Anathem

We took turns going into the men’s and women’s toilet chambers to change. The shoes immediately drove me crazy. I kicked them off and parked them under a bench, then found a clear place on the narthex floor where I could spread out my bolt and fold it up. That involved stooping and squatting-tricky, in dungarees. I couldn’t believe people wore this stuff their whole lives!

Once I had my bolt reduced to a book-sized package, I wrapped my chord around it, put them into the department-store bag along with my balled-up sphere, and stuffed that into the bottom of the knapsack. Across the narthex, Lio was trying to perform some of his Vale-lore moves in his new clothes. He moved as if he’d just come down with a neurological disorder. Tulia’s clothes didn’t fit at all and she was negotiating a swap with one of the Centenarian suurs.

“Is this a Convox?”

“It is now.”

There had only been eight Convoxes. The first had coincided with the Reconstitution. After that, one had been held at each Millennium to compile the edition of the Dictionary that would be used for the next thousand years, and to take care of other business of concern to the Thousanders. There had been one for the Big Nugget and one at the end of each Sack.

Barb became jumpy, then unruly, and then wild. None of the hierarchs knew what to make of him.

“He doesn’t like change,” Tulia reminded me. The unspoken message: he’s your friend-he’s your problem.

Barb didn’t like being crowded either, so Lio and I crowded him. We crowded him into a corner where Arsibalt was encamped with his stack of books.

“Voco breaks the Discipline because the one Evoked goes forth alone, and from that point onward is immersed in the Sæcular world,” Arsibalt intoned. “That’s why they can’t return. Convox is different. So many of us are taken at once that we can travel together and preserve the Discipline within our Peregrin group.”

“Peregrin begins and ends at a math,” Barb said, suddenly calm.

“Yes, Fraa Tavener.”

“When we get to Saunt Tredegarh’s-”

“We’ll celebrate the aut of Inbrase,” Arsibalt prompted him, “and-”

“And then we’ll be together with other avout in the Convox,” Barb guessed.

“And then-”

“And then when we’re done doing whatever it is they want us to do, we make Peregrin back to Saunt Edhar,” Barb went on.

“Yes, Fraa Tavener,” said Arsibalt. I could sense him fending off the temptation to add if we haven’t been incinerated by an alien death ray or gassed by the Warden of Heaven.

Barb calmed down. It wouldn’t last. Once we left the Day Gate, we’d be contending with minor violations of the Discipline all the time. Barb would be certain to notice these and point them out. Why, oh why, had he been Evoked? He was just a brand-new fid! I was going to be babysitting him through the entire Convox.

As the small hours of the morning passed, though, and the lapis sphere that represented Arbre in the orrery ticked slowly around, I settled down a little bit and remembered that half of what I now knew about theorics was thanks to Barb. What would it say about me if I ditched him?

It was getting light outside. Half of the Evoked had already departed. The hierarchs were pairing Tenners with Hundreders because many of the latter would need help from the former in speaking Fluccish and coping with the S?culum in general. Lio was summoned and went out with a couple of Hundreders. Arsibalt and Tulia were told to get ready.

I couldn’t go out barefoot. My shoes were under a bench by the orrery. Fraa Jad had parked himself on that bench. Right above my shoes. His head was bent. His hands were folded in his lap. He must be doing some kind of profound Thousander meditation. If I disturbed him just so that I could fetch my shoes, he would turn me into a newt or something.

No one else wanted to disturb him either. Tulia, then Arsibalt, left with Hundreders in tow. There were only three Evoked left: Barb, Jad, and I. Jad was still in his bolt and chord.

Barb headed for Fraa Jad. I broke into a sprint, and caught up with him just as he arrived.

“Fraa Jad must change clothes,” Barb announced, stretching his first-year Orth until it cracked.

Fraa Jad looked up. Until now I had thought that his hands were folded together in his lap. Now I saw that he was holding a disposable razor, still encased in its colorful package. I had one just like it in my bag. It was a common brand. Fraa Jad was reading the label. The big characters were Kinagrams, which he would never have seen before, but the fine print was in the same alphabet that we used.

“What principle explains the powers imputed by this document to the Dynaglide lubri-strip?” he asked. “Is it permanent, or ablative?”

“Ablative,” I said.

“It is a violation of the Discipline for you to be reading that!” Barb complained.

“Shut up,” Fraa Jad said.

“I don’t mean in any way to be disrespectful,” I tried, after a somewhat awkward and lengthy pause, “but-”

“Is it time to leave?” Fraa Jad asked, and checked the orrery as if it were a wristwatch.

“Yes.”

Fraa Jad stood up and, in the same motion, stripped his bolt off over his head. Some of the hierarchs gasped and turned their backs. Nothing happened for a little while. I rummaged in his shopping bag and found a pair of drawers, which I handed to him.

“Do I need to explain this?” I asked, pointing out the fly.

Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. “Topology is destiny,” he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time. It was hard to estimate his age. His skin was loose and mottled, but he balanced perfectly on one leg, then the other, as he put on the drawers.

The rest of getting Fraa Jad decent went by without notable incidents. I retrieved my shoes and tried once more to remember how to tie them. Barb seemed amazingly content to follow the command to shut up. I wondered why I had never tried this simple tactic with him before.

Stumbling and shuffling in our shoes, hitching our trousers up from time to time, we walked out the Day Gate. The plaza was empty. We crossed the causeway between the twin fountains and entered into the burgers’ town. An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. Some casinos had gone up around the Olde Market, hoping to cater to people who wanted to visit it or who had business of one kind or another linked to the concent. But no one wanted to visit an Olde Market that was surrounded by casinos, and frankly the concent wasn’t that much of an attraction, so the casinos were looking dirty and forlorn. Sometimes at night we could hear music playing from dance halls in their basements but they were awfully quiet at the moment.

“We can obtain breakfast in there,” Barb said.

“Casino restaurants are expensive,” I demurred.

“They have a breakfast buffet that you can go to for free. My father and I would eat there sometimes.”

This made me sad but I could not dispute the logic, so I followed Barb and Jad followed me. The casino was a labyrinth of corridors that all looked the same. They saved money by keeping the lights dim and not washing the carpets; the mildew made us sneeze. We ended up in a windowless room below ground. Fleshy men, smelling like soap, sat alone or in pairs at tables. There was nothing to read. A speely display was mounted to the wall, showing feeds of news, weather, and sports. It was the first moving picture praxis that Fraa Jad had ever seen, and it took him some getting used to. Barb and I let him stare at it while we got food from the buffet. We put our trays down on a table and then I returned to Fraa Jad who was watching highlights of a ball game. A man at a nearby table was trying to draw him into conversation about one of the teams. Fraa Jad’s T-shirt happened to be emblazoned with the logo of the same team and this had caused the man to jump to a whole set of wrong conclusions. I got between Fraa Jad’s face and the speely and managed to break his concentration, then led him over to the buffet. Thousanders didn’t eat much meat because there wasn’t room to raise livestock on their crag. He seemed eager to make up for lost time. I tried to steer him toward cereal products but he knew what he wanted.

While we were eating, a news feed came up on the speely showing a Mathic stone tower, seen from a distance, at night, lit from above by a grainy red glow. The scene was very much like what the Thousanders’ math had looked like last night. But the building on the feed was not one that I had ever seen.

“That is the Millenarians’ spire in the Concent of Saunt Rambalf,” Fraa Jad announced. “I have seen drawings of it.”

Saunt Rambalf’s was on another continent. We knew little of it because it had no orders in common with ours. I’d run across the name recently, but I could not remember exactly where-

“One of the three Inviolates,” Barb said.

“Is that what you call us?” Jad asked.

Barb was right. The Flying Wedge monument inside our Year Gate bore a plaque telling the story of the Third Sack and mentioning the three Thousander maths, in all the world, that had not been violated: Saunt Edhar, Saunt Rambalf, and-

“Saunt Tredegarh is the third,” Barb continued.

As if the speely were responding to his voice, we now saw an image of a math that seemed to have been carved into the face of a stone bluff. It too was illuminated from above by red light.

“That’s odd,” I said. “Why would the aliens shine the light on the Three Inviolates? That is ancient history.”

“They are telling us something,” said Fraa Jad.

“What are they telling us? That they’re really interested in the history of the Third Sack?”

“No,” said Fraa Jad, “they are probably telling us that they have figured out that Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh are where the Sæcular Power stored all of the nuclear waste.”

I was glad we were speaking Orth.

We walked to a fueling station on the main road out of town and I bought a cartabla. They had them in different sizes and styles. The one I bought was about the size of a book. Its corners and edges were decorated with thick knobby pads meant to look like the tires of off-road vehicles. That’s because this cartabla was meant for people who liked that kind of thing. It contained topographic maps. Ordinary cartablas had different decorations and they only showed roads and shopping centers.

When we got outside I turned it on. After a few seconds it flashed up an error message and then defaulted to a map of the whole continent. It didn’t indicate our position as it ought to have done.

“Hey,” I said to the attendant, back inside, “this thing’s busted.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is. It can’t fix our position.”

“Oh, none of them can today. Believe me. Your cartabla works fine. Hey, it’s showing you the map, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but…”

“He’s right,” said another customer, a driver who had just pulled into the station in a long-range drummon. “The satellites are on the blink. Mine can’t get a fix. No one’s can.” He chuckled. “You just picked the wrong morning to buy a new cartabla!”

“So, this started last night?”

“Yeah, ’bout three in the morning. Don’t worry. The Powers That Be depend on those things! Military. Can’t get by without ’em. They’ll get it all fixed in no time.”

“I wonder if it has anything to do with the red lights shining on the-on the clocks last night,” I said, just to see what they might say. “I saw it on the speely.”

“That’s one of their festivals-it’s a ritual or something they do,” said the attendant. “That’s what I heard.”

This was news to the other customer, and so I asked the attendant where he had heard it. He tapped a jeejah hanging on a lanyard around his neck. “Morning cast from my ark.”

The natural question would now have been: Warden of Heaven? But showing more than the weakest curiosity might have pegged me as an escapee from a concent. So I just nodded and walked out of the fueling station. Then I started to lead Barb and Jad in the direction of the machine hall.

“The aliens are jamming the nav satellites,” I announced.

“Or maybe they just shot them down!” said Barb.

“Let’s buy a sextant, then,” suggested Fraa Jad.

“Those have not been made in four thousand years,” I told him.

“Let’s build one then.”

“I have no idea of all the parts and whatnot that go into a sextant.”

He found this amusing. “Neither do I. I was assuming we would design it from first principles.”

“Yeah!” snorted Barb. “It’s just geometry, Raz!”

“In the present age, this continent is covered by a dense network of hard-surfaced roads replete with signs and other navigational aids,” I announced.

“Oh,” said Fraa Jad.

“Between that and this”-I waved the cartabla-“we can find our way to Saunt Tredegarh without having to design a sextant from first principles.”

Fraa Jad seemed a little put out by this. A minute later, though, we happened to pass an office supply store. I ran in and bought a protractor, then handed it to Fraa Jad to serve as the first component in his homemade sextant. He was deeply impressed. I realized that this was the first thing he’d seen extramuros that made sense to him. “Is that a Temple of Adrakhones?” he asked, gazing at the store.

“No,” I said, and turned my back on it and walked away. “It is praxic. They need primitive trigonometry to build things like wheelchair ramps and doorstops.”

“Nonetheless,” he said, falling behind me, and looking back longingly, “they must have some perception-”

“Fraa Jad,” I said, “they have no awareness of the Hylaean Theoric World.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Really. Anyone out here who begins to see into the HTW suppresses it, goes crazy, or ends up at Saunt Edhar.” I turned around and looked at him. “Where did you think Barb and I came from?”

Once we had gotten clear as to that, Barb and Jad were happy to follow me and discuss sextants as I led them on a wide arc around the west side of Saunt Edhar to the machine hall.

“You come and go at interesting times; I’ll give you that,” was how Cord greeted me.

We had interrupted her and her co-workers in the middle of some sort of convocation. Everyone was staring at us. One older man in particular. “Who’s that guy and why does he hate me?” I asked, staring back at him.

“That would be the boss,” Cord said. I noticed that her face was wet.

“Oh. Hmm. Sure. It didn’t occur to me that you’d have one of those.”

“Most people out here do, Raz,” she said. “When a boss gives you that look, it’s considered bad form to stare back the way you are doing.”

“Oh, is it some kind of social dominance gesture?”

“Yeah. Also, busting into a private meeting in someone’s place of employment is out of bounds.”

“Well, as long as I have your boss’s attention, maybe I should let him know that-”

“You called a big meeting here at midday?”

“Yeah.”

“Or, as he would think of it, you-a total stranger-invited a whole lot of other total strangers to gather on his property-an active industrial site with lots of dangerous equipment-without asking him first.”

“Well, this is really important, Cord. And it won’t last long. Is that why you and your co-workers were having a meeting?”

“That was the first agenda item.”

“Do you think he is going to physically assault me? Because I know a little vlor. Not as much as Lio but-”

“That would be an unusual way to handle it. Out here it would be a legal dispute. But you guys have your own separate law, so he can’t touch you. And it sounds like the Powers That Be are leaning on him to let this thing happen. He’ll negotiate with them for compensation. He’s also negotiating with the insurance company to make sure that none of this voids his policy.”

“Wow. Things are complicated out here.”

Cord looked in the direction of the Pr?sidium and sniffled. “And they’re not…in there?”

I thought about that for a while. “I guess my disappearance on Tenth Night probably looks as weird to you as your boss’s insurance policy looks to me.”

“Correct.”

“Well, it wasn’t personal. And it hurt me a lot. Maybe as much as this mess hurts you.”

“That is unlikely,” Cord said, “since ten seconds before you walked in here I got fired.”

“That is wildly irrational behavior!” I protested. “Even by extramuros standards.”

“Yes and no. Yes, it’s crazy for me to get fired because of a decision you made without my knowledge. But no, in a way it’s not, because I’m weird here. I’m a girl. I use the machines to make jewelry. I make parts for the Ita and get paid in jars of honey.”

“Well, I’m really sorry-”

“Just stop,” she suggested.

“If there’s anything I can do-if you’d like to join the math-”

“The math you just got thrown out of?”

“I’m just saying, if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you-”

“Give me an adventure.”

In the moment that followed, Cord realized that this sounded weird, and lost her nerve. She held up her hands. “I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.”

Now for the first time I reviewed everything that had happened in the last twelve hours. It made me a little dizzy.

“Raz?” she said, after a while.

“I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”

“Great!”

“Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

“Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

“That’d be great.”

“See you here at noon. If they’ll let me back in, that is.”

“I’ll see to it that they do. Hey, Cord-”

“Yeah?”

“This is probably the wrong time to ask…but could you do me one favor?”

I went into the shade of the great roof over the canal and sat on a stack of wooden pallets, then took out the cartabla and figured out how to use its interface. This took longer than I’d expected because it wasn’t made for literate people. I couldn’t make any headway at all with its search functions, because of all its cack-handed efforts to assist me.

“Where the heck is Bly’s Butte?” I asked Arsibalt when he showed up. It was half an hour before midday. About half of the Evoked had arrived. A small fleet of fetches and mobes had begun to form up: stolen, borrowed, or donated, I had no idea.

“I anticipated this,” Arsibalt said.

“Bly’s relics are all at Saunt Edhar,” I reminded him.

“Were,” he corrected me.

“Excellent! What did you steal?”

“A rendering of the butte as it appeared thirteen hundred years ago.”

“And some of his cosmographical notes?” I pleaded.

No such luck: Arsibalt’s face was all curiosity. “Why would you want Saunt Bly’s cosmographical notes?”

“Because he ought to have noted the longitude and latitude of the place from which he was making the observations.”

Then I remembered we had no way to determine our longitude and latitude anyway. But perhaps that information was entombed in the cartabla’s user interface.

“Well, perhaps it’s all for the best,” Arsibalt sighed.

“What!?”

“We are supposed to go directly to Saunt Tredegarh’s. Bly’s Butte is not between here and there.”

“I don’t think it’s that far out of the way.”

“Didn’t you just tell me you don’t know where it is?”

“I have a rough idea.”

“You can’t even be certain that Orolo went to Bly’s Butte. How are you going to persuade seventeen avout to make an illicit detour to search for a man they Anathematized a few months ago?”

“Arsibalt, I don’t understand you. Why did you bother stealing Bly’s relics if you had no intention of going to find Orolo?”

“At the time I stole them,” he pointed out, “I didn’t know it was a Convox.”

It took me a moment to follow the logic. “You didn’t know we’d be coming back.”

“Correct.”

“You reckoned, after we got finished doing whatever it is they wanted us to do-”

“We could find Orolo, and live as Ferals.”

That was all interesting. Sort of poignant too. It did nothing, however, to solve the problem at hand.

“Arsibalt, have you noticed any pattern in the lives of the Saunts?”

“Quite a few. Which pattern would you like to draw to my attention?”

“A lot of them get Thrown Back before everyone figures out that they are Saunts.”

“Supposing you’re right,” Arsibalt said, “Orolo’s canonization is not going to happen for a long time; he’s not a Saunt yet.”

“Beg pardon,” said a man who had lately been hovering nearby with his hands in his pockets, “are you the leader?”

He was looking at me. I naturally glanced around to see what fresh trouble Barb and Jad had gotten into. Barb was standing not far away, watching some birds that had built their nests up in the steel beams that supported the roof. He’d been doing this for a solid hour. Jad was squatting in a dusty patch, drawing diagrams using a broken tap as a stylus. Shortly after we’d arrived, Fraa Jad had wandered into the machine hall and figured out how to turn on a lathe. Cord’s ex-boss almost had attacked me. Since then, both Jad and Barb had been reasonably well-behaved. So why was this extra asking me if I was the leader? He didn’t seem angry or scared. More…lost.

I guessed that by pretending to be the leader I could make a few things go my way, at least for a little while, until they figured out I was faking it.

“Yes,” I said, “I am called Fraa Erasmas.”

“Oh, good to meet you. Ferman Beller,” he said, and extended his hand a little uncertainly-he wasn’t sure if we used that greeting. I shook his hand firmly and he relaxed. He was a stocky man in his fifth decade. “Nice cartabla you got there.”

This seemed like an incredibly strange thing for him to say until I remembered that extras were allowed to have more than three possessions and that these often served as starting-points for small talk.

“Thanks,” I tried. “Too bad it doesn’t work.”

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you there!” I guessed he was one of the locals who had volunteered to drive us. “Say, look, there’s a guy over there wants to talk to you. Didn’t know if we should, you know, let him approach.”

I looked over and saw a man with a black stovepipe on his head, standing in the sun, glaring at me.

“Please send Sammann over,” I said.

“You can’t be serious!” Arsibalt hissed when Ferman was out of range.

“I sent for him.”

“How would you go about sending for an Ita?”

“I asked Cord to do it for me.”

“Is she here?” he asked, in a new tone of voice.

“I’m expecting her and her boyfriend to show up at any minute,” I said, and jumped down off the stack of pallets. “Here, figure out where Bly’s Butte is.” I handed him the cartabla.

The bells of Provener flipped switches in my brain, as if I were one of those poor dogs that Saunts of old would wire up for psychological experiments. First I felt guilty: late again! Then my legs and arms ached for the labor of winding the clock. Next would be hunger for the midday meal. Finally, I felt wounded that they’d managed to wind the clock without us.

“We’re going to hold much of the discussion in Orth because many of us don’t really speak Fluccish,” I announced, from my pallet-stack podium, to the whole group: seventeen avout, one Ita, and a roster of extramuros people that grew and shrank according to their attention span and jeejah usage but averaged about a dozen. “Suur Tulia will translate some of what we say, but a lot of our conversation is going to be about stuff that is of interest only to avout. So you might want to have your own conversation about logistics-such as lunch.” I saw Arsibalt nodding.

Then I switched to Orth. I was a little slow to get going because I was waiting for someone to point out that I was not actually the leader. But I had called this meeting, and I was standing on the stack of pallets.

And I was a Tenner. Our leader would have to be a Tenner who would be able to speak Fluccish and deal with the extramuros world. Not that I was an expert on that. But a Hundreder would be even more inept. Fraa Jad and the Hundreders couldn’t very well choose which Tenner was going to be the leader, because they’d never met any of us until a few hours ago. For years, however, all of them had watched me and my team wind the clock, which gave me, Lio, and Arsibalt the advantage that our faces were familiar. Jesry, the natural leader, was gone. I had won Arsibalt’s loyalty by speaking of lunch. Lio was too goofy and weird. So through no rational process whatsoever I was the leader. And I had no idea what I was going to say.

“We have to divide up among several vehicles,” I said, stalling for time. “For now we’ll stick with the same mixed groups of Tenners and Hundreders that were assigned in the Narthex this morning. We’ll do that because it’s simple,” I added, because I could see Fraa Wyburt-a Tenner, older than me-getting ready to lodge an objection. “Swap things around later if you want. But each Tenner is responsible for making sure his Hundreders don’t end up stranded in a vehicle with non-Orth speakers. I think we can all happily accept that responsibility,” I said, looking Fraa Wyburt in the eye. He looked ready to plane me but decided to back down for reasons I could only guess at. “How will those groups be distributed among vehicles? My sib, Cord, the young woman in the vest with the tools, has offered to take some of us in her fetch. That’s a Fluccish word. It is that industrial-looking vehicle that seems like a box on wheels. She wants me and her liaison-partner Rosk-the big man with the long hair-in there with her. Fraa Jad and Fraa Barb are with me. I have invited Sammann of the Ita to join us. I know some of you will object”-they were already objecting-“but that’s why I’m putting him in the fetch with me.”

“It’s disrespectful to put an Ita in with a Thousander!” said Suur Rethlett-another Tenner.

“Fraa Jad,” I said, “I apologize that we are discussing you as if you were not present. It goes without saying that you may choose whichever vehicle you want.”

“We are supposed to maintain the Discipline during Peregrin!” Barb helpfully reminded us.

“Hey, you guys are scaring the extras,” I joked. Because looking over the heads of my fraas and suurs I could see the extramuros people looking unnerved by our arguing. Tulia translated my last remark. The extras laughed. None of the avout did. But they did settle down a little.

“Fraa Erasmas, if I may?” said Arsibalt. I nodded. Arsibalt faced Barb but spoke loudly enough for all to hear: “We have been given two mutually contradictory instructions. One, the ancient standing order to preserve the Discipline during Peregrin. Two, a fresh order to get to Saunt Tredegarh by any means necessary. They have not provided us with a sealed train-coach or any other such vehicle that might serve as a mobile cloister. It is to be small private vehicles or nothing. And we don’t know how to drive. I put it to you that the new order takes precedence over the old and that we must travel in the company of extras. And to travel with an Ita is certainly no worse than that. I say it is better, in that the Ita understand the Discipline as well as we do.”

“Sammann’s in Cord’s fetch with me,” I concluded, before Barb could let fly any of the objections that had been filling his quiver during Arsibalt’s statement. “Fraa Jad’s wherever he wants to be.”

“I’ll travel in the way you have suggested, and make a change if it is not satisfactory,” said Fraa Jad. This silenced the remainder of the seventeen for a moment, simply because it was the first time most of them had heard his voice.

“That might happen immediately,” I told him, “because the first destination of Cord’s fetch will be Bly’s Butte where I will try to find Orolo.”

Now the extras really did have something to worry about, for the avout became quite loud and angry and my short tenure as self-appointed leader looked to be at an end. But before they pulled me down and Anathematized me I nodded to Sammann, who strode forward. I reached down and grabbed his hand and pulled him up to stand alongside me. The novel sight of a fraa touching an Ita broke the others’ concentration for a moment. Then Sammann began to speak, which was so arresting that after the first few words he had a silent, almost rapt audience. A couple of Centenarian suurs plugged their ears and closed their eyes in silent protest; three others turned their backs on him.

“Fraa Spelikon told me to go to the Telescope of Saunts Mithra and Mylax and retrieve a photomnemonic tablet that Fraa Orolo had placed there hours before the starhenge was closed by the Warden Regulant,” Sammann announced in correct but strangely accented Orth. “I obeyed. He did not issue any command as to information security relating to this tablet. So, before I gave it to him, I made a copy.” And with that Sammann withdrew a photomnemonic tablet from a bag slung over his shoulder. “It contains a single image that Fraa Orolo created, but never got to see. I summon the image now,” he said, manipulating its controls. “Fraa Erasmas, here, saw it a few minutes ago. The rest of you may view it if you wish.” He handed it down to the nearest avout. Others clustered around, though some still refused even to acknowledge that Sammann was present.

“We need to be discreet and not show this to the extras,” I said, “because I don’t think they have any idea what we are up against.” We meaning everyone on Arbre.

But no one heard me because by then they were all looking at the image on the tablet.

What the tablet showed did not force anyone to agree with me, but it was a huge distraction from the argument we’d been having. Those who were inclined to see things my way derived new confidence from it. The rest of them lost their nerve.

It took an hour to figure out who was going in which vehicle. I couldn’t believe it could be so complicated. People kept changing their minds. Alliances formed, frayed, and dissolved. Inter-alliance coalitions snapped in and out of existence like virtual particles. Cord’s big boxy fetch, which had three rows of seats, was to be occupied by her, Rosk, me, Barb, Jad, and Sammann. Ferman Beller had a large mobe that was made to travel on uneven surfaces. He would take Lio, Arsibalt, and three of the Hundreders who had decided to throw in with us. We thought we had pretty efficiently filled the two largest vehicles, but at the last minute another extra who had been making a lot of calls on his jeejah announced that he and his fetch were joining our caravan. The man’s name was Ganelial Crade and he was pretty clearly some kind of Deolater from a counter-Bazian ark-whether Warden of Heaven or not, we didn’t know yet. His vehicle was an open-back fetch whose bed was almost completely occupied by a motorized tricycle with fat, knobby tires. Only three people could fit into its cab. No one wanted to ride with Ganelial Crade. I was embarrassed on his behalf, though not so embarrassed that I was willing to climb into his vehicle. At the last minute, some younger associate of his stepped up, tossed a duffel bag into the back, and climbed into the cab with him. So that completed the Bly’s Butte contingent.

The direct-to-Tredegarh contingent comprised four mobes, each with one owner/driver and one Tenner: Tulia, Wyburt, Rethlett, and Ostabon. Other seats in these vehicles were taken up by Hundreders who wanted no part of an Orolo expedition or by other extras who had volunteered to come on the journey.

With the exception of Cord and Rosk, all of the extras appeared to be part of religious groups, which made all of the avout more or less uncomfortable. I reckoned that if there had been a military base in this area the Sæcular Power might have ordered some soldiers to dress up as civilians and drive us around, but since there wasn’t, they’d hit on the idea of relying on organizations that people were willing to volunteer for on short notice, which in this time and place meant arks. When I explained it to people in those terms, it seemed to settle them down a little bit. The Tenners sort of understood it. The Hundreders found it quite difficult to fathom and kept wanting to know more about the deologies espoused by their would-be drivers, which in no way shortened the process of getting them into vehicles.

Ganelial Crade was probably in his fourth decade, but you could mistake him for a younger man because he was slender and whiskerless. He announced that he knew the location of Bly’s Butte and that he would lead us there and we should follow him. Then he got into his fetch and started the engine. Ferman Beller ambled over and grinned at him until he opened his window, then started talking to him. Pretty soon I could tell that they were disagreeing about something-mostly by watching Crade’s passenger, who was glaring at Beller.

I got that mud-on-the-head sense of embarrassment again. Ganelial Crade had spoken with such confidence that I’d assumed he’d already gone over this plan with Ferman Beller and that the two of them had agreed on it. Now it was obvious that no such thing had ever happened. I’d been prepared to follow Crade wherever he led us.

I could now see that this business of being the leader was going to be a pain in the neck because people would always be trying to get me to do the wrong things or get rid of me altogether.

“Some leader!” I said, referring to myself.

“Huh?” asked Lio.

“Don’t let me do stupid things any more,” I ordered Lio, who looked baffled. I started walking towards Crade’s fetch. Lio and Arsibalt followed at a distance. Crade and Beller were openly arguing now. I really wanted no part of this but I had been cornered into doing something.

The problem, I realized, was that Crade claimed to have knowledge we didn’t have as to the location of Bly’s Butte. That was my fault. I’d made the error of admitting that I didn’t know exactly where it was. Inside the concent it was fine to admit ignorance, because that was the first step on the road to truth. Out here, it just gave people like Crade an opening to seize power.

“Excuse me!” I called out. Beller and Crade stopped arguing and looked at me. “One of my brothers has brought with him ancient documents from the concent that tell us where to go. By combining this knowledge with the skills of our Ita and the topographic maps on the cartabla, we can find our own way to the place we are going.”

“I know exactly where your friend went,” Crade began.

“We don’t,” I said, “but as I mentioned we can figure it out long before we get there.”

“Just follow me and-”

“That is a brittle plan. If we lose you in traffic we will be in a bad way.”

“If you lose me in traffic you can call me on my jeejah.”

This hurt because Crade was being more rational than I was, but I couldn’t back down at this point. “Mr. Crade, you may go on ahead if you like, and have the satisfaction of beating us there, but if you look in your rearview and notice that we are no longer visible, it is because we have decided to keep our own counsel as to how we should get there.”

Crade and his passenger now hated me forever but at least this was over.

This plan, however, necessitated a shake-up that put me and Sammann in Ferman Beller’s vehicle with Arsibalt. The three of us would navigate. Lio and a Hundreder moved to Cord’s fetch to balance the load; they would follow. Ganelial Crade sprayed us with loose rocks as he gunned his fetch out into the open.

“That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it’s almost funny,” Arsibalt observed.

“Yes,” said one of the Hundreders, “it’s as if he’d never heard of foreshadowing.”

“He probably hasn’t,” I said. “But please remember that our driver is the only extra in this vehicle and so let’s show him the courtesy of speaking Fluccish at least part of the time.”

“Go ahead,” said the Hundreder, “and I’ll see if I can parse it.”

Fraa Carmolathu, as this Hundreder was called, was a little bit of a dork, but he had volunteered to go fetch Orolo, so he couldn’t be all bad. He was five or ten years older than Orolo, and I speculated that he was a friend of Paphlagon.

“How many roads lead northeast, parallel to the mountains?” I asked Beller. I was hoping he’d say only one.

“Several,” he said. “Which one do you want to take, boss?”

“By definition a butte is free-standing-not part of a range,” Arsibalt said in Orth, “so-”

“It rises from the plateau south of the mountains,” I announced in Fluccish. “We don’t need to take a mountain road.”

Beller put the vehicle into gear and pulled out. I waved goodbye to Tulia. She was watching us go, looking a little shocked. Our departure had been abrupt, but I was afraid that if we waited one more minute there would be another crisis. Tulia had elected to go directly to Tredegarh so that she could try to find Ala. Perhaps I ought to have done the same. But this was not an easy choice, and I thought I was choosing rightly. If all went well, we’d get to Tredegarh only a couple of days later than Tulia’s contingent. She’d do a fine job of leading them there.

Before leaving town we stopped, or rather slowed down, at a place where we could get food without spending a lot of time. I remembered this kind of restaurant from my childhood but it was new to the Hundreders. I couldn’t help seeing it as they did: the ambiguous conversation with the unseen serving-wench, the bags of hot-grease-scented food hurtling in through the window, condiments in packets, attempting to eat while lurching down a highway, volumes of messy litter that seemed to fill all the empty space in the mobe, a smell that outstayed its welcome.