Anathem

Between the monastery and Bly’s Butte, a very small river trickled through a very large canyon, spanned by only one bridge that was fit for use. Until we had crossed this, and come to a fork, we didn’t need to think very hard about which direction we ought to go. The road to the left swung wide to avoid the mountain. The one to the right headed up the bank of a tributary toward a settlement marked on the cartabla as Samble. So we went that way, and, a little more than an hour after leaving the monastery, found ourselves approaching something that, from a distance, looked like a pot scourer dropped on the smooth southern flank of Bly’s Butte. It was a carpet of scrubby trees. As we got closer we saw it had been cleaved and sorted by settlers’ walls, rooves, and fences. Taller trees, obviously fawned over by generations who loved them for shade or beauty, stood in a rectangle around a plot of grass, at one end of which rose the acute wood-framed sky-altar of a counter-Bazian ark. Without any communication between the two vehicles, we found our way to that village green. When we climbed out, we heard singing from the ark. But we saw no people. The entire town-including Ganelial Crade, whose fetch was parked in a patch of dirt behind the ark-was inside that building.

This didn’t seem like a good place to look for Orolo or (assuming he was still alive) Estemard. But it did give us our first hint as to how a couple of Ferals might have been able to survive out here: by coming down into Samble to get things like food and medicine. How they might have paid for them was another question. But Fraa Carmolathu pointed out that Samble didn’t make much economic sense to begin with. There weren’t any other towns hereabouts, the land didn’t support farming, there was little in the way of industry. He developed a theory that it was every bit as much a religious community as the monastery where we’d stayed last night. And if that were the case, perhaps Estemard and Orolo didn’t have to pay for things with money, if instead they could provide useful services to the townsfolk.

“Or perhaps they are simply beggars,” suggested Fraa Jad, “like certain Orders of old.”

Most of the avout seemed more comfortable with the beggar hypothesis than with any suggestion that Estemard or Orolo might have been making himself useful to these kinds of people. It led to a lively discussion. All of our attempts to plane each other would have disturbed the service in the ark if it had been a quiet and contemplative kind of proceeding, but it was more raucous in that place than we could ever hope to be, with a lot of singing that sounded like shouting. A few of us separated ourselves from the discussion and spent a minute looking back and forth between the cartabla and the butte. Samble-which Fraa Carmolathu speculated might be an ancient weathered contraction of “Savant Bly”-stood at the beginning of a dirt road that spiraled around the butte to its top. After a few minutes we identified the place where that road began: the dirt lot behind the ark. And at the moment there was no way to drive through it and get on that road. The lot was full of parked vehicles: a few shiny mobes such as might belong to whoever passed for Burgers in Samble, but mostly dust-covered fetches with big tires. There was an open lane up the center. The head of the road, though, was squarely blocked by Ganelial Crade’s fetch.

According to the cartabla, it was only four miles to the top, and I was feeling restless, so I filled my water bottle from a pump in the middle of the green and started to walk up the road. Lio came with me. So did Fraa Criscan, who was the youngest of the Hundreders. It felt a little strange walking among the parked fetches of the faithful of Samble, but once we squeezed past Crade’s and got onto the road, it curved around the flank of the butte, and the little town disappeared from view. A minute after that, we were no longer able to hear the shouting inside the ark, just the rush of a dry crackling wind coming at us from across the desert, carrying the sharp perfume of the tough resinous plants that grew down there. We gained altitude briskly and the temperature of the air dropped even as we warmed to the task. Once we had reached a point opposite to Samble, we were able to see all the way up to the top and make out a few buildings and the crippled skeletons of old aerial towers and polyhedral domes. We guessed they were military relics, which wasn’t interesting, since, after a few thousand years of habitation, all landscapes were strewn with such things.

We spiraled up and around to a point where we could look down into Samble and wave to our friends below. The service in the ark showed no sign of winding down. We had assumed that the vehicles would catch up with us soon into our hike. In other words, we were only doing this to get some exercise-not as a way of getting to the top. But now it seemed we might get there before our vehicles did. For some reason this aroused our competitive instincts and made us hike faster. We found a shortcut that had been used by other hikers, and cut off one whole circuit of the mountain by scrambling straight up the slope for a couple of hundred feet.

“Did you know Fraa Paphlagon?” I asked Criscan when we stopped at the top of the shortcut to drink water and marvel at our progress. The view was worth a few minutes.

“I was his fid,” Criscan said. “You were Orolo’s?”

I nodded. “Are you aware that Orolo was a fid of Paphlagon before Paphlagon came to you through the labyrinth?”

Fraa Criscan said nothing. For Paphlagon to have mentioned Orolo-or anything about his former life among the Tenners-to Criscan would have been a violation of the Discipline. But it was the sort of thing that could easily leak out when talking about one’s work. I went on, “Paphlagon and another Tenner named Estemard worked together and raised Orolo. They left at the same time: Paphlagon via the labyrinth and Estemard via the Day Gate. Estemard came here.”

Criscan asked, “What was Orolo’s reputation? Before his Anathem, I mean.”

“He was our best,” I said-surprised by the question. “Why? What was Paphlagon’s reputation?”

“Similar.”

“But-?” Because I could tell that there was a “but” coming.

“His avocation was a bit strange. Instead of doing something with his hands like most people, he made a hobby of studying-”

“We know,” I said. “The polycosm. And/or the Hylaean Theoric World.”

“You looked at his writings,” Criscan said.

“Twenty-year-old writings,” I reminded him. “We have no idea what he’s been up to recently.”

Criscan said nothing for a few moments, then shrugged. “It seems highly relevant to the Convox, so I guess it’s okay for me to talk to you about it.”

“We won’t tell on you,” Lio promised him.

Criscan didn’t catch the humor. “Have you ever noticed that when people are talking about the idea of the Hylaean Theoric World, they always end up drawing the same diagram?”

“Yeah-now that you mention it,” I said.

“Two circles or boxes,” Lio said. “An arrow from one to the other.”

“One circle or box represents the Hylaean Theoric World,” I said. “The arrow starts there and points to the other one, which represents this world.”

“This cosmos,” Criscan corrected me. “Or causal domain, if you will. And the arrow represents-?”

“A flow of information,” Lio said. “Knowledge of triangles pouring into our brains.”

“Cause-and-effect relationship,” was my guess. I was recalling Orolo’s talk of Causal Domain Shear.

“Those two amount to the same thing,” Criscan reminded us. “That kind of diagram is an assertion that information about theorical forms can get to our cosmos from the HTW, and cause measurable effects here.”

“Hold on, measurable? What kind of measurable are you talking about?” Lio asked. “You can’t weigh a triangle. You can’t pound in a nail with the Adrakhonic Theorem.”

“But you can think about those things,” Criscan said, “and thinking is a physical process that goes on in your nerve tissue.”

“You can stick probes into the brain and measure it,” I said.

“That’s right,” Criscan said, “and the whole premise of Protism is that those brain probes would show different results if there weren’t this flow of information coming in from the Hylaean Theoric World.”

“I guess that’s so,” Lio admitted, “but it sounds pretty sketchy when you put it that way.”

“Never mind about that for now,” Criscan said. We were on a steep part of the road, breathing hard and sweating as the sun shone down on us, and he didn’t want to expend much energy on it. “Let’s get back to that two-box diagram. Paphlagon was part of a tradition, going back to one Suur Uthentine at Saunt Baritoe’s in the fourteenth century A.R., that asks ‘why only two?’ Supposedly it all started when Uthentine walked into a chalk hall and happened to see the conventional two-box diagram where it had been drawn up on a slate by one Fraa Erasmas.”

Lio turned and looked at me.

“Yes,” I said, “my namesake.”

Criscan went on, “Uthentine said to Erasmas, ‘I see you are teaching your fids about Directed Acyclic Graphs; when are you going to move on to ones that are a little more interesting?’ To which Erasmas said, ‘I beg your pardon, but that’s no DAG, it is something else entirely.’ This affronted Suur Uthentine, who was a theor who had devoted her whole career to the study of such things. ‘I know a DAG when I see one,’ she said. Erasmas was exasperated, but on reflection, he decided it might be worth following up on his suur’s upsight. So Uthentine and Erasmas developed Complex Protism.”

“As opposed to Simple?” I asked.

“Yes,” Criscan said, “where Simple is the two-box kind. Complex can have any number of boxes and arrows, as long as the arrows never go round in a circle.”

We had spiraled around to the shady side of the butte, and come to a stretch of road that had been covered with silt during seasonal rains-perfect for drawing diagrams. While we rested and sipped water, Criscan went on to give us a calca* about Complex Protism. The gist of it was that our cosmos, far from being the one and only causal domain reached by information from a unique and solitary Hylaean Theoric World, might be only one node in a web of cosmi through which information percolated, always moving in the same direction, as lamp oil moves through a wick. Other cosmi-perhaps not so different from ours-might reside up-Wick from ours, and feed information to us. And yet others might be down-Wick from us, and we might be supplying information to them. All of which was pretty far out-but at least it helped me understand why Paphlagon had been Evoked.

“Now I have a question for you Tenners,” Criscan said, as we set out again. “What was Estemard like?”

“He walked out before we were Collected,” I said, “so we didn’t know him.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Criscan said, “we’ll know soon enough.”

We walked on silently for a few steps before Lio-casting a wary glance to the top of the butte, not so far away now-said, “I’ve been looking into Estemard a little. Maybe I should tell you what I know before we barge into his house.”

“Good for you. What did you learn?” I asked.

“This might be one of those cases where someone walked out before he could be Thrown Back,” Lio said.

“Really!? What was he doing?”

“His avocation was tiles,” Lio said. “The really ornate tile work in the New Laundry was done by him.”

“The geometric stuff,” I said.

“Yes. But it seems he was using that as a sort of cover story to pursue an ancient geometry problem called the Teglon. It’s a tiling problem, and it dates all the way back to the Temple of Orithena.”

“Isn’t that the problem that made a bunch of people crazy?” I asked.

“Metekoranes was standing on the Decagon in front of the Temple of Orithena, contemplating the Teglon, when the ash rolled over him,” Criscan said.

I said, “It’s the problem that Rabemekes was thinking about on the beach when the Bazian soldier ran him through with a spear.”

Lio said, “Suur Charla of the Daughters of Hylaea thought she had the answer, scratched out on the dust of the road to Upper Colbon, when King Rooda’s army marched through on their way to getting massacred. She never recovered her sanity. People’s efforts to solve it have spun off entire sub-disciplines of theorics. And there are-have always been-some who paid more attention to it than was really good for them. The obsession gets passed down from one generation to the next.”

“You’re talking of the Lineage,” Criscan said.

“Yes,” Lio answered, with another nervous look up.

“Which lineage do you mean?” I asked.

“The Lineage, people call it,” Criscan said, “or sometimes the Old Lineage.”

“Well…give me some help. What concents is it based at?”

Criscan shook his head. “You’re assuming it’s like an Order. But this Lineage goes back farther than the Reconstitution-farther even than Saunt Cartas. Supposedly it was founded during the Peregrin period, by theors who had worked with Metekoranes.”

“But who unlike him didn’t end up under three hundred feet of pumice,” Lio added.

“That’s a whole different matter then,” I said. “If that’s really true, it’s not of the mathic world at all.”

“That’s the problem,” Lio said, “the Lineage was around for centuries before the whole idea of maths, fraas, and suurs. So you wouldn’t expect it to operate according to any of the rules that we normally associate with our Orders.”

“You are speaking of it in the present tense,” I pointed out.

Criscan again looked uneasy, but he said nothing. Lio glanced up again, and slowed.

“Where is this going? Why are you guys so nervous?” I asked.

“Some came to suspect that Estemard was a member,” Lio said.

“But Estemard was an Edharian,” I said.

“That’s part of the problem,” Lio said.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Criscan, “for me and you, anyway.”

“Why-because you and I are Edharians?”

“Yes,” Criscan said, with a flick of the eyes toward Lio.

“Well, Lio I trust with my life,” I told him. “So you can say anything in front of him that you might say to me as a fellow Edharian.”

“All right,” Criscan said. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve never heard about this, since you have only been in the Order of Saunt Edhar for a few months, and you’re just a-er-”

“Just a Tenner?” I said. “Go ahead, I’m not offended.” But I was, a little. Behind Criscan, Lio made a funny face that took the sting out of it.

“Otherwise you might have heard rumors about this kind of thing. Remarks.”

“To what effect?”

“First of all, that Edharians in general are a little nutty-a little mystical.”

“Of course I know some people like to say that,” I said.

“All right,” Criscan said. “Well, then you know that one of the reasons people look askance at us Edharians is that it seems as though our devotion to the Hylaean Theoric World might take precedence over our loyalty to the Discipline and the principles of the Reconstitution.”

“Okay,” I said, “I think that’s unfair but I can see how some people might harbor such notions.”

Lio added, “Or pretend to harbor them when it gave them a weapon to wave in Edharians’ faces.”

“Now,” Criscan said, “imagine that there was-or was thought to be-a Lineage of what amounted to ultra-Edharians.”

“Are you telling me that people think there’s a connection between our Order and the Lineage?”

Criscan nodded. “Some have gone so far as to lodge the accusation that the Edharians are a sham-a false front whose real purpose is to act as a host body for an infestation of Teglon-worshippers.”

Given the number of contributions Edharians had made to theorics over the millennia, I didn’t have any trouble dismissing such a ludicrous claim, but one word caught my attention. “Worshippers,” I repeated.

Criscan sighed. “The kinds of people who spread such rumors-” he began, “Are the same ones who think that our belief in the HTW is tantamount to religion,” I concluded. “And it suits their purposes to spread the idea that there is a secret cult at the heart of the Edharian order.”

Criscan nodded.

“Is there?” Lio asked.

I’d have slugged him if I could have gotten away with it. Criscan didn’t know about Lio’s sense of humor and so he took it pretty badly.

“What did Estemard actually do when he was pursuing this avocation?” I asked Lio. “Was he reading books? Trying to solve the Teglon? Lighting candles and reciting spells?”

“Mostly reading books-very old ones,” Lio said. “Very old ones that had been left behind by others who in their day had likewise been under suspicion of belonging to the Lineage.”

“Seems interesting but harmless,” I said.

“Also, people noticed that he was unduly interested in the Millenarians. During auts, he would take notes while the Thousanders sang.”

“How can anyone really follow the meaning of those chants without taking notes?”

“And he went into the upper labyrinth a lot.”

“Well,” I admitted, “that’s a bit odd…is it a part of the myth surrounding the Lineage that its members violate the Discipline-communicate across the boundaries of their maths?”

“Yes,” Criscan said. “It fits in with the whole conspiracy-theory aspect. The slur on the Edharians in general is that they consider their work to be more profound, more important than anyone else’s-that the pursuit of the truths in the Hylaean Theoric World takes precedence over the Discipline. So, if their pursuit of the truth requires that they communicate with avout in other maths-or with extras-they have no compunctions about doing so.”

This was sounding more and more ridiculous by the moment, and I was beginning to think it was one of those nutty Hundreder fads. But I said nothing, because I was thinking about Orolo talking to Sammann in the vineyard and making illicit observations.

Lio snorted. “Extras? What kind of extras would care about a mystical, six-thousand-year-old theorics problem?”

“The kind we’ve been hanging around with the last two days,” Criscan said.

We had come to a complete stop. I stepped forward up the road. “Well, if everything you’re saying is true, we’re not doing ourselves any favors by being out here.”

Criscan took my meaning right away but Lio looked puzzled. I went on, “Saunt Tredegarh is filling up with avout from all over the world. The hierarchs must be keeping track of who has arrived, from which concent. And we-a group of mostly Edharians from, of all things, the Concent of Saunt Edhar-are going to be late…”

“Because we’ve been bending the rules-wandering among the Deolaters,” Lio said, beginning to get it.

“…looking for a couple of wayward fraas who exactly fit the stereotype that Criscan’s been talking about.”

Lio and I were at the summit a few minutes later. We had left Criscan huffing and puffing in our wake. All of the weird talk had made us nervous and we had practically run the rest of the way-not out of any practical need to hurry, simply to burn off energy.

The top of Bly’s Butte looked as if it might have been a lovely place back in the days of Saunt Bly. It existed because there was a lens of hard rock that had resisted erosion and protected the softer stuff beneath it while everything for miles around had slowly washed down. There was enough room on top to construct a large house, say, the size of the one where Jesry’s family lived. A lot of different structures had been crammed onto it over the millennia. The bottom strata were masonry: stones or bricks mortared directly onto the butte’s hard summit. Later generations had poured synthetic stone directly atop those foundations to make small blockhouses, guard shacks, pillboxes, equipment enclosures, and foundations for aerials, dishes, and towers. These then had been modified: connections between them built, worn out, demolished or rusted away, replaced or buried under new work. The stone-synthetic and natural-was stained a deep ochre by the rust of all the metal structures that had been here at one time or another. For such a small area it was quite complicated-the sort of place children could have explored for hours. Lio and I were not so far out from being children that we couldn’t be tempted. But we had plenty else on our minds. So we looked for signs of habitation. The most conspicuous of these was a reflecting telescope that stood on a high plinth that had once supported an aerial tower. We went there first. The telescope looked in some ways like an art project that Cord or one of her friends might have made in a welding shop from scraps of steel. But looking into it we could see a hand-ground mirror, well over twelve inches in diameter, that looked perfect, and it was easy to figure out that it had a polar axis drive cobbled together from motors, gearboxes, and bearings scavenged from who knows where. From there it was easy to follow a trail of evidence across the platform and down an external stairway to a lower platform on the southeast exposure of the complex. This had been kitted out with a grill for cooking meat, weatherproof poly chairs and table, and a big umbrella. Children’s toys were stored with un-childlike neatness in a poly box, as if kids came up here sometimes, but not every day. A door led off this patio into a warren of small rooms-little more than equipment closets-that had been turned into a home. Whoever was living in this place, it wasn’t Orolo. Judging from phototypes on the walls, it was an older man with a somewhat younger wife and at least two generations of offspring. Ikons were almost as numerous as snapshots and so this was obviously a Deolater family. We gathered these impressions over the course of a few seconds before we realized we were trespassing on someone’s home. Then we felt stupid because this was such a typical avout mistake. We backed out so fast we almost knocked each other down.

The patio was a smooth slab of synthetic stone. Given that Estemard was such a zealous tiler, it seemed odd that he had not improved it. But now we noticed a stair that led up to a ledge where he had fashioned a kiln out of burnt bricks. Around it was strewn the detritus of many years’ work: clay, molds, pots of glaze, and thousands of tiles and tile-shards in the same repertoire of simple geometric shapes as those that decorated the New Laundry at Edhar. Estemard hadn’t got round to tiling his patio yet because he hadn’t found the perfect configuration of tiles. He hadn’t solved the Teglon.

“Clinically insane?” I asked Lio. “Or just well on his way?”

Criscan came up a different way. When he found us, he mentioned that he’d seen another, smaller habitation. We followed him as he backtracked around the southern limb of the complex.

We knew what it was instantly. All the earmarks of a pinprick math were plain to see. It was set off in a corner, reachable only by a long and somewhat challenging path, at the end of which stood a barrier-mostly symbolic, as it had been improvised recently from poly tarps and plywood-and a gate. Passing through the gate we found ourselves in a setting where we felt perfectly at home. It was another roofless slab. A broker of real estate might have called it a patio. We saw it as a miniature cloister. All vestiges of the Sæcular had been carefully scrubbed away; all that remained was the ancient, stained stone, and a few necessaries, all hand-made: a table and chair sheltered beneath a canvas stretched over a frame of timbers lashed together with many turns of string. A rusty paintbucket stood in the corner, lid held down with a stone. Lio opened it, wrinkled his nose, and announced that he had found Orolo’s chamber pot. It was empty and dry. The ashes in the bottom of his brazier were cold. His water jug was empty and a wooden locker, which had once been used to store food, had been emptied of everything but seasonings, utensils, and matches.

A beat-up wooden door led to Orolo’s cell, which for the most part was done up in similar style. The clock, however, was distinctly modern, with glowing digital readouts to a hundredth of a second. Bookshelves made of old stair treads and masonry blocks supported a few machine-printed books and hand-written leaves. One wall was covered by leaves: diagrams and notes Orolo had posted there using little dabs of tack. Another wall was covered by phototypes mostly showing various efforts that Orolo had made to capture images of the Cousins’ ship using (we assumed) the homemade telescope above. The typical image was little more than a fat white streak against a background of smaller white streaks: the tracks of stars. In one corner of this mosaic, though, Orolo had posted several unrelated phototypes that he had torn from publications or printed using a syndev. At a glance, these seemed to depict nothing more than a big hole in the ground: an open-pit mine, perhaps.

The rest of the leaves formed an overlapping mosaic, with lines drawn from one to the next, diagramming a treelike system of connections. The uppermost leaf was labeled orithena. Near its top was written the name of Adrakhones. From it, one arrow descended vertically to the name of Diax. This was a dead end. But a second arrow, angling down and off to the side, pointed to the name of Metekoranes, and from it, the tree ramified downward to include names from many places and centuries.

“Uh-oh,” Lio said.

“I hate the looks of that,” I admitted.

“It is Lineage stuff,” put in Criscan.

The door opened, and there was violence. Not prolonged-it was finished in a second-and not severe. But it was definitely violence and it wrenched our minds so far out of the track we’d been following that there was no question of getting back to it any time soon.

Simply, a man burst in through the cell’s door and Lio took him down. When it was finished, Lio was sitting on the man’s chest and examining, with utmost fascination, a projectile weapon that he had just extracted from a holster on the man’s hip. “Do you have any knives or anything like that?” Lio asked, and glanced at the door. More people were approaching. The foremost of these was Barb.

“Get off me!” the man shouted. It took a moment for it to sink in that he was speaking in Orth. “Give me that back!” We noticed that he was pretty old, although when he’d come in the door, he’d moved with the vigor of a younger man.

“Estemard carries a gun,” Barb announced. “It is a local tradition. They don’t consider it threatening.”

“Well, I’m sure Estemard won’t feel threatened by my carrying this one, then,” Lio said. He rolled backward off Estemard and came up on his feet, gun in hand, pointed at the ceiling.

“You have no business in here.” Estemard said, “And as for my gun, you’d better shoot me with it or hand it over.”

Lio didn’t even consider handing it over.

Now, through most of this I’d been so shocked, and then so confused, that I’d stood motionless. I had been afraid of doing anything for fear of doing the wrong thing. But the sight of my friends’ faces outside nudged me to act, since I didn’t wish to look tongue-tied or indecisive. “Since you have just asserted we have no business here,” I pointed out, “an assertion we disagree with, by the way, it would not be in our interests to supply you with weapons.”

By this time, other members of our Peregrin group had crowded onto the patio. Fraa Jad came in, shouldered Estemard out of his way, took in the cell at a glance, and began examining the leaves and phototypes Orolo had put on the wall. This, much more than being knocked down by Lio or planed by me, made Estemard realize he was outmatched. He got smaller somehow, and looked away. Unlike the rest of us, he’d only had a few minutes to get used to being in the presence of a Thousander.

“Lio, a lot of people carry sidearms out here.” It was Cord. “I can see why you got the wrong idea, but take my word for it, he was not going to draw down on you.” No one responded. “Come on, you bunch of sad sacks, it’s picnic time!”

“Picnic?” I said.

“After we are finished with our service,” Estemard said, “we have a cookout on the green, if the weather is good.” Cord’s intervention seemed to have cheered him up a little.

I glanced out the door and caught the eye of Arsibalt, out on the patio. He raised his eyebrows. Yes. Estemard has become a Deolater.

Back in the concent, we’d always pictured Ferals as long-haired wild men, but Estemard looked like a retired chemist out for a day hike.

Estemard held me in a careful gaze. “You must be Erasmas,” he said. This seemed to settle something for him. He breathed deeply, shaking off the last vestiges of the shock he’d gone into when Lio had helped him to the floor. “Yes. All of you are invited to the picnic, if you promise not to assault people.” Seeing the objection percolating through my brain toward my face, he smiled and added, “People who haven’t assaulted you first, that is. And I doubt they will; they’re more tolerant of avout than you are of them.”

“Where’s Orolo?”

Fraa Jad, still planted with his back to us, currently viewing the phototypes of the open-pit mine, startled us all by unlimbering his subsonic voice: “Orolo has gone north.”

Estemard was astonished; then the smile crept back onto his face as he figured out how the Thousander had figured this out. “Fraa Jad has it right.”

“We shall attend the picnic,” Fraa Jad announced, pronouncing the Fluccish word with tweezers. “Lio, Erasmas, and I shall go down last, in the vehicle of Ganelial Crade.”

This directive filtered out to the patio. People turned around and headed back toward the vehicles. Lio took the ammunition magazine out of the gun and handed them back separately to Estemard, who departed, reluctantly, with Criscan. As soon as they had passed out through the makeshift gate, Fraa Jad reached out and began plucking the leaves off the wall. Lio and I helped, and gave all that we’d harvested to Fraa Jad. He left most of the phototypes alone, but took the ones that depicted the big hole in the ground, and handed them to me.

The Thousander went out to Orolo’s cloister and stuffed all of the leaves into the brazier. Then he reached into Orolo’s food-locker and took out the matches. “I infer from the label that this is a fire-making praxis,” he said.

We showed him how to use matches. He set fire to Orolo’s leaves. We all stood around until they had turned to ash. Then Fraa Jad stirred the ashes with a stick.

“Time for picnic,” he said.

As we spiraled down the butte, jostling and rocking in the open back of Ganelial Crade’s fetch like so many bottles in a box, we were able to look down from time to time and see the picnic taking shape down on the village green of Samble. It appeared that these people took their picnics as seriously as they did their religious services.

Fraa Jad seemed to have other things on his mind, and said nothing until we were almost down to Samble. Then he pounded on the roof of the fetch’s cab and, in Orth, asked Crade if he wouldn’t mind waiting here for a few minutes. In really wild, barbarous-sounding Orth, Crade said that this would be fine.

It had never crossed my mind that someone like Crade would know our language. But it made sense. The counter-Bazians distrusted priests and other middlemen. They believed everyone should read the scriptures themselves. Almost all read translations into Fluccish. But it wasn’t so farfetched to think that an especially fervent and isolated sect, such as the people of Samble, might learn Classical Orth so that they would no longer have to entrust their immortal souls to translators.

Fraa Jad let me know I should get out. I vaulted from the back of the fetch and then helped him down, more out of respect than anything, since he didn’t seem to need much helping. We strolled about a hundred paces to a bend in the road where there was an especially nice view over the high desert to the mountains of the north, still patched with snow in places, and dappled by cloud-shadows. “We are just like Protas looking down over Ethras,” he remarked.

I smiled but didn’t laugh. The work of Protas was viewed as embarrassingly naive by many. It was rarely mentioned except to be funny or ironic. But to deprecate it so was a trend that had come and gone a hundred times, and there was no telling what Fraa Jad, whose math had been sealed off for 690 years, might think of it. The more I stood and looked at him and followed his gaze northward to the clouds and the shadows that they cast on the flanks of the mountains, the more glad I became that I hadn’t snickered.

“What do you think Orolo saw, when he looked out thus?” Fraa Jad asked.

“He was a great appreciator of beauty and loved to look at the mountains from the starhenge,” I said.

“You think he saw beauty? That is a safe answer, since it is beautiful. But what was he thinking about? What connections did the beauty enable him to perceive?”

“I couldn’t possibly answer that.”

“Don’t answer it. Ask it.”

“More concretely, what do you want me to do?”

“Go north,” he said. “Follow and find Orolo.”

“Tredegarh is south and east.”

“Tredegarh,” he repeated, as if waking from a dream of it. “That is where I and the others shall go after the picnic.”

“I have bent the rules quite a bit by coming here,” I said. “We’ve lost a day-”

“A day. A day!” Fraa Jad, the Thousander, thought it was pretty funny that I should care about a day.

“Chasing Orolo around could take months,” I said. “For being so late, I could be Thrown Back. Or at least given more chapters.”

“Which chapter are you up to now?”

“Five.”

“Nine” Fraa Jad said. For a moment I thought he was correcting me. Then I was afraid he was sentencing me. Finally I understood that he himself was all the way up to Chapter Nine.

He must have spent years on it.

Why? How had he gotten in that much trouble?

Had it made him crazy?

But if he was crazy or incorrigible, why had he, of all the Thousanders, been Evoked? After his Voco, why had his fraas and suurs sung the way they had-as though their hearts had been ripped out?

“I have a lot of questions,” I said.

“The most efficient way for you to get answers is to go north.”

I opened my mouth to repeat my earlier objection, but he held up a hand to stay me. “I shall make every effort to see to it you are not punished.”

It was by no means clear to me that Fraa Jad would have any such power in a giant Convox, but I didn’t have the strength of will to tell him as much to his face. Lacking that strength, I had but one way out of the conversation. “Fine. After the picnic I’ll go north. Though I do not understand what that means.”

“Then keep going north until you understand it,” Fraa Jad said.