Anathem

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

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

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

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

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

I was already getting nervous.

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

“I don’t have pockets,” I joked.

No one laughed.

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

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

“The same purpose as spit?” Barb asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Went missing?” Lio repeated.

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

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

“Because of Relativity!” Barb exclaimed.

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

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

“What!?”

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

“Just before the Terrible Events!” Barb footnoted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Learning our language,” Tulia said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Actually doing something,” Barb said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For God’s sake, raise your sights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s on your mind?” I asked him.

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

“You mean, ours and the aliens’?”

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

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

“Obviously!” he barked.

“You sound like Ala.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are we to communicate with the aliens?”

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

“What if they can’t talk?”

“A minute ago you had them singing!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Capital!”

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

“And what would that be, Fraa Erasmas?”

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

“What?”

“Look at it,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statho Evoked seventeen.

“Lio.”

“Tulia.”

“Erasmas.”

“Arsibalt.”

“Tavener.” And some other Tenners.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is it a Convox?” someone asked.

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

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

“Any way you can,” said Trestanas.

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

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

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

“We have no idea.”

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

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

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

“Some of them,” Trestanas said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I considered it.

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