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

Part 10
MESSAL

The Geometers have us pinned down like a biological sample on a table,” said Ignetha Foral, after we had served the soup. “They can poke and prod us at their leisure, and observe our reactions. When we first became aware that they were in orbit around Arbre, we assumed that something was going to happen soon. But it has been maddeningly slow. The Geometers can get all the water they need from comets, all the stuff they need from asteroids. The only thing they can’t do—we suspect—is go on interstellar voyages. But it could be that they aren’t in that much of a hurry.” She paused to whet her whistle. A bracelet gleamed on her wrist. It looked valuable but not gaudy. Everything about her confirmed what Tulia had told us, months ago, at Edhar: that she came from a moneyed Burger clan with old ties to the mathic world. It wasn’t clear, yet, why she was here, and carrying the impressive-sounding title of “Madame Secretary.” According to the information Tulia had dug up, she had been deposed from her S#230;cular job by the Warden of Heaven. But that was old news. The Warden of Heaven had been thrown out of the airlock a few weeks ago. Perhaps, while I’d been distracted on Ecba, the S#230;cular Power had reorganized itself, and she’d been dusted off and given a new job.

Having taken a bit of refreshment, Madame Secretary made eye contact with the other six at the table. “Or at least that’s what I say to my colleagues who want to know why I’m wasting my time at this messal.” She said this in a good-humored way. Fraa Lodoghir laughed richly. Everyone else was able to manage at least a chuckle except for Fraa Jad, who was staring at Ignetha Foral as if she were the aforementioned biological specimen. Ignetha Foral was sharp enough to notice this. “Fraa Jad,” she said, inclining her head slightly in his direction, in a suggestion of a bow, “naturally takes the long view of things, and is probably thinking to himself that my colleagues must have dangerously short attention spans. But my metier, for better or worse, is the political workings of what you call the S#230;cular Power. And to many in that world, this messal looks like a waste of some very good minds. The kindest thing some will say of it, is that it is a convenient place to which difficult, irrelevant, or incomprehensible persons may be exiled, so that they don’t get in the way of the important business of the Convox. How would you at this table recommend that I counter the arguments of those who say it ought to be done away with? Suur Asquin?”

Suur Asquin was our host: the current Heritor of Avrachon’s Dowment, hence its owner in all but name. Ignetha Foral had called on her first because she looked as though she had something to say, but also, I suspected, because it was the correct etiquette. For now, I was giving Suur Asquin the benefit of the doubt, because she had helped us make dinner, working side by side with her servitor, Tris. This was the very first Plurality of Worlds Messal, and so it had taken us a while to find our way around the kitchen, get the oven hot, and so forth.

“I believe I’d have an unfair advantage, Madame Secretary, since I live here. I’d answer the question by showing your colleagues around Avrachon’s Dowment, which as you’ve all seen is a kind of museum…”

I was standing behind Fraa Lodoghir with my hands behind my back holding the knotted end of a rope that disappeared into a hole in the wall and ran thirty feet to the kitchen. Someone tugged on the other end of it, silently calling for me. I leaned forward to make sure that my doyn didn’t need his chin wiped, then walked around the table, sidestepping in front of other servitors. Meanwhile Suur Asquin was trying to develop an argument that merely looking at the old scientific instruments scattered around the Dowment would convince the most skeptical extra that pure metatheorics was worthy of S#230;cular support. Seemed obvious to me that she was using Hypotrochian Transquaestiation to assert that pure metatheorics would be the sole occupation of this messal, which I didn’t agree with at all—but I mustn’t speak unless spoken to, and I reckoned that the others here could take care of themselves. Fraa Tavener—aka Barb—was standing behind Fraa Jad, looking at Suur Asquin as a bird looks at a bug, just itching to jump in and plane her. I gave him a wink as I went by, but he was oblivious. I passed through a door, padded for silence, and entered a stretch of corridor that served as an airlock, or rather sound-lock. At its end was another padded door. I pushed through—it was hinged to swing both ways—and entered the kitchen, a sudden and shocking plunge into heat, noise, and light.

And smoke, since Arsibalt had set fire to something. I edged toward the sand bucket, but, not seeing any open flames, thought better of it. Suur Asquin could be heard over a speaker; the S#230;cular Power had sent in Ita to rig up a one-way sound system so that we in the kitchen—and others far away, I had to assume—could hear every word spoken in the messallan.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“No problem. Oh, this? I incinerated a cutlet. It’s all right. We have more.”

“Then why’d you yank me?”

He made a guilty glance at a plank on the wall with seven rope-ends dangling from it, all but one chalked with a servitor’s name. “Because I’m desperately bored!” he said. “This conversation is stupid!”

“It’s just getting started,” I pointed out. “These are just the opening formalities.”

“It’s no wonder people want to abolish this messal, if this is a fair sample of—”

“How is yanking my rope going to help?”

“Oh, it’s an old tradition here,” Arsibalt said, “I’ve been reading up on it. If the dialog gets boring, the servitors show their disdain by voting with their feet—withdrawing to the kitchen. The doyns are supposed to notice this.”

“The odds of that actually working with this group are about as high as that this dinner won’t make them sick.”

“Well, we must begin somewhere.”

I went over to the ropes, picked up a lump of chalk, and wrote “Emman Beldo” under the one that was still unlabeled.

“Is that his name?”

“Yeah. He talked to me after Plenary.”

“Why didn’t he help cook?”

“One of his jobs is driving Madame Secretary around. He only got here five minutes ago. Anyway, extras can’t cook.”

“Raz speaks the truth!” said Suur Tris, coming in from the garden with a bolt-load of firewood. “Even you guys seem a little challenged.” She hauled open the hatch of the oven’s firebox and gazed on the coal-bed with a critical eye.

“We shall prove our worth anon,” said Arsibalt, picking up a huge knife, like a barbarian warlord called to single combat. “This stove, your produce, your cuts of meat—all strange to us.” And then, as if to say speaking of strange…Arsibalt and I both glanced over at a heavy stew-pot, which had been pushed to the back of the stove in hopes that the vapors belching out of it would stink less if they came from farther away.

Suur Tris was nudging coals around and darting bits of wood into the firebox as if it were brain surgery. We’d made fun of her for this until our efforts to manage it ourselves had produced the kinds of outcomes normally associated with strategic nuclear warfare. Now, we watched contritely.

“Kind of weird for Madame Secretary to open by saying the messal’s a drain trap for losers,” I said.

“Oh, I disagree. She’s good!” Tris exclaimed. “She’s trying to motivate them.” Tris was podgy and not especially good-looking, but she had the personality of a beautiful girl because she’d been raised in a math.

“I wonder how that’s going to work on my doyn,” I said, “he’d like nothing more than to see this canceled, so he can go dine with cool people.”

A bell jingled. We turned to look. Seven bells were mounted to the wall above the seven rope-ends; each was connected, by a long ribbon routed through the wall and under the floor, to the underside of the table in the messallan, where it terminated in a velvet pull. A doyn could summon his servitor, silently and invisibly, by yanking on the pull.

The bell rang once, paused, then began to jangle nonstop, more and more violently, until it looked like it was about to jump off the wall. It was labeled “Fraa Lodoghir.”

I returned to the messallan, walked around behind him, and bent forward. “Get rid of this Edharian gruel,” he breathed. “It is perfectly unpalatable.”

“You should see what the Matarrhites are cooking up!” I muttered. Fraa Lodoghir glanced across the table at an avout—one of those who’d celebrated Inbrase with me, earlier in the day—whose face was covered by his or her bolt. The fabric had been drawn sideways over his or her head, as if to form a hood, but the hood had then been pulled down to cover the face, with an opening below through which food—if that was the correct word for what the Matarrhites put into their mouths during meals—could be introduced. “I’ll have what it’s having,” Lodoghir hissed. “But not this!”

I glanced significantly at Fraa Jad who was shoveling the stuff into his mouth, then confiscated Lodoghir’s serving and whisked it out of there, happy to have an excuse to go back to the kitchen. “Perfectly unpalatable,” I repeated, heaving it into the compost.

“Perhaps we should slip him some Allswell,” Arsibalt suggested.

“Or something stronger,” I returned. But before we could develop this promising theme, the back door swung open and in walked a girl swathed in a hectare of heavy, scratchy-looking black bolt, lashed to her body with ten miles of chord. Her punched-in sphere was overflowing with mixed greens. Out of doors, she kept her head covered, but once she had set the greens down she swept her bolt back to reveal her perfectly smooth dome, all dotted with perspiration, since it was a warm day and she was overdressed. Arsibalt and I did not feel as easy around Suur Karvall as we did around Tris, so all banter stopped. “That’s a lovely selection of greens,” Tris began, but Karvall flinched and held up a bony, translucent hand, gesturing for silence.

Fraa Lodoghir had begun speaking. I reckoned that was why he’d wanted his “gruel” cleared away.

“Plurality of Worlds,” he began, and let it resonate for a long moment. “Sounds impressive. I haven’t the faintest idea what it means to some here. The mere fact of the Geometers’ existence proves that there is at least one other world, and so on one level it is quite trivial. But since it appears that I am the token Procian at this messal, I shall play my role, and say this: we have nothing in common with the Geometers. No shared experiences, no common culture. Until that changes, we can’t communicate with them. Why not? Because language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that are perfectly meaningless until we associate them, in our minds, with meaning: a process of acculturation. Until we share experiences with the Geometers, and thereby begin to develop a shared culture—in effect, to merge our culture with theirs—we cannot communicate with them, and their efforts to communicate with us will continue to be just as incomprehensible as the gestures they’ve made so far: throwing the Warden of Heaven out the airlock, dropping a fresh murder victim into a cult site, and rodding a volcano.”

As soon as he paused, reactions came through on the speakers, several people talking over each other:

“I don’t agree that those are incomprehensible.”

“But they must have been watching our speelies!”

“You’re missing the point of the Plurality of Worlds.”

But Suur Asquin spoke last, and most distinctly. “Many other messals are addressing the topics you mentioned, Fraa Lodoghir. In the spirit of Madame Secretary’s opening question: why should we have a separate Plurality of Worlds Messal?”

“Well, you might simply ask the hierarchs who brought it into existence!” Fraa Lodoghir answered a little disdainfully. “But if you want my answer as a Procian, why, it is quite straightforward: the arrival of the Geometers is a perfect laboratory experiment, as it were, to demonstrate and to explore the philosophy of Saunt Proc: put simply, that language, communication, indeed thought itself, are the manipulation of symbols to which meanings are assigned by culture—and only by culture. I only hope that they haven’t watched so many of our speelies that their minds have been contaminated, and the experiment ruined.”

“And this relates to our theme how?” Suur Asquin prodded him.

“She knows perfectly well,” Suur Tris assured us, “she’s just making sure it all gets spelled out for Ignetha Foral.”

“Plurality of Worlds means a plurality of world cultures—cultures hermetically sealed off from one another until now—hence, for the time being, unable to communicate.”

“According to Procians!” someone put in. I didn’t recognize the oddly accented voice, so I thought it might be the Matarrhite.

“The purpose of this messal, accordingly, is to develop and, I would hope, implement a strategy for the S#230;cular Power, assisted by the avout, to break down the plurality—which is the same thing as developing a shared language. We shall put ourselves out of business by making the Plurality of Worlds into One World.”

“He hates this messal,” I translated, “so he’s trying to talk Ignetha Foral into turning it into something else: which would just happen to be a power base for the Procians.”

Suur Karvall really hated it when we talked over the doyns, but she was going to have to get used to it. We were all standing around distributing the greens among half a dozen salad plates. Only six, because Matarrhites, apparently, didn’t eat salad.

While making dinner, some of us servitors had had a good argument as to why a Matarrhite had been invited. One theory was simply that, because the S#230;cular Power was religious, they wanted some Deolaters in on the discussion. The Matarrhites were going to have Convox clout way out of proportion to their significance in the mathic world, or so this argument went, because the Panjandrums felt more comfortable with them. The other theory was more in line with the notion, just voiced by Ignetha Foral, that this messal was a dumping ground.

Clanking sounds over the speaker told us that those servitors who were still in the messallan were collecting the soup bowls. This led to a break in the dialog; but we could hear an elderly woman’s voice, speaking up, in a more informal mood, as the servitors worked: “I believe I can put your fears to rest, Fraa Lodoghir.”

“Why, that’s good of you, Grandsuur Moyra, but I don’t remember voicing any fears!” said Fraa Lodoghir, trying and failing to sound jovial.

Moyra was Karvall’s doyn, so, out of respect for Karvall, we actually did shut up for a moment.

Moyra returned, “I believe you did express concern that the Geometers had contaminated their own culture by watching too many of our speelies.”

“Of course you are right! That’s what I get for contradicting a Lorite!” Fraa Lodoghir said.

The door opened and in came Barb with seven bowls stacked on his arms.

“I think you ought to change my designation,” said Moyra delicately, after considering this for a moment, “and now call me a meta-Lorite, or, in honor of this occasion, a Plurality of Worlds Lorite.”

This got a murmur out of everyone—in the messallan and in the kitchen. Suur Karvall had drifted over to the speaker and was standing there rapt. Arsibalt had been chopping something; he stopped and poised his knife above the block.

“We Lorites are always making nuisances of ourselves,” Moyra said, “by pointing out that this or that idea was already come up with by someone else, long ago. But now I do believe we shall have to broaden our sphere to include the Plurality of Worlds, and say ‘I’m terribly sorry, Fraa Lodoghir, but your idea was actually dreamed up by a bug-eyed monster on Planet Zarzax ten million years ago!’”

Laughter around the table.

“Splendid!” Arsibalt said. He turned and looked at me.

“She’s a closet Halikaarnian,” I said.

“Exactly!”

Fraa Lodoghir had seen the same thing and was trying to lodge an objection: “I’d say you can’t know such a thing until you communicate with that bug-eyed monster or his descendants…” And then he went on to reiterate what he’d said before. I rushed the salad out in the hopes that it would shut him up. Suur Moyra didn’t seem quite taken with his arguments, and Ignetha Foral was beginning to look a little frosted.

Meanwhile, Arsibalt’s doyn, who happened to be seated next to Fraa Jad, was leaning to exchange whispers with the Thousander. When first I’d seen this man, he’d struck me as oddly familiar. Only when Arsibalt told me his name had I realized where I’d seen him before: standing alone in the chancel of Saunt Edhar, looking straight up at me. This was Fraa Paphlagon.

Fraa Jad nodded. Paphlagon cleared his throat as Lodoghir began to wind down, and finally barged in: “Perhaps while we’re proving that everything Saunt Proc ever wrote was just perfect, we can get some theorics done too!”

This shut even Lodoghir up, so there was a short pause. Paphlagon continued, “There’s another reason for having a messal about the Plurality of Worlds: a reason that some would say is almost as fascinating as Fraa Lodoghir’s remarks about syntax. It is a pure theorical reason. It is that the Geometers are made of different matter from us. Matter that is not native to this cosmos. And what is more, we have results just in from Laboratorium, concerning the tests that were performed on the four vials of fluid—assumed to be blood—on the Ecba probe. These four samples are made of different matter from each other, which is to say that each of them is as different from the other three, as it is from the matter we are made of.”

“Fraa Paphlagon, I was only made aware of this as I was en route. I’m still absorbing it,” said Ignetha Foral. “Say more, please, of what you mean when you speak of the matter being different?”

“The nuclei of the atoms are incompatible,” he said. Then, surveying the faces at the table, he shifted back in his chair, grinned, and held up his hands like parallel blades, as if to say “imagine a nucleus.” “Nuclei are forged in the hearts of stars. When the stars die, they explode, and the nuclei are thrown out as ash from a dead fire. These nuclei are positively charged. So, when things get cool enough, they attract electrons, and become atoms. Further cooling enables the atoms’ electrons to interact with one another to form complexes called molecules, which are what everything is made of. But, again, the making of the world begins in the hearts of stars, where those nuclei are forged according to certain rules that only apply in very hot crowded places. The chemistry of the stuff we are made of reflects, in a roundabout way, those rules. Until we learned to make newmatter, every nucleus in our cosmos was made according to the set of rules that naturally obtains. But the Geometers are aware of—they are made of—four other slightly different, but totally incompatible, sets of rules for making nuclei.”

“So,” said Suur Asquin, “they too learned to make newmatter or—”

“Or they came from different cosmi,” Fraa Paphlagon said. “Which makes a Plurality of Worlds Messal seem awfully relevant to me.”

“This is bizarre—fantastical!” said a reedy voice with a heavy and strange accent. No one’s lips were moving that we could see, so, by process of elimination, we turned to the Matarrhite, who was chalked up on the bell-board as one Zh’vaern, with no “Fraa” or “Suur” to give a clue as to sex. Zh’vaern turned slightly in his seat—I was guessing male, from the voice—and made a gesture. His servitor, a column of black fabric, loomed forward, grew a pseudopod, and took his plate—to the visible relief of those seated to either side. “I can hardly believe we are talking about a possibility so inconceivable as that other universes exist—and that the Geometers originate there!”

In this, Zh’vaern seemed to speak for the entire table.

Except for Jad. “The words fail. There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes—that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives—until they came here, and joined ours.”

Having dropped this bomb, Fraa Jad excused himself, and went to the toilet.

“What on earth is he going on about?” Fraa Lodoghir demanded. “It sounded like literary criticism!” But he did not speak scornfully; he was fascinated.

“So perhaps this messal has already turned into what its detractors claim of it,” said Ignetha Foral. And having issued that challenge, she turned toward the topic of the research she had performed, years ago, as a Unarian.

Paphlagon was in his seventh decade, impressive-looking rather than handsome, no doubt accustomed to being the most senior, the most eminent person in any given room. He was sitting there with a trim, wry smile, staring at the center of the table—resigning himself, with all good humor, to being Fraa Jad’s interpreter. “Fraa Jad,” he said, “speaks of Hemn space. It’s probably just as well he broached the subject early. Hemn space, or configuration space, is how almost all theors think about the world. During the Praxic Age, it became obvious that it was a better place for us to go about our work, so we decamped, left three-dimensional Adrakhonic space behind, and moved there. When you talk of parallel universes, you make as little sense to Fraa Jad as he does to you.”

“Perhaps you can say a few words, then, about Hemn space, if it is so important,” suggested Ignetha Foral.

Paphlagon got that wry look again, and sighed. “Madame Secretary, I am trying to think of a way to sum it up that will not turn this messal into a year-long theorics suvin.”

And he gamely launched into a primer on Hemn space. He learned to look to Suur Moyra whenever he got stuck for a way of explaining some abstruse concept. More often than not, she was able to drag him out of trouble. She’d already shown herself to be good company. And the vast stock of knowledge that she, as a Lorite, carried around in her head made her good at explaining things; she could always reach back to a useful analogy or clear line of argument that some fraa or suur had written down in the more or less distant past.

I got yanked in the middle of it and, going back to the kitchen, found Emman Beldo on the other end of the rope. Zh’vaern’s servitor was standing at the stove, stirring the mystery pot, and so Emman and I wordlessly agreed to retreat to the other end of the kitchen, near the open door to the garden. “What the hell are we talking about here?” Emman wanted to know. “Is this some kind of ‘travel through the fourth dimension’ scenario?”

“Oh, it’s good that you asked,” I said, “because it is precisely not that—Hemn space is anything but. You’re talking about the old thing where a bunch of separate three-dimensional universes are stacked on top of each other, like leaves in a book, and you can move between them—”

Emman was nodding. “By figuring out some way to move through the fourth spatial dimension. But this Hemn space thing is something else?”

“In Hemn space, any point—which means any string of N numbers, where N is how many dimensions the Hemn space has—contains all the information needed to specify everything that can possibly be known about the system at a given moment.”

“What system?”

“Whatever system the Hemn space describes,” I said.

“Oh, I see,” he said, “you’re allowed to set up a Hemn space—”

“Any time you feel like it,” I said, “to describe the states of any system you are interested in studying. When you are a fid, and your teacher sets a problem for you, your first step is always to set up the Hemn space appropriate to that problem.”

“So what is the Hemn space that Jad’s referring to, then?” Emman asked. “What is the system that his Hemn space gives all of the possible states of?”

“The cosmos,” I said.

“Oh!”

“Which, to him, is one possible track through an absurdly gigantic Hemn space. But that very same Hemn space can have points in it that do not lie on the track that is the history of our cosmos.”

“But they’re perfectly legitimate points?”

“A few of them are—a tiny few, actually—but in a space so huge, ‘a few’ can be enough to make many whole universes.”

“What about the other points? I mean the ones that aren’t legitimate?”

“They describe situations that are incoherent somehow.”

“A block of ice in the middle of a star,” Arsibalt suggested.

“Yes,” I said, “there is a point somewhere in Hemn space that describes a whole cosmos similar to ours, except that, somewhere in that cosmos, there’s a block of ice in the middle of a star. But that situation is impossible.”

Arsibalt translated, “There’s no past history that could make it happen, so it can’t be accessed by a plausible worldtrack.”

“But if you can suppress your curiosity about those for a moment,” I said to Emman, “the point I was getting at was that you can string the legitimate points—ones not visited by our worldtrack, but that make sense—into other worldtracks that make as much sense as ours.”

“But they’re not real,” Emman said, “or are they?”

I balked.

Arsibalt said, “That is a rather profound question of metatheorics. All of the points in Hemn space are equally real—just as all possible (x, y, z) values are equally real—since they are nothing more than lists of numbers. So what is it that imbues one set of those points—one worldtrack—with what we call realness?”

Suur Tris had been clearing her throat, more and more loudly, the last few minutes, and now graduated to throwing things at us. To this was added the jingling of several bells. It was time to bring out the main course; other servitors had been picking up the slack for me and Emman. So we got very busy for a while. Several minutes later, the fourteen were all back in their formal positions, doyns at the table waiting for Suur Asquin to pick up her fork, servitors standing behind them.

Suur Asquin said, “I believe we have all decided—albeit with some reservations—to move over into Hemn space with Fraa Jad. And according to what we hear of it from Fraa Paphlagon and Suur Moyra, there should be no lack of room for us there!” All the doyns laughed dutifully. Barb snorted. Arsibalt and I rolled our eyes. Barb was clearly dying to plane Suur Asquin by explaining, in excruciating, dinner-wrecking detail, just how colossal the configuration space of the universe really was, complete with estimates of how many zeroes it would take to write down the number of states it could describe, how far said string of digits would extend, et cetera, but Arsibalt raised a hand, threatening to rest it on his shoulder: steady, now. Suur Asquin began to eat, and the others followed her lead. There was a little interlude during which some of the doyns (not Lodoghir) made the requisite comments on how tasty the food was. Then Suur Asquin continued, “But looking back on our discussion, I find myself puzzled by a remark that Fraa Paphlagon made before the topic of Hemn space was mentioned, concerning the different kinds of matter. Fraa Paphlagon, I believe you were citing this as evidence that the Geometers all came from different cosmi—or, to use Fraa Jad’s term, different Narratives.”

“A somewhat more conventional term would be worldtracks,” Suur Moyra put in. “Use of Narrative is somewhat—well—loaded.”

“You’re speaking my language now!” said Lodoghir, clearly delighted. “Who besides Fraa Jad uses Narrative, and what do they really mean by it?”

“It is rare,” Moyra said, “and it is associated, in some people’s minds, with the Lineage.”

Fraa Jad appeared to be ignoring all of this.

“Terminology aside,” Suur Asquin went on—a little brusquely—“what I don’t quite understand is how it all fits together—what is the link that you see between the fact of the different kinds of matter, and the worldtracks?”

Paphlagon said, “The cosmogonic processes that lead to the creation of the stuff we are made of—the creation of protons and other matter, their clumping together to make stars, and the resulting nucleosynthesis—all seem to depend on the values of certain physical constants. The most familiar example is the speed of light, but there are several others—about twenty in all. Theors used to spend a lot of time measuring their precise values, back when we were allowed to have the necessary equipment. If these numbers had different values, the cosmos as we know it would not have come into being; it would just be an infinite cloud of cold dark gas or one big black hole or something else quite simple and dull. If you think of these constants of nature as knobs on the control panel of a machine, well, the knobs all have to be set in just the right positions or—”

Again Paphlagon looked to Moyra, who seemed ready: “Suur Demula likened it to a safe with a combination lock, the combination being about twenty numbers long.”

“If I follow Demula’s analogy,” said Zh’vaern, “each of those twenty numbers is the value of one of those constants of nature, such as the speed of light.”

“That is right. If you dial twenty numbers at random you never get the safe open; it is nothing more to you than an inert cube of iron. Even if you dial nineteen numbers correctly and get the other one wrong—nothing. You must get all of them correct. Then the door opens and out spills all of the complexity and beauty of the cosmos.”

“Another analogy,” Moyra continued, after a sip of water, “was developed by Saunt Conderline, who likened all of the sets of values of those twenty constants that don’t produce complexity to an ocean a thousand miles wide and deep. The sets that do, are like an oil sheen, no wider than a leaf, floating on the top of that ocean: an exquisitely thin layer of possibilities that yield solid, stable matter suitable for making universes with living things in them.”

“I favor Conderline’s analogy,” said Paphlagon. “The various life-supporting cosmi are different places on that oil-sheen. What the inventors of newmatter did was to devise ways to move around, just a little, to neighboring points on that oil-sheen, where matter had slightly different properties. Most of the newmatter they created was different from, but not really better than, naturally occurring matter. After a lot of patient toil, they were able to slide around to nearby regions of the oil-sheen where matter was better, more useful, than what nature has provided us. And I believe that Fraa Erasmas, here, already has an opinion on what the Geometers are made of.”

So unready was I to hear my name called that I didn’t even move for several seconds. Fraa Paphlagon was looking at me. In an effort to jog me out of my stupor, he added: “Your friend Fraa Jesry was kind enough to share your observations concerning the parachute.”

“Yes,” I said, and discovered that my throat needed clearing. “It was nothing special. Not as good as newmatter.”

“If the Geometers had learned the art of making newmatter,” Paphlagon translated, “they’d have made a better parachute.”

“Or come up with a way to land the probe that was not so ridiculously primitive!” Barb sang out, drawing glares from the doyns. His name hadn’t been called.

“Fraa Tavener makes an excellent point,” said Fraa Jad, defusing the situation. “Perhaps he shall have more of interest to say later—when called upon.”

“The point being, I take it,” said Ignetha Foral, “that the Geometers—the four groups of them, I should say—each use whatever kind of matter is natural in the cosmos where they originated.”

“The four have been given provisional names,” announced Zh’vaern. “Antarcts, Pangees, Diasps, and Quators.”

This was the first and probably the last time Zh’vaern was going to get a laugh out of the table.

“They all sound vaguely geographical,” said Suur Asquin, “but—?”

“Four planets are depicted on their ship,” Zh’vaern continued. “This is clearly visible on Saunt Orolo’s Phototype. A planet is depicted on each of the four vials of blood that came in the probe. People have given them informal names inspired by their geographical peculiarities.”

“So—let me guess—Pangee has one large continent?” asked Suur Asquin.

“Diasp a lot of islands, obviously,” put in Lodoghir.

“On Quator, most of the landmasses are at low latitude,” Zh’vaern said, “and Antarct’s most unusual feature is a big ice continent at the South Pole.” Then, perhaps anticipating another correction from Barb, he added: “Or whichever pole is situated at the bottom of the picture.”

Barb snorted.

If Fraa Zh’vaern seemed strangely well-informed for a member of a fanatically reclusive sect of Deolaters who’d only arrived at the Convox a few hours ago, it was because he had attended the same briefing as I had: a meeting in a chalk hall where a succession of fraas and suurs had gotten the Inbrase groups up to speed on diverse topics. Or (taking the more cynical view) fed us what some hierarchs wanted us to know. I was only beginning to get a feel for how real information diffused through the Convox.

This touched off a few minutes of banter, which made me impatient until I saw that Moyra and Paphlagon were using it as an opportunity to catch up with the others in cleaning their plates. Some of the servitors went back to the kitchen to look after dessert. It wasn’t until we began to clear away the dinner plates that the conversation paused, and Suur Asquin, after an exchange of glances with Ignetha Foral, hemmed into her napkin and said: “Well. What I have collected, from what we heard a few minutes ago, is that none of the four Geometer races has invented newmatter—”

“Or wishes us to know that they have,” Lodoghir put in.

“Yes, quite…but in any case, each of the four has originated from a cosmos, or a Narrative, or a worldtrack where the constants of nature are ever so slightly different from what they are here.”

No one objected.

Ignetha Foral said, “That to me seems like an almost incredibly strange and remarkable finding, and I don’t understand why we haven’t heard more of it!”

“The results of the tests were not definitive until today’s Laboratorium,” Zh’vaern said.

“This messal seems to have been thrown together immediately afterwards—actually during Inbrase, as a matter of fact,” said Lodoghir.

“There were some who had inklings of these results a day or two ago, in Lucub,” said Paphlagon.

“Then we ought to have been made aware of it a day or two ago,” said Ignetha Foral.

“It is in the nature of Lucub work that it does not get talked about as readily as what is done in Laboratorium,” Suur Asquin pointed out, deftly playing her role as social facilitator, smoother-out of awkward bits. Jad looked at her as if she were a speed bump stretching across the road in front of his mobe.

“But there is another reason, which Madame Secretary might look on a little more benignly,” said Suur Moyra. “The predominant hypothesis, until this morning, was that the propulsion system used by the Geometers to travel between star systems had changed their matter somehow.”

“Changed their matter?”

“Yes. Locally altered the laws and constants of nature.”

“Is that plausible?”

“Such a propulsion device was envisioned two thousand years ago, right here at Tredegarh,” Moyra said. “I brought it up last week. The idea gained currency for a few days. So, you see, it is all my fault.”

“The idea would not have gained currency,” Fraa Jad announced, “but for that many were unsettled, disturbed by talk of other Narratives. They longed for an explanation that would not force them to learn a new way of thinking, and forgot the Rake.”

“Most eloquent, Fraa Jad,” said my doyn. “A fine example of the hidden currents that so often drive what pretends to be rational theoric discourse.”

Fraa Jad fixed Lodoghir with a look that was hard to read—but not what you’d call warm.

I got yanked. I’d learned to recognize Emman’s touch on the rope. Sure enough, he was waiting for me when I entered the kitchen. “The first thing Madame Secretary will say to me in the mobe on her way home is that I have to find my way into the right Lucub.”

“You yanked the wrong guy then,” I said, “I just got out of quarantine this morning.”

“That’s why you’re perfect: you’re going to be in the market.”

The picture, as I’d pieced it together, was that mornings (ante Provener) were spent in Laboratorium. I would go to a specific place and work on a given job with others who’d been similarly assigned. Post Provener, but before Messal, was a part of the day called Periklyne, when people mixed and mingled and exchanged information (such as Laboratorium results) that could be further sorted and propagated in the messals. After Messal was Lucub—burning the midnight oil. Everyone was saying there was going to be a lot of Lucub activity tonight because so much of the workday had been wiped out by the Inbrase and the Plenary. Lucub tended to be where the action was anyway. Everyone here wanted to get things done, but many felt that the structure of Laboratorium, Messal, and so on was only getting in their way. Lucub was a way for them to exercise a little initiative. You might be working with a bunch of lunkheads all morning, the hierarchs might have assigned you to a real snoozer of a messal, but during Lucub you could do what you wanted.

“I’d be happy if you wanted to accompany me to Lucub,” I told Emman—and I meant it. “But you have to understand that I can’t guarantee—”

I was drowned out by indignant shushing from Arsibalt and Karvall.

Barb turned to me and announced: “They want you to be quiet, because they want to hear what is being said in the—”

I shushed Barb. Arsibalt shushed me. Karvall shushed him.

The topic seemed to have turned to the crux of the whole evening’s discussion: how the idea of worldtracks and configuration space were related to the existence of different kinds of matter on “Pangee,” “Diasp,” “Antarct,” “Quator,” and Arbre.

“It was a strong meme, around the time of the Reconstitution,” Moyra was saying, “that the constants of nature are contingent—not necessary. That is, they could have been otherwise, had the early history of the universe been somehow different. As a matter of fact, research into such ideas is how we got newmatter in the first place.”

“So, if I’m following you,” Ignetha Foral said, “the correctness of that idea—that those numbers are contingent—was proved. Proved by our ability to make newmatter.”

“That is the usual interpretation,” said Moyra.

“When you speak of ‘early history of the universe,’” put in Lodoghir, “how early—”

“We are speaking of an infinitesimal snatch of time just after the Big Bang,” Moyra said, “when the first elementary particles congealed out of a sea of energy.”

“And the claim is, it happened to congeal in a particular way,” Lodoghir said, “but it could have congealed a little differently—leading to a cosmos with different constants and different matter.”

“Exactly,” said Moyra.

“How can we translate what’s just been said into the language that Fraa Jad prefers, of Narratives in configuration space?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“I’ll take a crack at it,” said Paphlagon. “If we traced our worldtrack—the series of points through configuration space that is the past, present, and future of our cosmos—backwards in time, we would observe configurations that were hotter and brighter, more closely packed—like running a photomnemonic tablet of an explosion in reverse. It would lead us into regions of Hemn space scarcely recognizable as a cosmos at all: the moments just after the Big Bang. At some point, proceeding backwards, we’d get to a configuration in which the physical constants we’ve been speaking of—”

“Those twenty numbers,” said Suur Asquin.

“Yes, were not even defined. A place so different that those constants would be meaningless—they would have no value, because they still had the freedom to take on any value. Now, up until this point in the story I’m telling you, there really is no difference between the old one-universe picture, and the worldtrack-through-Hemn space picture.”

“Not even when newmatter is taken into account?” asked Lodoghir.

“Not even then, because all the newmatter makers did was to build a machine that could create energies that high, and then make their own little Big Bangs in the lab. But what is new to us now, as of this morning’s Laboratorium findings, is that if you, in the same manner, traced the worldtracks of Antarct, of Pangee, Diasp, and Quator backwards, you would find yourself in a very similar part of Hemn space.”

“The Narratives converge,” said Fraa Jad.

“As you go backwards, you mean,” Zh’vaern said.

“There is no backwards,” said Fraa Jad.

This occasioned a few moments of silence.

“Fraa Jad doesn’t believe in the existence of time,” Moyra said; but she sounded as if she were realizing it and saying it at the same moment.

“Ah, well! Important detail, that,” said Suur Tris, in the kitchen, and for once no one shushed her. For some minutes, we’d all been standing around a set of dessert plates, ready to serve, waiting for the right moment.

“I don’t recommend we get sidetracked on the question of whether time exists,” said Paphlagon, to the almost audible relief of everyone else. “The point is that in that model that views the five cosmi—Arbre, and those of the four Geometer races—as trajectories in Hemn space, those trajectories are extremely close together in the vicinity of the Big Bang. And we might even ask whether they were the same up to a certain point, when something happened that made them split off from one another. Perhaps that is a question for another messal. Perhaps only Deolaters would dare to attempt it.” In the kitchen, we risked glancing at Zh’vaern’s servitor. “In any case, the different worldtracks ended up with slightly different physical constants. And so you could say that even if we were to sit in a room with a Geometer who seemed similar to us, the fact is that they would carry in the very nuclei of their atoms a sort of fingerprint that proved they came from a different Narrative.”

“As our genetic sequences carry a record of every mutation, every adaptation, every ancestor to the first thing that ever lived,” said Suur Moyra, “so the stuff of which they were made would encode what Fraa Jad calls the Narrative of their cosmos, back to the point in Hemn space when we all diverged.”

“Farther,” Fraa Jad said. Which was followed by the customary silence that followed most Jad-statements; but it was shattered, this time, by a laugh from Lodoghir.

“Ah, I see it! Finally! Oh, what a fool I’ve been, Fraa Jad, not to notice the game you’ve been playing. But now at last I see where you have been leading us, ever so subtly: to the Hylaean Theoric World!”

“Hmm, I don’t know which is more annoying,” I said, “Lodoghir’s tone, or the fact that he figured this out before I did.”

I’d been shocked, a few hours ago, when Lodoghir had wandered up to me during Periklyne and begun chit-chatting about our encounter on the Plenary stage. How could he come anywhere near me without body armor and a team of stun-gun-brandishing Inquisitors? How could he not have foreseen that I’d devote the rest of my life to plotting violent revenge? Which had forced me to understand that it really wasn’t personal, for him: all the rhetorical tricks, the distortions, salted with outright lies, the appeals to emotion, were every bit as much parts of his tool kit as equations and syllogisms were of mine, and he didn’t imagine I’d really object, any more than Jesry would if I pointed out an error in his theorics.

I had stared dumbly at Lodoghir throughout, judging the distance separating my knuckles and his teeth. I had had the vague idea that he was bossing me around a little, concerning this evening’s messal, but I hadn’t heard any of it. After a while he had lost interest, since I hadn’t said a word, and had wandered off.

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this, between him, and the Inquisition!” I said.

“You’re already in trouble with the Inquisition?” Arsibalt asked, sounding amazed and appreciative at the same time.

“No—but Varax let me know he’s watching me,” I said.

“How in the world did he do that?”

“Earlier, I had a really annoying encounter with Lodoghir.”

“Yes. I saw it.”

“No, I mean I had a second one. And a few seconds later, guess who walked up to me?”

“Well, given the context in which you are telling the story,” Arsibalt said, “I would have to guess it was Varax.”

“Yeah.”

“What did Varax say?”

“He said, ‘I understand you’re up to Chapter Five! Hope it didn’t ruin your whole autumn.’ And I told him that it had taken me a few weeks but I didn’t blame him for what had happened.”

“That was all?”

“Yeah. Maybe some chitchat afterwards.”

“And how do you interpret these words of Varax?”

“He was saying ‘don’t pop your doyn in the nose, young man—I’m watching you.’”

“You’re an idiot.”

“What!?”

“You got it all wrong! This was a gift!”

“A gift!?”

Arsibalt explained: “A doyn has the power to discipline his servitor by assigning chapters in the Book. But you, Raz, hardened criminal that you are, are already up to Five. Lodoghir would have to give you Six: a very heavy punishment—”

“Which I could appeal,” I said, getting it, “appeal to the Inquisition.”

“Arsibalt’s right,” said Tris, who’d been listening (and who seemed to be looking at me in a whole new way, now that she knew I was up to Five). “It sounds to me like this Varax was giving you a big fat hint that the Inquisition would throw out any sentence from Lodoghir.”

“They would almost have to,” said Arsibalt.

I picked up Lodoghir’s dessert and headed for the messallan in a whole new mood. The others followed me. We came into a room of flushed faces and bitten lips: a tableau of strained and awkward body language. Lodoghir had been having his usual effect on people.

“Just when I’d thought we were getting somewhere,” Ignetha Foral was saying, “I see that once again the messal has been sidetracked into some old and tedious dispute between Procians and Halikaarnians. Metatheorics! Sometimes I wonder whether you in the mathic world really understand the stakes that are now in play.”

Clearly I had come in at the wrong moment. But it was too late now, and others were piling up behind me, so I barged on in and gave my doyn his dessert just as he was saying, “I accept your rebuke, Madame Secretary, and I assure you that—”

“I don’t accept it,” said Fraa Jad.

“Nor should you!” put in Zh’vaern.

“These matters are important whether or not you take the trouble to understand them,” Fraa Jad went on.

“How am I to distinguish this from the partisan bickering that goes on in the capital?” Ignetha Foral asked. Others at the table had been horrified by Fraa Jad’s tone, but she seemed to find it bracing.

Fraa Jad ignored the question—it was none of his concern—and turned his energies to his dessert. Fraa Zh’vaern—who was surprising us all with his interest in the topic—took it up. “By examining the quality of the arguments.”

“When the arguments come out of pure theorics, I am unable to make such judgments!” she pointed out.

“I would not assume that the existence of the Hylaean Theoric World comes out of what is called pure theorics,” Lodoghir said. “It is as much a leap of faith as believing in God.”

“As much as I admire the ingenuity with which you find a way to skewer Fraa Jad and Fraa Zh’vaern with the same sentence,” said Ignetha Foral, “I must remind you that most of the people I work with believe in God, and so, among them, your gambit is likely to backfire.”

“The hour is late,” Suur Asquin pointed out—though no one seemed tired. “I propose that we take up the topic of the Hylaean Theoric World in tomorrow evening’s messal.”

Fraa Jad nodded, but it was hard to tell whether he was accepting the challenge, or really enjoying the cake.

“Have you all been enjoying your books?” Suur Moyra inquired, then seized a pan and began scraping dead vegetables into the compost. Karvall gasped—Moyra had sneaked in and ambushed us. She dropped the pot she’d been scrubbing, spun away from the sink, and ran over to take the pan out of her old doyn’s frail hands. Arsibalt and I turned almost as adroitly to watch. Karvall might be swathed in a ton of black bolt, but, as we’d been noticing, the lashings that held it in place around her body were most intricate, and rewarded close examination. Even Barb looked. Emman Beldo was driving Ignetha Foral back to her lodgings. Zh’vaern’s servitor, Orhan, was a hard man or woman to read with his or her head totally covered, but the wrinkles in his or her bolt told me his or her head was tracking Karvall. Tris took advantage of this to steal the best scrub-brush.

“Were you responsible for the books?” I asked.

“I had Karvall place them in your trailer,” Moyra said, and gave me a smile.

“So that’s where those came from,” Tris said, then explained, “I found a stack of books in my cell this morning.” From the way other servitors were now looking at Moyra, I guessed they’d had similar experiences.

“Wait a minute, that is chronologically impossible!” Barb pointed out, and then, showing a flash of the old Barb wit, added, “Unless you violated the rules of causality!”

“Oh, I’ve been trying to get this messal started for a few days,” Moyra said. “Just ask Suur Asquin, she’ll tell you what a pest I’ve made of myself. You don’t really think something like this could be thrown together by a bunch of hierarchs passing notes around during Inbrase, do you?”

“Grandsuur Moyra,” Arsibalt began, “if it wasn’t this morning’s Laboratorium results that brought this messal into being, what was it?”

“Well, if you weren’t too busy flirting with these lovely suurs and horsing around in the kitchen, you might have heard me earlier, speaking of being a meta-Lorite.”

“Or a Plurality of Worlds Lorite,” I said.

“Ah, so you were paying attention!”

“I thought it was just an icebreaker.”

“Who was their Evenedric, Fraa Arsibalt?”

“I beg your pardon?” Arsibalt was fascinated by the question, but soon had his hands full as Suur Tris dumped a huge greasy platter into his arms.

“Fraa Tavener, who was the Saunt Hemn on the planet of Quator? Tris, who was the Lady Baritoe of Antarct? Fraa Orhan, do they worship a God on Pangee, and is it the same as the God of the Matarrhites?”

“It must be, Grandsuur Moyra!” Orhan exclaimed, and made a gesture with his hand (I had decided he had to be male) that I’d seen before. Some kind of Deolater superstition.

“Fraa Erasmas, who discovered Halikaarn’s Diagonal on the world of Diasp?”

“Because obviously they did think such thoughts, you’re saying…” Arsibalt said.

“They must have done, to build that ship!” said Barb.

“Your minds are so much fresher, more agile than some of those who sit in that messallan,” Moyra said. “I thought you might have ideas.”

Suur Tris turned around and asked, “Are you saying that there would be one-to-one-correspondences between our Saunts and theirs? Like the same mind shared across multiple worlds?”

“I’m asking you,” Moyra said.

I had nothing to say, being stricken with the all-too-familiar feeling of unease that came over me, lately, when conversations began to wander down this path. The last words Orolo had spoken to me, a few minutes before he’d died, had been a warning that the Thousanders knew about this stuff, and had been developing a praxis around it: in effect, that the legends of the Incanters were based in fact. And perhaps I’d fallen back into my old habit of worrying too much; but it seemed to me, now, that every conversation I was part of came dangerously close to this topic.

Arsibalt, unburdened by such cares, felt ready to have a go. He heaved the washed platter into a drying rack, wiped his hands on his bolt, and squared off. “Well. Any such hypothesis would have to be grounded in some account of why different minds in different worldtracks would think similar things. One could always look to a religious explanation,” he went on, with a glance at Orhan, “but other than that…well…”

“You needn’t be reticent about your belief in the HTW—remember who you’re talking to! I’ve seen it all!”

“Yes, Grandsuur Moyra,” Arsibalt said, with a dip of the head.

“How might the knowledge propagate from a common Theoric World—I won’t call it Hylaean, since presumably there was no person named Hylaea on Quator—to the minds of different Saunts in different worlds? And is it still going on at this moment—between us, and them?” Moyra had been edging toward the back door as she tossed these mind bombs into the kitchen, and now almost collided with Emman Beldo, fresh in from escorting his doyn home.

“Well, it sounds as though the messal will discuss that tomorrow,” I pointed out.

“Why wait? Don’t be complacent!” Moyra shot back as she was storming out into the night. Karvall threw down a towel and scurried after her, drawing her bolt up over her head. Emman politely got out of her way, then swiveled to watch Karvall until there was nothing left to see. When he turned back around, he got a sponge in the face from Suur Tris.

“You can’t just have these tracks wandering around in Hemn space—” said Emman.

“The way we’re wandering around in the dark,” I proposed. For we were attempting to find a suitable Lucub.

“With no rhyme or reason. Can you?”

“You mean the worldtracks? The Narratives?”

“I guess so—what is up with that, by the way?”

It was a vague question but I could tell what was on his mind.

“You mean, Fraa Jad’s use of the word Narrative?”

“Yeah. That’s going to be a hard one to sell to—”

“The Panjandrums?”

“Is that what you call people like my doyn?”

“Some of us.”

“Well, they’re pretty hardheaded. Don’t go in for anything highfalutin.”

“Well, let me see if I can come up with an example,” I said. “Remember what Arsibalt said? The block of ice buried in the star?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “There is a point in Hemn space that represents a cosmos that includes even that.”

“The configuration of the cosmos encoded in that point,” I said, “includes—along with all the stars and planets, the birds and the bees, the books and the speelies and everything else—one star that happens to have a big chunk of ice in the middle of it. That point, remember, is just a long string of numbers—coordinates in the space. No more or less real than any other possible string of numbers.”

“Its realness—or unrealness in this case—has to grow out of some other consideration,” Emman tried.

“You got it. And in this case, it is that the situation being described is so damned ridiculous.”

“How could it ever happen, to begin with?” Emman demanded, getting into the spirit.

“Happen. That’s the key word,” I said, wishing I could explain this as confidently as Orolo. “What does it mean for something to happen?” That sounded pretty lame. “It’s not just this situation—this isolated point in configuration space—that springs into being for a moment and then vanishes. It’s not like you have a normal star, and then suddenly for one tick of the cosmic clock a block of ice materializes in the middle of it, and then, next tick, poof! It’s gone without a trace.”

“But it could happen, couldn’t it, if you had a Hemn Space teleporter?”

“Mm, that’s a useful thought experiment,” I said. “You’re thinking of a gadget from one of Moyra’s novels. A magic booth where you could dial in any point in Hemn space, realize it, and then jump to another.”

“Yeah. Regardless of the laws of theorics or whatever. Then you could make the ice block materialize. But then it would melt.”

“It would melt,” I corrected him, “if you let natural law take over from that point. But you could preserve it by making your Hemn Space teleporter jump to another point encoding the same cosmos, an instant later, but with the block of ice still included.”

“Okay, I get it—but normally it would melt.”

“So, Emman, the question is: what means ‘normally’? Another way of putting it: if you look at the series of points you’d have to string together with your Hemn Space teleporter in order to see, outside the windows of the booth, a cosmos with a block of ice persisting in the middle of a star, how different would that series of points have to be from one that was a proper worldtrack?”

“Meaning, a worldtrack where natural laws were respected?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

We laughed. “Well,” I said, “I’m now starting to understand some of what Orolo was saying to me about Saunt Evenedric. Evenedric studied datonomy—an outgrowth of Sconic philosophy—which means, what is given to us, what we observe. In the end, that’s all we have to work with.”

“I’ll bite,” Emman said, “what do we observe?”

“Not just world points that are coherent,” I said, “so, no ice blocks in stars—but coherent series of such points: a worldtrack that could have happened.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s not just that you can’t have a block of ice in a star, but that you can’t get it there, you can’t keep it there—there is no coherent history that can include it. See, it’s not just about what is possible—since anything is possible in Hemn space—but what is compossible, meaning all the other things that would have to be true in that universe, to have a block of ice in a star.”

“Well, I actually think you could do it,” Emman said. The praxic gears were turning in his head. This was what he did for a living; he’d been pulled out of his job at a rocket agency to serve as technical advisor to Ignetha Foral. “You could design a rocket—a missile with a warhead made of thick heat-resistant material with a block of ice embedded in it. Make this thing plunge into the star at high velocity. The heat-resistant material would burn away. But just after it did, for a moment, you’d have a block of ice embedded in a star.”

“Okay, that’s all possible,” I said, “but it’s a way of answering the question ‘what other things would have to be true about a cosmos that included a block of ice in a star?’ If you were to go to that cosmos and freeze it in that moment of time—”

“Okay,” he said, “let’s say the teleporter has a user interface feature that makes it easy to freeze time by looping back to the same point over and over.”

“Fine. And if you did that and looked at the region around the ice, you’d see the heavy nuclei of the melted heat shield swirling around in the star-stuff. You’d see the trail of rocket exhaust in space, leading all the way back to the scorch marks on the launch pad. That launch pad has to be on a planet capable of supporting life smart enough to build rockets. Around that launch pad you’d see people who had spent years of their lives designing and building that rocket. Memories of that work, and of the launch, would be encoded in their neurons. Speelies of the launch would be stored in their reticules. And all of those memories and recordings would mostly agree with one another. All of those memories and recordings boil down to positions of atoms in space—so—”

“So those memories and recordings, you’re saying, are themselves parts of the configuration encoded by that point in Hemn space,” Emman said, loudly and firmly, as he knew he was getting it. “And that is what you mean about compossibility.”

“Yes.”

“Ice in a star could be encoded by many Hemn space points,” he said, “but only a few of them—”

“A vanishingly tiny few,” I said.

“Include all the records—coherent, mutually consistent records—of how it got to be there.”

“Yes. When you go all praxic on me and dream up the ice missile delivery system, what you’re really doing is figuring out what Narrative would create the set of conditions—the traces left behind in the cosmos by the execution of that project—that is compossible with ice in a star.”

We walked on for a bit and he said, “Or to give a less dignified example, you can’t look at Suur Karvall’s outfit—”

“Without having to reconstruct in your mind the sequence of operations needed to tie all those knots.”

“Or to untie them—”

“She’s a Hundreder,” I warned him, “and the Convox won’t last forever.”

“Don’t get too attached. Yeah, I know. But I could still get a date with her in 3700—”

“Or become a fraa,” I suggested.

“I might have to, after this. Hey, do you know where you’re going?”

“Yeah. I’m following you.”

“Well, I’ve been following you.”

“Okay, that would mean that we’re lost.” And we stumbled about until we encountered a pair of grandsuurs out for a stroll, and asked them for directions to the Edharian chapterhouse.

“So,” Emman said, after we’d set out on the right track, “the bottom line is that in any one particular cosmos—excuse me, on any one particular worldtrack—things make sense. The laws of nature are followed.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what a worldtrack is—a sequence of Hemn space points strung together just so, to make it look like the laws of nature are preserved.”

“I’m going to put that in teleporter terms, since that’s how I’ll be explaining it to people,” he said. “The whole point of the teleporter is that it could take you to any other point at any moment. You could jump randomly from one cosmos to another. But only one point in Hemn space encodes the state that the cosmos you’re in now will have at the next tick of the clock, if the laws of nature are followed—right?”

“You’re on the right track,” I said, “but—”

“Where I’m going with this,” he said, “is as follows: the people to whom I have to explain this have heard of the laws of nature. Maybe even studied them a bit. They’re comfortable with that. Now suddenly I come in and start talking about Hemn space. A new concept to them. I give them a big explanation—I talk about the teleporter, the ice in the star, and the scorch marks on the launch pad. Finally one of these people raises his hand and says, ‘Mr. Beldo, you have squandered hours of our valuable time giving us a calca on Hemn space—what, pray tell, is the bottom line?’ And my answer is, ‘If you please, sir, the bottom line is that the laws of nature are followed in our cosmos.’ And he’s going to say—”

“He’s going to say, ‘We already knew that, you idiot, you’re fired!’”

“Exactly! Which is when I have to run off and become a fraa, preferably in Karvall’s math.”

“So you are asking me—”

“What do we gain that is consequential by adopting the Hemn space model? You already mentioned it makes it easier to do theorics—but Panjandrums don’t do theorics.”

“Well, for one thing, it is actually not the case that, at any given point, there is only one next point that is consistent with the laws of nature.”

“Oh, are you going to talk about quantum mechanics?”

“Yeah. An elementary particle can decay—which is compatible with the laws of nature—or it can not decay—which is also compatible with the laws of nature. But decaying and not decaying take us to two different points in Hemn space—”

“The worldtrack forks.”

“Yeah. Worldtracks fork all the time, whenever quantum state reduction seems to occur—which is a lot.”

“But still, whatever worldtrack we happen to be on still always obeys the laws of nature,” he said.

“I’m afraid so.”

“So, back to my original problem—”

“What does Hemn space get us? Well, for one thing, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to think about quantum mechanics.”

“But Panjandrums don’t think about quantum mechanics!”

I had nothing to say; I just felt like a clueless avout.

“So, do you think I should mention the Hemn space thing at all?”

“Let’s ask Jesry,” I proposed. “He’s cool-looking.” For we had reached the Edharian cloister, and I spied him on a path, drawing diagrams in the gravel with a stick while a fraa and a suur stood by watching and laughing delightedly. In the moonlight these people looked as though they’d been sketched in ash on a fireplace floor. Still, they cut altogether different figures. Jesry looked like a young prophet from some ancient scripture next to the fraa and the suur, who came from more cosmopolitan orders that went in for fancy wraps. This morning at Inbrase I’d felt like a real hick when I’d looked at how the other avout dressed. But that was just me. Put the same outfit on Jesry and he became awe-inspiringly rugged, simple, austere, and, well, manly. I understood, as I looked at him, why Fraa Lodoghir had been so keen to plane me. There was something about the Edharian contingent that impressed people. Orolo had made us into stars. Lodoghir had seen the Plenary as an opportunity to take one of us down a peg.

“Jesry,” I called.

“Hi, Raz. I am not one of those people who think you sucked at the Plenary.”

“Thanks. Name one thing we get by working in configuration space that we don’t get any other way.”

“Time,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Time.”

“I thought time didn’t exist!” Emman said sarcastically.

Jesry looked at Emman for a few moments, then looked at me. “What, has your friend been talking to Fraa Jad?”

“It is nice that Hemn space gives us an account of time,” I said, “but Emman will say that the Panjandrums he has to talk to already believe in the existence of time—”

“Poor, benighted fools!” Jesry exclaimed, getting a low, painful laugh out of Emman, and quizzical looks from his avout companions.

“So of what relevance to them is the Hemn space picture?” I continued.

“None whatsoever,” Jesry said, “until strangers come to town from four different cosmi at once. Hey, can I get you guys something to drink?”

It was yet another of Jesry’s annoying qualities that he did some of his finest work while drunk. We servitors had sampled our share of wine and beer in the kitchen, and I was just beginning to get my head clear, so I decided to drink water. Presently we found ourselves in the largest chalk hall of the local Edharian chapter—or at least I assumed it had to be the largest. The slate walls were covered with calculations I recognized. “They’ve got you doing cosmography?” I asked.

Jesry followed my gaze and focused on a table of figures chalked up on a slate. One column was longitude, another latitude—and seeing fifty-one degrees and change chalked up in the latter, I realized I was looking at the coordinates of Saunt Edhar.

“This morning’s Laboratorium,” he explained. “We had to check a bunch of calculations that the Ita did last night. All of the world’s telescopes—including the M amp; M, as you can see—are to be pointed at the Geometers’ ship tonight.”

“All night long or—”

“No. In about half an hour. Something is going to happen,” Jesry proclaimed in his usual confident baritone. I noticed Emman cringing. “Something that will give us a different view,” Jesry went on, “more interesting than the pusher plate on its arse which I spent so many hours staring at.”

“How do we know this?” I asked, though I was a little distracted by Emman’s conspicuous nervousness.

“I don’t,” Jesry said, “I’m just inferring it.”

Emman jerked his head toward the exit and we followed him out into the cloister.

“I’ll tell you guys,” he said, once we’d gotten out of earshot of the rest of the Lucub, “since the secret is going to be out in half an hour anyway. This is an idea that was cooked up at a very influential messal after the Visitation of Orithena.”

“Were you in on it?” I asked.

“No—but it’s why I was brought here,” Emman said. “We have an old reconaissance bird up there in synchronous orbit. It’s got loads of fuel on board, so that it can move around when we tell it to. We don’t think the Geometers know about it. We’ve kept the bird silent, so it hasn’t occurred to them to jam its frequencies. Well, earlier today we narrow-beamed a burst of commands to the thing and it fired up its thrusters and placed itself into a new orbit that will intercept that of the Hedron in half an hour.” He used his toe to render the Geometers’ ship in the gravel path: a crude polygon for the envelope of the icosahedron, a heel-stomp on one edge for the pusher plate. “This thing is always pointed at Arbre,” he complained, tapping his toe on the pusher plate, “so we can’t see the rest of the ship”—he swept his foot in an arc around the forward half—“which is where they keep all of the cool stuff. Obviously a deliberate move—this half has been like the dark side of the moon to us, so we’ve had to rely entirely on Saunt Orolo’s Phototype.” He stepped around to the flank of the diagram and swept out a long arc aimed at the bow. “Our bird,” he said, “is approaching from this direction. It is radioactive as hell.”

“The bird is?”

“Yeah, it draws power from radiothermal devices. The Geometers are going to notice this thing headed their way and they’ll have no choice but to execute a maneuver—”

“To get the pusher plate—which is their shield—between themselves and the bogey,” Jesry said.

“They’ll have to spin the whole ship around,” I translated, “exposing the ‘cool stuff’ to view from ground—based telescopes.”

“And those telescopes are going to be ready.”

“Is it even possible to spin something that big around in any reasonable amount of time?” I asked. “I’m trying to imagine how big the thrusters would have to be—”

Emman shrugged. “You ask a good question. We’ll learn a lot just from observing its maneuver. Tomorrow we’ll have lots of pictures to look at.”

“Unless they get angry and nuke us,” Jesry put in, while I was trying to think of a more delicate way of saying it.

“There’s been some discussion of that,” Emman admitted.

“Well, I should hope so!” I said.

“The Panjandrums are all sleeping in caves and bunkers.”

“That’s comforting,” Jesry said.

Emman missed the sarcasm. “And the mathic world has experience in coping with nuclear aftermaths.”

Jesry and I both turned to look in the direction of the Precipice, wondering how deep we could get in those tunnels, how fast.

“But this is all considered low-probability,” Emman said. “What happened on Ecba was a serious provocation, if not an outright act of war. We have to make a serious response—show the Geometers we won’t just sit passively while they drop rods on us.”

“Will this bird actually hit the icosahedron?” I asked.

“Not unless they’re stupid enough to get in its way. But it’ll come close enough that they’ll have to respond, as a precaution.”

“Well!” Jesry said, after we had spent a minute absorbing all of this. “So much for getting anything done during Lucub.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess I will have that wine after all.”

We took a bottle out onto the lawn between the Edharian and Eleventh Sconic cloisters. We knew where to look in the sky, so we arranged ourselves and lay in the grass waiting for the End of the World.

I really missed Ala. For a while I hadn’t been thinking about her much. But she was the one I wanted to be next to when the nukes rained down.

At the appointed moment there was a tiny, momentary flash of light in the middle of the constellation where we knew the Hedron was. As though a spark had jumped between their ship and our “bird.”

“They nailed it with something,” Emman said.

“Directed energy weapon,” Jesry intoned, as if he actually knew what he was talking about.

“X-ray laser, to be specific,” said a nearby voice.

We sat up to see a stocky figure in an antique bolt-and-chord getup, shambling toward us on weary legs.

“Hello, Thistlehead!” I called out.

“Feel like a stroll while we await massive retaliation?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m going to bed,” Jesry said. I guessed he was lying. “No Lucub tonight.” Definitely lying.

“Then I’m doing the same,” said Emman Beldo, who knew when he was being gotten rid of. “Lots of work tomorrow.”

“If we still exist,” Jesry said.

“I really have to get in touch with Ala,” I told Lio, after we had wandered for half an hour without saying a word. “I looked for her at Periklyne this afternoon but—”

“She wasn’t there,” Lio said, “she was getting ready for this.”

“You mean aiming the telescopes or—”

“More the military side of it.”

“How’d she get mixed up in that?”

“She’s good. Someone noticed. The military gets what it asks for.”

“How would you know? Are you mixed up in the military side too?”

Lio was silent. We walked for a few minutes more. “A few days ago they put me in a new Laboratorium,” he said. I could tell that he’d been laboring to get it off his chest for a while.

“Oh really? What have they got you doing?”

“They dug up some old documents. Really old. We’ve been scraping them off. Getting familiar with them. Looking up old words, fallen from use.”

“What kinds of documents?”

“Technical drawings. Specs. Manuals. Back-of-envelope sketches, even.”

“For what?”

“They won’t just come out and say, and no one is allowed to see the whole picture,” Lio said, “but talking to some of the others, comparing notes in Lucub, taking into account the dates on the documents—just before the Terrible Events—we’re all pretty sure that what we are looking at are the original plans for the Everything Killers.”

I gave a little snort of laughter, simply out of habit. The Everything Killers were only ever mentioned in the same way as we might talk of God or Hell. But everything about Lio’s tone and manner told me that he was being altogether literal. There was a long silence while I tried to absorb this news.

In an attempt to prove that he must be mistaken, I pointed out, “But that goes against everything—everything—that the world is based on!” Meaning the post-Reconstitution world. “If they’re willing to do that, then nothing is real anymore.”

“There are many who agree with you, of course,” Lio said, “and that’s why—” He exhaled, the breath coming out raggedly. “That’s why I wanted to invite you to be part of my Lucub.”

“What’s the purpose of this Lucub?”

“Some people are thinking of going over to the Antarcts.”

“Going over—as in joining forces with? With the Geometers!?”

“The Antarcts,” he insisted. “It’s been established, now, that the dead woman in the probe was from Antarct.”

“Based on the blood samples in the tubes?”

He nodded. “But the projectiles in her body are from the Pangee cosmos.”

“So people are guessing that the Antarcts are on our side—”

He nodded again. “And having some sort of conflict, up there, with the Pangees.”

“So the idea is to forge an alliance between the avout, and the Antarcts?”

“You got it,” Lio said.

“Wow! How exactly would you go about that? How would you even communicate with them? I mean, so that the S#230;cular Power wouldn’t know of it.”

“Easy. Already been worked out.” Then, knowing I’d never be satisfied with that, he added, “It’s the guidestar lasers on the big telescopes. We can aim them at the icosahedron. They’ll see the light but it can’t be intercepted by anyone who’s not right on the beam line.”

I thought of the conversation I’d had with Lio months ago, when we had wondered whether it was really true, or just an old folk tale, that the Ita had us under continual surveillance. Idiotically, I looked around just in case any hidden microphones might somehow have popped into view. “Do the Ita—”

“Some of them are in on it,” Lio said.

“What kind of relationship exactly do these people want to forge with the Antarcts?”

“We spend most of our time arguing about that. Too much time. There are some nut jobs, of course, who think we can go up there and live on their ship and it’ll be like ascending to Heaven. Most are more reasonable. We’ll set up our own communications to the Geometers and…conduct our own negotiations.”

“But that is totally at odds with the Reconstitution!”

“Does the Reconstitution say anything about aliens? About multiple cosmi?”

I shut up, knowing when I was planed.

“Anyway,” he went on.

I completed his sentence. “The Reconstitution is a dead letter anyway if they are dusting off the Everything Killers.”

“The term post-mathic is being thrown around,” Lio said. “People are talking about the Second Rebirth.”

“Who’s in on it?”

“Quite a few servitors. Not so many doyns, if you follow me.”

“What orders? What maths?”

“Well…the Ringing Vale avout consider the Everything Killers to be dishonorable, if that helps you.”

“Where does this Lucub meet? It sounds huge.”

“It’s a bunch of Lucubs. A network of cells. We talk to one another.”

“What do you do, Lio?”

“Stand in the back of the room and look tough. Listen.”

“What are you listening for?”

“There are some crazies,” he said. “Well, not crazy, but too rational, if you know what I mean. No awareness of tactics. Of discretion.”

“And what are those people saying?”

“That it’s time for the smart people to be in charge. Time to take the power back from people like the Warden of Heaven.”

“That kind of talk could lead to a Fourth Sack!” I said.

“Some people are way ahead of you,” Lio said. “They are saying, ‘Fine. Bring it on. The Geometers will intervene on our side.’”

“That is just shockingly reckless,” I said.

“That’s why I’m listening to those people,” Lio said, “and reporting back to my Lucub group, which seems reasonable by comparison.”

“Why would the Geometers reach down to stop a Sack?”

“People who believe this tend to be hard-core HTW types, I’m sorry to say. They’ve seen the Adrakhonic proof on Orolo’s phototype. They assume that the Geometers are our brothers. The fact that the Geometers made their first landfall at Orithena just confirms this.”

“Lio, I have a question.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve had zero contact with Ala. Jesry thinks it’s because she’s trying to get her liaisons sorted. But that doesn’t seem like her. Does she know anything about this group?”

“She started it,” Lio said.

Paphlagon’s plate was clean; Lodoghir hadn’t even picked up his fork. Hunger at last succeeded where throat-clearing, glares, exasperated sighs, and the en masse departure of the servitors had failed: Lodoghir fell silent, picked up his glass, and doused his flaming vocal chords.

Paphlagon was eerily calm—almost jolly. “If one were to examine a transcript of that, one would see an extraordinary, and quite lengthy, catalog of every rhetorical trick in the Sphenic book. We’ve seen appeals to mob sentiment: ‘no one believes in the HTW any more,’ ‘everyone thinks Protism is crazy.’ We’ve seen appeals to authority: ‘refuted in the Twenty-ninth Century by no less than Saunt So-and-so.’ Efforts to play on our personal insecurity: ‘how can any person of sound mind take this seriously?’ And many other techniques that I have forgotten the names of, as it has been so long since I studied the Sphenics. So. I must begin by applauding the rhetorical mastery that has given the rest of us an opportunity to enjoy this excellent meal and rest our voices. But I would be remiss if I did not point out that Fraa Lodoghir has yet to offer up a single argument, worthy of the name, against the proposition that there is a Hylaean Theoric World, that it is populated by mathematical entities—cno#246;ns, as we call them—that are non-spatial and non-temporal in nature, and that our minds have some capability of accessing them.”

“Nor could I—ever!” exclaimed Fraa Lodoghir, whose jaw had been working at an astounding pace during the last few moments to get a bite of food squared away. “You Protists are ever so careful to frame the discussion so that it can’t be touched by rational debate. I can’t prove you’re wrong any more than I can prove the non-existence of God!”

Paphlagon had some infighting skills of his own; he simply ignored what Lodoghir had just said. “A couple of weeks ago, at a Plenary, you and some of the other Procians floated the suggestion that the diagram of the Adrakhonic Theorem on the Geometers’ ship was a forgery, inserted into Saunt Orolo’s Phototype by Orolo himself, or someone else at Edhar. Do you now retract that allegation?” And Paphlagon glanced over his shoulder at an astoundingly high-resolution phototype of the Geometers’ ship, taken last night by the largest optical telescope on Arbre, on which the diagram was clearly visible. The walls of the messallan were papered with such. The table was scattered with more.

“There is nothing wrong with mentioning hypotheses in the course of a discussion,” Lodoghir said. “Clearly that particular one happened to be incorrect.”

“I think he just said ‘yes, I withdraw the allegation,’ said Tris, in the kitchen. I had gone back there ostensibly to fulfill my duties, but really to plow through heaps of more phototypes. Everyone in the Convox had been looking at them all day, but we weren’t even close to being tired of it.

“It is such good fortune that this gambit worked,” Emman reflected, gazing fixedly at a grainy close-up of a strut.

“You mean, that we did not get rodded?” Barb asked—sincerely.

“No, that we got pictures,” Emman said. “Got them by doing something clever, here.”

“Oh—you mean it is good fortune politically?” Karvall asked, a little uncertain.

“Yes! Yes!” Emman exclaimed. “The Convox is expensive! It makes the Powers That Be happy when it yields discernible results.”

“Why is it expensive?” Tris asked. “We grow our own food.”

Emman finally looked up from his pictures. He was checking Tris’s face, in order to see whether she could possibly be serious.

Over the speaker, Paphlagon was saying: “the Adrakhonic Theorem is true here. It’s apparently true in the four cosmi the Geometers came from. If their ship had turned up in some other cosmos, the same as ours, but devoid of sentient beings, would it be true there?”

“Not until the Geometers arrived to say it was true,” said Lodoghir.

Back in the kitchen, I intervened before Emman could blurt out anything he might have to apologize for. “It must be expensive for people like Emman and Ignetha Foral to keep tabs on it,” I pointed out.

“Of course,” Emman said, “but even if you ignore that: there is a huge amount of mathic effort going into it. Thousands of avout working night and day. S#230;culars don’t like wasted effort. That goes double for S#230;culars who know a thing or two about management.”

Management was a Fluccish word. Faces went blank around the kitchen. I stepped in to translate: “Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox. Lots of people putting in time with no results makes them nervous.”

“Oh, I see,” Tris said, uncertainly.

“How funny!” Karvall said, and went back to work.

Emman rolled his eyes.

“I admit I am no theor,” Ignetha Foral was saying on the speaker, “but the more I hear of this, the less I understand your position, Fraa Lodoghir. Three is a prime number. It is prime today, was prime yesterday. A billion years ago, before there were brains to think about it, it was prime. And if all the brains were destroyed tomorrow, it would still be prime. Clearly its primeness has nothing to do with our brains.”

“It has everything to do with our brains,” Lodoghir insisted, “because we supply the definition of what it is to be a prime number!”

“No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the cno#246;ns exist independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples’ brains at any given moment,” Paphlagon said. “It is a simple application of the Steelyard. What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras, different sub-disciplines, different cosmi even, time and time again prove the same results—results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof-chains—results, some of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of the physical universe? The simplest answer is that the cno#246;ns really exist, and are not of this causal domain.”

Arsibalt’s bell jingled. I decided to go in with him. We took down a huge rendering of the icosahedron that had been pinned to a tapestry behind Paphlagon. Karvall and Tris came out and helped take the tapestry down, exposing a wall of dark grey slate, and a basket of chalk. The dialog had turned to an exposition of Complex versus Simple Protism, and so Arsibalt was called upon to draw on that slate the same sorts of diagrams that Fraa Criscan had drawn in the dust of the road up Bly’s Butte when he had explained this topic to me and Lio some weeks earlier: the Freight Train, the Firing Squad, the Wick, and so on. I drifted back and forth between there and the kitchen as the exposition went on. Ignetha Foral had long been familiar with this material, but it was new to several of the others. Zh’vaern, in particular, asked several questions. Emman, for once, understood less of what was going on than his doyn, and so as he and I worked on garnishes for the desserts, I watched his face, and jumped in with little explanations when his eyes went out of focus.

I returned to the messallan to clear plates just as Paphlagon was explaining the Wick: “A fully generalized Directed Acyclic Graph, with no distinction made any more between, on the one hand, so-called theoric worlds, and, on the other, inhabited ones such as Arbre, Quator, and the rest. For the first time, we have arrows leading away from the Arbran Causal Domain towards other inhabited worlds.”

“Do you mean to suggest,” Lodoghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaean Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”

“Of any number of such worlds,” Paphlagon said, “which might themselves be the HTWs of still other worlds.”

“But how could we possibly verify such a hypothesis?” Lodoghir demanded.

“We could not,” Jad admitted, in his first utterance of the whole evening, “unless those worlds came to us.”

Lodoghir broke into rich laughter. “Fraa Jad! I commend you! What would this messal be without your punch lines? I don’t agree with a word of what you’re saying, but it does make for an entertaining—because completely unpredictable—mealtime!”

I heard the first part of this in person, the back half over the speaker in the kitchen, to which I had repaired with an armload of plates. Emman was standing over the counter where we had spread out the phototypes, thumbing something into his jeejah. He ignored me, but he did glance up and fix his gaze on nothing in particular as Ignetha Foral began to speak: “The material is interesting, the explanation well carried off, but I am at a loss, now. Yesterday evening we were told one story about how Plurality of Worlds might be understood, and it had to do with Hemn space and worldtracks.”

“Which I spent all day explaining to rooms full of bureaucrats,” Emman complained, with a theatrical yawn. “And now this!”

“Now,” Ignetha Foral was saying, “we are hearing an altogether different account of it, which seems to have nothing to do with the first. I cannot help but wonder whether tomorrow’s Messal will bring another story, and the day after that, yet another.”

This touched off a round of not very interesting conversation in the messallan. The servitors pounced and cleared. Arsibalt trudged to the kitchen and busied himself at the keg. “I’d best fortify myself,” he explained, to no one in particular, “as I am condemned to spend the remainder of the evening drawing light bubbles.”

“What’s a light bubble?” Emman asked me quietly.

“A diagram that shows how information—cause-and-effect—moves across space and time.”

“Time, which doesn’t exist?” Emman said, repeating what had become a stock joke.

“Yeah. But it’s okay. Space doesn’t exist either,” I said. Emman threw me a sharp look, and decided I must be pulling his leg.

“So how’s your friend Lio doing?” Emman asked, apropos of yesterday evening. It was noteworthy that he remembered Lio’s name, since there had been no formal introduction, and little conversation. In the Convox, people met one another in myriad ways, though, so they might have crossed paths anywhere. I would not have given this a second thought if not for the substance of what Lio and I had talked about. Yesterday I’d felt easy around Emman. Today it was different. People I cared about were being drawn into—in Ala’s case, perhaps leading—a subversive movement. Lio was trying to draw me into it even as Emman wanted to follow me to Lucub. Could it be that the S#230;cular Power had got wind of it, and that Emman’s real mission was to ferret it out, using me as a way in? Not a very nice way to think—but that was the way I was going to have to think from now on.

I’d lain awake in my cell all night from a combination of jet lag and fear of a Fourth Sack. Good thing that most of the day had been a huge Plenary at which the story of last night’s satellite gambit had been told, and phototypes and speelies exhibited. The back pews of the Unarian nave were dark, and roomy enough that I and scores of Lucub-weary avout had been able to stretch out full-length and catch up on sleep. When it was over, someone had shaken me awake. I had stood up, rubbed my eyes, looked across the Nave, and caught sight of Ala—the first time I’d seen her since she had stepped through the screen at Voco. She had been a hundred feet away, standing in a circle of taller avout, mostly men, all older, but seemingly holding her own in some kind of serious conversation. Some of the men had been S#230;culars in military uniforms. I had decided that now was not the best time for me to bounce up to her and say hello.

“Hey! Raz! Raz! How many fingers am I holding up?” Emman was demanding. Tris and Karvall thought that was funny. “How’s Lio doing?” he repeated.

“Busy,” I said, “busy like all of us. He’s been working out quite a bit with the Ringing Vale avout.”

Emman shook his head. “Nice that they’re getting exercise,” he said. “Love to know what joint locks and nerve pinches are going to do against the World Burner.”

My gaze went to the stack of phototypes. Emman slid a few out of the way and came up with a detail shot of a detachable pod bracketed to one of the shock absorbers. It was a squat grey metal egg, unmarked and undecorated. A structural lattice had been built around it to provide mountings for antennae, thrusters, and spherical tanks. Clearly the thing was meant to detach and move around under its own power. Holding it to the shock absorber was a system of brackets that reached through the lattice to engage the grey egg directly. This detail had drawn notice from the Convox. Calculations had been done on the size of those brackets. They were strangely oversized. They only needed to be so large if the thing they were holding—the grey egg—were massive. Unbelievably massive. This was no ordinary pressure vessel. Perhaps it had extremely thick walls? But the calculations made no sense if you assumed any sort of ordinary metal. The only way to sort it—to account for the sheer number of protons and neutrons in that thing—was to assume it was made from a metal so far out at the end of the table of elements that its nuclei—in any cosmos—were unstable. Fissionable.

This object was not just a tank. It was a thermonuclear device several orders of magnitude larger than the largest ever made on Arbre. The propellant tanks carried enough reaction mass to move it to an orbit antipodal to that of the mother ship. If it were detonated, it would shine enough radiant energy onto Arbre to set fire to whatever half of the planet could see it.

“I don’t think that the Valers are really expecting to swarm over the World Burner in space suits and subdue it with fisticuffs,” I said. “Actually, what impressed me most about them was their knowledge of military history and tactics.”

Emman held up his hands in surrender. “Don’t get me wrong. I would like to have them on my side.”

Again, I couldn’t help but see a hidden meaning. But then a bell rang. Like animals in a lab, we had learned to tell the bells apart, so we didn’t have to look to know who it was for. Arsibalt took a final gulp from his flagon and hustled out.

Moyra’s voice was coming through on the speaker: “Uthentine and Erasmas were Thousanders, so their treatise was not copied out into the mathic world until the Second Millennial Convox.” She was speaking of the two avout who had developed the notion of Complex Protism. “Even then, it received scant notice until the Twenty-seventh Century, when Fraa Clathrand, a Centenarian—later in his life, a Millenarian—at Saunt Edhar, casting an eye over these diagrams, remarked on the isomorphism between the causality-arrows in these networks, and the flow of time.”

“Isomorphism meaning—?” asked Zh’vaern.

“Sameness of form. Time flows, or seems to flow, in one direction,” Paphlagon said. “Events in the past can cause events in the present, but not vice versa, and time never loops round in a circle. Fraa Clathrand pointed out something noteworthy, which is that information about the cno#246;ns—the givens that flow along all of these arrows—behaves as if the cno#246;ns were in the past.”

Again, Emman was staring off into space, drawing connections in his head. “Paphlagon is also a Hundreder from Edhar, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s probably how he got interested in this topic—probably found Clathrand’s manuscripts lying around somewhere.”

“Twenty-seventh Century,” Emman repeated. “So, Clathrand’s works would’ve been distributed to the mathic world at large at the Apert of 2700?”

I nodded.

“Just eight decades before the rise of…” But he cut himself short and flicked his eyes nervously in my direction.

“Before the Third Sack,” I corrected him.

In the messallan, Lodoghir had been demanding an explanation. Moyra finally settled him down: “The entire premise of Protism is that the cno#246;ns can change us, in the quite literal and physical sense that they make our nerve tissue behave differently. But the reverse is not true. Nothing that goes on in our nerve tissue can make four into a prime number. All Clathrand was saying was that things in our past can likewise affect us in the present, but nothing we do in the present can affect the events of the past. And so here it seems we might have a perfectly commonplace explanation of something in these diagrams that might otherwise seem a bit mystical—namely, the purity and changelessness of cno#246;ns.”

And here, just as Arsibalt had predicted, the conversation turned into a tutorial about light bubbles, which was an old scheme used by theors to keep track of how knowledge, and cause-and-effect relationships, propagated from place to place over time.

“Very well,” said Zh’vaern eventually, “I’ll give you Clathrand’s Contention that any one of these DAGs—the Strider, the Wick, and so on—can be isomorphic to some arrangement of things in spacetime, influencing one another through propagation of information at the speed of light. But what does Clathrand’s Contention get us? Is he really asserting that the cno#246;ns are in the past? That we are just, somehow, remembering them?”

“Perceiving—not remembering,” Paphlagon corrected him. “A cosmographer who sees a star blow up perceives everything about it in his present—though intellectually he knows it happened thousands of years ago and the givens are only now reaching the objective of his telescope.”

“Fine—but my question stands.”

It was unusual for Zh’vaern to become so involved in the dialog. Emman and I confirmed as much by giving each other quizzical looks. Perhaps the Matarrhite was actually getting ready to say something?

“After the Apert of 2700, various theors tried to do various things with Clathrand’s Contention,” Moyra said, “each pursuing a different approach, depending on their understanding of time and their general approach to metatheorics. For example—”

“It is too late in the evening for a recitation of examples,” said Ignetha Foral.

Which chilled the whole room, and seemed to end the discussion, until Zh’vaern, in the ensuing silence, blurted out: “Does this have anything to do with the Third Sack?”

A much longer silence followed.

It was one thing for me and Emman, standing back in the kitchen, to mention this under our breath. Even then, I’d felt excruciatingly awkward. But for Zh’vaern to raise the topic in a messal attended (and under surveillance) by S#230;culars, went far, far beyond disastrously rude. To imply that the avout were in any way to blame for the Third Sack—that was mere dinner-party-wrecking rudeness. But to plant such notions in the minds of extremely powerful S#230;culars was a kind of recklessness verging on treason.

Fraa Jad finally broke the silence with a chortling noise, so deep that it hardly came through on the sound system. “Zh’vaern violates a taboo!” he observed.

“I see no reason why the topic should be off limits,” Zh’vaern said, not in the least embarrassed.

“How fared the Matarrhites in the Third Sack?” Jad asked.

“According to the iconography of the time, we, as Deolaters, had nothing to do with Rhetors or Incanters and so were considered—”

“Innocent of what we were guilty of?” said Asquin, who seemed to have chosen this moment to stop being nice.

“Anyway,” Zh’vaern said, “we evacuated to an island, deep in the southern polar regions, and lived off the available plants, birds, and insects. That is where we developed our cuisine, which I know many of you find distasteful. We remember the Third Sack with every bite of food we take.”

On the speaker I heard shifting, throat-clearing, and the clink of utensils for the first time since Zh’vaern had rolled his big stink-bomb into the middle of the table. But then he ruined it all by the way he volleyed the question back at Jad: “And your people? Edhar was one of the Inviolates, was it not?” Everyone tensed up again. Clathrand had come from Edhar; Zh’vaern seemed to have been developing a theory that Clathrand’s work had been the basis for the exploits of the Incanters; now he was drawing attention to the fact that Jad’s math had somehow managed to fend off the Sack for seven decades.

“Fascinating!” Emman exclaimed. “How could this get any worse?”

“I’m glad I’m not in there,” Tris said.

“Arsibalt must be dying,” I said. A small noise in the back of the kitchen drew our notice: Orhan, Zh’vaern’s servitor, had been standing there silently the whole time. It was easy to forget he was there when you couldn’t see his face.

“You just got to the Convox, Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Suur Asquin, “and so we’ll forgive you for not having heard, yet, what has become an open secret in the last few weeks: that the Three Inviolates are nuclear waste repositories, and as such were probably protected by the S#230;cular Power.”

If this was news to Zh’vaern, he didn’t seem to find it very remarkable.

“This is going nowhere,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Time to move on. The purpose of the Convox—and of this messal—is to get things done. Not to make friends or have polite conversations. The policy of what you call the S#230;cular Power toward the mathic world is what it is, and shall not be altered by a faux pas over dessert. The World Burner, you must know, has quite focused people’s minds—at least where I work.”

“Where would you like the conversation to go tomorrow, Madame Secretary?” asked Suur Asquin. I didn’t have to see her face to know that the rebuke had really burned her.

“I want to know who—what—the Geometers are, and where they came from,” said Ignetha Foral. “How they got here. If we have to discuss polycosmic metatheorics all evening long in order to answer those questions, so be it! But let us not speak of anything more that is not relevant to the matter at hand.”

I’d been flattering myself that Fraa Jad might want to talk to me; he had, after all, sent me off on a mission that had almost killed me three times. But unlike Moyra he was not the type to hang around in the kitchen post-messal, rapping with the servitors and washing dishes. By the time we were done cleaning up, he was gone to wherever it was that the Convox stowed Thousanders when not in use.

It was just another reason I wanted to track down Lio. On the drive from Edhar to Bly’s Butte, Fraa Jad had confided in both of us—or so we believed—by dropping the hint that he was unnaturally old. If I were going to seek out Jad and take the dialog to the next stage—whatever that might be—Lio should be there with me.

The only problem was that I seemed to have sprouted an entourage: Emman, Arsibalt, and Barb. If I led those three into a meeting of the seditious conspiracy of which Lio was now part, Arsibalt would black out and have to be dragged back to his cell, Barb would blab it to the whole Convox, and Emman would report us to the Panjandrums.

While mopping the kitchen floor, I hit on the idea of leading them to Jesry’s Lucub instead. With luck, I could shed some or all of them there.

As we were informed while trying to find Jesry—in Emman’s case, by a jeejah message, and for the rest of us, by coded bell-ringing from a carillon in the Precipice—Lucub had been canceled. Everything, in fact, except Laboratorium and Messal had been suspended until further notice, and the only reason we still had Messal was that we had to eat in order to work. The rest of the time, we were supposed to analyze the Geometers’ ship. The S#230;culars had syntactic systems for building and displaying three-dimensional models of complicated objects, and so the goal, now, was to create such a model, correct down to the last strut, hatch, and weld, of the starship orbiting our planet—or at least of its outer shell, which was all of it we could see. Emman was proficient in the use of this modeling system, and so he was called away to toil in a Laboratorium with a lot of Ita. As I understood it, he wasn’t actually doing any modeling work—just getting the system to run. Those of us with theorical training had been assigned to new Laboratoria whose purpose was to pore over the phototypes from last night and integrate them into the model.

Some such tasks were more demanding than others. The propulsion system, with jets of plasma interacting with the pusher plate, was difficult even for a Jesry to understand. He’d been assigned to penetrate the mysteries of the X-ray laser batteries. I was on a team analyzing the large-scale dynamics of the entire ship. We assumed that, inside of the icosahedron, some part of it rotated to create pseudo-gravity. So it was a huge gyroscope. When it maneuvered—as it had been forced to, last night—gyroscopic forces must be induced between the spun and despun sections, and those must be managed by bearings of some description. How great were those forces? And how did the thing maneuver, anyway? No jets—no rocket thrusters—had fired. No propulsion charges had detonated. And yet the Hedron had spun around with remarkable adroitness. The only reasonable explanation was that it contained a set of momentum wheels—rapidly spinning gyroscopes—that could be used to store and release angular momentum. Imagine a circular railway built around the inner surface of the icosahedron, making a complete circuit, and a freight train running around it in an eternal loop. If the train applied its brakes, it would dump some of its angular momentum into the icosahedron and force it to spin. By releasing the brakes and hitting the throttle, it could reverse the effect. As of last night, it was obvious that the Hedron contained half a dozen such systems—two, running opposite directions, on each of three axes. How big might they be, how much power could they exchange with the ship? What might that imply about what they were made of? More generally, by making precise measurements of how the Hedron had maneuvered, what could we infer about the size, mass, and spin rate of the inhabited section that was hidden inside?

Arsibalt was put on a team using spectroscopy and other givens to figure out which parts of the ship had been forged in which cosmi; or had it all been made in one cosmos? Barb was assigned to make sense of a triangulated network of struts that had been observed projecting from the despun part of the ship. And so on. So six hours now went by during which I was completely absorbed in the problem to which I, and a team of five other theors, had been assigned. I didn’t have a moment to think about anything else until someone pointed out that the sun was rising, and we received a message that food was to be had on the great plaza that spread before the Mynster, at the foot of the Precipice.

Walking there, I tried to force gyroscope problems out of my head for a few minutes and consider the larger picture. Ignetha Foral had made no secret of her impatience yesterday evening. We’d emerged from the messal to find ourselves in a Convox that had abruptly been reorganized—along S#230;cular lines. All of us were like praxics now, working on small bits of a problem whose entirety we might never get to see. Was this a permanent change? How would it affect the movement Lio had spoken of? Was it a deliberate strategy by which the Panjandrums intended to snuff that movement out? What Lio had told me had made me anxious, and I’d been afraid of what I might learn if I ever found my way to Ala’s Lucub. So I was relieved that it had been put into suspended animation. The conspiracy could have made no progress last night. But another part of me was concerned about how it might respond to being driven further underground.

Breakfast was being served out of doors, at long tables that the military had set up on the plaza. Convenient for us—but weirdly and intrusively S#230;cular in style, and another hint that the Mathic hierarchs had lost or ceded power to the Panjandrums.

Emerging from the line with a hunk of bread, butter, and honey, I saw a small woman just in the act of taking a seat at an otherwise vacant table. I walked over quickly and took the seat across from her. The table was between us, so there was no awkwardness as to whether we should hug, kiss, or shake hands. She knew I was there, but remained huddled over her plate for a long moment, staring at her food, and, I thought, gathering her strength, before she raised her eyes and gazed into mine.

“Is this seat taken?” asked an approaching fraa in a complicated bolt, giving me the sort of ingratiating look I’d learned to associate with those who wanted to suck up to Edharians.

“Bugger off!” I said. He did.

“I sent you a couple of letters,” I said. “Don’t know if you got them.”

“Osa handed one to me,” she said. “I didn’t open it until after what happened with Orolo.”

“Why not?” I asked, trying to make my voice gentle. “I know about Jesry—”

The big eyes closed in pain—no—in exasperation, and she shook her head. “Forget about that. It’s just that too much else has been going on. I’ve not wanted to get distracted.” She leaned back against her folding chair, heaved a sigh. “After the Visitation of Orithena, I thought maybe I had better open up. Zoom out, as the extras say. I read your letter. I think—” Her brow folded. “I don’t know what I think. It’s like I’ve had three different lifetimes. Before Voco. Between Voco and Orolo’s death. And since then. And your letter—which was a respectable piece of work, don’t get me wrong—was written to an Ala two lifetimes gone.”

“I think that we could all tell similar stories,” I pointed out.

She shrugged, nodded, started to eat.

“Well,” I tried, “tell me about your current life, then.”

She looked at me, a little too long for comfort. “Lio told me that you spoke.”

“Yes.”

She finally broke eye contact, let her gaze wander over the breakfast tables, slowly filling up with weary fraas and suurs, and out over the lawns and towers of Tredegarh. “They brought me here to organize people. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“But not in the way they wanted?”

She shook her head quickly. “It’s more complicated than that, Erasmas.” It killed me to hear her speak my name. “Turns out that once you get an organization started, it takes on a life—lives by a logic—of its own. I suppose if I’d ever done this before, I’d have known it would be that way—would have planned for it.”

“Well—don’t beat yourself up.”

“I’m not beating myself up. That’s you putting emotions on me. Like clothes on a doll.”

The old feeling—a curious mix of irritation, love, and desire to feel more of it—came over me.

“See, they knew from the start that the Convox was vulnerable. An obvious target, if the pact opened hostilities.”

“The pact?”

“We call it PAQD now for Pangee-Antarct-Quator-Diasp. Less anthropomorphic than Geometers.”

But they are anthropomorphic, I was tempted to say. But I stifled it.

“I know,” she said, eyeing me, “they are anthropomorphic. Never mind. We call them the PAQD.”

“Well, I had been wondering,” I said. “Seems risky to put all the smart people in one square mile.”

“Yeah, but what they have drilled into me, over and over, is that it’s all about risk. The question is, what are the benefits that might be had in exchange for a given risk?”

To me this sounded like the kind of organizational bulshytt that was always being spouted by pompous extras who hadn’t bothered to define their terms. But it seemed weirdly important to Ala that I listen, understand, and agree. She even reached out and put her hand on mine for a few moments, which focused my attention. So I went through a little pantomime of processing what she’d said and agreeing to it. “The benefit, here, being that maybe the Convox could do something halfway useful before it got blown up?” I asked.

That seemed to pass muster, so she plowed ahead. “I was assigned to risk mitigation, which is bulshytt meaning that if the PAQD does anything scary, this Convox is going to scatter like a bunch of flies when they see the flyswatter. And instead of scattering randomly, we are going to do it in a systematic, planned way—the Antiswarm, the Ita have been calling it—and we are going to stay on the Reticulum so that we can continue the essential functions of the Convox even as we are scurrying all over the place.”

“Did you start on this right away? Just after you got Evoked?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew from the outset that there was going to be a Convox.”

She shook her head. “I knew they—we—were laying plans for one. I didn’t know for sure it would actually happen—or who would be called. When it started to materialize, these plans that I’d been making came into sharper focus, took on depth. And then it became obvious to me—was unavoidable.”

“What became obvious?”

“What did Fraa Corlandin teach us of the Rebirth?”

I shrugged. “You studied harder than I. The end of the Old Mathic Age. The gates of the old maths flung open—torn off their hinges, in some cases. The avout dispersed into the S#230;culum—okay, I think I see where this is going now…”

“What the S#230;cular Power had asked me to lay plans for—without understanding—was in many ways indistinguishable from a second Rebirth,” Ala said. “Because, Raz, not only Tredegarh would open its gates. If it comes to war with the PAQD, all of the concents will have to disperse. The avout will move among—mingle with—blend into the general population. Yet we’ll still be talking to one another over the Reticulum. Which means—”

“Ita,” I said.

She nodded, and smiled, warming to the task, to the picture she was building. “Each cell of wandering avout has to include some Ita. And it won’t be possible to maintain avout/Ita segregation any more. The Antiswarm will have tasks to carry out—not the kinds of things avout have traditionally done. Work of immediate S#230;cular relevance.”

“A second Praxic Age,” I said.

“Exactly!” She’d become enthusiastic. I felt the excitement too. But I drew back from it, recollecting that it could only come to pass if we got into out-and-out war. She sensed this too, and clamped her face down into the kind of expression I imagined she wore when sitting in council with high military leaders. “It started,” she said, in a much lower voice—and by it I knew she meant the thing Lio had told me of—“it started in meetings with cell leaders. See, the cells—the groups we’re going to break into, if we trigger the Antiswarm—each has a leader. I’ve been meeting with those leaders, giving them their evacuation plans, familiarizing them with who’s in their cells.”

“So that’s—”

“Preordained. Yes. Everyone in the Convox has already been assigned to a cell.”

“But I haven’t—”

“You haven’t been informed,” Ala said. “No one has—except for the cell leaders.”

“You didn’t want to upset people—distract them—there was no point in letting them know,” I guessed.

“Which is about to change,” she said, and looked around as if expecting it to change now. And indeed I noticed that several more military drummons had pulled onto the grounds and parked at one end of this open-air Refectory. Soldiers were setting up a sound system. “That’s why we’re all eating together.” She snorted. “That’s why I’m eating at all. First meal worthy of the name I’ve had in three days. Now I get to relax for a little—let things play out.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Everyone’s going to receive a pack, and instructions.”

“It can’t be random that we’re doing this out of doors under a clear sky,” I observed.

“Now you’re thinking like Lio,” she said approvingly, through a bite of bread. She swallowed and went on, “This is a deterrence strategy. The PAQD will see what we’re up to and, it is hoped, guess that we’re making preparations to disperse. And if they know that we are ready to disperse at a moment’s notice, they’ll have less incentive to attack Tredegarh.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I guess I’ll have many more questions about that in a minute. But you were saying something about the meetings with the cell leaders—?”

“Yes. You know how it is with avout. Nothing gets taken at face value. Everything is peeled back. Dialoged. I was meeting with these people in small groups—half a dozen cell leaders at a time. Explaining their powers and responsibilities, role-playing different scenarios. And it seemed as though every group had one or two who wanted to take it further than the others. To put it in bigger historical perspective, draw comparisons to the Rebirth, and so on. The thing that Lio told you about was an outgrowth of that. Some of these people—I simply couldn’t answer all of their questions in the time allotted. So I put their names on a list and told them, ‘Later we’ll have a follow-up meeting to discuss your concerns, but it’ll have to be a Lucub because I have no time otherwise.’ And the timing just happened—and you can consider this lucky or unlucky, as you like—to coincide with the Visitation of Orithena.”

We were distracted now, as the sound system came alive. A hierarch asked for “the following persons” to come to the front—to approach the trucks, where soldiers were breaking open pallet-loads of military rucksacks, prepacked and bulging. The hierarch had obviously never spoken into a sound amplification device before, but soon enough she got the hang of it and began to call out the names of fraas and suurs. Slowly, uncertainly at first, those who’d been called began to get up from their seats and move up the lanes between tables. Conversation paused for a little while, then resumed in an altogether different tone, as people began to exclaim about it, and to speculate.

“Okay,” I said, “so here you are in a Lucub, in a chalk hall somewhere with all of the pickiest, most obstreperous cell leaders—”

“Who are wonderful, by the way!” Ala put in.

“I can imagine,” I said. “But they are all wanting to go deep on these topics—at the same moment you are getting news of that poor woman from Antarct who sacrificed her life—”

“And of what Orolo did for her,” she reminded me. And here she had to stop talking for a few moments, because grief had overtaken her in an unwary moment. We watched, or pretended to watch, avout coming back to their seats, each with a rucksack slung over one shoulder and a sort of badge or flasher hanging around the neck.

“Anyway,” she said, and paused to clear her throat, which had gone husky. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. I’d expected we’d talk until dawn, and never arrive at a consensus. But it was the opposite of that. We walked in with a consensus. Everyone just knew that we had to make contact with whatever faction had sent that woman down. And that even if the S#230;culars wouldn’t allow such a thing, well, once we had turned into the Antiswarm—”

“What could they do to stop us?”

“Exactly.”

“Lio said something about using the guidestar lasers on the big telescopes to send signals?”

“Yes. It’s being talked about. Some might even be doing it for all I know.”

“Whose idea was that?”

She balked.

“Don’t get me wrong!” I assured her. “It’s a brilliant idea.”

“It was Orolo’s idea.”

“But you couldn’t have talked to him—!”

“Orolo actually did it,” Ala said, reluctantly, watching me closely to see how I’d react. “From Edhar. Last year. One of Sammann’s colleagues went up to the M amp; M and found the evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“Orolo had programmed the guidestar laser on the M amp; M to sweep out an analemma in the sky.”

A week or a month ago, I’d have denied it could possibly be true. But not now. “So Lodoghir was right,” I sighed. “What he accused Orolo of, at the Plenary, was dead on.”

“Either that,” Ala said, “or he changed the past.”

I didn’t laugh.

She continued, “You should know, too, that Lodoghir is one of this group I’ve been telling you about.”

“Fraa Erasmas of Edhar,” called the voice on the speaker.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better go find out which cell you put me in.”

She shook her head. “It’s not like that. You won’t know that until it’s time.”

“How can we meet up with our cell if we don’t know who to look for?”

“If it happens—if the order goes out—your badge will come alive, and tell you where to go. When you get there,” Ala said, “the other people you will see, are the rest of your cell.”

I shrugged. “Seems sensible enough.” Because she had suddenly become somber, and I couldn’t guess why. She lunged across the table and grabbed my hand. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at me.”

When I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes, and a look on her face unlike any I’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was the same way my face had looked when I had gazed down out of the open door of the aerocraft and recognized Orolo. She was telling me something with that face that she did not have power to put in words. “When you come back to this table, I’ll be gone,” she said. “If I don’t see you again before it happens”—and I sensed this was a certainty in her mind—“you have to know I made a terrible decision.”

“Well, we all do, Ala! I should tell you about some of my recent terrible decisions!”

But she was already shaking me off, willing me to understand her words.

“Isn’t there any way to change your mind? Fix it? Make amends?” I asked.

“No! I mean, I made a terrible decision in the way that Orolo made a terrible decision before the gates of Orithena.”

It took me a few moments to see it. “Terrible,” I said at last, “but right.”

Then the tears came so hard she had to close her eyes and turn her back on me. She let go my hand and began to totter away, shoulders hunched as if she’d just been stabbed in the back. She seemed the smallest person in the Convox. Every instinct told me to run after her, put an arm around her bony shoulders. But I knew she’d break a chair over my head.

I walked up to the truck and got my rucksack and my badge: a rectangular slab, like a small photomnemonic tablet that had been blanked.

Then I went back to work estimating the inertia tensor of the Geometers’ ship.

I slept most of the afternoon and woke up feeling terrible. Just when my body had adjusted to local time, I had messed it up by keeping odd hours.

I went early to Avrachon’s Dowment. This evening’s recipe called for a lot of peeling and chopping, so I brought a knife and cutting board around to the front veranda and worked there, partly to enjoy the last of the sunlight, but also partly in hopes I might intercept Fraa Jad on his way to messal. Avrachon’s Dowment was a big stone house, not quite so fortress-like as some Mathic structures I could name, with balconies, cupolas and bow windows that made me wish I could be a member of it, just so that I could do my daily work in such charming and picturesque surrounds. As if the architect’s sole objective had been to ignite envy in the hearts of avout, so that they’d scheme and maneuver to get into the place. I was fortunate that such an exceptional chain of events had made it possible for me even to sit on its veranda for an hour peeling vegetables. My conversation with Ala had reminded me that I had better take advantage of the opportunity while I could. The Dowment was situated on a knoll, so I had a good view over open lawns that rambled among other dowments and chapterhouses. Groups of avout came and went, some talking excitedly, some silent, hunched over, exhausted. Fraas and suurs were strewn at random over the grounds, wrapped in their bolts, pillowed on their spheres, sleeping. To see so many, clothed in such varied styles, reminded me again of the diversity of the mathic world—a thing I’d never been aware of, until I’d come here—and cast Ala’s talk of a Second Rebirth in a different light. The idea of tearing the gates off the hinges was thrilling in a way, simply because it represented such a big change. But would it mean the end of all that the avout had built, in 3700 years? Would people in the future look with awe at empty Mynsters and think that we must have been crazy to walk away from such places?

I wondered who else might be assigned to my cell, and what tasks we might be assigned by those in charge of the Antiswarm. A reasonable guess was that I’d simply be with my new Laboratorium group, and that we’d go on doing the same sorts of things. Living in rooms in a casino in some random city, toiling over diagrams of the ship, eating S#230;cular food brought up by illiterate servants in uniforms. The group included two impressive theors, one from Baritoe and one from a concent on the Sea of Seas. The others were tedious company and I didn’t especially relish the idea of being sent on the road with them.

Occasionally I would glimpse one of the Ringing Vale contingent and my heart would beat a little faster as I imagined what it would be like to be in a cell with them! Rank fantasy, of course—I would be worse than useless in such company—but fun to daydream about. No telling what such a cell would be ordered to do. But it would certainly be more interesting than guessing inertia tensors. Probably something incredibly dangerous. So perhaps it was for the best that they were out of my league.

Or—in a similar yet very different vein—what would Fraa Jad’s cell look like, and what sorts of tasks would they be assigned? How privileged I’d been, in retrospect, to have traveled in a Thousander’s company for a couple of days! As far as I’d been able to make out, he was the only Millenarian in the Convox.

I’d settle for being in a cell with at least one of the old clock-winding team from Edhar. Yet I doubted that this would be the case. Ala was quite obviously troubled by some aspect of the decisions she had made regarding cell assignments, and though I could not know just what was eating at her so, it did serve as a warning that I should not lull myself into imagining a happy time on the road with old friends. The respect—I was tempted to call it awe—with which we Edharians were viewed by many at the Convox made it unlikely that several of us would be concentrated in one cell. They would spread us out among as many cells as possible. We would be leaders, and lonely in the same way Ala was.

Fraa Jad approached from the direction of the Precipice. I wondered if they had given him a billet up on top, in the Thousanders’ math. If so, he must be spending a lot of time negotiating stairs. He recognized me from a distance and strolled right up.

“I found Orolo,” I said, though of course Jad already knew this. He nodded.

“It is unfortunate—what happened,” he said. “Orolo would have passed through the Labyrinths in due time, and become my fraa on the Crag, and it would have been good to work by his side, drink his wine, share his thoughts.”

“His wine was terrible,” I said.

“Share his thoughts, then.”

“He seemed to understand quite a lot,” I said. And I wanted to ask how—had he deciphered coded messages in the Thousanders’ chants? But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. “He thinks—he thought—that you have developed a praxis. I can’t help but imagine that this accounts for your great age.”

“The destructive effects of radiation on living systems are traceable to interactions between individual particles—photons, neutrons—and molecules in the affected organism,” he pointed out.

“Quantum events,” I said.

“Yes, and so a cell that has just undergone a mutation, and one that has not, lie on Narratives that are separated by only a single forking in Hemn space.”

“Aging,” I said, “is due to transcription errors in the sequences of dividing cells—which are also quantum-level events—”

“Yes. It is not difficult to see how a plausible and internally consistent mythology could arise, according to which nuclear waste handlers invented a praxis to mend radiation damage, and later extended it to mitigate the effects of aging and so on.”

And so on seemed to cover an awful lot of possibilities, but I thought better of pursuing this. “You’re aware,” I said, “of how explosive that mythology is, if it gains currency in the S#230;culum?”

He shrugged. The S#230;culum was none of his concern. But the Convox was a different matter. “Some here want badly to see that mythology promoted to fact. It would give them comfort.”

“Zh’vaern was asking some weird questions about it,” I said, and nodded at a procession of Matarrhites wafting across the lawn some distance away.

It was a gambit. I hoped to bond with Fraa Jad by giving him an opening to agree with me that those people were weird and obnoxious. But he slid around it. “There is more to be learned from them than from any others at the Convox.”

“Really?”

“It would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

Two Matarrhites detached themselves from the procession and set a course for Avrachon’s Dowment. I watched Zh’vaern and Orhan come towards us for a few moments, wondering what Jad saw in them, then turned back to the Thousander. But he had slipped inside.

Zh’vaern and Orhan approached silently and entered the Dowment after greeting me, rather stiffly, on the veranda.

Arsibalt and Barb were a hundred feet behind them.

“Results?” I demanded.

“A piece of the PAQD ship is missing!” Barb announced.

“That structure you’ve been studying—”

“It’s where the missing piece used to be attached!”

“What do you think it was?”

“The inter-cosmic transport drive, obviously!” Barb scoffed. “They didn’t want us to see it, because it’s top secret! So they parked it farther out in the solar system.”

“How about your group, Arsibalt?”

“That ship is patched together from subassemblies built in all four of the PAQD cosmi,” Arsibalt announced. “It is like an archaeological dig. The oldest part is from Pangee. Very little of it remains. There are only a very few odds and ends from Diasp. Most of the ship is made of material from the Antarct and Quator cosmi—of the two, we are fairly certain that Quator was visited more recently.”

“Good stuff!” I said.

“How about you—what results have been produced by your group, Raz?” Barb asked.

I was collecting my things, getting ready to go inside. Arsibalt shuffled over to help me. “It sloshed,” I said.

“Sloshed?”

“When the Hedron made its spin move the other evening, the rotation wasn’t steady. It jiggled a little. We conclude that the spun part contains a large mass of standing water, and when you hit it with a sudden rotation, the water sloshes.” And I went off into a long riff about the higher harmonics of the sloshing, and what it all meant. Barb lost interest and went inside.

“What were you discussing with Fraa Jad?” Arsibalt asked.

I didn’t feel comfortable divulging the part of the talk that had been about praxis, so I answered—truthfully—“The Matarrhites. We’re supposed to keep an eye on them—learn from them.”

“Do you suppose he wants us to spy on them?” Arsibalt asked, fascinated. This gave me the idea that Arsibalt wanted, for some reason, to spy on them, and was looking for Jad’s blessing.

“He said it would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

“Is that how he phrased it!?”

“Pretty near.”

“He said ‘cloaked ones,’ rather than ‘Matarrhites’?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not Matarrhites at all!” Arsibalt said in an excited whisper. “I’ll take that if you don’t mind,” I said. For in his eagerness to help, he had reached for my cutting board. I confiscated the knife.

“You think I’m so profoundly insane that I can’t be trusted with sharp objects!” Arsibalt said, crestfallen.

“Arsibalt! If they aren’t Matarrhites, what are they? Panjandrums in disguise?”

He looked as if he were about to spill a great secret, but then Suur Tris came around, and he clammed up.

“I’ll take your hypothesis under advisement,” I said, “and weigh it on the Steelyard against the alternative—which is that the Matarrhites are Matarrhites.”

Fraa Lodoghir said, “We are on the third messal already. The first seemed to be about worldtracks in Hemn space as a way of understanding the physical universe. Which was unobjectionable to me, until it turned out to be a stalking horse for the Hylaean Theoric World. The second was a trip to the circus—except that instead of gawking at contortionists, jugglers, and prestidigitators, we marveled at the intellectual backflips, sword-swallowing, and misdirection in which devotees of the HTW must engage if they are not to be Thrown Back as a religious cult. That’s quite all right, it was good to get it out of our systems, and I commend the Edharian plurality here for having, as it were, laid their cards on the messal. Ha. But what may we now say about the matter at hand—which is, in case anyone has forgotten, the PAQD, their capabilities and intentions?”

“Why do they look like us, for one thing?” asked Suur Asquin. “That is the question that my mind returns to over and over again.”

“Thank you, Suur Asquin!” I exclaimed back in the kitchen. I was scattering bread crumbs over the top of a casserole. “I can’t believe how little attention has been paid to that minor detail.”

“People simply don’t know what to make of it—have no idea where to begin,” said Suur Tris. And as if to confirm this, a welter of voices was coming through on the speaker. I hauled the oven door open and thrust the casserole in, arranging it on the center of a hand-forged iron rack. Fraa Lodoghir was going on about parallel evolution: how, on Arbre, physically similar but totally unrelated species had evolved to fill similar niches on different continents.

“Your point is well taken, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Zh’vaern, “but I believe that the similarities are too close to be explained by parallel evolution. Why do the Geometers have five fingers, one of which is an opposable thumb? Why not seven fingers and two thumbs?”

“Do you have some knowledge of the PAQD that has been withheld from the rest of us?” demanded Lodoghir. “What you say is true of the one specimen we have seen—the Antarct woman. The other three Geometer species might have seven fingers, for all we know.”

“Of course, you are correct,” Zh’vaern said. “But the Antarct-Arbre correspondence, taken alone, seems too great to be accounted for by parallel evolution.”

The point was argued all the way through the soup course. We servitors made our rounds, staggering and sidling through a messallan congested with rucksacks. For we had all been told that one should never let one’s rucksack out of sight—so that, even if the dispersal order were accompanied by a power blackout, or some sort of disaster that filled the air with dust and smoke, one would be able to find it by touch. Since we servitors couldn’t very well carry them up and down the serving corridor, we’d bent the rules by leaving ours lined up along the corridor wall. The doyns kept theirs behind the chairs in the messallan, and flipped their badges back over their shoulders to eat.

Ignetha Foral put a stop to the thumb-and-finger discourse with a glance at Suur Asquin, who silenced the room with another of her magisterial throat-clearings. “In the absence of further givens, the parallel-evolution hypothesis cannot be rationally evaluated.”

“I agree,” said Lodoghir in a wistful tone.

“The alternative hypothesis seems to be some sort of leakage of information through the Wick, if I have been taking up Fraa Paphlagon’s argument?”

Fraa Paphlagon looked a bit uneasy. “The word leakage makes it sound like a malfunction. It is nothing of the kind—just normal flow or, if you will, percolation along the world-DAG.”

“This percolation you speak of: until now, I fancied it was all theors seeing timeless truths about isosceles triangles,” Lodoghir said. “I oughtn’t to be surprised by the ever-escalating grandiosity of these claims, but aren’t you now asking us to believe something even more colossal? Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

An awkard pause.

“You do believe in evolution, don’t you?” Lodoghir continued.

“Yes, though it might have sounded strange to someone like Protas, who had frankly mystical pagan views about the HTW and so on,” said Paphlagon, “but any modern version of Protism must be reconcilable with long-established theories, not only of cosmography, but of evolution. However, I disagree with the polemical part of your statement, Fraa Lodoghir. It is not a larger claim, but a smaller, more reasonable one.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I thought that when you claimed more, it was a larger claim?”

“I am only claiming what is reasonable. That—as you yourself pointed out during your Plenary with Fraa Erasmas—tends to be the smallest, in the sense of least complicated, claim. What I claim is that information moves through the Wick in a manner that is somehow analogous to how it moves from past to present. As it moves, one of the things that it does is to excite physically measurable changes in nerve tissue…”

“That,” Suur Asquin said, just to clarify, “being the part where we see truths about cno#246;ns.”

“Yes,” said Paphlagon, “whence we get the HTW and the theorical Protism that Fraa Lodoghir loves so well. But nerve tissue is just tissue, it is just matter obeying natural law. It is not magical or spiritual, no matter what you might think of my opinions on this.”

“I am so relieved to hear you say so!” said Lodoghir. “I’ll have you in the Procian camp by the time Fraa Erasmas brings me my dessert!”

Paphlagon held his tongue for a moment, dodging laughter, then went on. “I can’t believe all of what I just said without positing some non-mystical, theorically understandable mechanism by which the ‘more Hylaean’ worlds can cause physical changes in the ‘less Hylaean’ worlds that lie ‘downstream’ of them in the Wick. And I see no prima facie reason to assume that all those interactions have to do with isosceles triangles and that the only matter in the whole cosmos that is ever affected just happens to be nerve tissue in the brains of theors! Now that would be an ambitious claim, and a rather strange one!”

“We agree on something!” said Lodoghir.

“A much more economical claim, in the Gardan’s Steelyard sense, is that the mechanism—whatever it is—acts on any matter whether or not that matter is part of a living organism—or a theor! It’s just that there is an observational bias at work.”

A couple of heads nodded.

“Observational bias?” Zh’vaern asked.

Suur Asquin turned to him and said, “Starlight falls on Arbre all the time—even at high noon—but we would never know of the stars’ existence if we slept all night.”

“Yes,” Paphlagon said, “and just as the cosmographer can only see stars in a dark sky, we can only observe the Hylaean Flow when it manifests itself as perceptions of cno#246;ns in our conscious minds. Like starlight at noon, it is always present, always working, but only noticed and identified as something remarkable in the context of pure theorics.”

“Er, since you Edharians are so adept at burying assertions in your speeches, let me clarify something,” Lodoghir said. “Did you just stake a claim that the Hylaean Flow is responsible for parallel evolution of Arbrans and Geometers?”

“Yes,” said Paphlagon. “How’s that for a speech?”

“Much more concise, thank you,” Lodoghir said. “But you still believe in evolution!”

“Yes.”

“Well, in that case, you must be saying that the Hylaean Flow has an effect on survival—or at least on the ability of specific organisms to propagate their sequences,” Lodoghir said. “Because that’s how we, and the Antarctans, ended up with five fingers, two nostrils, and all the rest.”

“Fraa Lodoghir, you are doing my work for me!”

“Someone has to do it. Fraa Paphlagon, what possible scenario could justify all of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“The Visitation of Orithena was only ten days ago. Givens are still pouring in. You, Fraa Lodoghir, are now on the forefront of research into the next generation of Protism.”

“I can’t tell you how uneasy that makes me feel—really, I’d rather eat what Fraa Zh’vaern is eating. What is that?”

“At last Fraa Lodoghir asks a good question,” said Arsibalt. Emman had yanked us; a boilover demanded our attention. We both knew exactly what Lodoghir was talking about. It was sitting on the stove, and we had been nervously edging around it all evening long. Stewed hair with cubes of packing material and shards of exoskeleton, or something. The hair seemed to be a vegetable. But what was really troubling Lodoghir and the others at the messal was the explosive crunching of the exoskeletons, or whatever they might be, between Zh’vaern’s molars. We could actually hear these noises over the speaker.

Arsibalt looked around, verifying that Emman and I were the only ones in the kitchen. “As a member of an ascetic, cloistered, contemplative order myself,” he said, “I probably ought not level such criticisms against the poor Matarrhites—”

“Oh, go ahead!” Emman said. He was gamely trying to repair the ruptured casserole.

“All right, since you insist!” said Arsibalt. Protecting his hand with a fold of his bolt, he lifted the lid from the stewpot to divulge a bubbling morass of expired weeds, laced with dangerous-looking carapaces. “I think it’s taking things just a little too far to selectively breed, over a period of millennia, foodstuffs that are offensive to all non-Matarrhites.”

“I’ll bet it’s one of those not-as-bad-as-it-looks, -sounds, -feels, and -smells type of things,” I said, holding my breath and approaching the pot.

“How much?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much do you bet?”

“Are you suggesting we try it?”

“I’m suggesting you try it.”

“Why only me?”

“Because you proposed the wager, and you are the theor.”

“What does that make you?”

“A scholar.”

“So you’ll take notes of my symptoms? Design my stained glass window, after I’m dead?”

“Yes, we’ll place it right there,” Arsibalt said, pointing to a smoke-hole in the wall, about the size of my hand.

Emman had drifted closer. Karvall and Tris had come in from the messallan and were standing very close to each other, watching.

Being watched by females changed everything. “What is the wager?” I said. “I am back down to three possessions.” And it was one of the oldest rules in the mathic world that we weren’t allowed to wager the bolt, chord, and sphere.

“Winner doesn’t have to clean up tonight,” Arsibalt proposed.

“Done,” I said. This was easy; all I had to do, to win the bet, was to claim it wasn’t that bad, and not throw up—at least, not in front of Arsibalt. And even if I lost, I got all kinds of childish satisfaction out of Tris’s and Karvall’s exquisitely horrified reactions as I fished something out of the pulp and put it in my mouth. It was a cube of (I guessed) some curd-like, fermented substance, tangled up in wilted fronds, flecked with a few crunchy shards. While I was pursuing the latter with my tongue, the fronds slipped halfway down my gullet and made me swallow convulsively. They dragged the cube down with them, like seaweed killing a swimmer. I had to do a bit of coughing and gagging to get the vegetable matter back up into my mouth where I could chew it decently. This added some drama to the proceedings and made it that much more entertaining to the others. I held up a hand, signaling that all was well, and took my time chewing what was left—didn’t want my innards slashed up by the sharp bits. Finally it all went down in a greasy, fibrous, thorny tangle. I put the odds at 60–40 that it wouldn’t be coming back up. “You know,” I claimed, “it’s not that much worse than just standing over the pot and wondering.”

“What’s it taste like?” Tris asked.

“Ever put your tongue across battery terminals?”

“No, I’ve never even seen a battery.”

“Mmm.”

“Now, as to the wager—” Arsibalt said uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said, “good luck with cleanup. Put your back into it when you are taking care of those casseroles, will you?”

Before Arsibalt could argue the point, his bell rang. Tris and Karvall were laughing at the look on his face as he slunk out of the kitchen.

In the messallan, the doyns had been asking Zh’vaern—much more circumspectly—about his food, but now Fraa Paphlagon took the bit in his teeth again: “Like cosmographers who sleep at day and work at night because that is when the stars can be seen, we are going to have to toil in the laboratory of consciousness, which is the only setting we know of where the effects of the Hylaean Flow are observable.” And then he muttered something to Arsibalt. Then he added: “Though instead of one single HTW we should now speak of the Wick instead; the Flow percolates through a complex network of cosmi ‘more theoric than’ or ‘prior to’ ours.”

Arsibalt returned to the kitchen. “Paphlagon doesn’t want me. He wants you.”

“Why would he want me?” I asked.

“I can’t be sure,” Arsibalt said, “but I was chatting with him yesterday and mentioned some of the conversations you had with Orolo.”

“Oh. Thanks a lot!”

“So pick the shrapnel out of your teeth and get in there!”

And that was how I came to spend the entire main course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo: the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and the second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos. Paphlagon ended up saying it better: “If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape—brightly illuminating a set of points—of cosmi—that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond.”

I gratefully stepped back against the wall, trying to fade into some shadows myself.

“I am indebted to Fraa Erasmas for allowing us to sit and eat, when so often we must interrupt our comestion with actual talk,” Lodoghir finally said. “Perhaps we ought to trade places and allow the servitors to sit and eat in silence while they are lectured by doyns!”

Barb cackled. He had lately been showing more and more relish for Lodoghir’s wit, furnishing me with the disturbing insight that perhaps Lodoghir was just a Barb who had become old. But after a moment’s reflection I rejected such a miserable idea.

Lodoghir continued, “I’d like you to know that I fully took up Paphlagon’s earlier point about using consciousness as the laboratory for observing the so-called Hylaean Flow. But is this the best we can do? It is nothing more than a regurgitation of Evenedrician datonomy in its most primitive form!”

“I spent two years at Baritoe writing a treatise on Evenedrician datonomy,” mentioned Ignetha Foral, sounding more amused than angry.

I got out of the room, which seemed more politic than laughing out loud. Back in the kitchen, I poured myself a drink and braced my arms on a counter, taking a load off my feet.

“Are you all right?” Karvall asked. She and I were the only servitors in the room.

“Just tired—that took a lot out of me.”

“Well, I thought you spoke really well—for what that’s worth.”

“Thanks,” I said, “it’s worth a lot, actually.”

“Grandsuur Moyra says we are doing something now.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She believes that the messal is on the verge of coming up with new ideas instead of just talking about old ones.”

“Well, that’s really something, from such a distinguished Lorite!”

“It’s all because of the PAQD, she says. If they hadn’t come and brought new givens, it might never have happened.”

“Well, my friend Jesry will be pleased to hear it,” I said. “He’s wanted it all his life.”

“What have you wanted all your life?” Karvall asked.

“Me? I don’t know. To be as smart as Jesry, I guess.”

“Tonight, you were as smart as anyone,” she said.

“Thanks!” I said. “If that’s true, it’s all because of Orolo.”

“And because you were brave.”

“Some would call it stupid.”

If I hadn’t had that conversation with Ala at breakfast, I’d probably be falling in love with Karvall about now. But I was pretty sure Karvall wasn’t in love with me—just stating facts as she saw them. To stand here and receive compliments from an attractive young woman was quite pleasant, but it was of a whole lesser order of experience from the continuous finger-in-an-electrical-socket buzz that I experienced during even brief interactions with Ala.

I ought to have volleyed some compliments back, but I was not brave in that moment. The Lorites had a kind of grandeur that intimidated. Their elaborate style—shaving the head, performing hours of knotwork just to get dressed—was, I knew, a way of showing respect for those who had gone before, of reminding themselves, every day, just how much work one had to do to get up to speed and be competent to sift new ideas from old. But my knowing that symbolism didn’t make Karvall any more approachable.

We were distracted by Zh’vaern’s strangely inflected voice on the speaker: “Because of the way we Matarrhites keep to ourselves, not even Suur Moyra might have heard of him we honor as Saunt Atamant.”

“I don’t recognize the name,” Moyra said.

“He was, to us, the most gifted and meticulous introspectionist who ever lived.”

“Introspectionist? Is that some sort of a job title within your Order?” Lodoghir asked, not unkindly.

“It might as well be,” Zh’vaern returned. “He devoted the last thirty years of his life to looking at a copper bowl.”

“What was so special about this bowl?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“Nothing. But he wrote, or rather dictated, ten treatises explaining all that went on in his mind as he gazed on it. Much of it has the same flavor as Orolo’s meditations on counterfactuals: how Atamant’s mind filled in the unseen back surface of the bowl with suppositions as to what it must look like. From such thoughts he developed a metatheorics of counterfactuals and compossibility that, to make a long story short, is perfectly compatible with all that was said during our first messal about Hemn space and worldtracks. He made the assertion that all possible worlds really existed and were every bit as real as our own. This caused many to dismiss him as a lunatic.”

“But that is precisely what the polycosmic interpretation is positing,” said Suur Asquin.

“Indeed.”

“What of our second evening’s discussion? Has Saunt Atamant anything to say about that?”

“I have been thinking about that very hard. You see, nine of his treatises are mostly about space. Only one is about time, but it is considered harder to read than the other nine put together! But if there is applicability of his work to the Hylaean Flow, it is hidden somewhere in the Tenth Treatise. I re-read it last night; this was my Lucub.”

“And what did Atamant’s copper bowl tell him of time?” Lodoghir asked.

“I should tell you first that he was knowledgeable about theorics. He knew that the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time’s arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in a system. The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.”

“We have heard of these records before,” Ignetha Foral pointed out. “They are essential to the Hemn space picture.”

“Yes, Madame Secretary, but now let me add something new. It is rather well encapsulated by the thought experiment of the flies, bats, and worms. We don’t give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say ‘this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,’ to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this.”

“But absolutely necessary from an evolutionary standpoint,” Lodoghir pointed out.

“To be sure! But none the less remarkable for that. The ability of our consciousness to see—not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things—copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas—and making these things available to cognition—that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought. And if consciousness can identify copper-bowlness, why can’t it identify isosceles-triangleness, or Adrakhonic-theoremness?”

“What you are describing is nothing more than pattern recognition, and then assigning names to patterns,” Lodoghir said.

“So the Syntactics would say,” replied Zh’vaern. “But I would say that you have it backwards. You Procians have a theory—a model—of what consciousness is, and you make all else subordinate to it. Your theory becomes the ground of all possible assertions, and the processes of consciousness are seen as mere phenomena to be explained in the terms of that theory. Atamant says that you have fallen into the error of circular reasoning. You cannot develop your grounding theory of consciousness without making use of the power consciousness has of seizing on and conferring thisness on givens, and so it is incoherent and circular for you to then employ that theory to explain the fundamental workings of consciousness.”

“I understand Atamant’s point,” Lodoghir said, “but by making such a move, does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse? This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status—it can’t be challenged or examined, it just is.”

“On the contrary, nothing could be more rational than to begin with what is given, with what we observe, and ask ourselves how we come to observe it, and investigate it in a thorough and meticulous style.”

“Let me ask it this way, then: what results was Atamant able to deliver by following this program?”

“Once he made the decision to proceed in this way, he made a few false starts, went up some blind alleys. But the nub of it is this: consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment—”

“Equipment?” Ignetha Foral asked sharply.

“Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers. The point being that it has what the Ita would call hardware. Yet Atamant’s premise is that consciousness itself, not the equipment, is the primary reality. The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. The story is long and winding, but eventually he found a fruitful line of inquiry rooted in the polycosmic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He quite reasonably applied this premise to his favorite topic—”

“The copper bowl?” Lodoghir asked.

“The complex of consciousness-phenomena that amounted to his perception of a copper bowl,” Zh’vaern corrected him, “and proceeded to explain it within that framework.” And Zh’vaern—uncharacteristically talkative this evening—proceeded to give us a calca summarizing Atamant’s findings on the copper bowl. As he’d warned us, this had much in common with the dialogs I’d been reporting on a few minutes earlier, and led to the same basic conclusion. As a matter of fact, it was so repetitive that I wondered, at first, why he bothered with it, unless it was just to show off what a smart fellow Atamant was, and score one for the Matarrhite team. As a servitor, I was free to come and go. Zh’vaern eventually worked his way around to the assertion, which we’d heard before, that crosstalk among different cosmi around the time that their worldtracks diverged was routinely exploited by consciousness-bearing systems.

Lodoghir said, “Please explain something to me. I was under the impression that the kind of crosstalk you are speaking of could only occur between two cosmi that were exactly the same except for a difference in the quantum state of one particle.”

“We can testify to that much,” said Moyra, “because the situation you’ve just described is just the sort of thing that is studied in laboratory experiments. It is relatively easy to build an apparatus that embodies that kind of scenario—‘does the particle have spin up or spin down,’ ‘does the photon pass through the left slit or the right slit,’ and so on.”

“Well, that’s a relief!” Lodoghir said. “I was afraid you were about to claim that this crosstalk was the same thing as the Hylaean Flow.”

“I believe that it is,” Zh’vaern said. “It has to be.”

Lodoghir looked affronted. “But Suur Moyra has just finished explaining that the only form of inter-cosmic crosstalk for which we have experimental evidence is that in which the two cosmi are the same except for the state of one particle. The Hylaean Flow, according to its devotees, joins cosmi that are altogether different!”

“If you look at the world through a straw, you will only see a tiny bit of it,” Paphlagon said. “The kinds of experiments that Moyra spoke of are all perfectly sound—better than that, they are magnificent, in their way—but they only tell us of single-particle systems. If we could devise better experiments, we could presumably observe new phenomena.”

Fraa Jad threw his napkin on the table and said: “Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

Silence except for the sound of Arsibalt chalking that one down on the wall. I slipped into the messallan.

“Would you be so kind as to unpack that statement?” Suur Asquin finally said. Glancing at Arsibalt’s handiwork, she said, “To begin with, what do you mean by amplifying weak signals?”

Fraa Jad looked as if he hardly knew where to begin, and couldn’t be bothered, but Moyra was game: “The ‘signals’ are the interactions between cosmi that account for quantum effects. If you don’t agree with the polycosmic interpretation, you must find some other explanation for those effects. But if you do agree with it, then, to make it compatible with what we have long known about quantum mechanics, you must buy into the premise that cosmi interfere with each other when their worldtracks are close together. If you restrict yourself to one particular cosmos, this crosstalk may be interpreted as a signal—a rather weak one, since it only concerns a few particles. If those particles are in an asteroid out in the middle of nowhere, it hardly matters. But when those particles happen to be at certain critical locations in the brain, why, then, the ‘signals’ can end up altering the behavior of the organism that is animated by that brain. That organism, all by itself, is vastly larger than anything that could normally be influenced by quantum interference. When one considers societies of such organisms that endure across long spans of time and in some cases develop world-altering technologies, one sees the meaning of Fraa Jad’s assertion that consciousness amplifies the weak signals that web cosmi together.”

Zh’vaern had been nodding vigorously: “This tallies with some Atamant that I was reading yesterday evening. Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies. This is how we get from a solipsistic world—one that is perceived by, and real to, only one subject—to the intersubjective world—the one where I can be certain that you see the copper bowl and that the thisness you attach to it harmonizes with mine.”

“Thank you, Suur Moyra and Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Ignetha Foral. “Assuming that Fraa Jad will maintain his gnomic ways, would you or anyone else care to take a crack at the second part of what he said?”

“I should be delighted to,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “since Fraa Jad is sounding more and more Procian every time he opens his mouth!” This earned Lodoghir a lot of attention, which he reveled in for a few moments before going on: “By selective amplification, I believe Fraa Jad is saying that not all inter-cosmic crosstalk gets amplified—only some of it. To cite Suur Moyra’s example, crosstalk affecting elementary particles in a rock in deep space has no effect.”

“No extraordinary effect,” Paphlagon corrected him, “no unpredictable effect. But, mind you, it accounts for everything about that rock: how it absorbs and re-radiates light, how its nuclei decay, and so on.”

“But it all sort of averages out statistically, and you can’t really tell one rock from another,” Lodoghir said.

“Yes.”

“The point being that the only crosstalk capable of being amplified by consciousness is that affecting nerve tissue.”

“Or any other consciousness-bearing system,” Paphlagon said.

“So there is a highly exclusive selection process at work to begin with in that, of all the crosstalk going on in a given instant between our cosmos and all the other cosmi that are sufficiently close to it to render such crosstalk possible, the stupefyingly enormous preponderance of it is only affecting rocks and other stuff that is not complex enough to respond to that crosstalk in a way we’d consider interesting.”

“Yes,” Paphlagon said.

“Let us then confine our discussion to the infinitesimally small fraction of the crosstalk that happens to impinge on nerve tissue. As I’ve just finished saying, this already gives us selectivity.” Lodoghir nodded at the slate. “But, whether or not Fraa Jad intended to, he has opened the door to another kind of selection procedure that may be at work here. Our brains receive these ‘signals,’ yes. But they are more than passive receivers. They are not merely crystal radios! They compute. They cogitate. The outcomes of those cogitations can by no means be easily predicted from their inputs. And those outcomes are the conscious thoughts that we have, the decisions we put into effect, our social interactions with other conscious beings, and the behavior of societies down through the ages.”

“Thank you, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Ignetha Foral, and turned to scan the slate again. “And would anyone care to tackle ‘feedback loops’?”

“We get those for free,” Paphlagon said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s already there in the model we’ve been talking about, we don’t have to add anything more. We’ve already seen how small signals, amplified by the special structures of nerve tissue and societies of conscious beings, can lead to changes in a Narrative—in the configuration of a cosmos—that are much larger than the original signals in question. The worldtracks veer, change their courses in response to those faint signals, and you could distinguish a cosmos that was populated by conscious organisms from one that wasn’t by observing the way their worldtracks behaved. But recall that the signals in question only pass between cosmi whose worldtracks are close together. There is your feedback! Crosstalk steers the worldtracks of consciousness-bearing cosmi; worldtracks that steer close together exchange more crosstalk.”

“So the feedback pulls worldtracks close to one another as time goes on?” Ignetha Foral asked. “Is this the explanation we’ve been looking for of why the Geometers look like us?”

“Not only that,” put in Suur Asquin, “but of cno#246;ns and the HTW and all the rest, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I am going to be a typical Lorite,” Moyra said, “and caution you that feedback is a layman’s term that covers a wide range of phenomena. Entire branches of theorics have been, and are still being, developed to study the behavior of systems that exhibit what laymen know as feedback. The most common behaviors in feedback systems are degenerate. Such as the howl from a public address system, or total chaos. Very few such systems yield stable behavior—or any sort of behavior that you or I could look at and say, ‘see, it is doing this now.’”

“Thisness!” Zh’vaern exclaimed.

“But conversely,” Moyra went on, “systems that are stable, in a tumultuous universe, generally must have some kind of feedback in order to exist.”

Ignetha Foral nodded. “So if the feedback posited by Fraa Jad really is steering our worldtrack and those of the PAQD races together, it’s not just any feedback but some very special, highly tuned species of it.”

“We call something an attractor,” Paphlagon said, “when it persists or recurs in a complex system.”

“So if it is true that the PAQD share the Adrakhonic Theorem and other such theorical concepts with us,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “those might be nothing more than attractors in the feedback system we have been describing.”

“Or nothing less,” said Fraa Jad.

We all let that one resonate for a minute. Lodoghir and Jad were staring at each other across the table; we all thought something was about to happen.

A Procian and a Halikaarnian were about to agree with each other.

Then Zh’vaern wrecked it. As if he didn’t get what was going on at all; or perhaps the HTW simply was not that interesting to him. He couldn’t get off the topic of Atamant’s bowl.

“Atamant,” he announced, “changed his bowl.”

“I beg your pardon?” demanded Ignetha Foral.

“Yes. For thirty years, it had a scratch on the bottom. This is attested by phototypes. Then, during the final year of his meditation—shortly before his death—he made the scratch disappear.”

Everyone had become very quiet.

“Translate that into polycosmic language, please?” asked Suur Asquin.

“He found his way to a cosmos the same as the one he’d been living in—except that in this cosmos the bowl wasn’t scratched.”

“But there were records—phototypes—of its having been scratched.”

“Yes,” said Zh’vaern. “so he had gone to a cosmos that included some inconsistent records. And that is the cosmos that we are in now.”

“And how did he achieve this feat?” asked Moyra, as if she already guessed the answer.

“Either by changing the records, or else by shifting to a cosmos with a different future.”

“Either he was a Rhetor, or an Incanter!” blurted a young voice. Barb. Performing his role as sayer of things no one else would say.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Moyra. “How did he achieve it?”

“He declined to share his secret,” said Zh’vaern. “I thought that some here might have something to say of it.” And he looked all around the table—but mostly at Jad and Lodoghir.

“If they do, they’ll say it tomorrow,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Tonight’s messal has ended.” And she pushed her chair back, casting a baleful glare at Zh’vaern. Emman burst through the door and snatched up her rucksack. Madame Secretary adjusted the badge around her neck as if it were just another item of jewelry, and stalked out, pursued by her servitor, who was grunting under the weight of two rucksacks.

I had grand plans for how I would spend the free time I’d won in my wager with Arsibalt. There were so many ways I wanted to use that gift that I could not decide where to start. I went back to my cell to fetch some notes and sat down on my pallet. Then I opened my eyes to find it was morning.

The hours of night had not gone to waste, though, for I awoke with ideas and intentions that had not been in my head when I’d closed my eyes. Given the sorts of things we’d been talking about lately at messal, it was hard not to think that while I’d lain unconscious, my mind had been busy rambling all over the local parts of Hemn space, exploring alternate versions of the world.

I went and found Arsibalt, who had slept less than I. He was inclined to surliness until I shared with him some of what I had been thinking about—if thinking was the right word for processes that had taken place without my volition while I had been unconscious.

For breakfast I had some dense, grainy buns and dried fruit. Afterwards, I went to a little stand of trees out behind the First Sconic chapterhouse. Arsibalt was waiting for me there, brandishing a shovel he’d borrowed from a garden shack. He scooped out a shallow depression in the earth, no larger than a serving-bowl. I lined it with a scrap of poly sheeting that I had scavenged from one of the middens that S#230;cular people left everywhere they went—and that had lately begun to pock the grounds of this concent.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, hitching up my bolt.

“The best experiments,” he said, “are the simplest.”

Analyzing the givens only took a few minutes. The rest of the day was spent making various preparations. How Arsibalt and I got others involved in that work, and the minor adventures each of us had during the day, would make for an amusing collection of anecdotes, but I have made the decision not to spell them out here because they are so trivial compared to what happened that evening. Before it was over, though, we had enlisted Emman, Tris, Barb, Karvall, Lio, and Sammann, and had talked Suur Asquin into looking the other way while we made some temporary alterations to her Dowment.

The fourth Plurality of Worlds Messal began normally: after a libation, soup was served. Barb and Emman went back to the kitchen. Not long after, Orhan was yanked. Tris followed him out. About a minute later I felt a coded sequence of tugs on my rope, which informed me that things had gone according to plan in the kitchen: the stew that Orhan had been cooking had “inadvertently” been knocked over by clumsy Barb. Between that distraction, and the racket that Tris and Emman had begun making with some pots and pans, Orhan would be unlikely to notice that sound was no longer coming out of the speaker.

I nodded across the table to Arsibalt.

“Excuse me, Fraa Zh’vaern, but you forgot to bless your food,” Arsibalt announced, in a clear voice.

Conversation stopped. The messal had been unusually subdued to this point, as though all the doyns were trying to devise some way of restarting the dialog while avoiding the awkward territory that Zh’vaern had attempted to drag us into last night. Even in the rowdiest messal, though, any unasked-for statement from a servitor would have been shocking; Arsibalt’s was doubly so because of what he’d said. As long as everyone was speechless, he went on: “I have been studying the beliefs and practices of the Matarrhites. They never take food without saying a prayer, which ends with a gesture. You have neither spoken the prayer nor made the gesture.”

“What of it? I forgot,” Zh’vaern said.

“You always forget,” Arsibalt returned.

Ignetha Foral was giving Paphlagon a look that meant when are you going to throw the Book at your servitor? and indeed Paphlagon now threw down his napkin and made as if to push his chair back. But Fraa Jad reached out and clamped a hand on Paphlagon’s arm.

“You always forget,” Arsibalt repeated, “and, if you like, I can list any number of other ways in which you and Orhan have imperfectly simulated the behavior of Matarrhites. Is it because you’re not actually Matarrhites?”

Beneath the hood, Zh’vaern’s head moved. He was casting a glance at the door. Not the one through which he and the other doyns had entered, but the one through which Orhan had left.

“Your minder can’t hear us,” I told him, “the microphone wire has been cut by an Ita friend of mine. The feed no longer goes out.”

Still Zh’vaern remained frozen and silent. I nodded at Suur Karvall, who pulled aside a tapestry to reveal a shiny mesh, woven of metal wires, with which we’d covered the wall. I stepped around toward Zh’vaern, stuck a toe under the edge of the carpet, and flipped it up to reveal more of the same on the floor. Zh’vaern took it all in. “It is a fencing material used in animal husbandry,” I explained, “obtainable in bulk extramuros. It is conductive—and it is connected to ground.”

“What is the meaning of all this?” demanded Ignetha Foral.

“We’re in a Saunt Bucker’s Basket!” exclaimed Moyra. Her life, as an extremely senior, semi-retired Lorite, probably didn’t include many unexpected events, and so even something as mundane as discovering that she was surrounded by chicken wire seemed like quite an adventure. More than that, though, I believe she was pleased that the servitors had taken her exhortations to heart, and gone out and done something that the doyns never would have dreamed of. “It’s a grounded mesh that prevents wireless signals from passing into or out of the room. It means we’re informationally shielded from the rest of Arbre.”

“In my world,” said Zh’vaern, “we call it a Faraday cage.” He stood up and shrugged his bolt off over his head, then tossed it to the floor. I was behind him and so could not see his face—only the looks of awe and astonishment on the faces of the others: the first Arbrans, with the possible exception of the Warden of Heaven, to gaze upon the face of a living alien. Judging from the back of his head and torso, I guessed he was of the same race as the dead woman who’d come down in the probe. Beneath a sort of under-shirt, a small device was attached to his skin with poly tape. He reached under the garment, peeled it off, and threw it on the table along with a snarl of wires.

“I am Jules Verne Durand of Laterre—the world you know as Antarct. Orhan is from the world of Urnud, which you have designated Pangee. You had best get him inside the Faraday cage before—”

“Done,” said a voice from the door: Lio, who had just come in, cheerfully flushed. “We have him in a separate Bucker’s Basket in the pantry. Sammann found this on him.” And he held up another wireless body transmitter.

“Well-wrought,” said Jules Verne Durand, “but it has purchased you a few minutes only; those who listen will grow suspicious at the loss of contact.”

“We have alerted Suur Ala that it might become necessary to evacuate the concent,” Lio said.

“Good,” said Jules Verne Durand, “for I am sorry to say that the ones of Urnud are a danger to you.”

“And to you of Laterre as well, it would seem!” said Arsibalt. Since the doyns were all too speechless to rejoin the conversation, Arsibalt—who’d had time to prepare—was doing his bit to keep things going.

“It is true,” said the Laterran. “I will tell you quickly that those of Urnud and of Tro—which you call Diasp—are of similar mind, and hostile to those of Fthos—which you call—”

“Quator, by process of elimination,” said Lodoghir.

I’d worked my way round to a place where I could see Jules Verne Durand, and so was feeling some of the astonishment that the others had experienced a few moments earlier. First at the differences—then similarities, then differences again—between Laterran and Arbran faces. The closest comparison I can make is to how one reacts when conversing with one who has a birth defect that has subtly altered the geometry of the face—but without the deformity or loss of function that this would imply. And of course no comparison can be drawn to the way we felt knowing that we were looking on one who had traveled from another cosmos.

“What of you and your fellow Laterrans?” Lodoghir asked.

“Split between the Fthosians and the others.”

“You, I take it, are loyal to the Urnud/Tro axis?” Lodoghir asked. “Otherwise, you would not have been sent here.”

“I was sent here because I speak better Orth than anyone else—I am a linguist. A junior one, actually. And so they put me to work on Orth in the early days, when Orth was believed to be a minor language. They are suspicious of my loyalty—with good reason! Orhan, as you divined, is my watcher—my minder.” He looked at Arsibalt. “You penetrated my disguise. Not surprising, really. But I should like to know how?”

Arsibalt looked to me. I said, “I ate some of your food yesterday. It passed through my digestive system unchanged.”

“Of course, for your enzymes could not react with it,” said Jules Verne Durand. “I commend you.”

Ignetha Foral had finally recovered enough to join the conversation. “On behalf of the Supreme Council I welcome you and apologize for any mistreatment you have undergone at the hands of these young—”

“Stop. This is what you call bulshytt. No time,” said the Laterran. “My mission—assigned to me by the military intelligence command of the Urnud/Tro axis—is to find out whether the legends of the Incanters are grounded in fact. The Urnud/Tro axis—which they call, in their languages, the Pedestal—is extremely fearful of this prospect; they contemplate a pre-emptive strike. Hence my questions of previous evenings, which I am aware were quite rude.”

“How did you get here?” asked Paphlagon.

“A commando raid on the concent of the Matarrhites. We have ways of dropping small capsules onto your planet that cannot be noticed by your sensors. A team of soldiers, as well as a few civilian experts such as myself, were sent down, and seized that concent. The true Matarrhites are held there, unharmed, but incommunicado.”

“That is an extraordinarily aggressive measure!” said Ignetha Foral.

“So it rightly seems to you who are not accustomed to encounters between different versions of the world, in different cosmi. But the Pedestal have been doing it for hundreds of years, and have become bold. When our scholars became aware of the Matarrhites, someone pointed out that their style of dress would make it easy for us to disguise ourselves and infiltrate the Convox. The order to proceed was given quickly.”

“How do you travel between cosmi?” Paphlagon asked.

“There is little time,” said Jules Verne Durand, “and I am no theor.” He turned to Suur Moyra. “You will know of a certain way of thinking about gravity, likely dating to the time of the Harbingers, called by us General Relativity. Its premise is that mass-energy bends spacetime…”

“Geometrodynamics!” said Suur Moyra.

“If the equations of geometrodynamics are solved in the special case of a universe that happens to be rotating, it can be shown that a spaceship, if it travels far and fast enough—”

“Will travel backwards in time,” said Paphlagon. “Yes. The result is known to us. We always considered it little more than a curiosity, though.”

“On Laterre, the result was discovered by a kind of Saunt named Godel: a friend of the Saunt who had earlier discovered geometrodynamics. The two of them were, you might say, fraas in the same math. For us, too, it was little more than a curiosity. For one thing, it was not clear at first that our cosmos rotated—”

“And if it doesn’t rotate, the result is useless,” said Paphlagon.

“Working in the same institute were others who invented a ship propelled by atomic bombs—sufficiently energetic to put this theory to the test.”

“I see,” said Paphlagon, “so Laterre constructed such a ship and—”

“No! We never did!”

“Just as Arbre never did—even though we had the same ideas!” Lio put in.

“But on Urnud it was different,” said Jules Verne Durand. “They had geometrodynamics. They had the rotating-universe solution. They had cosmographic evidence that their cosmos did in fact rotate. And they had the idea for the atomic ship. But they actually built several of them. They were driven to such measures because of a terrible war between two blocs of nations. The combat infected space; the whole solar system became a theatre of war. The last and largest of these ships was called Daban Urnud, which means ‘Second Urnud.’ It was designed to send a colony to a neighboring star system, only a quarter of a light-year away. But there was a mutiny and a change of command. It fell under the control of ones who understood the theorics that I spoke of. They chose to steer a different course: one that was intended to take them into the past of Urnud, where they hoped that they could undo the decisions that had led to the outbreak of the war. But when they reached the end of that journey, they found themselves, not in the past of Urnud, but in an altogether different cosmos, orbiting an Urnud-like planet—”

“Tro,” said Arsibalt.

“Yes. This is how the universe protects herself—prevents violations of causality. If you attempt to do anything that would give you the power of violating the laws of cause-and-effect—to go back in time and kill your grandfather—”

“You simply find yourself in a different and separate causal domain? How extraordinary!” said Lodoghir.

The Laterran nodded. “One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative,” he said, with a glance at Fraa Jad, “and thus causality is preserved.”

“And now it seems they’ve made a habit of it!” said Lodoghir.

Jules Verne Durand considered it. “You say ‘now’ as if it came about quickly and easily, but there is much history between the First Advent—the Urnudan discovery of Tro—and the Fourth—which is what we are all living through now. The First Advent alone spanned a century and a half, and left Tro in ruins.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Lodoghir. “Are the Urnudans really that nasty?”

“Not quite. But it was the first time. Neither the Urnudans nor the Troans had the sophisticated understanding of the polycosm that you seem to have developed here on Arbre. Everything was surprising, and therefore a source of terror. The Urnudans became involved in Troan politics too hastily. Disastrous events—almost all of them the Troans’ own fault—played out. They eventually rebuilt the Daban Urnud so that both races could live on it, and embarked on a second inter-cosmic voyage. They came to Laterre fifty years after the death of Godel.”

“Excuse me,” said Ignetha Foral, “but why did the ship have to be changed so much?”

“Partly because it was worn out—used up,” said Jules Verne Durand. “But it is mostly a question of food. Each race must maintain its own food supply—for reasons made obvious by Fraa Erasmas’s experiment.” He paused and looked around the messal. “It is my destiny, now, to starve to death in the midst of plenty, unless by diplomacy you can persuade those on the Daban Urnud to send down some food that I can digest.”

Tris—who had returned to the messal early in the conversation—said, “We’ll do all we can to preserve the Laterran victuals that are still in the kitchen!” and hustled out of the room.

Ignetha Foral added, “We shall make this a priority in any future communications with the Pedestal.”

“Thank you,” said the Laterran, “for one of my ancestry, death by starvation would be the most ignominious possible fate.”

“What happened in the Second Advent—on Laterre?” asked Suur Moyra.

“I will skip the details. It was not as bad as Tro. But in every cosmos they visit, there is upheaval. The Advent lasts anywhere from twenty to a couple of hundred years. With or without your cooperation, the Daban Urnud will be rebuilt completely. None of your political institutions, none of your religions, will survive in their current form. Wars will be fought. Some of your people will be aboard the new version of the ship when it finally moves on to some other Narrative.”

“As you were, I take it, when it left Laterre?” asked Lodoghir.

“Oh, no. That was my great-grandfather,” said the visitor. “My ancestors lived through the voyage to Fthos and the Third Advent. I was born on Fthos. Similar things will probably happen here.”

“Assuming,” said Ignetha Foral, “that they don’t use the World Burner on us.”

I was just learning to read Laterran facial expressions, but I was certain that what I saw on Jules Verne Durand’s face was horror at the very mention. “This hideous thing was invented on Urnud, in their great war—though I must confess we had similar plans on Laterre.”

“As did we,” said Moyra.

“There is a suspicion, you see, planted deep in the minds of the Urnudans, that with each Advent they are finding themselves in a world that is more ideal—closer to what you would call the Hylaean Theoric World—than the last. I don’t have time to recite all the particulars, but I myself have often thought that Urnud and Tro seemed like less perfect versions of Laterre, and that Fthos seemed to us what we were to Tro. Now we are come to yet a new world, and there is terrible apprehension among the Pedestal that those of Arbre will possess powers and qualities beyond their grasp—even their comprehension. They have exaggerated sensitivity to anything that has this seeming—”

“Hence the elaborate commando raid, this ambitious ruse to learn about the Incanters,” said Lodoghir.

“And Rhetors,” Paphlagon reminded him.

Moyra laughed. “It is Third Sack politics all over again! Except infinitely more dangerous.”

“And the problem you—we—face is that there is nothing you can do to convince them that such things as Rhetors and Incanters don’t exist,” said Jules Verne Durand.

“Quickly—Atamant and the copper bowl?” asked Lodoghir.

“Loosely based on a philosopher of Laterre, named Edmund Husserl, and the copper ashtray he kept on his desk,” said the Laterran. If I was reading his face right, he was feeling a bit sheepish. “I fictionalized his story quite heavily. The part about making the scratch disappear was, of course, a ruse to draw you out—to get you to state plainly whether anyone on Arbre possessed the power to do such things.”

“Do you think that the ruse worked?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“The way you reacted made those who control me even more suspicious. I was directed to bear down harder on it this evening.”

“So they are still undecided.”

“Oh, I am quite certain they are decided now.”

The floor jumped under our feet, and the air was suddenly dusty. The silence that followed was ended by a succession of concussive thuds. These rolled in over a span of perhaps a quarter of a minute—twenty of them in all. Lio announced, “No cause for alarm. This is according to plan. What you’re hearing are controlled demolition charges, taking down sections of the outer wall—creating enough apertures for us to get out of the concent quickly, so we don’t bunch up at the Day Gate. The evacuation is under way. Look at your badges.”

I pulled mine out from under a fold of my bolt. It had come alive with a color map of my vicinity, just like the nav screen on a cartabla. My evacuation route was highlighted in purple. Superimposed over that was a cartoon rendering of a rucksack with a red flashing question mark.

The doyns took the momentous step of pushing their chairs back. They were looking at their badges, making remarks. Lio vaulted up onto the table and stamped his foot, very loud. They all looked up at him. “Stop talking,” he said.

“But—” said Lodoghir.

“Not a word. Act!” And Lio gave that command in a voice I’d never heard from him before—though I had once heard something like it in the streets of Mahsht. He’d been training his voice, as well as his body—learning Vale-lore tricks of how to use it as a weapon. I sidestepped past a stream of doyns who were headed the other way, shouldering their rucksacks. I entered the corridor, where mine was waiting. I hoisted it to one shoulder and looked at my badge again. The rucksack cartoon had disappeared. I strode out to the kitchen. Tris and Lio were helping Jules Verne Durand package what was left of his food into bags and baskets.

I walked out the back of Avrachon’s Dowment and into the midst of a total evacuation of the ancient concent of Tredegarh.

Thousands of feet above, aerocraft were landing on the tops of the Thousanders’ towers.

All of this business with the badges and the rucksacks had seemed insultingly simpleminded to me and many others I’d talked to—as if the Convox were a summer camp for five-year-olds. In the course of a fifteen-minute jog across Tredegarh, I came to appreciate it. There was no plan, no procedure, so simple that it could not get massively screwed up when thousands of persons tried to carry it out at the same time. Doing it in the dark squared the amount of chaos, doing it in a hurry cubed it. People who had mislaid their badges and their rucksacks were wandering around in more or less panic—but they gravitated to sound trucks announcing “Come to me if you have lost your badge or your rucksack!” Others twisted ankles, hyperventilated, even suffered from heart trouble—military medics pounced on these. Grandfraas and grandsuurs who failed to keep up found themselves being carried on fids’ backs. Running through the dark, mesmerized by their badges, people banged into one another in grand slapstick style, fell down, got bloody noses, argued as to whose fault it had been. I slowed to help a few victims, but the aid teams were astoundingly efficient—and quite rude about letting me know I should head for an exit rather than getting in their way. Ala had really put her stamp on this thing. As I gained confidence that the evacuation was basically working, I moved faster, and struck out across the giant page tree plantation, heavy with leaves that would never be harvested, toward a rugged gap that had been blasted through the ancient wall. The opening was choked with rubble. Lights shone through from extramuros, making the dusty air above the aperture glow blue-white, and casting long, flailing silhouettes behind the avout who were streaming through it, clambering over the rubble-pile, helped over tricky parts by soldiers who played flashlights over patches of rough footing and barked suggestions at any avout who stumbled or looked tentative. My badge told me to go through it, so I did, trying not to think about how many centuries the stones I trod had stood until tonight, the avout who’d cut them to shape and laid them in place.

Beyond the wall was a glacis, a belt of open territory that locals used as a park. This evening it had become a depot for military drummons: simple flatbeds whose backs had been covered by canvas awnings. At first I saw only the few that stood closest to the base of the rubble-pile, since these lay in the halo of light. But my badge was insisting that I penetrate the darkness beyond. When I did, I became aware that these drummons were scattered across what seemed like square miles of darkness. I heard their engines idling all around, and I saw cold light thrown off by glow buds, by the spheres of wandering avout, and by control panels reflecting in drivers’ eyes. The vehicles themselves were running dark.

Something overtook me, parted around me, and moved on. I felt rather than heard it. It was a squad of Valers, swathed in black bolts, running silently through the night.

I jogged on for some minutes, taking a winding route, since my badge kept trying to get me to walk through parked drummons. Another blown wall section, with its mountain of light, passed by on my right, and I saw yet another swinging into view around the curve of the wall. All of these gaps continued to spew avout, so I didn’t get the sense that I was late. Here and there I’d spy a lone fraa or suur, face illuminated by badge-light, approaching the open back of a drummon, eyes jumping between badge and vehicle, the face registering growing certainty: yes, this is the one. Hands reaching out of the dark to help them aboard, voices calling out to them in greeting. Everyone was strangely cheerful—not knowing what I and a few others now knew about what we were getting into.

Finally the purple line took me out beyond the last of the parked drummons. Only one vehicle remained that was large enough to carry a cell of any appreciable size: a coach, gaudy with phototypes of ecstatic gamblers. It must have been commandeered from a casino. I could not believe that this was my destination, but every time I tried to dodge around it, the purple line irritably re-vectored itself and told me to turn back around. So I approached the side door and gazed up the entry stair. A military driver was sitting there, lit by his jeejah. “Erasmas of Edhar?” he called out—apparently reading signals from my badge.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Cell 317,” he said, and with a jerk of the head told me to come aboard. “Six down, five to go,” he muttered, as I lurched past him. “Put your pack on the seat next to you—quick on, quick off.”

The aisle of the coach and the undersurfaces of the luggage shelves were lined with strips that cast dim illumination on the seats and the people in them. It was sparsely occupied. Soldiers, talking on or busy with jeejahs, had claimed the first couple of rows. Officers, I thought. Then, after a few empty rows, I saw a face I recognized: Sammann, lit by his super-jeejah as usual. He glanced up and recognized me, but I didn’t see the old familiar grin on his face. Instead his eyes darted back for a moment.

Gazing into the gloom that stretched behind him, I saw several rows of seats occupied by rucksacks. Next to each was a shaven head, bowed in concentration.

I stopped so hard that my pack’s momentum nearly knocked me over. My mind said, boy, did you ever get on the wrong coach, idiot! and my legs tried to get me out of there before the driver could close the door and pull out.

Then I recalled that the driver had greeted me by name and told me to come aboard.

I glanced at Sammann, who adopted a sort of long-suffering expression that only an Ita could really pull off, and shrugged.

So I swung my pack down into an empty row and took a seat. Just before I sat down, I scanned the faces of the Valers. They were Fraa Osa, the FAE; Suur Vay, the one who’d sewn me back together with fishing line; Suur Esma, the one who had danced across the plaza in Mahsht, charging the sniper; and Fraa Gratho, the one who had placed his body between me and the Gheeth leader’s gun and later disarmed him.

I sat motionless for a while, wondering how to get ready for whatever was to come, wishing it would just start.

Next on the coach was Jesry. He saw what I had seen. In his face I thought I read some of the same emotions, but less so; he’d already been picked to go to space, he was probably expecting something like this. As he walked past me, he socked me on the shoulder. “Good to be with you,” he said, “there is no one I would rather be vaporized with, my fraa.”

“You’re getting your wish,” I said, recalling the talk we’d had at Apert.

“More of it than I wished for,” he returned, and banged down into the seat across the aisle from me.

A few minutes later we were joined by Fraa Jad, who sat alone behind the officers. He nodded to me, and I nodded back; but once he had made himself comfortable, the Valers came up the aisle one by one to introduce themselves to him and to pay their respects.

A young female Ita came in, followed by a very old male one. They stood around Sammann for a few minutes, reciting numbers to one another. I fancied that we were going to have three Ita in our cell, but then the two visitors walked off the coach and we did not see them again.

When Fraa Arsibalt arrived, he stood at the head of the aisle, next to the driver, and considered fleeing for a good half-minute. Finally he drew an enormous breath, as if trying to suck every last bit of air out of the coach, and marched stolidly up the aisle, taking a seat behind Jesry. “I had damned well better get my own stained-glass window for this.”

“Maybe you’ll get an Order—or a concent,” I proposed.

“Yes, maybe—if such things continue to exist by the time the Advent is finished.”

“Come off it, we are the Hylaean Theoric World of these people!” I said. “How can they possibly destroy us?”

“By getting us to destroy ourselves.”

“That’s it,” said Jesry. “You, Arsibalt, just appointed yourself the morale officer for Cell 317.”

Jesry didn’t understand some of the remarks that Arsibalt and I had exchanged, and so we set about explaining what had happened at messal. In the middle of this, Jules Verne Durand came aboard, hung all about with a motley kit of bags, bottles, and baskets. His presence in the cell must have been a last-minute improvisation; Ala couldn’t have planned on him. He looked slightly aghast for a minute, then—if I read his face right—cheered up. “My namesake would be unspeakably proud!” he announced, and walked the full length of the aisle, introducing himself as Jules to each member of Cell 317 in turn. “I shall be pleased to starve to death in such company!”

“That alien must have some namesake!” Jesry muttered after Jules had passed us.

“My friend, I’ll tell you all about him during the adventures that are to come!” said Jules, who had overheard; Laterran ears were pretty sharp, apparently.

“Ten down, one to go,” called the driver to someone who was evidently standing at the base of the steps.

“All right,” said a familiar voice, “let’s go!” Lio bounded up onto the coach. The door hissed shut behind him and we began to move. Lio, like Jules before him, worked his way down the aisle, somehow maintaining his balance even as the coach banked and jounced over rough ground. Those unknown to him got handshakes. Edharian clock-winders got spine-cracking hugs. Valers got bows—though I noticed that even Fraa Osa bowed more formally, more deeply, to Lio than Lio to him. This was my first clue that Lio was our cell leader.

We were at the aerodrome in twenty minutes. The escort of military police vehicles really helped speed up the trip. No hassles about tickets or security; we drove through a guarded gate right onto the taxiway and pulled up next to a fixed-wing military aerocraft, capable of carrying just about anything, but rigged for passengers tonight. The officers at the head of the coach were its flight crew. We filed out, crossed ten paces of open pavement, and clambered up a rolling stair onto the craft. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. Most of all, I wasn’t surprised. I saw Ala’s logic perfectly: once she had accepted that she was making the “terrible decision,” the only way forward was really to make it—to take it all the way. To put all of her favorite people together. The risk was greater for her—the risk, that is, that we’d all be lost, and she’d spend the rest of her life knowing she’d been responsible for it. But the risk, for each of us individually, was less, because we could help one another through it. And if we died, we’d die in good company.

“Is there a way to send a message to Suur Ala?” I asked Sammann, after we’d all claimed seats, and the engines had revved up enough to mask my voice. “I want to tell her that she was right.”

“Consider it done,” said Sammann. “Is there anything else—as long as I have a channel open?”

I considered it. There was much I could—should—have said. “Is it a private channel?” I asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he pointed out.

“No,” I said, “nothing further.”

Sammann shrugged and turned to his jeejah. The craft lunged forward. I fell into a seat, groped in the dark for the cold buckles, and strapped myself in.