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

Part 2
APERT

The last night of 3689 I dreamed that something was troubling Fraa Orolo, and that everyone had noticed, but on no account would he or anyone else speak of it openly. So it was a mystery. And yet everyone knew what it was: the planets were deviating from their courses, and the clock was wrong. For part of the clock was an orrery: a mechanical model of the solar system that displayed the current positions of the planets and many of their moons. It was in the narthex or lobby between the Day Gate and the north nave. It had been exactly correct for thirty-four centuries, but now it had gone out of whack. The marble, crystal, steel, and lapis spheres that represented the planets had moved to positions that were at odds with what Fraa Orolo could plainly see even in the smallest of telescopes. Never mentioned in the dream, but understood by me, was that the problem must have something to do with the Ita, because the orrery was one of the systems driven by the devices that they tended in the vaulted cavern beneath the floor of the Mynster.

The same system, it was rumored, effected subtle corrections to the rate of the main clock. If the error down in the cellar were not fixed, it would lead to greater errors that would be obvious to all, such as the bells chiming midday when the sun was not at its zenith, or the Day Gate opening before or after sunrise.

In a universe governed by the usual logic, those errors would have cropped up later than the tiny discrepancies between the orrery and the planets. But in dream-logic, it all happened at the same time, so that I was wondering what was troubling Fraa Orolo even as I saw the orrery show the phase of the moon wrong, which happened at the same time as burgers were wandering in through the Day Gate at midnight. But for some reason, none of those errors troubled me as much as the sounds emanating from the belfry: the bells ringing the wrong changes…

I opened my eyes to hear Apert ringing. Or so the other fraas in my cell speculated. There was no way of telling unless you listened carefully for a few minutes. The belfry movement could play fixed tunes, for example to chime the hours. But to announce auts and other events, our team of ringers would disengage that mechanism and ring changes, or permutations of tones. There was a pattern or code in them that we were taught to understand. This was supposedly so that messages could be cast to a sprawling concent without the people extramuros knowing what was being said.

Not that there was anything secret about Apert. This was the first day of 3690; therefore, not only the Day Gate but the Unarian and Decenarian Gates would open at sunrise. Any extra who glanced at a calendar knew this perfectly well, and so did we. But for some reason none of us would get out of bed and act upon it until we heard the right sequence of tones ring out from the belfry: a melody reversed, flipped upside-down, and turned back on itself in a particular way.

We sat up, three naked fraas in a cold cell with our bolts and chords and spheres all disheveled on the pallets. Such a day called for a formal wrap, which was difficult to manage alone. Fraa Holbane’s feet had touched the floor first, so I leaned over and rummaged through his warm, stirred-up bolt until my fingers felt the fraying end, which I drew toward me. Fraa Arsibalt, the third one in the cell, was the last to wake up; after some strong language from me and Holbane, he finally took up the selvage end. We went out into the corridor and stretched it between us. Fraa Holbane had made it short, thick, and fuzzy for warmth.

Arsibalt and I pleated Holbane’s bolt and then backed away from each other as Holbane made it three times as long and much thinner. Chord wadded in his hand, he crawled under it and then stood so that it was tented over his left shoulder. Then all he had to do was swivel this way and that, and raise and lower his arms at the right times, while Arsibalt and I moved about him, like planets in an orrery, winding the bolt, spreading or bunching pleats as necessary. The finished wrap was notoriously unstable, so we held it in place for a minute while Holbane passed his chord over it in several places and tied a few important knots. Then he was free to partner with Arsibalt in getting my bolt around me. Finally, Holbane and I did it for Arsibalt. Arsibalt always liked to go last, so that he would get the best results. Not that he was vain. On the contrary, of all of our crop, he seemed best suited to live in a math. He was big and portly, and kept trying to grow a beard so that he could look more like the old fraa that he was destined to be. But unlike, say, Fraa Lio, who invented new wraps all the time, Arsibalt insisted on having it done right.

When we were all clothed, we spent a few more minutes making extra passes with our chords and shaping the pleats that hooded our heads: just about the only part of this wrap where it was possible to show any individual style.

Completed sandals were heaped on the ground next to the exit of the cell-house. I kicked through them looking for a pair big enough for my feet. The Discipline had been created by people who lived in warm places. It allowed each of the avout to own a bolt, a chord, and a sphere, but it said nothing about footwear. That didn’t trouble us much during the summer. But the weather was getting ready to turn cold. And during Apert we might go extramuros and walk on city streets with broken glass and other hazards. We stretched the Discipline a little bit, wearing tire sandals during Apert and soft-soled mukluks during the winter months. The avout of Saunt Edhar had been doing this for a long time now and the Inquisition hadn’t come down on us yet, so it seemed that we were safe. I made a pair of sandals mine, and tied them onto my feet.

Finally, each of us took his sphere and made it fist-sized. As we strolled in the direction of the Mynster, we passed the knotted ends of our chords around these, weaving simple nets to entrap them, then made the spheres inhale and swell to draw the chords taut. Each of us then made his sphere glow with a soft scarlet light. The light was so that we could see where we were going and the color was to mark ourselves as Tenners, which was necessary since before long we’d be mixed up with One-offs.

When all of these preparations were finished, the sphere dangled from the right hip and swung against the thigh, which looked fascinating when a couple of hundred of us were converging on the Mynster in the dark. If you wanted to look like a real Saunt in a statue, you could cup the glowing sphere in one hand and stroke it with the other while staring off into the distance as though mesmerized by the Light of Cno#252;s.

Forty avout had risen earlier and gathered in the chancel. They were singing the processional of Decennial Apert as we came in. Woven into this chant was a melody I had not heard in ten years, or since I had stood inside the Decade Gate at sunrise and watched its stone-and-steel doors grind shut on everything I had ever known. To hear that melody now penetrated so deep into my brain that it literally threw me off balance, and I leaned into another fraa: Lio, who for once did not use it as an excuse to flip me over his hipbone and slam me to the ground, but rather pushed me back up straight, as if I were a crooked ikon, and turned his attention back to the aut.

All of the music was synchronized to the clock, which served as metronome and conductor. It went on for another quarter of an hour: no reading, no homily, just music.

The sky was clear, and so at the moment of sunrise, light washed down the well from the quartz prism at the top of the starhenge. The music stopped. We extinguished our spheres. I had an impression that the light from above was emerald-colored at first, or perhaps that was a trick of my eyes; by the time I’d blinked once, it had gone the color of the back of your hand when you shine a light through it in a dark cell. There was an unbearable moment of stillness when we all feared that (as in my dream) the clock was wrong and nothing would happen.

Then the central weight began to drop. This happened every day at sunrise to open the Day Gate. But today it was the signal for everyone to crane their necks and look up to where the Pr#230;sidium’s pillars pierced the Mynster’s vault. We heard, then saw movement. It was happening! Two of the weights were descending, riding down their rails to open the Year Gate and the Decade Gate.

We all gasped and exclaimed and cheered and many of us had to wipe our eyes. I could even hear the Thousanders reacting to it behind their screen. The cube and the octahedron descended into plain view and everyone roared. We applauded them as if they were celebrities at an awards ceremony. As they neared the chancel floor we hushed, as if fearing that they might smash into the ground. But as they got closer they slowed, and finally crept to a halt only a hand’s-breadth above the floor. Then we all laughed.

In some ways this was ridiculous. The clock was but a mechanism. It had no choice at this moment but to let those weights drop. Yet to see it happen created a feeling that can’t be conveyed to one who was not there. The choir were supposed to break into polyphonic singing now, and they almost couldn’t. But the raggedness of their voices was a music of its own.

Outside, beneath the singing, I could hear the sound of running waters.

“There’s no right way to build a clock,” Fraa Corlandin used to say when he was teaching us modern (post-Reconstitution) history. This was his euphemistic way of saying that Saunt Edhar’s praxics had been a little bit crazy.

Our concent was nestled in the crook of a river where it dodged around one end of a range of rocky bluffs—the terminus of a mountain range that stretched for hundreds of miles to the northeast and whose glaciers and snowpacks formed the river’s headwaters. Just upstream was a series of cataracts. We could hear them at night if the slines weren’t making too much noise. Below them, the river, as though resting from all of the excitement, ran still and gentle for some distance, curving across a well-drained prairie. Part of that prairie, and a mile and a half of the river, were encompassed by our walls.

Up at the cataract, the river was easily bridged, and so a settlement tended to be there. During some eras it would grow and engulf our walls, and office workers in skyscrapers would gaze down on the tops of our bastions. At other times it would ebb and recede to a tiny fueling-station or gun emplacement at the river crossing. Our stretch of the river was hazardous with rust-eaten girders and lumps of moss-covered synthetic stone, the remains of bridges that had been raised at that crossing and, in later ages, collapsed and washed downstream.

Most of our land and almost all of our buildings were on the inside of the riverbend, but we had claimed a strip on the far bank and built our fortifications there: walls parallel to the river where it ran straight, bastions where it bent. Three of those bastions housed gates, one each for the Unarian, Decenarian, and Centenarian maths (the Millenarian Gate was up on the mountain and worked differently). Each gate was a pair of doors, supposed to swing open and closed at certain times. This had posed a problem for the praxics, in that the gates were situated far away, and on the opposite side of a river, from the clock that was supposed to command the opening.

The praxics had done it with water power. Far outside of our walls, upstream of the cataract—therefore, at an altitude well above our heads—they had carved a pool, like an open cistern, out of the river’s stony course, and made it feed an aqueduct that cut due south toward the Mynster, bypassing the cataract, the bridge, and the bend. After rushing through a short tunnel and loping on stone stilts across half a mile of broken terrain, this dove into the ground and became a buried pipe that passed beneath what was now a settled neighborhood of burgers. The water in that pipe, pressurized by gravity, erupted in a pair of fountains from the pond that lay just outside of the Day Gate. A causeway ran across the middle of that pond, connecting the central square of the burgers’ town, at its northern end, to our Day Gate at its southern, and passing right between those two fountains.

The elevation of the pond was still above that of the river and plain. Drains were plumbed into its bottom and throttled by monumental ball-valves of polished granite. One of them fed a series of ponds, canals, and fountains that beautified the Primate’s compound and, farther downstream, formed part of the barrier between the Unarian and the Decenarian maths. Three other drains were connected to systems of pipes, siphons, and aqueducts that ran out toward the Year, Decade, and Century Gates. Those systems were dry except at Apert. Now the clock’s descending weights had opened two valves and allowed water to rush from the pond to flood the Year and Decade systems.

In some ways maybe this was a crazy and ramshackle way to do it, but there was one advantage that wasn’t obvious to me until that day. The waterworks had been designed to fill up slowly. So after the rite concluded, we were able to spill out of the Mynster and follow the water at a brisk walking pace as it charged an aqueduct that ran along beside the Seven Stairs, skirted the Cloister, and reached across the Back toward the river.

A stone bridge crossed the river there, anchored on the near bank by a round tower and on the far by a bastion in the concent’s outer wall. Within the round tower was a cistern, now being filled by water from the aqueduct, with a pitcher-lip poised above the petals of a water-wheel. Most of us reached it in time to see the cistern overflow and the wheel begin to turn, accepting energy from the water before exhausting it into the river. By stainless steel gears the wheel rotated a shaft, as thick as my thigh, that ran across the bridge (you might mistake it for a very stout railing if you didn’t know what it was for). Across the river, inside of the bastion, the shaft drove another set of gears that was connected directly to the hinge-pins around which the gates swung.

Hearing them move, we ran toward them, but slowed as we got closer, not knowing what was about to happen.

Well…actually, we had a pretty good idea. But I was still young enough that I could let myself forget about Diax’s Rake when I was in love with some idea. Orolo’s yarn about a math that floated freely in time, surfing on crosscurrents of Causal Domain Shear, had really stirred my emotions, and so for a few moments I let my imagination run away, and pretended that I lived in such a math and that I really had no idea what might be found outside its gates when they opened: Mobs of jumped-up slines rushing in with pitchforks or molotovs. Starving ones crawling in to worry potatoes out of the ground. Moshianic pilgrims expecting to see the face of some god or other. Corpses strewn to the horizon. Virgin wilderness. The most interesting moment was when the gap between the gates grew just wide enough to admit a single person. Who would it be? Male or female, old or young, carrying an assault rifle, a baby, a chest of gold, or a backpack bomb?

As the doors continued to open, we were able to make out perhaps thirty S#230;culars who had gathered to watch. Several were planted facing the gate, all sharing the same awkward stance; after a while I figured out that these were aiming speelycaptors at us, or holding up jeejahs to send feeds to people far away. A small child sat on her father’s shoulders, eating something; she was already bored, and wriggling to be let down; he bent and twisted at the hips and insisted through clenched teeth that she watch, just for another minute. Eight children in identical clothes stood in a row, watched over by a lady. These must have come from one of the Burgers’ suvins. A desolate woman, looking as though she’d survived a natural disaster that hadn’t touched anyone else, walked slowly toward the gate carrying a bundle that I suspected was a newborn infant. Half a dozen men and women were gathered around something that smoked. This artifact was surrounded by a loose revetment of large brightly colored boxes, on which some of them sat, the better to eat their enormous drooling sandwiches. Half-forgotten Fluccish words came to me: barbecue, cooler, cheesburg.

One man had planted himself in a disk of open space—or perhaps the others were just avoiding him—and was waving a banner on the end of a pole: the flag of the S#230;cular Power. His posture was defiant, triumphant. Another man shouted into a device that made his voice louder: some sort of a Deolater, I guessed, who wanted us to join his ark.

The first to enter were a man and woman dressed in the kinds of clothes that people wore extramuros to attend a wedding or make an important commercial transaction, and three children in miniature renditions of those clothes. The man was towing behind him a red wagon carrying a pot with a sapling growing out of it. Each of the children had a hand on the rim of the pot so that it wouldn’t topple as the wagon’s wheels felt their way over the cobbles. The woman, unencumbered, moved faster, but in a gait that looked all wrong until I recollected that women extramuros wore shoes that made them walk so. She was smiling but also wiping tears from her eyes. She headed straight for Grandsuur Ylma, whom she seemed to recognize, and began explaining that her father, who had died three years ago, had been a great supporter of the concent and liked to go in the Day Gate to attend lectures and read books. When he had died, his grandchildren had planted this tree, and now they hoped to see it transplanted to a suitable location on our grounds. Grandsuur Ylma said that that would be fine provided it was of the One Hundred Sixty-four. The Burger lady assured Ylma that, knowing our rules, they had gone to all sorts of trouble to make sure that this was so. Meanwhile, her husband was prowling around taking pictures of this conversation with a jeejah.

Seeing that we had not massacred the Burger family or inserted probes into their orifices, a young assistant to the man with the sound amplification device came in and began to approach us one by one, handing us leaves with writing on them. Unfortunately they were in Kinagrams and so we could not read them. We had been warned that it was best to accept such things politely and claim we would read them later—not engage such persons in Thelenean dialog.

This man noticed the desolate woman. Guessing that she meant to leave her baby with us, he began trying to talk her out of it in slangy Fluccish. She recoiled; then, understanding that she was probably safe, began cursing at him. Half a dozen suurs moved forward to surround her. The Deolater became furious and looked as if he might strike someone. I noticed Fraa Delrakhones for the first time, watching this fellow closely and making eye contact with several burly fraas who were moving closer to him. But then the man with the sound device chirped out a word that must have been the younger fellow’s name. Having got his attention, he looked up at the sky for a moment (“The Powers that Be are watching, idiot!”) then glared at him (“Simmer down and keep handing out the all-important literature!”).

A tall man was walking toward me: Artisan Quin. Next to him was a shorter copy of Quin, without the beard. “Bon Apert, Fraa Erasmas,” Quin said.

“Bon Apert, Artisan Quin,” I returned, and then looked at his son. His son was looking at my left foot. His gaze traveled quickly up to the top of my hood but did not catch or linger on my face, as if this were of no more note than a wrinkle in my bolt. “Bon—” I began, but he interrupted: “That bridge is built on the arch principle.”

“Barb, the fraa is wishing you Bon Apert,” said Quin, and held out his hand in my direction. But Barb actually reached out and pulled his father’s arm down—it was blocking his view of the bridge.

“The bridge has a catenary curve because of the vectors,” Barb went on.

“Catenary. That’s from the Orth word for—” I began.

“It’s from the Orth word for chain,” Barb announced. “It is the same curve that a hanging chain makes, flipped upside-down. But the driveshaft that opens the gates has to be straight. Unless it was made with newmatter.” His eyes found my sphere and studied it for a few moments. “But that can’t be, because the Concent of Saunt Edhar was built after the First Sack. So it must have been made with old matter.” His eyes went back to the driveshaft, which seemed to follow the arch of the bridge, passing through blocks of carved stone at regular intervals. “Those stone things must contain universal joints,” he concluded.

“That is correct,” I said. “The shaft—”

“The shaft is put together from eight straight pieces connected by universal joints hidden inside the bases of those statues. The base of a statue is called a plinth.” And Barb began to walk very fast; he was the first extra to cross over the bridge into our math. Quin gave me a look that was difficult to interpret, and hustled after him.

An altercation had flared up between the desolate woman and the suurs. Apparently, this woman had been told by some ignorant person that we’d give her money for the baby. The suurs had set her straight as gently as they knew how.

Several more extras had come in. A group of half a dozen, mostly men, all wearing clothes that were respectful, but not expensive. They had engaged a small group of mostly older avout. The foremost of the visitors was draped in a thick, gaudy-colored rope with a globe at the end. I reckoned he was the priest of some newfangled counter-Bazian ark. He was talking to Fraa Haligastreme: big, bald, burly, and bearded, looking as if he’d just stepped off the Periklyne after a brisk discussion of ontology with Thelenes. He was a theorical geologist, and the FAE of the Edharian chapter. He was listening politely, but kept throwing significant glances at a pair of purple-bolted hierarchs standing off to the side: Delrakhones, the Warden Fendant, and Statho, the Primate.

Circumventing this group, I passed in earshot of a side conversation. One of the women visitors had engaged Fraa Jesry. I put her age at about thirty, though the way that extramuros women did their hair and faces made it difficult to guess such things; on second thought, she was a dressed-up twenty-five. She was paying close attention to Jesry, asking him questions about life in the math.

After what seemed like a long time, I got Jesry’s attention. He politely told the woman that he had made arrangements to go extramuros with me. She looked at me, which I enjoyed. Then her jeejah spat out a burst of notes and she excused herself to take a call.

Jesry and I walked out for the first time in ten years.

The first thing I noticed was that people had leaned a lot of junk against the outside of our walls. Apparently some of it had even been leaned against the gates, but someone had cleared it off to the sides in preparation for Apert.

During this era, the neighborhood outside the Decade Gate was where artisans kept their shops, and so the stuff leaned against the walls tended to be lumber, pipes, reels of cable or tubing, and long-handled tools. We walked silently for a while, just looking. But sooner than you might think, we got used to it and forgot we were fraas.

“Do you think that woman wanted to have a liaison with you?” I asked.

“A—what do you call it—”

“An Atlanian Liaison.” Named after a Decenarian fraa of the Seventeenth Century A.R. who saw his true love for ten days every ten years and spent the rest of the time writing poems to her and sneaking them out of the math. They were really fine poems, carved in stone some places.

“Why do you think a woman would want that?” he wondered.

“Well, no risk of getting pregnant, when your partner is a fraa,” I pointed out.

“That might be important sometimes, but I think it’s easy for them to obtain contraception in this epoch.”

“I was kind of joking.”

“Oh. Sorry. Well…maybe she wants me for my mind.”

“Or your spiritual qualities.”

“Huh? You think she’s some kind of Deolater?”

“Didn’t you see who she was with?”

“Some sort of—who knows—a contingent, I think is what they call that.”

“Those were Warden of Heaven people, I’ll bet. Their leader was got up in a kind of imitation of a chord.”

We had gone far enough that the Decade Gate was lost to view around a curve. I glanced up at the Pr#230;sidium. The megaliths rising up from the perimeter of the starhenge served as compass points to help me establish my bearings. We had come to a larger road now, running roughly parallel to the river. If we crossed it and kept going, we’d climb into a neighborhood of big houses where burgers lived. If we followed it to the right, it would take us to the commerce district and we could eventually loop back in through the Day Gate. To the left, it ran out into the fauxburbs where I had spent my first eight years.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said, and turned left.

After we had gone a few paces, Jesry said “Again?” which was his annoying way of requesting clarification. “The Warden of Heaven?”

“Moshianics,” I said, and then spent a while telling him about Fraa Orolo’s interviews with Flec and Quin.

As we went along, the nature of the place changed: fewer workshops, more warehouses. Barges could navigate this stretch of the river and so it was where people tended to store things. We saw more vehicles now: a lot of drummons, which had up to a dozen wheels and were used for carrying large, heavy objects around districts like this. These looked the same as I remembered. A few fetches scurried around with smaller loads secured to their backs. These were more colorful. The men who owned them tended to be artisans, and it was clear that they spent a lot of time altering the vehicles’ shape and color, apparently for no reason other than to amuse themselves. Or maybe it was a kind of competition, like plumage on birds. Anyway, the styles had changed quite a bit, and so Jesry and I would stop talking and stare whenever a particularly strange or gaudy fetch went by. Their drivers stared right back at us.

“Well, I was oblivious to all that Warden of Heaven stuff,” Jesry concluded. “I’ve been very busy computing for Orolo’s group.”

“Why did you think Tamura was drilling us last night?” I asked.

“I didn’t think about it,” Jesry said. “All I can say is, it’s good you are around to be aware of all this. Have you considered—”

“Joining the New Circle? Angling to become a hierarch?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I don’t have to, because everyone else seems to be considering it for me.”

“Sorry, Raz!” he said, not really sounding sorry—more miffed that I had become miffed. He was hard to talk to, and sometimes I’d go months avoiding him. But slowly I’d learned it could be worth the aggravation.

“Forget it,” I said. “What have Orolo’s group been up to?”

“I’ve no idea, I just do the calculations. Orbital mechanics.”

“Theorical or—”

“Totally praxic.”

“You think they have found a planet around another star?”

“How could that be? For that, they have to collate information from other telescopes. And we haven’t gotten anything in ten years, obviously.”

“So it’s something nearer,” I said, “something that can be picked out with our telescopes.”

“It’s an asteroid,” Jesry said, fed up with my slow progress on the riddle.

“Is it the Big Nugget?”

“Orolo would be a lot more excited in that case.”

This was a very old joke. The Panjandrums had almost no use for us, but one of the few things that might change that would be the discovery of a large asteroid that was about to hit Arbre. In 1107 it had almost happened. Thousands of avout had been brought together in a convox that had built a spaceship to go nudge it out of the way. But by the time the ship had been launched in 1115, the cosmographers had calculated that the rock would just miss us, and so it had turned into a study mission. The lab where they’d built the ship was now the concent of Saunt Rab, after the cosmographer who had discovered the rock.

To our right, the hill where the burgers lived had petered out. A tributary of the river cut across our path from that direction. The road crossed it on an ancient steel bridge, built, rusted, decayed, condemned, and pasted back together with newmatter. A dotted line, worn away to near invisibility, hinted to motorists that they might consider showing a little civility to pedestrians between the rightmost lane and the railing. It was a bit late for us to double back now, and we could see another pedestrian pushing a cart, piled high with polybags, so we hustled over as quickly as we could manage, trusting the drummons, fetches, and mobes not to strike us dead. To our left we could see the tributary winding through its floodplain toward the join with the main river a mile away. When I’d been younger, the angle between the two watercourses had been mostly trees and marsh, but it looked as though they had put up a levee to fend off high water and then shingled it with buildings: most obviously, a large roofless arena with thousands of empty seats.

“Shall we go watch a game?” Fraa Jesry asked. I couldn’t tell whether he was serious. Of all of us, he looked the most like an athlete. He didn’t play sports often, but when he did, he was determined and angry, and tended to do well even though he had few skills.

“I think you need money to get in.”

“Maybe we could sell some honey.”

“We don’t have any of that either. Maybe later in the week.”

Jesry did not seem very satisfied with my answer.

“It’s too early in the morning for them to be having a game,” I added.

A minute later he had a new proposal: “Let’s pick a fight with some slines.”

We were almost to the end of the bridge. We had just scurried out of the path of a fetch operated by a man about our age who drove it as if he had been chewing jumpweed, with one hand on the controls and the other pressing a jeejah to the side of his face. So we were physically excited, breathing rapidly, and the idea of getting into a fight seemed a tiny bit less stupid than it would have otherwise. I smiled, and considered it. Jesry and I were strong from winding the clock, and many of the extras were in terrible condition—I understood now what Quin had meant when he’d said that they were starving to death and dying from being too fat at the same time.

When I looked back at Jesry he scowled and turned his face away. He didn’t really want to get into a fight with slines.

We had entered into the fauxburb where I had come from. A whole block had been claimed by a building that looked like a megastore but was apparently some new counter-Bazian ark. In the lawn before it was a white statue, fifty feet high, of some bearded prophet holding up a lantern and a shovel.

The roadside ditches were full of jumpweed and slashberry poking up through sediments of discarded packaging. Beneath a grey film of congealed exhaust, faded Kinagrams fidgeted like maggots trapped in a garbage bag. The Kinagrams, the logos, the names of the snacks were new to me, but in essence it was all the same.

I knew now why Jesry was being such a jerk. “It’s disappointing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jesry said.

“All these years reading the Chronicles and hearing strange tales told every day at Provener…I guess it sort of…”

“Raised our expectations,” he said.

“Yeah.” Something occurred to me: “Did Orolo ever talk to you about the Ten-thousanders?”

“Causal Domain Shear and all that?” Jesry looked at me funny, surprised that Orolo had confided in me.

I nodded.

“That is a classic example of the crap they feed us to make it seem more exciting than it really is.” But I sensed Jesry had only just decided this; if Orolo was talking to all the fids about it, how special could it be?

“They’re not feeding us crap, Jesry. It’s just that we live in boring times.”

He tried a new tack: “It’s a recruiting strategy. Or, to be precise, a retention strategy.”

“What does that mean?”

“Our only entertainment is waiting for the next Apert—to see what’s out there when the gates open. When the answer turns out to be the same crap except dirtier and uglier, what can we do besides sign up for another ten years and see if it’s any different next time?”

“Or go in deeper.”

“Become a Hundreder? Haven’t you realized that’s worthless for us?”

“Because their next Apert is our next Apert,” I said.

“And then we die before the next one after that.”

“It’s not that rare to live to 130,” I demurred. Which only proved that I had done the same calculation in my head and come to the same conclusion as Jesry. He snorted.

“You and I were born too early to be Hundreders and too late to be Thousanders. A couple of years earlier and we might have been foundlings and gone straight to the crag.”

“In which case we’d both die before seeing an Apert,” I said. “Besides, I might have been a foundling, but from what you’ve said of your birth family, I don’t think you’d have.”

“We’ll see soon enough,” he said.

We covered a mile in silence. Even though we didn’t say anything, we were in dialog: a peregrin dialog, meaning two equals wandering around trying to work something out, as opposed to a suvinian dialog where a fid is being taught by a mentor, or a Periklynian dialog, which is combat. The road dovetailed into a larger one lined with the mass-produced businesses where slines obtained food and stuff, enlivened by casinos: windowless industrial cubes wrapped in colored light. Back in some day when there had been more vehicles, the full width of the right-of-way had been claimed by striped lanes. Now there were a lot of pedestrians and people getting around on scooters and wheeled planks and pedal-powered contraptions. But instead of going in straight lines they, and we, had to stitch together routes joining the pavement slabs that surrounded the businesses as the sea surrounds a chain of islands. The slabs were riven with meandering cracks marked by knife-thin hedges of jumpweed that had been straining dirt and wrappers out of the wind for a long time. The sun had gone behind clouds shortly after dawn but now it came out again. We ducked into the shade of a business that sold tires of different colors to young men who wanted to prettify their fetches and their souped-up mobes, and spent a minute rearranging our bolts to protect our heads.

“You want something,” I said. “You’re grumpy you don’t have it yet. I don’t think that what you want is stuff, because you’ve paid no attention at all to any of this.” I jerked my head at a display of iridescent newmatter tires. Moving pictures of naked women with distended breasts came and went on the sides of the wheels.

Jesry watched one of the moving pictures for a while, then shrugged. “I suppose I could leave, and learn to like such things. Frankly it seems pretty stupid. Maybe it helps if you eat what they eat.”

We moved on across the pavement-slab. “Look,” I said, “it’s been understood at least since the Praxic Age that if you have enough allswell floating around in your bloodstream, your brain will tell you in a hundred different ways that everything is all right-”

“And if you don’t, you end up like you and me,” he said.

I tried to become angry, then surrendered with a laugh. “All right,” I said, “let’s go with that. A minute ago, we passed a stand of blithe in the median strip—”

“I saw it too, and the one by the pre-owned-pornography store.”

“That one looked fresher. We could go pick it and eat it, and eventually the level of allswell in our blood would go up and we could live out here, or anywhere, and feel happy. Or we could go back to the concent and try to come by our happiness honestly.”

“You are so gullible,” he said.

“You’re supposed to be the Edharians’ golden boy,” I said, “you’re supposed to be the one who swallows this stuff without question. I’m surprised, frankly.”

“And what are you now, Raz? The cynical Procian?”

“So people seem to think.”

“Look,” Jesry said, “I see the older avout working hard. Those who have upsight—who are illuminated by the light of Cno#252;s”—he said this in a mocking tone; he was so frustrated that he veered and lunged in random ways as he moved from one thought to the next—“they do theorics. Those who aren’t so gifted fall back, and cut stone or keep bees. The really miserable ones leave, or throw themselves off the Mynster. Those who remain seem happy, whatever that means.”

“Certainly happier than the people out here.”

“I disagree,” Jesry said. “These people are as happy as, say, Fraa Orolo. They get what they want: naked ladies on their wheels. He gets what he wants: upsight to the mysteries of the universe.”

“Let’s get down to it then: what do you want?”

“Something to happen,” he said, “I almost don’t care what.”

“If you made a great advance in theorics, would that count?”

“Sure, but what are the odds I’ll do that?”

“It depends on the givens coming in from the observatories.”

“Right. So it’s out of my control. What do I do in the meantime?”

“Study theorics, which you’re so good at. Drink beer. Have Tivian liaisons with as many suurs as you can talk into it. Why is that so bad?”

He was devoting way too much attention to kicking a stone ahead of him, watching it bound across the pavement. “I keep looking at the shrimpy guys in the stained-glass windows,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You know. In the windows depicting the Saunts. The Saunts themselves, they’re always shown big. They fill most of the window. But if you look close, you can see tiny little figures in bolts and chords—”

“Huddled around their knees,” I said.

“Yeah. Looking up at the Saunt adoringly. The helpers. The fids. The second-raters who proved a lemma or read a draft somewhere along the way. No one knows their names, except maybe the cranky old fraa who takes care of that one window.”

“You don’t want to end up as a knee-hugger,” I said.

“That is correct. How does that work? Why some, but not others?”

“So, you want a window all to yourself?”

“It’d mean that something interesting happened to me,” he said, “something more interesting than this.”

“And if it came to a choice between that, and having enough allswell in your blood?”

He thought about that as we waited for a huge, articulated drummon to back out of our way.

“Finally you ask an interesting question,” he said.

And after that, he was quite a pleasant companion.

Half an hour later I pronounced us lost. Jesry accepted it with pleasure, as if this were more satisfactory than being found.

A boxy vehicle rolled past. “That is the third coach full of children that has gone by us recently,” Jesry pointed out. “Did you have a suvin in your neighborhood?”

“Places like this don’t have suvins,” I reminded him. “They have stabils.”

“Oh yes. That comes from—it’s an old Fluccish word—uh, cultural…”

“Stabilization Centers. But don’t say that because no one has called them that in something like three thousand years.”

“Right. Stabils it is.”

We turned where the coaches turned. For the next minute or so, things were fragile between us. Inside the math, it didn’t matter that he had come from burgers and I had come from slines. But as soon as we had stepped out of the Decade Gate, this fact had been released, like a bubble of swamp gas deep in dark water. Invisibly it had been rising and expanding ever since, and had just now erupted in a great, flaming, stinking belch.

My old stabil looked, in my eyes, like a half-scale reproduction of itself thrown together by a sloppy modelmaker. Some of the rooms had been boarded up. In my day they’d been crowded. So that confirmed that the population was declining. Perhaps by the time I was a grandfraa there would be a young forest here.

An empty coach pulled out of the drive. Before the next drew up to take its place, I glimpsed a crowd of youngsters staggering under huge backpacks into a canyon of raucously colored light: a breezeway lined with machines dispensing snacks, drinks, and attention-getting noises. From there they would carry their breakfasts into rooms, which Jesry and I could see through windows: in some, the children all watched the same program on a single large screen, in others each had his or her own panel. To one end, the blank wall of the gymnasium was booming with low-frequency rhythms of a sports program. I recognized the beat. It was the same one they had used when I was there.

Jesry and I had not seen moving pictures in ten years and so we stood there for a few minutes, hypnotized. But I had got my bearings now, and once I had nudged Jesry back into motion, I was able to lead us down the streets I had wandered as a boy. People here were as keen to modify their houses as their vehicles, and so when I did recognize a dwelling, it would have a new, freestanding roof lofted above the old one, or new modules plugged and pasted onto the ones I saw when I dreamed about the place. But I was helped by the fact that the neighborhood was half the size of what I remembered.

We found where I’d lived before I was Collected: two shelter modules joined into an L, another L of wire mesh completing a weedy cloister that housed one dead mobe and two dead fetches, the oldest of which I had personally helped set up on blocks. The gate was decorated with four different signs of varying ages promising to kill anyone who entered, which, to me, seemed much less intimidating than a single sign would’ve. A baby tree, about as long as my forearm, had sprouted from a clogged raingutter. Its seed must have been carried there by wind or a bird. I wondered how long it would take to grow to a size where it would tear the gutter clean off. Inside, a loud moving picture was showing on a speely, so we had to do a lot of hallooing and gate-rattling before someone emerged: a woman of about twenty. She’d have been a Big Girl to me when I’d been eight. I tried to remember the Big Girl’s names.

“Leeya?”

“She moved away when those guys left,” the woman explained, as if hooded men came to her door every day incanting the names of long-lost relations. She glanced back over her shoulder to watch a fiery explosion on the speely. As the sound of the explosion died away we could hear a man’s voice demanding something. She explained to him what she was doing. He didn’t quite follow her explanation, so she repeated the same words more loudly.

“I infer that some kind of factional schism has taken place within your family while you were gone,” Jesry said. I wanted to slug him. But when I looked at his face I saw he wasn’t trying to be clever.

The woman turned to look at us again. I was peering at her through an aperture between two signs that were threatening to kill me, and I wasn’t certain that she could see my face.

“I used to be named Vit,” I said.

“The boy who went to the clock. I remember you. How’s it going?”

“Fine. How are you?”

“Keeping it casual. Your mama isn’t here. She moved.”

“Far away?”

She rolled her eyes, vexed that I had leaned on her to make such a judgment. “Farther than you can probably walk.” The man inside yelled again. She was obliged to turn her back on us again and summarize her activities.

“Apparently she does not subscribe to the Dravicular Iconography,” Jesry said.

“How do you figure?”

“She said you went to the clock. Voluntarily. Not that you were taken by or abducted by the avout.”

The woman turned to face us again.

“I had an older sib named Cord,” I said. I nodded at the oldest of the broken fetches. “Former owner of that. I helped put it there.”

The woman had complex opinions of Cord, which she let us know by causing several emotions to ripple across her face. She ended by exhaling sharply, dropping her shoulders, setting her chin, and putting on a smile that I guessed was meant to be obviously fake. “Cord works all the time on stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

This question was even more exasperating to her than my earlier “Far away?” She looked pointedly at the moving picture.

“Where should I look?” I tried.

She shrugged. “You passed it on the way probably.” And she mentioned a place that we had in fact passed, shortly after leaving the Decade Gate. Then she took a step back inside, because the man in there was demanding an account of her recent doings. “Keep it casual,” she said, and waved, and disappeared from our view.

“Now I really want to meet Cord,” Jesry said.

“Me too. Let’s get out of here,” I said, and turned my back on the place—probably for the last time, as I didn’t imagine I’d come back at next Apert. Perhaps when I was seventy-eight years old. Reforestation was a surprisingly quick process.

“What’s a sib? Why do you use that word?”

“In some families, it’s not entirely clear how people are related.”

We walked faster and talked less, and got back across the bridge in very little time. Since the place where Cord worked was so close to the concent, we first went up into the burger neighborhood and found Jesry’s house.

When we’d gone out the Decade Gate, Jesry had been quiet and distracted for a few minutes before he had gone on his rant. Now I had an upsight, which was that he’d been expecting his family to be standing in front of the gate to meet him. So as we approached his old house I actually felt more anxious than I had when approaching mine. A porter let us in at the front gate and we kicked off our sandals so that the damp grass would clean and soothe our blasted feet. As we passed into the deep shade of the forested belt around the main residence, we threw back our hoods and slowed to enjoy the cool air.

No one was home except for a female servant whose Fluccish was difficult for us to make out. She seemed to expect us; she handed us a leaf, not from a leaf-tree such as we grew in the concent, but made by a machine. It seemed like an official document that had been stamped out on a press or generated by a syntactic device. At its head was yesterday’s date. But it was actually a personal note written to Jesry by his mother, using a machine to generate the neat rows of letters. She had written it in Orth with only a few errors (she didn’t understand how to use the subjunctive). It used terms with which we were not familiar, but the gist seemed to be that Jesry’s father had been doing a lot of work, far away, for some entity that was difficult to explain. But from the part of the world it was in, we knew it had to be some organ of the S#230;cular Power. Yesterday, she had with great reluctance and some tears gone to join him, because his career depended on her attending some kind of social event that was also difficult to explain. They had every intention of making it back for the banquet on Tenth Night, and they were bending every effort to round up Jesry’s three older brothers and two older sisters as well. In the meantime, she had baked him some cookies (which we already knew since the female servant had brought them out to us).

Jesry showed me around the house, which felt like a math, but with fewer people. There was even a fancy clock, which we spent a lot of time examining. We pulled down books from the shelves and got somewhat involved in them. Then the bells began to ring in the Bazian cathedral across the street, followed by the chimes in the fancy clock, and we realized that we could read books any day and sheepishly re-shelved them. After a while we ended up on the veranda eating the rest of the cookies. We looked at the cathedral. Bazian architecture was a cousin to Mathic, broad and rounded where ours was narrow and pointy. But this town was not nearly as important to the S#230;cular world as the Concent of Saunt Edhar was to the mathic world, so the cathedral looked puny compared to the Mynster.

“Do you feel happy yet?” Jesry joked, looking at the cookies.

“It takes two weeks,” I said, “that’s why Apert is only ten days long.”

We wandered out onto the lawn. Then we marched back out and headed down the hill.

Cord worked in a compound where everything was made of metal, which marked it as an ancient place—not quite as ancient as a place made of stone, but probably dating back to the middle of the Praxic Age when steel had become cheap and heat engines had begun to move about on rails. It was situated a quarter of a mile from the Century Gate on the end of a slip that had been dug from the river so that barges could penetrate into this neighborhood and connect to roads and rails. The property was a mess, but it drew a kind of majesty just from being huge and silent. It had been outlined by a fence twice my height made from sheets of corrugated steel anchored in earth or concrete, welded together, and braced against wind by old worn-out railroad rails, which seemed like overkill for a wind brace. In fact it was such conspicuous overkill that Jesry and I interrupted each other trying to be the first to point it out, and got into an argument about what it meant. Other parts of the perimeter were made of the steel boxes used later in the Praxic Age to enclose goods on ships and trains. Some of these were filled with dirt, others stuffed with scraps of metal so tangled and irregular that they looked organic. Some were organic because they had been colonized by slashberry. There was a lot of green and growing matter around the edges of the compound, but the center was a corral of pounded earth.

The main building was little more than a roof on stilts straddling the last two hundred feet of the canal. Its trusses were oversized to support a traveling crane with a great hook dangling from a rusty chain, each of whose links was as big as my head. We had seen this structure from the Mynster but never given much thought to it. Teed into its side was a high-roofed hall enclosed by proper walls of brick (below) and corrugated steel (above). Grafted to the side of that, down low, was a shelter module with all sorts of homey touches, such as a fake wood door and a farm-style weathervane, that looked crazy here. We knocked, waited, then pushed our way in. We made lots of noise, just in case this was another one of those places where visitors were put to death. But no one was there.

The module had been designed to serve as a home, but everything in it had been bent to serve the purposes of an office. So for example the shower stall was occupied by a tall cabinet where records were filed. A hole had been sawed into a wall so that little pipes could be routed to a hot-beverage machine. A freestanding urinal had been planted in the bedroom. The only decoration, other than those crazy-looking rustic touches that had shipped with the module, was oddly shaped pieces of metal—parts from machines, I reckoned—some of which had been bent or snapped in traumatic events we could only imagine.

A trail of oily bootprints led us to the back door. This opened straight into the cavernous hall. Both of us hunched our shoulders as we stepped over the threshold. We hesitated just inside. The place was too big to illuminate, so most of the light was natural, shining through translucent panels high up in the walls, each surrounded by a hazy nimbus. The walls and floors were dark with age, congealed smoke, and oil. More hooks and chains dangled from overhead beams. The light washing round these gave them a spindly, eroded look. The floor sprawled away into haze and shadow. Widely spaced around it were crouching masses, some no bigger than a man, others the size of a library. Each was built around a hill of metal: from a distance, smooth and rounded, from up close, rough, which led me to guess that these had been made in the ancient process of excavating molds from sand and pouring in a lake of molten iron. Where it mattered, the rough iron had been cut away to leave planes, holes, and right angles of bare grey metal: stubby feet by which the castings were bolted to the floor, or long V-shaped ways on which other castings could slide, driven by great screws. Huddled beside these things or crouching under them were architectures of wound copper wire, rife with symmetries, and, when they moved, brilliant with azure-tinged lightning. Tendrils of wire and of artfully bent tubing had grown over these machines like ivy exploring a boulder, and my eye followed them to concentrations where I was sometimes surprised to see a human being in a dark coverall. Sometimes these humans were doing something identifiable as work, but more often they were just thinking. The machines emitted noise from time to time, but for the most part it was quiet, pervaded by a low hum that came from warm resonating boxes strewn all round and fed by, or feeding, cables as thick as my ankle.

There were perhaps half a dozen humans in the entire place, but something in their posture made us not dare approach them. One came our way pushing a rusty cart exploding with wild helices of shaved metal.

“Excuse me,” I said, “is Cord here?”

The man turned and extended his hand toward something big and complicated that stood in the middle of the hall. Above it, the rational adrakhonic geometry of the roof-trusses and the infinitely more complex manifolds of swirling mist were magnified and made more than real by the sputtering blue light of electrical fire. If I saw a star of that color through a telescope, I would know it as a blue dwarf and I could guess its temperature: far hotter than our sun, hot enough that much of its energy was radiated as ultraviolet light and X-rays. But, paradoxically, the house-sized complex that was the source of the energy looked orange-red, with only a fringe of the killing radiance leaking out round edges or bouncing from slick places on the floor. As Jesry and I drew closer, we perceived it as a giant cube of red amber with two black forms trapped in it: not insects but humans. The humans shifted position from time to time, their silhouettes rippling and twisting.

We saw that this machine had been robed in a curtain of some red jelly-like matter suspended from an overhead track. The blue light could blast straight up and kill germs in the rafters but it could not range across the floor and blind people. Obviously to me and Jesry, the curtain was red because it had been formulated to let only low-energy light—which our eyes saw as red—pass through it. To high-energy light—which we saw as blue, if we could see it at all—it was as opaque as a steel plate.

We walked around the perimeter, which was about the size of two small shelter modules parked side by side. Through the red jelly-wall it was difficult to resolve fine details of the machine, but it seemed to have a slab-like table, big enough to sleep ten, that eased to and fro like a block of ice on a griddle. Planted in its center was a smaller, circular table that made quick but measured spins and tilts. Suspended above all of this, from a cast-iron bridge, was a mighty construct that moved up and down, and that carried the spark-gap where the light was born.

An arm of tubular steel was thrust forth from the apex of the bridge toward a platform where the two humans stood. Pendant from its end was a box folded together from sheet metal, which looked out of place; it was of a different order of things from the sand-cast iron. Glowing numbers were all over it. It must be full of syntactic processors that measured what the machine was doing, or controlled it. Or both; for a true syntactic processor would have the power to make decisions based on measurements. Of course my thought was to turn away and get out of the room. But Jesry was rapt. “It’s okay, it’s Apert!” he said, and grabbed my arm to turn me back around.

One of the two humans inside said something about the x-axis. Jesry and I looked at each other in astonishment, just to be sure we’d actually heard such a thing. It was like hearing a fry cook speak Middle Orth.

Other fragments came through above the sputtering of the machine: “Cubic spline.” “Evolute.” “Pylanic interpolation.”

We could not keep our eyes off the banks of red numbers on the front of the syntactic processor. They were always changing. One was a clock counting down in hundredths of a second. Others—as we gradually perceived—reflected the position of the table. They were literal transcriptions of the great table’s x and y position, the angles of rotation and tilt of the smaller table in the middle, and the altitude of the sizzling blaster. Sometimes all would freeze except for one—this signaled a simple linear move. Other times they would all change at once, realizing a system of parametric equations.

Jesry and I watched it for half an hour without speaking another word. Mostly I was trying to make sense of how the numbers changed. But also I was thinking of how this place was similar in many respects to the Mynster with its sacred clock in the center, in its well of light.

Then the clock struck, as it were. The countdown stopped at zero and the light went out.

Cord reached up and threw back the curtain. She peeled off a pair of black goggles, and raised one arm to wipe her brow on her sleeve.

The man standing next to her—who I gathered was the customer—was dressed in loose black trousers and a black long-sleeved pullover, with a black skullcap on his head. Jesry and I realized at the same moment what he was. We were dumbstruck.

Likewise, the Ita saw what we were, and took half a step back. His long black beard avalanched down his chest as his mouth fell open. But then he did something remarkable, which was that he mastered the reflex to cringe and scuttle away from us, which had been drilled into him since birth. He thought better of that half-step back. He resumed his former stance, and—hard to believe, but Jesry and I agreed on this later—glared at us.

Not knowing how to handle this, Jesry and I backed away and stood out of earshot while Cord did one small quick necessary chore after another, celebrating some aut of shutting down the machine and making it ready for re-use.

The Ita peeled off his skullcap—which was how they covered their heads when they were among their own kind—and drew it out into the slightly mushroomed stovepipe that they wore when they were out and about so that we could identify them from a distance. He then set this back on his head while sending another defiant look our way.

Just as we would never let the Ita come into the chancel, he saw it as sacrilege that we would come here. As if we were guilty of a profanation.

Perhaps obeying a similar impulse, Jesry and I hooded ourselves.

It was almost as if, far from chafing under the stereotype of the sneaky, scheming, villainous Ita, this one was embracing it—taking pride in it, and pushing it as far as he could without actually talking to us.

As we waited for Cord and the Ita to conclude their business, I kept thinking of all the ways that this place was similar to the Mynster: for example, how I had been taken aback when I’d stepped into the hall, so dark and so light at the same time. A voice in my head—the voice of a Procian pedant—admonished me that this was a Halikaarnian way of thinking. For in truth I was looking at a collection of ancient machines that had no meaning: all syntax, no semantics. I was claiming I saw a meaning in it. But this meaning had no reality, outside of my mind. I had brought it into the hall with me, carrying it in my head, and now I was playing games with semantics by pasting it onto these iron monuments.

But the longer I thought about it, the more certain I became that I was having a legitimate upsight.

Protas, the greatest fid of Thelenes, had climbed to the top of a mountain near Ethras and looked down upon the plain that nourished the city-state and observed the shadows of the clouds, and compared their shapes. He had had his famous upsight that while the shapes of the shadows undeniably answered to those of the clouds, the latter were infinitely more complex and more perfectly realized than the former, which were distorted not only by the loss of a spatial dimension but also by being projected onto terrain that was of irregular shape. Hiking back down, he had extended that upsight by noting that the mountain seemed to have a different shape every time he turned round to look back at it, even though he knew it had but one absolute form and that these seeming changes were mere figments of his shifting point of view. From there he had moved on to his greatest upsight of all, which was that these two observations—the one concerning the clouds, the other concerning the mountain—were themselves both shadows cast into his mind by the same greater, unifying idea. Returning to the Periklyne he had proclaimed his doctrine that all the things we thought we knew were shadows of more perfect things in a higher world. This had become the essential doctrine of Protism. If Protas could be respected for saying so, then what was wrong with me thinking that our Mynster, and this machine hall, were both shadows of some higher thing that existed elsewhere—a sacred place of which they were both shadows, and that cast other shadows in such places as Bazian arks and groves of ancient trees?

Jesry meanwhile had been staring at Cord’s machine. Cord had manipulated some controls that had caused the lightning-head to retract as far up as it would go and the table to thrust itself forward. She vaulted up onto that steel slab. In small premeditated steps she came to the part of it that tilted and rotated (which, by itself, was a machine of impressive size). Before resting her weight on a foot she would wiggle it to and fro, scattering shards and twists of silver metal to either side. They made glinting music as they found their way to the floor, and some left corkscrews of fine smoke along their paths. A helper approached with an empty cart, a broom, and a shovel, and began pushing the scraps into a pile.

“It carves the metal from a block,” Jesry said. “Not with a blade but with an electrical discharge that melts the stuff away—”

“More than melts. Remember the color of the light?” I said. “It turns the metal to—”

“Plasma,” we said in unison, and Jesry went on: “It just carves off all the bits that aren’t wanted.”

This raised the question of what was wanted? The answer was clamped to the top of the rotating table: a sculpture of silver metal, flowing and curved like an antler, swelling in places to knobs pierced by perfect cylindrical holes. Cord drew a wrench from the thing she was wearing, which seemed more harness than garment, as its chief purpose was to secure tools to her body. She released three vises, put the wrench back in its ordained pocket, threw back her shoulders, bent her knees, made her spine long, raised her hands, and clasped them around two prongs of this thing she had made. It came up off the table. She carried it down off the machine as if it were a cat rescued from a tree and set it upon a steel cart that looked older than a mountain. The Ita ran his hands over it. His tall hat turned this way and that as he bent to inspect certain details. Then he nodded and exchanged a few words with Cord and pushed the cart off into smoke and quiet.

“It’s a part for the clock!” Jesry said. “Something must have broken or worn out down in the cellar!”

I agreed that the style of the thing reminded me of some parts of the clock, but I shushed him because I was more interested in Cord just now. She was walking toward us, almost but not quite stepping on strewn shards of metal, wiping her hands on a rag. Her hair was cut short. I thought at first that she was tall, perhaps because that was how I remembered her. In truth she was no taller than I. She seemed stocky with all that hardware strapped to her, but her neck and forearms were firm. She drew to within a couple of paces and clanked to a stop and planted herself. She had a quite solid and deliberate manner of standing. She seemed as though she could sleep standing up, like a horse.

“I guess I know who you are,” she said to me, “but what is your name?”

“Erasmas, now.”

“Is that the name of an old Saunt?”

“That’s right.”

“I never did get that old fetch to run.”

“I know. I just saw it.”

“Took part of it here, to be machined, and never left.” She gazed at the palm of her right hand, then looked up at me. I understood this to mean “my hand is dirty but I will shake it if you please.”

I extended my hand and clasped hers.

The sound of bells drifted in.

“Thank you for letting us see your machine,” I said. “Would you care to see ours? That’s Provener. Jesry and I have to go wind the clock.”

“I went to Provener one time.”

“Today, you can see it from where we see it. Bon Apert.”

“Bon Apert,” she returned. “Okay, what the heck, I’ll come see it.”

We had to run across the meadow. Cord had left her big tool-harness behind at the machine hall, only to reveal a smaller, vestlike one that I guessed held the stuff she’d not be without under any circumstances. When we broke into a run, she clanked and jounced for a few paces until she cinched down some straps, and then she was able to keep pace with us as we rushed through the clover. Our meadow had been colonized by S#230;culars who were having midday picnics. Some were even grilling meat. They watched us run by as if our being late were a performance for their amusement. Children were chivvied forward for a better view. Adults trained speelycaptors on us and laughed out loud to see us caring so much.

We came in the meadow door, ran up stairs into a wardroom where stacks of dusty pews and altars were shoved against the walls, and nearly tripped over Lio and Arsibalt. Lio was sitting on the floor with his legs doubled under him. Arsibalt sat on a short bench, knees far apart, leaning forward so that the blood streaming from his nostrils would puddle neatly on the floor.

Lio’s lip was puffy and bleeding. The flesh around his left eye was ochre, suggesting it would be black tomorrow. He was staring into a dim corner of the room. Arsibalt let out a shuddering moan, as if he’d been sobbing, and was just now managing it.

“Fight?” I asked.

Lio nodded.

“Between the two of you or—”

Lio shook his head.

“We were set upon!” Arsibalt proclaimed, shouting at his blood-puddle.

“Intra or extra?” Jesry demanded.

“Extramuros. We were en route to my pater’s basilica. I wished only to learn whether he would speak to me. A vehicle drove by once, twice, thrice. It circled us like a lowering raptor. Four men emerged. One had his arm in a sling; he looked on and cheered the other three.”

Jesry and I both looked at Lio, who took our meaning immediately.

“Useless. Useless,” he said.

“What was useless?” Cord asked. The sound of her voice caused Arsibalt to look up.

Lio was not the sort to care that we had a visitor—but he did answer her question. “My vlor. All of the Vale-lore I have ever studied.”

“It can’t have been that bad!” Jesry exclaimed. Which was funny since, over the years, no one had been more persistent than Jesry in telling Lio how useless his vlor was.

By way of an answer Lio rolled to his feet, glided over, grasped the edge of Jesry’s hood, and yanked it down over his face. Not only was Jesry now blind, but because of how the bolt was wound around his body, it interfered with his arms and made it surprisingly difficult for him to expose his face again. Lio gave him the tiniest of nudges and he lost his balance so badly that I had to hug him and force him upright.

“That’s what they did to you?” I asked. Lio nodded.

“Tilt your head back, not forward,” Cord was saying to Arsibalt. “There’s a vein up here.” She pointed to the bridge of her nose. “Pinch it. That’s right. My name is Cord, I am a sib of…Erasmas.”

“Enchanted,” Arsibalt said, muffled by his hand, as he had taken Cord’s advice. “I am Arsibalt, bastard of the local Bazian arch-prelate, if you can believe such a thing.”

“The bleeding is slowing down, I think,” Cord said. From one of her pockets she had drawn out a pair of purple wads which unfolded to gloves of some stretchy membranous stuff. She wiggled her hands into them. I was baffled for a few moments, then realized that this was a precaution against infection: something I never would have thought of.

“Fortunately, my blood supply is simply enormous, because of my size,” Arsibalt pointed out, “otherwise, I fear I should exsanguinate.”

Some of Cord’s pockets were narrow and tall and ranked in neat rows. From two of these she drew out blunt plugs of white fibrous stuff, about the size of her little finger, with strings trailing from them. “What on earth are those?” Arsibalt wanted to know.

“Blood soaker-uppers,” Cord said, “one for each nostril, if you would like.” She gave them over into Arsibalt’s gory hands, and watched, a little bit nervous and a little bit fascinated, as Arsibalt gingerly put them in. Lio, Jesry, and I looked on speechless.

Suur Ala came in with an armload of rags, most of which she threw on the floor to cover the blood-puddle. She and Cord used the rest to wipe the blood off Arsibalt’s lips and chins. The whole time, they were appraising each other, as if in a competition to see which was the scientist and which was the specimen. By the time I got my wits about me to make introductions, they knew so much about each other that names hardly mattered.

From yet another pocket Cord produced a complex metal thing all folded in on itself. She evoluted it into a miniature scissors, which she used to snip off the strings dangling from Arsibalt’s nostrils.

So bossy, so stern a person was Suur Ala that, until this moment, I had feared that she and Cord were going to fall upon each other like two cats in a pillowcase. But when she drew focus on those blood soaker-uppers, she gave Cord a happy look which Cord returned.

We frog-marched Arsibalt out of there, hid his carnage under a huge scarlet robe, and came out for Provener only a few minutes late. We were greeted by titters from some who assumed we’d been extramuros getting drunk. Most of these wags were Apert visitors, but I heard amusement even from the Thousanders. I was expecting that Jesry and I would have to do most of the work, but, on the contrary, Lio and Arsibalt pushed with far more than their usual strength.

After Provener, the Warden Fendant crossed the chancel and came through our screen to interview Lio and Arsibalt. Jesry and I stood off to one side. Cord stood close and listened. This influenced Lio to use a lot of Fluccish, to the annoyance of Fraa Delrakhones. Arsibalt, on the other hand, kept using words like rapscallions.

From his description of the vehicle the thugs had driven and the clothes they had worn, Cord knew them. “They are a local—” she said, and stopped.

“Gang?” Delrakhones offered.

She shrugged. “A gang that keeps pictures of fictional gangs from old speelys on their walls.”

“How fascinating!” Arsibalt proclaimed, while Fraa Delrakhones was absorbing this detail. “It is, then, a sort of meta-gang…”

“But they still do gangy stuff for real,” Cord said, “as I don’t have to tell you.”

It became clear from the nature of the questions Delrakhones asked that he was trying to work out which iconography the gang subscribed to. He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them up—not because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.

Cord and I therefore became frustrated, then bored (and as Orolo liked to say, boredom is a mask that frustration wears). I caught her eye. We drifted to one side. When no one objected, we fled.

As mentioned, we Tenners had a bundle of turrets instead of a proper nave. The skinniest turret was a spiral stair that led up to the triforium, which was a sort of raised gallery that ran all the way around the inside of the chancel above the screens and below the soaring clerestory windows. At one end of our triforium was another little stair that led up to the bell-ringers’ place. Cord was interested in that. I watched her gaze traveling up the bell-ropes to where they vanished into the heights of the Pr#230;sidium. I could tell she wouldn’t rest until she had seen what was at the other ends of those ropes. So we went to the other end of the triforium and began to climb another stair. This one zigzagged up the tower that anchored the southwestern corner of the Mynster.

Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three-dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they’d fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery. When people complained about wind, vermin, and other things that would be kept out of a normal building by walls, they might be troubled to fill up a vacancy with a stained-glass window. But we hadn’t got round to putting all of those in yet. On a windy and rainy day it made buildings like this hellish. But on a day like this one it was fine because you could always see. As we scaled the flights of the southwestern tower we had views down into the Mynster, and out over the concent.

The upper reaches of this tower—the place where it devolved into piers and pinnacles, the highest part, in other words, that you could get to without ladders and mountaineering equipment—was at about the same altitude as the Warden Regulant’s headquarters. It sported one of the most elaborate works of stone-carving in the whole concent, a sort of cupola/tower/walk-through statue depicting planets and moons and some of the early cosmographers who had studied them. Built into the middle of this was a portcullis: a grid of bars that could be cranked up and down. At the moment, it had been drawn up out of the way, giving us the freedom to attack yet another stair. This one was cut right into the top of a flying buttress. It would take us up and inwards to the Pr#230;sidium. If the portcullis had been closed, we’d have had nowhere else to go, unless we wanted to cross over a sort of bridge into the Warden Regulant’s quarters.

Cord and I passed through the cupola, moving slowly so that she could take in the carvings and the mechanism. Then we were on our way up. I let her go ahead of me so that she could get an unobstructed view, and so that I could steady her if she got dizzy. For we were high above the ground here, climbing over the curve of a stone buttress that seemed about as thick as a bird’s bone when you looked at it from the ground. She gripped the iron banisters with both hands and took it slowly and seemed to enjoy it. Then we passed through an embrasure (sort of a deep complicated Mathic archway), built into the corner of the Praesidium at about the level of the belfries.

From here there was only one way up: a series of stairs that spiraled up the inside of the Pr#230;sidium just within its tracery walls. Few tourists were game for that much climbing, and many of the avout were extramuros, so we had the whole Pr#230;sidium to ourselves. I let her enjoy the view down to the chancel floor. The courts of the Wardens, immediately below us, were cloister-shaped, which is to say that each had a big square hole in the middle where the Pr#230;sidium shot through it, lined with a walkway with sight-lines down to the chancel and up to the starhenge.

Cord traced the bell-ropes up from the balcony and satisfied herself that they were in fact connected to a carillon. But from here it was obvious that other things too were connected to the bells: shafts and chains leading down from the chronochasm, where automatic mechanisms chimed the hours. It was inevitable that she’d want to see this. Up we went, trudging around like a couple of ants spiraling up a well shaft, pausing now and then to catch our breaths and to give Cord leisure to inspect the clock-work, and to figure out how the stones had been fitted together. This part of the building was much simpler because there was no need to contend with vaults and buttresses, so the architects had really gotten out of hand with the tracery. The walls were a fractal foam of hand-carved, interlocking stone. She was fascinated. I couldn’t stand to look at it. The amount of time I had spent, as a fid, cleaning bird droppings off this stone, and the clock-works inside…

“So, you can’t come up here except during Apert,” she asserted at one point.

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, you’re not allowed to have contact with people outside your math, right? But if you and the One-offs and the Hundreders and Thousanders could all use this stairway any time you wanted, you’d be bumping into each other.”

“Look at how the stairway is designed,” I said. “There’s almost no part of it that we can’t see. So, we just keep our distance from each other.”

“What if it’s dark? Or what if you go to the top and bump into someone at the starhenge?”

“Remember that portcullis we went through?”

“On top of the tower?”

“Yeah. Well, remember there’s three more towers. Each one has a similar portcullis.”

“One for each of the maths?”

“Exactly. During the hours of darkness, all but one of them is closed by the Master of the Keys. That’s a hierarch—a deputy of the Warden Regulant. So on one night, the Tenners might have sole access to the stair and the starhenge. Next night it might be the Hundreders. And so on.”

When we reached the altitude where the Century weight was poised on its rail, we paused for a minute so that Cord could look at it. We also looked out through the tracery of the south wall to the machine hall where she worked. I retraced my morning’s walk, and picked out the house of Jesry’s family on the hill.

Cord was still looking for flaws in our Discipline. “These wardens and so on—”

“Hierarchs,” I said.

“They communicate with all of the maths, I guess?”

“And also with the Ita, and the S#230;cular world, and other concents.”

“So, when you talk to one of them—”

“Well, look,” I said, “one of the misconceptions people have is that the maths are supposed to be hermetically sealed. But that was never the idea. The kinds of cases you are asking about are handled by disciplined conduct. We keep our distance from those not of our math. We are silent and hooded when necessary to avoid leakage of information. If we absolutely must communicate with someone in another math, we do it through the hierarchs. And they have all sorts of special training so that they can talk to, say, a Thousander in a way that won’t allow any S#230;cular information to pass into his mind. That’s why hierarchs have those outfits, those hairstyles—those literally have not changed in 3700 years. They speak only in a very conservative ancient version of Orth. And we also have ways to communicate without speech. So, for example, if Fraa Orolo wishes to observe a particular star five nights in a row, he’ll explain his plan to the Primate, and if it seems reasonable, the Primate will direct the Master of the Keys to keep our portcullis open those nights but leave all the others closed. All of them are visible from the maths, so the Millenarian cosmographers can look down and see how it is and know that they won’t be using the starhenge tonight. And we can also use the labyrinths between the maths for certain kinds of communication, such as passing objects or people back and forth. But there’s nothing we can do to prevent aerocraft from flying over, or loud music from being heard over the walls. In an earlier age, skyscrapers looked down on us for two centuries!”

That last detail was of interest to Cord. “Did you see those old I-beams stacked in the machine hall?”

“Ah—were those the frames of the skyscrapers?”

“It’s hard to imagine what else they’d be. We have a box of old phototypes showing those things being dragged to our place by teams of slaves.”

“Do the phototypes have date prints?”

“Yeah. They’re from about seven hundred years ago.”

“What does the landscape in the background look like? A ruined city, or—”

She shook her head. “Forest with big trees. In some of those pictures they are rolling the beams over logs.”

“Well, there was a collapse of civilization right around 2800, so it all fits together,” I said.

The chronochasm was laced through with shafts and chains that in some places converged to clock-movements. The chains that led up from the weights terminated up here in clusters of bearings and gears.

Cord had been growingly exasperated by something, and now, finally, she let it out: “This just isn’t the way to do it!”

“Do what?”

“Build a clock that’s supposed to keep going for thousands of years!”

“Why not?”

“Well, just look at all those chains, for one thing! All the pins, the bearing surfaces, the linkages—each one a place where something can break, wear out, get dirty, corrode…what were the designers thinking, anyway?”

“They were thinking that plenty of avout would always be here to maintain it,” I answered. “But I take your point. Some of the other Millennium Clocks are more like what you have in mind: designed so that they can run for millennia with no maintenance at all. It just depends on what sort of statement the designer wanted to make.”

That gave her much food for thought, so we climbed in silence for a while. I took the lead, since, above a certain point, there was no direct route. We had to dodge and wind among diverse catwalks and stairs, each of which had been put there to provide access to a movement. Which was fine with Cord. In fact she spent so much time working out how the clock functioned that I became restless, and thought about the meal being served at this moment in our refectory. Then I recollected that it was Apert and I could go extramuros if I wanted, and beg for a cheeseburg. Cord, accustomed to being able to eat whenever she pleased, wasn’t concerned about this at all.

She watched a complex of bone-like levers wrestling with one another. “Those remind me of the part I made for Sammann this morning.”

I held up my hands. “Don’t tell me his name—or anything,” I pleaded.

“Why can’t you talk to the Ita?” she asked, suddenly irritated. “It’s stupid. Some of them are very intelligent.”

Yesterday I would have laughed at any artisan who was so presumptuous as to pass judgment on the intelligence of anyone who lived in a concent—even an Ita—but Cord was my sib. She shared a lot of my sequences and had as much intrinsic intelligence as I. Fraas were kept sterile by substances in our food so that we could not impregnate suurs and breed a species of more intelligent humans inside the concents. Genetically, we were all cut from the same cloth.

“It’s kind of like hygiene,” I said.

“You think the Ita are dirty?”

“Hygiene isn’t really about dirt. It’s about germs. It’s to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.”

“Why—what is the point? Who came up with all these stupid rules? What were they afraid of?”

She was quite loud. I’d have cringed if she’d talked this way in the Refectory. But I was happy to hear her out alone in this chasm of patient, deaf machines. As we resumed our ascent, I searched for some explanation to which her mind might be open. We had passed above most of the complicated stuff now—the machines that moved the clock’s dials. All that remained were half a dozen vertical shafts that ran up through holes in the roof to connect with things on the starhenge: polar drives for the telescopes, and the zenith synchronizer that adjusted the clock’s time every day at noon—every clear day, anyway. Our final approach to the starhenge was a spiral stair that coiled around the largest of those shafts: the one that rotated the great Telescope of Saunts Mithra and Mylax.

“That big machine you use to cut the metal—”

“It’s called a five-axis electrical discharge mill.”

“I noticed it had cranks, made for human hands. After the job was finished, you turned them to move the table this way and that. And I’ll bet you could also use those cranks to cut a shape, couldn’t you?”

She shrugged. “Sure, a very simple shape.”

“But when you take your hands off the cranks and turn control over to the syntactic device, it becomes a much more capable tool, doesn’t it?”

“Infinitely more. There’s almost no shape you couldn’t make with a syndev-controlled machine.” She slid her hand down to her hip and drew out a pocket-watch, and let it dangle at the end of a silver chain made of fluid, seamless links. “This chain is my journeyman piece. I cut it from a solid bar of titanium.”

I took a moment to feel the chain. It was like a trickle of ice water over my fingers.

“Well, syndevs can have the same amplifying effect on other kinds of tools. Tools for reading and writing genetic sequences, for example. For adjusting proteins. For programmatic nucleosynthesis.”

“I don’t know what those are.”

“Because no one does them any more.”

“Then how do you know about them?”

“We study them—in the abstract—when we are learning about the First and Second Sacks.”

“Well, I don’t know what those are either, so I wish you would just get to the point.”

We’d been standing at the top of the stair that led up to the starhenge. I pushed the door open and we walked outside, squinting in the light. Cord had gotten a little testy. From watching Orolo talk to artisans like Flec and Quin, I knew how impatient they could be with what they saw as our winding and indirect way of talking. So I shut up for a minute, and let her look around.

We were on the roof of the Pr#230;sidium, which was a great disk of stone reinforced by vault-work. It was nearly flat, but bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. Its stones were graven and inlaid with curves and symbols of cosmography. Around its perimeter, megaliths stood to mark where certain cosmic bodies rose and set at different times of the year. Inside of that ring, several freestanding structures had been erected. The tallest of these, right in the center, was the Pinnacle, wrapped in a double helix of external stairs. Its top was the highest part of the Mynster.

The most voluminous structures up here were the twin domes of the big telescope. Dotted around from place to place were a few much smaller telescope-domes, a windowless laboratory where we worked with the photomnemonic tablets, and a heated chapel where Orolo liked to work and to lecture his fids. I led Cord in that direction. We passed through two consecutive doors of massive iron-bound hardwood (the weather could get rough up here) and came into a small quiet room that, with its arches and its stained-glass rosettes, looked like something out of the Old Mathic Age. Resting on a table, just where I’d left it, was the photomnemonic tablet that Orolo had given me. It was a disk, about the size of my two hands held side by side, and three fingers thick, made of dark glassy stuff. Buried in it was the image of Saunt Tancred’s Nebula, dull and hard to make out until I slid it away from the pool of sunlight coming in the window.

“That’s about the bulkiest phototype I’ve ever seen,” Cord said. “Is that like some ancient technology?”

“It’s more than that. A phototype captures one moment—it doesn’t have a time dimension. You see how the image seems close to the upper surface?”

“Yeah.”

I put a fingertip to the side of the tablet and slid it downwards. The image receded into the glass, following my finger. As it did, the nebula changed, contracting into itself. The fixed stars around it did not change their positions. When my fingertip reached the bottom of the tablet, the nebula had focused itself into a single star of extraordinary brilliance. “At the bottom layer of the tablet, we’re looking at Tancred’s Star, on the very night it exploded, in 490. Practically at the same moment that its light penetrated our atmosphere, Saunt Tancred looked up and noticed it. He ran and put a photomnemonic tablet, just like this one, into the great telescope of his concent, and aimed it at that supernova. The tablet remained lodged there, taking pictures of the explosion every single clear night, until 2999, when finally they took it out and made a number of copies for distribution to the Thousanders.”

“I see things like this all the time in the background of spec-fiction speelys,” Cord said, “but I didn’t realize that they were explosions.” She traced her finger up the side of the tablet a few times, running it forward thousands of years in a second. “But it couldn’t be more obvious.”

“The tablet has all kinds of other functions,” I said, and showed her how to zoom in on one part of the image, up to its resolution limit.

That’s when Cord saw the point I was making. “This,” she said, pointing at the tablet, “this has got to have some kind of syndev built into it.”

“Yes. Which makes it much more powerful than a phototype—just as your five-axis mill is much more powerful because of its brain.”

“But isn’t that a violation of your Discipline?”

“Certain praxes were grandfathered in. Like the newmatter in our spheres and our bolts, and like these tablets.”

“They were grandfathered in—when? When were all of these decisions made?”

“At the Convoxes following the First and Second Sacks,” I said. “You see, even after the end of the Praxic Age, the concents obtained a huge amount of power by coupling processors that had been invented by their syntactic faculties to other kinds of tools—in one case, for making newmatter, and in the other, for manipulating sequences. This reminded people of the Terrible Events and led to the First and Second Sacks. Our rules concerning the Ita, and which praxes we can and can’t use, date from those times.”

This was still too abstract for Cord’s taste, but suddenly she got an idea, and her eyes sprang open. “Are you talking about the Incanters?”

Out of some stupid, involuntary reflex, I turned my head to look out the window in the direction of the Millenarian math, a fortress on a crag, on a level with the top of this tower, but shielded from view by its walls. Cord took this in. Worse, she seemed to have expected it.

“The myth of the Incanters originated in the days leading up to the Third Sack,” I said.

“And their enemies—the what-do-you-call-’em…”

“Rhetors.”

“Yeah. What’s the difference exactly?” She was giving me the most innocent, expectant look, twirling her watch chain around her finger. I couldn’t bear to level with her—to let her know what stupid questions she was asking. “Uh, if you’ve been watching those kinds of speelies, you know more about it than I do,” I said. “One sort of glib explanation I heard once was that Rhetors could change the past, and were glad to do it, but Incanters could change the future—and were reluctant.”

She nodded as if this weren’t a load of rubbish. “Forced to by what the Rhetors had done.”

I shrugged. “Again: it all depends on what work of fiction you happen to be enjoying—”

“But those guys would be Incanters,” she said, nodding at the crag.

I was getting a little restless, so I led her back out onto the open roof, where she immediately turned her gaze back to the Thousanders’ math. I finally worked it out that she was merely trying to reassure herself that the strange people living up there on the crag that loomed over her town were not dangerous. And I was happy to help her, especially if she might go out and spread the good news to others. That sort of fence-mending was the whole purpose of Apert.

But I didn’t want to lie to her either. “Our Thousanders are a little different,” I said. “Down in the other maths, like the one where I live, different orders are mixed together. But up on the crag, they all belong to one order: the Edharians. Who trace their lineage back to Halikaarn. And to the extent there is any truth whatsoever in the folk tales you’re talking about, that would put them on the Incanter side of things.”

That seemed to satisfy her where Rhetor/Incanter wars were concerned. We continued wandering around the starhenge, though I had to give wide berth to an Ita who emerged from a utility shack with a coil of red cable slung over his shoulder. Cord noticed this. “What’s the point of having the Ita around if you have to go to all of this trouble to avoid them? Wouldn’t it be simpler to send them packing?”

“They keep certain parts of the clock running…”

“I could do that. It’s not that hard.”

“Well…to tell you the truth, we ask ourselves the same question.”

“And being who you are, you must have twelve different answers.”

“There is a sort of traditional belief that they spy on us for the S#230;cular Power.”

“Ah. Which is why you despise them.”

“Yeah.”

“What makes you think they’re spying on you?”

“Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math—Evoked—and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again.”

“They just vanish?”

“We sing a certain anathem—a song of mourning and farewell—as we watch them walk out of the Mynster and get on a horse or climb into a helicopter or something, and, yes, ‘vanish’ is fair.”

“What do the Ita have to do with that?”

“Well, let’s say that the S#230;cular Power needs a disease cured. How can they possibly know which fraa or suur, out of all the concents, happens to be an expert in that disease?”

She thought about this as we clambered up the spiral stair that wrapped up and around the Pinnacle. Each tread was a slab of rock cantilevered straight out from the side of the building: a daring design, and one that required some daring from anyone who would climb it, since there was no railing.

“This all sounds pretty convenient for the Powers That Be,” Cord commented. “Has it ever occurred to you that all this fear about the Terrible Events and the Incanters is just a stick they keep handy to smack you with to make you do what they want?”

“That is Saunt Patagar’s Assertion and it dates from the Twenty-ninth Century,” I told her.

She snorted. “I’ll bite. What happened to Saunt Patagar?”

“Actually, she flourished for a while, and founded her own Order. There might still be chapters of it somewhere.”

“It’s frustrating, talking to you. Every idea my little mind can come up with has already been come up with by some Saunt two thousand years ago, and talked to death.”

“I really don’t mean to be a smarty pants,” I said, “but that is Saunt Lora’s Proposition and it dates to the Sixteenth Century.”

She laughed. “Really!”

“Really.”

“Literally two thousand years ago, a Saunt put forth the idea that—”

“That every idea the human mind could come up with, had already been come up with by that time. It is a very influential idea…”

“But wait a minute, wasn’t Saunt Lora’s idea a new idea?”

“According to orthodox paleo-Lorites, it was the Last Idea.”

“Ah. Well, then, I have to ask—”

“What have we all been doing in here for the 2100 years since the Last Idea was come up with?”

“Yeah. To be blunt about it.”

“Not everyone agrees with this proposition. Everyone loves to hate the Lorites. Some call her a warmed-over Mystagogue, and worse. But Lorites are good to have around.”

“How do you figure?”

“Whenever anyone comes up with an idea that they think is new, the Lorites converge on it like jackals and try to prove that it’s actually 5000 years old or something. And more often than not, they’re right. It’s annoying and humiliating but at least it prevents people from wasting time rehashing old stuff. And the Lorites have to be excellent scholars in order to do what they do.”

“So I take it you’re not a Lorite.”

“No. If you like irony, you might enjoy knowing that, after Lora’s death, her own fid determined that her ideas had all been anticipated by a Peregrin philosopher 4000 years earlier.”

“That’s funny—but doesn’t it prove Lora’s point? I’m trying to figure out what’s in it for you. Why do you stay?”

“Ideas are good things to have even if they are old. Even to understand the most advanced theorics requires a lifetime of study. To keep the existing stock of ideas alive requires…all of this.” And I waved my arm around at the concent spread out below us.

“So you’re like, I don’t know, a gardener. Tending a bunch of rare flowers. This is like your greenhouse. You have to keep the greenhouse up and running forever or the flowers will go extinct…but you never…”

“We rarely come up with new flowers,” I admitted. “But sometimes one will get hit with a cosmic ray. Which brings me to the subject of this stuff you see up here.”

“Yeah. What is it? I’ve been looking at this poky thing my whole life and thinking it had a telescope on top, with a crinkly old fraa peering through it.”

We’d reached the top of the “poky thing”—the Pinnacle. Its roof was a slab of stone about twice as wide as I was tall. There were a couple of odd-looking devices up here, but no telescopes.

“The telescopes are down in those domes,” I said, “but you might not even recognize them as such.” I got ready to explain how the newmatter mirrors worked, using guidestar lasers to probe the atmosphere for density fluctuations, then changing their shape to cancel out the resulting distortions, gathering the light and bouncing it into a photomnemnonic tablet. But she was more interested in deciphering what was right in front of her. One was a quartz prism, bigger than my head, held in the grip of a muscular Saunt carved out of marble, and pointed south. Without any explanation from me, Cord saw how sunlight entering into one face of the prism was bounced downwards through a hole in the roof to shine on some metallic construct within. “This I’ve heard of,” she said, “it synchronizes the clock every day at noon, right?”

“Unless it’s cloudy,” I said. “But even during a nuclear winter, when it can be cloudy for a hundred years, the clock doesn’t get too far out of whack.”

“What’s this thing?” she asked, pointing to a dome of glass about the size of my fist, aimed straight up. It was mounted at the top of a pedestal of carven stone that rose to about the same height as the prism-holding statue. “It’s got to be some kind of a telescope, because I see the slot where you put in the photomnemonic tablet,” she said, and poked at an opening in the pedestal, just beneath the lens. “But this thing doesn’t look like it can move. How do you aim it?”

“It can’t move, and we don’t have to aim it, because it’s a fisheye lens. It can see the entire sky. We call it Clesthyra’s Eye.”

“Clesthyra—that’s the monster from ancient mythology that could look in all directions at once.”

“Exactly.”

“What’s the use of it? I thought the point of a telescope was to focus in on one thing. Not to look at everything.”

“These things were installed in starhenges all over the world around the time of the Big Nugget, when people were very interested in asteroids. You’re right that they’re useless if you want to focus in on something. But they’re great for recording the track of a fast-moving object across the sky. Like the long streak of light that a meteorite draws. By recording all of those and measuring them, we can draw conclusions about what kinds of rocks are falling out of the sky—where they come from, what they’re made of, how big they are.”

But as Clesthyra’s Eye lacked moving parts, it didn’t hold Cord’s attention. We’d gone as high as we could go, and reached the limit of her cosmographical curiosity. She drew out her pocket-watch on its rippling chain and checked the time, which I pointed out was funny because she was standing on top of a clock. She didn’t see the humor. I offered to show her how to read the time by checking the sun’s position with respect to the megaliths, but she said maybe some other time.

We descended. She was feeling late, worrying about jobs to do and errands to run—the kinds of things that people extramuros spent their whole lives fretting about. It wasn’t until we reached the meadow, and the Decade Gate came in view, that she relaxed a little, and began reviewing in her mind all that we’d discussed.

“So—what do you think of Saunt What’s-her-name’s Assertion?”

“Patagar? That the legend of the Incanters is trumped up so that the Panjandrums can control us?”

“Yeah. Patagar.”

“Well, the problem with it is that the S#230;cular Power changes from age to age.”

“Lately from year to year,” she said, but I couldn’t tell whether she was being serious.

“So it’s awfully hard to see how they could maintain a consistent strategy over four millenia,” I pointed out. “From our point of view, it changes so often we don’t even bother keeping track, except around Apert. You could think of this place as a zoo for people who just got sick of paying attention to it.”

I guess I sounded a little proud. A little defensive. I said goodbye to her on the threshold of the Decade Gate. We had agreed to meet again later in the week.

As I walked back over the bridge, I thought that of all the people I’d talked to today, I was probably the least content in my situation. And yet when I heard the system being questioned by Jesry and by Cord, I lost no time defending it and explaining why it was a good thing. This seemed crazy on the face of it.

Fraa Lio perfected a new wrap that made him look like a parcel that had fallen from a mail train, but that could not under any circumstances be pulled over the face by a foe. We proved as much by trying to do it for a quarter of an hour, Lio getting more and more pleased with himself until Jesry ruined the mood by asking whether it could stop bullets.

Cord came back, accompanied by one Rosk, a young man with whom she was having some sort of liaison. They had supper with us in the Refectory. She wore fewer wrenches and more jewelry, all of which she had made herself out of titanium.

Arsibalt managed to walk to the basilica unmolested, but his father refused to talk to him, unless his purpose in coming was to repent and be consecrated into the orthodox Bazian faith.

Lio roamed the fauxburbs in the hopes that he would be set upon by a gang of thugs, but instead people kept offering him rides and buying him drinks.

Jesry’s family filtered back into town, and he went to visit them from time to time. I accompanied him once and was struck by their intelligence, their polish, and (as usual) how much stuff they owned. But there was nothing underneath. They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

Stung by Jesry’s earlier remarks, Lio persuaded some of his new friends to take him out to an abandoned quarry in the foothills where people amused themselves by discharging projectile weapons at things that didn’t move. His bolt and sphere became targets. Lio took up arms against two of his three possessions, assaulting them with bullets and broad-headed arrows. Bullets apparently passed through the weave of the bolt—the newmatter fibers stretched to let them go through, leaving gaps that could later be massaged away. But the razor-sharp arrows cut some of the fibers and left irreparable holes in the garment. The sphere, however, distorted and stretched without limit, like a sheet of caramel if you try to shove your finger through it. The bullets poked it nearly inside-out and knocked it back like a batted balloon. Lio’s verdict was that the sphere could be used as a defense against gunfire: the bullet would still penetrate your body, but it would pull a long stretchy finger of sphere-stuff behind it, which would prevent fragmentation or tumbling, and which could be used to pull the bullet out of the wound. We were all much comforted by this.

Cord came back for yet another visit, this time without Rosk. We had a nice stroll around the math and even went into the upper labyrinth for a look round. The conversation was first about where various members of our family had ended up, and later about where she hoped she’d be at the next Apert.

Eight days into Apert, I was sick of it, and thoroughly mixed up. I had a crush on my sib. This might mean all kinds of bad things about me. As I thought about it more, though, I saw it was not the kind of crush where I wanted to have a liaison with her.

I would think about her all day, care too much what she thought of me, and wish she would come around more often and pay attention to me. Then I’d remember that in a few days the gate would close and I wouldn’t have any contact with her for ten years. She seemed never to have lost sight of this, and had kept a certain distance. Anyway, I reckoned, the parts of the concent that were most interesting to her were those that concerned the Ita, and, in a sense, she had access to that all the time because she made stuff for them.

On any given day of Apert I could have written an entire book about what I was thinking and feeling, and it would have been completely different from the previous day’s book. But by the end of the eighth day, the thing had been settled in such a way that I can sum it up much more briefly.

Fraa Orolo had noticed how distracted I was and summoned me to the starhenge shortly before sunset. He’d reserved the Telescope of Saunts Mithra amp; Mylax for the night. The weather was cloudy, but in the hope that it would clear up, he had gone there late in the afternoon to aim the telescope and blank a photomnemonic tablet. I found him at the controls of the M amp; M just as he was finishing these preparations. We went out and strolled around the ring of megaliths. My tongue was a long time in loosening, but after a while I told Orolo of what I’d been feeling and thinking about Cord. He asked all sorts of questions I’d never have thought of, and listened carefully to my answers, all of which seemed to confirm in his mind that I wasn’t feeling anything about her that was inappropriate for a sib.

Orolo reminded me that Cord was all the biological family I had left, not to mention the only person I really knew from extramuros, and assured me that it was normal and healthy for me to think about her a lot.

I told him about the conversations I’d been having lately that called into question all kinds of things about the Discipline and the Reconstitution. He assured me that this was an unwritten tradition of Apert. This was a time for the avout to get all of that out of their systems so that they did not have to spend the next ten years worrying about it.

He slowed and stopped as we rounded the northeastern limb. “Did you know that we live in a beautiful place?” he asked.

“How could I not know it?” I demanded. “Every day, I go into the Mynster, I see the chancel, we sing the Anathem—”

“Your words say yes, your defensive tone says something else,” Orolo said. “You haven’t even seen this.” And he gestured to the northeast.

The range of mountains leading off in that direction was obscured during winter by clouds and during summer by haze and dust. But we were between summer and winter now. The previous week had been hot, but temperatures had fallen suddenly on the second day of Apert, and we had plumped our bolts up to winter thickness. When I had entered the Pr#230;sidium a couple of hours earlier, it had been storming, but as I’d ascended the stair, the roar of the rain and the hail had gradually diminished. By the time I’d found Orolo up top, nothing remained of the storm except for a few wild drops hurtling around on the wind like rocks in space, and a foam of tiny hailstones on the walkway. We were almost in the clouds. The sky had hurled itself against the mountains like a sea attacking a stony headland, and spent its cold energy in half an hour. The clouds were dissolving, yet the sky did not get any brighter, because the sun was going down. But Orolo with his cosmographer’s eye had noted on the flank of a mountain a stretched patch that was brighter than the rest. When I first saw what he was pointing at, I guessed that hail had silvered the boughs of trees in some high vale. But as we watched, the color of it warmed. It broadened, brightened, and crept up the mountainside, setting fire to individual trees that had changed color early. It was a ray coming through a gap in the weather far to the west, levering up as the sun sank.

“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

From Fraa Orolo, of all people, this was an astonishingly poetic and sentimental remark. I was so startled that it didn’t occur to me to wonder what Orolo was referring to when he spoke of the ugliness.

At least my eyes were open, though, to what he wanted me to see. The light on the mountain became rich in hues of crimson, gold, peach, and salmon. Over the course of a few seconds it washed the walls and towers of the Millenarian math with a glow that if I were a Deolater I’d have called holy and pointed to as proof that there must be a god.

“Beauty pierces through like that ray through the clouds,” Orolo continued. “Your eye is drawn to where it touches something that is capable of reflecting it. But your mind knows that the light does not originate from the mountains and the towers. Your mind knows that something is shining in from another world. Don’t listen to those who say it’s in the eye of the beholder.” By this Orolo meant the Fraas of the New Circle and the Old Reformed Faanites, but he could just as well have been Thelenes warning a fid not to be seduced by Sphenic demagogues.

The light lingered on the highest parapet for a minute, then faded. Suddenly all before us was deep greens, blues, and purples. “It’ll be good seeing tonight,” Orolo predicted.

“Will you stay?”

“No. We must go down. We’re already in trouble with the Master of the Keys. I must go fetch some notes.” Orolo hustled away and left me alone for a minute. I was surprised by a little sunrise above the mountains: the ray, sweeping invisibly up through empty sky, had found a couple of small wispy clouds and set them alight, like balls of wool flung into a fire. I looked down into the dark concent and felt no desire to jump. Seeing beauty was going to keep me alive. I thought of Cord and the beauty that she had, in the things she made, the way she carried herself, the emotions that played on her face while she was thinking. In the concent, beauty more often lay in some theoric proof—a kind of beauty that was actively sought and developed. In our buildings and music, beauty was always present even if I didn’t notice. Orolo was on to something; when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something—something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of. This was both a good reason not to die and a hint that death might not be everything. I knew I was perilously close to Deolater territory now. But because people could be so beautiful it was hard not to think that there was something of people that came from the other world that Cno#252;s had seen through the clouds.

Orolo met me at the top of the stairs, notes under his arm. Before we began our descent, he took one last look at the stars and planets beginning to come out, like a butler counting the spoons. We went down in silence, lighting our way with our spheres.

Fraa Gredick, the Master of the Keys, was waiting by the portcullis just as Fraa Orolo had predicted. Another, slighter person stood next to him. As we came down the buttress, we saw that it was Gredick’s superior: Suur Trestanas. “Ugh, looks like we’re going to get penance,” I muttered. “This just demonstrates your point.”

“Which point do you mean?”

“The ugliness coming in from all directions.”

“I don’t think this is that,” Fraa Orolo said. “This is something exceptional.”

We stepped down into the stone cupola and crossed the threshold. Gredick slammed the grid down behind us with too much force. I looked at his face, thinking he was angry we’d made him wait. But that wasn’t it. He was unsettled. He only wanted to get out of there. We all watched him fumble with his key ring. As he was locking the portcullis down, I looked north to the Unarians’ cupola and then east to the Centenarians’. Both of their gridirons were also closed. The whole thing seemed to have been shut down. Perhaps a security precaution for Apert?

I expected Gredick to leave so that Suur Trestanas could give me and Orolo a scolding. But Gredick looked me in the eye and said, “Come with me, Fid Erasmas.”

“Where to?” I asked. It was unusual for the Master of the Keys to make such a request; it wasn’t his job.

“Anywhere,” he said, and then nodded toward the head of the stairs that would lead us down.

I looked at Orolo, who shrugged and made the same nod. Then I looked at Suur Trestanas, who only stared back at me, putting on a show of patience. She was early in her fourth decade of life, and not unattractive. She was brisk and organized and confident—the kind of woman who in the S#230;cular world might have gone into commerce, and scampered up the hierarchy of a firm. During her first months as Warden Regulant, she had handed out a lot of penance for small infractions that her predecessor would have ignored. Older avout had assured me that this was typical behavior for a new Warden Regulant. I was so certain that she was going to give me and Orolo penance for being late that I hesitated to leave before she had done so. But it was clear that she had come here for another purpose. So I took my leave of Trestanas and Orolo, and began descending the stairs, followed by Fraa Gredick.

When Trestanas judged that Gredick and I were far enough away, she began telling Orolo something in a low voice. She talked for a minute or so, as if delivering a little speech that she had prepared.

When Orolo answered—which he did only after a long pause—it was in a voice that was wound up tight. He was making some kind of argument. And it was not the cool voice that he used when he was in dialog. Something had upset him. From this I knew that Suur Trestanas had not given him penance, because that was something one had to accept meekly, lest it be doubled and doubled again. They were talking about something more important than that. And Suur Trestanas had obviously told Gredick to get me out of that place so that she and Orolo could have privacy.

This was not a very satisfying end to the conversation that Orolo and I had shared on the starhenge! But it was further proof of the point he had made, and a challenge for me to put the idea into practice.

You must have this and hold to it or you’ll die. By the time I awoke the next morning I could not recall whether this was something Orolo had said in so many words, or a resolution that had formed in my own mind. Anyway I woke up exhilarated and determined.

In the Refectory I saw Fraa Orolo, sitting alone, several tables away. He gave me a tight smile and looked away in the next instant. He did not wish to fill me in on his argument with Suur Trestanas. He ate quickly, then got up and headed in the direction of the Decade Gate for another day on the town.

More important than the argument with Trestanas was my conversation with Orolo just before. I knew I could not talk about this in the Refectory. It would not survive Diax’s Rake; it would not be considered sound by the avout. Those of a more Procian bent would say I’d become a kind of Deolater. I’d be unable to defend myself without invoking all kinds of ideas that would sound ridiculously fuzzy-minded to them. At the same time, though, I knew that this was how the Saunts had done it. They judged theorical proofs not logically but aesthetically.

I wasn’t the only one with a lot on his mind. Arsibalt sat alone, ate practically nothing, and then skulked out. Later Tulia picked up her bowl and came over and sat by me, which made me happy until I understood that she only wanted to talk about him. Arsibalt had been doing a lot of brooding, and he had been doing it in conspicuous places, as much as demanding that we ask him what was wrong. I’d refused to do so because I found it such an annoying tactic. But Suur Tulia had been checking on him from time to time. She let me know I ought to go and see him. I did so only because the request had come from her.

After the Reconstitution, the first fraas and suurs of the Order of Saunt Edhar had come to this place where the river scoured around a ramp of stone and attacked it with explosives and water-jet cutters, cleaning away the scree and rotten rock—which they moved to the perimeter and piled up to fashion the concent’s walls—until they hit the sound stone at the heart of the mountain. This they cleaved off in slabs and prisms that tumbled to the valley floor, sometimes rolling almost to the walls before they came to rest. The ramp became a knob, the knob was sharpened to a crag. The first Thousanders whittled a narrow meandering stair up its face and went up there one day and never came back again, but pitched a camp on its top and set to work building their own walls and towers. The valley below remained a rubble-field for centuries. The avout swarmed over the strewn stones wherever they had come to rest and carved out of them the pieces of the Mynster. Almost all of them were now gone, and the land was flat, fertile, and stoneless. But a few of the great boulders were still dotted around the meadow, partly for decoration and partly as raw materials for our stonecutters, who were still fiddling with the Mynster’s gargoyles, finials, and such.

I found Arsibalt perched on the top of a boulder, surrounded by empty beverage containers that had been strewn around the place by slines. All around him, visitors were sleeping it off in the tall grass. Across the meadow, Lio was cavorting around a statue of Saunt Froga, flinging the end of his bolt out and letting it waft over the statue’s head, then snapping it back like a whip. I wouldn’t have looked twice if this hadn’t been Apert. But there were visitors on the meadow, watching, pointing, laughing, and speelycaptoring. Another useful function of Apert: to be reminded of how weird we were, and how fortunate to live in a place where we could get away with it.

Exhibit A: Fraa Arsibalt. Speaking whole paragraphs, complete with topic sentences, in perfect Middle Orth, with footnotes in Old and Proto-Orth, he explained that he felt aggrieved by his father’s refusal to talk to him, because he was not so much abjuring his father’s faith as trying to build a bridge between it and the mathic world.

This struck me as an ambitious project for a nineteen-year-old to undertake, seven thousand years after the two daughters of Cno#252;s had stopped speaking to each other. Still, I heard him out. Partly so that I could later impress Tulia with what a good guy I was. Partly because I didn’t want to be a Lorite. But also partly because what Arsibalt was saying was nearly as crazy as my discussion with Orolo the evening before. And so perhaps, after I had heard Arsibalt out, he would let me confide some of my thoughts. But as the conversation (if listening to Arsibalt talk could be called that) went on, this hope curdled. It had not crossed his mind that I too might have some things I wanted to discuss—perhaps not as clever or as momentous as what was on his mind, but important to me. I bided my time. And just when I saw an opening, he changed the subject altogether and ambushed me with a rhapsody about “the exquisite Cord.” And so instead of talking about what I wanted to talk about, I was forced to come to grips with the idea of Cord as being exquisite. He wondered whether she might be open to an Atlanian liaison. I thought not, but who was I to judge? And a boyfriend who was (a) sterile and (b) only allowed out once every ten years seemed like a safe boyfriend to have, so I shrugged and allowed that anything was possible.

Then, back to Suur Tulia to file a report.

Seventeen years ago, Tulia had been found at the Day Gate, wrapped in newspapers and nestled in a beer cooler with the lid ripped off. The stump of her umbilical cord had already fallen off, which meant that she was too old and too touched by the S#230;cular world to be accepted by the Thousanders. Anyway she had been sickly at first and so she had been kept in the Unarian math, which was more convenient to Physicians’ Commons. There she had been raised (as I pictured it) by the doting burgers’ wives and daughters who populated that math until she’d graduated through the labyrinth at the age of six. She had emerged, all alone, from our side of the maze and gravely introduced herself to the first suur she saw. Anyway, she had no family on the outside. Watching the rest of us cope with our families during Apert had led her to understand how very fortunate she might be. She was too deft to say anything, but it was clear she’d spent the whole time being bemused at the rest of us. She had seen me strolling around chatting with my sib and concluded that everything was fine and simple for me. I sensed it would boot me nothing to try to explain to her what I had discussed with Orolo.

So, instead, I talked to groups of total strangers from extramuros who showed up to take tours of the Unarian math.

My math was small, simple, and quiet. The Unarian math, by contrast, had been built to overawe people who came in from outside: ten days out of each year, groups of extramuros tourists, and the rest of the time, those who’d made a vow to spend at least one year in it. Few of these graduated to the Decenarian math. “Burgers’ wives trying to feel something,” was an especially cruel description I had once heard from an old fraa. As often, they were younger, unmarried, and looking for the final coat of polish and prestige needed to go out into adult society and seek a mate. Some studied under Halikaarnians and became praxics or artisans. Others studied under Procians; these tended to go into law, communications, or politics. Jesry’s mother had done two years here just after she’d turned twenty. Not long after coming out, she’d married Jesry’s father, a somewhat older man who had put in three years and used what he’d learned to start a career doing whatever it was he did.

Around dawn of the tenth day of Apert, Suur Randa, who was one of the beekeepers, discovered that during the night some ruffians had found their way into the apiary shed, smashed some crockery, and made off with a couple of cases of mead. Nothing so exciting had happened in eons. When I came into the Refectory to break my fast, everyone was talking about it. They were still talking about it when I left, which was at about seven. I was due at the Year Gate at nine. The easy way to get there would have been to go extramuros through the Decade Gate, walk north through the burgers’ town, and approach it from the outside. But thinking about Tulia yesterday had given me the idea of getting there through our lower labyrinth—retracing the steps she’d taken at the age of six. Supposedly she had made it through in about half a day. I hoped that at my age I could get through it in an hour, but I allowed two hours just to be on the safe side. It ended up taking me an hour and a half.

As the clock struck nine, I stood, formally wrapped and hooded, at the foot of the bridge that led to the Year Gate, which rose up before me in its crenellated bastion. Bridge and gate were of similar design to those in the Decenarian math, but twice as big and much more richly decorated. On the first day of Apert, four hundred had thronged the plaza that I could now see through the Year Gate, and cheered as their friends and family had poured out at sunrise to end their year of seclusion.

This morning’s tour group numbered about two dozen. A third of them were uniformed ten-year-olds from a Bazian Orthodox suvin, or so I guessed from the fact that their teacher was in a nun’s habit. The others seemed a typical mix of burgers, artisans, and slines. The latter were recognizable from a distance. They were huge. Some artisans and burgers were huge too, but they wore clothes intended to hide it. The current sline fashion was to wear a garment evolved from an athletic jersey (bright, with numerals on the back) but oversized, so that shoulder seams hung around the elbows, and extremely long—descending all the way to the knee. The trousers were too long to be shorts and too short to be pants—they hung a hand’s-breadth below the jersey but still exposed a few inches of chunky calf, plunging into enormous, thickly padded shoes. Headgear was a burnoose blazoned with beverage logos whose loose ends trailed down the back, and dark goggles strapped over that and never removed, even indoors.

But it was not only clothing that set the slines apart. They had also adopted fashions in how they walked (a rolling, sauntering gait) and how they stood (a pose of exaggerated cool that somehow looked hostile to me). So I could see even from a distance that I had four slines in my tour group this morning. This troubled me not at all, because during the previous nine days there had been no serious trouble on the tours. Fraa Delrakhones had concluded that the slines of this era subscribed to a harmless iconography. They were not half as menacing as their postures.

I backed up onto the crest of the bridge to get a little altitude. Once the group had formed up below me I greeted them and introduced myself. The suvin kids stood in a neat row in the front. The slines stood together in the back, maintaining some distance to emphasize their exceptional cool, and thumbed their jeejahs or suckled from bucket-sized containers of sugar water. Two latecomers were hustling across the plaza and so I went a little slowly at first so as not to strand them.

I had learned not to expect much in the way of attention span and so after pointing out the orchard of page trees and the tangles on this side of the river, I led them over the bridge into the heart of the Unarian math. We skirted a wedge-shaped slab of red stone, carved all over with the names of the fraas and suurs whose remains lay underneath it. It was our policy not to talk about this unless someone asked. Today, no one did, and so a lot of awkwardness was avoided.

The Third Sack had opened with a week-long siege of the concent. The walls were far too long to be defended by so few, and so on the third day the Tenners and Hundreders had broken the Discipline and withdrawn to the Unarian math, which was somewhat easier to defend because it had a smaller perimeter that included some water barriers. The Thousanders of course were safe up on their crag.

By the time the siege was two weeks old, it had become obvious that the S#230;cular Power had no intention of coming to their aid. Before dawn one day, most of the avout gathered behind the Year Gate, threw it open, and stormed out across the plaza in a flying wedge, driving through the surprised besiegers and into the town. For one hour they sacked the town and the besiegers’ supply dumps, gathering medicines, vitamins, ammunition, and all that they could find of certain chemicals and minerals that could not be obtained within the concent. Then they did something even more astonishing to the attackers, which was that instead of running away they formed up into another wedge—much smaller, by this point—and fought their way back across the plaza and went back in the gate. They didn’t stop until they’d crossed the bridge, which was immediately dropped by explosives. There they threw down the stuff they had scavenged and collapsed. Five hundred had stormed out. Three hundred had come back. Of those, two hundred died on the spot from wounds suffered during the operation. This wedge of granite was their tumulus. The stuff that they had gathered was sent up to the Thousanders. The rest of the concent fell the next day. The Thousanders lived alone and untouched on their crag for the next seventy years. Besides ours, only two other Millenarian maths in the world had made it through the Third Sack unviolated and unsacked. Though in many cases there had been enough warning that avout had been able to run away, carrying what they could in the way of books, and live in remote places for the next decades.

The wedge monument was aimed, not out toward the city, but in toward the clock. This was to emphasize that those buried under it had returned.

Fifty paces from its vertex lay the entrance of the Hylaean Way. After the Mynster, this was the dominant architectural feature of the concent. The style of these buildings was more Bazian than Mathic—less vertical, more horizontal, reminding people of arks, which traditionally spread wide to welcome all comers.

I held the door open long enough for the two latecomers to scurry inside, then closed it, content—maybe even smug—in the knowledge that Barb was not with us. During the first two days of Apert, the son of Quin had attended almost every one of these tours. After memorizing every word that the guides said, he had begun to ask crippling numbers of questions. From there he’d moved on to correcting the fraas and suurs whenever they’d said something wrong, and amplifying their remarks when they were insufficiently long-winded. A couple of wily suurs had found other ways to keep him busy, but it was difficult to keep him focused for long and so he would still make occasional strafing runs. Quin and his ex-wife seemed content to give Barb the run of the concent at all hours, which was as good as telling us that they wanted him Collected.

The architects of the Hylaean Way had played a little trick by making its grand-looking entrance lead to a space that was unexpectedly dark and close—suggestive of a labyrinth, but not nearly that complicated. The walls and floors were made from slabs of greenish-brown shale quarried from a deposit that fascinated naturalists because of the profusion of early life-forms fossilized in it. I explained as much to the group as we all waited for our eyes to adjust to the dimness, then invited them to spend a few minutes looking at the fossils. Those who’d had the foresight to bring a source of light, such as the suvin kids and some of the retired burgers, dispersed into the corners of the chamber. The nun had brought a map so that she knew just where to look for the really weird fossils. I circulated among the others with a basket of hand-lights. Some accepted them. Some waved me off. Probably these were counter-Bazian fundamentalists who believed that Arbre had been created all at once in its present form shortly before the time of Cno#252;s. They ignored this phase of the tour as a silent protest. A few more wore earbuds and listened to recorded tours on jeejahs. The slines only stared at me and made no response. I noticed that one of them had his arm in a sling. It took me a few moments to place this memory. Then I drew the obvious conclusion that this was the very group that had attacked Lio and Arsibalt. I felt helpless in my formal wrap—the one that could easily be pulled down over the face—and wished I’d paid more attention to how Lio had been wearing his bolt lately.

Backing away from them, I announced: “This chamber is two things at once. On the one hand, it’s an exhibit of ancient fossils—mostly weird and funny-looking ones that did not evolve into any creatures known to us today. Evolutionary dead ends. At the same time, this place is a symbol for the world of thought as it existed before Cno#252;s. In that age there was a zoo of different thought-ways, most of which would seem crazy to us now. These too were evolutionary dead ends. They are extinct except among primitive tribes in remote places.” As I was saying this I was leading them around a couple of turns toward a much bigger and brighter space. “They are extinct,” I continued, “because of what happened to this man as he was walking along a riverbank seven thousand years ago.” And I stepped forth into the Rotunda, quickening my pace to draw the group along in my wake.

A long pause now, so as not to ruin the moment. The central sculpture was more than six thousand years old; it had been a world-famous masterpiece for almost that long. How it had found its way to this continent and this rotunda was a long and lively story in itself. It was of white marble, double life size, though it seemed even bigger because it was up on a huge stone pedestal. It was Cno#252;s, aged but muscular, with long wavy beard and hair, sprawled back against the gnarled roots of a tree, staring up in awe and astonishment. As if to shield himself from the vision, he had raised a hand, but could not resist the temptation to peek over it. Gripped in his other hand was a stylus. Tumbled at his feet were a ruler, a compass, and a tablet graven with precisely constructed circles and polygons.

Barb hadn’t looked at the ceiling when he’d come in here for the first time. This was because Barb’s brain was so organized that he was blind to facial expressions. Everyone else—even I, who’d seen it many times—looked up to see what was having such an effect on poor old Cno#252;s. The answer (at least, ever since the statue had been installed here) was an oculus, or a hole at the apex of the Rotunda dome, shaped like an isosceles triangle, and letting in a beam of sunlight.

“Cno#252;s was a master stonemason,” I began. “On one ancient tablet, which was made before he had his vision, he is described by an adjective that literally means one who is elevated. This might mean either that he was especially good at being a stonemason or that he was some kind of holy man in the religion of his place and time. At the command of his king, he was building a temple to a god. The stone was quarried from a place a couple of miles upriver and floated down to the building site on rafts.”

Here one of the slines broke in with a question, and I had to stop and explain that all of this had happened far away, and that I was not speaking of our river or our quarries. A jeejah began to crow a ridiculous tune; I waited for its owner to stifle it before I continued.

“Cno#252;s would draw up measurements on a wax tablet and then walk up to the quarry to give instructions to the stonecutters. One day he was trying to work out a particularly difficult problem in the geometry of the piece he needed to have cut. Under the shade of a tree that grew on the riverbank, he sat down to work on this problem, and there he had a vision that changed his mind and his life.

“Everyone agrees on that much. But his description of that vision comes to us indirectly, through these women.” I extended my arm toward a pair of slightly smaller sculptures, which (inevitably) formed an isosceles triangle with that of Cno#252;s. “His daughters Hylaea and De#228;t, thought to be fraternal twins.”

The counter-Bazians were way ahead of me. They had already moved to the foot of De#228;t and knelt down to pray. Some were rummaging in their bags for candles. Others, peering into their jeejahs as they snapped phototypes, stumbled and collided. De#228;t was a cloaked figure sunk to her knees, facing toward Cno#252;s, her garment shielding her face from the light of the oculus.

Our Mother Hylaea, by contrast, stood erect, pulling her cloak back to bare her head, the better to gaze straight up into the light. With her other hand she was pointing at it, and her lips were parted as if she were just beginning to offer up some observation.

I recited a legend concerning these two statues. They had been commissioned in #8722;2270 by Tantus, the Bazian Emperor, specifically as companion-pieces to the older one of Cno#252;s, which he had just acquired by sacking what was left of Ethras. He had also acquired the quarry whence the marble for the original statue had come, and so he had caused two more great blocks to be extracted from it and shipped to Baz in specially made barges. The finest sculptor of the age had spent five years carving these.

At the formal unveiling, Tantus had been so taken by the look on Hylaea’s face that he had ordered the sculptor to be brought before him and had asked him what it was that Hylaea was about to say. The sculptor had declined to answer the question. Tantus had insisted. The sculptor had pointed out that all of the art, and all of the virtue, in this statue lay in that very ambiguity. Tantus, fascinated, had asked him a number of questions on that theme, then drew the Imperial sword and plunged it into the sculptor’s heart so that he would never be able to undermine his own work of art by answering the question. Later scholarship had cast doubt on this story, as it did on all good stories, but to tell it at this point in the tour was obligatory, and the slines got a kick out of it.

In my opinion, these two sculptures were such bald pro-Hylaea, anti-De#228;t propaganda that I was almost embarrassed by them. The Deolaters, however, seemed to take precisely the opposite view. Over the course of Apert, Deat’s pedestal had become bedizened with so many candles and charms, flowers, stuffed animals, fetishes, phototypes of dead people, and slips of paper that the One-offs would be cleaning it up for weeks after the gates closed.

“De#228;t and Hylaea went out searching for their father and found him lost in contemplation under the tree. Both saw the tablet on which he had recorded his impressions, and both listened to his account. Not long after, Cno#252;s said something so offensive to the king that he was sent into exile, where he soon died. His daughters began telling people different stories. De#228;t said that Cno#252;s had looked up into the sky and seen the clouds part to give him a vision of a pyramid of light, normally concealed from human eyes. He was seeing into another world: a kingdom of heaven where all was bright and perfect. According to her, Cno#252;s drew the conclusion that it was a mistake to worship physical idols such as the one he had been building, for those were only crude effigies of actual gods that lived in another realm, and we ought to worship those gods themselves, not artifacts we made with our own hands.

“Hylaea said that Cno#252;s had actually been having an upsight about geometry. What her sister De#228;t had misinterpreted as a pyramid in heaven was actually a glimpse of an isosceles triangle: not a crude and inaccurate representation of one, such as Cno#252;s drew on his tablet with ruler and compass, but a pure theorical object of which one could make absolute statements. The triangles that we drew and measured here in the physical world were all merely more or less faithful representations of perfect triangles that existed in this higher world. We must stop confusing one with the other, and lend our minds to the study of pure geometrical objects.

“You’ll notice that there are two exits from this room,” I pointed out, “one on the left near the statue of De#228;t, the other on the right near Hylaea. This symbolizes the great forking that now took place between the followers of De#228;t, whom we call Deolaters, and of Hylaea, who in the early centuries were called Physiologers. If you pass through Deat’s door you’ll soon find yourself outside where you can easily find your way back to the Unarian Gate. A lot of our visitors do that because they don’t think that anything beyond this point is relevant to them. But if you follow me through the other door, it means you are continuing on the Hylaean Way.” And after giving them a few minutes to roam around and take pictures, I went out, leading all but the De#228;t-pilgrims into a gallery lined with pictures and artifacts of the centuries following the death of Cno#252;s.

This in turn gave on to the Diorama Chamber, which was rectangular, with a vaulted ceiling, and clerestory windows letting in plenty of light to illuminate the frescoes. The centerpiece was a scale model of the Temple of Orithena. As I explained, this had been founded by Adrakhones, the discoverer of the Adrakhonic Theorem, which stated that the square of a right triangle’s hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. To honor this, the floor of the chamber was adorned with numerous visual proofs of the said theorem, any of which you could puzzle out if you stood and stared at it for long enough.

“We’re now in the period from about 2900 years before the Reconstitution to about negative 2600,” I said. “Adrakhones turned Orithena into a temple devoted to exploration of the HTW, or the Hylaean Theoric World—the plane of existence that had been glimpsed by Cno#252;s. People came from all over. You’ll notice that this chamber has a second entrance, leading in from the out of doors. This commemorates the fact that many who had taken the other fork and sojourned among the Deolaters came in from the cold, as it were, trying to reconcile their ideas with those of the Orithenans. Some were more successful than others.”

I looked over at the slines. Back in the rotunda, they had spent some time speculating as to the size of certain parts of the anatomy of Cno#252;s (which were hidden under a fold of his garment) and then gotten into a debate as to which they fancied more: De#228;t, who was conveniently kneeling, or Hylaea, who was beginning to take her clothes off. In this chamber, they had gathered beneath the most prominent fresco, which depicted a furious dark-bearded man charging down the steps of the temple swinging a rake, striking terror in a group of deranged, eye-rolling dice-players. It was clear that the slines loved this picture. So far, they’d seemed docile enough. So I drew closer to them and explained it. “That’s Diax. He was famous for his disciplined thought. He became more and more distressed by the way Orithena was being infiltrated by Enthusiasts. Those were people who misunderstood how the Orithenans used numbers. They dreamed up all kinds of crazy number-worshipping stuff. One day Diax was coming out of the temple after the singing of the Anathem when he saw these guys casting fortunes using dice. He was so furious that he grabbed a rake from a gardener and used it to drive the Enthusiasts out of the temple. After that, he ran the place. He coined the term theorics, and his followers called themselves ‘theors’ to distinguish themselves from the Enthusiasts. Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that ‘Diax’s Rake’ and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.”

This explanation was too long for the four slines, who turned their backs to me as soon as I got past the rake fight. I noticed that one of them—the one with his arm in a sling—had a curious, bony ridge running up his spine and protruding a few inches above the collar of his jersey. Normally this was concealed by his trailing burnoose, but when he turned away from me I saw it clearly. It was like a second, exoskeletal spine attached to the natural one. At its top was a rectangular tab, smaller than the palm of my hand, bearing a Kinagram in which a large stick figure struck a smaller one with his fist. It was one of the spine clamps Quin had described to me and Orolo. I guessed it had disabled the man’s right arm.

A fresco on the ceiling at the far end showed the eruption of Ecba and the destruction of the temple. The following series of galleries contained pictures and artifacts from the ensuing Peregrin period, with separate alcoves dedicated to the Forty Lesser and the Seven Great Peregrins.

From there we came out into the great elliptical chamber with its statues and frescoes of the theoric golden age centered on the city-state of Ethras. Protas, gazing up at the clouds painted on the ceiling, anchored one end. His teacher Thelenes commanded the other, striding across the Plane with his interlocutors—variously awed, charmed, chastened, or indignant. The two bringing up the rear had their heads together, conspiring—a foreshadowing of Thelenes’s trial and ritual execution. A large painting of the city made it easy for me to point out the Deolaters’ temples atop its highest hill, where Thelenes had been put to death; its market, the Periklyne, wrapped around the hill’s base; a flat open area in the center of the Periklyne, called ‘the Plane,’ where geometers would draw figures in the dust or engage in public debate; and the vine-covered bowers around the edges, in whose shade some theors would teach their fids, from which we got the word suvin, meaning “under the vines.” As far as the nun was concerned, that one moment made the whole trip worth the trouble.

As we worked our way to the farther end, we began seeing theors standing at the right hands of generals and emperors, which led naturally enough to the last of the great chambers in the Hylaean Way, which was all about the glory that was Baz, its temples, its capitol, its walls, roads, and armies, its library, and (increasingly, as we approached the end) its Ark. After a certain point it was priests and prelates of the Ark of Baz, instead of theors, advising those generals and emperors. Theors had to be sought out as small figures in the deep background, reclining on the steps of the Library or going into the Capitol to spill wise counsel into the dead ears of the high and mighty.

Frescoes depicting the Sack of Baz and the burning of the library flanked the exit: an incongruously narrow, austere archway that you might miss if it weren’t for the statue of Saunt Cartas cradling a few singed and tattered books in one arm, looking back over her shoulder to beckon us toward the exit. This led to a high stone-walled chamber, devoid of decoration and containing nothing except air. It symbolized the retreat to the maths and the dawn of the Old Mathic Age, generally pegged at Negative 1512.

From there the Hylaean Way took a lap around the Unarian Cloister and petered out. There was room on the other side where exhibits might one day be added about the rise of the Mystagogues, the Rebirth, the Praxic Age, and possibly even the Harbingers and the Terrible Events. But we had seen all the good stuff, and this was customarily the end of the tour.

I thanked them all for coming, invited them to backtrack if they wanted to spend more time with any of what they’d seen, reminded them that all were welcome at the Tenth Night supper, and told them I’d be happy to answer questions.

The slines seemed happy for now to savor the pictures of Imperial Bazian galley combat and library-burning. A retired burger stepped up to thank me for my time. The suvin kids asked me what sorts of things I had been studying lately. The two visitors who had rushed in at the last minute bided their time as I tried to explain to the kids certain theorical topics that they’d never heard of. After a minute the nun took pity on me (or possibly on the kids) and hustled them away.

The latecomers were a man and a woman, both probably in their fifth decades of life. I did not get the sense that they were having a liaison. Both were attired for commerce, so perhaps they were colleagues in a business. Around each one’s neck was a lanyard leading to a flasher of the type used extramuros to demonstrate one’s identity and control access to places. Since such things weren’t needed here, both of them had tucked their flashers into their breast pockets. They had been appreciative tourists, trailing the group, cocking their heads toward each other to discuss fine details that one or the other had noticed.

“I was intrigued by your remarks about the daughters of Cno#252;s,” the man announced. His accent marked him as coming from a part of this continent where cities were bigger and closer together than around here, and where a concent might house a dozen or more chapters in contrast to our three.

He went on, “It’s just that normally I would expect an avout to emphasize what made them different. But I almost got the idea you were hinting at a—” And here he stopped, as though groping for a word that was not in the Fluccish lexicon.

“Common ground?” suggested the woman. “A parallel between them?” Her accent—as well as the bone structure of her face and the hue of her skin—marked her as coming from the continent that, in this age, was the seat of the S#230;cular Power. And so by this point I had made up a reasonable story in my head about these two: they lived in big cities far away, they worked for the same employer, a business of global scope, they were visiting its local office for some purpose, they’d heard it was the last day of Apert and had decided to spend a couple of hours taking in the sights. Both, I guessed, had spent at least a few years in a Unarian math when younger. Perhaps the man’s Orth had grown some rust and he was more comfortable confining the discussion to Fluccish.

“Well, I think many scholars would agree that De#228;t and Hylaea both say that one should not confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized,” I said.

He looked as if I’d poked him in the eye. “What kind of way to begin a sentence is that? ‘I think many scholars would agree…’ Why don’t you just say what you mean?”

“All right. De#228;t and Hylaea both say that one should not confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized.”

“That’s better.”

“For De#228;t the symbol is an idol. For Hylaea it’s a triangular shape on a tablet. For De#228;t, the thing symbolized is an actual god in heaven. For Hylaea, it’s a pure theorical triangle in the HTW. So, do you agree that I can speak about that commonality in itself?”

“Yes,” the man said, reluctantly, “but an avout rarely takes an argument that far only to drop it. I keep waiting for you to base some further argument on it, the way they do in the dialogs.”

“I take your point clearly,” I said. “But I was not in dialog at the time.”

“But you are now!”

I took this as a joke and chuckled in a way I hoped would seem polite. His face showed a trace of dry amusement but on the whole he looked serious. The woman seemed a bit uneasy.

“But I wasn’t then,” I said, “and then I had a story to tell, and it had to make sense. It makes sense if De#228;t and Hylaea took the same idea and mapped it onto different domains. But if I’d described them as saying totally contradictory things about their father’s vision, it wouldn’t have made sense.”

“It would have made perfect sense if you had made De#228;t out to be a lunatic,” he demurred.

“Well, that’s true. Maybe because there were so many Deolaters in the group I avoided being so blunt.”

“So you said something you don’t actually believe, just to be polite?”

“It’s more a matter of emphasis. I do believe what I said before about the commonality—and so do you, because you agreed with me to that point.”

“How widespread do you suppose that mentality is within this concent?”

Hearing this, the woman looked as if she had got a whiff of something foul. She turned sideways to me and spoke in a subdued voice to the man. “Mentality is a pejorative term, isn’t it?”

“All right,” the man said, never taking his eyes off me. “How many here see it your way?”

“It’s a typical Procian versus Halikaarnian dispute,” I said. “Avout who follow in the way of Halikaarn, Evenedric, and Edhar seek truth in pure theorics. On the Procian/Faanian side, there is a suspicion of the whole idea of absolute truth and more of a tendency to classify the story of Cno#252;s as a fairy tale. They pay lip service to Hylaea just because of what she symbolizes and because she wasn’t as bad as her sister. But I don’t think that they believe that the HTW is real any more than they believe that there is a Heaven.”

“Whereas Edharians do believe in it?”

The woman shot him a look, and he made the following adjustment: “I specify Edharians only because this is the Concent of Saunt Edhar, after all.”

If this man had been one of my fraas I might have spoken more freely now. But he was a S#230;cular, strangely well-informed, and he behaved as though he were important. Even so, I might have blurted something out if this had been the first day of Apert. But our gates had been open for ten days: long enough for me to grow some crude political reflexes. So I answered not for myself but for my concent. More specifically for the Edharian order; for all of the Edharian chapters in other concents around the world looked to us as their mother, and had pictures of our Mynster up in their chapterhouses.

“If you ask an Edharian flat out, he’ll be reluctant to admit to it,” I began.

“Why? Again, this is the Concent of Saunt Edhar.”

“It was broken up,” I told him. “After the Third Sack, two-thirds of the Edharians were relocated to other concents, to make room for a New Circle and a Reformed Old Faanite chapter.”

“Ah, the Powers That Be put a bunch of Procians in here to keep an eye on you, did they?” This actually caused the woman to reach out and put her hand on his forearm.

“You seem to be assuming I’m an Edharian myself,” I said, “but I have not yet made Eliger. I don’t even know if the Order of Saunt Edhar would accept me.”

“I hope so for your sake,” he said.

The conversation had become steadily odder from its very beginning and had reached a point where it was difficult for me to see a way forward. Fortunately the woman got us out of the jam: “It’s just that with all that’s been going on with the Warden of Heaven, we were speculating, as we were on our way here, whether the avout were feeling any pressure to change their views. And we wondered if your take on De#228;t and Hylaea might have reflected some S#230;cular influence.”

“Ah. That’s an interesting point,” I said. “As it happens, I’d never heard of the Warden of Heaven until a few days ago. So if my take on De#228;t and Hylaea reflects anything at all, it’s what I’ve been thinking about lately for my own reasons.”

“Very well,” the man said, and turned away. The woman mouthed a “thank you” at me over her shoulder and together they strolled off into the Cloister.

Not long after, the bells began to chime Provener. I walked across the Unarian campus, which had been turned inside-out. Many avout, as well as some extramuros contract labor, were cleaning the dormitories to make them ready for the crop that would be starting their year tomorrow.

For once, I reached the Mynster with plenty of time to spare. I sought out Arsibalt and warned him to be on the lookout for those four slines. Lio overheard the end of that conversation and so I had to repeat it as we were getting our robes on. Jesry showed up last, and drunk. His family had thrown a reception for him at their house.

When the Primate entered the chancel, just before the beginning of the service, he had two purple-robed visitors in tow. It was not unusual for hierarchs from other concents to show up in this way, so I didn’t think twice about it. The shape of their hats was a little unusual. Arsibalt was the first to recognize them. “It appears that we have two honored guests from the Inquisition,” he said.

I looked across the chancel and recognized the faces of the man and woman I’d been talking to earlier.

I spent the afternoon striping the meadow with rows of tables. Fortunately, Arsibalt was my partner. He might be a little high-strung in some ways, but beneath the fat he had the frame of an ox from winding the clock.

For three thousand years it had been the concent’s policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, hand-carved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal, and plaited grass. Tabletops could be made of old-growth lumber, particle board, extruded titanium, recycled paper, plate glass, rattan, or substances on whose true nature I did not wish to speculate. Their lengths ranged from two to twenty-four feet and their weights from that of a dried flower to that of a buffalo.

“You’d think that after all this time someone might have invented…oh, say…the wheel,” Arsibalt mentioned at one point, as we were wrestling with a twelve-foot-long monster that looked like it might have stopped spears during the Old Mathic Age.

Dragging these artifacts up from the cellars and down from the rafters was an almost perfectly stupid task. It was not much more difficult to get Arsibalt talking about Inquisitors and the Inquisition.

The gist of it was that the arrival of two Inquisitors wasn’t a big deal at all, unless it was a big deal, in which case it was a really big deal. The Inquisition long ago had become a “relatively non-psychotic, even bureaucratized, process.” This was evidenced by the fact that we saw the Warden Regulant and her officers all the time even when we weren’t in trouble. Though they reported to the Primate, they were technically a branch of the Inquisition. They even had the power to depose a Primate in certain circumstances (Arsibalt, warming to the task, here threw in some precedents of yore involving insane or criminal Primates). Consistent standards had to be maintained across all the world’s concents, or else the Reconstitution would be null and void. And how could that be achieved unless there existed this elite class of hierarchs—typically, Wardens Regulant who had doled out so much penance to their long-suffering fraas and suurs that they’d been noticed, and promoted—who traveled from concent to concent to poke around and keep an eye on things? It happened all the time. I just hadn’t noticed it until now.

“I’m a little rattled by something that happened just before Provener,” I told him.

We were out in the meadow, working on our second acre of tables. Suurs and younger fraas were scurrying around in our wake, lining the tables with chairs, covering them with paper. Older and wiser fraas were hauling on lines, causing a framework of almost weightless struts to rise up above our heads; later these would support a canopy. In an open-air kitchen in the center of the meadow, older suurs were trying to kill us with the fragrance of dishes that were many hours away from being served. Arsibalt and I had been trying for ten minutes to defeat the latching mechanism on the legs of an especially over-designed table: military surplus from a Fifth Century world war. Certain levers and buttons had to be depressed in the right sequence or the legs would not deploy. A dark brown leaf, folded many times, had been wedged into the undercarriage: helpful instructions written in the year 940 by one Fraa Bolo, who had succeeded in getting the table open and wanted to brag about it to generations of unborn avout. But he used incredibly recondite terminology to denote the different parts of the table, and the leaf had been attacked by mice. At a moment when we were about to lose our tempers, throw the table off the Pr#230;sidium, consign Fraa Bolo’s useless instructions to the fires of Hell, and run out the Decade Gate in search of strong drink, Fraa Arsibalt and I agreed to sit down for a moment and take a break. That was when I told Arsibalt about my conversation with Varax and Onali—as the male and female Inquisitors were called, according to the grapevine.

“Inquisitors in disguise, hmm, I don’t think I’ve heard of that,” Arsibalt said. Gazing worriedly at the look on my face, he added: “Which means nothing. It is selection bias: Inquisitors who can’t be distinguished from the general populace would of course go unnoticed and unremarked on.”

Somehow I didn’t find that very comforting.

“They have to move about somehow,” Arsibalt insisted. “It never occurred to me to wonder how exactly. They can’t very well have their own special aerocraft and trains, can they? Much more sensible for them to put on normal clothing and buy a ticket just like anyone else. I would guess that they happened to come in from the aerodrome just as your tour was beginning, and decided on the spur of the moment to tag along so that they could view the statues in the Rotunda, which anyone would want to see.”

“Your words make sense but I still feel…burned.”

“Burned?”

“Yeah. That Varax tricked me into saying things I’d never have said to an Inquisitor.”

“Then why on earth did you say them to a total stranger?”

This wasn’t helpful. I threw him a look.

“What did you say that was so bad?” he tried.

“Nothing,” I concluded, after I’d thought about it for a while. “I mean, I probably sounded very HTW, very Edharian. If Varax is a Procian, he hates me now.”

“But that is still within normal limits. There are whole orders that have prospered for thousands of years, saying much more ridiculous things, without running afoul of the Inquisition.”

“I know that,” I said. Looking across the meadow I happened to see Corlandin and several others of the New Circle getting in position to rehearse a carol that they would sing tonight. From a hundred feet away I could see them grinning and exchanging handshakes. I could smell their confidence as if I were a dog. I wanted to be like that. Not like the crusty Edharian theoricians carrying on bitter debates about the vector sums on the vertices of the canopy struts.

“When I say burned, maybe what I’m getting at is that I burned my bridge. What I said to Varax is going to get repeated to Suur Trestanas and then filter down to the rest of her lot.”

“You’re afraid the New Circle won’t want you for Eliger?”

“That is correct.”

“You can avoid the stink then. Better for you.”

“What stink, Arsibalt?”

“The stink that’s going to permeate this place when most of our crop join the Edharians. The New Circle and the Reformed Old Faanians are going to be left with floor-sweepings.”

Trying to seem casual, I looked around to be sure that we were not in earshot of any of the fids Arsibalt considered to be floor-sweepings. But the only person nearby was the primeval Grandfraa Mentaxenes, shuffling around waiting for a purpose, but too proud to ask for one. I approached him with the gnawed table-opening codex of Fraa Bolo and asked him to translate it. He couldn’t have been more ready. Arsibalt and I left him to it, and trudged back toward the Mynster for the next table.

“What makes you think that’s going to happen?” I said.

“Orolo has been talking to many of us—not just you,” Arsibalt said.

“Recruiting us?”

“Corlandin recruits—which is why we don’t trust him. Orolo simply talks, and lets us draw our own conclusions.”

Somehow that canopy got raised. The struts were newmatter dating back to the founding of the Concent; as dusk fell, they began to emit a soft light that came from all directions and made even Fraa Mentaxenes look healthy. Beneath it, twelve hundred visitors, three hundred Decenarians, and five hundred Unarians celebrated Tenth Night.

This had originated as a harvest festival, coinciding with the end of the calendar year. Thanks to some adroit sequence-writing that had been done before the Second Sack, we had a few crops that could grow almost year-round. In our greenhouses we could cultivate less hardy plants in midwinter. But that stuff wasn’t glorious in the way that tangle food was at this time of the year.

The tangle had been invented way back before Cno#252;s, by people who lived on the opposite side of the world from Ethras and Baz. Cob grew straight up out of the ground to the height of a man’s head and bore rich heads of particolored kernels late in the summer. In the meantime, it served as a trellis for climbing vines of podbeans that gave us protein while fixing nitrogen in the soil to nourish the cob. In the web that the podbean vines spun among the cob stalks, three other kinds of vegetables grew: highest from the ground, where bugs couldn’t get to them, red, yellow, and orange tommets to give us vitamins and flavor our salads, stews, and sauces. Snaking along the ground, gourds of many varieties. In the middle, hollow pepperpods. Tubers of two kinds grew beneath the ground, and leaf vegetables gathered whatever light remained. The original, ancient tangle had comprised eight plants, and the people who cultivated them had over thousands of years bred them to be as efficient as they could be without actually reaching in and tinkering with their sequences. Ours were more efficient yet, and we had added four more types of plants, two of which had no purpose other than to replenish the soil. At this time of year, the tangles we’d been cultivating since thaw were in their glory and sported a variety of color and flavor that couldn’t be had extramuros. That’s why Apert took place now. It was a way for those inside the math to share their good fortune with their neighbors extramuros, as well as to relieve them of any babies not likely to survive the winter.

I saved seats for Cord and her boyfriend Rosk. Cord also brought with her a cousin of ours: Dath, a boy of fifteen. I remembered him vaguely. He’d been the kind of youngster who was always being rushed to Physicians’ Commons for repair of astonishing traumas. Somehow he’d survived and even put on passable clothing for the event. His dents and scars were hidden beneath a mess of curly brown hair.

Arsibalt made sure he was seated across from “the exquisite” Cord; he didn’t appear to understand the significance of Rosk. Jesry caused his entire family to sit at the next table, which placed him back to back with me. Then Jesry flagged down Orolo and persuaded him to sit in our cluster. Orolo attracted Lio and several other lonely wanderers, who proceeded to fill out our table.

Dath was the kind of sweet untroubled soul who could ask very basic questions with no trace of embarrassment. I tried to answer them in the same spirit.

“You know I’m a sline, cousin,” I said. “So the difference between slines and us is not that we’re smarter. That is demonstrably not the case.”

This topic had come up after people had been eating, drinking, talking, and singing old carols just long enough to make it obvious that there really were no differences. Dath, who had come through his early mishaps with his good sense intact, had been looking about and taking note of this—I could read it on his face. And so he had raised the question of why bother to put up walls—to have an extramuros and an intramuros?

Orolo had caught wind of this and turned around to get a look at Dath. “It would be easier for you to understand if you could see one of the pinprick maths,” he said.

“Pinprick maths?”

“Some are no more than a one-room apartment with an electrical clock hanging on the wall and a well-stocked bookcase. One avout lives there alone, with no speely, no jeejah. Perhaps every few years an Inquisitor comes round and pokes his head in the door, just to see that all is well.”

“What’s the point of that?” Dath asked.

“That is precisely the question I am asking you to think about,” Orolo said, and turned back round to resume a conversation with Jesry’s father.

Dath threw up his hands. Arsibalt and I laughed, but not at his expense. “That’s how Pa Orolo does his dirty work,” I told him.

“Tonight, instead of sleeping, you’ll lie awake wondering what he meant,” Arsibalt said.

“Well, aren’t you guys going to help me? I’m not a fraa!” Dath pleaded.

“What would motivate someone to sit alone in a one-room apartment reading and thinking?” Arsibalt asked. “What would have to be true of a person for them to consider that a life well spent?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re really shy? Scared of open spaces?”

“Agoraphobia is not the correct answer,” Arsibalt said, a little huffy.

“What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?” I tried.

“Okayyy…”

“You might say that the difference between us and you is that we have been infected by a vision of…another world.” I’d been about to say “a greater” or “a higher” but settled for “another.”

“I don’t like the infection metaphor,” Arsibalt started to say in Orth. I kneed him under the table.

“You mean like a different planet?” Dath asked.

“That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” I said. “Most of us don’t think it’s another planet in the sense of a speculative fiction speely. Maybe it’s the future of this world. Maybe it’s an alternate universe we can’t get to. Maybe it’s nothing but a fantasy. But at any rate it lives in our souls and we can’t help striving toward it.”

“What’s that world like?” Dath asked.

Behind me, a jingle began to play from someone’s jeejah. It wasn’t that loud, but something about it made my brain lock up. “For one thing, it doesn’t have any of those,” I told Dath.

After the jeejah had been singing for a little while, I turned around. Everyone in a twenty-foot radius was staring at Jesry’s older brother, who was slapping himself all over trying to determine which of the pockets in his suit contained the jeejah. Finally he extracted it and silenced it. He stood up, as if he had not drawn enough attention to himself, and bellowed his own name. “Yes, Doctor Grane,” he went on, staring into the distance like a holy man. “I see. I see. Can they infest humans as well? Really!? I was only joking. Well, how would we be able to tell if that had happened?”

People turned back to their meals, but conversations were slow to restart, because of sporadic incursions from Jesry’s brother.

Arsibalt cleared his throat as only Arsibalt could; it sounded like the end of the world. “The Primate’s about to speak.”

I turned around and looked at Jesry, who had realized the same thing and was waving his arms at his brother, who stared right through him. He was negotiating a bulk rate on biopsies. He was a very tough negotiator. Women in the party—sisters and sisters-in-law of Jesry—had begun to feel ashamed and to tug at the man’s elbows. He spun around and stalked away from us: “Excuse me, Doctor, I didn’t catch that last part? Something about the larvae?” But in his defense, as I looked around I could see that he was only one of many who were using jeejahs for one purpose or another.

Statho had already addressed us twice. The first time had been ostensibly to greet everyone but really to nag us into taking our seats. The second time had been to intone the Invocation, which had been written by Diax himself while the rake blisters were still fresh on his hands. If you could understand Proto-Orth and if you happened to be a mushy-headed, number-worshipping Enthusiast, the Invocation would make you feel distinctly unwelcome. Everyone else just thought it added a touch of class to the proceedings.

Now he told us we were going to be entertained by a contingent of Edharians. Statho’s grasp of Fluccish was weak; the way he phrased it, he was commanding us to be entertained. This made laughter run through the crowd, which left him nonplussed and asking the Inquisitors (who were flanking him at the high table) for explanations.

Three fraas and two suurs sang a five-part motet while twelve others milled around in front of them. Actually they weren’t milling; it just looked that way from where we sat. Each one of them represented an upper or lower index in a theorical equation involving certain tensors and a metric. As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another’s paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold, involving various steps of symmetrization, antisymmetrization, and raising and lowering of indices. Seen from above by someone who didn’t know any theorics, it would have looked like a country dance. The music was lovely even if it was interrupted every few seconds by the warbling of jeejahs.

Then we ate and drank more. Then the New Circle fraas sang their piece, which was much better received than the tensor dance. Then we ate and drank more. Statho made it all tick along, like Cord running her five-axis mill. We weren’t used to seeing him do a lot of work, but he was earning his beer this evening. To the visitors, this was just a free feed with weird entertainment, but in truth it was a ritual as old and as important as Provener and so there were certain boxes that had to be checked if we were to get out of it without drawing a rebuke from the Inquisition. And Statho was the kind who would have done it the right way even if Varax and Onali hadn’t been sitting there asking him to pass the salt.

Fraa Haligastreme was introduced to say a few words on behalf of the Edharian chapter. He tried to talk about what I had mentioned to Dath earlier, and bungled it even worse. He was the funniest man in the world if you just walked up to him and asked him a question, but he was helpless when given the opportunity to prepare, and the sporadic alarums of the jeejahs shattered his concentration and reduced his talk to a heap of shards. The only shard that lodged in my memory was his concluding line: “If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.”

Next up was Corlandin for the New Circle chapter.

“I’ve been with my family the last ten days,” he announced, and smiled over at a table of Burgers who smiled back at him. “They were kind enough to organize a family reunion during Apert. All of them have busy lives out there, just as I do in here, but for these days we suspended our routines, our careers, and our other commitments so that we could be together.”

“Myself, I’ve been out watching speelys,” Orolo remarked. Only about five of us could hear him. “Ones with plenty of explosions. Some are quite enjoyable.”

Corlandin continued, “Making dinner—normally a routine chore we perform to avoid starvation—became something altogether different. The pattern of cuts my Aunt Prin made in the top crust of a pie was not just a system of vents to relieve internal pressure, but a sort of ritual going back who knows how many generations—an invocation, if you will, of her ancestors who did it the same way. The conversations we had about, say, when Grandpa Myrt fell off his porch roof while cleaning the gutters, were not just debriefings about the hazards of home renovation but celebrations—full of laughter, tears, and sometimes laughter and tears at the same time—of how much we loved each other. So you could say that nothing was about what it superficially seemed to be about. Which in another context might make it sound all just a bit sinister. But obviously it was nothing of the kind. We all got it. You’d have gotten it too. And that’s a lot like what we fraas and suurs do in this concent all the time. Thank you.” And Corlandin sat down.

Slightly indignant murmuring from avout—not at all certain that they agreed with him—was drowned out by applause from the majority of visitors. Poor Suur Frandling had to get up next and say a few words for the Reformed Old Faanians, but she could have been reading from an economic database for all anyone cared. Most of the avout were peeved by Corlandin’s eloquence—or glibness—and Orolo was among them. But to his credit he pointed out that Corlandin had smoothed over an awkward moment and probably won us some sympathy extramuros.

“How do you know when someone is really glib?” Jesry muttered to me.

“I’ll bite. How?”

“It doesn’t cross your mind that he’s glib until someone older and wiser points it out. And then, your face turns hot with shame.”

More music then, as most of us avout got up to clear plates and fetch dessert. The entertainment, which earlier had been so intimidating, had become a little easier to enjoy. Many of the carols traditionally played over loudspeakers in stores and elevators at this time of year were derived from liturgical music that had originated in the maths and filtered out at Apert, and so many of the visitors were pleasantly surprised to hear familiar melodies spilling from the lips of these bolt-wrapped weirdos.

Dessert was sheet cakes baked and served in broad trays. One of them ended up in front of Arsibalt—not a coincidence. He picked up the spatula that had arrived with it: a flat metal blade about the size of the palm of a child’s hand. Just before he plunged it into the cake, I had an idea, and stopped him. “Let’s have Dath do it,” I said.

“As hosts, it is our duty to serve,” Arsibalt demurred.

“Then you can serve, but I want Dath to do the cutting,” I insisted. I wrenched the spatula from Arsibalt’s grip and handed it across to Dath, who took it a little uncertainly.

I then talked him through cutting the cake; but I had him go about it in a very specific way, working through the steps of an old geometry proof* that Orolo had taught me when I had been a brand-new fid, up all night crying because I missed my old life. This took a little while, but when all was said and done, it was clear from the look on Dath’s face that he understood it, and I was able to tell him: “Congratulations. You have just worked out a geometric proof that is thousands of years old.”

“They had sheet cakes back then?”

“No, but they had land and other things they needed to measure, and the same trick works for those things too.”

“Uh huh,” Dath said, gobbling a vertex from his serving.

“You say uh huh like it is not a big deal, but it is a big deal to us,” I said. “Why should a proof that works for sheet cake work as well for a plot of land? Cake and land are different things.”

We had gone a little over the head of Dath, who just wanted to eat his cake, but Cord saw it. “I guess I have an unfair advantage here since I spend so much time thinking about geometry in my work. But the answer is that geometry is…well…geometry. It’s pure. It doesn’t matter what you’re applying it to.”

“And it turns out that the same is true for other kinds of theorics besides geometry,” I said. “You can prove something. Later the same thing might be proved in a totally different way; but you always end up with the same answer. No matter who is discussing these proofs, in what age, whether they are speaking of sheet cake or pasture-land, they always arrive at the same answer. These truths seem to come out of another world or plane of existence. It’s hard not to believe that this other world really exists in some sense—not just in our imaginations! And we would like to go there.”

“Preferably without having to die first,” Arsibalt put in.

“When I’m cutting a part, sometimes I get obsessed with it,” Cord said. “I lie awake in my bed thinking about its shape. Is that—perhaps—related to how you all feel about what you study?”

“Why not? You’re carrying this geometry around in your head that fascinates you. Some would say it’s only a pattern of neurons firing in your brain. But it has an independent reality. And for you, thinking about that reality is an interesting and rewarding way to spend your life.”

Rosk was a manual therapist—he put his hands on people to fix them. “I’ve been working on someone who has a pinched nerve because he has lousy posture,” he said. “I was discussing it with my teacher, over the jeejah—no pictures, just our voices. We had this long talk about this nerve and the muscles and ligaments around it and how I should manipulate them to help alleviate the problem, and suddenly I just flashed on how weird the whole thing was—two of us both relating to this image—this model—of another person’s body that was in his mind and in my mind, but—”

“Also seemingly in a third place,” I suggested, “a shared place.”

“That’s what it felt like. It freaked me out for a little while, but then I put it out of my mind because I thought I was just being weird.”

“Well, it’s been freaking people out since Cno#252;s and this is like an asylum for people who can’t stop thinking about it,” I said. “It’s not for everyone, but it’s harmless.”

“Since the Third Sack anyway,” Rosk said.

That he said it so innocently made it ten times as rude as it was to begin with. I saw Cord’s face flush, and guessed she’d probably have words with him after dinner. It was anyone’s guess whether he’d ever really understand why it was such an abhorrent thing to say.

People were shushing us because we had reached that part of the aut where the newcomers were presented at the high table.

Eight foundlings had been Collected. One was sickly and would stay in the Unarian math where it would be easier for the physicians to keep an eye on her. Two of them still had the stumps of their umbilical cords attached, which meant that they were destined for the Millenarian math, by way of a brief sojourn among the Hundreders. We would pass them along via our upper labyrinth. The remaining five were a little bit older, and so would be passed to the Hundreders.

Thirty-six youngsters were to be Collected. Seventeen of these, including Barb, would come directly to our math. The others would stay with the One-offs, at least at first. With any luck, some of them might graduate to our math later.

Twelve of the One-offs had decided to graduate to our math. Nine more had arrived from another, smaller concent in the mountains that acted as a feeder to ours.

All of these were brought up before the high table, welcomed, and applauded. Tomorrow, after the gate closed, we would celebrate their arrival in a much more tedious ceremony. Tonight was the time for the extramuros authorities to supply their own special brand of tedium. By ancient tradition, the highest-ranking Panjandrum present at this dinner was supposed to stand up and formally hand the newcomers over to us. At that moment, they passed out of S#230;cular, and into mathic jurisdiction. We became responsible for housing them and feeding them, caring for them when they ailed, burying them when they died, and punishing them when they misbehaved. It was as if they ceased in this moment to be citizens of one country and became citizens of another. It was, in other words, a big deal from a legal standpoint, and it had to be solemnized by the speaking of certain oaths and the ringing of a bell. And there was an almost as ancient tradition that the official in question would use it as an excuse to “deliver some remarks.”

This turned out to be the rope-draped oddity who had appeared at the Decade Gate with his contingent on the first morning of Apert. He was, as it turned out, the mayor.

After thanking everyone from God on down and then back up to God again, and then, as a precaution, tacking on a blanket thank-you for any persons or supernatural beings he had left out, he began: “Even those of you who live at Saunt Edhar must be aware by now that the extraordinary re-configuration of prefectural boundaries mandated by the Eleventh Circle of Arch-Magistrates has literally transformed the political landscape. The Plenary Council of the Recovered Satrapies has passed through a tipping point of no return, placing five of the eight Tetrarchies within the grasp of a new generation of leaders who I can promise you will be far more sensitive than their predecessors to the values and priorities of New Counterbazian constituencies and our many friends who may belong to other Arks, or even to no Ark at all, but who share our concerns…”

“If there are eight of them, why are they called Tetrarchs?” Orolo demanded, drawing an exasperated look from Jesry’s father, who had been listening intently—he was taking notes.

“There were four of them originally and the name stuck,” Arsibalt said.

Jesry’s father seemed to relax a bit, thinking that the interruption was over. But we were just beginning.

“What’s a New Counterbazian?” Lio wanted to know. Jesry’s brother shushed him. To my surprise Jesry rose to Lio’s defense. “We didn’t tell you to shut up when you were bellowing about your infestation.”

“Yes you did.”

“I’ll bet it’s a euphemism for one of those Warden of Heaven nut jobs,” I said to Lio. This brought a cataract of shushing down on me. Jesry’s father sighed as if he could thereby rise above all of this, and cupped a hand to his ear, but it was too late; we’d planted a branching tree of arguments and recriminations. The mayor was going on and on about the beauty of our clock, the majesty of our Mynster, and the magnificent singing of the fraas and suurs. At no point did he say anything that was not as sugary as words could be, and yet the feeling I got was one of foreboding, as if he were urging all of his constituents to mass before our gates with bottles of gasoline. The argument between Jesry and his brother decayed into sporadic sniper fire across the table, suppressed by glares and arm-squeezings from exasperated females who had wordlessly squared up into a peacekeeping force. Jesry’s brother had decided that with our hair-splitting debates about how many Tetrarchs there were, we’d shown ourselves to be a lot of insignificant pedants. Jesry informed him that this was an iconography that dated back to before the founding of the city-state of Ethras.

In some eerily quiet way that he must have learned from a book of Vale-lore, Lio had vanished. Strangely for one who studied fighting so much, he hated conflict.

I waited until the bell had rung to induct the newcomers, then excused myself and walked out during the standing ovation. I felt like getting some fresh air. By tradition, the revelry would wind down and the cleanup gather momentum until the gates closed at dawn, so it was unlikely I’d miss much.

The meadow was lit partly by the harvest moon and partly by light diffusing through the skirts of the great canopy, which, when I turned around to look back on it, looked like an enormous straw-colored moon half sunk into a dark sea. Lio was silhouetted against it. He was moving in an odd, dance-like fashion, which for him was hardly unusual. One end of his bolt was modesty-wrapped, but the other was all over the place—flinging out like a bucket of suds, then wafting down for a few moments only to be snapped back and regathered: the same thing he’d been practicing on the statue of Saunt Froga. It was strangely fascinating to watch. I was not his only spectator: a few visitors had gathered around him. Bulky men. Four of them. All wearing the same color. Numbers on their backs.

Lio’s bolt slapped down on top of Number 86 and draped him, making him look like a ghost. The lower part was all in a thrash as he flailed his arms to throw it off. His head was a stationary knob at the top—hence a fine target for the ball of Lio’s foot, which was delivered in a perfectly executed flying kick.

I started running toward them.

86 went down backwards. Lio’s momentum carried him to the same place. He used 86’s torso to cushion his landing, and rolled off smartly, staying low like a spider and snapping his bolt free. 79 was coming in high. Lio spun clear of the line of attack and in so doing got his bolt around 79’s knees. Then he stood up, bringing 79’s knees with him; 79’s face dove at the ground and he didn’t get his arms up—excuse me, down—fast enough to avoid getting a mouthful of turf. For just a moment after Lio spiraled his bolt loose, 79 remained poised upside-down with his legs splayed. Lio absent-mindedly rammed his elbow down into the vee as he turned to see who was next.

Answer: Number 23, running right at him. Lio turned and ran away. But not very fast. 23 gained on him. It was his fate to step on Lio’s bolt, which was dragging behind Lio on the grass. This demolished his gait, which had been clumsy to begin with. Lio sensed it—as how could he not, since the other end of that bolt was lashed around his crotch. He whirled and yanked. 23 somehow remained on his feet, but the price he paid for doing so was that he ended up staggering, bent forward at the waist, leading with his head. Lio planted a foot in his path, got a hand on the back of 23’s head, and used the other’s momentum to flip him over his knee. 23 didn’t know how to fall. He came down hard on his shoulder and pivoted around that to a hard landing on his back. I knew what was coming next: Lio would follow with a “death blow” to the exposed throat. And that is just what he did; but he pulled it, as he always had with me, and refrained from staving in the man’s windpipe.

One remained. And I do mean one, for he had a large numeral 1 on his back. This was the man with his arm in a sling. With his good arm, he had been been rummaging through the pockets of the fallen 86. He found what he had been looking for and stood up, holding something that I was pretty sure was a gun.

His spine-clamp exploded in light, flashing alternately red and blue. He uttered a common profanity. He dropped the gun and collapsed. Every muscle in his body had lost tone in the same instant, jammed by signals from the clamp. All four of the attackers were down now, and the meadow was quiet except for the plaintive warbling of their jeejahs.

A solitary person, somewhere nearby, began clapping. I assumed it was a sline who’d had too much to drink. But looking toward the sound, I was surprised to see a hooded figure in a bolt. He kept shouting an ancient Orth word that meant “hail, huzzah, well done.”

Stalking toward this fraa, I shouted, “I hope you’re stinking drunk, because if not, you’re an idiot. He could have gotten killed. And even if you really are that big of a jerk—don’t you know there’s a couple of Inquisitors skulking around?”

“It’s okay, one of them skulked out to get away from that idiotic speech,” the fraa said.

He pulled back his hood to reveal that he was Varax of the Inquisition.

I can’t guess what my face looked like, but I can tell you that the sight of it was the most entertaining thing Varax had seen in a long time. He tried not to show it too much. “It never ceases to amaze me, what people think of us and why we’re here,” he said. “Will you please forget about this. It is nothing.” He looked up at the top of the Pr#230;sidium. “Larger matters are at stake than whether a young fraa at the remote hermitage of Saunt Edhar practices his vlor on some local runagates. For God’s sake,” he continued (which sounded funny to me since few of us believed in God, and he didn’t seem like one of them; but maybe it was just an oath used by cosmopolitan people in the sorts of places where our concent was thought of as a “remote hermitage”). “For God’s sake, raise your sights. Think bigger—the way you were doing this morning. The way your friend, there, does when he decides to tackle four larger men.” And with that Varax drew his hood back over his head and walked back toward the canopy.

He passed the Warden Fendant and the Warden Regulant hurrying the other way. The two of them parted and stood aside to let him pass. Each nodded and uttered some term of respect that no one had ever bothered to teach me.

Both of the Wardens were looking rather tightly wound. In ordinal time, the boundary between their jurisdictions was clear: it was the top of the wall. During Apert, things became complicated as the wall ceased to exist for ten days.

Suur Trestanas was for throwing the Book at Lio. Fraa Delrakhones was satisfied with how things had come out, with a few quibbles: when Lio had noticed the four slines sneaking out the back, he ought to have alerted someone instead of going out to confront them himself.

“Well, is that an offense or isn’t it?” demanded Suur Trestanas.

“It is an overlookable offense, as far as I am concerned,” said Delrakhones, “but I’m not the Warden Regulant.”

“Well, I am,” said Suur Trestanas unnecessarily, “and for one of our fraas to be brawling, during Apert, when he’s supposed to be welcoming newcomers and busing tables, strikes me as something that could even lead to being Thrown Back.”

This was such an outrageous thing to say that I spoke immediately—as if Lio’s impulsiveness had jumped like a spark into my head. “If I were you, I’d run that by Inquisitor Varax before taking it any further,” I said.

Trestanas turned and looked at me, head to toe, as if she’d never seen me before. And perhaps she hadn’t. “The amount of private time you are spending with our honored guests is remarkable. Extraordinary.”

“And accidental, I promise you.” But Suur Trestanas was—I realized too late—jealous of me for this. Almost as if she pined to be in a liaison with Varax and Onali, but they had a crush on me. And she’d never believe that my encounters with them had been mere accidents. You didn’t get to be Warden Regulant by believing such things.

“It is obvious that you have no conception of the power that the Inquisition may wield over us.”

“Uh, not true. They may put the concent on probation for up to one hundred years, during which time our diet will be restricted to the basics—nutritional but not so interesting. If we haven’t mended our ways after a century they can come in and clean the place out top to bottom. And they have the power to fire any hierarch and replace him or…her…with…a new one of their choosing…” I was faltering because my brain—too late—was working through the implications. I had only been spewing back what Arsibalt had told me earlier in the day. But to Trestanas it would, of course, sound like a taunt.

“Maybe you think that Saunt Edhar’s current hierarchs are not handling their responsibilities well,” Suur Trestanas proposed, too calmly. “Perhaps Delrakhones—or Statho—or I—ought to be replaced?”

“I have never thought anything of the sort!” I said, and bit my tongue before I could add until now.

“Then why all of these secret assignations with the Inquisitors? You are the only non-hierarch who has spoken to them at all—and now you have done so twice, both times under circumstances that were extraordinarily private.”

“This is crazy,” I said, “this is crazy.”

“More is at stake than a boy of your age can comprehend. Your naivete—combined with your refusal to admit just how naive you are—imposes risks on us all. I am throwing the Book at you.”

“No!” I couldn’t believe it.

“Chapters One through…er…oh…Five.”

“You have got to be kidding!”

“I believe you know what to do,” she said, and looked across the meadow to the Mynster.

“Fine. Fine. Chapters One through Five,” I repeated, and turned toward the canopy.

“Halt,” Suur Trestanas said.

I halted.

“The Mynster is that way,” she said, sounding amused. “You seem to be going the wrong direction.”

“My sib and my cousin are in there. I just need to go and explain to them that I have to leave.”

“The Mynster,” she repeated, “is in that direction.”

“I can’t do five chapters before sunrise,” I pointed out. “The gates are going to be closed when I come out of that cell. I have to say goodbye to my family.”

“Have to? Curious choice of words. Let me bring you up to date on semantics, since you who worship at Hylaea’s feet are so keen on such things. You have to go to the Mynster. You want to say goodbye to your family. The whole point of being a fraa is to be free of those wants that enslave people who live extramuros. I am doing you the favor of forcing you to make a choice now, in this instant. If you want to see your family so badly, go see them—and keep on walking, right out the gate, and don’t ever come back. If you will remain here, you have to walk straight to the Mynster now.”

I looked for Lio, hoping he might convey a message to Cord and Dath, but he was some distance away now, recounting the fight to Delrakhones, and anyway I didn’t want to give Suur Trestanas the additional pleasure of telling me I couldn’t.

So I turned my back on what remained of my family and started walking toward the Mynster.