making allowances for the fact that you and the Geometer are in different places, seeing me from different points of view, taking in different givens. From where you’re standing you might be able to see the freckle on the left side of my nose, but you have the wit to understand that the Geometer can’t see that freckle because of where it is standing. This is another way in which your consciousness is forever building counterfactual universes: ‘if I were standing where the Geometer is, my view of the freckle would be blocked.’ Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer—to imagine what it would be like to be someone else—isn’t a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.”

“Wait a second,” I said, “you’re saying I can’t predict the Geometers’ inability to see the freckle without erecting a replica of the whole universe in my imagination?”

“Not exactly a replica,” Orolo said. “Almost a replica, in which everything is the same, except for where you are standing.”

“It seems to me that there are much simpler ways of getting that result. Perhaps I have a memory of what you look like when viewed from that side. I call up that image in my memory and say to myself, ‘Hmm, no freckle.’”

“It is a perfectly reasonable thought,” Orolo said, “but I must warn you that it does not really buy you much, if what you seek is a simple and easy-to-understand model of how the mind works.”

“Why not? I’m only talking about memory.”

Orolo chortled, then composed himself, and made an effort to be tactful. “Thus far we have spoken only of the present. We’ve talked only of space—not of time. Now you would like to bring memories into the discussion. You are proposing to pull up memories of how you perceived Orolo’s nose from a different angle at a different time: ‘I sat on his right last night at supper and couldn’t see the freckle.’”

“It seems simple enough,” I said.

“You might ask yourself what in your brain enables you to do such things.”

“What things?”

“Take in some givens one evening at supper. Take in another set of givens now—or one second ago—two seconds ago—but always now! And say that all of them were—are—the same chap, Orolo.”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” I said. “It’s just pattern recognition. Syntactic devices can do it.”

“Can they? Give me an example.”

“Well…I guess a simple example would be…” I looked around, and happened to notice the contrail of an aerocraft high overhead. “Radar tracking aerocraft in a crowded sky.”

“Tell me how it works.”

“The antenna spins around. It sends out pulses. Echoes come back to it. From the time lag of the echo, it can calculate the bogey’s distance. And it knows in what direction the bogey lies—that’s dead easy, it’s just the same direction as the antenna is pointing when the echo hits it.”

“It can only look in one direction at a time,” Orolo said.

“Yeah, it’s got extreme tunnel vision, and compensates for that by spinning around.”

“A little bit like us,” Orolo said.

We had begun descending the mountain, and were walking side by side. Orolo went on, “I can’t see in all directions at once, but I glance to the side every so often to make sure you’re still there.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “You have in your head a model of your surroundings that includes me off to your right side. You can maintain it for a while by holding down the fast-forward button. But every so often you have to update it with new givens, or it’ll get out of whack with what is really going on.”

“How does the radar system manage it?”

“Well, the antenna rotates once and takes in echoes from everything that’s in the sky. It plots their positions. Then it rotates again and collects a new set of echoes. The new set is similar to the first one. But all of the bogeys are now in slightly different positions, because all of the aerocraft are moving, each at its own speed, each in its own direction.”

“And I can see how a human observer, watching the bogeys plotted on a screen, would be able to assemble a mental model of where the aerocraft were and how they were moving,” Orolo said, “in the same way as we stitch together frames of a speely to form a continuous story in our minds. But how does the syntactic device inside the radar system do it? It has nothing more than a list of numbers, updated from time to time.”

“If there were only one bogey, it would be easy,” I said.

“Agreed.”

“Or just a few, widely separated, moving slowly, so that their paths didn’t cross.”

“Also agreed. But what of the hard case of many fast bogeys, close together, paths crossing?”

“A human observer could manage it easily—just like watching a speely,” I said. “A syndev would have to do some of what a human brain does.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

“We have a sense for what is plausible. Let’s say there are two aerocraft, full of passengers, going just under the speed of sound, and that during the interval between two radar sweeps, their paths cross at right angles. The machine can’t tell the bogeys apart. So there are a few possible interpretations of the givens. One is that both planes executed sharp right-angle turns at the same moment and veered off in new directions. Another is that they bounced off each other like rubber balls. The third interpretation is that the planes are at different altitudes, so they didn’t collide, and both simply kept flying in a straight line. That interpretation is the simplest, and the only one consistent with the laws of dynamics. So the syndev must be programmed to evaluate the different interpretations of the givens and choose the one that is most plausible.”

“So we have taught this device a little of what we know of the action principles that govern the movement of our cosmos through Hemn space, and commanded it to filter out possibilities that diverge from a plausible world-track,” Orolo said.

“In a very crude way, I suppose. It doesn’t really know how to apply action principles in Hemn space and all that.”

“Do we?”

“Some of us do.”

“Theors, yes. But a sline playing catch knows what the ball will do—more importantly, what it can’t do—without knowing the first thing about theorics.”

“Of course. Even animals can do that. Orolo, where is Evenedrician datonomy getting us? I see some connection to our pink dragon dialog back home, a few months ago, but—”

Orolo got a funny look on his face. He’d forgotten. “Oh yes. About you and your worrying.”

“Yes.”

“That’s something animals can’t do,” he pointed out. “They react to immediate, concrete threats, but they don’t worry about abstract threats years in the future. It takes the mind of an Erasmas to do that.”

I laughed. “I haven’t been doing it so much lately.”

“Good!” He reached out and gave me an affectionate thud on the shoulder.

“Maybe it’s the Allswell.”

“No, it’s that you have real things to worry about now. But please remind me how it went—the dialog about the pink nerve-gas-farting dragon?”

“We developed a theory that our minds were capable of envisioning possible futures as tracks through configuration space, and then rejecting ones that didn’t follow a realistic action principle. Jesry complained it was a heavyweight solution to a lightweight problem. I agreed. Arsibalt objected.”

“This was after Fraa Paphlagon had been Evoked, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Arsibalt had been reading Paphlagon.”

“Yes.”

“So tell me, Fraa Erasmas, are you still with Jesry, or with Arsibalt?”

“I still think it seems fanciful to think we are all the time erecting and tearing down counterfactual universes in our minds.”

“I’ve become so used to it that it seems fanciful to think otherwise,” Orolo said. “But perhaps we can go on another hike tomorrow and discuss it further.” We were reaching the outskirts of the math.

“I’d like that,” I said.

As we drew near enough to smell supper cooking, I recollected that I needed to get a message out to my friends the next day. But it was not the right moment to bring this up and so I resolved to mention it the next morning.

I had it in my mind that this would force Orolo to make a decision, but as soon as I explained it to him, he made a point that was embarrassingly obvious, once he’d made it: the three-day deadline was perfectly arbitrary, and hence the only sound approach was to brush it aside without any further mention. He called in Fraa Landasher, who proposed that my friends be invited into the math and allowed to lodge here for as long as it might take to sort things out. This was shocking until I reminded myself that things were done differently here and that Landasher was beholden to no one except, possibly, the dowment that owned Ecba. Then I felt sure that my four friends would have no interest in biding in such a place as this. But a couple of hours later, when I walked out of the gate and down to the souvenir shop to explain matters to them, they accepted unanimously and without discussion. That in itself made me a little nervous, so I accompanied them back to the cove and helped them strike camp, using the afternoon to provide them with a running lecture on mathic etiquette. I was especially worred that Ganelial Crade would preach to them. But soon, beginning with Yul and spreading quickly to the others, they began to make fun of me for being so worried about this, and I realized that I had offended them. So I said nothing more until we got back to Orithena. Cord, Yul, Gnel, and Sammann were let in through the gate and given rooms in a sort of guest lodge, set apart from the cloister, where they were allowed to keep jeejahs and other S#230;cular goods. Dressed in their extramuros garb—but without the jeejahs—they joined us at dinner and were formally toasted and welcomed by Fraa Landasher.

The next morning I rousted them early and led them down to the dig for a tour. Gnel looked as if he were having some sort of Deolatrous epiphany, though in all fairness I’d probably had a similar look on my face when Suur Spry had taken me down there.

I asked Sammann if he’d learned anything more about who was running Ecba and he said “yes” and “it’s boring.” Some burger, just after the Third Sack, had become an Enthusiast for all things Orithenan. He was very rich and so he’d bought the island and, to run it, set up the foundation, complete with tedious bylaws that ran to a thousand pages—it was meant to last forever and so the bylaws had to cover every eventuality they could think of. Executive power lay in the hands of a mixed S#230;cular/Mathic board of governors, Sammann explained, warming to the task even as my attention was beginning to wander…

So getting my friends squared away at Orithena distracted me for a couple of days. After that I resumed my walks up the mountain with Orolo.

“I know that our last conversation was not completely satisfactory to you, Erasmas. I apologize for that. These ideas are unfinished. I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension. I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore. But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves. Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it. But then, before I can form any firm impression of what it is I’m seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave.”

“I feel that way all the time, when I am trying to understand something new,” I said. “Then, one day, all of a sudden—”

“You just get it,” Orolo said.

“Yeah. The idea is just there, fully formed.”

“Many have noted this, of course. I believe it is related, in a deep way, to the sort of mental process I was speaking of the other day. The brain takes advantage of quantum effects; I’m sure of it.”

“I know just enough about it to know that what you just said has been controversial for a long, long time.”

This affected him not at all; but after I looked in his eye long enough, he finally gave a shrug. So be it. “Did Sammann ever talk to you of Saunt Grod’s Machines?”

“No. What is it?”

“A syntactic device that made use of quantum theorics. Before the Second Sack, his forerunners and ours worked together on such things. Saunt Grod’s Machines were extremely good at solving problems that involved sifting through many possible solutions at the same time. For example, the Lazy Peregrin.”

“That’s the one where a wandering fraa needs to visit several maths, scattered randomly around a map?”

“Yes, and the problem is to find the shortest route that will take him to all of the destinations.”

“I kind of see what you mean,” I said. “One could draw up an exhaustive list of every possible route—”

“But it takes forever to do it that way,” Orolo said. “In a Saunt Grod’s Machine, you could erect a sort of generalized model of the scenario, and configure the machine so that it would, in effect, examine all possible routes at the same time.”

“So, this kind of machine, instead of existing in one fixed, knowable state at any given time, would be in a superposition of many quantum states.”

“Yes, it’s just like an elementary particle that might have spin up or spin down. It is in both states at the same time—”

“Until someone observes it,” I said, “and the wavefunction collapses to one state or the other. So, I guess with a Saunt Grod’s Machine, one eventually makes some observation—”

“And the machine’s wavefunction collapses to one particular state—which is the answer. The ‘output,’ I believe the Ita call it,” Orolo said, smiling a little as he pronounced the unfamiliar bit of jargon.

“I agree that thinking often feels that way,” I said. “You have a jumble of vague notions in your mind. Suddenly, bang! It all collapses into one clear answer that you know is right. But every time something happens suddenly, you can’t simply chalk it up to quantum effects.”

“I know,” Orolo said. “Do you see where I’m going, though, when I speak of counterfactual cosmi?”

“I didn’t really get it until you brought quantum theorics into the picture,” I said. “But it’s been obvious for a while that you have been developing a theory about how consciousness works. You have mentioned some different phenomena that any introspective person would recognize—I won’t bother to go back and list them all—and you have tried to unify them…”

“My grand unification theory of consciousness,” Orolo joked.

“Yes, you are saying that they are all rooted in a special ability that the brain has to erect models of counterfactual cosmi in the brain, and to play them forward in time, evaluate their plausibility, and so on. Which is utterly insane if you take the brain to be a normal syndev.”

“Agreed,” Orolo said. “It would require an immense amount of processing power just to erect the models—to say nothing of running them forward. Nature would have found some more efficient way to get the job done.”

“But when you play the quantum card,” I said, “it changes the game entirely. Now, all you need is to have one generalized model of the cosmos—like the generalized map that a Saunt Grod’s Machine uses to solve the Lazy Peregrin problem—permanently loaded up in your brain. That model can then exist in a vast number of possible states, and you can ask all sorts of questions of it.”

“I’m glad that you now understand this in the same way that I do,” Orolo said. “I do have one quibble, however.”

“Oh boy,” I said, “here goes.”

“Traditions die hard, among the avout,” Orolo said. “And for a very long time, it has been traditional to teach quantum theorics to fids in a particular way that is based on how it was construed by the theors who discovered it, way back in the time of the Harbingers. And that, Erasmas, is how you were taught as well. Even if I had never met you before today, I would know this from the language that you use to talk about these things: ‘it exists in a superposition of states—observing it collapses the wavefunction’ and so on.”

“Yes. I know where you are going with this,” I said. “There are whole orders of theors—have been for thousands of years—that use completely different models and terminology.”

“Yes,” Orolo said, “and can you guess which model, which terminology, I am partial to?”

“The more polycosmic the better, I assume.”

“Of course! So, whenever I hear you talking of quantum phenomena using the old terminology—”

“The fid version?”

“Yes, I must mentally translate what you’re saying into polycosmic terms. For example, the simple case of a particle that is either spin up or spin down—”

“You would say that, at the moment when the spin is observed—the moment when its spin has an effect on the rest of the cosmos—the cosmos bifurcates into two complete, separate, causally independent cosmi that then go their separate ways.”

“You’ve almost got it. But it’s better to say that those two cosmi exist before the measurement is made, and that they interfere with each other—there is a little bit of crosstalk between them—until the observation is made. And then they go their separate ways.”

“And here,” I said, “we could talk about how crazy this sounds to many people—”

Orolo shrugged. “Yet it is a model that a great many theors come to believe in sooner or later, because the alternatives turn out to be even crazier in the end.”

“All right. So, I think I know what comes next. You want me to restate your theory of what the brain does in terms of the polycosmic interpretation of quantum theorics.”

“If you would so indulge me,” Orolo said, with a suggestion of a bow.

“Okay. Here goes,” I said. “The premise, here, is that the brain is loaded up with a pretty accurate model of the cosmos that it lives in.”

“At least, the local part of it,” Orolo said. “It needn’t have a good model of other galaxies, for example.”

“Right. And to state it in the terminology of the old interpretation that fids are taught, the state of that model is a superposition of many possible present and future states of the cosmos—or at least of the model.”

He held up a finger. “Not of the cosmos, but—?”

“But of hypothetical alternate cosmi differing slightly from the cosmos.”

“Very good. Now, this generalized cosmos-model that each person carries around in his or her brain—do you have any idea how it would work? What it would look like?”

“Not in the slightest!” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about the nerve cells and so on. How they could be rigged together to create such a model. How the model could be reconfigured, from moment to moment, to represent hypothetical scenarios.”

“Fair enough,” Orolo said, holding up his hands to placate me. “Let’s leave nerve cells out of the discussion, then. The important thing about the model, though, is what?”

“That it can exist in many states at once, and that its wavefunction collapses from time to time to give a useful result.”

“Yes. Now, in the polycosmic interpretation of how quantum theorics works, what does all of this look like?”

“There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of different copies of me—of my brain—each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another.”

He let me stew on that for a few moments. And then it came to me. Just like those ideas we had spoken of earlier—suddenly there in my head. “You don’t even need the model any more, do you?”

Orolo just nodded, smiled, egged me on with little beckoning gestures.

I went on—seeing it as I was saying it. “It is so much simpler this way! My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more! All it needs to do is to perceive—to reflect—the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”

“The variations—the myriad possible alternative scenarios—have been moved out of your brain,” Orolo said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles, “and out into the polycosm, which is where they all exist anyway!” He opened his hand and extended it to the sky, as if releasing a bird. “All you have to do is perceive them.”

“But each variant of me doesn’t exist in perfect isolation from the others,” I said, “or else it wouldn’t work.”

Orolo nodded. “Quantum interference—the crosstalk among similar quantum states—knits the different versions of your brain together.”

“You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.”

“I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”

Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away from Arbre at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.

One of the stars was moving. So discreetly, at first, that I had to stop, find my balance, and observe it closely to be sure. It was no illusion. The ancient animal part of my brain, so attuned to subtle, suspicious movement, had picked out this one star among the millions. It was in the western sky, not far above the horizon, hence diluted, at first, in twilight. But it rose slowly and steadily into the black. As it did, it changed its color and its size. Early on, it was a pinprick of white light, just like any other star, but as it rose toward the zenith it reddened. Then it broadened to a dot of orange, then flared yellow and threw out a comet-tail. Until that point my eyes had been playing any number of tricks on me and I’d misconceived its distance, its altitude, and its velocity. But the comet-tail shocked me into the right view: the thing was not high above us in space but descending into the atmosphere, dumping its energy into shredded, glowing air. Its rise had slowed as it neared the zenith, and it was clear it would lose all forward speed before it passed over our heads. The meteor’s bearing had never changed: it was headed right at us, and the brighter and fatter it grew, the more it seemed to hang motionless in the sky, like a thrown ball that is coming straight at your head. For a minute it was a little sun, fixed in the sky and stabbing rays of incandescent air in all directions. Then it shrank and faded back through orange to a dull red, and became difficult to make out.

I realized I had tilted my head as far back as it would go, and was gazing vertically upwards.

At the risk of losing my fix on it, I dropped my chin and had a look around.

Orolo was a hundred feet downhill of me and running as fast as he could.

I gave up trying to track the thing in the sky and took off after him. By the time I caught up, we were almost at the edge of the pit.

“They deciphered my analemma!” he exclaimed between gasps.

We stopped at a rope that had been stretched at waist level from stake to stake around the edge of the pit, to prevent sleepy or drunk avout from falling into it. I looked up and cried out in shock as I saw something absolutely enormous, just above us, like a low cloud. But it was perfectly circular. I understood that it was a gigantic parachute. Its shroud lines converged on a glowing red load that hung far below it.

The lines went all quavery and the chute blurred, then began to drift sideways on a barely perceptible breeze. It had been cut loose. The hot red thing fell like a stone but then thrust out legs of blue fire and, a few seconds later, began to hiss, shockingly loud. It was aiming for the floor of the pit. Orolo and I followed the rope around to the top of the ramp. A crowd of fraas and suurs was building there, more fascinated than afraid. Orolo began pushing through them, headed for the ramp, shouting above the hiss of the rocket: “Fraa Landasher, open the gate! Yul, go out with your cousin and get your vehicles. Find the parachute and bring it back! Sammann, do you have your jeejah? Cord! Get all of your things and meet me at the bottom!” And he launched himself down the ramp, rushing alone into the dark to meet the Geometers.

I ran after him. My usual role in life. I’d lost sight of the probe—the ship—whatever it was—during all of this, but now it was suddenly there, dead level with me and only a few hundred feet away, dropping at a measured pace toward the Temple of Orithena. I was so stunned by its immediacy, its heat and noise, that I recoiled, lost my balance, and stumbled to my knees. In that posture I watched it descend the last hundred feet or so. Its attitude, its velocity were perfectly steady, but only by dint of a thousand minute twitches and wiggles of its rocket nozzles: something very sophisticated was controlling the thing, making a myriad decisions every second. It was headed for the Decagon. In the final half-second, a hell-storm of shattering tiles was kicked up by the plumes of hypersonic gas shooting from those engines. Crouching, insect-like legs took up the last of its velocity and the engines went dark. But they continued to hiss for a couple of seconds as some kind of gas was run through the engines, purging the lines, shrouding the probe in a cool bluish cloud.

Then Orithena was silent.

I picked myself up and began hurrying down the ramp as best I could while keeping my head turned sideways, the better to stare at the Geometers’ probe. Its bottom was broad and saucer-shaped and still glowing a dull red-brown from the heat of re-entry. Above that it had a simple shape, like an inverted bucket, with a slightly domed top. Five tall narrow hatches had opened in its sides, revealing slots from which the bug-legs had unfolded. Atop its dome was some clutter I could not quite make out: presumably the mechanism for deploying and cutting free the parachute, maybe some antennas and sensors. I saw all sides of it as I chased Orolo down the spiral ramp, and never saw anything that looked like a window.

I caught up with him at the edge of the Decagon. He was sniffing the air. “Doesn’t seem to be venting anything noxious,” he said. “From the color of the exhaust, I’m guessing hydrogen/oxygen. Clean as a whistle.”

Landasher came down alone. It seemed he had ordered the others to remain above. He had his mouth open to say something. He looked half-deranged, a man in over his head. Orolo cut him off: “Is the gate open?” Landasher didn’t know. But above, we could now hear vehicles roaring around. I recognized them by their sounds: they were the ones we had brought over the pole. A light appeared at the top of the ramp.

“Someone opened them,” Orolo said. “But they must be closed and bolted again, as soon as the vehicles and parachute are inside. You should prepare for an invasion.”

“You think the Geometers are launching an—”

“No. I mean an invasion of the Panjandrums. This event will have been picked up on sensors. There is no telling how quickly the S#230;cular Power may respond. Possibly within an hour.”

“We cannot possibly keep the S#230;cular Power out, if they wish to come in,” Landasher said.

“As much time as possible. That is all I ask for,” Orolo said.

The three-wheeler was coming down the ramp. As it drew closer I saw Cord at the controls, Sammann standing on the back, gripping Cord’s shoulders to maintain his balance.

“What do you propose to do with that time?” Landasher demanded. Until now, he had always struck me as a wise and reasonable leader, but this evening he was under a lot of stress.

“Learn,” Orolo said. “Learn of the Geometers, before the S#230;cular Power takes this moment away from us.”

The three-wheeler reached the bottom. Sammann hopped off, unslinging his jeejah from his shoulder. He aimed its sensors at the probe. Cord gunned the engine briefly and swung the machine around so that its headlight, too, was aimed at the probe. Then she hopped off and began to pull gear from the cargo shelf on the rear axle.

“What of—how do you know it is safe? What about infection!? Orolo? Orolo!” Landasher cried, for Cord’s headlight gambit had offered a much better look at the thing, and Orolo was drifting toward it, fascinated.

“If they were afraid of being infected by us, they would not have come here,” Orolo said. “If we are at risk of being infected by them, then we are at their mercy.”

“Do you really fancy that bolting the gate is going to stop people who have helicopters?” Landasher asked.

“I have an idea about that,” Orolo said. “Fraa Erasmas will see to it.”

By the time I had got back up to the top of the ramp, Yul and Gnel had retrieved the parachute. They and a small crew of adventurous avout had wadded and stuffed much of it into the open back of Gnel’s fetch, restraining it with a haphazard web of cargo straps and shroud lines. Still, an acre of parachute and a mile of shroud lines trailed in the dust behind the fetch as they drew up to the edge of the pit.

Now at this point we ought to have put on white body suits, gloves, respirators, and sealed the alien chute in sterile poly and sent it to a lab to be examined and analyzed down to the molecular level. But I had other orders. So I grabbed the edge of the chute—my first physical contact with an artifact from another star system—and felt it. To me, no expert on textiles, it felt like the same stuff we used to make parachutes on Arbre. Same story with the shroud lines. I did not think that they were what we called newmatter.

Quite a crowd had gathered around the fetch. They were respecting Landasher’s order not to go into the pit. But he hadn’t said anything about the parachute. I climbed up onto the top of the fetch and announced: “Each of you is responsible for one shroud line. We’ll pull the chute out and spread it on the ground. Form a ring around its edge. Choose your line. Then radiate. Spread the lines outwards, untangling them as you go. In ten minutes I would like to see the whole population of Orithena standing in a huge circle around this parachute, each holding the end of a line.”

A pretty simple plan. It got quite a bit messier as they put it into practice. But they were smart people, and the less fussing and meddling I did, the better they showed themselves at dreaming up solutions to problems. Meanwhile I had Yul estimate the length of a single shroud line by counting fathoms with his arms.

Gnel drove his fetch out from under the spreading chute and down the ramp to the bottom of the pit. He had equipped it with a battery of high-powered lights that I had always found ridiculous. Tonight, he had finally found something to aim them at. I took a moment to glance down, and saw that Orolo and Cord had approached to within twenty feet of the probe.

Getting the Orithenans spread out around the chute took a little while. A supersonic jet screamed overhead and startled us.

Yul’s measurement confirmed my general impression, which was that the shroud lines were something like half as long as the pit was wide. Once I explained the general plan to the Orithenans, they began to move toward the edge of the pit, parting to either side and circumventing the rim while keeping the shroud lines taut. The chute glided across the ground in fits and starts. We had to get a few people underneath it to coax and waft it over snags. But presently the leading edge of the fabric curled over the rim of the pit, and then the movement took on a life of its own as gravity helped it forward. I hoped the Orithenans on the ends of the lines would have the good sense to let go the ropes if they felt themselves being pulled toward the edge. But the chute wasn’t nearly heavy enough to cause any such problems. Once all of the fabric had gone over the edge, and the Orithenans had spaced themselves evenly around it, the thing became quite manageable. The chute seemed to cover about half of the pit’s area. The Orithenans by now had figured out the general idea, which was that we wanted to suspend the parachute above the Teglon plaza as a canopy. They began to move about en masse, adjusting its position and its altitude with no further direction from me. When it seemed right, I jogged around the perimeter urging them to move away from the hole and trace their shroud lines out as far as they could go, and to lash the ends around any solid anchors they could find. For about a third of them, this ended up being the top of the concent’s outer wall. Other lines ended up finding purchase on trees, Cloister pillars, trestles, rocks, or sticks hammered into the ground.

Hearing an engine, I looked over to the top of the ramp and saw that Yul was gingerly driving his house-on-wheels down into the pit—the better, I guessed, to cook breakfast for the Geometers. I sprinted over and dived into the cabin with him. This sparked a general rebellion among the Orithenans who, ignoring Landasher’s earlier order, followed us down on foot.

Yul and I drove down the ramp in silence. The look on his face was as if he were just on the verge of hysterical laughter. When we reached the bottom, he parked amid the ruins of the Temple, just near the Analemma. He shut off the engine. He turned to look at me and finally broke the silence. “I don’t know how this is going to come out,” he said, “but I sure am glad I came with you.” And, before I could tell him how glad I was of his company, he was out the door, striding over to join Cord.

Radiant heat from the underside of the vehicle was making it difficult to approach. Yul went back to his fetch and got some reflective emergency blankets. Cord, Orolo, and I used these as bolts. Most of the vehicle was above us, so we put out a call for ladders.

It had been difficult to guess the thing’s size before, but now I was able to borrow a measuring rod from the archaeological dig and measure it at about twenty feet in diameter. I hadn’t brought anything to write with, but Sammann was using his jeejah in speelycaptor mode, taking everything down, so I called out the numbers.

A helicopter approached. We could hear it through the canopy. It circled the compound a few times, its downwash creating huge, eye-catching disturbances in the canopy. Then it withdrew to a higher altitude and hovered. It could not land here because of the parachute. All the land within the walls was built on or cultivated with trees and trellises. They’d have to land outside and knock on the door, or scale the wall.

So we had stalled them for a few minutes. But everyone felt desperately short of time now. Suddenly a dozen ladders were available—all different sizes, all hand-crafted of wood. The Orithenans began lashing them together to make a scaffold right next to the probe, on the side that seemed to have a sort of hatch. Cord clambered up and found a place to stand on a ladder that had been placed horizontally. I felt proud watching her. So much about this might have been overwhelming. At some level perhaps she was overwhelmed. But this probe was, after all, a machine. She could tell how it worked. And as long as she held her focus on that, none of the other stuff mattered.

“Talk to us!” Sammann called to her, staring at the screen of his jeejah as he lined up his shot.

“There is clearly a removable hatch,” she said. “It is trapezoidal with rounded corners. Two feet wide at the base. One and a half at the top. Four high. Curved like the fuselage.” She was doing a funny kind of dance, because the scaffold was still being improvised beneath her—she was poised between two ladder-rungs and the ladder kept shifting. She was casting an array of lapping shadows on what she wanted to see, so she fished a headlamp out of her vest, turned it on, and played its beam over the streaked and burned surface of the probe.

“Can we just go ahead and call it a door?” Sammann asked.

“Okay. There is Geometer-writing stenciled around the door. Letters about an inch high.”

“Stenciled?” Sammann asked.

“Yeah.” Cord stretched the band of the lamp over her head and adjusted its angle, freeing her hands.

“Literally stenciled?”

“Yeah. In the sense that they took a piece of paper with letter-shaped cutouts and held it up to the metal and slapped paint on it.” I heard a series of metallic raps. Cord was touching a magnet to various places around the door. “None of this is ferrous.” Then a screeching noise. “I can’t scratch it with my steel knife blade. Maybe a high-temp stainless alloy.”

“Fascinating,” Orolo called. “Can you get it open?”

“I think that the stenciled messages are opening instructions,” she said. “It is the same message—the same stencil—repeated in four places around the door. In each case, there is a line painted from it—”

“An arrow?” someone called. Others, who were standing where they could see it better, were more certain. “Those are arrows!”

“They don’t look like our arrows,” Cord said, “but maybe the Geometers do them differently. Each of them is aimed at a panel about the size of my hand. These panels appear to be held in place with fasteners—flush-head machine bolts—four per panel—I don’t have the right tool to put into them but I can fake it with a daisy-head driver.” She frisked herself.

“How do we know they are fasteners at all?” someone called. “We know nothing of these aliens and their praxis!”

“It’s just obvious!” Cord called back. “I can see little burrs where some alien mechanic over-torqued them. The heads are knurled so aliens can turn ’em with their alien fingers when they are loose. The only question is: clockwise, or counterclockwise?”

She jammed a driver into place, whacked it once with the heel of her hand to seat it, and grunted as she applied torque. “Counterclockwise,” she announced. For some reason this caused a cheer to run through the crowd of avout. “The Geometers are right-handed!” someone called, and everyone laughed.

Cord pocketed the bolts as she got them out. The little panel fell off and clattered through the scaffolding to the stone plaza, where someone snatched it up and peered at it like a page from a holy book. “Behind the panel is a cavity containing a T-handle,” she announced. “But I’m going to remove the other three panels before I mess with it.”

“Why?” someone asked—typical argumentative avout, I thought.

Going to work on another panel, Cord answered patiently: “It’s like when you bolt the wheel onto your mobe, you take turns tightening the nuts to equalize the stress.”

“What if there is a pressure differential?” Orolo asked.

“Another good reason to take it slow,” Cord muttered. “We don’t want anyone to get smashed by a flying door. As a matter of fact—” She looked out at the crowd of avout below.

Yul took her meaning. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed: “MOVE BACK! Everyone get clear of the hatch. A hundred feet away. MOVE!” The voice was shockingly loud and authoritative. People moved, and opened up a corridor all the way to Gnel’s fetch.

More aerocraft, of two or three different types, approached while Cord was undoing the panels. We could hear them landing on the other side of the wall. Someone called down news that soldiers were getting out, down on the road by the souvenir shop.

A thought occurred to me. “Sammann,” I asked, “are you sending this out over the Reticulum?”

“Smile,” Sammann answered, “right now a billion people are laughing at you.”

I tried not to think about the soldiers and the billion people.

A hiss came from the probe. Cord jumped back and almost toppled from the scaffold. The hiss died away asymptotically over a few seconds. Cord laughed nervously. “One of the things that happens when you operate a T-handle,” she said, “is that a pressure-equalizing valve opens up.”

“Did air go in, or out?” Orolo asked.

“In.” Cord operated the other three T-handles. “Uh-oh,” she said, “here it comes!” And the door simply fell out and hit the ladder she was standing on. Yul got his arms up in time to steer it down to the ground. We all watched that. Then all looked to Cord, who was standing there, hands on hips, pelvis cocked to one side, aiming the beam of her headlamp into the probe.

“What’s in there?” someone finally asked.

“A dead girl,” she said, “with a box on her lap.”

“Human or—”

“Close,” Cord said, “but not from Arbre.”

Cord crouched as if to enter the capsule, but then started as the scaffolding torqued, rocked, and rebounded. It was Yul. He had vaulted up to join her. He wasn’t about to let his girl climb into an alien spaceship until he’d checked it for monsters. The scaffold had been about right for one, and had now reached maximum capacity; no one else was going up there as long as most of the space was claimed by an agitated Yulassetar Crade. Cord was mildly offended; she refused to move, so Yul had to drop to his knees and stick his head into the doorway down around the level of her thighs. It felt haphazard, hasty, and absolutely the wrong way to treat such priceless theorical evidence. If circumstances had been different, avout would have swarmed the ladders and restrained Yul, nothing would have been touched until all had been measured, phototyped, examined, analyzed. But the hovering and circling aerocraft, as well as other sound effects from above, had put everyone in a different frame of mind. “Yul!” Sammann shouted, and as soon as Yul turned around the Ita lobbed his jeejah up to the scaffold. Yul reached instinctively, snatched it out of the air, and thrust it into the capsule. It could see in the dark better than a human and so he ended up using its screen as a night vision device. That’s how he noticed the dark stains in the clothing of the dead Geometer.

“She’s wounded,” he announced, “she’s bleeding!” There were cries of alarm from some of the avout who assumed Yul must be talking of Cord, but soon it was clear that he was speaking of the Geometer in the capsule.

“Are you claiming he, she, is alive!?” Sammann asked.

“I don’t know!” Yul said, turning his head to look down at us.

As long as he was out of the way, Cord thrust a leg into the doorway and leaned her head and upper body through. We heard a muffled exclamation. Yul relayed it: “Cord says she’s still warm!”

All kinds of theorical questions were coming up in my mind—and probably the minds of all the others: how can you tell it’s female? How do you know they even have sexes? What makes you think they have blood like we do, and that that’s what is coming out of her? But, again, the stress and chaos relegated all such questions to a kind of intellectual quarantine.

Orolo pointed out, “If there is any possibility that she might be alive, we must do whatever we can to help her!”

That was all Yul needed to hear. He tossed the jeejah back to Sammann with one hand while giving Cord a knife with the other. “She’s strapped in pretty good,” he warned us. All we could see of Cord now was one leg, which twisted and pawed as she braced it against the scaffold. A minute passed. We stood, waiting, unable to help Cord, helpless to do anything about the banging, booming, and metallic screeching noises resounding from the gates and walls of the concent high above. Finally Cord gave a great heave and tumbled half out of the door. Yul reached in for the second heave. Like a rafting guide hauling a drowned customer from a river, he brought the Geometer out with the full power of both arms and legs, and ended up lying on his back with the alien sprawled full-length on top of him. Red liquid spilled down around his ribs and dripped through the rungs onto the ground. Twenty hands reached up to accept the weight of the Geometer as Yul rolled her sideways off his body. Three hands, one of them Orolo’s, converged on her head, cradling it, taking great care it did not loll. I glimpsed the face. From fifty feet, anyone would have taken her for a native of this planet. Close up, there was no doubt that she was, as Cord had put it, “not from Arbre.” There was no one thing about her face that would prove this. But the color and texture of her skin and hair, the bone structure, the sculpture of the outer ear, the shape of the teeth, were all just different enough.

It was out of the question to lay her down on the rocket-blasted ground, still hot and strewn with jagged tile-shards, so we looked around for the nearest flat surface that might serve. This turned out to be the empty bed of Gnel’s fetch, about a hundred feet away. We carried the Geometer on our shoulders, quick-stepping as fast as we could without dropping her. Suur Maltha, the concent’s physician, met us halfway and was probing the patient’s neck with her fingertips before we had even set her down. Gnel, thinking fast, got a camp pad rolled out just in time. We laid the Geometer down on it, head on the tailgate. She was in a loose, pale blue coverall, the back sodden with what was obviously blood. Suur Maltha ripped the garment open and explored the body with a stethoscope. “Even allowing for the fact that I can’t be sure where the heart is, I hear no pulse. Just some very faint noises that I would identify as bowel sounds. Roll her over.”

We got the Geometer on her stomach. Suur Maltha cut the fabric away. It was not just soaked with blood but perforated with many holes. Maltha used a cloth to swipe a mess of gore away from the back, revealing a constellation of large round puncture wounds, extending from the buttocks up halfway to the shoulder, mostly on the left side. Everyone inhaled and became silent. Suur Maltha regarded it for a few moments, mastering her own sense of shock, and then looked as if she might be about to deliver some clinical observation.

But Gnel beat her to it. “Shotgun blast,” he diagnosed. “Heavy gauge—antipersonnel. Medium range.” And then, though it wasn’t really necessary, he delivered the verdict: “Some SOB shot this poor lady in the back. May God have mercy on her soul.”

One of Maltha’s assistants had had the presence of mind to shove a thermometer into an orifice that she had noticed down where the legs joined. “Body temp similar to ours,” she announced. “She has been dead for maybe minutes.”

The sky fell on us. Or so it seemed, for a few moments. Someone above had cut the shroud lines of the parachute and it had collapsed on our heads. Startling as all hell, but harmless. Everyone spread out and got busy pawing, dragging, stuffing, and wadding. There was no coherent plan. But eventually a lot of avout came together in the middle of the plaza, corralling a huge wad of chute-stuff which they pushed and rolled up the steps of the Temple to get it out of the way. When it was obvious that there was an oversupply of these chute-wranglers, I turned back towards the probe, meaning to go and give the people there an update. My inclination was to run. But soldiers in head-to-toe suits were coming down the ramp in force and I thought that running might only excite someone’s chase instinct.

Orolo and Sammann were examining an artifact that had been in the capsule—the box that Cord had seen on the occupant’s lap. It was made of some fibrous stuff, and it contained four transparent tubes filled with red liquid. Blood samples, we figured. Each was labeled with a different, single word in Geometer-writing, and a different circular ikon: a picture of a planet—not Arbre—as seen from space.

Soldiers yanked it out of our hands. They were all around us now. Each sported a bandolier loaded with what looked like oversized bracelets. Whenever they encountered an avout they’d yank one off and ratchet it around the avout’s throat, whereupon it would come alive and flash a few times a second. Each collar had a different string of digits printed on its front, so once they’d captured a picture of you, they would know your face and your number. It didn’t require a whole lot of imagination to guess that the collars had tracking and surveillance capabilities. But as sinister and dehumanizing as all of this was, nothing came of it, at least for now—it seemed that they only wanted to know who was where.

Fraa Landasher acquitted himself well, demanding—firmly but calmly—to know who was in charge, by what authority this was being done (“What law covers alien probes, by the way?”) and so on. But the soldiers were all dressed in suits made for chemical and biological warfare, which didn’t make engaging them in dialog any easier, and Landasher didn’t know enough about the legal procedures of this time and place. He could have mounted a fine legal defense 6400 years ago but not today.

A contingent of four soldiers, distinguished by special insignias that had been hastily poly-taped onto their suits, approached the probe and started to unpack equipment. Two of them climbed up on the scaffold, shooed away the fraa who was inside of it, and began collecting samples and making phototypes of their own.

The soldiers had naturally come to the probe first. They communicated well with one another because their suits had wireless intercoms, but they couldn’t hear or talk to us very fluently. When they did talk to us, it was to boss us around, and when they listened, it was with something worse than skepticism—as if their officers had issued a warning that the avout would try to cast spells on them. The ones who entered the probe might have noted some red fluid, but it wasn’t as obvious as you might think—the capsule had very little uncluttered floor space, the lighting was poor, and the acceleration couches were upholstered in dark material that didn’t show the stain. The face shields on the soldiers’ helmets kept fogging up. Their gloved hands could not feel the sticky wetness, their air-filtration devices removed all odors. Standing near the probe, getting used to the collar snugged around my neck, I realized that a long time might actually go by before any of the soldiers became aware of the fact that a Geometer had come down in this capsule and was lying dead in the back of a fetch a hundred feet away. The billion people watching Sammann’s feed over the Reticulum all knew this. The soldiers, isolated in their own secure, private reticule, had no idea. Sammann, Orolo, Cord, and I kept exchanging amazed and amused looks as we collectively realized this.

Yul distracted everyone for a while. He shoved away the soldiers who came to collar him, then, when they aimed weapons at him, negotiated a deal that he would collar himself. But once he’d put it on and the soldiers had walked away, he pulled the collar right off over his head. He had a thick neck and a small skull. The collar scraped his scalp and lacerated his ears, but he got it off. Then, having satisfied himself that he could do it, he pulled it back on again.

An officer finally noticed the small crowd of uncollared avout gathered around Gnel’s fetch, and sent a squad over to take care of them. It seemed that we were free to move about as long as we didn’t try to run away or interfere with the soldiers, so I followed them at a distance that I hoped they would consider polite.

Collared avout were being herded toward the Temple steps. Nearby, a line of soldiers was moving across the Teglon plaza, bent forward at the waist, picking up stray tiles and other debris that might go ballistic when they began landing things there. Big vertical-landing aerocraft were keeping station in the sky above, waiting for the landing zone to be prepared. I reckoned that the general plan was to load us on aerocraft and take us away to some kind of detention facility. The longer I could delay being on one of those flights, the better.

The squad leader did not show the least bit of curiosity as to what these half-dozen avout were doing in the back of the fetch, but only ordered them to move away from the vehicle and line up for collaring. The avout complied, looking nonplussed. A soldier circled around behind the fetch to check for stragglers. He saw the dead body, started, unslung his weapon—which drew the attention of his squad-mates—then relaxed and put the weapon back over his shoulder. He approached the fetch slowly. Something in his posture told me he was communicating with his mates on the wireless. I got in close enough to hear the squad leader saying to Suur Maltha—obviously the physician, since she was all stained with blood—“You have one casualty?”

“Yes.”

“Do you require—”

“She’s dead,” Suur Maltha said, “we don’t need a medic.” She was speaking bluntly, a little sarcastically, astounded as I had been to realize that the soldiers didn’t know. If they had only asked us, we would have told them; we wouldn’t have been able to shut up. But they hadn’t asked. They didn’t care for our knowledge, our opinions. And so all of us—all the avout—were reacting in the same way to that: to hell with them!

The soldiers began to pop collars off their bandoliers and fit them around the necks of Maltha and her assistants. But halfway through they all stopped. Several of them raised gloves to helmets. I turned around and saw that all of the soldiers on the plaza and around the probe were behaving the same way. I reckoned the jig was up now. Some general, sitting in an office a thousand miles away where he had access to the civilian feeds, was screaming into a microphone that there was a dead alien in the back of the fetch. I supposed that in a moment all heads would turn in our direction, all soldiers would converge here.

But that was not what they did. Instead they all looked up into the sky.

Something was coming.

The hovering aerocraft had received the message too: the pitch of their engines changed, their lights shifted as they spun to new headings, banked, and sidled away, gaining altitude.

The soldiers by the fetch had turned inward on one another, though they kept glancing skywards.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Look at me!” I finally got the leader to swing his face shield in my direction. “Talk to us!” I shouted. “We can’t hear! We don’t know what’s going on!”

“…mumble mumble mumble EVACUATE!” he said.

Ganelial Crade didn’t need to hear that twice. He swung himself up into the cab of the fetch and started the engine. Suur Maltha and one of her assistants climbed into the back with the “casualty.” I decided to circle back to the probe first, just to make sure my friends there had gotten the same message—and to chivvy Orolo along if he decided to be difficult. All around the plaza, soldiers were waving their arms, herding avout toward the base of the ramp. Gnel’s fetch was headed that way at slower than walking pace, pausing here and there to pick up slower-moving avout. Yul’s vehicle had begun to do likewise, and I was comforted to see Cord in the front seat. But the ramp was already jammed with pedestrians, so the vehicles would not be able to go any faster than the slowest could walk.

Or run, as the case might be. “MOVE! MOVE!” someone was shouting. An officer had ripped his helmet off—alien infections be damned—and begun shouting into a loud-hailer. “If you can run, do so! If you can’t, get on the truck!”

I ended up a straggler along with Sammann and Orolo. We jogged toward the ramp. I threw Sammann a questioning look. He shrugged. “They jammed the Ret as soon as they got here,” he said, “and I can’t penetrate their transmissions.”

So I looked at Orolo, who was keeping an eye on the western sky as he jogged along. “You think something else is coming?” I asked.

“Since the probe was launched, about one orbital period has expired,” he pointed out. “So, if the Geometers wanted to drop something on us at the next opportunity, then now would be the time to expect it.”

“Drop something,” I repeated.

“You saw what was done to that poor woman!” Orolo exclaimed. “There is insurrection—perhaps civil war—in the icosahedron. A faction that wishes to share information with us, and another that will kill to prevent it.”

“Kill us, even?”

Orolo shrugged. We had reached the base of the ramp and got stuck in a traffic jam. Scanning the ramp circling round above us, I could see avout and soldiers, all mixed together, running. But some inscrutable law of traffic-jam dynamics dictated that those of us at the bottom were at a perfect standstill. All we could do was wait for it to clear. We were the last avout in the queue; behind us were two squads of soldiers bent under heavy packs, waiting stolidly, as was the timeless lot of soldiers. Behind them, Orithena was depopulated, empty except for the alien probe.

Orolo squared off in front of me and favored me with a bright grin. “Regarding our earlier conversation,” he began, as if inviting me to dialog in the Refectory kitchen.

“Yes? You have something to add?”

“As to the actual substance, no,” he confessed. “But things are about to become quite chaotic indeed, and it’s possible we may get separated.”

“I intend to stay by your side—”

“They may not give us a choice,” he pointed out, running his finger around his collar. “My number is odd, yours is even—perhaps they’ll sort us into different tents, or something.”

The people in front of us finally began to move. Sammann, sensing we were trying to have some kind of private conversation, went ahead. We shouldered and jostled our way onto the lower stretches of the ramp. In a few moments we were walking, then jogging.

Orolo, still casting frequent glances at the western sky, went on: “If you find yourself at Tredegarh, let us say, talking to people of your experiences here, and you tell them about what we spoke of this afternoon, the kind of reaction you will get will depend quite strongly on who they are, what math they came from—”

“As in, Procian versus Halikaarnian?” I asked. “I’m used to that, Orolo.”

“This is a little different,” Orolo said. “Most people, Procians and Halikaarnians alike, will deem it nothing more than idle, metatheorical speculation. Harmless, except insofar as it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if you talk to someone like Fraa Jad…”

He paused. I thought it was only to catch his breath, for we really were running now. Above us, aerocraft were settling in for landings outside the front gates, and the noise of their engines forced Orolo to raise his voice. But when I glanced sideways at him, I thought I saw uncertainty on his face. Not something I’d learned to associate with Pa Orolo. “I think,” he finally said, “I think that they all know this.”

“Know what?”

“That what I told you earlier is true.”

“Oh.”

“That they’ve known it for at least a thousand years.”

“Ah.”

“And that…that they do experiments.”

“What!?”

Orolo shrugged, and got a wry smile. “An analogy: when the theors lost their atom smashers, they turned to the sky and made cosmography their laboratory, the only place remaining to test their theories—to turn their philosophy into theorics. Likewise, when a lot of these people were put together on a crag with nothing to do except ponder the kinds of things you and I were talking of earlier, well…some of them, I believe, devised experiments to prove whether they were speaking truth or nonsense. And out of that arose, over time, through trial and error, a form of praxis.” I looked at him and he winked at me.

“So, you think Fraa Jad sent me here to find out whether you knew?”

“I suspect so, yes,” Orolo said. “Under normal circumstances they might simply have reached down and hauled me up into the Centenarian or Millenarian math, but…” He was scanning the western sky again. “Ah, here it comes now!” he exclaimed, delightedly, as if we had been waiting for a train, and he’d just spied it coming into the station.

A white streak sliced heaven in half, moving west to east, and ending, with no loss of speed, in the caldera of the volcano a few thousand feet above us.

In the moment before the sound reached us, Orolo remarked, “Clever. They don’t trust their aim enough to score a perfect hit on the probe. But they know enough geology to—”

After that I could not hear anything for half an hour. Hearing was worse than useless; I was sorry I’d been born with ears.

Fraa Haligastreme had taught me some geological terms which I will use here. I can imagine Cord shaking her head in dismay, giving me a hard time for using dry technical language instead of writing about the emotional truth. But the emotional truth was a black chaos of shock and fear, and the only way to recount what happened in a sensible way is to give technical details that we only pieced together later.

So, the Geometers had thrown a rock at us. Actually, a long rod of some dense metal, but in principle nothing fancier than a rock. It penetrated a quarter of a mile into the solid cap of hardened lava on top of the volcano before it vaporized of its own kinetic energy, creating a huge burst of pressure that we knew as an earthquake. The pressure vented up along the wound that the rod had left through the rock, widening the hole as it roared out, founding systems of cracks that were immediately blown open by the underlying lava. This lava was wet, saturated with steam; the steam exploded into gas as the overburden was relieved, just as bubbles appear in a bottle of soda when the lid is removed. The lava, inflated by the steam, blew itself up into ash, most of which went straight up, which is why everything for a thousand miles downwind ended up buried in grey dust. But some of it came down the side of the mountain in the form of a cloud, rolling down the slope like an avalanche, and easy for us to see, since it was glowing orange. And once we had gotten over the shock of what we had seen and staggered back up to our feet after the leg-breaking jolt of the explosion and sprinted to the top of the ramp in a desperate mob, what we clearly saw was that this thing, this glowing cloud, was coming for us, and that it would simultaneously crush us like a sledgehammer and roast us like a flamethrower if we didn’t get out of its path. The only way of doing that was to get on the aerocraft, which had landed on the open slope between the walls of the concent and the souvenir shop. There were exactly enough of these to carry the soldiers who had arrived in them, plus their gear. So they had chivalrously dropped their gear on the ground. They were abandoning everything they had brought with them, the better to carry passengers—avout—away from danger. They were even flinging armloads of gear—fire extinguishers, medical kits—out onto the ground to make room for more humans.

What it came down to then was a simple calculation of the type any theor could appreciate. The pilots of the craft knew how much weight they could lift off the ground and they knew how much a person weighed, on average. Dividing the latter into the former told them how many people might be allowed on each craft. To enforce that limit, the pilots had their sidearms out, and armed soldiers posted to either side of the doors. The soldiers, by and large, knew where to go: they simply returned to the same craft they’d arrived in. The Orithenans swarmed, streamed, surged in the open spaces among the aerocraft, tripping on or vaulting over abandoned gear. Pilots pointed at them one by one, hustled them aboard, and kept count. From time to time they figured out a way to throw out more equipment and accept another passenger. This had already been going on for some time before Orolo, Sammann, and I came running out the gates. Most of the places were already taken. Full craft were lifting off, some with desperate people hanging from their landing gear. The few who hadn’t yet been chosen were running from one aerocraft to another, and I was heartened to see that many were finding spaces. I saw Gnel’s and Yul’s vehicles parked with lights on and engines running, but didn’t see them—they must have made it! I’d lost track of Orolo, though. A running soldier grabbed my arm and hurled me toward an aerocraft that was revving up its engines. I staggered toward the door through a cloud of flying dirt. Hands grabbed me and hauled me inside as the craft’s skids were leaving the ground. The soldier climbed on to the skid behind me. I spun around in the doorway to take in the scene below. I could not see Sammann and I could not see Orolo—good! Had they found places? Only two craft remained on the ground. One of them lifted off, shedding two Orithenans who pawed desperately at the frame of its door but couldn’t get a grip. At least ten other people had been left behind. Some sat despondently or lay crumpled on the ground where they had fallen. Some ran for the sea. One took off running toward the one remaining aerocraft, but he was too far away. Some part of me was thinking why couldn’t they only have taken a few more? but the answer was obvious in the way my aerocraft was performing: engines screaming full tilt, yet gaining altitude no faster than a man could climb a ladder, and shedding a hail of small objects as people found odds and ends that could be hurled out the open door. A flashlight bounced off the back of my head and tumbled to the floor; I clawed it up and tossed it out.

It almost struck a bolted figure hurrying over the ground, harshly lit from behind by the lights of Gnel’s fetch, bent under a heavy burden—light blue. The dead body of the Geometer, forgotten and abandoned in the back of Gnel’s fetch. The man bent under it was headed straight for the only aerocraft still on the ground. Arms were reaching out from the door. The runner put on a last, mighty effort, planted both feet in the dust below the aerocraft, and gave a mighty leg-thrust to hurl the Geometer’s body upward. Hands grasped it and hauled it aboard. The soldier in the doorway showed his teeth as he screamed something into his microphone. The aerocraft rose, leaving behind the man who had delivered the dead Geometer. I forced myself to look at him, and saw what I had expected and dreaded: it was Orolo, alone before the gates of Orithena.

We had enough altitude now that I could look over the walls and buildings of the concent and up the slope to see what was coming. It looked very much as Fraa Haligastreme had described it to us from ancient texts: heavy as stone, fluid as water, hot as a forge, and—now that it had fallen several thousand feet down a mountain—fast as a bullet train.

“No!” I screamed. “We have to go back!” Not that anyone could hear me. But a soldier behind me read my face, saw my eyes swing toward the cockpit. He calmly raised his sidearm and planted its muzzle in the center of my forehead.

My next thought was do I have the guts to jump out so that Orolo could have my place? but I knew that they would not set down again to pick him up. There was no time.

Orolo was looking about curiously. He seemed almost bored. He sidestepped to a position where he could get a clear view uphill through the open gates and see what was headed for him. That, I think, gave him a sense of how many more seconds he had. He picked up a trenching tool that had been discarded, and used its handle to slash an arc into the loose soil. He turned, again and again, joining one arc to another, until he had completed the graceful, neverending curve of the analemma. Then he tossed the tool aside and stood on the center, facing his fate.

The buildings of the concent imploded before the glowing cloud even reached them, for the avalanche was pushing an invisible pressure wave before it. Destruction washed across the full width of the concent in a few seconds, and slammed into the walls from the back side. The walls bulged, cracked, shed a few blocks, but held, until the glowing cloud hit them with its full force. Then they went down like a sand castle struck by a wave.

“No!” I screamed one more time, as Orolo withered under the pressure wave. He flopped to the ground like a hank of rope. For a moment, smoke shrouded him: radiant heat shining out as a harbinger of the glowing cloud. Our aerocraft rocked and skidded sideways on hard air. The cloud erupted from the gates, vaulted over the rubble of the wall, and fell on Orolo. For a fraction of a second he was a blossom of yellow flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he’d been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire.