Anathem

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

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

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

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

“A-what do you call it-”

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

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

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

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

“I was kind of joking.”

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

“Or your spiritual qualities.”

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

“Didn’t you see who she was with?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

“Theorical or-”

“Totally praxic.”

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

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

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

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

“Is it the Big Nugget?”

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

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

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

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

“I think you need money to get in.”

“Maybe we could sell some honey.”

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

Jesry did not seem very satisfied with my answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Jesry said.

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

“Raised our expectations,” he said.

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

“What does that mean?”

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

“Or go in deeper.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll see soon enough,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are so gullible,” he said.

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

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

“So people seem to think.”

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

“Certainly happier than the people out here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh?”

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

“Huddled around their knees,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And after that, he was quite a pleasant companion.

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

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

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

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

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

“Right. Stabils it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Leeya?”

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

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

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

“I used to be named Vit,” I said.

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

“Fine. How are you?”

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

“Far away?”

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

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

“How do you figure?”

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

The woman turned to face us again.

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

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

“What kind of stuff?”

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

“Where should I look?” I tried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me,” I said, “is Cord here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Erasmas, now.”

“Is that the name of an old Saunt?”

“That’s right.”

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

“I know. I just saw it.”

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

I extended my hand and clasped hers.

The sound of bells drifted in.

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

“I went to Provener one time.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Fight?” I asked.

Lio nodded.

“Between the two of you or-”

Lio shook his head.

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

“Intra or extra?” Jesry demanded.

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

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

“Useless. Useless,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gang?” Delrakhones offered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes you think that?”

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

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

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

“Remember that portcullis we went through?”

“On top of the tower?”

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

“One for each of the maths?”

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

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

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

“Hierarchs,” I said.

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

“And also with the Ita, and the Sæcular world, and other concents.”

“So, when you talk to one of them-”

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

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

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

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

“Do the phototypes have date prints?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do what?”

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s kind of like hygiene,” I said.

“You think the Ita are dirty?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know what those are.”

“Because no one does them any more.”

“Then how do you know about them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rhetors.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They keep certain parts of the clock running…”

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

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

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

“There is a sort of traditional belief that they spy on us for the Sæcular Power.”

“Ah. Which is why you despise them.”

“Yeah.”

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

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

“They just vanish?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed. “Really!”

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

“Ah. Well, then, I have to ask-”

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

“Yeah. To be blunt about it.”

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

“How do you figure?”

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

“So I take it you’re not a Lorite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah. Patagar.”

“Well, the problem with it is that the Sæcular Power changes from age to age.”

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

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

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

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