Anathem

By the time we’d finished eating, we’d passed out of view of the Pr?sidium. We had left most of the slines’ quarter behind us and were moving across a sort of tidal zone that was part of the city when the city was big and part of the country when it wasn’t. Where a tidal zone would have driftwood, dead fish, and uprooted seaweed, this had stands of scrawny trees, animals killed by vehicles, and tousled jumpweed. Where the tidal zone would be littered with empty bottles and wrecked boats, this had empty bottles and abandoned fetches. The only thing of consequence was a complex where fuel trees that had been barged down from the mountains were chewed up and processed. There we were caught for a few minutes in a traffic jam of tanker-drummons. But few of these were going our way, and soon we had got clear of them and passed into the district of vegetable gardens and orchards that stretched beyond.

In my vehicle, besides me and Ferman Beller, were Arsibalt, Sammann, and two Hundreder Fraas, Carmolathu and Harbret. The other vehicle contained Cord, Rosk, Lio, Barb, Jad, and another Edharian from the Hundreder math: Fraa Criscan. I noted a statistical oddity, which was that there was only one female, and that was my sib, who was pretty unconventional as females went. Intramuros, we didn’t often see the numbers get so skewed. Extramuros, of course, it depended on what religions and social mores prevailed at a given time. Naturally, I wondered how this had come about, and spent a little while reviewing my memories of the hour-long scramble to get people into vehicles. Of course, the biggest factor in determining who’d go in which group was how one thought about Orolo and the mission to go and find him. Perhaps there was something about this foray that smelled good to men and bad to women.

We numbered twelve, not counting Ganelial Crade. This was a common size for an athletic team or a small military unit. It had been speculated for a long time that this was a natural size for a hunting party of the Stone Age, and that men were predisposed to feel comfortable in a group of about that size. Anyway, whether it was a statistical anomaly or primitive behavior programmed into our sequences, this was what we’d ended up with. I spent a few minutes wondering whether Tulia and some of the other suurs in the straight-to-Tredegarh contingent hated me for letting it come out this way, then forgot about it, since we needed to think about navigation.

From the drawing that Arsibalt had supplied-which showed the profile of a range of mountains in the distance-and from certain clues in the story of Saunt Bly as recorded in the Chronicles, and from things that Sammann looked up on a kind of super-jeejah, we were able to identify three different isolated mountains on the cartabla, any one of which might have been Bly’s Butte. They formed a triangle about twenty miles on a side, a couple of hundred miles from where we were now. It didn’t seem that far away but when we showed it to Ferman he told us we shouldn’t expect to reach it until tomorrow; the roads in that area, he explained, were “new gravel,” and it would be slow going. We could get there today, but it would be dark and we wouldn’t be able to do anything. Better to find a place to stay nearby and get an early start tomorrow.

I didn’t understand “new gravel” until several hours later when we turned off the main highway and on to a road that had once been paved. It almost would have been faster to drive directly over the earth than to pick our way over this crazed puzzle of jagged slabs.

Arsibalt was uncomfortable being around Sammann, which I could tell because he was extremely polite when addressing him. Complaining of motion sickness, he moved up to the seat next to Ferman and talked to him in Fluccish. I sat behind him and tried to catch up on sleep. From time to time my eyelids would part as we caught air over a gap in the road and I’d get a dreamy glimpse of some religious fetish swinging from the control panel. I was no expert on arks, but I was pretty sure that Ferman was Bazian Orthodox. At some level this was just as crazy as believing in whatever Ganelial Crade believed, but it was a far more traditional and predictable form of crazy.

Still, if a group of religious fanatics had wanted to abduct a few carloads of avout, they couldn’t have done a slicker job of it. That’s why I snapped awake when I heard Ferman Beller mention God.

Until now he’d avoided it, which I could not understand. If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him? Instead of which Deolaters like Beller would go on for hours without bringing God into the conversation at all. Maybe his God was remote from our doings. Or-more likely-maybe the presence of God was so obvious to him that he felt no more need to speak of it than did I to point out, all the time, that I was breathing air.

Frustration was in Beller’s voice. Not angry or bitter. This was the gentle, genial frustration of an uncle who can’t get something through a nephew’s head. We seemed so smart. Why didn’t we believe in God?

“We’re observing the Sconic Discipline,” Arsibalt told him-happy, and a bit relieved, to’ve been given an opportunity to clear this up. He was too optimistic, I thought, too confident he could get Beller to see it our way. “It’s not the same thing as not believing in God. Though”-he hastily added-“I can see why it looks that way to one who’s never been exposed to Sconic thought.”

“I thought your Discipline came from Saunt Cartas,” said Beller.

“Indeed. One can trace a direct line from the Cartasian principles of the Old Mathic Age to many of our practices. But much has been added, and a few things have been taken away.”

“So, I guess Scone was another Saunt who added something?”

“No, a scone is a little cake.”

Beller chuckled in the forced, awkward way that extras did when someone told a joke that was not funny.

“I’m serious,” Arsibalt said. “Sconism is named after the little tea-cakes. It is a system of thought that was discovered about halfway between the Rebirth and the Terrible Events. The high-water mark of Praxic Age civilization, if you will. A couple of hundred years earlier, the gates of the Old Maths had been flung open, the avout had gone forth and mingled with the S?culars-mostly S?culars of wealth and status. Lords and ladies. The globe, by this point, had been explored and charted. The laws of dynamics had been worked out and were just beginning to come into praxic use.”

“The Mechanic Age,” Beller tried, dredging up a word he’d been forced to memorize in some suvin a long time ago.

“Yes. Clever people could make a living, in those days, just by hanging around in salons, discussing metatheorics, writing books, tutoring the children of nobles and industrialists. It was the most harmonious relationship between, er-”

“Us and you?” Beller suggested.

“Yes, that had existed since the Golden Age of Ethras. Anyway, there was one great lady, named Baritoe, whose husband was a philandering idiot, but never mind, she took advantage of his absence to run a salon in her house. All the best metatheoricians knew to gather there at a particular time of day, when the scones were coming out of her ovens. People came and went over the years, so Lady Baritoe was the only constant. She wrote books, but, as she herself is careful to say, the ideas in them can’t be attributed to any one person. Someone dubbed it Sconic thought and the name stuck.”

“And it all got incorporated into your Discipline, what, a couple of hundred years later?”

“Yes, not in a very formal way though. More as a set of habits. Thinking-habits that many of the new avout already shared when they came in the gates.”

“Such as not believing in God?” Beller asked.

And here-though we were driving on fair, level ground-I felt as I would’ve if we’d been on a mountain track with a thousand-foot cliff to one side, which Beller could have spilled us into with a twitch of the controls. Arsibalt was relaxed, though, which I marveled at, because he could be so high-strung about matters that were so much less dangerous.

“Studying this is sort of a pie-eating contest,” Arsibalt began.

This was a Fluccish expression that Lio, Jesry, Arsibalt, and I used to mean a long thankless trudge through a pile of books. It completely wrong-footed Beller, who thought we were talking of scones, and so here Arsibalt had to spend a minute or two disentangling these two baked-goods references.

“I’ll try to sketch it out,” Arsibalt continued, once they’d gotten back on track. “Sconic thought was a third way between two unacceptable alternatives. By then it was well understood that we do all of our thinking up here in our brains.” He tapped his head. “And that the brain gets its inputs from eyes, ears, and other sense organs. The naive attitude is that your brain works directly with the real world. I look at this button on your control panel, I reach out and feel it with my hand-”

“Don’t touch that!” Beller warned.

“I see you seeing it and having thoughts about it, and I conclude that it’s really there, just as my eyes and fingers present it to me, and that when I think about it I’m thinking about the real thing.”

“That all seems pretty obvious,” Beller said.

Then there was an awkward silence, which Beller finally broke by saying-in good humor-“I guess that’s why you called it naive.”

“At the opposite extreme, there were those who argued that everything we think we know about the world outside of our skulls is an illusion.”

“Seems kind of smart-alecky more than anything else,” Beller said after considering it for a bit.

“The Sconics didn’t much care for it either. As I said, they developed a third attitude. ‘When we think about the world-or about almost anything-’ they said, ‘what we are really thinking about is a bunch of data-givens-that have reached our brains from our eyes and ears and so forth.’ To go back to my example, I am given a visual image of that button and I am given a memory of what it felt like when I touched it, but that’s all I have to work with, as far as that button is concerned-it is impossible, unthinkable, for my brain to come to grips with the actual, physical button in and of itself because my brain simply does not have access to it. All that my brain can ever work with are the look and the feel-givens piped into our nerves.”

“Well, I guess I see the point. It doesn’t have that smart-aleckiness of the other one you mentioned. But it seems like a distinction without a difference,” Beller said.

“It’s not,” Arsibalt said. “And here is where the pie-eating contest would begin, if you wanted to understand why it’s not. Because, starting from this idea, the Sconics went on to develop a whole metatheorical system. It was so influential that no one has been able to do metatheorics since then without coming to grips with it. All subsequent metatheorics is a refutation, an amendment, or an extension of Sconic thought. And one of the most important conclusions you arrive at, if you make it to the end of the pie-eating contest, is that-”

“There is no God?”

“No, something different, and harder to sum up, which is that certain topics are simply out of bounds. The existence of God is one of those.”

“What do you mean, out of bounds?”

“If you follow through the logical arguments of the Sconic system, you are led to the conclusion that our minds can’t think in a productive or useful way about God, if by God you mean the Bazian Orthodox God which is clearly not spatiotemporal-not existing in space and time, that is.”

“But God exists everywhere and in all times,” Beller said.

“But what does it really mean to say that? Your God is more than this road, and that mountain, and all the other physical objects in the universe put together, isn’t He?”

“Sure. Of course. Otherwise we’d just be nature-worshippers or something.”

“So it’s crucial to your definition of God that He is more than just a big pile of stuff.”

“Of course.”

“Well, that ‘more’ is by definition outside of space of time. And the Sconics demonstrated that we simply cannot think in a useful way about anything that, in principle, can’t be experienced through our senses. And I can already see from the look on your face that you don’t agree.”

“I don’t!” Beller affirmed.

“But that’s beside the point. The point is that, after the Sconics, the kinds of people who did theorics and metatheorics stopped talking about God and certain other topics such as free will and what existed before the universe. And that is what I mean by the Sconic Discipline. By the time of the Reconstitution it had become in-grained. It was incorporated into our Discipline without much discussion, or even conscious awareness.”

“Well, but with all the free time you’ve got-sitting there in your concents-couldn’t someone be troubled in four thousand years to be aware of it? To discuss it?”

“We have less free time than you imagine,” Arsibalt said gently, “but nevertheless, many people have devoted much thought to the matter, and founded Orders devoted to denying God, or believing in Him, and currents have surged back and forth in and among the maths. But none of it seems to have moved us away from the basic position of the Sconics.”

“Do you believe in God?” Beller asked flat-out.

I leaned forward, fascinated.

“I have been reading a lot, lately, about things that are non-spatiotemporal-yet believed to exist.” By this, I knew he meant mathematical objects in the Hylaean Theoric World.

“Doesn’t that go against the Sconic Discipline?” Beller asked.

“Yes,” Arsibalt said, “but that is perfectly all right, as long as one isn’t going about it in a naive way-as if Lady Baritoe had never written a word. A common complaint made about the Sconics is that they didn’t know much about pure theorics. Many theoricians, looking at Baritoe’s works, say ‘wait just a minute, there’s something missing here-we can relate directly to non-spatiotemporal objects when we prove theorems and so on.’ The stuff I’ve been reading lately is all about that.”

“So you can see God by doing theorics?”

“Not God,” Arsibalt said, “not a God that any ark would recognize.”

After that he managed to change the subject. He-like I-had wondered what the Powers That Be might have told Ferman and the others when they had put out the call for volunteers.

The answer seemed to be: not much. The Sæcular Power needed some sort of puzzle solved-the sort of thing that avout were good at. Some fraas and suurs would have to be moved from Point A to Point B so that they could work on this conundrum. People like Ferman Beller were naturally curious about us. They had all learned about the Reconstitution in their suvins, and they understood that we had an assigned role to play, however sporadically, in making their civilization work. They were fascinated to see the mechanism being invoked, at least once in their lives, and were proud to be a part of it even if they hadn’t a clue as to why it was being engaged.

In the hottest part of the afternoon we pulled off into the shade of a line of trees that had once served as wind-break for a farm compound, now collapsed. We hadn’t seen Crade in hours, but Cord’s fetch was right behind us. Some of us walked around and some dozed. The mountains darkened the northwestern sky, though if you didn’t know what they were you might mistake them for a storm front. On their opposite slope they caught most of the moisture blowing in from the ocean and funneled it into the river that ran through our concent. Consequently this side was arid. Only bunchgrass and low fragrant shrubs would grow here of their own accord. From age to age the Sæcular Power would irrigate it and people would live here growing grain and legumes, but we were now on the wane of such a cycle, as was obvious from the condition of the roads, the farmsteads, and what were shown on the cartabla as towns. The old irrigation ditches were fouled by whatever would grow in them, which was mostly things with thorns, spines, and detachable burrs. Lio and I went for a brisk walk along one of these, but we didn’t say much as we were keeping an eye out for snakes.

Sammann kept looking as if he had something to say. We decided on a shake-up that put me and him in Cord’s fetch, while Lio and Barb went to Ferman’s mobe. Barb wanted to stay with Jad but we all knew that Jad must be getting a little weary of his company and so we insisted. Cord was tired of driving, so Rosk took the controls.

“Ferman Beller is communicating with a Bazian installation on one of those mountains,” Sammann told me.

This was an odd phrasing, since Baz had been sacked fifty-two hundred years ago. “As in Bazian Orthodox?” I asked.

Sammann rolled his eyes. “Yes.”

“A religious institution?”

“Or something.”

“How do you know this?”

“Never mind. I just thought you might want to know that Ganelial Crade isn’t the only one with an agenda.”

I considered asking Sammann what his agenda was but decided to let it drop. He was probably wondering how a bunch of Bazian priests would treat an Ita.

My agenda was looking at the photomnenomic tablet, which I knew that everyone in this vehicle-except for Cord, who’d been driving-must have been studying. I’d only had a brief look at it before. Cord and I sat together in the back. The sun was shining in so we threw a blanket over our heads and huddled in the dark like a couple of kids playing campout.

This thing that Orolo had wanted so badly to take pictures of: would it be something that we would recognize as a ship? Until Sammann had showed me this tablet a few hours ago, all I had known was that it used bursts of plasma to change its velocity and that it could shine red lasers on things. For all I’d known, it could have been a hollowed-out asteroid. It could have been an alien life form, adapted to live in the vacuum of space, that shot bombs out of a sphincter. It could have been constructed out of things that we would not even recognize as matter; it could have been only half in this universe and half in some other. So I had made an effort to open my mind. I had been prepared to be confronted by some sort of image that I would not be able to understand at first. And it had, indeed, been a riddle. But not the kind of riddle I’d been expecting. I hadn’t had time to study it, to puzzle over it, at the time. Now I had a good long look.

The image was streaked in the direction of the ship’s motion. Fraa Orolo had probably set up the telescope to track it across the sky, but he’d had to make his best guess as to its direction and speed, and he hadn’t gotten it exactly right, hence the motion blur. I guessed that this was only the last in a series of such images that Orolo had been making during the weeks leading up to Apert, each slightly better than the last as he learned how to track the target and how to calibrate the exposure. Sammann had already applied some kind of syntactic process to the image to reduce the blur and bring out many details that would have been lost otherwise.

It was an icosahedron. Twenty faces, each of them an equilateral triangle. That much I’d seen when Sammann had first shown it to me. And therein lay the puzzle, because such a shape could be either natural or artificial. Geometers loved icosahedrons, but so did nature; viruses, spores, and pollens had all been known to take this shape. So perhaps it was a space-adapted life form, or a giant crystal that had grown in a gas cloud.

“This thing can’t be pressurized,” I pointed out.

“Because the surfaces are all flat?” Cord said-more as statement than question. She dealt with compressed gases in her work, and knew in her bones that any vessel containing pressure must be rounded: a cylinder, a sphere, or a torus.

“Keep looking,” Sammann advised us.

“The corners,” Cord said, “the-what-do-you-call-’em-”

“Vertices,” I said. Those twenty triangular facets came together at twelve vertices; each vertex joined five triangles. These seemed to bulge outward a little. At first I’d mistaken this for blur. But on a closer look I convinced myself that each vertex was a little sphere. And this drew my eye to the edges. The twelve vertices were joined by a network of thirty straight edges. And those too had a rounded, bulging look to them-

“There they are!” said Cord.

I knew exactly what she meant. “The shock absorbers,” I said. For it was obvious, now: each of the thirty edges was a long slender shock absorber, just like the ones on the suspension of Cord’s fetch, except bigger. The frame of this ship was just a network of thirty shock absorbers that came together at a dozen spherical vertices. The entire thing was one big distributed shock absorption system.

“There must be ball-and-socket joints in the corners, to make that work,” Cord said.

“Yeah-otherwise the frame couldn’t flex,” I said. “But there’s a big part of this I’m not getting.”

“What are the flats made of? The triangles?” Cord said.

“Yeah. No point making a triangle out of things that can give, unless the stuff in the middle can give too-change its shape a little, when the shocks flex.” So we spent a while puzzling over the twenty flat, triangular surfaces that accounted for the ship’s surface area. These, I thought, looked a little funny. They looked rugged. Not smooth metal, but cobbled together.

“I could almost swear it’s stucco.”

“I was going to say concrete,” Cord said.

“Think gravel,” suggested Sammann.

“Okay,” Cord said, “gravel has some give to it where concrete doesn’t. But how’s it held together?”

“There are a lot of little rocks floating around up there,” I said. “In a way, gravel’s the most plentiful solid thing you can obtain in space.”

“Yeah, but-”

“But that doesn’t answer your question,” I admitted. “Who knows? Maybe they have woven some kind of mesh to hold them in place.”

“Erosion control,” Cord said, nodding.

“What?”

“You see it on the banks of rivers, where they’re trying to stop erosion. They’ll throw a bunch of rocks into a cube of wire mesh, then stack the cubes and wire ’em together.”

“It’s a good analogy,” I said. “You need erosion control in space too.”

“How do you figure?”

“Micrometeoroids and cosmic rays are always coming in from all directions. If you can surround your ship with a shell of cheap material-aka, gravel-you’ve cut down quite a bit on the problem.”

“Hey, wait a sec,” she said, “this one looks different.” She was pointing to one face that had a circle inscribed in it. We hadn’t noticed it at first, because it was around to one side, foreshortened, harder to make out. The circle was clearly made of different stuff: I had the feeling it was hard, smooth, and stiff.

“Not only that,” I pointed out, “but-”

She’d caught it too: “No shocks around this one.” The three edges outlining this face were sharp and simple.

“I’ve got it!” I said. “That one is the pusher plate.”

“The what?”

I explained about the atomic bombs and the pusher plate. She accepted this much more readily than any of us had. The ship that Lio had shown us in the book had been a stack: pusher plate, shocks, crew quarters. This one was an envelope: the outer shell was one large distributed shock absorber, as well as a shield. And, I was beginning to realize, a shroud. A veil to hide whatever was suspended in the middle.

Once we’d identified the pusher plate-the stern of the ship-our eyes were naturally drawn to the face on the opposite, or forward end: its prow. This was hidden from view. But one of the adjoining shock absorbers was visible. And something was written on it. Printed there neatly was a line of glyphs that had to be an inscription in some language. Some of the glyphs, like circles and simple combinations of strokes, could easily be mistaken for characters in our Bazian alphabet. But others belonged to no alphabet that I had ever seen.

And yet they were so close to our letters that this alphabet seemed almost like a sib of ours. Some of them were Bazian letters turned upside-down or reflected in a mirror.

I flung the blanket off.

“Hey!” Cord complained, and closed her eyes.

Fraa Jad turned around and looked me in the face. He seemed ever so slightly amused.

“These people”-I did not call them aliens-“are related to us.”

“We have started referring to them as the Cousins,” announced Fraa Criscan, the Hundreder sitting next to Fraa Jad.

“What could possibly explain that!?” I demanded-as if they could possibly know such a thing.

“These others have been speculating about it,” Fraa Jad said. “Wasting their time-as it is just a hypothesis.”

“How big is this thing-has anyone tried to estimate its dimensions?” I asked.

“I know that from the settings of the telescope and the tablet,” Sammann said “It is about three miles in diameter.”

“Let me spare you having to work it out in your head,” said Fraa Criscan, watching my face, mildly amused. “If you want to generate pseudogravity by spinning part of the ship-”

“Like those old doughnut-shaped space stations in spec-fic speelies?” I asked.

Criscan looked blank. “I’ve never seen a speely, but yes, I think we are talking about the same thing.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. If you are playing that game, and you want to generate the same level of gravity we have here on Arbre-and if there is such a thing hidden inside of this icosahedron-”

“Which is kind of what I was imagining,” I allowed.

“Say it’s two miles across. The radius is one mile. It would have to spin about once every eighty seconds to provide Arbre gravity.”

“Seems reasonable. Doable,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Cord asked.

“Could you live on a merry-go-round that spun once every minute and a half?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Are you talking about where the Cousins came from?” shouted Rosk over his shoulder. He couldn’t understand Orth but he could pick out some words and he could read our tones of voice.

“We’re debating whether it is productive to have any such discussion at all,” I said, but that was a little too complicated, shouted from the back of the fetch over road noise.

“In books and speelies, sometimes you see a fictional universe where an ancient race seeded a bunch of different star systems with colonies that lost touch with each other afterwards,” Rosk volunteered.

The other avout in the vehicle looked as if they were biting their tongues.

“The problem is, Rosk, we have a fossil record-”

“That goes back billions of years, yeah, that is a problem with that idea,” Rosk admitted. From which I guessed that others had already torn this idea limb from limb before his eyes, but that Rosk liked it too much to let go of it-he’d never been taught Diax’s Rake.

Cord had put the blanket back over her head but she said, “Another idea that we were talking about earlier was, you know, the whole concept of parallel universes. Then Fraa Jad pointed out that this ship is quite clearly in this universe.”

“What a killjoy,” I remarked-in Fluccish, obviously.

“Yeah,” she said. “It is a real drag hanging around with you people. So logical. Speaking of which-did you notice the geometry proof?”

“What?”

“They couldn’t stop talking about it, earlier.”

I ducked back under the blanket with her. She knew how to pan and zoom the image. She magnified one of the faces, then dragged it around until the screen was filled with something that looked like this, though a lot streakier and blurrier:

“That’s certainly a weird thing to put on your ship,” I said. I zoomed back out for a moment because I wanted to get a sense of where this diagram was located. It was centered on one of the icosahedron’s faces, adjoining, and just aft of, the one that we had identified as the bow. If the ship’s envelope was made of gravel, held in some kind of matrix, then this diagram had been built into this face as a sort of mosaic, by picking out darker pieces of gravel and setting them carefully into place. They’d put a lot of work into it.

“It’s their emblem,” I said. Only speculating. But no one spoke out against the idea. I zoomed back in and spent a while examining the network of lines. It was obviously a proof-almost certainly of the Adrakhonic Theorem. The sort of problem that fids worked all the time as an exercise. Just as if I were sitting in a chalk hall, trying to get the answer quicker than Jesry, I began to break it down into triangles and to look for right angles and other features that I could use to anchor a proof. Any fid from the Halls of Orithena probably would have gotten it by now, but my plane geometry was a little rusty-

Wait a minute! some part of my mind was saying.

I poked my head out from under the blanket, careful this time not to blind Cord.

“This is just plain creepy,” I said.

“That’s the same word Lio used!” Rosk shouted back.

“Why do you guys all think it’s creepy?” Cord wanted to know.

“Please supply a definition of the oft-used Fluccish word creepy,” said Fraa Jad.

I tried to explain it to the Thousander, but primitive emotional states were not what Orth was good at.

“An intuition of the numenous,” Fraa Jad hazarded, “combined with a sense of dread.”

“Dread is a strong word, but you are close.”

Now I had to answer Cord’s question. I made a few false starts. Then I saw Sammann watching me and I got an idea. “Sammann here is an expert on information. Communication, to him, means transmitting a series of characters.”

“Like the letters on this shock absorber?” Cord asked.

“Exactly,” I said, “but since the Cousins use different letters, and have a different language, a message from them would look to us like something written in a secret code. We’d have to decipher it and translate it into our language. Instead of which the Cousins have decided here to-to-”

“To bypass language,” Sammann said, impatient with my floundering.

“Exactly! And instead they have gone directly to this picture.”

“You think they put it there for us to see?” Cord asked.

“Why else would you go to the trouble to put something on the outside of your ship? They wanted to mark themselves with something they knew we’d understand. And that is what’s creepy-the fact that they just knew in advance that we’d understand this.”

“I don’t understand it,” Cord protested.

“Yet. But you know what it is. And we could get you to understand it a lot faster than we could decipher an alien language. It looks to me as though Fraa Jad has already worked it out.” My eye had fallen on a leaf in his lap that bore a copy of the diagram, with some marks and notations that he had added as he had worked through the logic of the proof.

Logic. Proof. The Cousins had these-had them in common with us.

With us who lived in concents, that is.

Avout with nukes!

Roaming from star system to star system in a bomb-powered concent, making contact with their planet-bound brethren-

“Snap out of it, Raz!” I said to myself.

“Yes,” said Fraa Jad, who’d been watching my face, “please do.”

“They came,” I said, “the Cousins did, and the Sæcular Power picked them up on radar. Tracked them. Worried about them. Took pictures of them. Saw that.” I pointed to the proof on Fraa Jad’s lap. “Recognized it as an avout thing. Got worried. Figured out that the ship had been detected-somehow-by at least one fraa: Orolo.”

“I told him about it,” Sammann said.

“What?”

Sammann looked uncomfortable. But I had gotten it all so badly wrong that he couldn’t contain himself-he had to straighten me out. “A communication reached us from the Sæcular Power,” he said.

“Us meaning the Ita?”

“A third-order reticule.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. We were told to go in secret-bypassing the hierarchs-to the concent’s foremost cosmographer, and tell him of this thing.”

“And then what?”

“There were no further instructions,” Sammann said.

“So you chose Orolo.”

Sammann shrugged. “I went to his vineyard one night while he was alone, cursing at his grapes, and told him this-told him I had stumbled across it while reviewing logs of routine mail-protocol traffic.”

I didn’t understand a word of his Ita gibberish but I got the gist of it. “So, part of your orders from the Sæcular Power were to make it seem that this was just you, acting on your own-”

“So that they could later deny that they had anything to do with it,” Sammann said, “when it came time to crack down.”

“I doubt that they were so premeditated,” Fraa Jad put in, using a mild tone of voice, as Sammann and I had become heated-conspiratorial. “Let us get out the Rake,” Jad went on. “The Sæcular Power had radar, but not pictures. To get pictures they needed telescopes and people who knew how to use them. They did not want to involve the hierarchs. So they devised the strategy that Sammann has just explained to us. It was only a means of getting some pictures of the thing as quickly and quietly as possible. But when they did get the pictures, they saw this.” He rested the palm of his hand on the proof in his lap.

“And then they realized that they’d made a big mistake,” I said, in a much calmer tone than before. “They had divulged the existence and nature of the Cousins to the last people in the world they’d want to know about them.”

“Hence the closure of the starhenge and what happened to Orolo,” Sammann said, “and hence me in this fetch, as I have no idea what they’ll want to do to me.”

I’d assumed until now that Sammann had obtained permission to go on this journey. This was my first hint that it was more complicated than that. I found it strange to hear an Ita voicing fear of getting in trouble, since usually it was we who worried about their sneaky tricks-such as the one that had ensnared Orolo. But then my point of view snapped around and I saw it his way. Precisely because people believed the things they did about the Ita, no one was likely to believe Sammann’s story or stand up for him if all of these doings broke out into the open.

“So you made this copy of the tablet and kept it so that you would have-”

“Something,” he said, “that I could leverage.”

“And you showed yourself in Clesthyra’s Eye. Announcing, in a deniable way, that you knew something-that you had information.”

“Advertising,” Sammann said, and the shape of his face changed, whiskers shifting on whiskers-his way of hinting at a smile.

“Well, it worked,” I said, “and here you are, on the road to nowhere, being driven around by a bunch of Deolaters.”

Cord got fed up with hearing Orth and moved up to the front of the fetch to sit with Rosk. I felt sorry-but some things were nearly impossible to talk about in Fluccish.

I was dying to ask Fraa Jad about the nuclear waste, but was reluctant to broach this topic with Sammann listening. So I drew my own copy of the proof on the Cousins’ ship and began working it. Before long I got bogged down. Cord and Rosk started playing some music on the fetch’s sound system, softly at first, more loudly when no one objected. This had to be the first time Fraa Jad had ever heard popular music. I cringed so hard I thought I’d get internal injuries. But the Thousander accepted it as calmly as he had the Dynaglide lubri-strip. I gave up trying to work the proof, and just looked out the window and listened to the music. In spite of all of my prejudices against extramuros culture, I kept being surprised by moments of beauty in these songs. Most of them were forgettable but one in ten sheltered some turn or inflection that proved that the person who had made it had achieved some kind of upsight-had, for a moment, got it. I wondered if this was a representative sampling, or if Cord was just unusually good at finding songs with beauty in them and loading only those onto her jeejah.

The music, the heat of the afternoon, the jouncing of the fetch, my lack of sleep, and shock at leaving the concent-with all of these affecting me at once, it was no wonder I couldn’t work a proof. But as the day grew old and the sun came in more and more horizontally, as the dying towns and ruined irrigation systems came less and less frequently and the landscape was purified into high desert, spattered with stony ruins, I started thinking that something else was working on me.

I was used to Orolo being dead. Not literally dead and buried, of course, but dead to me. That was what Anathem did: killed an avout without damaging the body. Now, with only a few hours to get used to the idea, I was about to see Orolo again. At any moment, for all I knew, we might spy him hiking up one of these lonely crags to get ready for a night’s observations. Or perhaps his emaciated corpse was waiting for us under a cairn thrown up by slines descended from those who’d eaten Saunt Bly’s liver. Either way, it was impossible for me to think of anything else when I might be confronted by such a thing at any moment.

Cord’s face was shining on me. She reached for a control and turned down the music, then repeated something. I had gone into a sort of trance, which I shattered by moving.

“Ferman’s on the jeejah,” she explained. “He wants to stop. Pee and parley.”

Both sounded good to me. We pulled off at a wide place in the road along a curving grade, a third of the way into a descent that would, over the next half-hour, take us into a flat-bottomed valley that connected to the horizon. This was no valley of the wet and verdant type, but a failure in the land where withered creeks went to die and flash floods spent their rage on a supine waste. Spires and palisades of brown basalt hurled shadows much longer than they were tall. Two solitary mountains rose up perhaps twenty or thirty miles away. We gathered around the cartabla and convinced ourselves that those were two of the three candidates we’d chosen earlier. As for the third-well, it appeared that we had just driven around it and were now scouring its lower slopes.

Ferman wanted to talk to me in my capacity as leader. I shook off the last wisps of the near-coma I had sunk into, and drew myself up straight.

“I know you guys don’t believe in God,” he began, “but considering the way you live, well, I thought you might feel more at home staying with-”

“Bazian monks?” I hazarded.

“Yes, exactly.” He was a little taken aback that I knew this. It was only a lucky guess. When Sammann had mentioned earlier that Ferman was talking to a “Bazian installation,” I had imagined a cathedral or at any rate something opulent. But that was before I’d seen the landscape.

“A monastery,” I said, “is on one of those mountains?”

“The closer of the two. You can see it about halfway up, on the northern flank.”

With some hints from Ferman I was able to see a break in the mountain’s slope, a sort of natural terrace sheltered under a crescent of dark green: trees, I assumed.

“I’ve been there for retreats,” Ferman remarked. “Used to send my kids there every summer.”

The concept of a retreat didn’t make sense to me until I realized that it was how I lived my entire life.

Ferman misinterpreted my silence. He turned to face me and held up his hands, palms out. “Now, if you’re not comfortable, let me tell you we have enough water and food and bedrolls and so on that we can camp anywhere we like. But I was thinking-”

“It’s reasonable,” I said, “if they’ll accept women.”

“The monks have their own cloister, separate from the camp. But girls stay at the camp all the time-they have women on the staff.”

It had been a long day. The sun was going down. I was tired. I shrugged. “If nothing else,” I said, “it might make for a good story or two, for us to tell when we get to Saunt Tredegarh.”

Lio and Arsibalt had been hovering. They pounced on me as soon as Ferman Beller started to walk away. They both had the somewhat tense and frayed look of people who’d just spent several hours cooped up with Barb. “Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt began, “let’s be realistic. Look at this landscape! There’s no way anyone could live here on his own. How would one obtain food, water, medical care?”

“Trees are growing on one place on that mountain,” I said. “That probably means that there is fresh water. People like Ferman send their kids here for summer camp-how bad can it be?”

“It’s an oasis!” Lio said, having fun whipping out this exotic word.

“Yeah. And if the nearer butte has an oasis large enough for a monastery and a summer camp, why couldn’t the farther one have a place where Ferals like Bly, Estemard, and Orolo could live in the shade and drink spring water?”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of getting food,” Arsibalt pointed out.

“Well, it’s an improvement on the picture that I’ve been carrying around in my head,” I said. I didn’t have to explain this to the others because they’d had it in their heads too: desperate men living on the top of a mountain, eating lichens.

“There must be a way,” I continued, “the Bazian monks do it.”

“They are a larger community, and they are supported by alms,” Arsibalt said.

“Orolo told me that Estemard had been sending him letters from Bly’s Butte for years. And Saunt Bly managed to live there for a while-”

“Only because slines worshipped him.” Lio pointed out.

“Well, maybe we’ll find a bunch of slines bowing down to Orolo then. I don’t know how it works. Maybe there’s a tourist industry.”

“Are you joking?” Arsibalt asked.

“Look at this wide spot in the road where we are stopped,” I said.

“What of it?”

“Why do you suppose it’s here?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m not a praxic,” Arsibalt said.

“So that vehicles can pass each other more easily?” Lio guessed.

I held out my arm, drawing their attention to the view. “It’s here because of that.”

“What? Because it’s beautiful?”

“Yeah.” And then I turned away from Arsibalt and looked at Lio, who started to walk away. I fell in alongside him. Arsibalt stayed behind to examine the view, as if he could discover some flaw in my logic by staring at it long enough.

“Did you get a chance to look at the icosahedron?” Lio asked me. “Yeah. And I saw the proof-the geometry.”

“You think these people are like us. That they will be sympathetic to our point of view as followers of Our Mother Hylaea,” he said, trying these phrases on me for size.

I was already defensive-sensing a flank maneuver. “Well, I think that they are clearly trying to get at something by making the Adrakhonic Theorem into their emblem…”

“The ship is heavily armed,” he said.

“Obviously!”

He was already shaking his head. “I’m not talking about the propulsion charges. They’d be almost useless as weapons. I’m talking about other things on that ship-things that become obvious when you look for them.”

“I didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a weapon.”

“You can hide a lot of equipment on a mile-long shock absorber,” he pointed out, “and who knows what’s concealed under all that gravel.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“The faces have regularly spaced features on them. I think that they are antennas.”

“So? Obviously they’re going to have antennas.”

“They are phased arrays,” he said. “Military stuff. Just what you’d want to aim an X-ray laser, or a high-velocity impactor. I’ll need to consult books to know more. Also, I don’t like the planets lined up on the nose.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a row of four disks painted on a forward shock. I think that they are depictions of planets. Like on a military aerocraft of the Praxic Age.”

It took me a few moments to sort out the reference. “Wait a minute, you think that they are kills?”

Lio shrugged.

“Well, now, hold on a second!” I said. “Couldn’t it be that it’s something more benign? Maybe those are the home planets of the Cousins.”

“I just think that everyone is too eager to look for happy, comforting interpretations-”

“And your role as a Warden Fendant-in-the-making is to be way more vigilant than that,” I said, “and you’re doing a great job.”

“Thanks.”

We walked along silently for a little while, strolling up and down the length of this wide place, occasionally passing others who were taking the opportunity to get a little bit of exercise. We happened upon Fraa Jad, who was walking alone. I decided that now was the moment.

“Fraa Lio,” I said, “Fraa Jad has informed me that the Millenarian math at Saunt Edhar is one of three places where the Sæcular Power put all of its nuclear waste around the time of the Reconstitution. The other two are Rambalf and Tredegarh. Both of them were illuminated last night by a laser from the Cousins’ ship.”

Lio wasn’t as surprised by this as I’d hoped. “Among Fendant types there is a suspicion that the Three Inviolates were allowed to remain unsacked for a reason. One hypothesis is that they are dumps for Everything Killers and other dangerous leftovers of the Praxic Age.”

“Please. You speak of my home. Don’t call it a dump,” Fraa Jad said. But he was amused-not offended. He was being-if I could say this of a Thousander-playful.

“Have you seen the stuff?” Lio asked.

“Oh yes. It is in cylinders, in a cavern in the rock. We see it every day.”

“Why?”

“Various reasons. For example, my avocation is thatcher.”

“I don’t recognize the word,” I said.

“It is an ancient profession: one who makes roofs out of grass.”

“What possible application could that have in a nuclear waste d-repository?”

“Condensation forms on the ceiling of the cavern and drips onto the tops of the cylinders. Over thousands of years it could corrode them-or, just as bad, form stalagmites whose weight would crush and rupture the containers. We have always maintained thatched roofs atop the cylinders to prevent this from happening.”

This was all so weird that I couldn’t think of anything to do other than to continue making polite chatter. “Oh, I see. Where do you get the grass? You don’t have much room to grow grass up there, do you?”

“We don’t need much. A properly made thatching lasts for a long time. I have yet to replace all of those that were put in place by my fid, Suur Avradale, a century ago.”

Lio and I both walked on for a few paces before this hit us; then we exchanged a look, and wordlessly agreed not to say anything.

“He was just having us on,” I said, the next time Lio and I could speak privately, which was at the retreat center, as we were dropping our bags in the cell we were to share. “He was getting back at us for calling his math a dump.”

Lio said nothing.

“Lio! He’s not that old!”

Lio put his bag down, stood up straighter than I could, and rotated his shoulders down and back, which was a way of recovering his equilibrium. As if he could defeat opponents just through superior posture. “Let’s not worry about how old he is.”

“You think he is that old.”

“I said, let’s not worry about it.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about it. But it would be interesting to know.”

“Interesting?” Lio did the shoulder thing again. “Look. We’re both talking bulshytt, would you agree?”

“Yeah, I agree,” I said immediately.

“Enough of this. We have to talk straight-and then we have to shut up, if we don’t want to get burned at the stake.”

“Okay. You see this from a Fendant point of view. I take your point.”

“Good. So we both know what we’re really talking about now.”

“That you can’t live that long without repairing the sequences in the nuclei of your cells,” I said.

“Especially if you work around radiation.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” I pondered it for a moment, replaying the earlier conversation with Jad. “How could he have possibly made such a slip? He must know how dangerous it is even to hint that he is-er-the sort of person who can do things like repairing his own cells.”

“Are you kidding? It wasn’t a slip. It was deliberate, Raz.”

“He was letting us know-”

“He was entrusting us with his life,” Lio said. “Haven’t you noticed how he was sizing everyone up today? He chose us, my fraa.”

“Wow! If that’s really true, I’m honored.”

“Well, enjoy being honored while you can,” Lio said, “because that kind of honor doesn’t come without obligations.”

“What kind of obligations are you thinking of?”

“How should I know? I’m just saying that he was Evoked for a reason. He’s expected to do something. He’s starting to develop a strategy. And we’re part of that strategy now. Soldiers. Pawns.”

This shut me up for a little while; I could hardly think straight.

Then I remembered something that somehow made it easier.

“We were already pawns anyway,” I said.

“Yeah. And given the choice, I’d rather be a pawn of someone I can see,” Lio said. And then he smiled the old Lio smile for the first time since last night. He had been more serious than I’d ever seen him. But the sight of those kills-if that was what they were-lined up on that ship had given him a lot to be serious about.

We avout liked to tell ourselves that we lived in a humble and austere manner, by contrast with Bazian prelates who strutted around in silk robes, enveloped in clouds of incense. But at least our buildings were made out of stone and didn’t need a lot of upkeep. This place was all wooden: higher up the slope, a little ark and a ring of barracks that formed a sort of cloister, centered on a spring. Down closer to the road, two rows of cells with bunk beds and a large building with a dining hall and a few meeting rooms. The buildings were well taken care of, but it was obvious that they were in continual decay and that, if the people were to leave, the place would be a pile of kindling in a few decades.

We did not get to see how the monks lived. The cells where we stayed were clean but covered with graffiti scratched into the walls and bunks by the kids who came here by the coach-load during the summer. It was just dumb luck that no kids were there when we arrived; one group had departed a couple of days earlier, and another was expected soon. Of the half-dozen young adults who staffed the place, four had gone back to town during the break. The remaining two, and the Bazian priest who was in charge of the retreat center, had prepared a simple meal for us. After we’d deposited our bags in our cells and spent a few minutes cleaning up in the communal bathrooms, we convened in the dining hall and sat down at rows of folding tables much like the ones we used at Apert. The place smelled of art supplies.

The monks, we were told, numbered forty-three, which seemed like a small figure to us avout for whom a chapter was a hundred strong. Four of them came down to dine with us. It wasn’t clear whether they had special status, like hierarchs, or were simply the only ones of the forty-three who had any curiosity about us. All of them were greybeards, and all wanted to meet Fraa Jad. Bazian Orthodox clerical Orth was about seventy percent the same as what we spoke.

After the exchange that Lio and I just had, you might think we’d have wanted to sit next to Fraa Jad, but in fact we had the opposite reaction and ended up sitting as far away from him as we could-as if we were secret agents in a speely, making a big point of preserving our cover, playing it cool. At the last minute, Arsibalt hustled in with several of the Hundreders; they’d been running a calca in one of the cabins. He had a wild look about him, desperate to talk. He had not been able to examine the photomnenomic tablet until late in the day. Now he’d seen the geometry proof blazoned on the Cousins’ ship, and he was about to explode. I felt sorry for him when he came into the dining hall and found himself forced to choose between sitting with me and Lio, or with Fraa Jad and the Bazian monks. Ferman Beller, noting his indecision, stood up and beckoned him over. Arsibalt couldn’t decline the invitation without giving offense, so he went and sat with Ferman.

We always opened our meals by invoking the memory of Saunt Cartas. The gist of it was that our minds might be nourished by all manner of ideas originating from thinkers dating all the way back to Cnous, but for the physical nourishment of our bodies we relied upon one another, joined in the Discipline that we owed to Cartas. Deolaters, on the other hand, all had different pre-meal rituals. Bazian Orthodoxy was a post-agrarian religion in which literal sacrifice had been replaced by symbolic; they opened their meals with a re-enactment in effigy of that, then praised their God for a while, then asked Him for goods and services. The priest who ran the retreat center launched into it out of habit, but got unnerved in the middle when he noticed that none of the avout were bowing their heads, just gazing at him curiously. I didn’t think he was all that troubled by our not believing what he believed-he must have been used to that. He was more embarrassed that he’d committed a faux pas. So, when he was finished, he implored us to say whatever sort of blessing or invocation might be traditional in the math. As mentioned we were strangely lacking in sopranos and altos, but we were able to put together enough tenors, baritones, and basses to sing a very ancient and simple Invocation of Cartas. Fraa Jad handled the drone, and I could swear he made the silverware buzz on the tables.

The four monks seemed to enjoy this very much, and when we’d finished they stood up and did an equally ancient-sounding prayer. It must have dated back to the early centuries of their monastic age, just after the Fall of Baz, because their Old Orth was indistinguishable from ours, and it had obviously been composed in a time before the music of the maths and of the monasteries had diverged. If you didn’t listen too carefully to the words, you could easily mistake this piece for one of ours.

The conversation during the meal had to be superficial compared to the events of the last twenty-four hours, given that we had to talk in Fluccish and couldn’t mention the ship in earshot of our hosts. I became frustrated, then bored, then drowsy, and ate mostly in silence. Cord and Rosk talked to each other. They weren’t religious, and I could tell they felt awkward here. One of the young women on the staff made lavish efforts to make them feel welcome, which mostly backfired. Sammann was absorbed in his jeejah, which he had somehow patched into the retreat center’s communications system. Barb had found a list of the camp rules and was memorizing it. Our three Hundreders sat in a cluster and talked amongst themselves; they could not speak Fluccish and didn’t have the Thousander glamor that had made Fraa Jad the center of attention with the Bazian monks. I noticed that Arsibalt was deep in conversation with Ferman, and that Cord and Rosk had shifted closer to them, so I wandered over to see what they were talking about. It seemed that Ferman had been thinking about the Sconics, and wanted to know more. Arsibalt, for lack of any other way to pass the time, had launched into a calca called “The Fly, the Bat, and the Worm,” which was a traditional way of explaining the Sconic theory of time and space to fids. “Look at that fly crawling around on the table,” Arsibalt said. “No, don’t shoo it away. Just look at it. The size of its eyes.”

Ferman Beller gave it a quick glance and then returned his eyes to his dinner. “Yeah, half of its body seems to be eyes.”

“Thousands of separate eyes, actually. It doesn’t seem as though it could possibly work.” Arsibalt reached back behind himself and waved his hand around, nearly hitting me in the face. “Yet if I wave my hand back here, far away, it doesn’t care-knows there is no threat. But if I bring my hand closer…”

Arsibalt brought his hand forward. The fly took off.

“…somehow its microscopic brain takes signals from thousands of separate, primitive eyes and integrates them into a correct picture, not merely of space, but of spacetime. It knows where my hand is. Knows that if my hand keeps moving thus, it’ll soon squash it-so it had better change its position.”

“You think the Cousins have eyes like that?” Beller asked.

Arsibalt dodged sideways: “Maybe they’re like bats instead. A bat would have detected my hand by listening for echoes.”

Beller shrugged. “All right. Maybe the Cousins squeak like bats.”

“On the other hand, when I shift my body to swat the fly, it creates a pattern of vibrations in the table that a creature-even a deaf and blind one, such as a worm-might feel…”

“Where is this going?” Beller asked.

“Let’s do a thought experiment,” Arsibalt said. “Consider a Protan fly. By that, I mean the pure, ideal form of a fly.”

“Meaning what?”

“All eyes. No other sense organs.”

“All right, I’m considering it,” Beller said, trying to be good-humored.

“Now, a Protan bat.”

“All ears?”

“Yes. Now a Protan worm.”

“Meaning all touch?”

“Yes. No eyes, ears, or nose-just skin.”

“Are we going to do all five senses?”

“It would start to become boring, so let’s stop with three,” Arsibalt said. “We place the fly, the bat, and the worm in a room with some object-let’s say a candle. The fly sees its light. The bat squeals at it, and hears its echoes. The worm feels its warmth, and can crawl over it to feel its shape.”

“It sounds like the old parable of the six blind men and the-”

“No!” said Arsibalt. “This is completely different. Almost the opposite. The six blind men all have the same sensory equipment-”

Beller nodded, seeing his mistake. “Yeah, but the fly, the bat, and the worm have different ones.”

“And the six blind men disagree about what it is they are groping-”

“But the fly, the bat, and the worm agree?” Beller asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You sound skeptical. Rightly so. But they are all sensing the same object, are they not?”

“Sure,” Beller said, “but when you say that they agree with each other, I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s a fascinating question, so let’s explore it. Let’s change the rules a little,” said Arsibalt, “just to set the stakes a little higher, and make it so that they have to agree. The thing in the middle of the room isn’t a candle. Now, it’s a trap.”

“A trap!?” Beller laughed.

Arsibalt got a proud look.

“What’s the point of that?” Beller asked.

“Now there’s a threat, you see. They have to figure out what it is or they’ll be caught.”

“Why not a hand coming down to swat them?”

“I thought of that,” Arsibalt admitted, “but we have to make allowances for the poor worm, who senses things very slowly compared to the other two.”

“Well,” Beller said, “I expect they’re all going to be caught in the trap sooner or later.”

“They are very intelligent,” Arsibalt put in.

“Still-”

“All right then, it is a huge cavern swarming with millions of flies, bats, and worms. Thousands of traps are scattered about the place. When a trap catches or kills a victim, the tragedy is witnessed by many others, who learn from it.”

Beller considered it for a while as he served himself some more vegetables. After a while, he said, “Well, I expect that where you’re going with it is that once enough time has gone by, and enough of these critters have been caught, the flies will learn what a trap looks like, the bats what it sounds like, the worms what it feels like.”

“The traps are being planted by exterminators who are intent on killing everything. They keep disguising them, and coming up with new designs.”

“All right,” Beller said, “then the flies, bats, and worms have to get clever enough to detect traps that are disguised.”

“A trap could look like anything,” Arsibalt said, “so they must learn to look at any object in their environment and to puzzle out whether or not it could possibly function as a trap.”

“Okay.”

“Now, some of the traps are suspended from strings. The worms can’t reach them or feel their vibrations.”

“Too bad for the worms!” Beller said.

“The flies can’t see anything at night.”

“Poor flies.”

“Some parts of the cavern are so noisy that the bats can’t hear a thing.”

“Well, it sounds as though the flies, the bats, and the worms had better learn to cooperate with one another,” Beller said.

“How?” This was the sound of Arsibalt’s trap closing on his leg.

“Uh, by communicating, I guess.”

“Oh. And what exactly does the worm say to the bat?”

“What does all of this have to do with the Cousins?” Beller asked.

“It has everything to do with them!”

“You think that the Cousins are hybrid fly-bat-worm creatures?”

“No,” Arsibalt said, “I think that we are.”

“AAARGH!” Beller cried, to laughter from everyone.

Arsibalt threw up his hands as if to say how could I make this any clearer?

“Please explain!” Beller said. “I’m not used to this, my brain’s getting tired.”

“No, you explain. What does the worm say to the bat?”

“The worm can’t even talk!”

“This is a side issue. The worms learn over time that they can squirm around into different shapes that the bats and flies can recognize.”

“Fine. And-let me see-the flies could fly down and crawl around on the worms’ backs and give them signals that way. Et cetera. So, I guess that each type of critter could invent signals that the other two could detect: worm-bat, bat-fly, and so on.”

“Agreed. Now. What do they say to each other?”

“Well, hold on now, Arsibalt. You’re skipping over a bunch of stuff! It’s one thing to say a worm can squirm into a shape like C or S that could be recognized by a fly looking down. But that’s an alphabet. Not a language.”

Arsibalt shrugged. “But languages develop over time. Monkeys hooting at each other developed into some primitive speech: ‘there’s a snake under that rock’ and so forth.”

“Well, that’s fine, if snakes and rocks is all you have to talk about.”

“The world in this thought experiment,” Arsibalt said, “is a vast, irregular cavern sprinkled with traps: some freshly laid and still dangerous, others that have already been sprung and may safely be ignored.”

“You went out of your way to say that they were mechanical contraptions. Are you saying they’re predictable?”

“You or I could inspect one and figure out how it worked.”

“Well, in that case it comes down to saying ‘this gear here engages with that gear, which rotates yonder shaft, which is connected to a spring,’ and so on.”

Arsibalt nodded. “Yes. That’s the sort of thing the flies, bats, and worms would have to communicate to one another, in order to figure out what was a trap and what wasn’t.”

“All right. So, same way that monkeys in trees settled on words for ‘rock’ and ‘snake,’ they’d develop symbols-words-meaning ‘shaft,’ ‘gear,’ and so on.”

“Would that be enough?” Arsibalt asked.

“Not for a complicated piece of clockwork. Let’s see, you could have two gears that were close to each other, but they couldn’t engage each other unless they were close enough for their teeth to mesh.”

“Proximity. Distance. Measurement. How would the worm measure the distance between two shafts?”

“By stretching from one to the other.”

“What if they were too far apart?”

“By crawling from one to the other, and keeping track of the distance it moved.”

“The bat?”

“Timing the difference in echoes between the two shafts.”

“The fly?”

“For the fly it’s easy: compare the images coming into its eyes.”

“Very well, let’s say that the worm, the bat, and the fly have each observed the distance between the two shafts, just as you said. How do they compare notes?”

“The worm for example would tell what it knew by translating it into the squirming-alphabet you mentioned.”

“And what does a fly say to another fly upon seeing all of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“It says ‘the worm seems to be relating some kind of account of its wormy doings, but since I don’t squirm on the ground and can’t imagine what it would be like to be blind, I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s trying to tell me!’”

“Well, this is just what I was saying earlier,” Beller complained, “they have to have a language-not just an alphabet.”

Arsibalt asked, “What is the only sort of language that could possibly serve?”

Beller thought for a minute.

“What are they trying to convey to each other?” Arsibalt prompted him.

“Three-dimensional geometry,” Beller said. “And, since parts of the clock are moving, you’d also need time.”

“Everything that a worm could possibly say to a fly, or a fly to a bat, or a bat to a worm, would be gibberish,” Arsibalt said, leading Beller forward.

“Kind of like saying ‘blue’ to a blind man.”

“‘Blue’ to a blind man, except for descriptions of geometry and of time. That is the only language that these creatures could ever possibly share.”

“This makes me think of that geometry proof on the Cousins’ ship,” Beller said. “Are you saying that we are like the worms, and the Cousins are like the bats? That geometry is the only way we can speak to each other?”

“Oh no,” Arsibalt said. “That’s not where I was going at all.”

“Where are you going then?” Beller asked.

“You know how multicellular life evolved?”

“Er, single-celled organisms clumping together for mutual advantage?”

“Yes. And, in some cases, encapsulating one another.”

“I’ve heard of the concept.”

“That is what our brains are.”

“What!?”

“Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That’s what a brain is. That’s what it is to be conscious.”

Beller spent a few seconds mastering the urge to run away screaming, then a few minutes pondering this. Arsibalt watched him closely the whole time.

“You don’t mean literally that our brains evolved that way!” Beller protested

“Of course not.”

“Oh. That’s a relief.”

“But I put it to you, Ferman, that our brains are functionally indistinguishable from ones that evolved thus.”

“Because our brains have to be doing that kind of processing all the time, just-”

“Just in order for us to be conscious. To integrate our sensory perceptions into a coherent model of ourselves and our surroundings.”

“Is this that Sconic stuff you were talking about earlier?”

Arsibalt nodded. “To a first approximation, yes. It is post-Sconic. Certain metatheoricians who had been strongly influenced by the Sconics came up with arguments like this one later, around the time of the First Harbinger.” Which was a bit more detail than Ferman Beller really wanted to hear. But Arsibalt’s eyes flicked in my direction, as if to confirm what I’d been suspecting: he had been reading up on this kind of thing as part of his research into the work that Evenedric had pursued later in his life. I lingered on the edge of that dialog until it started to wind down. Then I got up and headed straight for my bunk, planning to sleep good and hard. But Arsibalt, moving uncharacteristically fast, chased me out of the dining hall and ran me down.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked him.

“Some of the Hundreders held a little calca just before dinner.”

“I noticed.”

“They couldn’t get the numbers to add up.”

“Which numbers?”

“That ship simply isn’t big enough to travel between star systems in a reasonable amount of time. It can’t possibly hold a sufficient number of atomic bombs to accelerate its own mass to relativistic velocity.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it split off from a mother ship that we haven’t seen yet, and that is that big.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s that kind of vessel,” Arsibalt said. “It is huge, with space to support tens of thousands of people indefinitely.”

“Too big to be a shuttle-too small for interstellar cruising,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions though.”

“That is a fair criticism,” he said with a shrug. But I could tell he had some other hypothesis.

“Okay. What do you think?” I asked him.

“I think it is from another cosmos,” he said, “and that is why they Evoked Paphlagon.”

We were at the door of my cabin.

“This cosmos we’re living in has me flummoxed,” I said. “I don’t know whether I can start thinking about additional ones at this point in the day.”

“Good night then, Fraa Erasmas.”

“Good night, Fraa Arsibalt.”

I woke to the sound of bells. I couldn’t make sense of them. Then I remembered where I was and understood that they were not our bells, but those of the monks, rousing them for some punishingly early ritual.

My mind was about half sorted out. Many of the new ideas, events, people, and images that had come at me from every direction the day before had been squared away, like so many leaves rolled up and thrust into pigeonholes. Not that anything had really been settled. All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping: it’s when we work hardest.

The peals faded slowly, until I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing the bells themselves, or ringing in my ears. Enduring was a deep tone, solid, steady, but faint because distant. I knew somehow that I’d been hearing it for hours-that in those moments of semi-waking when I’d rolled over or pulled up the covers I’d marked this sound and wondered what it was before falling back to sleep. An obvious guess would be some nocturnal bird. But the tone was low, for an avian throat: like someone playing a ten-foot-long flute half-choked with rocks and water. And birds tended not to just sit in one place and make noise for half the night. Some kind of big amphibian, then, crazy for a mate, squatting on a rock by the spring and blowing wind through a quivering air-sac. But the sound was regular. Patterned. Perhaps the hum from a generator. An irrigation pump down in the valley. Trucks descending a grade using air brakes.

Curiosity and a full bladder were keeping me awake. Finally I got up, moving quietly so as not to disturb Lio, and tugged at my blanket. Out of habit, I was going to wrap it around myself. Then I hesitated, remembering that I was supposed to wear extramuros clothes. In the predawn gloom I couldn’t even see the pile of trousers and underwear and whatnot I’d left on the floor last night. So I went back to plan A, peeled the blanket off the bed, wrapped it around myself, and went out.

The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, but by the time I’d used the latrine and emerged into the cool morning air, I’d started to get an idea of where it came from: a stone retaining wall that the monks had built along a steep part of the mountain to prevent their road from crumbling into the valley. As I walked toward it my perceptions cleared suddenly and I shook my head in amazement at my own silliness in having imagined it was an amphibian or a truck. It was plainly a human voice. Singing. Or rather droning, for he had been stuck on the same note the whole time I’d been awake.

The note changed slightly. Okay, so it wasn’t a drone. It was a chant. A very, very slow one.

Not wanting to stroll right up to Fraa Jad and disturb him, I maneuvered around on the soft wet grass of the retreat center’s archery range until I was able to bring him in view at a distance of a couple of hundred feet. The retaining wall ran in straight segments joined by round, flat-topped towers about four feet in diameter. Fraa Jad had rescued his bolt from his luggage, plumped it up to winter thickness, and put it on, then climbed to the top of a pillar that had a fine view to the south across the desert. He was sitting there with his legs tucked under him and his arms outstretched. Off to the left, the sky was luminescent purplish, washed of stars. To the right, a few bright stars and a planet still shone, striving against the light of the coming day, succumbing one by one as the minutes went by.

I could have stood there watching and listening for hours. I got the idea-which might have been just my imagination-that Fraa Jad was singing a cosmographical chant: a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn. Certainly it was music of cosmographical slowness. Some of the notes went on for longer than I could hold my breath. He must have some trick of breathing and singing at the same time.

A single bell rang behind and above me at the monastery. A priest’s voice sang an invocation in Old Orth. A choir answered him. It was a call to the dawn aut, or something. I was crestfallen that their rituals were trampling on Fraa Jad’s chant. But I had to admit that if Cord had been awake to see this, she’d have been hard put to see any difference between the two. Whatever Fraa Jad was chanting was rooted, I knew, in thousands of years’ theorical research wedded to a musical tradition as old and as deep. But why put theorics into music at all? And why stay up all night sitting in a beautiful place chanting that music? There were easier ways to add two plus two.

I’d been singing bass since the eventful season, six years ago, when I’d fallen down the stairs from soprano. Where I lived, that meant lots of droning. When you spend three hours singing the same note, something happens to your brain. And that goes double when you have fallen into oscillatory lockstep with the others around you, and when you collectively have gotten your vocal chords tuned into the natural harmonics of the Mynster (to say nothing of the thousands of casks stacked against its walls). In all seriousness I believe that the physical vibration of your brain by sound waves creates changes in how the brain works. And if I were a craggy old Thousander-not a nineteen-year-old Tenner-I might just have the confidence to assert that when your brain is in that state it can think things it could never think otherwise. Which is a way of saying that I didn’t think Fraa Jad had been up all night chanting just because he was a music lover. He was doing something.

I left Fraa Jad alone and went for a stroll while the sun came up. Clatters and hisses from the dining hall told me that the retreat center staff were up making breakfast, so I went to the cell and put on my extra costume, then went there to lend a hand. In some respects I might be helpless extramuros, but I knew how to cook. Fraa Jad and the rest of our group drifted in, one by one, and tried to help until they were ejected and commanded to eat.

In addition to the four who’d dined with us the night before, three more monks joined us for breakfast, including one very old one who wanted to talk to Fraa Jad, though he was quite hard of hearing. The rest of the avout left them alone. These monks seemed to consider it a high honor to talk to a Thousander and so why should we interfere? They weren’t going to get another chance.

At the end of the meal they presented us with some books. I let Arsibalt accept them and make a nice speech. They liked what he said so much that it made me squirm a little, because it seemed he was encouraging them to see all sorts of natural connections between who we were and who they were. But no harm came of it. These people had been good to us, and they’d done it with open hearts, and no expectation of anything in return-I was pretty sure the Sæcular Power wasn’t going to reimburse them! That’s why Arsibalt’s talk made me uneasy-he seemed to hold out the possibility that they would get something in return, namely, future contact between them and us. I stepped on his toe. He seemed to take my meaning. A few minutes later, we were on our way down the mountain, the monks’ books having been added to Arsibalt’s portable library.