Anathem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my opinion, these two sculptures were such bald pro-Hylaea, anti-Deat propaganda that I was almost embarrassed by them. The Deolaters, however, seemed to take precisely the opposite view. Over the course of Apert, Deat’s pedestal had become bedizened with so many candles and charms, flowers, stuffed animals, fetishes, phototypes of dead people, and slips of paper that the One-offs would be cleaning it up for weeks after the gates closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right. Deat and Hylaea both say that one should not confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized.”

“That’s better.”

“For Deat the symbol is an idol. For Hylaea it’s a triangular shape on a tablet. For Deat, the thing symbolized is an actual god in heaven. For Hylaea, it’s a pure theorical triangle in the HTW. So, do you agree that I can speak about that commonality in itself?”

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

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

“But you are now!”

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

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

“It would have made perfect sense if you had made Deat out to be a lunatic,” he demurred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whereas Edharians do believe in it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hope so for your sake,” he said.

The conversation had become steadily odder from its very beginning and had reached a point where it was difficult for me to see a way forward. Fortunately the woman got us out of the jam: “It’s just that with all that’s been going on with the Warden of Heaven, we were speculating, as we were on our way here, whether the avout were feeling any pressure to change their views. And we wondered if your take on Deat and Hylaea might have reflected some Sæcular influence.”

“Ah. That’s an interesting point,” I said. “As it happens, I’d never heard of the Warden of Heaven until a few days ago. So if my take on Deat and Hylaea reflects anything at all, it’s what I’ve been thinking about lately for my own reasons.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow I didn’t find that very comforting.

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

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

“Burned?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is correct.”

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

“What stink, Arsibalt?”

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

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

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

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

“Recruiting us?”

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