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

Part 1
PROVENER

Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.

Embarrassment befell me. Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh, like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head.

“Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, “You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”

The embarrassment had turned runny. It was horrifying my scalp along a spreading frontier.

“When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”

Now it was sheeting warm down my face, clogging my ears and sanding my eyes. I could barely hear Fraa Orolo’s questions: “Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?”

Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word, so I’d said yes.

He had heard that an artisan from extramuros had been allowed into the New Library to fix a rotted rafter that we could not reach with our ladders; it had only just been noticed, and we didn’t have time to erect proper scaffolding before Apert. Orolo meant to interview that artisan, and he wanted me to write down what happened.

Through drizzly eyes, I looked at the leaf in front of me. It was as blank as my brain. I was failing.

But it was more important to take notes of what the artisan said. So far, nothing. When the interview had begun, he had been dragging an insufficiently sharp thing over a flat rock. Now he was just staring at Orolo.

“Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?”

Artisan Flec closed his mouth for the first time in quite a while. I could tell that the next time he opened it, he’d have something to say. I scratched at the edge of the leaf just to prove that my quill had not dried up. Fraa Orolo had gone quiet, and was looking at the artisan as if he were a new-found nebula in the eyepiece of a telescope.

Artisan Flec asked, “Why don’t you just speel in?”

“Speel in,” Fraa Orolo repeated to me, a few times, as I was writing it down.

I spoke in bursts because I was trying to write and talk at the same time: “When I came—that is, before I was Collected—we—I mean, they—had a thing called a speely… We didn’t say ‘speel in’—we said ‘cruise the speely.’” Out of consideration for the artisan, I chose to speak in Fluccish, and so this staggering drunk of a sentence only sounded half as bad as if I’d said it in Orth. “It was a sort of—”

“Moving picture,” Orolo guessed. He looked to the artisan, and switched to Fluccish. “We have guessed that ‘to speel in’ means to partake of some moving picture praxis—what you would call technology—that prevails out there.”

“Moving picture, that’s a funny way to say it,” said the artisan. He stared out a window, as if it were a speely showing a historical documentary. He quivered with a silent laugh.

“It is Praxic Orth and so it sounds quaint to your ears,” Fraa Orolo admitted.

“Why don’t you just call it by its real name?”

“Speeling in?”

“Yeah.”

“Because when Fraa Erasmas, here, came into the math ten years ago, it was called ‘cruising the speely’ and when I came in almost thirty years ago we called it ‘Farspark.’ The avout who live on the other side of yonder wall, who celebrate Apert only once every hundred years, would know it by some other name. I would not be able to talk to them.”

Artisan Flec had not taken in a word after Farspark. “Farspark is completely different!” he said. “You can’t watch Farspark content on a speely, you have to up-convert it and re-parse the format…”

Fraa Orolo was as bored by that as the artisan was by talk of the Hundreders, and so conversation thudded to a stop long enough for me to scratch it down. My embarrassment had gone away without my noticing it, as with hiccups. Artisan Flec, believing that the conversation was finally over, turned to look at the scaffolding that his men had erected beneath the bad rafter.

“To answer your question,” Fraa Orolo began.

“What question?”

“The one you posed just a minute ago—if I want to know what things are like extramuros, why don’t I just speel in?”

“Oh,” said the artisan, a little confounded by the length of Fra Orolo’s attention span. I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.

“First of all,” Fraa Orolo said, “we don’t have a speely-device.”

“Speely-device?”

Waving his hand as if this would dispel clouds of linguistic confusion, Orolo said, “Whatever artifact you use to speel in.”

“If you have an old Farspark resonator, I could bring you a down-converter that’s been sitting in my junk pile—”

“We don’t have a Farspark resonator either,” said Fraa Orolo.

“Why don’t you just buy one?”

This gave Orolo pause. I could sense a new set of embarrassing questions stacking up in his mind: “do you believe that we have money? That the reason we are protected by the S#230;cular Power is because we are sitting on a treasure hoard? That our Millenarians know how to convert base metals to gold?” But Fraa Orolo mastered the urge. “Living as we do under the Cartasian Discipline, our only media are chalk, ink, and stone,” he said. “But there is another reason too.”

“Yeah, what is it?” demanded Artisan Flec, very provoked by Fraa Orolo’s freakish habit of announcing what he was about to say instead of just coming out and saying it.

“It’s hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it…”

“A speelycaptor.”

“…at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”

“Words,” the artisan echoed, and then aimed sharp looks all round the library. “Tomorrow, Quin’s coming instead of me,” he announced, then added, a little bit defensively, “I have to counter-strafe the new clanex recompensators—the fan-out tree’s starting to look a bit clumpy, if you ask me.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Orolo marveled.

“Never mind. You ask him all your questions. He’s got the gift of gab.” And for the third time in as many minutes, the artisan looked at the screen of his jeejah. We’d insisted he shut down all of its communications functions, but it still served as a pocket-watch. He didn’t seem to realize that in plain sight out the window was a clock five hundred feet high.

I put a full stop at the end of the sentence and aimed my face at a bookshelf, because I was afraid that I might look amused. There was something in the way he’d said Quin’s coming instead of me that made it seem he’d just decided it on the spot. Fraa Orolo had probably caught it too. If I made the mistake of looking at him, I would laugh, and he wouldn’t.

The clock began chiming Provener. “That’s me,” I said. Then I added, for the benefit of the artisan: “Apologies, I must go wind the clock.”

“I was wondering—” he said. He reached into his toolbox and took out a poly bag, blew off sawdust, undid its seal (which was of a type I had never seen before), and withdrew a silver tube the size of his finger. Then he looked at Fraa Orolo hopefully.

“I don’t know what that is and I don’t understand what you want,” said Fraa Orolo.

“A speelycaptor!”

“Ah. You have heard about Provener, and as long as you are here, you’d like to view it and make a moving picture?”

The artisan nodded.

“That will be acceptable, provided you stand where you are told. Don’t turn it on!” Fraa Orolo raised his hands, and got ready to avert his gaze. “The Warden Regulant will hear of it—she’ll make me do penance! I’ll send you to the Ita. They’ll show you where to go.”

And more in this vein, for the Discipline was made up of many rules, and we had already made a muddle of them, in Artisan Flec’s mind, by allowing him to venture into the Decenarian math.

I’d been using my sphere as a stool. I traced counterclockwise circles on it with my fingertips and it shrank until I could palm it. My bolt had shifted while I’d been sitting. I pulled it up and yanked the pleats straight as I careered around tables, chairs, globes, and slow-moving fraas. I passed under a stone arch into the Scriptorium. The place smelled richly of ink. Maybe it was because an ancient fraa and his two fids were copying out books there. But I wondered how long it would take to stop smelling that way if no one ever used it at all; a lot of ink had been spent there, and the wet smell of it must be deep into everything.

At the other end, a smaller doorway led to the Old Library, which was one of the original buildings that stood right on the Cloister. Its stone floor, 2300 years older than that of the New Library, was so smooth under the soles of my feet that I could scarcely feel it. I could have found my way with my eyes closed by letting my feet read the memory worn into it by those gone before.

The Cloister was a roofed gallery around the perimeter of a rectangular garden. On the inner side, nothing separated it from the weather except the row of columns that held up its roof. On the outer side it was bounded by a wall, openings in which gave way to buildings such as the Old Library, the Refectory, and various chalk halls.

Every object I passed—the carven bookcase-ends, the stones locked together to make the floor, the frames of the windows, the forged hinges of the doors and the hand-made nails that fastened them to the wood, the capitals of the columns that surrounded the Cloister, the paths and beds of the garden itself—every one had been made in a particular form by a clever person a long time ago. Some of them, such as the doors of the Old Library, had consumed the whole lifetimes of those who had wrought them. Others looked as though they’d been tossed off in an idle afternoon, but with such upsight that they had been cherished for hundreds or thousands of years. Some were founded on pure simple geometry. Others reveled in complication and it was a sort of riddle whether there was any rule governing their forms. Still others were depictions of actual people who had lived and thought interesting things at one time or another—or, barring that, of general types: the Deolater, the Physiologer, the Burger and the Sline. If someone had asked, I might have been able to explain a quarter of them. One day I’d be able to explain them all.

Sunlight crashed into the Cloister garden, where grass and gravel paths were interwoven among stands of herbs, shrubs, and the occasional tree. I reached back over my shoulder, caught the selvage end of my bolt, and drew it up over my head. I tugged down on the half of the bolt that hung below my chord, so that its fraying edge swept the ground and covered my feet. I thrust my hands together in the folds at my waist, just above the chord, and stepped out onto the grass. This was pale green and prickly, as the weather had been hot. As I came out into the open, I looked to the south dial of the clock. Ten minutes to go.

“Fraa Lio,” I said, “I do not think that slashberry is among the One Hundred and Sixty-four.” Meaning the list of plants that were allowed to be cultivated under the Second New Revised Book of Discipline.

Lio was stockier than I. When younger he had been chubby, but now he was just solid. On a patch of disturbed earth in the shade of an apple tree, he was squatting, hypnotized by the dirt. He had wrapped the selvage end of his bolt around his waist and between his thighs in the basic modesty knot. The remainder he had rolled up into a tight cylinder which he had tied at each end with his chord and then slung diagonally on his back, like a bedroll. He had invented this wrap. No one else had followed his lead. I had to admit that it looked comfortable, if stupid, on a warm day. His bottom was ten inches off the ground: he had made his sphere about the size of his head, and was balancing on it.

“Fraa Lio!” I said again. But Lio had a funny mind that sometimes did not respond to words. A slashberry cane arched across my path. I found a few thornless inches, closed my hand around it, jerked it up by its roots, and swung it round until the tiny flowers at its tip grazed Fraa Lio’s stubbly scalp. “Thistlehead!” I said, at the same moment.

Lio tumbled backward as if I’d smacked him with a quarter-staff. His feet flew up and spun back to find purchase on the roots of the apple tree. He stood, knees bent, chin tucked, spine straight, pieces of dirt trickling down from his sweaty back. His sphere rolled away and lodged in a pile of uprooted weeds.

“Did you hear me?”

“Slashberry is not one of the Hundred and Sixty-four, true. But neither is it one of the Eleven. So it’s not like I have to burn it on sight and put it down in the Chronicle. It can wait.”

“Wait for what? What are you doing?”

He pointed at the dirt.

I stooped and looked. Many would not have taken such a risk. Hooded, I could not see Fraa Lio in my peripheral vision. It was believed you should always keep Lio in the corner of your eye because you never knew when he might commence wrestling. I had endured more than my share of headlocks, chokeholds, takedowns, and pins at Lio’s hands, as well as large abrasions from brushes with his scalp. But I knew that he would not attack me now because I was showing respect for something that he thought was fascinating.

Lio and I had been Collected ten years ago, at the age of eight, as part of a crop of boys and girls numbering thirty-two. For our first couple of years we had watched a team of four bigger fraas wind the clock each day. A team of eight suurs rang the bells. Later he and I had been chosen, along with two other relatively large boys, to form the next clock-winding team. Likewise, eight girls had been chosen from our crop to learn the art of ringing the bells, which required less strength but was more arduous in some ways, because some of the changes went on for hours and required unbroken concentration. For more than seven years now, my team had wound the clock each day, except when Fraa Lio forgot, and three of us had to do it. He’d forgotten two weeks ago, and Suur Trestanas, the Warden Regulant, had sentenced him to do penance, in the form of weeding the herb beds during the hottest time of the year.

Eight minutes to go. But nagging Lio about the time wouldn’t get me anywhere; I had to go through, and out the other side of, whatever it was that he wanted to talk about.

“Ants,” I said. Then, knowing Lio, I corrected myself: “Ant vlor?”

I could hear him smiling. “Two colors of ants, Fraa Raz. They’re having a war. I regret to say I caused it.” He nudged a pile of uprooted slashberry canes.

“Would you call it a war, or just mad scrambling around?”

“That’s what I was trying to figure out,” he said. “In a war, you have strategy and tactics. Like flanking. Can ants flank?”

I barely knew what that meant: attacking from the side. Lio worried such terms loose from old books of vlor—Vale-lore—as if pulling dragon’s teeth from a fossil jaw.

“I suppose ants can flank,” I said, though I sensed that it was a trick question and that Lio was flanking me with words at this very moment. “Why not?”

“By accident, of course they can! You look down on it from above and say, ‘Oh, that looked like flanking.’ But if there’s no commander to see the field and direct their movements, can they really perform coordinated maneuvers?”

“That’s a little like Saunt Taunga’s Question,” I pointed out (“Can a sufficiently large field of cellular automata think?”).

“Well, can they?”

“I’ve seen ants work together to carry off part of my lunch, so I know they can coordinate their actions.”

“But if I’m one of a hundred ants all pushing on the same raisin, I can feel the raisin moving, can’t I—so the raisin itself is a way that they communicate with one another. But, if I’m a lone ant on a battlefield—”

“Thistlehead, it’s Provener.”

“Okay,” he said, and turned his back on me and started walking. It was this penchant for dropping conversations in the middle, among other odd traits, that had earned him a reputation as being less than intact. He’d forgotten his sphere again. I picked it up and threw it at him. It bounced off the back of his head and flew straight up in the air; he held out a hand, barely looking, and caught it on the drop. I edged around the battlefield, not wanting to get combatants, living or dead, on my feet, then hustled after him.

Lio reached the corner of the Cloister well ahead of me and ducked in front of a mass of slow-moving suurs in a way that was quite rude and yet so silly that the suurs all had a chuckle and thought no more of it. Then they clogged the archway, trapping me behind them. I had alerted Fraa Lio so he wouldn’t be late; now I was going to arrive last and be frowned at.

In a sense the clock was the entire Mynster, and its basement. When most people spoke of “the clock,” though, they meant its four dials, which were mounted high on the walls of the Pr#230;sidium — the Mynster’s central tower. The dials had been crafted in different ages, and each showed the time in a different way. But all four were connected to the same internal works. Each proclaimed the time; the day of the week; the month; the phase of the moon; the year; and (for those who knew how to read them) a lot of other cosmographical arcana.

The Pr#230;sidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an octagon, and not far above that, the octagon became a sixteen-sided polygon, and above that it became round. The roof of the Pr#230;sidium was a disk, or rather a lens, as it bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. It supported the megaliths, domes, penthouses, and turrets of the starhenge, which drove, and was driven by, the same clock-works that ran the dials.

Below each dial was a belfry, screened behind tracery. Below the belfries, the tower flung out plunging arcs of stone called buttresses to steady itself. Those found footing amid the topmost spires of four outlying towers, shorter and squatter than the Pr#230;sidium, but built to the same general plan. The towers were webbed to one another by systems of arches and spans of tracery that swallowed the lower half of the Pr#230;sidium and formed the broad plan of the Mynster.

The Mynster had a ceiling of stone, steeply vaulted. Above the vaults, a flat roof had been framed. Built upon that roof was the aerie of the Warden Fendant. Its inner court, squared around the Pr#230;sidium, was roofed and walled and diced up into store-rooms and headquarters, but its periphery was an open walkway on which the Fendant’s sentinels could pace a full circuit of the Mynster in a few minutes’ time, seeing to the horizon in all directions (except where blocked by a buttress, pier, spire, or pinnacle). This ledge was supported by dozens of close-spaced braces that curved up and out from the walls below. The end of each brace served as a perch for a gargoyle keeping eternal vigil. Half of them (the Fendant gargoyles) gazed outward, the other half (the Regulant gargoyles) bent their scaly necks and aimed their pointy ears and slitted eyes into the concent spread below. Tucked between the braces, and shaded below the sentinels’ walkway, were the squat Mathic arches of the Warden Regulant’s windows. Few places in the concent could not be spied on from at least one of these—and, of course, we knew them all by heart.

The Mynster erupted from the planed-off stump of what had once been the end of a mountain range. The crag of the Millenarian math loomed above it on the east. The other maths and compounds were spread below it on the south and west. The one where I lived with the other Tenners was a quarter of a mile away. A roofed gallery, consisting of seven staircases strung together by landings, connected our math to a stone patio spread before the portal that we used to get into the Mynster. This was the route being taken by most of my fellow Tenners.

Rather than wait for that clot of old suurs to clear the bottleneck, though, I doubled back into the Chapterhouse, which was really just a wide spot in the gallery that surrounded the Cloister. This had a back exit that got me into a covered alley between chalk halls and workshops. Its walls were lined with niches where we stuffed work in progress. Ends and corners of half-written manuscripts projected, slowly yellowing and curling, making the passage seem even narrower than it was.

Jogging to its end and ducking through a keyhole arch, I came out into a meadow that spread below the elevated plinth on which the Mynster was built, and that served as a buffer separating us from the math of the Centenarians. A stone wall sixteen feet high sliced it in half. The Hundreders used their side for raising livestock.

When I had been Collected, we had used our side as a haymow. A few years ago, in late summer, Fraa Lio and Fraa Jesry had been sent out with hoes to walk it looking for plants of the Eleven. And indeed they had happened upon a patch of something that looked like blithe. So they had chopped it out, piled it in the middle of the meadow, and set fire to it.

By day’s end, the entire meadow on our side of the wall had become an expanse of smoking carbonized stubble, and noises coming over the top of the wall suggested that sparks had blown onto the Hundreders’ side. On our side, along the border between the meadow and the tangles where we grew most of our food, the fraas and suurs had formed a battle line that ran all the way down to the river. We passed full buckets up the line and empty ones down it and threw the water onto those tangles that seemed most likely to burst into flames. If you’ve ever seen a well-tended tangle in the late summer, you’ll know why; the amount of biomass is huge, and by that time of the year it’s dry enough to burn.

At the inquisition, the deputy Warden Regulant who had been on duty at the time had testified that the initial fire had produced so much smoke that he’d been unable to get a clear picture of what Lio and Jesry had done. So the whole thing had been Chronicled as an accident, and the boys had got off with penance. But I know, because Jesry told me later, that when the fire in the blithe had first spread to the surrounding grass, Lio, instead of stamping it out, had proposed that they fight fire with fire, and control it using fire vlor. Their attempt to set counterfires had only made matters worse. Jesry had dragged Lio to safety as he was attempting to set a counter-counterfire to contain a system of counterfires that was supposed to be containing the original fire but that had gotten out of hand. Having his hands full with Lio, he’d had to abandon his sphere, which to this day was stiff in one place and could never quite become transparent. Anyway, the fire had provided an excuse for us finally to do something we’d been talking about forever, namely to plant it in clover and other flowering plants, and keep bees. When there was an economy extramuros, we could sell the honey to burgers in the market stall before the Day Gate, and use the money to buy things that were difficult to make inside the concent. When conditions outside were post-apocalyptic, we could eat it.

As I jogged toward the Mynster, the stone wall was to my right. The tangles—now just as full and ripe as they’d been before the fire—were mostly behind me and to my left. In front of me and somewhat uphill were the Seven Stairs, crowded with avout. Compared to the other fraas all swathed in their bolts, half-naked Lio, moving twice as fast, was like an ant of the wrong color.

The chancel, the heart of the Mynster, had an octagonal floor-plan (as theors were more apt to put it, it had the symmetry group of the eighth roots of unity). Its eight walls were dense traceries, some of stone, others of carved wood. We called them screens, a word confusing to extramuros people for whom a screen was something on which you’d watch a speely or play a game. For us, a screen was a wall with lots of holes in it, a barrier through which you could see, hear, and smell.

Four great naves were flung out, north-east-south-west, from the base of the Mynster. If you have ever attended a wedding or a funeral in one of the Deolaters’ arks, a nave would remind you of the big part where the guests sit, stand, kneel, flog themselves, roll on the floor, or whatever it is that they do. The chancel, then, would correspond to the place where the priest stands at the altar. When you see the Mynster from a distance, it’s the four naves that make it so broad at its base.

Guests from extramuros, like Artisan Flec, were allowed to come in the Day Gate and view auts from the north nave when they were not especially contagious and, by and large, behaving themselves. This had been more or less the case for the last century and a half. If you visited our concent by coming in through the Day Gate, you’d be channeled into the portal in the north facade and walk up the center aisle of the north nave toward the screen at the end. You might be forgiven for thinking that the whole Mynster consisted of only that nave, and the octagonal space on the other side of the screen. But someone in the east, west, or south nave would make the same mistake. The screens were made dark on the nave side and light on the chancel side, so that it was easy to see into the chancel but impossible to see beyond it, creating the illusion that each nave stood alone, and owned the chancel.

The east nave was empty and little used. We’d ask the older fraas and suurs why; they’d give a wave of the hand and “explain” that it was the Mynster’s formal entrance. If so, it was so formal that no one knew what to do with it. At one time a pipe-organ had stood there, but this had been ripped out in the Second Sack, and later improvements of the Discipline had banned all other musical instruments. When my crop had been younger, Orolo had strung us along for several years telling us that there was talk of making it a sanctuary for ten-thousand-year fraas if the Concent of Saunt Edhar ever got round to building a math for such. “A proposal was submitted to the Millenarians 689 years ago,” he’d say, “and their response is expected in another 311.”

The south nave was reserved for the Centenarians, who could reach it by strolling across their half of the meadow. It was much too big for them. We Tenners, who had to cram ourselves into a much smaller space just next to it, had been annoyed by this fact for more than three thousand years.

The west nave had the best stained-glass windows and the finest stone-carving because it was used by the Unarians, who were by far the best-endowed of all the maths. But there were easily enough of them to fill the place up and so we didn’t resent their having so much space.

There remained four screen-walls of the chancel—northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest—that were the same size and shape as the four that lay in the cardinal directions but that were not connected to proper naves. On the dark sides of these screens lay the four corners of the Mynster, cluttered by structural works that were inconvenient for humans but necessary for the whole thing to remain standing. Our corner, on the southwest, was by far the most crowded of these, since there were about three hundred Tenners. Our space had therefore been expanded by a couple of side-towers that bulged out from the walls of the Mynster and accounted for its obvious asymmetry in that corner.

The northwest corner connected to the Primate’s compound, and was used only by him, his guests, the wardens, and other hierarchs, so there was no crowding there. The southeast corner was for the Thousanders; it connected directly to their fantastical hand-carved stone staircase, which zoomed, veered and rambled down the face of their crag.

The northeastern corner, directly across from us, was reserved for the Ita. Their portal communicated directly with their covered slum, which filled the area between that side of the Mynster and the natural stone cliff that, in that zone, formed the concent’s outer wall. A tunnel supposedly gave them access to the subterranean workings of the clock, which it was their duty to tend. But this, like most of our information concerning the Ita, was little better than folklore.

So there were eight ways into the Mynster if one only counted the formal portals. But Mathic architecture was nothing if not complicated and so there were also any number of smaller doors, rarely used and barely known about, except by inquisitive fids.

I shuffled through the clover as quickly as I could without stepping on any bees. Even so I made better time than those on the Seven Stairs, and soon reached the Meadow door, which was set into a masonry arch that had been grafted onto the native rock. A flight of stone steps took me up to the level of the Mynster’s main floor. I dodged through a series of odd, mean little store-rooms where vestments and ceremonial objects were kept when out of season. Then I came out into that architectural hodgepodge in the southwest corner that we Tenners used in place of a nave. Incoming fraas and suurs obstructed me. But there were lanes of open space wherever the view was obstructed by a pillar. Planted in one of those lanes, right up against the base of a pillar, was our wardrobe. Most of its contents had been dumped out onto the floor. Fraa Jesry and Fraa Arsibalt were standing nearby, already swathed in scarlet and looking irritated. Fraa Lio was swimming through silk trying to find his favorite robe. I dropped to one knee and found something in my size among the ones he had discarded. I threw it on, tied it, and made sure it wouldn’t get in the way of my feet, then fell in behind Jesry and Arsibalt. A moment later Lio came up and stood too close behind me. We came out from the shadow of that pillar and threaded our way through the crowd toward the screen, following Jesry, who wasn’t afraid to use his elbows. But it wasn’t that crowded. Only about half of the Tenners had shown up today; the rest were busy getting ready for Apert. Our fraas and suurs were seated before the southwest screen in tiered rows. Those in the front sat on the floor. The next row sat on their spheres, head-sized. Those behind them had made their spheres larger. In the back row, the spheres were taller than those who sat on them, stretched out like huge filmy balloons, and the only thing that kept them from rolling about and spilling people onto the stone was that they were all packed in together between the walls, like eggs in a box.

Grandfraa Mentaxenes pulled open the little door that penetrated our screen. He was very old, and we were pretty sure that doing this every day was the only thing that kept him alive. Each of us stepped into a tray of powdered rosin so that his feet could better grip the floor.

Then we filed out and, like grains of sugar dropped in a mug of tea, dissolved in a vast space. Something about the way the chancel was built made it seem a cistern storing all of the light that had ever fallen upon the concent.

Looking up from a standpoint just inside the screen, one saw the vaulted Mynster ceiling almost two hundred feet above, illuminated by light pouring in through stained-glass windows in the clerestory all around. So much light, shining down onto the bright inner surfaces of the eight screens, rendered them all opaque and made it seem as though the four of us had the whole Mynster to ourselves. The Thousanders who had clambered down their walled and covered stair to attend Provener were now seeing us through their screen, but they could not see Artisan Flec, with his yellow T-shirt and his speelycaptor, in the north nave. Likewise Flec could not see them. But both could view the aut of Provener, which would take place entirely within the chancel, and which would be indistinguishable from the same rite performed one, two, or three thousand years ago.

The Pr#230;sidium was supported by four fluted legs of stone that rammed down through the middle of the chancel and, I imagined, through the underlying vault where the Ita looked after the movements of their bits. Moving inward we passed by one of those pillars. These were not round in cross-section but stretched out diagonally, almost as if they were fins on an old-fashioned rocket-ship, though not nearly as slender as that implies. We thus came into the central well of the Mynster. Looking up from here, we could see twice as far up, all the way to the top of the Pr#230;sidium where the starhenge was. We took up our positions, marked by rosin-stained dimples.

A door opened in the Primate’s screen, and out came a man in robes more complicated than ours, and purple to indicate he was a hierarch. Apparently the Primate was busy today—also probably getting ready for Apert—and so he had sent one of his aides in his place. Other hierarchs filed out behind. Fraa Delrakhones, the Warden Fendant, sat in his chair to the left of the Primate’s, and Suur Trestanas, the Warden Regulant, sat to the right.

Fifteen green-robed fraas and suurs—three each of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass—trooped out from behind the screen of the Unarians. It was their turn to lead the singing and chanting, which probably meant we were in for a weak performance, even though they’d had almost a year to learn it.

The hierarch spoke the opening words of the aut and then threw the lever that engaged the Provener movement.

As the clock would tell you, if you knew how to read it, we were still in Ordinal time for another two days. That is, there was no particular festival or holiday going on, and so the liturgy did not follow any special theme. Instead it defaulted to a slow, spotty recapitulation of our history, reminding us how we’d come to know all that we knew. During the first half of the year we would cover all that had gone before the Reconstitution. From there we would work our way forward. Today’s liturgy was something to do with developments in finite group theorics that had taken place about thirteen hundred years ago and that had caused their originator, Saunt Bly, to be Thrown Back by his Warden Regulant and to live out the remainder of his days on top of a butte surrounded by slines who worshipped him as a god. He even inspired them to stop consuming blithe, whereupon they became surly, killed him, and ate his liver out of a misconception that this was where he did his thinking. If you live in a concent, consult the Chronicles for more concerning Saunt Bly. If you don’t, know that we have so many stories in this vein that one can attend Provener every day for one’s whole life and never hear one repeated.

The four pillars of the Pr#230;sidium I have mentioned. Right in the middle, on the central axis of the whole Mynster, hung a chain with a weight at its end. It reached so high in the column of space above us that its upper reaches dissolved into dust and dimness.

The weight was a blob of grey metal shot through with voids, as if it had been half eaten by worms: a nickel-iron meteorite four billion years old, made of the same stuff as the heart of Arbre. During the almost twenty-four hours since the last celebration of Provener, it had descended most of the way to the floor; we could almost reach up and touch it. It descended steadily most of the time, as it was responsible for driving the clock. At sunrise and sunset though, when it had to supply the power for opening and closing the Day Gate, it dropped rapidly enough to make casual spectators scurry out of its way.

There were four other weights on four other, independently moving chains. They were less conspicuous because they did not hang down in the middle, and they didn’t move much. They rode on metal rails fixed to the four Pr#230;sidium pillars. Each of these had a regular geometric shape: a cube, an octahedron, a dodecahedron, and an icosahedron, all wrought from black volcanic stone quarried from the Cliffs of Ecba and dragged on sledge trains over the North Pole. Each rose a little bit every time the clock was wound. The cube descended once a year to open the Year Gate and the octahedron every ten years to open the Decade Gate, so both of these were now quite close to the tops of their respective tracks. The dodecahedron and the icosahedron did the same for the century and millenium gates respectively. The former was about nine-tenths of the way to the top, the latter about seven-tenths. So just from looking, you could guess it was about 3689.

Much higher in the Pr#230;sidium, in the upper reaches of the chronochasm—the vast airy space behind the dials, where all of the clock-work came together—was a hermetically sealed stone chamber that contained a sixth weight: a sphere of grey metal that rode up and down on a jack screw. This kept the clock ticking while we were winding it. Other than that, it would only move if the meteorite was on the floor—that is, if we failed to celebrate the daily aut of Provener. When this happened, the clock would disengage most of its machinery to conserve energy and would go into hibernation, driven by the slow descent of the sphere, until such time as it was wound again. This had only ever occurred during the three Sacks and on a few other occasions when everyone in the concent had been so sick that they’d not been able to wind the clock. No one knew how long the clock could run in that mode, but it was thought to be on the order of a hundred years. We knew it had continued to run all through the time following the Third Sack when the Thousanders had holed up on their crag and the rest of the concent had been uninhabited for seven decades.

All of the chains ran up into the chronochasm where they hung from sprockets that turned on shafts, connected by gear-trains and escapements that it was the Ita’s business to clean and inspect. The main drive chain—the one that ran up the middle, and supported the meteorite—was connected to a long system of gear-trains and linkages that was artfully concealed in the pillars of the Pr#230;sidium as it made its way down into the vaulted cellar below our feet. The only part of this visible to non-Ita was a squat hub that rose up out of the center of the chancel floor, looking like a round altar. Four horizontal poles projected like spokes from this hub at about the height of a person’s shoulder. Each pole was about eight feet long. At the proper moment in the service, Jesry, Arsibalt, Lio, and I each went to the end of a pole and put his hands on it. At a certain beat in the Anathem, each of us threw himself behind his pole, like a sailor trying to weigh anchor by turning a capstan. But nothing moved except for my right foot, which broke loose from the floor and skidded back for a few inches before finding purchase. Our combined strength could not overcome the static friction of all the bearings and gears between us and the sprocket hundreds of feet above from which the chain and the weight depended. Once it became unstuck we would be strong enough to keep it going, but getting it unstuck required a mighty thrust (supposing we wanted to use brute force) or, if we chose to be clever, a tiny shake: a subtle vibration. Different praxics might solve this problem in different ways. At Saunt Edhar, we did it with our voices.

Back in very ancient times, when the marble columns of the Halls of Orithena still rose from the black rock of Ecba, all the world’s theors would gather beneath the great dome just before noon. Their leader (at first, Adrakhones himself; later, Diax or one of his other fids) would stand on the analemma, waiting for the shaft of light from the oculus to pass over him at midday: a climax celebrated by the singing of the Anathem to our mother Hylaea who had brought us the light of her father Cno#252;s. The aut had fallen into disuse when Orithena had been destroyed and the surviving theors had embarked on the Peregrination. But much later, when the theors retreated to the maths, Saunt Cartas drew on it to anchor the liturgy that was then practiced all through the Old Mathic Age. Again it fell into disuse during the Dispersal to the New Periklynes and the Praxic Age that followed, but then, after the Terrible Events and the Reconstitution, it was revived again, in a new form, centered on the winding of a clock.

The Hylaean Anathem now existed in thousands of different versions, since every composer among the avout was likely to take at least one crack at it during his or her lifetime. All versions used the same words and structure, but they were as various as clouds. The most ancient were monophonic, meaning each voice sang the same note. The one used at Saunt Edhar was polyphonic: different voices singing different melodies that were woven together in a harmonious fashion. Those One-offs in their green robes sang only some of the parts. The rest of the voices came out through the screens. Traditionally the Thousanders sang the deepest notes. Rumor had it they’d developed special techniques to loosen their vocal chords, and I believed it, since no one in our math could sing tones as deep as the ones that rumbled out from their nave.

The Anathem started simple, then got almost too complicated for the ear to follow. When we’d had an organ, it had required four organists, each using both hands and both feet. In the ancient aut, this part of the Anathem represented the Kaos of non-systematic thought that had preceded Cno#252;s. The composer had realized it almost too well, since during this part of the music the ear could scarcely make sense of all the different voices. But then, sort of as when you are looking at some geometric shape that looks like a tangle having no order at all, and you rotate it just a tiny bit, and suddenly all its planes and vertices come into alignment and you see what it is, all of those voices fell in together over the course of a few measures and collapsed into one pure tone that resonated in the light-well of our clock and made everything vibrate in sympathy with it. Whether by a lucky accident, or by a feat of the praxics, the vibration was just enough to break the seal of static friction on the winding-shaft. Lio, Arsibalt, Jesry and I, even though we knew it was coming, practically fell forward as the hub went into motion. Moments later, after the backlash in the gear train had been taken up, the meteorite above our heads began to creep upwards. And we knew that twenty beats later we could expect to feel the day’s accumulation of dust and bat droppings raining down on our heads from hundreds of feet above.

In the ancient liturgy, this moment had represented the Light dawning in the mind of Cno#252;s. The singing now split apart into two competing strains, one representing De#228;t and the other Hylaea, the two daughters of Cno#252;s. Trudging counterclockwise around the shaft, we worked up to a steady pace that fell into synchrony with the rhythm of the Anathem. The meteorite began to rise at about two inches every second, and would continue to do so until it reached its upper stop, which would take about twenty minutes. At the same time, the four sprocket-wheels from which the four other chains were suspended were also turning, though much more slowly. The cube would rise by about a foot during this aut. The octahedron would rise by about an inch, and so on. And up above the ceiling, the sphere was slowly descending to keep the clock going during the time it took us to wind it.

I should stipulate that it does not really take so much energy to run a clock—even a huge one—for twenty-four hours! Almost all of the energy that we were putting into the system went to run the add-ons, like bells, gates, the Great Orrery just inside the Day Gate, various lesser orreries, and the polar axes of the telescopes on the starhenge.

None of this was in the front of my mind while I was pushing my pole around and around the hub. True, I did look at these things afresh during the first few minutes, simply because I knew that Artisan Flec was watching, and I was trying to imagine how I might explain these things to him, supposing he asked. But by the time we had found our rhythm, and my heart had begun to thump along at a steady pace, and the sweat had begun to drip from my nose, I had forgotten about Artisan Flec. The chanting of the One-offs was better than I’d expected—not so bad as to call attention to itself. For a minute or two I thought about the story of Saunt Bly. After that, I thought mostly of myself and my situation in the world. I know that this was selfish of me, and not what I should have been doing during the aut. But unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one’s mind. You might find it in poor taste that I tell you of what I was thinking. You might find it unnecessarily personal, perhaps even immoral—a bad example for other fids who might one day find this account sticking out of a niche. But it is part of this story.

As I wound the clock on that day I was wondering what it would be like to climb up to the Warden Fendant’s ledge and jump off.

If you find such a thing impossible to comprehend, you probably are not avout. The food that you eat is grown from crops whose genes partake of the Allswell sequence, or even stronger stuff. Melancholy thoughts may never come into your mind at all. When they do, you have the power to dismiss them. I did not have that power, and was becoming weary of keeping company with those thoughts. One way to silence them forever would have been to walk out of the Decenarian Gate in a week’s time, go to live with my birth family (supposing they would have me back), and eat what they ate. Another would have involved climbing the stair that spiraled up our corner of the Mynster.

“Are people starving to death? Or are they sick because they are too fat?”

Artisan Quin scratched his beard and thought about that one. “You’re talking of slines, I assume?”

Fraa Orolo shrugged.

Quin thought that was funny. Unlike Artisan Flec, he was not afraid to laugh out loud. “Sort of both at the same time,” he finally admitted.

“Very good,” said Fraa Orolo, in a now we’re getting somewhere tone, and glanced at me to make sure I was getting it down.

After the Flec interview, I had had words with Fraa Orolo. “Pa, what are you doing with that five-hundred-year-old questionnaire? It’s crazy.”

“It is an eight-hundred-year-old copy of an eleven-hundred-year-old questionnaire,” he had corrected me.

“It would be one thing if you were a Hundreder. But how could things have changed that much in only ten years?”

Fraa Orolo had told me that since the Reconstitution there had been forty-eight instances in which radical change had occurred in a decade, and that two of these had culminated in Sacks—so perhaps the sudden ones were the most important. And yet ten years was a long enough span of time that people who lived extramuros, immersed in day-to-day goings-on, might be oblivious to change. So a Tenner reading an eleven-hundred-year-old questionnaire to an artisan could perform a service to the society extramuros (assuming anyone out there was paying attention). Which might help to explain why we were not only tolerated but protected (except when we weren’t) by the S#230;cular Power. “The man who looks at a mole on his brow every day when he shaves may not see that it is changing; the physician who sees it once a year may easily recognize it as cancer.”

“Beautiful,” I’d said. “But you’ve never cared about the S#230;cular Power before, so what’s your real reason?”

He had pretended to be bewildered by the question. But, seeing I wasn’t going to back off, he had shrugged and said “Just a routine check for CDS.”

“CDS?”

“Causal Domain Shear.”

This had as much as proved that Orolo was only having me on. But sometimes he had a point when he was doing that.

Correction: he always had a point. Sometimes I was able to see it. So I had rested my face on my hands and muttered, “Okay. Open the floodgates.”

“Well. A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships.”

“But isn’t everything in the universe so linked?”

“Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can’t affect things in our past. Some things are too far away to affect us in any way that matters.”

“But still, you can’t really draw hard and fast boundaries between causal domains.”

“In general, no. But you are much more strongly webbed together with me by cause and effect than you are with an alien in a faraway galaxy. So, depending on what level of approximation you’re willing to put up with, you could say that you and I belong together in one causal domain, and the alien belongs in another.”

“Okay,” I had said, “what level of approximation are you willing to put up with, Pa Orolo?”

“Well, the whole point of living in a cloistered math is to reduce our causal linkages with the extramuros world to the minimum, isn’t it?”

“Socially, yes. Culturally, yes. Ecologically, even. But we use the same atmosphere, we hear their mobes driving by—on a pure theoric level, there is no causal separation at all!”

He hadn’t seemed to have heard me. “If there were another universe, altogether separate from ours—no causal linkages whatsoever between Universes A and B—would time flow at the same rate between them?”

“It’s a meaningless question,” I’d said, after having thought about it for a moment.

“That’s funny, it seemed meaningful to me,” he’d retorted, a little cross.

“Well, it depends on how you measure time.”

He’d waited.

“It depends on what time is!” I’d said. I had spent a few minutes going up various avenues of explanation, only to find each of them a dead end.

“Well,” I’d said finally, “I guess I have to invoke the Steelyard. In the absence of a good argument to the contrary, I have to choose the simplest answer. And the simplest answer is that time runs independently in Universe A and Universe B.”

“Because they are separate causal domains.”

“Yes.”

Orolo said, “What if these two universes—each as big and as old and as complicated as ours—were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them. Would that be enough to wrench A’s time and B’s time into perfect lockstep for all eternity?”

I had sighed, as I always did when one of Orolo’s traps closed over me.

“Or,” he’d said, “is it possible to have a little bit of time slippage—shear—between causal domains that are connected only loosely?”

“So—back to your interview with Artisan Flec—you want me to believe that you were just checking to see whether a thousand years might have gone by on the other side of that wall while only ten have gone by on this side!?”

“I saw no harm in making inquiries,” he’d said. Then he’d gotten a look as if something else were on the tip of his tongue. Something mischievous. I had headed him off before he could say it:

“Oh. Is this anything to do with your crazy stories about the wandering ten-thousand-year math?”

When we’d been new fids, Orolo had once claimed that he had found an instance in the Chronicles where a gate somewhere had ground open and some avout had walked out of it claiming to be Ten-thousanders celebrating Apert. Which was ridiculous because avout in their current form had only existed for (at that time) 3682 years. So we’d reckoned that the whole purpose of the story had been to see if we had been paying any attention whatsoever to our history lessons. But perhaps the story had been meant to convey a deeper point.

“You can get a lot done in ten millennia if you put your mind to it,” Orolo had said. “What if you found a way to sever all causal links to the world extramuros?”

“That is utterly ridiculous. You are giving Incanter-like powers to these people.”

“But if one could do it, then one’s math would become a separate universe and its time would no longer be synchronized with the rest of the world’s. Causal Domain Shear would become possible—”

“Nice thought experiment,” I’d said. “Point taken. Thank you for the calca. But please tell me you don’t really expect to see evidence of CDS when the gates open!”

“It is what you don’t expect,” he’d said, “that most needs looking for.”

“Do you have, in your wigwams or tents or skyscrapers or wherever you live—”

“Trailers without wheels mostly,” said Artisan Quin.

“Very well. In those, is it common to have things that can think, but that are not human?”

“We did for a while, but they all stopped working and we threw them away.”

“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…”

“No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”

“We don’t have underwear, or bleach—just the bolt, the chord, and the sphere,” said Fraa Orolo, patting the length of cloth thrown over his head, the rope knotted around his waist, and the sphere under his bottom. This was a weak joke at our expense to set Quin at ease.

Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”

I felt old: a new feeling for me.

Orolo had been curious until he’d seen the Kinagrams; now he looked disappointed. “Oh,” he said, in a mild and polite tone of voice, “you are talking bulshytt.”

I got embarrassed. Quin was amazed. Then his face turned red. It looked as if he were talking himself into being angry.

“Fraa Orolo didn’t say what you think!” I told Quin, and tried to punctuate it with a chuckle, which came out as a gasp. “It is an ancient Orth word.”

“It sounded a lot like—”

“I know! But Fraa Orolo has forgotten all about the word you are thinking of. It’s not what he meant.”

“What did he mean, then?”

Fraa Orolo was fascinated that Quin and I were talking about him as if he weren’t there.

“He means that there’s no real distinction between Kinagrams and Logotype.”

“But there is,” Quin said, “they are incompatible.” His face wasn’t red any more; he drew breath and thought about it for a minute. Finally he shrugged. “But I see what you mean. We could have gone on using Logotype.”

“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.

“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”

Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”

“So that they could make money.”

“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”

“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”

“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”

“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better. So, I guess you’re right. It really is bul-” But he stopped in mid-word.

“You can say it. It’s not a bad word.”

“Well, I won’t say it, because it feels wrong to say it here, in this place.”

“As you wish, Artisan Quin.”

“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.

“Yes.”

“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”

“His father made him learn?” Fraa Orolo put in.

Quin smiled. “Yes.”

“He reads books?”

“All the time.”

“His age?” Obviously this was not on the questionnaire.

“Eleven. And he hasn’t been burned at the stake yet.” Quin said that in a very serious way. I wondered if Fraa Orolo understood that Quin was making a joke—taking a dig at him. Orolo made no sign.

“You have criminals?”

“Of course.” But the mere fact that Quin responded in this way caused Orolo to jump to a new leaf of the questionnaire.

“How do you know?”

“What?!”

“You say of course there are criminals, but if you look at a particular person, how do you know whether or not he is a criminal? Are criminals branded? Tattooed? Locked up? Who decides who is and isn’t a criminal? Does a woman with shaved eyebrows say ‘you are a criminal’ and ring a silver bell? Or is it rather a man in a wig who strikes a block of wood with a hammer? Do you thrust the accused through a doughnut-shaped magnet? Or use a forked stick that twitches when it is brought near evil? Does an Emperor hand down the decision from his throne written in vermilion ink and sealed with black wax, or is it rather that the accused must walk barefoot across a griddle? Perhaps there is ubiquitous moving picture praxis—what you’d call speelycaptors—that know all, but their secrets may only be unlocked by a court of eunuchs each of whom has memorized part of a long number. Or perhaps a mob shows up and throws rocks at the suspect until he’s dead.”

“I can’t take you seriously,” Quin said. “You’ve only been in the concent, what, thirty years?”

Fraa Orolo sighed and looked at me. “Twenty-nine years, eleven months, three weeks, six days.”

“And it’s plain to see you are boning up for Apert—but you can’t really think that things have changed so much!”

Another look in my direction. “Artisan Quin,” said Fraa Orolo, after a pause to make his words hit harder, “this is anno three thousand, six hundred, and eighty-nine of the Reconstitution.”

“That’s what my calendar says too,” Quin affirmed.

“3690 is tomorrow. Not only the Unarian math, but we Decenarians as well, will celebrate Apert. According to the ancient rules, our gates will open. For ten days, we shall be free to go out, and visitors such as you shall be welcome to come in. Now, ten years hence, the Centenarian Gate will open for the first, and probably the last, time in my life.”

“When it closes, which side of that gate will you be on?” Quin asked.

I got embarrassed again, because I’d never dare ask such a question. But I was secretly delighted that Quin had asked it for me.

“If I am found worthy, I should very much like to be on the inside of it,” said Fraa Orolo, and then glanced at me with an amused look, as if he’d guessed my thoughts. “The point is that in nine or so years, I can expect to be summoned to the upper labyrinth, which separates my math from that of the Centenarians. There I shall find my way to a grate in a dark room, and on the other side of that grate shall be one of those Hundreders (unless they have all died, vanished, or turned into something else) who shall ask me questions that shall seem just as queer to me as mine do to you. For they must make preparations for their Apert just as we do for ours. In their books they have records of every judicial practice that they, and others in other concents, have heard of in the last thirty-seven-hundred-odd years. The list that I rattled off to you, a minute ago, is but a single paragraph from a book as thick as my arm. So even if you find it to be a ridiculous exercise, I should be most grateful if you’d simply describe to me how you choose your criminals.”

“Will my answer be entered in that book?”

“If it is a new answer, yes.”

“Well, we still have Magistrate Doctors who roam about at the new moon in sealed purple boxes…”

“Yes, those I remember.”

“But they weren’t coming round as often as we needed them—the Powers That Be weren’t doing a good job of protecting them and some got rolled down hills. Then the Powers That Be put up more speelycaptors.”

Fraa Orolo jumped to a new leaf. “Who has access to those?”

“We don’t know.”

Orolo began moving to yet another new leaf. But before he found it, Quin continued: “But if someone commits a bad enough crime, the Powers That Be clamp a thing on their spine that makes them sort of crippled, for a while. Later it falls off and then they are normal again.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

A new page. “When you see someone wearing one of those devices, can you tell what crime they committed?”

“Yes, it says right on it, in Kinagrams.”

“Theft, assault, extortion?”

“Sure.”

“Sedition?”

Quin waited a long time before saying, “I’ve never seen that.”

“Heresy?”

“That would probably be handled by the Warden of Heaven.”

Fraa Orolo threw his hands up so high that his bolt fell away from his head and even bared one of his armpits. Then he brought them down again, the better to clamp them over his face. It was a sarcastic gesture that he liked to make in a chalk hall when a fid was being impossibly block-headed. Quin clearly took its meaning, and became embarrassed. He shifted back in his chair and pointed his chin at the ceiling, then lowered it again and looked at the window he was supposed to be mending. But there was something in Fraa Orolo’s huge gesture that was funny, and gave Quin the feeling that it was okay.

“All right,” Quin finally said, “I never thought of it like this, but now that you mention it, we have three systems…”

“The chaps in the purple boxes, the spine clamps, and this new thing that neither I nor Fraa Erasmas has ever heard of called the Warden of Heaven,” said Fraa Orolo, and began pushing through many leaves of his questionnaire—digging deep.

Something had occurred to Artisan Quin. “I never mentioned them because I thought you’d know all about them!”

“Because,” Fraa Orolo said, finding the page he’d been looking for, and scanning it, “they claimed that they came from the concent…bringing the enlightenment of the mathic world to a worthy few.”

“Yeah. Didn’t they?”

“No. They didn’t.” Seeing just how taken aback Quin was, Orolo continued: “This sort of thing happens every few hundred years. Some charlatan will appear and make a claim on S#230;cular Power based on an association with the mathic world—which happens to be fraudulent.”

I knew the answer to the following question before I blurted it out: “Does Artisan Flec—is he a follower, a disciple, of the Warden of Heaven?”

Quin and Orolo both looked at me, agog for different reasons. “Yes,” Quin said. “He listens to their casts while he works.”

“That’s why he made a speely of Provener,” I said. “Because this Warden of Heaven claims to be part of us. If there’s anything mysterious or…well, magnificent about this place, why, that just makes the Warden of Heaven seem that much bigger and more powerful. And to the extent that Artisan Flec is a disciple of the Warden of Heaven, he feels some of that belongs to him.”

Orolo said nothing, which made me embarrassed at the time. When I thought about it later, though, I understood that he didn’t need to say anything because what I’d said was obviously true.

Quin was looking a little confused. “Flec didn’t make a speely.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

Fraa Orolo was still distracted, thinking about the Warden of Heaven.

“They wouldn’t allow it. His speelycaptor was too good,” Quin explained.

Being old and wise, Fraa Orolo went rigid, pursed his lips, and looked uneasy. Being neither, I said: “What on earth does that mean?”

Fraa Orolo’s hand came down on my wrist and prevented me from writing any more. And I suspect that his other hand wanted to clamp down on Quin’s mouth. Quin went on, “The Eagle-Rez, the SteadiHand, the DynaZoom—put those all together, and it could have seen straight across into the other parts of your Mynster, even through the screens. Or at least that’s what he was told by the—”

“Artisan Quin!” Fraa Orolo trumpeted, loud enough to draw looks from everyone else in the library. Then he made his voice quite low: “I am afraid you are about to tell us something that your friend Flec learned from talking to the Ita. And I must remind you that such a thing is not allowed under our Discipline.”

“Sorry,” Quin said. “It’s confusing.”

“I know it is.”

“All right. Forget about the speelycaptor. I’m sorry. Where were we?”

“We were talking about the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Orolo said, relaxing a little, and finally letting go my wrist. “And as far as I’m concerned, the only thing we need to establish is whether he is a Throwback-turned-Mystagogue, or a Bottle Shaker, as the former can be quite dangerous.”

“I can puzzle out ‘Throwback-turned-Mystagogue,’” I told Fraa Orolo later. I was chopping carrots in the Refectory kitchen, and he was eating them. “And I can even guess why they are dangerous: because they’re angry, they want to come back to the place that Anathematized them, and even the score.”

“Yes, and that’s why Quin and I spent the whole afternoon with the Warden Fendant.”

“But what’s a Bottle Shaker?”

“Imagine a witch doctor in a society that doesn’t know how to make glass. A bottle washes up on the shore. It has amazing properties. He puts it on a stick and waves it around and convinces his fellows that he has got some of those amazing properties himself.”

“So Bottle Shakers aren’t dangerous?”

“No. Too easily impressed.”

“What of the slines who ate Saunt Bly’s liver? Apparently they weren’t so impressed.”

To hide a smile, Fraa Orolo pretended to inspect a potato. “The point is well taken, but remember that Saunt Bly was living alone on a butte. The very fact of his having been Thrown Back separated him from the artifacts and auts that are most impressive to Bottle Shaker-producing societies.”

“So what did you and the Warden Fendant decide?”

Fraa Orolo glanced around in a way that made it obvious I should have been more discreet.

“Expect more precautions at Apert.”

I lowered my voice. “So, the S#230;cular Power will send…I don’t know…?”

“Robots with stun guns? Echelons of horse archers? Cylinders of sleeping gas?”

“I guess so.”

“That depends on to what extent the Warden of Heaven has become the same as the Panjandrums,” Fraa Orolo said. He liked to call the S#230;cular Power the Panjandrums. “And that is very difficult for us to make out. Obviously, I can’t make heads or tails of it. It is just the kind of thing for which the office of Warden Fendant was created, and I’m certain that Fraa Delrakhones is working the problem as we speak.”

“Could it lead to…you know…”

“A Sack? Local or general? I certainly don’t think that this is going to culminate in Number Four. Fraa Delrakhones would have heard rumblings from other Wardens Fendant. Even a local sack is most improbable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bit of roughhousing on Tenth Night; but that’s why we prepare for Apert by moving all of the stuff we really care about to the labyrinths.”

“You said to Quin that radical changes extramuros had twice culminated in Sacks,” I reminded him.

Fraa Orolo let a moment go by and said, “Yes?” Then, before I could go on, he put on the merry-fraa face that he used when he was trying to humor a chalk hall full of bored fids. “You’re not actually worrying about Number Four, are you?”

I murdered a carrot and said Diax’s Rake three times under my breath.

“Three Sacks-General in 3700 years is not bad,” he pointed out. “The statistics for the S#230;cular world are far more alarming.”

“I was worrying about it a little bit,” I said. “But that is not what I was going to ask before you went Kefedokhles on me.”

Orolo said nothing, perhaps because I was gripping a large knife. I was tired and testy. Earlier, I had punched in my sphere to make it a bushel basket and ventured into the tangles nearest the Cloister, only to find they’d already been stripped of produce. To find all the stuff we needed to make the stew, I’d had to cross the river and ransack some of the tangles between it and the wall.

I snatched a hard-earned carrot and aimed it at the sky. “You have only taught me of the stars,” I said. “History I have learned from others—mostly from Fraa Corlandin.”

“He probably told you that the Sacks were our fault,” said Orolo—using our, I noted, in a very elastic way, to mean every avout all the way back to Ma Cartas.

Sometimes, when I was chatting with Thistlehead, he would reach out and give me a little push on the collarbone, and just like that I’d be flailing my arms, aware that one more push would topple me. It was Lio’s charming way of letting me know that he had noticed I was standing in the wrong way, according to his books of Vale-lore. I thought it nonsense. But my body always seemed to agree with Fraa Lio, because it would over-react. Once, in trying to recover my balance, I had pulled a muscle deep in my back that had hurt for three weeks.

Fraa Orolo’s last sentence touched my mind in a similar way. And in a similar way, I over-reacted. My face flushed and my heart beat faster. It was just like the moment in a dialog when Thelenes has tricked his interlocutor into saying something stupid and is about to begin slicing him up like a carrot on a plank.

“Each Sack was followed by a reform, was it not?” I said.

“Let us Rake your sentence, and say that each Sack led to changes in the maths that are still observed to this day.”

That Fraa Orolo was now talking in this style confirmed that we were in dialog. The other fraas stopped peeling potatoes and chopping herbs, and gathered around to watch me get planed.

“All right, call them whatever you wish,” I said, and then snorted, because I knew I had left myself open; this was the equivalent of me falling on my arse after one little nudge from Fraa Lio. I should never have brought up Kefedokhles. I was going to pay for that.

I couldn’t stop myself from shooting a glance out the window. The kitchen faced south into an herb garden that filled most of the space between it and the closest of the tangles—the ones cultivated by the very oldest fraas and suurs, so that they wouldn’t have to walk very far to get their chores done. The roof on that side had a deep overhanging eave to prevent sun from shining in and making the kitchen even hotter than it already was. Suur Tulia and Suur Ala were sitting together in the shade of that eave, directly beneath the window, cutting up tires to make sandals. I didn’t want Tulia to hear me get planed because I had a crush on her, and I didn’t want Ala to hear it because she would enjoy it so much. Fortunately, they were explaining something to each other as usual, and had no idea what was happening in here.

“Call them whatever you wish? What a curious thing to say, Fid Erasmas,” Orolo said. “Let me see…may I call them carrots or floor-tiles?” Titters flew out from all around, like sparrows flushed from a belfry.

“No, Pa Orolo, it would not make sense to say that each Sack was followed by a carrot.”

“Why not, Fid Erasmas?”

“Because the word carrot has a meaning different from reform or change in the maths.”

“So because words have this remarkable property of possessing specific meanings, we must take care to use the correct ones? Is that a just statement of what you have said, or am I in error?”

“It is correct, Pa Orolo.”

“Perhaps some of the others, who have learned so much from the New Circle and the Reformed Old Faanians, have noted some error in this, and would like to correct us.” And, with the placid eye of a viper tasting the air, Fraa Orolo looked about at the half-dozen fids who had encircled us.

No one moved.

“Very well, no one here wishes to support the novel hypothesis of Saunt Proc. We may continue under the assumption that words mean things. What is the difference between saying that the Sacks were followed by reforms, and saying that they were followed by changes in the maths?”

“I suppose it has to do with the connotations of the word reform,” I said. For I had given up and was willing to let myself be planed, not because I liked it but because it was so unusual for Fraa Orolo to expose his views about anything other than stars and planets.

“Ah, perhaps you could elaborate on that, for I am not gifted with your faculty for words, Fid Erasmas, and would be chagrined if I failed to follow your argument.”

“Very well, Pa Orolo. To say that there were changes seems like a more Diaxan phrasing—raked clean of subjective emotional judgments—whereas, when we say reforms, it gives the feeling that something was wrong with how the maths were run before, and that—”

“We deserved to be sacked? The Panjandrums needed to come in and mend us?”

“When you put it that way, Pa Orolo, and in that tone of voice, you seem to suggest that the changes that were made, need not have been—that they were forced on us wrongly by the S#230;cular Power.” I stumbled over a few words, because I was excited. I had glimpsed a way to corner Orolo. For those reforms—those changes—were as fundamental to the maths as going to Provener every day, and he could hardly take a stand against them.

But Fraa Orolo only shook his head sadly, as if he could scarcely believe what thin gruel was being spooned out to us in the chalk halls. “You need to review the S#230;culum of Saunt Cartas.”

Avout who spent a lot of time peering through telescopes were known for taking an eccentric approach to the study of history, and so I did not laugh at this. A few of the others exchanged smirks.

“Pa Orolo, I read it last year.”

“What you read was probably selections from a translation into Middle Orth. Many of those translations were influenced by a sort of ur-Procian mentality that took hold during the Old Mathic Age, not long before the rise of the Mystagogues. You giggle, but it is obvious once you begin to notice it. Certain bits of it they translate poorly, because they are skittish about what it means; then, when they get around to choosing selections, they leave those bits out because they’re ashamed of them. Instead you should go to the effort of reading Cartas in the original. It is not as difficult to follow Old Orth as some would have you believe.”

“And when I do this, what shall I learn?”

“That in the very founding document of the mathic world, Saunt Cartas herself emphasizes that it is not an accommodation to the S#230;culum but a kind of opposition to it. A counterbalance.”

“The Concent-as-fortress mentality?” suggested one of the listeners—trying to bait Orolo.

“That is not a designation I love,” said Orolo, “but if I hold forth on that, the stew will never get made, and we’ll soon have two hundred and ninety-five hungry avout calling for our heads. Suffice it to say, Fid Erasmas, that Saunt Cartas would never have accepted the notion that the S#230;cular Power can or should ‘reform’ the maths. But she would have admitted that it does have the power to wreak changes on us.”

“I understand that some planning took place in the kitchen?”

“Believe me, it was not one for ink or even chalk.”

Fraa Corlandin, the FAE—First Among Equals—of the Order of the New Circle, had sat down across the table from me.

For the first nine and three-quarters years of my time at the Concent, he had ignored me, except in chalk hall where he was obliged to pay attention; lately he was acting as if we were friends. This was to be expected. With luck, thirty or forty new avout would be joining us at Apert. Even though they were not here yet, they seemed to surround us like ghosts, which made me seem older by contrast.

Not long after, if things went according to the usual pattern, the bells would signal the aut of Eliger, and all the Tenners would come together to watch me take a vow that would bind me to one order or another.

Eleven of my crop had been Collected—brought straight into the math from extramuros. The other twenty-one had joined the Unarian math first and spent at least a year under their Discipline before graduating to the Tenners; they tended to be a little bit older than us Collects. All Collection, and most graduation, happened during Apert. Though if a One-off showed exceptional promise, he or she could graduate early by passing through the labyrinth that connected the Unarian to the Decenarian math. But this had only happened three times while I’d been here. The full wiring diagram of how avout came here from extramuros and from small feeder maths in the region, and how they moved from one math to another, was complicated, and not really worth explaining. The upshot was that in order to maintain our nominal strength of three hundred, we Tenners would need to take in about forty new people at Apert. Some—we couldn’t know how many—would be graduating from the Unarian math. The balance would be made up by Collection, and by trolling through hospitals and shelters for abandoned newborns.

Once that was all done, I’d be facing a choice. Fraa Corlandin was sounding me out, perhaps even recruiting me, for the New Circle.

I had always been seen as a fid of Orolo and a few other Edharians who assisted him in his theorics. They spent whole days together in tiny chalk halls, and when they came out, I would go in and see their handwriting all tangled together on the slates—snarled skeins of equations and diagrams of which I understood perhaps one symbol in twenty. At this very moment, I was supposed to be working on a problem that Orolo had set for me: a photomnemonic tablet bearing an image of Saunt Tancred’s Nebula, from which I was supposed to answer certain questions about the formation of heavy nuclei in the cores of stars. Definitely not a New Circle kind of exercise. So why would the New Circle take it into their heads, now, that I might choose them at Eliger?

“Orolo is an impressive theorician,” Fraa Corlandin said. “I regret that I haven’t been suvined by him more.”

The flaw in this was obvious: odds were that Corlandin was going to spend sixty or seventy more years in the same math with Orolo. If he really meant what he said, why didn’t he simply pick up his stew-bowl and walk across the Refectory to Orolo’s table?

Fortunately my mouth was full of bread, and so I did not subject Fraa Corlandin to a withering blast of Thelenean analysis. Chewing my food gave me time to realize that he was just speaking polite nothings. Edharians never talked this way. Spending all my time around Edharians, I’d forgotten how to do it.

I tried to unlimber those parts of my mind that were used for polite conversation: probably a good thing to do anyway, on Apert eve. “I’m sure you could arrange to be suvined by Orolo, if you sat down near him and said something wrong.”

Fraa Corlandin chuckled at my joke. “I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the stars even to say something wrong.”

“Well, today for once he said something that wasn’t about stars.”

“That’s what I heard. Who could have guessed that our cosmographer was an enthusiast for dead languages?”

This entire sentence went by me—a little like when you are eating a slice of canned fruit and suddenly it slides down your throat before you’ve had a chance to chew it. Having finally got the hang of polite chitchat, I returned the favor of chuckling at his remark. But before I could really think about what he was saying, I noticed Lio and Jesry carrying their bowls to the kitchen. Two other fids stood, as though caught up in their wake, and followed them.

Following their glances, I noticed Grandsuur Tamura standing by the exit with her arms folded.

She reacted as if I had hit her with a spitball from across a crowded chalk hall, swiveling her head to strafe me with her eyes. I still had no idea what was going on, but I excused myself from Fraa Corlandin and carried my bowl into the kitchen. Seven of the other fids were there, hurriedly cleaning their bowls, but none of them knew any more than I did.

A few minutes later, all thirty-two fids and Grandsuur Tamura were together in Saunt Grod’s chalk hall, which was normally considered to hold eighteen. “Shall we move over to Saunt Venster where there’s more room?” suggested Suur Ala. She was the self-appointed boss of the bell-ringing team—and of everyone else in range of her searchlight eyes. Behind Ala’s back, people liked to say that, of all the current crop of fids, she was the most likely to end up being Warden Regulant.

Grandsuur Tamura pretended not to hear. She had lived here seventy-five years and well knew the sizes of the available halls. She must have chosen this one for a reason—probably, I realized, because no one could hide ignorance, or boredom, when we were packed in so tightly. There wasn’t room to make our spheres into stools, and so we kept them pilled up and tucked inside our bolts.

I noticed that some of the suurs were standing even closer together than was strictly necessary, and sniffling into one another’s shoulders. One of them was Tulia, whom I liked quite a bit. I was eighteen. Tulia was a bit younger. Lately I had dreamed of having a liaison with her once she had come of age. In general I looked at her more often than was strictly necessary. Sometimes she looked back. But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window depicted Saunt Grod and his research assistants being beaten with rubber hoses in the dungeons of some Praxic Age spy bureau and (c) Tulia had already spent something like a quarter of her life in this room, I reckoned that inspecting the window wasn’t really the point.

Dense though I am, I finally put it together that this was the last time that our crop of thirty-two fids would be gathered together, as such, in our lives. The girls with their preternatural ability for noticing such things were responding, the boys with our equally uncanny obtuseness were only affected inasmuch as the girls we fancied were crying.

Grandsuur Tamura was not doing this to be sentimental, though. “Our topic is the Iconographies and their origins,” she announced. “If I am satisfied that you know enough and that you understand the importance of what you know, then you shall be free to roam about extramuros during the ten days of Apert. Otherwise, you shall remain in the Cloister for your own safety. Fid Erasmas, what are the Iconographies and why do we concern ourselves with them?”

Why had Grandsuur Tamura directed the first question at me? Probably because I’d been transcribing those interviews with Fraa Orolo, and had an advantage over the others. I decided to frame my answer accordingly. “Well, the extras—”

“The S#230;culars,” Tamura corrected me.

“The S#230;culars know that we exist. They don’t know quite what to make of us. The truth is too complicated for them to keep in their heads. Instead of the truth, they have simplified representations—caricatures—of us. Those come and go, and have done since the days of Thelenes. But if you stand back and look at them, you see certain patterns that recur again and again, like, like—attractors in a chaotic system.”

“Spare me the poetry,” said Grandsuur Tamura with a roll of the eyes. There was a lot of tittering, and I had to force myself not to glance in Tulia’s direction.

I went on, “Well, long ago those patterns were identified and written down in a systematic way by avout who make a study of extramuros. They are called Iconographies. They are important because if we know which iconography a given extra—pardon me, a given S#230;cular—is carrying around in his head, we’ll have a good idea what they think of us and how they might react to us.”

Grandsuur Tamura gave no sign of whether she liked my answer or not. But she turned her eyes away from me, which was the most I could hope for. “Fid Ostabon,” she said, staring now at a twenty-one-year-old fraa with a ragged beard. “What is the Temnestrian Iconography?”

“It is the oldest,” he began.

“I didn’t ask how old it was.”

“It’s from an ancient comedy,” he tried.

“I didn’t ask where it was from.”

“The Temnestrian Iconography…” he rebegan.

“I know what it’s called. What is it?”

“It depicts us as clowns,” Fraa Ostabon said, a little brusquely. “But…clowns with a sinister aspect. It is a two-phase iconography: at the beginning, we are shown, say, prancing around with butterfly nets or looking at shapes in the clouds…”

“Talking to spiders,” someone put in. Then, when no reprimand came from Grandsuur Tamura, someone else said: “Reading books upside-down.” Another: “Putting our urine up in test tubes.”

“So at first it seems only comical,” said Fraa Ostabon, regaining the floor. “But then in the second phase, a dark side is shown—an impressionable youngster is seduced, a responsible mother lured into insanity, a political leader led into decisions that are pure folly.”

“It’s a way of blaming the degeneracy of society on us—making us the original degenerates,” said Grandsuur Tamura. “Its origins? Fid Dulien?”

“The Cloud-weaver, a satirical play by the Ethran playwright Temnestra that mocks Thelenes by name and that was used as evidence in his trial.”

“How to know if someone you meet is a subscriber to this iconography? Fid Olph?”

“Probably they will be civil as long as the conversation is limited to what they understand, but they’ll become strangely hostile if we begin speaking of abstractions…?”

“Abstractions?”

“Well…let’s say anything that comes to us from our mother Hylaea.”

“Level of dangerousness, on a scale of 1 to 10?”

“Given what happened to Thelenes, I’d say 10.”

Grandsuur Tamura didn’t favor the answer. “I can’t be too hard on you for over-estimating the risk, but—”

“Thelenes was executed in an orderly judicial proceeding by the S#230;cular Power—not a mob action,” volunteered Lio, “and mob actions are less predictable, thus, more difficult to defend against.”

“Very good,” said Grandsuur Tamura, obviously surprised to hear such a cogent answer coming from Lio. “So let us rate its level of danger as 8. Fid Halak, what is the origin of the Doxan Iconography?”

“A Praxic Age moving picture serial. An adventure drama about a military spaceship sent to a remote part of the galaxy to prevent hostile aliens from establishing hegemony, and marooned when their hyperdrive is damaged in an ambush. The captain of the ship was passionate, a hothead. His second-in-command was Dox, a theorician, brilliant, but unemotional and cold.”

“Fid Jesry, what does the Doxan Iconography say of us?”

“That we are useful to the S#230;cular Power. Our gifts are to be celebrated. But we are blinded, or crippled—take your pick—by, er…”

“By the very same qualities that make us useful,” said Fid Tulia. Which was why I couldn’t get her out of my mind: in a heartbeat, she could go from blubbering to being the cleverest person in the room.

“How to identify one who is under the influence of the Doxan Iconography? Fid Tulia, again?”

“They’ll be curious about our knowledge, impressed by us, but patronizing—certain that we must be subordinated to intuitive, common-sense leaders.”

“Danger level? Fid Branch?”

“I would put it very low. It is basically the situation we are living in anyway.”

This got a laugh, which Grandsuur Tamura didn’t like very much. “Fid Ala. What does the Yorran Iconography have in common with the Doxan?”

Suur Ala had to think for a minute before trying: “Also from a Praxic Age entertainment serial? But it was an illustrated book, wasn’t it?”

“Later they made moving pictures of it,” put in Fraa Lio.

Someone muttered a hint into Ala’s ear, and then she remembered everything. “Yes. Yorr is identified as a theorician, but if you see how he actually spends his time, he’s really more of a praxic. He has turned green from working with chemicals, and he has a tentacle sprouting from the back of his skull. Always wears a white laboratory smock. Criminally insane. Always has a scheme to take over the world.”

“Fraa Arsibalt, what iconography surrounds the Rhetors?”

He was so ready. “Fiendishly gifted at twisting words and confusing S#230;culars—or, what is worse, influencing them in ways so subtle they don’t even know it’s happening. They use Unarian maths to recruit and groom minions, whom they send out into the S#230;cular world to get influential positions as Burgers—but in truth they are all puppets of a Rhetor conspiracy.”

“Well, that one makes sense, anyway!” said Fid Olph.

Everyone looked at him to make out whether he was joking. He looked taken aback.

“Guess we know which order you’ll be signing up for!” said one irritated suur, who everyone knew was headed for the New Circle.

“Because he’s a Procian-hater? Or just because he’s socially inept?” said one of her companions in a low voice that was, however, clearly audible.

“That’s enough!” said Grandsuur Tamura. “The S#230;culars don’t know about the differences between our Orders and so all of us—not just the Procians—are equally vulnerable to the iconography that Fraa Arsibalt has just explained. Let’s move on.”

And so it went. The Muncostran Iconography: eccentric, lovable, disheveled theorician, absent-minded, means well. The Pendarthan: fraas as high-strung, nervous, meddling know-it-alls who simply don’t understand the realities; lacking physical courage, they always lose out to more masculine S#230;culars. The Klevan Iconography: theor as an awesomely wise elder statesman who can solve all the problems of the S#230;cular world. The Baudan Iconography: we are grossly cynical frauds living in luxury at the expense of the common man. The Penthabrian: we are guardians of ancient mystical secrets of the universe handed down to us by Cno#252;s himself, and all of our talk about theorics is just a smoke-screen to hide our true power from the unwashed multitude.

In all, there were a round dozen iconographies that Grandsuur Tamura wanted to talk about. I’d heard of all of them, but I hadn’t realized that there were so many until she made us sort through them one by one. Particularly interesting was the rating of their relative dangers. After much back-and-forth we concluded that the most dangerous of the lot was not the Yorran, as one might have expected, but rather the Moshianic, which was a hybrid of the Klevan and the Penthabrian: it held that we were going to emerge from the gates and bring enlightenment to the world and usher in a new age. It tended to peak every hundred or thousand years, as people got ready for the Centenarian or Millenarian gates to open. It was dangerous because it raised people’s expectations to the point of delirium, and drew many pilgrims and much attention.

Because of my work with Fraa Orolo, I knew that the Moshianic Iconography was ascendant, in the guise of the so-called Warden of Heaven. Our hierarchs had become aware of this, and the Warden Fendant had asked Grandsuur Tamura to lead us in this discussion.

In the end, she gave the whole crop permission to go extramuros during Apert, which surprised no one: the threat of locking us up had only been to make us pay heed.

The discussion had actually become quite interesting, and the only thing that ended it was the ringing of the curfew bell. It was part of our Discipline never to sleep two nights in a row in the same cell. Assignments were posted each evening on a slate in the refectory. We had to go back there to find out where we’d be sleeping and whom we’d be chumming with. So the entire group made its way out of the chalk hall and around the Cloister, chattering and laughing about Dox and Yorr and the other funny characters that the extras had dreamed up in an effort to make sense of us. Older fraas and suurs sat on the benches that faced into the Cloister, assembling sandals—normally our sort of job—and giving us dirty looks.

It was important that I not let any one of the sandal-makers catch my eye, so I looked elsewhere. I noticed Fraa Orolo emerging from one of the other chalk halls with a sheaf of leaves, cluttered with calculations, tucked under his arm. He started one way, then, seeing our crowd, turned into the garden instead, and headed off in the direction of the Mynster. This gave me a little twinge, for a certain tablet of Saunt Tancred’s Nebula was gathering dust on a table in a workroom up in the starhenge, holding down a couple of leaves stained with inconclusive notes and scratch-outs in my handwriting. Orolo would notice, and know I hadn’t worked on it in days.

A few minutes later I was in the cell that I was to share that night with two other fraas, wrapping myself up in my bolt and making my sphere a pillow. You might expect that, as I lay there trying to get to sleep, I’d be thinking about Apert or about the iconographies. But spying Fraa Orolo in the Cloister had put me in mind of the slippery sentence that Fraa Corlandin had spoken at dinner, and that I’d swallowed without tasting. Now it had become one of those unwelcome thoughts I didn’t know how to get rid of.

That’s what I heard, Fraa Corlandin had said. But my dialog with Orolo had taken place only an hour before dinner. Who among the spectators had run off to spread the story in the New Circle chapterhouse? Why did anyone care?

Until last year, Corlandin had been in a liaison with Suur Trestanas, also of the New Circle. Then one day the bells had rung to signal the aut of Regred, meaning that someone had made the decision to go into retirement. We had convened in the Mynster and the Primate had called out a name: that of our Warden Regulant. Despite all of the penance that this man had meted out to us over the years, we all felt sorrow as we sang the chants of the aut, for he’d been reasonable and wise.

Statho—the Primate—had then named Suur Trestanas the new Warden Regulant. It was a little bit of a surprise because she was young, but not controversial since everyone knew she was bright. She’d moved to the Primate’s Compound where she now had a cell to herself, and took her meals with the other hierarchs. But rumor had it that her liaison with Fraa Corlandin continued. Some avout, of a suspicious mindset, believed that the hierarchs had devices salted around the concent that enabled them to know what we were saying. Believing so was a fad that came and went depending on what people thought of the hierarchs at a given time. It had been on the rise since Suur Trestanas had been appointed Warden Regulant. It was impossible for me not to think of it now. Perhaps she had listened to my dialog with Orolo and then passed it on to Corlandin.

On the other hand (said the part of my mind that pleaded with such thoughts to go away), I had to admit that I myself had thought it strange that Orolo would suddenly take an interest in Old Orth translation errors.

Who could have guessed that our cosmographer was an enthusiast for dead languages? Well, enthusiast was one of those unkillable words that had passed almost unchanged from Proto-Orth all the way up into Fluccish. In Fluccish—which was how I assumed, at first, Corlandin had used it—it simply meant one who liked something. The Proto-Orth meaning, however, was not a very complimentary one to hang on a fraa, especially a theorician like Orolo. And dead languages too was an interesting choice of words. Was it really dead if Orolo was reading it? And if Orolo was right about the translations, then by calling the original “dead,” wasn’t Corlandin sort of making a point—and doing it in a sneaky way, without going to the effort of proving it?

After what seemed like hours of lying awake and worrying about this, I had the upsight that the things Fraa Orolo said—even when they caused me embarrassment or outright pain—never made me wrestle with my bolt in the night-time in the way that these words from Fraa Corlandin had. This made me think I’d rather join the Edharians.

If, that is, the Edharians would have me. I was not so confident that they would. I’d never been as quick to grasp pure theorics as some of the other fids. This must have been noticed. I wondered: why had Grandsuur Tamura asked me the first, and easiest, question? Was it because she didn’t think I could handle anything more difficult? Why did Orolo have me working as an amanuensis instead of doing theorics? Why was Corlandin now trying to recruit me? Putting it all together, I came to the conclusion that everyone knew I just wasn’t fit to join the Edharian order, and some were trying to prepare a soft landing for me.