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

Part 5
VOCO

Whatever you might say of his rich descendants, Fraa Shuf had had little wealth and no plan. That became obvious as soon as you descended the flagstone stairs into the cellar of the place that he had started and his heirs had finished. I write cellar, but it is more true to say that there was some number of cellars—I never made an exact count—cemented to one another in some graph that no one fully understood. It was a real accomplishment, in a way, to have left such a mess under a building so small. Arsibalt, of course, had an explanation: Shuf’s avocation was stone-mason. He had begun the project, circa 1200, as a sort of eccentric pastime. He’d meant only to build a narrow tower with a room at the top where one avout could sit and meditate. That done, he’d passed it on to a fid who had noticed the tower beginning to lean, and had spent much of his life replacing the foundation—a tetchy sort of undertaking that involved digging out cavities beneath what was already there and socking huge stone blocks into the holes. He’d ended up with more foundation than was really needed, and passed it on to another mason who had done more digging, more foundation work, and more wall-building. And so it had gone for some generations until the Lineage had begun to gather wealth beyond the building itself and had needed a place to store it. The old foundation-work had then been rediscovered, re-excavated, walled, floored, vaulted, and extended. For one of the toxic things about Lineages was that rich avout could get not-so-rich ones to do things for them in exchange for better food, better drink, and better lodging.

Anyway, by the time that the Reformed Old Faanians had begun sneaking back to the ruin of Shuf’s Dowment, hundreds of years after the Third Sack, the earth had reclaimed much of the cellars. I wasn’t sure how the dirt got into those places and covered the floor so deep. Some process humans couldn’t fathom because it went on so gradually. The ROF, who had been so diligent about fixing up the above-ground part, had almost completely ignored the cellars. To your right as you reached the bottom of the stairs there was one chamber where they stored wine and some silver table-service that was hauled out for special occasions. Beyond that, the cellars were a wilderness.

Arsibalt, contrary to his reputation, had become its intrepid explorer. His maps were ancient floor-plans that he found in the Library and his tools were a pickaxe and a shovel. The mystical object of his quest was a vaulted sub-basement that according to legend was where Shuf’s Lineage had stored its gold. If any such place had ever existed, it had been found and cleaned out during the Third Sack. But to rediscover it would be interesting. It would also be a boon for the ROF since, in recent years, avout of other orders had entertained themselves by circulating rumors to the effect that the ROF had found or were accumulating treasure down there. Arsibalt could put such rumors to rest by finding the sub-basement and then inviting people to go and see it for themselves.

But there was no hurry—there never was, with him—and no one was expecting results before Arsibalt’s hair had turned white. From time to time he would come tromping back over the bridge covered with dirt and fill our bath with silt, and we would know he had gone on another expedition.

So I was surprised when he took me down those stairs, turned left instead of right, led me through a few twists and turns that looked too narrow for him, and showed me a rusty plate in the floor of a dirty, wet-smelling room. He hauled it up to expose a cavity below, and an aluminum step-ladder that he had pilfered from somewhere else in the concent. “I was obliged to saw the legs off—a little,” he confessed, “as the ceiling is quite low. After you.”

The legendary treasure-vault turned out to be approximately one arm-span wide and high. The floor was dirt. Arsibalt had spread out a poly tarp so that perishable things—“such as your bony arse, Raz”—could exist here without continually drawing up moisture from the earth. Oh, and there wasn’t any treasure. Just a lot of graffiti carved into the walls by disappointed slines.

It was just about the nastiest place imaginable to work. But we had almost no choices. It wasn’t as if I could sit up on my pallet at night and throw my bolt over my head like a tent and stare at the forbidden tablet.

We employed the oldest trick in the book—literally. In the Old Library, Tulia found a great big fat book that no one had pulled down from the shelf in eleven hundred years: a compendium of papers about a kind of elementary particle theorics that had been all the rage from 2300 to 2600, when Saunt Fenabrast had proved it was wrong. We cut a circle from each page until we had formed a cavity in the heart of this tome that was large enough to swallow the photomnemonic tablet. Lio carried it up to the Fendant court in a stack of other books and brought it back down at suppertime, much heavier, and handed it over to me. The next day I gave it to Arsibalt at breakfast. When I saw him at supper he told me that the tablet was now in place. “I looked at it, a little,” he said.

“What did you learn?” I asked him.

“That the Ita have been diligent about keeping Clesthyra’s Eye spotless,” he said. “One of them comes every day to dust it. Sometimes he eats his lunch up there.”

“Nice place for it,” I said. “But I was thinking of night-time observations.”

“I’ll leave those to you, Fraa Erasmas.”

Now I only wanted an excuse to go to Shuf’s Dowment a lot. Here at last politics worked in my favor. Those who looked askance at the ROF’s fixing up the Dowment did so because it seemed like a sneaky way of getting something for nothing. If asked, the ROF would always insist that anyone was welcome to go there and work. But New Circles and especially Edharians rarely did so. Partly this was the usual inter-Order rivalry. Partly it was current events.

“How have your brothers and sisters been treating you lately?” Tulia asked me one day as we were walking back from Provener. The shape of her voice was not warm-fuzzy. More curious-analytical. I turned around to walk backwards in front of her so that I could look at her face. She got annoyed and raised her eyebrows. She was coming of age in a month. After that, she could take part in liaisons without violating the Discipline. Things between us had become awkward.

“Why do you ask? Just curious,” I said.

“Stop making a spectacle of yourself and I’ll tell you.”

I hadn’t realized I was making a spectacle of myself but I turned back around and fell in step beside her.

“There is a new strain of thought,” Tulia said, “that Orolo was actually Thrown Back as retribution for the politicking that took place during the Eliger season.”

“Whew!” was the most eloquent thing I could say about that. I walked on in silence for a while. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. If you couldn’t be Thrown Back for stealing mead and selling it on the black market to buy forbidden consumer goods, then what wouldn’t bring down the Anathema? And yet—

“Ideas like that are evil,” I said, “because some creepy-crawly part of your brain wants to believe in them even while your logical mind is blasting them to pieces.”

“Well, some among the Edharians have been letting their creepy-crawly brains get the better of them,” Tulia said. “They don’t want to believe in the mead and the speelycaptor. Apparently, Orolo brokered a three-way deal that sent Arsibalt to the ROF in exchange for—”

“Stop,” I said, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“You know what Orolo did and so it’s easier for you to accept,” she said. “Others are having trouble with it—they want to make it into a political conspiracy and say that the thing with the mead never happened.”

“Not even I am that cynical about Suur Trestanas,” I said. In the corner of my eye I saw Tulia turn her head to look at me.

“Okay,” I admitted, “Let me put it differently. I don’t think she’s a conspiracist. I think she’s just plain evil.”

That seemed to satisfy Tulia.

“Look,” I said, “Fraa Orolo used to say that the concent was just like the outside world, except with fewer shiny objects. I had no idea what he was getting at. Now that he’s gone, I see it. Our knowledge doesn’t make us better or wiser. We can be just as nasty as those slines that beat up Lio and Arsibalt for the fun of it.”

“Did Orolo have an answer?”

“I think he did,” I said, “he was trying to explain it to me during Apert. Look for things that have beauty—it tells you that a ray is shining in from—well—”

“A true place? The Hylaean Theoric World?” Again her face was hard to read. She wanted to know whether I believed in all that stuff. And I wanted to know if she did. I reckoned the stakes were higher for her. As an Edharian, I could get away with it. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know if he would have called it by that name. But it’s what he was driving at.”

“Well,” she said, after giving it a few moments’ thought, “it’s better than spending your life swapping conspiracy theories.”

That’s not saying much, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud. The decision Tulia had made to join the New Circle was a real decision with real consequences. One of which was that she must be guarded when talking about ideas like the HTW that they considered to be superstitions. She could believe in that stuff if she wanted; but she had to keep it to herself, and it was bad form for me to try to pry it out of her.

Anyway I now had an excuse to hang around at Shuf’s Dowment: I was trying to act as a peacemaker among the orders by accepting the ROF’s standing invitation.

After breakfast each morning I would attend a lecture, typically with Barb, and work with him on proofs and problems until Provener and the midday meal. After that I would go out to the back part of the meadow where Lio and I were getting ready for the weed war, and work, or pretend to, for a while. I kept an eye on the bay window of Shuf’s Dowment, up on the hill on the other side of the river. Arsibalt kept a stack of books on the windowsill next to his big chair. If someone else was there, he would turn these so that their spines were toward the window. I could see their dark brown bindings from the meadow. But if he found himself alone, he would turn them so that their white page-edges were visible. When I noticed this I would stop work, go to a niche-gallery, fetch my theorics notes, and carry them over the bridge and through the page-tree-coppice to Shuf’s Dowment, as if I were going there to study. A few minutes later I’d be down in the sub-cellar, sitting crosslegged on that tarp and working with the tablet. When I was finished I would come back up through the cellars. Before ascending the flagstone steps I would look for another signal: if someone else was in the building, Arsibalt would close the door at the top of the stairs, but if he were alone, he’d leave it ajar.

One of the many advantages that photomnemonic tablets held over ordinary phototypes was that they made their own light, so you could work with them in the dark. This tablet began and ended with daylight. If I ran it back to the very beginning, it became a featureless pool of white light with a faint bluish tinge: the unfocused light of sun and sky that had washed over the tablet after I had activated it on top of the Pinnacle during Fraa Paphlagon’s Voco. If I put the tablet into play mode I could then watch a brief funny-looking transition as it had been slid into Clesthyra’s Eye, and then, suddenly, an image, perfectly crisp and clear but geometrically distorted.

Most of the disk was a picture of the sky. The sun was a neat white circle, off-center. Around the tablet’s rim was a dark, uneven fringe, like a moldy rind on a wheel of cheese: the horizon, all of it, in every direction. In this fisheye geometry, “down” for us humans—i.e., toward the ground—was always outward toward the rim of the tablet. Up was always inward toward the center. If several people had stood in a circle around Clesthyra’s eye, their waists would have appeared around the circumference of the image and their heads would have projected inward like spokes of a wheel.

So much information was crammed into the tablet’s outer fringe that I had to use its pan and zoom functions to make sense of it. The bright sky-disk seemed to have a deep dark notch cut into it at one place. On closer examination, this was the pedestal of the zenith mirror, which stood right next to Clesthyra’s Eye. Like the north arrow on a map, this gave me a reference point that I could use to get my bearings and find other things. About halfway around the rim from it was a wider, shallower notch in the sky-disk, difficult to make sense of. But if I turned it about the right way and gave my eye a moment to get used to the distortion, I could understand it as a human figure, wrapped in a bolt that covered everything except one hand and forearm. These were reaching radially outward (which meant down) and became grotesquely oversized before being cropped by the edge of the tablet. This monstrosity was me reaching toward the base of the Eye, having just inserted the tablet and secured the dust cover. The first time I saw this I laughed out loud because it made my elbow look as big as the moon, and by zooming in on it I could see a mole and count the hairs and freckles. My attempt to hide my identity by hooding myself had been a joke! If Suur Trestanas had found this tablet she could have found the culprit by going around and examining everyone’s right elbow.

When I let the tablet play forward, I could see the notch-that-was-me melt into the dark horizon-rim as I departed. A few moments later, a dark mote streaked around the tablet in a long arc, close to the rim: the aerocraft that had taken Fraa Paphlagon away to the Panjandrums. By freezing this and zooming in I could see the aerocraft clearly, not quite so badly distorted because it was farther away: the rotors and the streams of exhaust from its engines frozen, the pilot’s face, mostly covered by a dark visor, caught in sunlight shining through the windscreen, his lips parted as if he were speaking into the microphone that curved alongside his cheek. When I ran the time point forward a few minutes I was able to see the aerocraft flying back in the other direction, this time with the face of Fraa Paphlagon framed in a side-window, gazing back at the concent as if he’d never seen it before.

Then, by sliding my finger up along the side of the tablet for a short distance, I was able to make the sun commit its arc across the sky-disk and sink into the horizon. The tablet went dark. Stars must be recorded on it, but my eyes couldn’t see them very well because they hadn’t adjusted to the dark yet. A few red comets flashed across it—the lights of aerocraft. Then the disk brightened again and the sun exploded from the edge and launched itself across the sky the next morning.

If I ran my finger all the way up the side of the tablet in one continuous motion, it flashed like a strobe light: seventy-eight flashes in all, one for each day that the tablet had lodged in Clesthyra’s Eye. Coming to the last few seconds and slowing down the playback, I was able to watch myself emerging from the top of the stairs and approaching the Eye to remove the tablet during Fraa Orolo’s Anathem. But I hated to see this part of it because of the way my face looked. I only checked it once, just to be sure that the tablet had continued recording all the way until the moment I’d retrieved it.

I erased the first and last few seconds of the recording, so that if the tablet were confiscated it would not contain any images of me. Then I began reviewing it in greater detail. Arsibalt had mentioned seeing the Ita in this thing. Sure enough, on the second day, a little after noon, a dark bulge reached in from the rim and blotted out most of the sky for a minute. I ran it back and played it at normal speed. It was one of the Ita. He approached from the top of the stairs carrying a squirt-bottle and a rag. He spent a minute cleaning the zenith mirror, then approached Clesthyra’s Eye—which was when his image really became huge—and sprayed cleaning fluid on it. I flinched as if the stuff were being sprayed into my face. He gave it a good polish. I could see all the way up into his nostrils and count the hairs; I could see the tiny veins in his eyeballs and the striations in his iris. So there was no doubt that this was Sammann, the Ita whom Jesry and I had stumbled upon in Cord’s machine-hall. In a moment he became much smaller as he backed away from the Eye. But he did not depart from the top of the Pinnacle immediately. He stood there for several moments, bobbed out of view, re-appeared, approached and loomed in Clesthyra’s Eye for a little bit, then finally went away.

I zoomed in and watched that last bit again. After he polished the lens, he looked down, as if he had dropped something. He stooped over, which made all but his backside disappear beyond the rim of the tablet. When he stood up, bulging back into the picture again, he had something new in his hand: a rectangular object about the size of a book. I didn’t have to zoom in on this to know what it was: the dust jacket that, a day previously, I had torn off this very tablet. The wind had snatched it from my hand, and in my haste to leave, I had, like an idiot, left it lying where it had fallen.

Sammann examined it for a minute, turning it this way and that. After a while he seemed to get an idea of what it was. His head snapped around to look at me—at Clesthyra’s Eye, rather. He approached and peered into the lens, then cocked his head, reached down, and (I guessed, though I couldn’t see) prodded the little door that covered the tablet-slot. His face registered something. If I’d wanted, I could have zoomed in on his eyeballs and seen what was reflected in them. But I didn’t need to because the look on his face told all.

Less than twenty-four hours after I had slipped that tablet into Clesthyra’s Eye, someone else in this concent had known about it.

Sammann stood there for another minute, pondering. Then he folded up the dust jacket, inserted it into a breast-pocket of his cloak, turned his back on me, and walked away.

I moved the tablet forward to a cloudy night, thereby plunging myself into almost total blackness, and I sat there in that hole in the ground and tried to get over this.

I was remembering the other evening, standing around the campfire, when I had criticized Orolo for being incautious, and told my friends that I’d be much more careful. What an idiot I was!

Watching Sammann pick up that dust jacket and put two and two together, my face had flushed and my heart had thumped as if I were actually there on top of the Pinnacle with him. But this was just a recording of something that had happened months ago. And nothing had come of it. Granted, Sammann could spill the beans any time he chose.

That was unnerving. But I could do nothing about it. Feeling embarrassed by a mistake I’d made months ago was a waste of time. Better to think about what I was going to do now. Sit here in the dark worrying? Or keep investigating the contents of this tablet? Put that way, it wasn’t a very difficult question. The fury that had taken up residence in my gut was a kind of anger that had to be acted upon. The action didn’t need to be sudden or dramatic. If I’d joined one of the other orders, I might have made acting upon it into a sort of career. Using it as fuel, I could have spent the next ten or twenty years working my way up the hierarch ranks, looking for ways to make life nasty for those who had wronged Orolo. But the fact of the matter was that I’d joined the Edharians and thereby made myself powerless as far as the internal politics of the concent were concerned. So I tended to think in terms of murdering Fraa Spelikon. Such was my anger that for a little while this actually made sense, and from time to time I’d find myself musing about how to carry it off. There were a lot of big knives in the kitchen.

So how fortunate it was that I had this tablet, and a place in which to view it. It gave me something to act on—something, that is, besides Fraa Spelikon’s throat. If I worked on it hard enough and were lucky, perhaps I could come up with some result that I could announce one evening in the Refectory to the humiliation of Spelikon, Trestanas, and Statho. Then I could storm out of the concent in disgust before they had time to Throw me Back.

And in the meantime, studying this thing answered that need in my gut to take some kind of action in response to what had been inflicted on Orolo. And I’d found that taking such action was the only way to transmute my anger back into grief. And when I was grieving—instead of angry—young fids no longer shied away from me, and my mind was no longer filled with images of blood pumping from Fraa Spelikon’s severed arteries.

So I had no choice but to put Sammann and the dust cover out of my mind, and concentrate instead on what Clesthyra’s Eye had seen during the night-time. I had kept track of the weather those seventy-seven nights. More than half had been cloudy. There had only been seventeen nights of really clear seeing.

Once I allowed my eyes to adjust to the darkness, it was easy to find north on this thing, because it was the pole around which all the stars revolved. If the image was frozen, or playing back at something like normal speed, the stars appeared as stationary points of light. But if I sped up the playback, each star, with the exception of the pole star, traced an arc centered on the pole as Arbre rotated beneath it. Our fancier telescopes had polar axis systems, driven by the clock, that eliminated this problem. These telescopes rotated “backwards” at the same speed as Arbre rotated “forwards” so that the stars remained stationary above them. Clesthyra’s Eye was not so equipped.

The tablet could be commanded to tell what it had seen in several different ways. To this point I’d been using it like a speelycaptor with its play, pause, and fast-forward buttons. But it could do things that speelycaptors couldn’t, such as integrate an image over a span of time. This was an echo of the Praxic Age when, instead of tablets like this one, cosmographers had used plates coated with chemicals sensitive to light. Because many of the things they looked at were so faint, they had often needed to expose those plates for hours at a time. A photomnemonic tablet worked both ways. If you were to “play back” such a record in speelycaptor mode, you might see nothing more than a few stars and a bit of haze, but if you configured the tablet to show the still image integrated over time, a spiral galaxy or nebula might pop out.

So my first experiment was to select a night that had been clear, and configure the tablet to integrate all the light that Clesthyra’s Eye had taken in that night into a single still image. The first results weren’t very good because I set the start time too early and the stop time too late, so everything was washed out by the brightness in the sky after dusk and before dawn. But after making some adjustments I was able to get the image I wanted.

It was a black disk etched with thousands of fine concentric arcs, each of which was the track made by a particular star or planet as Arbre spun beneath it. This image was crisscrossed by several red dotted lines and brilliant white streaks: the traces made by the lights of aerocraft passing across our sky. The ones in the center, made by high-flying craft, ran nearly straight. Over toward one edge the star-field was all but obliterated by a sheaf of fat white curves: craft coming in to land at the local aerodrome, all following more or less the same glide path.

Only one thing in this whole firmament did not move: the pole star. If our hypothesis was correct as to what Fraa Orolo had been looking for—namely, something in a polar orbit—then, assuming it was bright enough to be seen on this thing, it ought to register as a streak passing near the pole star. It would be straight or nearly so, and oriented at right angles to the myriad arcs made by the stars—it would move north-south as they moved east-west.

Not only that, but such a satellite should make more than one such streak on a given night. Jesry and I had worked it out. A satellite in a low orbit should make a complete pass around Arbre in about an hour and a half. If it made a streak on the tablet as it passed over the pole at, say, midnight, then at about one-thirty it should make another streak, and another at three, and another at four-thirty. It should always stay in the same plane with respect to the fixed stars. But during each of those ninety-minute intervals Arbre would rotate through twenty-two and a half degrees of longitude. And so the successive streaks that a given satellite made should not be drawn on top of each other. Instead they should be separated by angles of about twenty-two and a half degrees (or pi/8 as theoricians measured angles). They should look like cuts on a pie.

My work on that first day in the sub-cellar consisted of making the tablet produce a time exposure for the first clear night, then zooming in on the vicinity of the pole star and looking for something that resembled a pie-cutting diagram. I succeeded in this so easily that I was almost disappointed. Because there was more than one such satellite, what it looked like was more complex:

But if I looked at it long enough I could see it as several different pie-cut diagrams piled on top of each other.

“It’s an anticlimax,” I told Jesry at supper. We had somehow managed to avoid Barb and sit together in a corner of the Refectory.

“Again?”

“I’d sort of thought that if I could see anything at all in a polar orbit, that’d be the end of it. Mystery solved, case closed. But it is not so. There are several satellites in polar orbits. Probably have been ever since the Praxic Age. Old ones wear out and fall down. The Panjandrums launch new ones.”

“That is not a new result,” he pointed out. “If you go out at night and stand facing north and wait long enough, you can see those things hurtling over the pole with the naked eye.”

I chewed a bit of food as I struggled to master the urge to punch him in the nose. But this was how things were done in theorics. It wasn’t only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People reinvented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, “Gosh, a wheel, no one’s ever thought of that before,” just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done. But still it stung to risk so much and do so much work to get a result, only to be told it was nothing new.

“I don’t claim it is a new result,” I told him, with elaborate patience. “I’m only letting you know what happened the first time I was able to spend a couple of hours with the tablet. And I guess I am posing a question.”

“All right. What is the question?”

“Fraa Orolo must have known that there were several satellites in polar orbits and that this wasn’t a big deal. To a cosmographer, it’s no more remarkable than aerocraft flying overhead.”

“An annoyance. A distraction,” Jesry said, nodding.

“So what was it that he risked Anathem to see?”

“He didn’t just risk Anathem. He—”

I waved him off. “You know what I mean. This is no time to go Kefedokhles.”

Jesry gazed into space above my left shoulder. Most others would have been embarrassed or irritated by my remark. Not him! He couldn’t care less. How I envied him! “We know that he needed a speelycaptor to see it,” Jesry said. “The naked eye wasn’t good enough.”

“He had to see all of this in a different way. He couldn’t make time exposures on a tablet,” I put in.

“The best he could do, once the starhenge had been locked, was to stand out in that vineyard, freezing his arse off, looking at the pole star through the speelycaptor. Waiting for something to streak across.”

“When it showed up, it would zoom across the viewfinder in a few moments,” I said. We were completing each other’s sentences now. “But then what? What would he have learned?”

“The time,” Jesry said. “He would know what time it was.” He shifted his gaze to the tabletop, as if it were a speely of Orolo. “He makes a note of it. Ninety minutes later he looks again. He sees the same bird making its next pass over the pole.” Lio referred to satellites as birds—this was military slang he’d picked up from books—and the rest of us had adopted the term.

“That sounds about as interesting as watching the hour hand on a clock,” I said.

“Well, but remember, there’s more than one of these birds,” he said.

“I don’t have to remember it—I spent the whole afternoon looking at them!” I reminded him.

But Jesry was on the trail of an idea and had no time for me and my petty annoyance. “They can’t all be orbiting at the same altitude,” he said. “Some must be higher than others—those would have longer periods. Instead of ninety minutes they might take ninety-one or a hundred three minutes to go around. By timing their orbits, Fraa Orolo could, by making enough observations, compile sort of—”

“A census,” I said. “A list of all the birds that were up there.”

“Once he had that in hand, if there was any change—any anomaly—he’d be able to detect it. But until such time as he had completed that census, as you call it—”

“He’d be working in the dark, in more ways than one, wouldn’t he?” I said. “He’d see a bird pass over the pole but he wouldn’t know which bird it was, or if there was anything unusual about it.”

“So if that’s true we have to follow in his footsteps,” Jesry said. “Your first objective should be to compile such a census.”

“That is much easier for me than it was for Orolo,” I said. “Just looking at the tracks on the tablet you can see that some are more widely spread—bigger slices of the pie—than others. Those must be the high flyers.”

“Once you get used to looking at these images, you might be able to notice anomalies just by their general appearance,” Jesry speculated.

Which was easy for him to say, since he wasn’t the one doing it!

For the last little while he had seemed restless and bored. Now he broke eye contact, gazed around the Refectory as if seeking someone more interesting—but then turned his attention back to me. “New topic,” he announced.

“Affirmative. State name of topic,” I answered, but if he knew I was making fun of him, he didn’t show it.

“Fraa Paphlagon.”

“The Hundreder who was Evoked.”

“Yes.”

“Orolo’s mentor.”

“Yes. The Steelyard says that his Evocation, and the trouble Orolo got into, must be connected.”

“Seems reasonable,” I said. “I guess I’ve sort of been assuming that.”

“Normally we’d have no way of knowing what a Hundreder was working on—not until the next Centennial Apert, anyway. But before Paphlagon went into the Upper Labyrinth, twenty-two years ago, he wrote some treatises that got sent out into the world at the Decennial Apert of 3670. Ten years later, and again just a few months ago, our Library got its usual Decennial deliveries. So, I’ve been going through all that stuff looking for anything that references Paphlagon’s work.”

“Seems really indirect,” I pointed out. “We’ve got all of Paphlagon’s work right here, don’t we?”

“Yeah. But that’s not what I’m looking for,” Jesry said. “I’m more interested in knowing who, out there, was paying attention to Paphlagon. Who read his works of 3670, and thought he had an interesting mind? Because—”

“Because someone,” I said, getting it, “someone out there in the S#230;cular world must have said ‘Paphlagon’s our man—yank him, and bring him to us!’”

“Exactly.”

“So what have you found?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Jesry said. “Turns out Paphlagon had two careers, in a way.”

“What do you mean—like an avocation?”

“You could say his avocation was philosophy. Metatheorics. Procians might even call it a sort of religion. On the one hand, he’s a proper cosmographer, doing the same sort of stuff as Orolo. But in his spare time he’s thinking big ideas, and writing it down—and people on the outside noticed.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“I don’t want to go there now,” Jesry said.

“Well, damn it—”

He held up a hand to settle me. “Read it yourself! That’s not what I’m about. I’m about trying to reckon who picked him and why. There’s lots of cosmographers, right?”

“Sure.”

“So if he was Evoked to answer cosmography questions, you have to ask—”

“Why him in particular?”

“Yeah. But it’s rare to work on the metatheorical stuff he was interested in.”

“I see where you’re going,” I said. “The Steelyard tells us he must have been Evoked for that—not the cosmography.”

“Yeah,” Jesry said. “Anyway, not that many people paid attention to Paphlagon’s metatheorics, at least, judging from the stuff we got in the deliveries of 3680 and 3690. But there’s one suur at Baritoe, name of Aculoa, who really seems to admire him. Has written two books about Paphlagon’s work.”

“Tenner or—”

“No, that’s just it. She’s a Unarian. Thirty-four years straight.”

So she was a teacher. There was no other reason to spend more than a few years in a Unarian math.

“Latter Evenedrician,” Jesry said, answering my next question before I’d asked it.

“I don’t know much about that order.”

“Well, remember when Orolo told us that Saunt Evenedric worked on different stuff during the second half of his career?”

“Actually, I think Arsibalt’s the one who told us that, but—”

Jesry shrugged off my correction. “The Latter Evenedricians are interested in exactly that stuff.”

“All right,” I said, “so you reckon Suur Aculoa fingered Paphlagon?”

“No way. She’s a philosophy teacher, a One-off…”

“Yeah, but at one of the Big Three!”

“That’s my point,” Jesry said, a little testy, “a lot of important S#230;culars did a few years at Big Three maths when they were younger—before they went out and started their careers.”

“You think this suur had a fid, ten or fifteen years ago maybe, who’s gone on to become a Panjandrum. Aculoa taught the fid all about how great and wise Fraa Paphlagon was. And now, something’s happened—”

“Something,” Jesry said, nodding confidently, “that made that ex-fid say, ‘that tears it, we need Paphlagon here yesterday!’”

“But what could that something be?”

Jesry shrugged. “That’s the whole question, isn’t it?”

“Maybe we could get a clue by investigating Paphlagon’s writings.”

“That is obvious,” Jesry said. “But it’s rather difficult when Arsibalt’s using them as a semaphore.”

It took me a moment to make sense of this. “That stack of books in the window—”

Jesry nodded. “Arsibalt took everything Paphlagon ever wrote to Shuf’s Dowment.”

I laughed. “Well then, what about Suur Aculoa?”

“Tulia’s going through her works now,” Jesry said, “trying to figure out if she had any fids who amounted to anything.”

Working in a hole in the ground had made me ignorant of all these goings-on. But now that Jesry had let me know that my fraas and suurs were working so hard, I redoubled my efforts with the tablet. Stored on that thing I had all of seventeen clear nights. Once I got the knack, it took me about half an hour’s work to configure the tablet to give me the time exposure for a given night. Then, using a protractor, I would spend another half hour or so measuring the angles between streaks. As Jesry had predicted, some birds made slightly larger angles than others, reflecting their longer periods, but the angle for a given bird was always the same, every orbit, every night. So in a sense it only took a single night’s observations to make a rough draft of the census. But I went ahead and did it for all seventeen of the clear nights anyway, just to be thorough, and because frankly I had no idea what to do next. I could polish off one, sometimes two nights’ observations every time I got a chance to go down into that sub-cellar, but I didn’t get that chance every day.

By the time I finished, I had been at it for about three weeks. Buds were out on the page trees. Birds were flying north. Fraas and suurs were poking around in their tangles, arguing about whether it was time to plant. The barbarian weed-horde was marshaling on the riverbank and getting ready to invade the fertile Plains of Thrania. Arsibalt was two-thirds of the way through his pile of Paphlagon. The vernal equinox was only a few days away. Apert had begun on the morning of the autumnal equinox—half a year ago! I could not understand where the time had gone.

It had gone the same place as all the thousands of years before it. I had spent it working. It didn’t matter that my work was secret, illicit, and could have got me Thrown Back. The concent didn’t care about that. Certain persons would have cared a lot. But this was a place for the avout to spend their lives working on such projects. And now that I had a project, I was a part of that concent in a way I’d never been before, and the place was the right place for me.

Since Arsibalt, Jesry, and Tulia had their minds on other projects, I didn’t tell them about Sammann. That was a topic reserved for Lio when we were out in the meadow coaxing the starblossom to grow in the right direction. Or, since it was Lio, doing whatever else had most recently jumped into his mind.

We had reacted in different ways to the loss of Orolo. In my case, it was bloody revenge fantasies that I kept to myself. Lio, on the other hand, had become entranced by ever weirder varieties of vlor. Two weeks ago, he had tried to get me interested in rake vlor, which I guessed was inspired by the story of Diax casting out the Enthusiasts. I had declined on grounds of not wanting to get a blood infection—a weaponized rake could give you mass-produced puncture wounds. Last week he had developed a keen interest in shovel vlor, and we had spent a lot of time squatting on the riverbank sharpening spades with rocks.

When he led me down to the river again one day, I assumed it was for more of the same. But he kept looking back over his shoulder and leading me in deeper. I’d been on enough furtive expeditions as a fid to know that he was checking the sight-lines to the Warden Regulant’s windows. Old habits kicked in; I became silent, and moved from one shady place to another until we had reached a place where the bending river had cut away the bank to form an overhang, sheltered from view. Fortunately no one was there having a liaison just now. It would have been a bad place for it anyway: mucky ground, lots of bugs, high probability of being interrupted by avout messing around on the river in boats.

Lio turned to face me. I was almost worried that he was going to make a pass at me.

But no. This was Lio we were talking about.

“I’d like you to punch me in the face,” he said. As if he were asking me to scratch his back.

“Not that I haven’t always dreamed of it,” I said, “but why would you want it?”

“Hand-to-hand combat has been a common element of military training down through the ages,” he proclaimed, as if I were a fid. “Long ago it was learned that recruits—no matter how much training they had received—tended to forget everything they knew the first time they got punched in the face.”

“The first time in their lives, you mean?”

“Yeah. In peaceful, affluent societies where brawling is frowned on, this is a common problem.”

“Not being punched in the face a lot is a problem?”

“It is,” Lio said, “if you join the military and find yourself in hand-to-hand combat with someone who is actually trying to kill you.”

“But Lio,” I said, “you have been punched in the face. It happened at Apert. Remember?”

“Yes,” he said, “and I have been trying to learn from that experience.”

“So why do you want me to punch you in the face again?”

“As a way to find out whether I have learned.”

“Why me? Why not Jesry? He seems more the type.”

“That is the problem.”

“I see your point. Why not Arsibalt, then?”

“He wouldn’t do it for real—and then he’d complain that he’d hurt his hand.”

“What are you going to tell people if you show up for dinner with a busted face?”

“That I was battling evildoers.”

“Try again.”

“That I was practicing falls, and landed wrong.”

“What if I don’t want to mess up my hand?”

He smiled and produced a pair of heavy leather work gloves. “Stuff some rags under the knuckles,” he suggested, as I was pulling them on, “if you’re that worried about it.”

Grandsuurs Tamura and Ylma drifted by on a punt. We pretended to pull weeds until they were out of sight.

“Okay,” Lio said, “my objective is to perform a simple takedown on you—”

“Oh, now you tell me!”

“Nothing we haven’t done a hundred times,” he said, as if I would find this reassuring. “That’s why we came here.” He stomped the damp sand of the riverbank. “Soft ground.”

“Why—?”

“If I put up my hands to defend my face, I won’t be able to complete my objective.”

“I get it.”

Suddenly he came at me and took me down. “You lose,” he proclaimed, getting up.

“Okay.” I sighed, and clambered to my feet. Immediately he wheeled around and took me down again. I threw a playful blow at his head, way too late. This time he took me down a lot harder. Every one of the small muscles in my head felt as if it had been strained. He planted a dirty hand on top of my face and shoved off while getting back to his feet. The message was clear.

The next time I tried for real, but I didn’t have my feet planted and wasn’t able to hit very hard. And he was coming in too low.

The time after that, I got my center of gravity low, planted my feet in the mud, made a bone connection from hip to fist, and drilled him right on the cheekbone. “Good!” he moaned, as he was climbing off me. “See if you can actually slow me down though—that’s the whole point, remember?”

I think we did it about ten more times. Since I was suffering a lot more abuse than he was, I sort of lost track. On my best go, I was able to throw him off stride for a moment—but he still took me down.

“How much longer are we going to do this?” I asked, lying in the mud, in the bottom of an Erasmas-shaped crater. If I refused to get up, he couldn’t take me down.

He scooped up a double handful of river water and splashed it on his face, rinsing away blood from nostrils and eyebrows. “That should do,” he said. “I’ve learned what I wanted.”

“Which is?” I asked, daring to sit up.

“That I’ve adjusted, since what happened at Apert.”

“We did all that to obtain a negative result?” I exclaimed, getting to my knees.

“If you want to think of it that way,” he said, and scooped up more water.

I’d never get such a fine opportunity again, so I rolled up, put a foot in his backside, and sent him headlong into the river.

Later, as Lio was engrossed in the comparatively normal and sane activity of shovel-sharpening, I got us back on the topic of what I’d been seeing in the tablet: specifically, Sammann’s behavior during his noon visits.

Once I’d gotten over that sick feeling of having been found out, I’d begun to brood over some other questions. Was it merely a coincidence that the Ita who had discovered the dust jacket was the same one who had visited Cord in the machine hall? I reckoned that either it was a simple coincidence, or else that this Sammann was some kind of high-ranking Ita who was responsible for important tasks having to do with the starhenge. In any case, it booted me nothing to speculate about it.

“Has dis Ita tried to cobbudicade wid you?” Lio asked through puffy lips.

“You mean, like, sneaking into the math at night to slip me notes?”

Lio was baffled by my answer. He showed this in his usual way: by correcting his posture. The scrape of the rock on the shovel paused for a moment. Then he got it. “No, I don’t mean in real time,” he said. “I mean, on the tablet does he—you know.”

“No, Thistlehead, I have to confess I haven’t the faintest idea—”

“If anyone understands surveillance, it’s those guys,” Lio pointed out. “If you buy into Saunt Patagar’s Assertion, sure.”

Lio seemed disappointed that I was so naive as not to believe this. He went back to work on that rock. The scraping really set my teeth on edge but I reckoned it must be putting the hurt on any spies who might be eavesdropping.

Apparently my new role at the Concent of Saunt Edhar was to be the sheltered innocent. I said, “Well, answer me this. If they have us under total surveillance, they must know everything about me and the tablet, right?”

“Well, yeah, you’d think so.”

“So why hasn’t anything happened?” I asked him. “It’s not like Spelikon and Trestanas have soft spots for me.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he insisted. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about that.”

“How do you figure?”

He paused long enough to give me the idea he was making up an answer on the spot. He dipped his sharpening-rock into the river. “The Ita can’t be telling the Warden Regulant everything they know. Trestanas would have to spend every minute of every day with them, to take in so much intelligence. The Ita must make decisions as to what they will pass on and what they will withhold.”

What Lio was saying opened up all sorts of interesting scenarios that would take me some time to sort out. I didn’t want to stand there with my mouth hanging open any longer than I already had, so I bent down and grabbed the handle of the shovel. It wasn’t going to get any sharper. I looked around for a stand of slashberry that needed to be massacred. It didn’t take long to find one. I made for it and Lio followed me.

“That’s giving the Ita a lot of responsibility,” I said, raising the shovel, then driving it down and forward into the roots of the slashberry canes. Several of them toppled. Most satisfying.

“Assume that they are as intelligent as we are,” Lio said. “Come on! They operate complicated syntactic devices for a living. They created the Reticulum. No one knows better than they do that knowledge is power. By employing strategy and tactics in what they say and what they don’t, they must be able to get things they want.”

I took down a square yard of slashberry while thinking about what he said.

“You’re saying there’s a whole world of Ita/hierarch politics going on over there that we know nothing about.”

“Has to be. Or else they wouldn’t be human,” Lio said.

Then he used Hypotrochian Transquaestiation on me: he changed the subject in such a way as to imply that the question had just been settled—that he had won the point and I had lost. “So, back to my question: does Sammann do anything else on the tablet that sends you a message—or at least indicates he knows that his image is being recorded?” He chucked his sharpening-rock into the river.

The correct response to Hypotrochian Transquaestiation was Hey, not so fast! but Lio’s question was so interesting that I didn’t make a fuss. “I don’t know,” I had to admit, after I’d spent an enjoyable minute or so taking down more slashberry. “But I’m getting bored measuring pie-slices. And I honestly don’t know what else to look at next. So I’ll have a look.”

After that I couldn’t get into the cellar for almost a week. The concent was getting ready for some equinox celebrations and so I had chant rehearsals. The weed war was entering a stage that demanded I draw at least one sketch of it. I had to get my tangle planted. When I was free, there always seemed to be other people at Shuf’s Dowment. The place was becoming hip!

“Be careful what you wish for,” Arsibalt moaned to me, one afternoon. I was helping him carry a stack of beehive frames into a wood shop. “I invited one and all to use the Dowment—now they are doing so—and I can’t work there!”

“Nor I,” I pointed out.

“And now this!” He picked up a putty knife, which I was pretty sure was the wrong tool for the job, and began to pick absent-mindedly at a patch of rotten wood on the corner of a frame. “Disaster!”

“Do you know anything about woodworking?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“How about the metatheorical works of Fraa Paphlagon?”

“That I know a few things about,” he said. “And what is more, I think Orolo wanted us to learn about them.”

“How so?”

“Remember our last dialog with him?”

“Pink nerve-gas-farting dragons. Of course.”

“We must come up with a more dignified name for it before we commit it to ink,” Arsibalt said with a grimace. “Anyway, I believe that Orolo was pushing us to think about some of the ideas that were—are—important to his mentor.”

“Funny he didn’t mention Paphlagon, in that case,” I pointed out. “I remember talking about the later works of Saunt Evenedric, but—”

“One leads to the other. We would have found our way to Paphlagon in due course.”

“You would’ve, maybe,” I said. “What’s it all about?” This seemed a reasonable question. But Arsibalt flinched.

“The sort of stuff Procians hate us for.”

“Like, the Hylaean Theoric World?” I asked.

“That’s what they would call it, as a backhanded way of suggesting we are naive. But, starting at least as early as Protas, the idea of the HTW was developed into a more sophisticated metatheorics. So you could say that Paphlagon’s work is to classical Protan thought what modern group theory is to counting on one’s fingers.”

“But still related to it?”

“Certainly.”

“I’m just thinking back to my conversation with that Inquisitor.”

“Varax?”

“Yeah. I’m wondering whether his interest in the topic—”

“Correction: he was interested in whether we were interested in it,” Arsibalt pointed out.

“Yeah, exactly—whether that might be further evidence for the existence of the Hypothetical Important Fid of Suur Aculoa.”

“I think we should be careful speculating about the HIFOSA until Suur Tulia has actually found evidence of his or her existence,” Arsibalt said. “Otherwise we’ll be coming up with all manner of speculations that would never make it past the Rake.”

“Well, without telling me everything you know about it,” I said, “can you give me a clue as to why anyone in the S#230;cular world would think Paphlagon’s work might be of practical importance?”

“Yes,” he said, “if you fix this beehive for me.”

“You know about atom smashers? Particle accelerators?”

“Sure,” I said. “Praxic Age installations. Huge and expensive. Used to test theories about elementary particles and forces.”

“Yes,” Arsibalt said. “If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics—it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.”

“Wow,” I said, “I’ll bet a philosopher would really jump down your throat for talking that way. It’s like saying that philosophy is nothing more than bad theorics.”

“There are some theors who would say so,” Arsibalt admitted. “But those people aren’t really talking about philosophy as philosophers would define it. Rather, they are talking about something that theors begin to do when they get right up to the edge of what they can prove using the equipment they’ve got. They drive philosophers crazy by calling it philosophy or metatheorics.”

“What kind of stuff are you talking about?”

“Well, they speculate as to what the next theory might look like. They develop the theory and try to use it to make predictions that might be testable. In the late Praxic Age, that usually meant constructing an even bigger and more expensive particle accelerator.”

“And then came the Terrible Events,” I said.

“Yes, no more expensive toys for theors after that,” Arsibalt said. “But it’s not clear that it actually made that much of a difference. The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.”

“I hadn’t known that,” I said. “I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.”

“There might as well be,” Arsibalt said, “but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

“So the Turn to Cosmography might have happened even without the Reconstitution.”

“It was already happening,” Arsibalt said, “as the theors of the very late Praxic Age were coming to terms with the fact that no machine would be constructed during their lifetimes that would be capable of testing the theorics to which they were devoting their careers.”

“So those theors had no alternative but to look to the cosmos for givens.”

“Yes,” Arsibalt said. “And in the meantime we have people like Fraa Paphlagon.”

“Meaning what? Both theors and philosophers?”

He thought about it. “I’m trying to respect your earlier request that I not simply bury you in Paphlagon,” he explained, when he caught me looking, “but this forces me to work harder.”

“Fair is fair,” I pointed out, brandishing a crosscut saw that I had been putting to use.

“You could think of Paphlagon—and presumably Orolo—as descendants of people like Evenedric.”

“Theors,” I said, “who turned to philosophy when theorics stopped.”

“Slowed down,” Arsibalt corrected me, “waiting for results from places like Saunt Bunjo’s.”

Bunjo was a Millenarian math built around an empty salt mine two miles underground. Its fraas and suurs worked in shifts, sitting in total darkness waiting to see flashes of light from a vast array of crystalline particle detectors. Every thousand years they published their results. During the First Millennium they were pretty sure they had seen flashes on three separate occasions, but since then they had come up empty.

“So, in the meantime, they’ve been fooling around with ideas that people like Evenedric came up with when they reached the edge of theorics?”

“Yes,” Arsibalt said. “There was a profusion of them, right around the time of the Reconstitution, all variations on the theme of the polycosm.”

“The idea that our cosmos is not the only one.”

“Yes. And that’s what Paphlagon writes about when he isn’t studying this cosmos.”

“Now I’m a little confused,” I said, “because I thought you told me just a minute ago that he was working on the HTW.”

“Well, but you could think of Protism—the belief that there is another realm of existence populated by pure theorical forms—as the earliest and simplest polycosmic theory,” he pointed out.

“Because it posits two cosmi,” I said, trying to keep up, “one for us, and one for isosceles triangles.”

“Yes.”

“But the polycosmic theories I’ve heard about—the circa-Reconstitution ones—are a whole different kettle of fish. In those theories, there are multiple cosmi separate from our own—but similar. Full of matter and energy and fields. Always changing. Not eternal triangles.”

“Not always as similar as you think,” Arsibalt said. “Paphlagon is part of a tradition that believed that classical Protism was just another polycosmic theory.”

“How could you possibly—”

“I can’t tell you without telling you everything,” Arsibalt said, holding up his fleshy hands. “The point I’m getting at is that he believes in some form of the Hylaean Theoric World. And that there are other cosmi. Those are the topics Suur Aculoa is interested in.”

“So if the HIFOSA really exists—” I said.

“He or she summoned Paphlagon because the polycosm somehow became a hot topic.”

“And we are guessing that whatever made it hot, also triggered the closure of the starhenge.”

Arsibalt shrugged.

“Well, what could that possibly be?”

He shrugged again. “That’s one for you and Jesry. But don’t forget that the Panjandrums might simply be confused.”

Finally one day I made it down into the sub-cellar of Shuf’s Dowment and spent three hours watching Sammann eat lunches. He made the trip almost every day, but not always at the same time. If the weather was fine and the time of day was right, he would sit on the parapet, spread out some food on a little cloth, and enjoy the view while he ate. Sometimes he read a book. I couldn’t identify all of his little morsels and delicacies, but they looked better than what we had for lunch. Sometimes, if the wind blew out of the northeast, we could smell the Ita cooking. It always seemed as if they were taunting us.

“Results!” I proclaimed to Lio the next time I was alone with him in the meadow. “Sort of.”

“Yeah?”

“You were right, I think.”

“Right about what?” For so much time had passed that he had forgotten our earlier talk about Sammann. I had to remind him. Then, he was taken aback. “Wow,” he said, “this is big.”

“Could be. I still don’t know what to make of it,” I said.

“What does he do? Hold up a sign in front of the Eye? Use sign language?”

“Sammann’s too clever for that,” I said.

“What? It sounds like you’re speaking of an old friend.”

“I almost feel that way about him by this point. He and I have had a lot of lunches together.”

“So, how does he—did he—talk to you?”

“For the first sixty-eight days, he’s a real bore,” I said. “Then on Day Sixty-nine, something happens.”

“Day Sixty-nine? What does that mean to the rest of us?”

“Well, it’s about two weeks after the solstice and nine days before Orolo got Thrown Back.”

“Okay. So what does Sammann do on Day Sixty-nine?”

“Well, normally, when he gets to the top of the stair, he unslings a bag from his shoulder and hangs it around a stone knob that sticks up from the parapet there. He cleans the optics. Then he goes over and sits on the parapet—it has a flat top about a foot wide—and takes his lunch out of that bag and spreads it out there and eats it.”

“Okay. What happens on Day Sixty-nine?”

“In addition to the shoulder bag, he is carrying something cradled in one arm like a book. The first thing he does is set this down on the parapet. Then he goes about his usual routine.”

“So it’s sitting there in plain view of the Eye.”

“Exactly.”

“Can you zoom in on it?”

“Of course.”

“Can you read its title?”

“Turns out it’s not a book at all, Lio. It is another dust jacket—just like the one Sammann found up there the first day. Except this one is big and heavy because it contains—”

“Another tablet!” Lio exclaimed, then paused to consider it. “I wonder what that means.”

“Well, we have to assume he had just picked it up elsewhere in the starhenge.”

“He doesn’t leave it there, I assume.”

“No, when he’s finished eating he takes it with him.”

“I wonder why he’d choose that day of all days to snatch a tablet.”

“Well, I’m thinking it must have been around Day Sixty-nine that Fraa Spelikon’s investigation of Orolo really began to pick up steam. Now, you might remember that when I sneaked up there during the Anathem, on Day Seventy-eight, I checked the M amp; M—”

“And found it empty,” Lio said with a nod. “So. On Day Sixty-nine, Spelikon probably ordered Sammann to fetch the tablet that Orolo had left in the M amp; M. Which Sammann did. But Spelikon didn’t know about the one you’d put in Clesthyra’s Eye, so he didn’t ask for it.”

“But Sammann knew,” I reminded him. “He had noticed it on Day Two.”

“And had made up his mind not to tell Spelikon. But on Day Sixty-nine he didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d just grabbed Orolo’s tablet.” Lio shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he risk letting you know that?”

I threw up my hands. “Maybe it’s not such a risk for him. He’s already Ita. What can they do to him?”

“Good point. They can’t be nearly as afraid of the Warden Regulant as we are.”

I was a little bit irritated to be reminded that we were afraid, but, considering all of the skulking around I’d been doing lately, I couldn’t argue.

I’d been getting better, I realized. Recovering from the loss of Fraa Orolo. Forgetting how sad and angry I was. And when Lio mentioned the Warden Regulant, it reminded me.

Anyway, there was a long silence now as Lio assimilated all of this. We actually got some work done. On the weeds I mean.

“Well,” he finally said, “what happens after that?”

“Day Seventy, cloudy. Day Seventy-one, snowing. Day Seventy-two, snowing. Can’t see anything because the lens is covered. Day Seventy-three, it’s brilliant weather. Most of the snow has melted off by the time Sammann gets there. He cleans the place up and has lunch. He’s wearing goggles.”

“Like sunglasses?”

“Bigger and thicker.”

“Like what mountain climbers wear?”

“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “Actually, I had to watch Day Seventy-three several times before I got it.”

“Got what?” Lio asked. “It was bright, there was snow, he wore dark goggles.”

“Really dark,” I said. “I don’t think that these were ordinary goggles like an outdoorsman would wear. I’ve seen these goggles before, Lio. When I saw Cord and Sammann in the machine hall, during Apert, they were wearing these things to shield their eyes from the arc. An arc that’s as bright as the sun.”

“But why would Sammann suddenly start wearing such a getup to clean the lenses?”

“He doesn’t actually have them on while he’s cleaning. They’re dangling around his neck on a strap,” I said. “Then he puts them on and eats his lunch as usual. But the entire time that he’s eating, he’s staring directly into the sun. Sammann is watching the sun.”

“And he never did this before Day Sixty-nine?”

“Nope. Never.”

“So do you think that he learned something—?”

“Something from Fraa Orolo’s tablet, maybe?” I said. “Or something Spelikon told him? Or perhaps scuttlebutt from other Ita in other concents, talking, or whatever they do, over the Reticulum?”

“Why watch the sun? That is completely off the track of what you have been doing, isn’t it?”

“Completely. But it’s something. It is a big fat hint. A gift from Sammann.”

“So, have you started looking at the sun too?”

“I don’t have goggles,” I reminded him, “but I do have twenty-odd clear sunny days recorded on that tablet. So starting tomorrow I can at least look at what the sun was doing three and four months ago.”

The next morning, after a theorics lecture, Jesry and Tulia and I went talking in the meadow. It was the first really fine spring day and everyone was out walking around, so it felt as though we could do this without being conspicuous.

“I think I found the IFOSA,” Tulia announced.

“You mean the HIFOSA,” Jesry corrected her.

“No,” I said, “if Tulia has found such a person, it is no longer Hypothetical.”

“I stand corrected,” Jesry said. “Who is the Important Fid?”

“Ignetha Foral,” Tulia said.

“The surname sounds vaguely familiar,” Jesry said.

“The family has been wealthy for a few hundred years, which makes them old and well-established by S#230;cular standards. They have a lot of ties to the mathic world—especially Baritoe.”

Saunt Baritoe was adjacent to landforms that made a huge and excellent harbor when the sea level was behaving itself, when it wasn’t buried in pack ice, and when the river that emptied into it had not dried up or been diverted. For about a third of the time since the Reconstitution, a large city had existed around Baritoe’s walls—not always the same city, of course—and so it had the reputation of being urban and worldly, with many ties to families such as, apparently, the Forals. The Procians were powerful there, and in their Unarian math they trained many young S#230;culars who later went into law, politics, and commerce.

“What are we allowed to know of her?” Jesry asked.

The question was aptly phrased. Once a year, at Annual Apert, our Unarians reviewed summaries of the S#230;cular news of the year just ended. Then, once every ten years, just before Decennial Apert, they reviewed the previous ten annual summaries and compiled a decennial summary, which became part of our library delivery. The only criterion for a news item to make it into a summary was that it still had to seem interesting. This filtered out essentially all of the news that made up the S#230;cular world’s daily papers and casts. Jesry was asking Tulia what Ignetha Foral had done that was interesting enough to have made it into the most recent Decennial summary.

“She had an important post in the government—she was one of the dozen or so highest-ranking people—and she took a stand against the Warden of Heaven, and he got rid of her.”

“Killed her?”

“No.”

“Threw her into a dungeon?”

“No, just fired her. I speculate that she has some other job now where she still has enough pull to Evoke someone like Paphlagon.”

“So, she was a fid of Suur Aculoa?”

“Ignetha Foral spent six years in the Unarian math at Baritoe and wrote a treatise comparing Paphlagon’s work to that of some other, er…”

“People like Paphlagon,” Jesry said impatiently.

“Yeah, of previous centuries.”

“Did you read it?”

“We didn’t get a copy. Maybe in another ten years. I already went into the Lower Labyrinth and shoved a request through the grille.”

Someone at Baritoe—presumably a Unarian fid—would have to copy Foral’s treatise by hand and send it to us. If a book were very popular, fids would do this without being asked, and copies would circulate to other maths.

“You’d think a rich family would have had copies machine-printed,” Jesry said.

“Too vulgar,” Tulia said. “But I know the title: Plurality of Worlds: a Comparative Study of Polycosmic Ideation among the Halikaarnians.”

“Hmm. Makes me feel like a bug under the Procians’ magnifying glass,” I said.

“Baritoe is Procian-dominated,” Tulia reminded me. “She wasn’t going to get anywhere calling it Why the Halikaarnians Are So Much Smarter than Us.” Too late I remembered that Tulia belonged to a Procian order now.

“So, she was interested in the polycosm,” Jesry said before this could flourish into a spat. “What could have happened that would be observable from the starhenge and that would make the polycosm relevant?” It was the sort of question Jesry would never ask unless he already knew the answer, which he now supplied: “Something’s gone wrong with the sun, I’ll bet.”

I was poised to scoff, but held back, reflecting that Sammann had, after all, been looking at the sun. “Something visible with the naked eye?”

“Sunspots. Solar flares. These can affect our weather and so on. And ever since the Praxic Age, the atmosphere doesn’t protect us from certain things.”

“Well, if that’s where the action is, why was Orolo looking at the North Pole?”

“The aurora,” Jesry said, as if he actually knew what he was talking about. “It responds to solar flares.”

“But we haven’t had a single decent aurora this whole time,” Tulia pointed out, with a catlike look of satisfaction on her face.

“That we could see with the naked eye,” Jesry returned. “This tablet of ours could be the perfect instrument for observing not only auroras but the disk of the sun itself.”

“I notice it’s ‘our’ tablet now that it’s got something good on it,” I pointed out.

“If Suur Trestanas finds it, it’ll go back to being ‘your’ tablet,” Tulia said. She and I laughed but Jesry was determined not to be amused.

“Seriously,” Tulia continued, “that hypothesis doesn’t explain why they Evoked Paphlagon. Any cosmographer can look at solar flares.”

“What’s the connection to the polycosm, you’re asking?” Jesry said.

“Exactly.”

“Maybe there is none,” I speculated, “maybe Ignetha Foral just wanted a cosmographer, and happened to remember Paphlagon’s name.”

“Maybe she’s being persecuted as a heretic, and they yanked Paphlagon so that they could burn him too,” Jesry suggested. And we chatted about such ideas for a few minutes before discarding all of them in favor of the proposition that Paphlagon must have been chosen for some good reason.

“Well,” Jesry said, “the way that the theors of old found themselves talking about the polycosm in the first place was by thinking about stars: how they formed, and what went on inside them.”

“Formation of nuclei and so on,” Tulia said.

“And not only that but, when the stars die, how do those nuclei get blown out into space so that they can form planets and—”

“And us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jesry said. “It leads to the question, why are all of those processes so fine-tuned to produce life? A sticky question. Deolaters would say, ‘Ah, see, God made the cosmos just for us.’ But the polycosmic answer is, ‘No, there must be lots of cosmi, some good for life, most not—we only see one cosmos in which we are capable of existing.’ And that is where all of this philosophical stuff originated that Suur Aculoa likes to study.”

“I think I see where you’re going now when you guess something’s gone wrong with the sun,” I said. “Maybe there are some new solar observations that contradict what we thought we knew about the theorics of what goes on in the cores of stars. And maybe this has ramifications that extend all the way to those polycosmic theories that Paphlagon’s interested in.”

“Or—more likely—Ignetha Foral mistakenly thinks so, so she’s yanked Paphlagon, and is now sending him on a wild goose chase,” Jesry said.

“I think she’s pretty smart,” Tulia demurred, but Jesry didn’t hear her because a resolution was forming in his head. He turned toward me. “I want to go down there and view this with you,” he said. “Or without you, if you are busy.”

For about twelve different reasons I hated this idea, but I couldn’t say so without making it look like I was trying to be a pig and monopolize the tablet. “Fine,” I said.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tulia said—sounding as if she were pretty sure it wasn’t. But before this could develop into a proper fight, we all took notice of the approach of Suur Ala, who was heading straight for us across the meadow. “Uh-oh,” Jesry said.

Suur Ala was unusual-looking in a way I’d never been able to pin down; sometimes I found myself staring at her during lectures or at Provener trying to make sense of her face. She had a round head on a slender neck, lately accentuated by a short haircut she had gotten during Apert; since then, one of the other suurs had been maintaining this for her. She had huge eyes, a delicate sharp nose, and a wide mouth. She was small and bony where Tulia was generous. Anyway there was something about her physical form that matched her soul.

She didn’t waste time greeting us. “For the eight-hundredth time in the last three months, Fraa Erasmas is at the center of a heated conversation. Carefully out of earshot of others. Complete with significant glances at the sky and at Shuf’s Dowment,” she began. “Don’t bother trying to explain it away, I know you guys are up to something. Have been for weeks and weeks.”

We all stood there for a long moment. My heart was pounding. Ala was squared off against the three of us, scanning our faces with those searchlight eyes.

“All right,” Jesry said, “we won’t bother.” But that was all he said. There followed another long silence. I was expecting a look of fury to come over Ala’s face. For her to make a threat to bring down the Inquisition on us. Instead of which her face slowly collapsed. For a moment I thought she might show some other emotion—I couldn’t guess what. But she passed from there to a blank resolute look, turned her back on us, and began walking away. After she’d gone a few paces, Tulia went after her, leaving Jesry and me alone. “That was weird,” he observed.

I could hardly respond. The miserable feeling that had kept me awake in my cell on the night that Ala had joined the New Circle had come over me again.

“You think she’ll rat us out?” I asked him.

I tried to put it in an incredulous tone of voice, as in are you really stupid enough to think she’d rat us out? but Jesry took it at face value. “It would be a great way to score points with the Warden Regulant.”

“But she was careful to approach us when no one else was around,” I pointed out.

“Maybe in hopes of negotiating some kind of deal with us?”

“What do we have to offer in the way of a deal!?” I snorted.

Jesry thought about it and shrugged. “Our bodies?”

“Now you’re just being obnoxious. Why don’t you say ‘our affections’ if you’re going to make such jokes.”

“Because I don’t think I have any affection for Ala,” Jesry said, “and I don’t think she has any for me.”

“Come on, she’s not that bad.”

“How can you say that after the little performance she just put on?”

“Maybe she was trying to warn us that we’re being too obvious.”

“Well, she might have a point there,” Jesry admitted. “We should stop talking out in the open where the whole math can observe us.”

“You have a better idea?”

“Yeah. The sub-cellar of Shuf’s Dowment, next time Arsibalt sends us the signal.”

As it turned out, this was only about four hours later. It all worked fine—superficially. Arsibalt sent the signal. Jesry and I noticed it from different places and converged on Shuf’s Dowment. No one was there except for Arsibalt. Jesry and I went below and got to work.

But in every other way it was wrong from the start. Whenever I went to Shuf’s Dowment, I took a circuitous route through the back of the page-tree-coppice. I never went the same way twice. Jesry, on the other hand, just crossed the bridge and made a beeline for it. But I couldn’t say his way was any worse than mine, because that day I encountered no fewer than four different people, or groups of people, out strolling around to enjoy the weather. Within a stone’s throw of the Dowment I almost tripped over Suur Tary and Fraa Branch who were enjoying a private moment together, all wrapped up in each other’s bolts.

When I finally reached the building, it was with the intent of calling the thing off. But Jesry wasn’t about to walk away. He talked me into going down there as Arsibalt looked on, growingly horrified, eyes jumping from door to window to door. So down we went, and crammed ourselves into that tiny place where I had spent so many hours by myself. But it wasn’t the same with him there. I’d grown used to the geometric distortion wreaked by the lens; he hadn’t, and spent a lot of time zooming in on different things just to see what they looked like. It was no different from what I had done on my first few sessions with it, but it made me want to scream. He didn’t seem to understand that we did not have time for this. When he got really interested in something, he would talk much too loudly. Both of us had to go out and urinate; I had to teach him about the “all clear” signal involving the door.

It seemed like two or three hours went by before we actually got around to observing the sun. The tablet worked as well for this as it did for looking at distant stars. It could only generate so much light, and so the sun appeared, not as a blinding thermonuclear fireball, but as a crisp-edged disk—the brightest thing on the tablet, certainly, but not so bright you couldn’t look at it. If you zoomed in on it and turned down the brightness, you could observe sunspots. I couldn’t really say whether there was an exceptional number of these. Neither could Jesry. By blacking out the sun’s disk and observing the space around it, we could look for solar flares, but there was nothing unusual going on that we could see. Not that either of us was an expert on such things. We’d never paid much attention to the sun before, considering it an obnoxious, wayward star that interfered with our observations of all the other stars.

After we became discouraged, and convinced ourselves that the hypothesis about Sammann and the goggles was wrong, and that we’d wasted the whole afternoon, we attempted to leave, and found the door at the top of the stairs closed. Someone else was in the building; it wasn’t safe to go out.

We waited for half an hour. Maybe Arsibalt had closed the door in error. I crept up and put my ear to it. He was carrying on a conversation with someone there, and the longer I listened to their muffled voices the more certain I became that the other person was Suur Ala. She had tracked us here!

Jesry had uncomplimentary things to say about her when I came back down to report this news. Half an hour later she was still there. Both of us were starving. Arsibalt must be in a state of animalistic terror.

Clearly our secret was out, or soon to be out, to at least one person. Squatting there in the darkness, trapped like rats, we had more than enough time to think through the implications. To go on as if this had not happened would be senseless. So, having nothing else to do, we pulled the poly tarp up off the floor and wrapped the tablet in it. Then we maneuvered and squirmed into the remotest place we could find—the utmost frontier of Arsibalt’s explorations—and used his shovel to bury the tablet four feet deep. When we were finished with that project, and nicely covered with dirt, I went up and put my ear to the door again. This time I heard no conversation. But the door was still closed.

“I think Arsibalt has abandoned us in favor of supper,” I told Jesry. “But I’ll bet she’s still up there.”

“It’s not in her character to leave at this point,” Jesry said.

“Say, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about her.”

“What do you think we should do, Raz?”

It was strange to hear Jesry asking for my views on any topic. I savored this novel experience for a few moments before saying, “If she intends to rat us out, I’m dead no matter what. But you have a chance. So, let’s go out together. You hood yourself and go straight out the back door and make yourself scarce. I’ll approach Ala and talk to her—she’ll be distracted long enough for you to melt into the darkness.”

“It’s a deal,” Jesry said. “Thanks, Raz. And remember: if it’s your body that she wants—”

“Shut up.”

“Okay, let’s do it,” Jesry said, pulling his bolt over his head. But I could see him shaking his head at the same time. “Can you believe this is what passes for excitement around this place?”

“Maybe someday your wish will be granted and something will happen in the world.”

“I thought this might be it,” he said, nodding toward the sub-cellar. “But, so far, there’s nothing but sunspots.”

The door opened and a light shone on us.

“Hello, boys,” said Suur Ala, “lose your way?”

Jesry was hooded; she couldn’t see his face. He bounded up the stairs, pushed his way past Ala, and headed for the back door. I was right behind him. I came face to face with Suur Ala just in time to hear a terrible thud from down the hall. Jesry was sprawled over the threshold, covered by a mess of bolt—from the waist up.

“No point hiding, Jesry. I’d know your smile anywhere,” Ala called.

Jesry got his legs under him, let his bolt drop back down over his arse, and ran off. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light I could see that Ala had stretched her chord across the doorway at ankle level and tied it off between a couple of chairs flanking the exit. Lacking any other way to keep her bolt on, she had thrown it over herself loosely and was holding it up with one arm. She turned her back on me and shuffled over to retrieve the chord.

“Arsibalt left an hour ago,” she said. “I think he lost half his weight in perspiration.”

I couldn’t muster a lot of amusement, since I knew she was in a position to say equally funny things about me or Jesry if she wanted.

“Cat got your tongue?” she asked, after a good long while.

“How many other people know?”

“You mean, how many have I told? Or how many have figured it out on their own?”

“I guess…both.”

“I’ve told no one. As to the other question, I guess the answer would be, anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which probably means…no one.”

“Why would you pay attention to me?”

She rolled her eyes. “Good question!”

“Look, what do you want, Ala? What are you after?”

“It’s part of the rules of the game that I mustn’t tell you.”

“If this is about you trying to be some sort of junior Warden Regulant—her little protegee—then get it over with! Go and tell her. I’ll march out of the Day Gate at sunrise and go find Orolo.”

She was winding her chord about herself as I said this. Suddenly the bolt seemed to grow twice as large as all of the breath went out of her. Her chest collapsed and her head drooped. The big eyes closed for a few moments. Here was where any other girl would have gone to pieces.

It is hard to say just how monstrous I felt. I leaned back against the wall and let my head thud back as if attempting to escape from my own, hideously guilty skin. But there was no way out of it.

She had opened her eyes. They were gleaming, but they saw everything. Anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which means no one.

In a voice almost too quiet to hear, she said, “You need to take a bath.”

For once in my life I actually managed to see the double meaning. But Ala was already gone.

I’d have become a Deolater and gone on a pilgrimage of any length to find a magic bath that would wash away the mess I’d just made. The hardships of the journey would have been pleasant compared to my next week or so in the math. Not that Ala told anyone. She was too proud for that. But all the other suurs, beginning with Tulia, could tell she was suffering. And by breakfast the next morning, everyone had decided it must be my fault. I wondered how this worked. My first hypothesis was wrong on the face of it: that Ala had run home and narrated the story to a chalk hall full of appalled suurs. My second hypothesis was that she had been seen coming home miserable after having missed supper; I had been seen skulking home a little while later; ergo, I had done a bad thing to her. It wasn’t until later that I understood the much simpler truth: others had noticed that Ala had her eye on me, and so if Ala were miserable, it could only be because I had done something—it didn’t matter what—bad.

In a stroke I had been Thrown Back by every young female in the math. All the girls seemed to be aghast, all the time, because that was the look that would come over every girl’s face when she saw me.

The thing grew over time. If Ala had simply written up an account of what I’d done and stapled it to my chest, it wouldn’t have been so bad; but because the amount of information about what I had done was exactly zero, people’s imaginations went crazy. Young suurs cringed away from me. Older ones glared at me through supper. It doesn’t matter what you did, young man…we know you did something.

I did not see Ala again for four days, which was statistically improbable. It suggested that other suurs were acting as lookouts, tracking my movements so that they could tell Ala where not to be.

Arsibalt was so rattled that he could hardly speak until three days later, when he came to supper all dirty, and told me in a whisper that he had dug up the tablet from where Jesry and I had buried it (“ridiculously easy to find”) and hid it in a much better place (“safe and sound”).

Jesry and I knew better than to try to find any object that Arsibalt considered to be safe and sound. All we could do was wait for him to calm down.

I figured out why I never saw Ala: she and Tulia were spending an inordinate amount of time at the Mynster, doing some maintenance on the bells, practicing weird changes, and passing their knowledge down to the younger girls who would eventually replace them.

Sunny days came more frequently. I could look up to the top of the spire sometimes and see Sammann eating his lunch and staring fixedly into the sun through his goggles. Jesry and I discussed smoking a pane of glass and using it to do likewise, but we knew that if we did it wrong we’d go blind. I even contemplated going over the wall, running off to the machine hall, and borrowing a welding mask from Cord. But all of these were really nothing more than distractions to get my mind off the Ala problem. Early on, I had thought of this as a matter of salvaging my reputation. But as time went by, and I thought about it harder, the real nature of the thing became clear: I had made a mess inside of someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me. Now it was closed. I was the only one who could clean up the mess; but in order to do this I first had to get in there. And I had no idea how, especially in the case of someone as fierce as Ala.

But it occurred to me, one day, as I was pursuing the weed project, that unilateral disarmament might work with someone like her. The work Lio and I had been doing along the riverbank was bringing me into contact with many spring wildflowers. The girls were up in the Mynster doing maintenance on the belfry. Suddenly it all seemed obvious. I put the plan into motion before I’d really thought it through. Ten minutes later I was sleep-walking up the Mynster stairs with a bunch of flowers on my arm, covered under a fold of my bolt because one of them was of the Eleven and I was about to carry it straight through the Warden Regulant’s court.

The portcullis was still locked down, the stair up the buttress inaccessible, the upper Pr#230;sidium off limits. Our carillon was in the lower reaches of the chronochasm, reachable by a ladder that ran up from the Fendant court. This route dead-ended in a sort of maintenance shack just below the carillon; you couldn’t go any higher up the Pr#230;sidium that way, so I could go there without arousing any concern that I might be attempting to look at the forbidden sky.

The bells themselves were open to the weather. Below them was this shack that sheltered some of the machinery that made the bells ring. I could hear Ala and Tulia up there talking. The ladder led up to a trapdoor in its floor. My heart was bonging like a bell as I climbed; I gripped the rungs hard so I wouldn’t fall off. I’d stuffed the flowers into my bolt to leave both hands free, and now I was sweating all over the blossoms. Disgusting. Ala laughed at some witty remark of Tulia’s. I was happy to hear that she was capable of laughter, then chagrined, in a weird way, that she’d already gotten over me.

There was no way to make a smooth entrance. I shoved the trapdoor up and out of my way. The girls became silent. I heaved the bouquet through the aperture and dumped it on the floor to one side, thinking that this would make a more favorable first impression than my face, which of late had practically made young females run screaming. But this was only delaying the inevitable. My face was attached to the rest of me. It and I would have to arrive together. I poked the sorry thing up through the door and looked around, but couldn’t see a thing; the shack had windows, but they’d been covered. The girls, however, recognized me with their dark-adjusted eyes, and became even more silent, if such a thing is possible. I hauled the rest of me up through the door.

Tulia made her sphere emit light. She and Ala were sitting side by side on the floor, leaning back against the wall. I wondered why. But I was leery of opening my mouth for any purpose other than the one at hand. So I knelt to one side of the trapdoor and regathered the bouquet. This gave me a few moments to realize I had no plan and nothing to say. But having grown up with Suur Ala and knowing how she reacted to things, I reckoned I couldn’t go wrong asking permission. “Ala, I would like to give you these, if it wouldn’t kill you.”

At least one of them inhaled. Neither raised an objection. The place was larger than I imagined, but so cluttered with beams and shafts I wasn’t certain I could stand up, so I knee-walked over to where they were sitting. Something brushed past me—a bat? But the next time I took a count of persons in the room—which was much later—there were only two of us. So it must have been Tulia teleporting herself out of the place like a space captain in a speely.

“Thank you,” Ala said—guardedly. “Did you carry these things up through the Regulant court? I guess you must have.”

“I did,” I said. “Why?” Though I already knew why.

“This one here is Saunt Chandera’s Bane, isn’t it?”

“Saunt Chandera’s Bane makes a weird-looking blossom around this time of year, which I have decided is beautiful.” I was getting ready to make an analogy to Ala’s appearance but faltered, wondering how to phrase the part about her being kind of weird-looking.

“But it’s one of the Eleven!”

“I’m aware of it,” I said, getting a little tense, as she had broken into my analogy only to start a dispute. “Look, I put it there because it’s forbidden. And this thing between you and me—this mess that I made—is all about something else that’s forbidden.”

“I can’t believe you carried this right up the stairs under the nose of the Inquisition.”

“Okay. Now that you mention it, it was pretty stupid.”

“That wasn’t the word I was going to use,” she said. “Thanks for bringing these.”

“You’re welcome.”

“If you sit next to me I’ll show you something I’ll bet you never expected,” she said. And here I was pretty sure there wasn’t a double meaning. By the time I’d gotten myself seated in Tulia’s former spot, Ala had already climbed to her feet—she could stand up in here, at least—and padded over to the trapdoor, which Tulia had left open. Ala closed it. She sat next to me and extinguished her light. It was totally dark in here now. Totally dark, that is, except for a single splotch of white light, about the size of the palm of Ala’s hand, that seemed to hover in space just in front of us. I didn’t imagine that this was a coincidence; the girls had been sitting here because of the splotch of light. I reached out and explored it with my right hand (the left, curiously, was beyond use, as it had somehow ended up around Ala’s shoulders). There was a plank leaning against the wall, with a blank leaf pinned to it, and the light-splotch was being projected against that leaf. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see that the splotch was round. Perfectly circular, in fact.

“Do you remember the total eclipse of 3680 when we made a camera obscura so we could see it without burning our eyes?”

“A box,” I recalled, “with a pinhole at one end and a sheet of white paper at the other.”

“Tulia and I have been spring cleaning up here,” she said. “We noticed these patches of sunlight moving around on the floor and the walls. They were shining through from an old opening up high in the wall, over thataway.” She squirmed as she pointed invisibly in the dark, and somehow ended up closer to me. “We think it was put there to ventilate the place, then boarded up because bats were getting in. The light was leaking in through chinks between the boards. We fixed it—almost.”

“That ‘almost’ being a nice neat little pinhole?”

“Exactly, and we set up the screen down here. We have to move it, obviously, as the sun moves across the sky.”

Ala could insert the word obviously into an otherwise polite sentence like nobody’s business. I’d spent more than half of my life being sporadically annoyed by it. Here, finally, I let it go. I was too busy admiring the cleverness of Tulia and Ala. I wished I’d thought of this. You didn’t need a lens or a mirror of ground and polished glass to see things far away. A simple pinhole could serve as well. The image that it cast was faint, though, and so you had to view it in a dark room—a camera obscura.

Apparently Tulia had told Ala everything about the tablet, about Sammann, and about my observations. But it seemed like years since I had cared about that stuff as much as I cared about fixing my mess. In fact, as we sat there in the dark together I was finding it difficult to muster even the least bit of interest in the sun. It was shining. Photosynthesis was safe. There were no major flares, and only a few spots. Who cared?

It was even harder to care a few minutes later. Kissing was not a subject taught in chalk halls. We had to learn by trial and error. Even the errors were not too bad.

“A spark,” Ala said—muffled somewhat—a while later.

“I’ll say!”

“No, I thought I saw a spark.”

“I’m told it’s normal to see stars at times like this—”

“Don’t flatter yourself!” she said, and heaved me aside. “I just saw another one.”

“Where?”

“On the screen.”

Somewhat bleary-eyed, I turned my attention to it. Nothing was on that page except the same pale-white disk.

And…

a spark. A pinprick of light, brighter than the sun, gone before I could be certain it was there.

“I think—”

“There it is again!” she exclaimed. “It moved a little though.”

We watched a few more. She was right. All of the sparks were below and to the right of the sun’s disk. But each one was slightly higher and farther to the left. If you plotted them on the page, they’d form a line aimed right at the sun.

What would Orolo do? “We need a pen,” I said.

“Don’t have one,” she said. “They’re coming about once a second. Maybe faster.”

“Is there anything sharp?”

“The pins!” Ala and Tulia had used four stick-pins to fix the page to the plank. I worried one loose and let it tumble into her warm little hand.

“I’m going to hold the plank still. You poke a hole in the page wherever you see a spark,” I said.

We missed a few more while we were getting ourselves arranged. I knelt to one side, bracing the plank against the wall with my hand, holding its base steady with my knee. She threw herself down on her belly and propped herself up on her elbows, her face so close to the page that I could see her eyes and the curve of her cheek in the faint illumination scattering from the page. She was the most beautiful girl in the concent.

I saw the next spark reflected in her eye. Up came her hand as she poked it on the page.

“It would be really good if we knew the exact time,” I said.

Poke. “In a few minutes this is,” poke, “going to migrate off the page, obviously.” Poke. “Then we can run out and look at,” poke, “the clock.” Poke.

“Notice anything funny about these sparks?” Poke.

“They’re not instant on-off.” Poke. “They flare up quickly,” poke, “but fade slowly.” Poke.

“I was referring to the color.” Poke.

“Kind of blue-y?” Poke.

A sudden grinding noise nearly gave me a heart attack. It was the belfry’s automatic mechanism going into action. The clock was striking two. At this time it would have been traditional to plug one’s ears. I didn’t dare; Ala would have assailed me with that jabbing pin. Poke…poke…poke…

“So much for knowing the time,” I said, when I thought she might be able to hear again.

“I made a triple hole on the spark that came closest to the stroke of two,” she said.

“Perfect.”

“I think it’s been curving,” she said.

“Curving?”

“Like—whatever makes these sparks isn’t moving in a straight line. It is changing its course,” she said. “It’s obviously flying between us and the sun—it’s passing right across the sun’s disk, at the moment. But the line of pinholes doesn’t look straight to me.”

“Well, assuming it’s in orbit, that’s really weird,” I said. “It ought to go straight.”

“Unless it’s in the act of changing its course,” she insisted. “Maybe these sparks are something to do with its propulsion system.”

“I remember now where I’ve seen that shade of blue before,” I said.

“Where?”

“Cord’s shop. They have a machine that uses plasma to cut metal. The light that comes from it is that shade of blue. The same as a hot star.”

“It’s passing off the edge of the sun’s disk,” she said. Then: “Hey!”

“Hey what?”

“It stopped.”

“No more sparks?”

“No more sparks. I’m sure of it.”

“Well, before I move this thing, make some pinpricks around the edge of the disk of the sun, so we know where it stood in relation to all this. Between that and the time—we can find this thing!”

“Find it how?”

“We can work out where in the sky the sun stood at two p.m. on this day of the year. That is, which of the so-called fixed stars it’s passing in front of. This plasma-spark thing that we were tracking—it was in the same place. That means that unless it changes its orbit again, it will pass over the same fixed stars on each orbit. We can find it in the sky.”

“But it seems to have no difficulty changing its orbit,” said Ala, meticulously outlining the sun’s disk with a series of closely spaced pinpricks.

“But part of the puzzle we’ve failed to understand until now—maybe—is that it only does so when it’s passing near the sun. So as long as we have this camera obscura, we can be on the lookout for that.”

“Why should the sun’s position make any difference?”

“I think it’s hiding,” I said. “If it did what it just did in the night sky, anyone could see it with the naked eye.”

“But we were able to detect it with a pinhole and a sheet of paper!” Ala pointed out. “So it’s a pretty ineffective way to hide.”

“And Sammann can apparently see it with welding goggles,” I said. “But the difference is that people like you and me and Sammann are…”

“Are what?” she said. “Knowledgeable?”

“Yeah. And whoever, or whatever this thing is, it doesn’t or they don’t care if knowledgeable people know they are up there. They are letting their existence be known to us—”

“Which the S#230;cular Power doesn’t like—”

“Which is why Orolo got Thrown Back for looking at it.”

It took us a while to get out of there. Too much was going on. I rolled up the page and stuck it inside my bolt. Ala picked up the bunch of flowers. This reminded me of why I’d come up here in the first place and of what we’d been doing before Ala had noticed the sparks. I felt like a jerk for letting this slip my mind. By that time, though, Ala had remembered about the Saunt Chandera’s Bane and was wondering what to do with it. So we traded; I gave her the chart and she gave me the flowers so that I could accept the risk of sneaking them back down.

“What should we do next?” I wondered out loud.

“About…?”

We had opened the trapdoor. There was plenty of light. I was about to blurt “what we just saw” when I noticed a look on her face—steeling herself to get hurt again. I think I stopped myself just in time.

“Do you want to—should we—” I began, then closed my eyes and just said it. “I think we should be honest about this in front of everyone.”

“I’m fine with that,” she said.

“I’ll set it up for tomorrow, I guess. After Provener.”

“I’ll tell Tulia,” she said, and something about the way she pronounced that name informed me that she knew everything; she knew I’d once had a crush on her best friend. “Who do you want as your witness?”

I had been about to say Lio, but Jesry had been such a jerk about this that I decided he had to be the one. “And our free witness can just be Haligastreme or whoever is handy,” I said.

“What kind of liaison are we to publish?” she asked.

This was not a difficult question. Liaisons were supposed to be announced when they were formed and when they were dissolved. It was a way to curtail gossip and intrigue, which could so easily run rampant in a math. The Concent of Saunt Edhar recognized several types. The least serious was Tivian. The most serious—Perelithian—was equivalent to marriage. That was out of the question for two kids of our age who’d hated each other’s guts until forty-five minutes ago. If I said Tivian, Ala would throw me out the trapdoor to my death, and I’d spend the last four seconds of my life wishing I’d said Etrevanean.

“Could you stand having people know that you were in an Etrevanean liaison with that big jerk Fraa Erasmas?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“Okay.” Then awkwardness. It seemed appropriate to kiss her one more time. This went over well.

“Now, are we going to talk about the fact that we have just discovered an alien spacecraft hiding in orbit around Arbre?” she asked in a tiny, coy voice—most unlike her. But she wasn’t as used to being in big trouble as I was and so I think she felt as though, on such questions, she had to defer to a hardened criminal.

“To a few people. I’m pretty sure Lio’s down in the Fendant court. I’ll stop there and tell him—”

“That works. We should go about separately, anyway, until our liaison is published.”

Her agility in jumping between the love topic and the alien spacecraft was making me dizzy. Or perhaps giddy. “So I’ll meet you below later. We’ll spread the news to the others as we have opportunity.”

“Bye,” she said. “Don’t forget your forbidden flower.”

“I won’t,” I said.

Just like that she was gone down the ladder.

I followed a minute later and found Lio in the reading room in the Fendant court. He was studying a book about a Praxic Age battle that had been conducted in the abandoned subway tunnels of a great city by two armies that had run out of ammunition and so had to fight with sharpened shovels. He looked at me blankly for a while. I must have looked even blanker. Then I realized that the recent events weren’t written on my face. I would actually have to communicate.

“Incredible things have happened in the last hour,” I announced.

“Such as?”

I didn’t know what to say first but concluded that alien spaceships were a better topic for the Warden Fendant’s reading room. So I gave him a full account of that. He looked a little deranged until I got to the point about how the spark track curved, and mentioned plasma. Then his face snapped like a shutter. “I know what it is,” he said.

He was so certain that doubting him never crossed my mind. Instead, I just wondered how he knew. “How can you—”

“I know what it is.”

“Okay. What is it?”

For the first time he took his eyes off mine, and let his gaze wander around the reading room. “It might be here…or it might be in the Old Library. I’ll find it. I’ll show it to you later.”

“Why don’t you simply tell me?”

“Because you won’t believe me until I show it to you in a book that was written by someone else. That’s how weird it is.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I added, “Congratulations!” since that seemed like the right thing to say.

Lio slammed his book shut, stood up, turned his back on me, and headed for the stacks.

Back at the Cloister I came to understand that things were going to move much more slowly than I wanted them to. I was on supper duty, so I spent the remainder of the afternoon in the kitchen. Ala and Tulia didn’t have to cook, but they did have to serve. While dumping a hot potato into my bowl Ala gave me a look that moved me in a way I won’t describe here. While burying it with stew Tulia gave me a look that proved Ala had told her everything. “The pinhole: nice!” I told her. Fraa Mentaxenes, who’d been nudging me in the kidney with his bowl, trying to get me to move faster, had no idea what I meant and only became more irritated.

Lio didn’t show up for supper. Jesry was there, but I couldn’t talk to him because we were at a crowded table with Barb and several others. Arsibalt sat as far from us as he could, as had been his habit of late. After supper he was on cleanup duty. Jesry went off to a chalk hall to work with some of the other Edharians on a proof. Those guys might work until dawn. But I couldn’t have talked to him anyway because I had to corner Fraa Haligastreme and set up the little aut tomorrow where Ala and I would declare our liaison before witnesses and have it entered in the Chronicle.

I did have time to work out where in the sky the sun had stood at two in the afternoon. After curfew, when the fids had gone to bed, I went out into the meadow alone, sat on a bench, and stared at that place in the sky for an hour, hoping I might get lucky and see a satellite pass through. Which was irrational, because if this spaceship could be seen with the naked eye, none of this intrigue would have been necessary. It was some combination of too small, too dark, and/or too high to bounce back enough light for our eyes to see it. But I needed to sit there alone for a while and stare into the black just to settle my thoughts. My brain zinged back and forth between the Two Topics for an hour. When I was totally exhausted I got up and crawled into a vacant cell where I slept soundly.

Lio was in the Refectory at breakfast. When I caught his eye, he glanced significantly at a big old book he’d dug up: Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems.

Cheerful.

Jesry skipped breakfast. Afterward, Ala and I squandered most of the morning getting things ready for this afternoon. You could announce a Tivian liaison at the drop of a hat but for the Etrevanean each participant was supposed to discuss it first with an older fraa or suur. I was finishing that up when Provener rang. This was one of those increasingly rare days when my old team was supposed to wind the clock. I found the cell where Jesry was still asleep, yanked him off his pallet, and got him moving. We ended up sprinting to the Mynster, late as usual. But it felt good to have the team back together, after all that had been happening lately, and I enjoyed the simple physical work of winding the clock more than I’d used to.

After, the four of us went to the Refectory to take the midday meal. But there was no question of talking about the spaceship there. Instead it was all about the aut that Ala and I were to celebrate later. Of all the team, I was the first to go so far as to join in such a liaison and so this was sort of like a rehearsal for a bachelor party. We became so loud and so funny (at least, we believed we were funny) that we were asked on two separate occasions to tone it down, and threatened with severe penance—which only made us louder and funnier.

At some point during all of this I mentally stepped back from it all and took a moment to enjoy the looks on my friends’ faces and to reflect on everything that had been going on lately. And as part of that, I recollected that Orolo had been Thrown Back and that he was out there, somewhere, extramuros, trying to find his way. Which made me sad, and even brought back a spark of the old anger. But none of it stopped me from being happy with my friends. Part of this was the sheer thrill of what had happened with Ala. But part of it too was the growing certainty that Ala and Tulia and I had scored a victory over those like Spelikon and Trestanas who had locked us out of the starhenge and tried to control what we knew and what we thought about. We just needed to find a way to announce it that wouldn’t lead to my getting Thrown Back. I didn’t want to leave the concent any more. Not as long as Ala lived here.

She and Tulia were nowhere to be seen, and before long we found out why: they had duties in the Mynster. Bells began to ring not long after we had finished eating. We sat and listened for a couple of minutes, trying to decipher the changes. But Barb had been memorizing these things and figured it out first. “Voco,” he announced, “the S#230;cular Power will Evoke one of us.”

“Apparently Fraa Paphlagon couldn’t get the job done,” Jesry cracked, as we were draining our beers.

“Or he’s calling for reinforcements,” Lio suggested.

“Or he had a heart attack,” said Arsibalt. Lately he had been full of gloomy ideas like this, and so the rest of us gave him dirty looks until he held up his hands in submission.

We sauntered across the meadow to the Mynster. Even so, we got there in plenty of time, and ended up in the front row, closest to the screen. Voco continued ringing for some minutes after we arrived. Then the eight ringers filed down from their balcony and found places farther back. A choir of Hundreders came out into the chancel and began a monophonic chant. I thought of going back to be near Ala but it was part of the Discipline that you didn’t engage in any of that clingy couple-like behavior before your liaison was published, so it would have to wait for a few more hours.

This time Statho didn’t have any Inquisitors with him, as he’d had during Fraa Paphlagon’s Voco. He went through the opening rounds of the rite as before, and for the first time since the bells had begun to ring, it sank in that this was for real. I wondered which avout we would say goodbye to—whether it would be one of us Tenners this time, or someone like Fraa Paphlagon whom we’d never met because they were of a different math.

By the time Statho reached the place in the aut where he was to call out the name of the Evoked, I had become quite anxious. The Mynster was as silent as that sub-basement beneath Shuf’s Dowment. So I almost wanted to scream when he chose that moment to pause and fumble around in his vestment. He took out a page that had been folded in on itself and sealed shut with a dollop of beeswax. It took him forever to pick the thing open. He unfolded it, held it up in front of his face, and looked astonished.

It was such an awkward moment that even he felt the need to explain. He announced, “There are six names!”

Pandemonium was the wrong word to describe a few hundred avout standing still and muttering to each other, but it conveys the right feeling. A single Voco was rare enough. Six at a stroke had never happened—or had it? I looked at Arsibalt. He read my mind. “No,” he whispered, “not even for the Big Nugget.”

I looked at Jesry. “This is it!” he told me. Meaning the something different he’d been waiting for.

Statho cleared his throat and waited for the murmuring to subside.

“Six names,” he went on. The Mynster now became silent again, except for the faint wail of police sirens outside the Day Gate, and the rumble of engines. “One of them is no longer among us.”

“Orolo,” I said. About a hundred others said it at the same time. Statho’s face reddened. “Voco,” he called, but his voice choked up and he had to swallow before trying it again. “Voco Fraa Jesry of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math.”

Jesry turned and socked me on the shoulder, hard enough to leave a charley horse that would still ache three days later. Something to remember him by. Then he turned his back on us and walked out of our lives.

“Suur Bethula of the Edharian chapter of the Centenarian math…Fraa Athaphrax of the same…Fraa Goradon of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math…and Suur Ala of the New Circle, Decenarians.”

By the time I had regained consciousness she was already on the threshold of the door through the screen. She was as shocked as I was. Tears began to run out of her eyes as she hesitated, there, and looked my way.

When I’d watched Fraa Paphlagon step out, all those months ago, I’d understood clearly that no one in this place would ever see him again. The same thing was now happening to Ala. But it didn’t sink in. The only thing that got through to me was the look on her face.

They told me later I knocked two people down as I made my way over to her.

She hooked an elbow over my neck and kissed me on the lips, then pressed her wet cheek against mine for an instant.

When Fraa Mentaxenes closed the door between us, I looked down to discover a rolled-up page stuck in my bolt. It was perforated with tiny holes. By the time I’d finished taking that in, and stepped forward to put my face to the screen, Jesry, Bethula, Athaphrax, Goradon, and Ala had already walked out the same way that Paphlagon and Orolo had gone before. Everyone was singing except for me.

“You see what I mean,” Lio said, “that it’s so crazy, you wouldn’t have believed me unless I showed it to you in a book.”

He and I, Arsibalt, Tulia, and Barb were all sitting around the big table at Shuf’s Dowment. Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems was sprawled out like an autopsy. We were looking at a double-ended foldout. It had taken us a quarter of an hour just to get the thing unfurled without tearing the ancient leaves: real paper made in a factory. We were looking at a huge, exquisitely detailed diagram of a spaceship. At one end, it sported a proper nose cone, as a rocket should. Everything else about it looked weird. It did not have engines per se. At the aft end, where the nozzle bells of a proper rocket ought to be, there was instead a broad flat disk, looking like a pedestal on which the vessel might be stood upright. Forward of that were several stout columns that ran up to what I assumed was the spaceship proper: the family of rounded pressure vessels sheltered beneath that nose cone.

“Shock absorbers,” Lio said, pointing to the columns, “except bigger.” He drew our attention to a tiny hole in the center of the big disk astern. “This is where it would spit out the atomic bombs, one after another.”

“That’s the part I still can’t get my mind to accept.”

“Have you ever heard of those Deolaters who walk barefoot over hot coals to show that they have supernatural powers?” He looked over toward the hearth. We’d lit a fire there. Not that we needed one. We had a couple of windows cracked open to admit a fresh green-scented breeze that was blowing in over the young clover in the meadow. Sad songs were carried on that air. Most of the avout were so shocked by the six-fold Voco that to make music about it was all that they could do. Those of us in this room had another way to come to terms with our loss, but only because we knew things that the others didn’t. We’d lit the fire as soon as we’d arrived, not to keep warm but as a primitive way to get some comfort. It was what humans had done, long before Cno#252;s, long before even language, to claim a bit of space in a dark universe that they did not understand and that was wont to claim their family and friends suddenly and forever. Lio went over to that fire and assaulted a glowing log with a poker until he had knocked off several lumps of glowing charcoal. He raked one of these out onto the stones. It was about the size of a nut, and red hot.

I was already getting nervous.

“Raz,” he said, “would you put this in your pocket and carry it around?”

“I don’t have pockets,” I joked.

No one laughed.

“Sorry,” I said. “No, if I had a pocket I would not put that into it.”

Lio spat into the palm of his left hand, then put the fingertips of his right into the pool of saliva. He then used them to pick up that coal. There were sizzling noises. We cringed. He calmly tossed the coal back into the fire, then slapped his hot fingertips against his thigh a few times. “Slight discomfort. No damage,” he announced. “The noise was spit being vaporized by the heat of the coal. Now imagine that the plate on the back of that ship was coated with something that served the same purpose.”

“The same purpose as spit?” Barb asked.

“Yes. It was vaporized by the plasma from the atomic bombs, and as it expanded into space, it would spank that plate. The shock absorbers would even out the impact and turn it into steady thrust so that the people up at the forward end would feel nice smooth acceleration.”

“It’s just hard to imagine being that close to an atomic bomb going off,” Tulia said. “And not just one, but a whole series of them.”

Her voice sounded pretty raw. All of ours did, except for Barb’s. He’d been perusing the book earlier. “They were special bombs. Really tiny,” he said, making a circle of his arms to show their size. “Designed not to blow out in all directions but to spew a lot of plasma in one direction—toward that ship.”

“I too find it unfathomable,” Arsibalt volunteered, “but I vote we suspend our disbelief and move forward. The evidence is before us, in this”—he gestured toward the book—“and this.” He rested his hand on the sheet that Ala had pinpricked the day before. Then he looked stricken. I think he had seen something on my face, or Tulia’s, or both. For us, this leaf was now like one of the mementoes of bygone Saunts that the avout cherished in reliquaries.

“Perhaps,” Arsibalt said, “it is too early for us to have this discussion. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps it’s too late!” I said. Which earned me a grateful look from Tulia, and seemed to settle it for everyone.

“I’m surprised—pleasantly—you’re here at all, Arsibalt,” I said.

“You are referring to my, ah, apparent skittishness of recent weeks.”

“Your words, not mine,” I said, working to keep a straight face.

He raised his eyebrows. “I do not recall—do you? — any diktat from the hierarchs to the effect that we must not make tiny holes in pieces of foil and allow the light of the sun to fall on paper. Our position is unassailable.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said. “I almost feel a little let down that we are no longer breaking any rules.”

“I know it must be an odd sensation for you, Fraa Erasmas, but you may get used to it after a while.”

Barb didn’t get the joke. We had to explain it. He still didn’t get it.

“So I wonder if—perhaps—one of these ships went missing,” Tulia said.

“Went missing?” Lio repeated.

“Like—its crew mutinied and they headed out for parts unknown. Now, thousands of years later, their descendants have returned.”

“It might not even be their descendants,” Arsibalt pointed out.

“Because of Relativity!” Barb exclaimed.

“That’s right,” I said. “Come to think of it, if the ship could travel at relativistic velocity, they might have gone on a round-trip journey that lasted a few decades to them—but thousands of years to us.”

Everyone loved this hypothesis. We had already made up our minds it must be true. There was only one problem. “None of these ships was ever built,” Lio said.

“What!?”

He looked as if we were about to blame him for it. “It was just a proposal. These are nothing more than conceptual drawings from very late in the Praxic Age.”

“Just before the Terrible Events!” Barb footnoted.

We were all silent for a while. It takes time and effort to tear down and stow away an idea you were that excited about.

“Besides,” Lio went on, “this ship was only for military operations inside the solar system. They had ideas for ones that could go to relativistic velocity, but they would have been much bigger and they’d have looked different.”

“You wouldn’t need a nose cone!” said Barb—which was his idea of hilarious.

“So if we buy the idea that what Ala and I saw—the blue sparker—was a ship in orbit that was using this kind of propulsion system—” I began, nodding at the diagram.

“—Then it must have come from an alien civilization,” Arsibalt said.

“Fraa Jesry believes that advanced life forms must be extremely rare in the universe,” Barb told us.

“He followed the Conjecture of Saunt Mandarast,” Arsibalt said, nodding agreement. “Billions of planets infested with unicellular glop. Almost none with multicellular organisms—to say nothing of civilizations.”

“Let’s speak of him in the present tense—it’s not as though he’s dead!” Tulia pointed out.

“I stand corrected,” said Arsibalt, none too wholeheartedly.

“Barb, when you were talking to Jesry of this, did he have some alternate theory?” Tulia asked.

“Yes—an alternate theory about an alternate universe!” Barb cracked. Tulia mussed his hair and gave him a shove, which was a mistake because then he wanted to get rambunctious. We had to threaten him with Anathem and make him go outside and run five laps around Shuf’s Dowment before he would settle down.

“Talking about where this thing might have come from is a side track to the main discussion,” Lio pointed out.

“Agreed,” said Arsibalt, so authoritatively that we did agree.

“It came from somewhere. Who cares. It settled into a polar orbit around Arbre and stayed there for a while—doing what?” I said.

“Reconaissance,” said Lio. “That’s what polar orbits are for.”

“So they were learning about us. Mapping Arbre. Eavesdropping on our communications.”

“Learning our language,” Tulia said.

I went on, “Somehow Orolo became aware of it. Maybe he happened to see the deceleration burn that took it into polar orbit. Perhaps others did too. The Panjandrums knew. They sent word to the hierarchs: ‘we are putting you on notice that we deem this to be a S#230;cular matter, it is none of your business, so butt out.’ And the hierarchs dutifully sent out the order to close every starhenge.”

“Inquisitors were sent to make sure it was done,” Lio said.

“Fraa Paphlagon was Evoked to go somewhere and study this thing,” Tulia said.

“He,” said Arsibalt, “and perhaps others like him from other concents.”

“The ship stayed in orbit. Maybe sometimes it would adjust its trajectory by firing those engines. But it would only do so when it was passing between Arbre and the sun—to hide its traces.”

“Like a fugitive who walks in a river not to leave footprints,” Barb put in.

“But yesterday something changed. Something big must have happened.”

“Gardan’s Steelyard says that the course change you and Ala witnessed, and the unprecedented six-fold Voco less than a day later, must be connected,” Arsibalt said.

I had been avoiding the sacred relic. That had to end. Ala had given it to me for a reason. We unrolled it on the table and weighed its corners down with books.

“We can’t figure out what it did unless we know the darn geometry!” Barb complained.

“You mean, of the pinhole, and where the screen was situated up in the Pr#230;sidium. Which way was up. Which way was north,” I said. “I agree that we have to take all of those measurements.”

Barb started backing toward the exit—ready to take those measurements at once.

But I held back. I wanted to do those things as badly as he did. But here was where Orolo would have proposed something brilliantly simple. Something that would have made me feel like an idiot for having made it too complicated. I could think of nothing like that.

“Why don’t we at least measure the angle,” I said. “It comes in from one direction. That’s its initial orbit. By firing those bombs, it curves until it is going a different direction. That’s its final orbit. We could at least measure that angle.”

So we did. The answer was something like a quarter of pi—forty-five degrees.

“So if we assume it started out in a polar orbit, then by the time this maneuver was finished, it was in a new orbit, roughly halfway between polar and equatorial,” Lio said.

“And what do you suppose would be the point of that?” I asked, since Lio knew so much more of exoatmospheric weapons systems than anyone else in the room.

“If you plot its ground track on a globe or a map of the world, well, it’s never going to ascend higher than forty-five degrees of latitude, in such an orbit. It’ll sine-wave back and forth between forty-five degrees north and forty-five south.”

“Which is where ninety-nine percent of the people live,” Tulia pointed out.

“Which they would know by now, since they have had time to compile maps of every square inch of Arbre,” Arsibalt reminded us.

“They have finished Phase One: reconaissance,” Lio concluded, “and yesterday began Phase Two: which is—who knows?”

“Actually doing something,” Barb said.

“And the Panjandrums know it,” I said. “Have been worrying about it. They’ve had a contingency plan ready for months—we know this because Orolo’s name was on that list! So it must have been written out and sealed before his Anathem.”

“I’ll bet Varax and Onali handed it to Statho during Apert,” Tulia said. “Statho’s been carrying it around ever since, awaiting the signal to break the seal and read out those names.” She got a distracted look on her face. “It bothers me that they chose Ala.”

“I never fully understood until last week how close the two of you were,” I said.

But Tulia wanted none of it. “It’s not just that,” she said. “I mean, it is. I love her. I can’t stand that she’s gone. But why her? Paphlagon—Orolo—Jesry—fine. I get it. But why would you choose Ala? What would you want someone like her for?”

“To organize a lot of other people,” Arsibalt said without hesitation.

“That,” said Tulia, “is what troubles me.”

For God’s sake, raise your sights.

Mention of the Inquisitors had put me in mind of the conversation I’d had with Varax on Tenth Night. This had slipped my mind because of what had happened a few moments afterward. But I could remember him gazing up at the starhenge—or perhaps he’d been raising his sights a little higher, looking off into space. Come to think of it, he’d been facing north at the time. Larger matters are at stake than whether a young fraa at the remote hermitage of Saunt Edhar practices his vlor on some local runagates…think bigger…the way your friend does when he decides to tackle four larger men.

What on earth did that mean? That the alien ship was a threat? That we would soon have to tackle it against long odds? Or was I reading too much into it? And why, during my earlier conversation with Varax, had he grilled me concerning my opinions on the Hylaean Theoric World? It was an odd time for someone like him to be so concerned with metatheorics.

Or maybe I was reading way too much into these conversations. Maybe Varax was just one of those guys who thought out loud.

The “raise your sights” part of it seemed pretty clear.

I didn’t need a lot of encouragement to get to work. After Orolo’s Anathem, the only thing that had kept me from going crazy had been working on the photomnemonic tablet. Ala’s loss wasn’t quite as dreadful—at least she hadn’t been Thrown Back—but unlike Orolo’s it had been entirely surprising to me. I was still feeling bad that I’d just stood there like a stunned animal while she’d walked out of my life. To have lost her, just after we’d begun something—well, suffice it to say that I really needed a project to work on.

Our group invaded the shack above the belfry with every measuring device we could scare up. Arsibalt found some architectural drawings of the Mynster dating back to the Fourth Century. We calculated the geometry of the camera obscura in three different ways, and compared the results until we got them all to agree. We were able to refine the rough measurement we had made at Shuf’s Dowment: the ship’s new orbit was inclined at about fifty-one degrees to the equator, which meant that it passed over essentially all populated areas. When the weather had become hot and dry in the centuries after the Terrible Events, people had tended to move poleward. More recently, reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had begun to gentle the climate, and people had migrated back towards the equator to get away from the solar radiation near the poles. As a matter of fact, fifty-one degrees was a higher orbit than the ship really needed, if all it wanted was to keep an eye on most of the world’s population.

We thought this mysterious until Arsibalt pointed out that if you looked at all the world’s major concents—meaning ones that had Millennium Clocks and that housed hundreds or thousands of avout—the one that was farthest from the equator was at 51.3 degrees north latitude.

That one happened to be the “remote hermitage” of Saunt Edhar.

Word got around. Within a month of the big Voco, everyone in the Decenarian math knew most of what we knew about the ship. The hierarchs could do nothing to suppress it. But still they didn’t open the starhenge. I found myself getting invited to a lot more late-night chalk hall sessions. We studied the diagram Lio had found in that book and worked out the theorics of how such a ship would function, and how much bigger it would have to be to journey between stars. Some of it was simple praxic calculations about the shock absorbers. Some—such as predicting what the plasma would do when it hit the plate—was extraordinarily challenging work. The theorics was too advanced for me. It felt like we were proving the Lorites wrong, because some of the other avout, just a little older than I, were coming up with proofs that we were pretty sure had never been thought of by anyone before—anyone on Arbre, that is.

“It makes you wonder about the Hylaean Theoric World,” Arsibalt volunteered, one summer evening, about eight weeks after the big Voco. He had been pretending to look after his bees and I had been pretending to tend the weeds. By that time, the Sarthian cavalry had penetrated deep into the Plains of Thrania and driven a wedge between the Fourth and the Thirty-third Legions of General Oxas. So it wasn’t surprising that Arsibalt and I bumped into each other. At our latitude, days were very long at this time of year, and we still had some light remaining even though supper had ended hours ago.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked him.

“You are toiling in chalk halls with the other Edharians, trying to work out the theorics of this alien ship,” he said, “theorics that the aliens must have mastered long ago, to build such a thing and drive it among stars. My question is: are they the same theorics?”

“You mean, ours and the aliens’?”

“Yes. I see the chalk-dust on your bolt, Fraa Erasmas, from equations you were drawing after supper. Did some two-headed, eight-limbed alien draw the same equations on the equivalent of a slate on another planet a thousand years ago?”

“I’m pretty sure the aliens use different notation,” I began.

“Obviously!” he barked.

“You sound like Ala.”

“Maybe they use a little square to represent multiplication and a circle for division, or something,” he went on, rolling his eyes in annoyance, then whirling his hand to indicate he wanted the conversation to go faster.

“Or maybe they don’t write out equations at all,” I said. “Maybe they prove things with music, or something.” Which wasn’t farfetched at all, since we did something like that in our chants, and there had been whole orders of avout who had done all of their theorics that way.

“Now we’re getting somewhere!” He was so thrilled by this idea that I regretted having mentioned it. “Suppose they have a system of doing theorics that uses music, as you said. And perhaps if it leads to a harmonious chord, or a pleasing tune, it means that they have proved that something is true.”

“You really are going off the deep end now, Arsibalt.”

“Tolerate your friend and fraa. Do you think it’s the case that, for every proof you and the other Edharians work out on a slate, the aliens have a proof in their own system that corresponds to it? That says the same thing—expresses the same truth?”

“We couldn’t do theorics at all if we didn’t think that was the case. But Arsibalt, this is old stuff we’re talking about. Cno#252;s saw it. Hylaea understood it. Protas formalized it. Paphlagon thought about it—which is why he got Evoked. What’s the point of going over it now? I’m tired. As soon as it gets a little darker, I’m going to bed.”

“How are we to communicate with the aliens?”

“I don’t know. It’s been speculated that they have been learning our language,” I reminded him.

“What if they can’t talk?”

“A minute ago you had them singing!”

“Don’t be tedious, Fraa Erasmas. You know what I’m getting at.”

“Maybe I do. But it’s late. I was up until three talking about plasma. Hey, I think it is dark enough for me to go to bed now.”

“Hear me out. I’m saying that it is through the Protan forms—the theoric truths—in the Hylaean Theoric World that we might end up communicating with them.”

“It sounds like you’re just itching for an excuse to barricade yourself in Shuf’s Dowment behind a stack of old books and work on this. Are you asking me for—permission? Approval?”

He shrugged. “You are the resident expert on the alien ship.”

“Okay. Fine. Knock yourself out. I’ll back you up. I’ll tell everyone you’re not crazy—”

“Capital!”

“—if you help me with one thing that really has me scratching my head right now.”

“And what would that be, Fraa Erasmas?”

“Why does the Millenarian math appear to be glowing?”

“What?”

“Look at it,” I said.

He turned around and raised his chin to gaze up at the crag. It was glowing ruby red. This was not a normal thing for it to be doing.

Of course, we saw soft lights up there all the time. And if the weather was right, the walls would sometimes catch the light of the setting sun, as when Orolo and I had looked on it during Apert. For the last few minutes, as the twilight had been deepening, I’d noticed a red glow about the place, and reckoned it must be that again. But the sun was absolutely down now. And this light was a shade of red that was most un-sun-like. It had a grainy, sparkly quality.

And it was coming from the wrong direction. Sunlight would have lit up the west-facing surfaces of the math and the crag. But this weird red light was striking the roofs, parapets, and tower-tops. Everything below was in shade. It was almost as if some aerocraft were hovering high above the crag shining a light straight down. But if that were the case, it was so high we could neither see nor hear it.

The meadow grew busy with fraas and suurs who came out of the Cloister buildings to look at it. Most were silent—like Deolaters gazing upon a heavenly omen. But among a group of theoricians not far away an argument was gaining momentum, featuring words such as laser, color, and wavelength. That jogged my memory: I knew where I’d seen that grainy sort of light before: the guidestar lasers on the M amp; M.

And that was the key to the riddle. A laser beam could shine across a vast distance without spreading out very much. The thing that was shining this light on the Millenarian math didn’t have to be nearby. It could be thousands of miles away. It could be—could only be—the alien spaceship.

Exclamations, and even a little bit of applause, rose up from the meadow. Looking more closely at the Millenarian math I saw that a column of smoke was rising from behind its walls. I swallowed hard and got very upset for just a moment, thinking that the laser was setting fire to the place! It was a death ray! Then my better sense got the upper hand. To burn things down, one would want an infrared laser, whose light would make things hot. By definition, this laser wasn’t infrared, because we could see it. The smoke wasn’t from burning buildings. The Thousanders were creating it. They were throwing grass or something onto fires, filling the space above their math with smoke and steam.

It was impossible to see a laser beam from the side if it was traversing empty space or clean air, but if you put smoke or dust in its way, the particles would scatter some of the light in all directions and make the ray stand out as a glittering line in space.

It worked. That ray might be thousands of miles long. We’d never be able to see most of it—the part that traversed the vacuum above the atmosphere. But the smoke made by the Thousanders enabled us to see the last few hundred feet, and to get a very good idea of which direction the light was coming from.

And of course I had an unfair advantage, since I knew the plane of the alien ship’s orbit—which of the fixed stars it would pass in front of. I held my bolt up with one hand, making a screen to block out most of the light from the crag. My eyes adjusted to the dark, to the point where I could see the stars again.

And then I saw it arcing across the sky, just where I knew it’d be: a point of red light surrounded by a grainy nimbus caused by its passage through the atmosphere. I pointed. Others around me saw this and found it for themselves. The meadow became as silent as the Mynster during an Anathem.

The shooting star winked out and vanished into the black. The red glow was gone. A round of applause started up in the meadow, but it was tentative. Nervous. It died away before it really got going.

“I feel like a fool,” Arsibalt said. He turned and looked at me. “When I think of all the things I’ve worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it’s plain that I’ve been scared of the wrong things.”

They rang Voco at three o’clock in the morning.

No one minded the odd hour. No one was sleeping anyway. People showed up slow and late because most of them were carrying books and other things they thought they might need, supposing their names were called.

Statho Evoked seventeen.

“Lio.”

“Tulia.”

“Erasmas.”

“Arsibalt.”

“Tavener.” And some other Tenners.

I stepped over the threshold into the chancel—a step I’d taken thousands of times to wind the clock. But when I wound the clock I always knew that a few minutes later Fraa Mentaxenes would open the door again. This time, I turned my back on three hundred faces I’d never see again—unless they got Evoked and sent to—well—wherever I was being sent.

I found myself with several I knew well, and some who were strangers to me: Hundreders.

The intonation of the names stopped. There had been so many that I’d lost count, and supposed we were finished. I looked at Statho, expecting him to move on to the next phase of the aut. He was staring at the list in his hand. His expression was difficult to read: his face and body had gone stiff. He blinked slowly and shifted the list toward the nearest candle as if having trouble reading it. He seemed to be scanning the same line over and over. Finally he forced himself to raise his gaze, and looked directly across the chancel at the Millenarians’ screen.

“Voco,” he said, but it came out husky and he had to clear his throat. “Voco Fraa Jad of the Millenarians.”

Everything got quiet; or maybe it was blood raging in my ears.

There was a long wait. Then the door in the Thousanders’ screen creaked open to reveal the silhouette of an old fraa. He stood there for a moment waiting for the dust to clear—that door didn’t get opened very often. Then he stepped out into the chancel. Someone closed the door behind him.

Statho said a few more words to formally Evoke us. We said the words to answer the call. The avout behind the screens took up their anathem of mourning and farewell. All of them sang their hearts out. The Thousanders shook the Mynster with a mighty croaking bass line, so deep you felt more than heard it. That, even more than the singing of my Decenarian family, made the hairs prickle on my scalp, made my nose run and my eyes sting. The Thousanders were going to miss Fraa Jad and they were making sure he knew it in his bones.

I looked straight up, just as Paphlagon and Orolo had. The light of the candles only penetrated a short distance up the well. But I wasn’t really doing this in an attempt to see something. I was doing it to prevent a deluge from running out of my nostrils and my eyes.

The others were moving around me. I lowered my chin to see what was happening. A junior hierarch was leading us out.

“There’s a hypothesis, you know, that we just get taken to a gas chamber now,” Arsibalt muttered.

“Shut up,” I said. Not wanting to hear any more in this vein from him, I lingered, and let him go well ahead of me. Which took a while since he had made half of his bolt into a sack and was lugging a small library.

The hierarchs, all formally robed in purple, led us down the center aisle of the empty north nave and from there to the narthex just inside the Day Gate. We congregated below the Great Orrery. The Day Gate had been opened, but the plaza beyond was empty. No aerocraft was waiting for us there. No buses. Not even a pair of roller skates.

Junior hierarchs were circulating through the group handing things out. I got a shopping bag from a local department store. Inside were a pair of dungarees, a shirt, drawers, socks, and, on the bottom, a pair of walking shoes. A minute later I was handed a knapsack. Inside was a water bottle, a poly bag containing toiletries, and a money card.

There was also a wristwatch. It took me a while to understand why. Once we got more than a couple of miles from Saunt Edhar, we’d have no way of knowing the time.

Suur Trestanas addressed us. “Your destination is the Concent of Saunt Tredegarh,” she announced.

“Is it a Convox?” someone asked.

“It is now,” she answered. This killed all discussion for a minute as everyone absorbed that news.

“How are we to get there?” Tulia asked.

“Any way you can,” said Trestanas.

“What!?” That or some variation of it came from all of the Evoked at once. Part of the romance of Voco—a small consolation for being ripped away from everyone you knew—was that you got whisked away in some kind of vehicle, as Fraa Paphlagon had been. Instead of which we’d been issued walking shoes.

“You are not to wear the bolt and the chord under the open sky, night or day,” Trestanas went on. “Spheres are to be kept fist-sized or smaller and not used to make light. You are not to walk out of this gate all together—we’ll have you emerge in groups of two or three. Later, if you want, you can meet up somewhere, away from the Concent. Preferably underneath something.”

“What is the resolution of their surveillance?” Lio asked.

“We have no idea.”

“Saunt Tredegarh’s is two thousand miles away,” Barb mentioned. In case this was of interest. Which it was.

“There are local organizations, connected with arks, that are trying to round up vehicles and drivers to get you there.”

“Warden of Heaven people?” Arsibalt asked—he beat me to it.

“Some of them,” Trestanas said.

“No, thanks!” someone called out. “One of those people tried to convert me during Apert. Her arguments were pathetic.”

“Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!” went someone very close to me.

I turned and looked. It was Fraa Jad, standing behind me with his shopping bag and his knapsack. He wasn’t laughing that loudly, so no one else had noticed him. He smelled like smoke. He had not bothered to look into the shopping bag yet. He saw my head turn, and looked me in the eye—very amused. “The Powers That Be must be pissing their pants,” he said, “or whatever they wear nowadays.”

Everyone else was too stunned by all that had happened to say much. Here I had an advantage: I had gotten used to being stunned. Like Lio was used to being punched in the head.

I climbed up onto a stone bench that had been placed where visitors could sit on it and watch the orrery. “South of the concent, not far from the Century Gate, west of the river, there’s a great roof on stilts that straddles a canal. Next to it is a machine-hall. You can’t miss it. It’s the biggest structure in the neighborhood by far. We can meet there under cover. Go there in small groups, like Suur Trestanas said. We’ll convene there later and come up with a plan.”

“What time shall we meet?” asked one of the Hundreders.

I considered it.

“Let’s meet when we—I mean, when they—ring Provener.”