Anathem

We crested the pass and descended into a small city, Norslof. This took me by surprise. I’d seen the cartabla. But in the fantasy map of the world that I carried in my head, the mountains went on much farther.

We had not found Orolo, but we had at least made one pass over the landscape. Along the way we had taken note of a few places where he might have gone. Most promising of these, to my mind, had been a small, tatterdemalion math constructed on a lookout tower originally put there to detect forest fires. It was a few miles off the road and a few thousand feet above it. We’d noticed it shortly after topping the pass. If it had been a full-sized concent they wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with someone like Orolo, but such an out-of-the-way math might have welcomed an Orth-speaking wanderer who could bring them some new ideas.

We stopped to eat and use toilets at a big drummon-refueling station several miles outside of Norslof’s commercial center. Here it was possible to rent rooms and it was permissible to sleep in one’s vehicle. I had an idea that we might use it as a base from which to double back into the mountains and search for Orolo. I changed my mind when we walked into the mess hall, steamy and redolent of cured meats, and all of the long-range drummon operators turned to stare at us. It was obvious that they didn’t get many customers such as us and that they preferred it that way. Part of it must have been that we were a group of four in a room full of singletons. But even if we’d come in one by one, we would have drawn stares. Sammann was dressed in normal-looking extramuros garb, but his long beard and hair were not the norm, and the bone structure of his face marked him ethnically. The men in this room would not be able to peg him as Ita-supposing they even knew what the Ita were-but they could tell he was not one of them. Cord did not dress or move like their women. Her repertoire of gestures and facial expressions was altogether disjoint from theirs. Ganelial, being an extra, ought to have blended-but somehow didn’t. He belonged to a religious community that went to great lengths to preserve its apartness from the cultural baseline and he proclaimed as much in the way he carried himself and the looks he gave people. And I: I had no idea how I looked. Since leaving the concent I’d spent most of my time among extras who knew that I was an avout on Peregrin. Here I was trying to pass for something I wasn’t, and it seemed best to assume I was doing a terrible job of it.

We might have drawn even more attention had it not been for the fact that there were speelies all over the place. They were mounted to the ceiling, angled down toward the tables. All of them ran the same feed in lockstep. At the moment we walked in the door, this showed a house burning down at night. It was surrounded by emergency workers. A close-up showed a woman leaning out of an upper-story window that was vomiting black smoke. She had a towel wrapped around her face. She dropped a baby. I kept watching to see what happened next, but instead the speely cycled back and showed the baby drop two more times in slow motion. Then that scene vanished and was replaced by images of a ball player making a clever play. But then it showed the same ball player breaking his leg later in the game. This too was repeated several times in slow motion so that you could see the leg bending at the site of the break. By the time we reached our table, the speelies were showing an extraordinarily beautiful man in expensive clothes being arrested by police. My companions glanced at the images from time to time, then looked away. It seemed that they had built up some kind of immunity. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, so I tried to sit in a position where there wasn’t a speely directly in front of me. Still, every time the feed popped from one image to another, my eye jumped to it. I was like an ape in a tree, looking at whatever moved fastest in my environment.

We sat in the corner, ordered food, and talked quietly. The room, which had gone silent when we’d entered, slowly defrosted and was replenished by the normal low murmur of conversation. It occurred to me that we should not have chosen a corner table because this would make it impossible for us to get out quickly if there was some kind of trouble.

I missed Lio badly. He would have assessed the threats, if any, and thought about how to counter them. And he might have gotten it completely wrong, as he had with Estemard and his sidearm. But at least he would have taken care of these matters so that I could worry about other things.

Take Sammann as an example. When he’d joined us I’d been glad of his company, as he knew how to do so many things that I didn’t. Which was all fine when it was just four of us camped by a tarn. But now that we were deep in the Sæcular world I recalled the ancient taboo against contact between avout and Ita, which we could not have been breaking any more flagrantly. Did these people know of that taboo? If so, did they understand why it had been instated? Were we, in other words, stirring memories and awakening fears of old? Would their police protect us from a mob-or join in with them?

Ganelial Crade started canvassing his local brethren on his jeejah. This grew obnoxious, and when he noticed that we were all glaring at him, he got up and moved to an empty table. I asked Sammann if he could pull up any information on the lookout-tower math and he began to view maps and satellite photos on his jeejah that were much better than the stored charts on the cartabla. I’d rarely seen anything like these pictures, which must have been very like what the Cousins could see of Arbre from their ship. This answered a question that had been rattling around in my head since yesterday morning. “Hey,” I said, “I think Orolo was looking at such pictures. He put a few up on the wall of his cell.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t tell me that before,” said Sammann curtly. Not for the first time I got the feeling that we avout were children and the Ita, far from being a subservient caste, were our minders. I was about to apologize. Then I got the feeling that once I started apologizing I’d never be able to stop. Somehow I managed to arrest my embarrassment before it reached the mud-on-the-head stage.

(on the speely: an old building being blown up; people celebrating)

“Okay, well, now that you mention it, Fraa Jad went out of his way to make sure I came away with them,” I said, and pulled from my shirt pocket the folded-up phototypes of the big hole in the ground. I spread them out on the table. Three heads converged and bent over them. Even Ganelial Crade-who had taken to pacing back and forth as he yammered on his jeejah-slowed down for a look-see. But no light of recognition came into his face. “That looks like a mine. Probably in the tundra,” he said, just to be saying something.

“The sun is shining almost straight down into it,” I pointed out.

“So?”

“So it can’t be at a high latitude.”

Now it was Crade’s turn to be embarrassed. He turned away and pretended to be extremely involved in his jeejah conversation.

(on the speely: phototypes of a kidnapped child, blurry footage of the kid being led out of a casino by a man in a big hat)

“I was wondering,” I said to Sammann, “if you could, I don’t know, use your jeejah to start scanning the globe and look for such features. I know it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. But if we were systematic about it, and if we worked in shifts for long enough-”

Sammann responded to my idea in much the same spirit as I had to Crade’s suggestion that this thing was in the tundra. He held his jeejah up above the picture and took a phototype of the phototype. Then he spent a few seconds interacting with the machine. Then he showed me what had come up on its screen: a different picture of the same hole in the ground. Except now it was a live feed from the Reticulum.

“You found it,” I said, because I wanted to go slowly and make sure I understood what was going on.

“A syntactic program available on the Reticulum found it,” he corrected me. “It turns out to be a long way from here-on an island in the Sea of Seas.”

“Can you tell me the name of the island?”

“Ecba.”

“Ecba!?” I exclaimed.

“Is there a way to figure out what it is?” Cord asked.

Sammann zoomed in. But this was almost unnecessary. Now that I knew it was on Ecba, I was no longer inclined to see this hole as an open-pit mine. It was clearly an excavation-it was completely encircled by mounded-up earth that had been taken out of it. And a ramp spiraled around to its flat bottom. But it was too orderly, too prim for a mine. Its flat bottom was neatly gridded.

“It is an archaeological dig,” I said. “A huge one.”

“What’s there on Ecba to dig up?” Cord asked.

“I can search for that,” Sammann said, and got ready to do so.

“Wait! Zoom out. Again…and again,” I asked him.

We could now see the dig as a pale scar several miles south-southeast of a huge, solitary mountain that ramped up out of a wrinkled sea. The upper slopes of the mountain were patched with snow but its summit had a scoop taken out of it: a caldera.

“That is Orithena,” I said.

“The mountain?” Cord asked.

“No. The dig,” I said. “Someone has been digging up the Temple of Orithena! It was buried by an eruption in Negative 2621.”

“Who’d do that and why?” Cord asked.

Sammann zoomed back in. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that the whole dig was surrounded by a wall. It was pierced in one place by a gate. Inside, several structures had been erected around a rectangular courtyard-a cloister. A tower sprouted from one of these.

“It’s a math,” I said. “Come to think of it, I once heard a story-probably from Arsibalt-that some order had gone to Ecba and started trying to dig their way down to the Temple of Orithena. I thought it was just a few eccentric fraas with shovels and wheelbarrows, though.”

“I don’t see any heavy equipment on the site,” Crade pointed out. “A few people with shovels could dig a hole that deep if they kept at it long enough.”

This left me a little irritated, since it ought to have been obvious to me; after all, our Mynster had been constructed in the same style. But Crade was right and there was nothing I could do but agree as vigorously as I could so that he wouldn’t explain this any further.

“This is all very interesting,” Sammann said, “but it’s probably a dead end for us.”

“I agree,” I said. Ecba was on another continent; or, to be precise, it was in the Sea of Seas which lay among four continents on the opposite side of the world.

“Orolo is not in the mountains,” Ganelial Crade announced, pocketing his jeejah. “He passed through here and kept right on going.”

(on the speely: two very beautiful people getting married)

“How do you know this?” Sammann asked. I was glad of it. Crade was so sure of himself that I found it draining to confront him with even simple questions. Sammann seemed to derive wicked pleasure from doing so.

Crade rose to it. “He got a ride as far as here from some Samble folk who were going this way, and stayed the night before last in the back of my cousin’s fetch, just a couple of miles from here.”

“The back of his fetch? Doesn’t your cousin have a spare bed?” Sammann asked.

“Yulassetar travels a lot,” Crade answered, “the back of his fetch is nicer than his house.”

“You say this happened the night before last?” I asked. “I had no idea we were so hot on his trail!”

“Getting colder every minute…Yulassetar helped him get outfitted yesterday morning, and then Orolo hitched a ride on a northbound drummon.”

“Outfitted how?” Cord asked.

“With warm clothes,” Crade said. “The warmest clothes. This is something Yul knows a lot about. It’s what he does for a living. I’m sure that’s why Orolo sought him out in Norslof.”

“Why would Orolo want to keep going north?” I asked. “There’s nothing there, am I right?”

Sammann pawed at my cartabla-which had a larger display than his jeejah-zoomed way out, and slewed it north and east. “Practically nothing but taiga, tundra, and ice between here and the North Pole. As far as economic activity is concerned, there are fuel tree plantations for the first couple of hundred miles. Beyond that, nothing but a few resource extraction camps.”

The view on the cartabla seemed to contradict him, as it was densely netted with roads that came together at named places, many of which were ringed by concentric beltways. But all of these were depicted in the faint brown color used to denote ruins.

(on the speely: a fiery rocket launch from an equatorial swamp)

“Orolo’s going to Ecba!” Cord proclaimed.

“What are you talking about?” Crade demanded.

“Ecba is not on this continent, you have to fly!” I said.

“He’s going over the pole,” she explained. “He’s headed for the sledge port at Eighty-three North.”

We were in the habit of referring to the Sæcular Power as if it were one thing down through the ages. This seemed simple-minded or even insulting to some extras-though they did essentially the same thing when they spoke of the Powers That Be. Of course we knew it was an over-simplification. But for us it was a useful convenience. Whatever empire, republic, despotate, papacy, anarchy, or depopulated wasteland lay beyond our walls at a given moment, we could slap this name on it and predicate certain things of it.

What you are reading does not attempt to set forth details as to how the Sæcular Power was constituted in my day. Such information can be had anywhere. It might even be interesting if you know nothing about the history of the world up to the Terrible Events; but if you have studied that, everything since will seem like repetition and all the particulars as to how the Sæcular Power of my day was organized will remind you of more or less ancient forerunners, but with less majesty and clarity since the ancients were all doing it for the first time and believed they were on to something.

But at this point I had to attend to one of those details. The Sæcular Power in my day was a federation. It broke down into political units that more or less agreed with Arbre’s continents. One could travel freely within most of those units, but to cross from one to another one had to have documents. The documents were not that difficult to obtain-unless one was avout.

Since the Reconstitution, we had existed wholly apart from the legal system of the Sæcular Power. They had no records of us, no jurisdiction over us, no responsibility for us; they could not draft us into their armies, levy taxes on us, or even step through our gates except at Apert. Likewise they would not offer us assistance of any kind, except for protecting us from direct assault by mobs or armies if they felt like it. We didn’t get pensions or medical care from the Sæcular Power-and we certainly didn’t get identity documents.

It has become obvious during the writing of this that it might one day be read by people from other worlds. So I’ll say that we considered ourselves to have ten continents but that the Cousins, or anyone else who came to us from beyond and looked at Arbre fresh, would have said we had only seven-and they would have been right. We counted ours as ten because the original tally had been made by explorers working outward from the Sea of Seas, who could only guess at what might lie more than a few days’ march from its convoluted shores. It happened more than once that they bestowed distinct names on lands that were sundered by straits and gulfs, but that on further-and much later-exploration proved to be lobes of the same great land mass reaching toward the Sea of Seas from different quarters. But by that time the places had made their way into the classical myths and histories under the ancient names, which we could no more dislodge from the culture than we could withdraw one of the colossal foundation-stones that supported the Mynster.

Likewise, during the Rebirth, land had been found on the other side of the world from the Sea of Seas and had been proclaimed and mapped as a new continent. But centuries later it had been determined that the far northern reaches of that continent wrapped over the North Pole and thence extended south all the way to the Sea of Seas. It was not a new continent at all but a limb of the oldest and best-known continent, and no one had ever had a clue about it because even the aboriginal peoples who knew how to live in ice houses could not venture much above eighty degrees of latitude. To prove that the “old” and “new” continents were one, it was necessary to go all the way up to ninety degrees north latitude-the North Pole-and then descend to eighty or less on the other side. This had not been accomplished until the last century before the Terrible Events and it had not changed people’s habit of referring to the place that Cord, Sammann, Ganelial Crade, and I were on now, and the land mass forming the northern boundary of the Sea of Seas, as two different continents. The ice cap separated the two even more absolutely than an ocean would have, and no normal person ever traveled between them that way. They flew in an aerocraft or did it in a ship.

But to do it by aerocraft or ship you’d have to pass through ports of entry and show documents. Orolo had none and no hope of getting any. So he was doing what was logical, which was to exploit the fact that the two continents were in fact one. Cord had been the first to put this whole picture together in her mind.

No. She’d been the second. The first had been Fraa Jad.

“The sledge trains! That’s like something out of a children’s storybook to me,” Sammann said. “Do they still operate?”

“They were shut down for a while, but they are running again now,” Crade confirmed. “The price of metals went up. People went back to stripping the Deep Ruins.”

“We used to make parts for the sledge locomotives in the machine hall where I worked,” Cord said. “We were the largest machine hall that was so far north, so they’d send the jobs to us. It’s been a source of business for that shop for over a thousand years. We had to make them of special alloys that wouldn’t shatter in the cold.” And she went on in this vein for a minute or two; she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes. Crade and Sammann, who’d been so fascinated to hear about the sledge train idea at first, got less and less so the more Cord said of it.

In my mind I was replaying the memory of Fraa Jad in Orolo’s cell yesterday. He couldn’t have spent more than half a minute gazing at these phototypes before he’d figured it all out. Even if you were the kind of person who attributed nearly supernatural powers to the Thousanders, this seemed a little weird. He must have had some prior knowledge about this.

“This excavation,” I said, tapping my finger on the phototype.

Everyone looked at me funny. I realized that I had just interrupted Cord’s disquisition about alloys.

(on the speely: victims of a roadside massacre; their hysterical wives rending their clothes and rolling on the ground)

I continued, “I’ll bet you my last energy bar that if you look it up, you’ll find that it is 690 years old.”

“You think they started digging this hole in 3000,” said Ganelial Crade. “Why? You like round numbers?”

This was an extremely rare attempt by Crade to make a joke, and so etiquette required me to smirk at it for a moment before I answered. “I’m pretty sure Fraa Jad knew that this was going on. He recognized this as soon as he saw it. So, I’m thinking that this dig must have been launched during the most recent Millennial Convox. The Thousander math at Saunt Edhar would have sent delegates to that Convox and so they would have heard about it, and brought the knowledge back home with them-which is how Fraa Jad knew.”

Sammann, as usual, was ready to play devil’s advocate: “I’m not disagreeing, but even if you’re right, it seems strange to me that Fraa Jad could take one look at this phototype and know that it was the Orithena dig. It could be any hole in the ground. There’s nothing to peg it to Ecba.”

Until now we had been attending mostly to the phototype that showed the entire dig on one sheet. The others were zoomed-in detail shots that hadn’t made much sense before. Scanning them now, I was able to perceive the outlines of ancient building foundations, the stubs of columns, and flat areas of tiled floor. One of these was marked thus:

I pointed to it. “That’s the analemma,” I said. “The Temple of Orithena was a big camera obscura. It had a small hole in the roof that projected an image of the sun on the floor. As the seasons changed, the sun-spot hit the floor in a different place each day during their midday ritual-what we celebrate now as Provener. Over the course of the year it would trace this pattern on the floor.”

“So, you think Fraa Jad noticed the analemma on this phototype and said to himself ‘Aha, this must be the Temple of Orithena?’ That seems like pretty quick thinking to me,” Cord said.

“Well, he’s a pretty smart guy,” I returned. This was not the most polite answer. Jesry would have planed me at this point. Cord was right to be skeptical about it. I wasn’t willing to dig any deeper on this point, though. The speed with which Fraa Jad had recognized this hole in the ground suggested that he, and presumably the other Millenarians, knew a lot about it. I was worried that if we pulled any harder on this loose thread, it would lead us back to crazy talk about the Lineage.

“Oh, how interesting,” Sammann said, gazing into his jeejah, “Erasmas wins his bet. This dig in the phototypes was started in A.R. 3000.” He read another tidbit off the screen, then looked up and grinned at me. “It was started by Edharians!”

“Great!” I muttered, wishing I could take Sammann’s jeejah and drop it down a toilet.

“It’s a spinoff of Saunt Edhar. But a lot of other Edharian maths around the world contributed fraas and suurs to get it started.”

“How many avout live there?” Cord asked. I could see her doing the calculation in her head: if each avout moves twenty wheelbarrow loads of dirt per day, for 690 years, how big does the hole get?

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Sammann said, grimacing. “Most of the information on this topic is crap.”

“What do you mean by that?” Crade demanded. We all looked at him, because in an instant he had become markedly defensive.

Sammann raised his eyes from the screen of the jeejah and gazed interestedly at Crade. He let a few moments go by, then responded in a calm and matter-of-fact tone: “Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what’s on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered. The filtering systems are ancient. My people have been improving them, and their interfaces, since the time of the Reconstitution. They are to us what the Mynster is to Fraa Erasmas and his kind. When I look at a given topic I don’t just see information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells me what the filtering systems learned when they were conducting the search. If I look up analemma, the filtering system tells me that only a few sources have provided information about this and that they are mostly of high repute-they are avout. If I look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with her boyfriend,” Sammann continued, nodding at a tearful female on the speely, “the filtering system tells me that a vast amount of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of very low repute. When I look up the excavation of the Temple of Orithena on the Island of Ecba, the filtering system informs me that people of very high and very low repute have been posting on this topic, slowly but steadily, for seven centuries.”

Sammann’s explanation had failed if its purpose had been to settle Crade down. “What’s an example of a person of high repute? Some fraa sitting in a concent?”

“Yes,” Sammann said.

“And what would a low-repute source be?”

“A conspiracy theorist. Or anyone who makes a lot of long rambling posts that are only read by like-minded sorts.”

“A Deolater?”

“That depends,” Sammann said, “on what the Deolater is writing about.”

“What if he’s writing about Ecba? Orithena? The Teglon?” Crade asked, whacking his index finger into a phototype that depicted the ten-sided plaza in front of the ancient temple.

“The filters tell me that a lot has been posted in that vein,” Sammann said, “as you appear to know very well. Sorting it out is difficult. When I see such a pattern emerging in the filter interface, my gut tells me that most of it is probably crap. It’s a quick and superficial judgment. I could be wrong. I apologize if my choice of words offended you.”

“You’re forgiven,” Crade snapped.

“Well!” I exclaimed, after a few moments’ awkward silence had gone by. “This has been fascinating. It’s good that we figured this out before we wasted a lot of time searching the mountains! Obviously, the whole premise of my search for Orolo has changed. None of you imagined he would be going to the other side of the world. So you’ll all want to turn around and head back south at this point.”

Everyone just looked at me. None of their faces was readable.

“Or so I imagine,” I added.

“This changes nothing,” Sammann said.

“I’m not about to ditch my sib in this dump,” Cord said.

“You have to have two vehicles in case one breaks down in the cold,” said Ganelial Crade. I couldn’t argue with his logic. But I didn’t for one moment think that this was his real reason for wanting to tag along. Not after he had let the word Teglon slip out.

“From here to Eighty-three North is two thousand miles on a great circle route,” said Sammann, working his jeejah. “On the highway, it’s twenty-five hundred and some.”

“If you and Sammann learn to drive, Raz, so that we can switch off, we can make it in three or four days,” Crade said.

“The road’s bound to get worse as we go north,” Cord said. “I would plan on it taking a week.”

Crade was eager to dispute that with her but she added, “And we’ll have to modify the vehicles.”

So we encamped in the fueling station’s back lot and set to work. Once the proprietors understood that we were just passing through en route to the far north, they became more comfortable with us and things got easier. They assumed we were just another crew of vagabonds going up to mine the ruins, and better equipped and financed than most.

The next day we used Cord’s fetch to go out and buy new tires for Crade’s. Then we used his to get tires for hers. The new tires were deeply grooved and had hobnails sticking out of them. Cord and Gnel (as Ganelial Crade now insisted we call him) worked together on some sort of tool-intensive project to replace the vehicles’ coolants and lubricants with ones that would not freeze. Neither Sammann nor I knew much about working on vehicles, so we stood around and tried to be useful. Sammann used his jeejah to study the route north, reading logs posted by travelers who’d gone that way recently.

“Hey,” I said to him at one point, “my mind keeps going back to an image I saw on that speely feed yesterday.”

“The burning librarian?”

“No.”

“The mudslide hitting the school?”

“No.”

“The brain-damaged boy playing with the puppies?”

“No.”

“Okay, I give up.”

“A rocket taking off.”

He looked at me. “And-what? Blowing up? Crashing into an orphanage?”

“No. That’s the thing. It just took off.”

“Did it have celebrities on board or-”

“Not that they showed. They’d show that, wouldn’t they?”

“I wonder why they bothered to show it then. Rockets take off all the time.”

“Well, I’m no judge of these things, but it looked like an especially big one.”

For the first time Sammann seemed to take my meaning. “I’ll see what I can find,” he said.

An elderly but bustling lady-one of Gnel’s co-religionists-came out with a cake that had been baked for us, then snared Gnel in a conversation that never seemed to end. While they were talking, a big, mud-splattered fetch with a wooden cabin on its back thundered into the fueling station, circled around us a couple of times, and claimed four parking spaces. The cake lady marched away, her face all pinched up. A big man with a beard shambled out of the cabin-fetch and came toward Gnel with his hands in his pockets, looking about curiously. When he got closer to Gnel he suddenly flashed a grin and extended his hand. Gnel extended his after a moment’s hesitation and let the other heave it up and down for a while. They spoke for no more than a few seconds, then the newcomer began to pace around our little encampment taking a mental inventory of what we had and reconstructing in his mind what we’d been doing there. After a few minutes of that, he unfolded a sort of deployable counter from the side of his cabin-on-wheels and fired up a stove and began to make hot beverages for us.

“That’s Yulassetar Crade. My cousin,” Gnel told me as we watched him erect a little kitchen, blowing dust out of teacups and polishing pots with a rag from his pocket.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” Gnel asked, nonplussed.

“It’s obvious from the way that you and that lady react to him that there is some history. Some kind of trouble between you.”

“Yul is a here-” Gnel began, and stopped himself before he had got to the end of the word. “An apostate.”

I wanted to ask, other than that, is he all right? but I let it drop.

Yul made no effort to introduce himself, but when I approached him he turned to me with a smile and shook my hand before turning back to his chores. “Hold your arms out,” he said, and when I complied he put a tray on them and then placed cups of hot stuff on the tray. “For your friends,” he said.

I insisted that he come with me, though. So after giving Gnel a cup we went over to Sammann and I introduced the two of them. Then I talked Cord into sliding out from under her fetch. She stood up and dusted herself off and shook Yul’s hand. They gave each other a funny look, which made me speculate that they might have crossed paths before. But neither one of them said anything about it. She accepted her cup and then they turned away from each other as if something embarrassing had happened.

Yulassetar Crade gave me a lift into town so that I could run a couple of errands. First, I mailed my letter to Ala, care of the Concent of Saunt Tredegarh. The woman at the post office gave me a lot of trouble because it wasn’t properly addressed. Concents didn’t have addresses for the same reason that I didn’t have a passport. I knew I’d made a terrible mistake by not giving some sort of note to Arsibalt or Lio at the picnic in Samble. They could have smuggled it directly to Ala. Instead of which I had to mail this thing to the concent, where it would be intercepted by the hierarchs and-if they were sticking to the Discipline-kept out of Ala’s knowledge until her next Apert, more than nine years from now. I could only imagine what she’d think of me at that time, reading this yellowed document written by a boy not yet twenty years of age.

The next stop on the itinerary was a place where we could get suitsacks: huge orange coveralls whose legs could be zipped together to make them into sleeping bags. These were made for people who hunted or scavenged in the far north. Each had a catalytic power unit built into it; as long as you kept some fuel in its bladder it would supply a modest trickle of power that was routed down the suits’ arms and legs to warming-pads placed in the soles of the boots and the palms of the mittens. New ones could be pretty expensive, but Yul had helped Orolo get a cheap one the other day. He knew of places where you could get used ones that had been fixed up, and he knew tricks for making them more comfortable.

Once we’d taken care of that we set out in search of other gear and supplies we were going to need. Whenever I suggested going to an outdoorsy type of store, Yul winced and groaned, and then explained how better stuff could be had at one-tenth the price by using things you could buy at stores that sold housewares and groceries. He was always right, of course. He made his living as a wilderness guide, taking vacationers on trips to the mountains. Apparently he had no work at the moment, because he spent the whole day driving me around Norslof helping me improvise what we needed. When we were unable to get what we wanted at a store, he promised to supply us out of his own personal stock.

The driving consumed an unbelievable amount of time. The traffic was always bad, or so it seemed to me. But I wasn’t used to the vehicular life of a city. When the traffic slowed to a stop, people in the mobes around us would look out the windows at Yul’s ramshackle fetch. If they were grownups they would soon look the other way, but children loved to point and stare and laugh. And they were right to do so. Yul and I were an odd pair, compared to all of these people driving to school and to work.

At first Yul seemed to feel an obligation to be a good host-to provide entertainment during traffic jams. “Music?” he said distantly, as if music were something he had heard of once. Hearing no objection, he took to fiddling with the controls on his sound system as if they had broken off in his hands and were no longer attached to anything. Eventually he left it set on a random feed. Later, once he got to talking, I reached over and turned it off and he didn’t notice.

Part of his job, I guessed, was to make people he’d just met (his clients) feel comfortable, which he did by telling stories. He was good at it. I tried to get him to talk about Orolo but he didn’t have much to say. Orolo might be a lot of things to me but to Yul he was just another tenderfoot who needed advice on how to travel in the rough. This did, however, lead to the topic of getting around in the far north, which he knew a lot about.

Later I asked him if all of his travel had been in that direction and he scoffed and said that no, he’d spent years as a river guide in a region south of Samble that was gouged by deep sandstone canyons filled with spectacular rock formations. He told some good stories about such trips, but after a while became uncomfortable and stopped talking. Telling tales, it seemed, was a good way to loosen things up, a useful time-killer, but what he really wanted was a project into which he could pour his energies and his intelligence.

At some point during the day, he stopped referring to “you” as in “You’re going to need extra fuel in case you have to melt snow to make drinking water” and began speaking of “we” as in “We should plan on at least four flat tires.”

Yul’s house was really just a dumping ground for stuff he couldn’t fit into his fetch: camping equipment, vehicle parts, empty bottles, weapons, and books. The books were stacked in piles that came up to my hip. He didn’t seem to own any shelves. A lot of them were fiction but he also had several geology-piles. Nailed to the wall were big blown-up phototypes of colorful sedimentary rock formations, sculpted by water and wind. In his cellar, where we went to mine more equipment, he had stacks of tabular rocks-slabs of sandstone-with fossils in them.

After we’d got everything he thought we’d need, and begun driving through another traffic jam back to the fueling station, I said to him, “You figured out that the world was old, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said immediately. “I spent years on rafts going down those rivers. Years. The whole way, there’s rocks strewn along the banks. Rocks the size of houses that fell off the canyon walls, higher up. Just looking down one of those canyons, you can see it happens all the time.”

“You mean, rocks falling down.”

“Yeah. It’s like, if you’re driving down this highway and you see skid marks on the pavement, like those right there, any idiot knows that skidding happens. If you see lots of skid marks, well, that means that skidding is common. If you see lots of fallen rocks in a canyon, then rock falls are common. So, I kept expecting to see one. Every day, I’d be drifting down the river on that raft with the clients, you know, and they’d be sleeping or talking about whatever they wanted to talk about, and I’d keep an eye on the canyon walls, waiting to see a rock fall.”

“But you never did.”

“Never. Not once.”

“So you realized that the time scale had to be enormous.”

“Yeah. I tried to figure it out once. I don’t have the theorics. But I kept an eye on that river for five years and not a single rock fell down while I was running it. If Arbre is only five thousand years old-if all the rocks in that canyon have fallen down in that short a time-I should have seen some rocks fall.”

“The people in your ark didn’t like what you had to say about that,” I guessed.

“There’s a reason I got out of Samble.”

That was the end of that conversation. It was the evening rush hour now and we drove in silence for a long time. I was fascinated by the little glimpses of other people’s lives that I got through the windows of their mobes. Then I was struck by how different Yul’s life seemed to be from theirs.

The way in which Yul had decided to join us on our journey north was strange to me. There had been no rational process: no marshaling of evidence, no weighing of options. But that was how Yul lived his whole life. He had not-I realized-been invited by Gnel to come out and pay us a visit at the fueling station. He had just shown up. He did a new thing with a new set of people every day of his life. And that made him just as different from the people in the traffic jam as I was.

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why S?culars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.

We at last reached the fueling station. Yul deployed his traveling kitchen and began to make supper. He made no formal announcement that he was coming with us, but this was obvious from the way he talked, and so after a while Gnel went into the station and struck a deal with the management for Cord to leave her fetch parked there for a couple of weeks. Cord began to move things from her fetch into Yul’s. As he cooked, Yul observed this procedure closely, and soon began to complain, in a joking way, about the enormous volume of unnecessary clutter that Cord was, according to him, stuffing into his home-on-wheels. Cord soon began to volley the abuse back at him. Within about sixty seconds they were saying amazingly rude things to each other. I couldn’t take part in their banter any more than I could get between two persons who were kissing or fighting, so I drifted over to Sammann.

“I found that rocket speely,” he told me. “You were right about its being big. That’s one of the largest rockets going nowadays.”

“Anything else?”

“The payload,” he said. “Its shape and size match those of a vehicle that is generally used to carry humans into space.”

“How many humans?”

“Up to eight.”

“Well, is there any information about who is on board, or why they’re going up there?”

Sammann shook his head. “Not unless you count the absence of information as information.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“According to the Powers That Be, the vehicle is unmanned. It’s a test of a new system. Under syndev control.”

I gave him a look. He grinned and held up his hands. “I know, I know! I’ve made inquiries on a few reticules known to me. In a few days maybe we’ll have something.”

“In a few days we’ll be at the North Pole.”

“In a few days,” he said, “that might be a wise place to be.”

The next morning, after a large breakfast prepared by Yul and Cord, we started the journey north. Cord’s fetch stayed behind. Our caravan consisted of the Crade vehicles, that of Yulassetar containing most of the gear, that of Ganelial carrying his three-wheeler in the back.

The first leg was north and downhill to the coastal plain, a turn to the right when we neared salt water, and then a long sweeping leftward curve as we skirted a gulf of the northern ocean. At the head of that gulf lay what had been the greatest port in the world for a couple of centuries back in the First Millennium A.R. when the water had stayed ice-free all year round. Because of its location it had later become the “shallowest” of all ruins-the easiest to mine. Most of its great works-its viaducts, seawalls, and bridges-had been hammered apart by scavengers who had extracted the reinforcing bars buried in the synthetic stone and shipped the metal to places where it was needed. The rubble-mounds were forested with immense trees. The only remaining structure from that age was a suspension bridge over the great river that emptied into the head of the gulf; it was high enough above sea level that the resurgent pack ice had not crushed it. At this time of year there was no ice to be seen, but it was easy to make out the scars it had left along the rubble-banks. This port-ruin now functioned as a fishing village and drummon stop. A few hundred people lived here, at least in the summer. Once we left it behind and struck inland, heading almost due north, we saw only scattered settlements, which thinned and failed as we climbed into forested hills. We then descended into an unmistakably different landscape: taiga, a country too dry and cold for trees to grow much higher than a person’s head. Almost all traffic had vanished from the highway. We drove for an hour without seeing any other vehicles. Finally we stopped in a rocky place near a river, pulled our vehicles round to where they couldn’t be seen from the road, and slept in our suitsacks.

The next morning, the brand-new stove we had bought after leaving Samble stopped working. If Yul hadn’t joined us, we’d have spent the rest of the trip eating cold energy bars. Yul, looking quietly triumphant, produced a thunderous breakfast on his battery of roaring industrial burners. Watching his cousin work, Gnel seemed proud, if exasperated. As if to say, look at what fine people we can produce when they stop believing in our religion.

Since there was almost no traffic on the road, I took driving lessons from Yul while Cord dismantled the stove. She diagnosed the problem as a clogged orifice, attributable to gunk that had precipitated from the fuel during the cold night.

“You’re fuming,” she pointed out a while later. I realized that I had withdrawn from the conversation. She and Yul had been talking, but I hadn’t heard a word of their conversation. “What is the problem?”

“I just can’t believe that in this day and age we are having a problem with chemical fuel,” I said.

“Sorry. We should have bought the premium brand.”

“No, it’s not that. Nothing for you to be sorry about. I’m just pointing out that this stove is four-thousand-year-old praxis.”

Cord was nonplussed. “Same goes for this fetch and everything in it,” she said.

“Hey!” Yul cried, mock-wounded.

Cord scoffed, rolled her eyes, and turned her attention back to me. “Everything except for your sphere, that is. So?”

“I guess because I live in a place with almost zero praxis, it never occurs to me to think about such things,” I said. “But at times like this, the absurdity hits me between the eyes. There’s no reason to put up with junk like this. A stove with dangerous, unreliable chemical fuel. With orifices that clog. In four thousand years we could have made a better stove.”

“Would I be able to take that stove apart and fix it?”

“You wouldn’t have to, because it would never break.”

“But I want to know if I could understand such a stove.”

“You’re the kind of person who could probably understand just about anything if you set your mind to it.”

“Nice flattery, Raz, but you keep dodging the question.”

“All right, I take your point. You’re really asking if the average person could understand the workings of such a thing…”

“I don’t know what an average person is. But look at Yul here. He built his stove himself. Didn’t you, Yul?”

Yul was uneasy that Cord had suddenly made this conversation about him. But he deferred to her. He glanced away and nodded. “Yup. Got the burners from scavengers. Welded up the frame.”

“And it worked,” Cord said.

“I know,” I said, and patted my belly.

“No, I mean the system worked!” Cord insisted.

“What system?”

She was exasperated. “The…the…”

“The non-system,” Yul said. “The lack of a system.”

“Yul knew that stoves like this were unreliable!” Cord said, nodding at the broken one. “He’d learned that from experience.”

“Oh, bitter experience, my girl!” Yul proclaimed.

“He ran into some scavengers who’d found better burner heads in a ruin up north. Haggled with them. Figured out a way to hook them up. Probably has been tinkering with them ever since.”

“Took me two years to make it run right,” Yul admitted.

“And none of that would have been possible with some kind of technology that only an avout can understand,” Cord concluded.

“Okay, okay,” I said, and let it drop there. Letting the argument play out would have been a waste of breath. We, the theors, who had retreated (or, depending on how you liked your history, been herded) into the maths at the Reconstitution, had the power to change the physical world through praxis. Up to a point, ordinary people liked the changes we made. But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on us-and they didn’t like that at all.

Cord spent a while telling Yul what she knew about the Cousins, and about all that had happened during the journey from Saunt Edhar to Samble to Norslof. Yul took it pretty calmly, which irked me. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and make him see, somehow, that this was an event of cosmic significance: the most important thing that had ever happened. But he listened to Cord’s narration as if she were relating a story of how she had fixed a flat tire on her way to work. Perhaps it was a habit of wilderness guides to feign unnatural calm when people ran up to them with upsetting news.

Anyway, it gave me an opening to carry forward the stove argument in a way that wouldn’t make Cord so irritated. When the conversation lapsed, I tried: “I see why you guys-or anyone-would feel more comfortable with a stove you could take apart and understand. And I’m fine with that-normally. But these are not normal times. If the Cousins turn out to be hostile, how can we oppose them? Because it looks like they came from a world that didn’t have anything like the Reconstitution.”

“A dictatorship of the theors,” Yul said.

“It doesn’t have to be a dictatorship! If you could see how theors behave in private, you’d know they could never be that organized.”

But Cord was of one mind with Yul on this. “Once they get to the point where they’re building ships like that one,” she said, “it is a dictatorship in effect. You said yourself it would take the resources of a whole planet. How do you think they got their hands on those resources?”

In most cases Cord and I saw things the same way and the extra/avout split simply was not important to us, so when she talked this way it made me more upset than I cared to let on. I let it drop for a while. On these endless drives, it was nothing to let the conversation pause for an hour or two.

And there was something else going on, which was that everything had changed about Cord when Yul had showed up. These two simply knew what to do around each other. Whatever was going on between them, I wasn’t part of it, and I felt jealous.

We passed through another ruin-city, almost as “shallow” as yesterday’s and almost as thoroughly erased.

“The Cousins’ praxis is nothing to jump up and down about,” I said. “We haven’t seen anything on that ship that couldn’t have been built in our own Praxic Age. That makes me think that we could build a weapon that could disable their ship.”

Cord smiled and the tension was gone. “You sound like Fraa Jad the other day!” she exclaimed, with obvious affection-for me.

“Oh really? What did the old man say?” I could hear the hurt draining out of my own speech.

She adopted a pretty good imitation of his grumbling voice. “‘Their electrical systems could be disabled by a burst of whozamajigger fields.’ Then Lio said, ‘Begging your pardon, Fraa Jad, but we don’t know how to make those.’ ‘Why, it’s simple, just build a phrastic array of whatsit-field inducers.’ ‘Sorry, Fraa Jad, but no one knows those theorics any more and it takes thirty years’ study to get up to speed!’ and so on.”

I laughed. But then-tallying the days in my head-I realized something: “They’re probably reaching Tredegarh right now. Probably starting to talk about how to make those whatsit field inducers.”

“I would hope so!”

“The Sæcular Power probably has tons of information about the Cousins that has been withheld from us until now. Maybe they’ve even been going up there and talking to the Cousins. I’ll bet they are giving all of that information to the fraas and suurs at the Convox. I wish I was there. I’m tired of not understanding! Instead I’m helping Fraa Jad understand why a Throwback wants to visit a seven-century-old archaeological dig.” I slapped the control panel helplessly.

“Hey!” Yul said in mock outrage and pretended to haul off and punch me in the shoulder.

“I guess that’s part of being a pawn,” I went on.

“Your vision of what the Convox is like sounds pretty romantic to me,” Cord said. “Way too optimistic. Remember the first day at the machine-hall when we were trying to get seventeen people into six vehicles?”

“Vividly.”

“This Convox thing is probably like that except a thousand times worse.”

“Unless there’s someone like me there,” Yul said. “You should see the way I can get seventeen tourists into four rafts.”

“Well, Yul’s not at Tredegarh,” Cord pointed out, “so you’re not missing a thing. Just relax and enjoy the drive.”

“Okay,” I said, and laughed a little. “Your understanding of human nature is better than mine.”

“What’s her problem with me then?” Yul demanded.

As the drive went on, most of us bounced back and forth between the two vehicles. The exception was Gnel who always remained in his fetch, though sometimes he’d let Sammann drive it.

The next day, when Cord and I were alone together for a couple of hours, she told me that she and Yul had become boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Huh,” I said, “I guess that explains why you two spend so much time out ‘gathering firewood.’” I wasn’t trying to be a smarty-pants, just trying to emulate the kind of banter that Cord and Yul exchanged so freely. But Cord became quite embarrassed and I realized that I had struck too close to home. I groped around for something else to say. “Well, now that you’ve told me, it seems like it was meant to be. I guess I just didn’t see it because I had this idea that you were going out with Rosk.”

Cord thought that was pretty silly. “Remember all those conversations I was having with him on my jeejah the other day?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what we were really doing was breaking up.”

“Well, Cord, I hate to be a pedantic avout, but I couldn’t help overhearing your half of those conversations, and I don’t think I heard a single word that was even remotely about breaking up.”

She looked at me as if I were insane.

“All I’m saying,” I said, holding up my hands, “is that I had no idea that that was what was going on.”

“Neither did I,” Cord said.

“Do you think…” I began, and stopped. I’d been about to say Do you think that Rosk knows? but I realized in the nick of time that it would be suicide. It seemed to me like a pretty irregular way to handle important relationships, but then I remembered how things had gone with me and Ala and decided I was in no position to criticize my sib on that score.

Cord and I had talked surprisingly little about our family-that is, the family I’d shared with her until I’d “gone to the clock.” But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable, whether it was those they were related to or a crowd of strangers they’d been thrown together with in a concent. Cord sometimes seemed eighty years old in her knowledge and experience and cynicism about such things. I couldn’t help thinking she’d thrown up her hands at some point and decided to devote the rest of her life to mastering things, such as machines, that could be made sense of and fixed. No wonder she hated the idea of machines she couldn’t understand. And no wonder she didn’t waste a lot of time trying to understand things she couldn’t-like why she was now Yul’s girlfriend.

When the climate had been warmer, civilizations had sloshed back and forth across this glacier-planed landscape for a couple of thousand years like silt in a miner’s pan, forming drifts of built-up stuff that stayed long after the people had departed. At any given moment during those millennia, a billion might have lived on this territory that now supported a few tens of thousands. How many bodies were buried up here, how many people’s ashes scattered? Ten, twenty, fifty billion all told? Given that they all used electricity, how many miles of copper wire had been sewn through their buildings and under their pavements? How many man-years had been devoted to the one activity of pulling and stapling those wires into place? If one out of a thousand was an electrician, something like a billion man-years had been devoted to running wire from one point to another. After the weather had grown cold again and the civilizations had, over the course of a few centuries, shifted south-moving like glaciers-scavengers had begun coming up here to undo those billion man-years one tedious hour at a time, and retrieve those countless miles of wire yard by yard. Professional scavengers working on an industrial scale had gotten ninety percent of it quickly. I’d seen pictures of factories on tank treads that rolled across the north and engulfed whole city blocks at a time, treating the fabric of the ruins just as a mining robot would an ore-rich hill, grinding the buildings to rubble and sorting the shards according to density. The first ruins we had seen were the feces that those machines left along their paths.

Stripping ruins by hand was more expensive. When times were prosperous elsewhere, metals became precious enough that miners could make a life out of venturing to the deep ruins-far-flung cities of old, never reached by the factories-on-tank-treads-and extracting whatever was most valuable: copper wires, steel beams, plumbing, or what have you. The swag made its way toward the road we were driving in fitful stages, from one anarchic little tundra market-town to the next. Snowstorms and arctic pirate-bands might impede its progress but eventually it found the road and was piled on the backs of ramshackle drummons that seemed to consist of seventy-five percent rust by weight, held together only by rimes of ice and shaggy cloaks of dirty snow. These moved in caravans for protection, so it was hopeless to try to pass them, but they moved fast enough for our purposes and they afforded us the safety of the herd once they’d figured out we were pilgrims, not pirates. We stayed well back of them so that we’d have time to swerve whenever a rigid glyph of plumbing or a hairball of wire fell off onto the road. Our windscreen grew opaque with tire-flung mud-ice. We kept the side windows open so that we could reach out and wipe it off with rags on sticks. On the third day the rags froze; after that we kept the stove running with a pot of warm water on top of it, to thaw them out. Through our open windows we looked at ruins passing by. We learned to tell what age a place had been built by the character of its fortifications: missile silos, three-mile-long runways, curtain walls, stone ramparts, acres of curled razor barbs, belts of sequence-engineered thorn trees, all more or less torn down and deranged by scavengers.

As the days went on, all of this stuff was dusted, then frosted, then choked, flattened, crushed, drowned, obliterated by ice. After that, the only things we saw that had been put there by humans were wrecks of former sledge ports: fluctuations of climate or of markets had left them defenseless long enough to die. The landscape a mile from the road was clean and white, that along the road was the most disgusting thing I’d seen the whole trip. The snow-piles along the sides of the road grew higher and blacker until our way became a carbon-black slit trench twenty feet deep, crammed with drummons moving about as fast as a healthy person could walk. After that there was no escape. We could have shut off our vehicles’ engines and the drummon behind us would have shoved us all the way to the end of the road. They had snorkels to draw fresh air down into their cabs. We hadn’t thought to so equip ourselves, and spent the last day breathing oily blue exhaust. When this became too sickening to endure we would swap drivers and climb up out of the trench (there were occasional ramps in the snow-walls) and simply walk alongside for a while (we had bought snowshoes, improvised from scavenged building materials, in one of the tundra markets) or ride on Gnel’s three-wheeler.

It was on one of those trudges-the very last leg-that Yul finally asked me about the parking ramp dinosaur.

Ever since our day together in Norslof, it had been clear he’d wanted to get something off his chest. When he and Cord had suddenly become an item, he’d avoided being alone with me for a couple of days. But once it was clear that I was not going to go nonlinear, he’d begun a gentle search for opportunities to talk to me one-on-one. I’d assumed the topic was going to be him and Cord. But Yul was full of surprises.

“Some say it was a dinosaur, some say dragon,” I told him. “One of the first things we were taught about the incident is that nothing can be known of it for certain-”

“Since all evidence was wiped out by the Incanters?”

“That’s one story. The second thing we were taught, by the way, was that we should never discuss the incident with S?culars.”

He got a frustrated look.

“Sorry,” I said, “that’s just how it is. Most accounts agree that one group, let’s call them Group A, started it, and Group B finished it. In popular folkore, A equals the so-called Rhetors and B equals the so-called Incanters. It happened three months before the opening of the Third Sack.”

“But the dinosaur-or the dragon or whatever-really did appear in the parking ramp.”

Yul and I were walking side-by-side on compacted snow, a stone’s throw off to the right side of the drummon-jammed slit trench. Closer to it, conditions were dangerous because men, many of them intoxicated, were zipping back and forth on snow machines. The track that Yul and I were following appeared to have been laid down by such a machine a day or two earlier. We could tell where our fetches were in the trench because we’d learned to recognize the jury-rigged snorkels of the adjoining drummons. The traffic seemed to be accelerating slightly, so that we had to mush harder in order to keep pace. This was probably because we were only a couple of miles from the sledge port. We could see its antennas, its smoke, and its lights a couple of miles ahead. Even if the fetches outdistanced us, we’d be able to reach it on foot, so we weren’t overly concerned about keeping up.

“It was only a couple of thousand feet away from Muncoster,” I said. “There was a city there-as there is now. Overall level of affluence and praxic development, let’s say nine on a scale of ten.”

“Where are we today?” Yul asked.

“Let’s say eight. But the society around Muncoster had peaked, though they didn’t know it yet. Deolaters were gaining political influence.”

“Which Ark?”

“I don’t know. One of those that is aggressive about garnering power. They had an iconography-”

“A what?”

“Well,” I said, “let’s just say that they felt threatened by certain things that avout tend to believe.”

“Such as that the world is old,” Yul said.

“Yeah. There had been trouble at a couple of Annual Aperts, and bigger trouble at the Decennial of 2780. The Tenners’ math got sacked a little on Tenth Night. But then things seemed to calm down. Apert was over. Things went back to normal. So, now, a parking ramp was then under construction within sight of the concent. It was part of a shopping center. The avout could see it going up, just by looking out the windows of their towers-Muncoster has a lot of towers. The ramp was finished a few months later. S?culars went in there every day and parked their cars. No problem. Six years passed. The shopping center expanded. The workers had to make some structural changes to the parking ramp so that they could attach a new wing. One of them was up on the fourth level, using a pneumatic hammer to demolish part of the floor, when he noticed something embedded in the synthetic stone. It looked like a claw. Investigating, they removed more and more stone. It was a major safety issue since the building isn’t structurally sound if there are such things as claws and bones in load-bearing members. They had to shore it up-the building was weakening, sagging, before their eyes. The more they uncovered, the worse it got. When all was said and done, they had uncovered a complete skeleton of a hundred-foot-long reptile embedded in synthetic stone that had only been poured four years earlier. The Deolaters didn’t know what to make of it. There started to be serious unrest and violence around the walls of the concent. Then one night, chanting was heard from the Thousanders’ tower. It went on all night. The next day, the parking ramp was back to normal. So the story goes.”

“Do you believe it?” Yul asked.

“Something happened. There were-are-records.”

“You mean, like, phototypes of the skeleton?”

“I’m referring more to things like the memories in the witnesses’ minds. Piles of lumber used to shore up the structure. The paperwork at the lumberyard. A little bit of additional wear on the tires of the drummons that carried the lumber to the site.”

“Like ripples spreading out,” Yul said.

“Yeah. So if the skeleton suddenly vanishes, and there’s no physical evidence it was ever there, what do you have left?”

“Only the records,” Yul said, nodding vigorously, as if he understood it better than I. “The ripples, without the splash.”

“The tires of the lumber drummon didn’t suddenly get un-worn. The paperwork at the lumberyard didn’t vanish from the files. But now there is a conflict. The world isn’t coherent any more-there are logical contradictions.”

“Big piles of shoring lumber in front of a parking ramp that never needed to be shored up,” Yul said.

“Yeah. And it’s not that this is physically impossible. Obviously it is possible to have a pile of wood in front of a parking ramp, or some pieces of paper in a filing cabinet. But the problem-the issue it raises-is that the overall state of affairs just doesn’t add up any more.” I was remembering the pink dragon dialog with Orolo-realizing, all these months later, that his choice of a dragon to illustrate the point had been no accident. He’d been trying to remind us of the very incident Yul was talking about.

We heard a braying engine behind us and turned around to see Ganelial Crade headed our way on the three-wheeler. Yul and I exchanged a look that meant let’s not discuss this around him. Yul bent down, scooped up a double handful of snow, and tried to pack it into a ball to throw at his cousin. It was too cold to pack though.

We reached the sledge port at Eighty-three North at two in the morning, which only meant that the sun was slightly lower in the sky than usual. The slit-road debouched into a plateau of pack ice a mile or two wide, and somewhat lower than the surrounding ice, so that it felt like being on the floor of a large meteorite crater. Here and there, housing modules rose on stilts that could be moved and adjusted when the ice flowed under them. The drummons tended to congregate around these. Each was the headquarters of a different scrap dealer, and the drivers would hustle from one to the next trying to get the best prices for their loads. Other structures served as hostels, eateries, or bordellos.

The place was dominated by the sledge train itself. The first time I saw this, with the low sun behind it, I mistook it for a factory. The locomotive looked like one of those city-eating scrap processors: a power plant and a village of housing modules built on a bridge that spanned the interval between two colossal tracks. In the train behind it were half a dozen sledges, each built on parallel runners that rode in the ruts of packed snow laid down by the locomotive’s treads. The first of these was built to carry shipping containers. They were stacked four high, and an ungainly crane on wheels was laboring to begin a fifth layer. Behind it were a few sledges that simply consisted of great open boxes. Another crane, equipped with pincers easily big enough to snatch both of our vehicles at the same time, was clawing tangles of scrap metal from a pile on the snow and dropping them into these with heart-stopping crashes. The last sledge in the train was a flatbed: a mobile parking lot about half full of loaded drummons.

We spent a while blundering around, but from having talked to drummon operators at roadside stops we had a general notion of how the place worked and some good suggestions on how not to behave. From Sammann’s research we already knew that another sledge train had departed two days earlier and that the one we were looking at would continue loading for another few days.

Getting about was a hazard because there were no established rights-of-way. Drummons and fetches just moved in straight lines toward whatever their jumped-up drivers wanted to reach. So we tended to use our vehicles even for short movements. We found the office-on-stilts that booked places on the flatbed, and arranged to have both of our vehicles loaded upon it. But we paid a little extra to get Gnel’s fetch situated at the edge, rather than in the middle; that way, by deploying planks as ramps, we were able to get the three-wheeler on and off at will. It then became our means of moving around the sledge port, though it could only take two at a time and so at any given moment three of us would be marooned. So we rented one of the housing modules on the locomotive and marooned ourselves there. It was cheap. The toilet was a hole in the floor covered, when not used, by a trapdoor weighed down with slugs of scrap iron so that arctic gales wouldn’t blow it open. A few trips up and down the sledge train in the three-wheeler sufficed to stock our little house with the rations and other goods we’d packed into the fetches, as well as a surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of projectile and edged weapons. Yulassetar and Ganelial Crade might disagree about religion, but in their relationship to arms they were the same mind in two different bodies. They even used the same types of cases to store their guns, and the same boxes for ammunition. Many at the sledge port carried weapons openly, and there was a place at the edge of “town” where people would go out and discharge weapons into the encircling ice-wall just to pass the time. On the whole, though, the place was more orderly and predictable than the territory we’d spent the last week driving though. As I was coming to understand, it had to be thus because it was a place of commerce.

Once we were settled in, Sammann and I took the three-wheeler and made the rounds of bars and brothels just to confirm that Orolo wasn’t in any of them. Cord clambered around on the locomotive, admiring its workings, and Yul followed her. He claimed to be as interested in such things as Cord, but to me it was obvious that he expected she’d be raped if she went out alone.

We killed time for several days. I tried to read some theorics books I’d brought, but couldn’t concentrate, and ended up sleeping for unreasonable amounts of time. Sammann had found a place near an office-module where he could get patchy connections to the Reticulum. He went there once a day, then came back to scan through the information he had acquired. Yul and Cord watched speelies on a tiny jeejah screen when they weren’t “gathering firewood.” Ganelial Crade read his scriptures in Old Bazian and began to signal interest in something that he had been polite enough to avoid and that I had been dreading: religion.

Sammann once saved me from a near brush with that by looking up suddenly from his jeejah, finding my face at the other end of the room, then dropping his gaze again to the screen. He’d recently come back from one of his data-foraging expeditions; there were still a few clots of ice dangling from his whiskers. I went over and squatted next to his chair.

“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”

“How would that work?” I asked.

Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”

“Norslof,” I said.

“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”

“Okay, but how-”

“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”

“Asamocra?”

“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass-never mind-and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”

“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but maybe we can save that for later.”

“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”

“Ah. And have you succeeded?”

“I’d say yes. You might say no because you avout like your information tidily written down in a book and cross-checked by other avout. The information we trade in is noisy and ambiguous and suggestive. Often it’s images or acoustical signatures instead of words.”

“I accept your rebuke. What have you got?”

“Eight went up on that rocket.”

“So the official statement was a lie as we suspected.”

“Yes.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know. That’s where things get noisy and ambiguous. This thing was very hush-hush. Military secrets and so forth. There is no passenger manifest that I can read to you. No stack of dossiers. All I have is ten seconds of really bad images from the collision-avoidance speelycaptor on the windscreen of some janitor’s fetch, taken while he was parallel-parking in a tight spot a quarter of a mile away. Motion artifacts have been removed, of course.”

Sammann caused the jeejah to begin playing back a snippet of-as advertised-terrible speely data. It showed a coach, with military markings, parked next to a large building. A door in the side of the building opened. Eight people in white coveralls came out and climbed into the coach. They were followed by others who looked like doctors and technicians. The interval between the building and the coach was about twenty feet, so we got to see them walk that far. Sammann made the thing run on infinite loop. The first couple of dozen times through, we focused all of our attention on the first four people in the white suits. Faces were impossible to make out, but it was surprising how much could be inferred from how people moved. Three of the white-suited people moved in an ever-shifting triangle around a fourth, who was bigger than all of them, with prepossessing hair. He carried himself erect and moved in a heedless line; the others scurried and weaved. His coverall was subtly different from the others’: it had a pattern of stripes or markings crisscrossed over it, almost as if he’d been draped in a few yards of-

“Rope,” I said, freezing the image and pointing to it. “I’ve seen something like that before-at Apert. There was an extra wearing something like that. He was a Warden of Heaven priest. That is their ceremonial garb.”

By this point Cord had come over to watch the speely with us. She was standing behind Sammann’s chair looking over his shoulder. “Those four who are bringing up the rear,” she said, “they are avout.”

Until now we’d only had eyes for the high priest and his three acolytes. The other half of the crew didn’t do much: just walked in single file from the building to the coach. “What makes you say that?” I asked. “That is, other than the fact that they show zero interest in the guy with the rope. There is nothing to mark them as avout.”

“Yes there is,” Cord said. “The way they walk.”

“What are you talking about!? We’re all bipeds! We all walk the same way!” I protested. But Sammann had twisted around in his chair to grin up at Cord. He nodded enthusiastically.

“You two are nuts,” I said.

“Cord is right,” Sammann insisted.

“It couldn’t have been more obvious at Apert,” Cord said. “Extras swagger and slouch. They walk like they own the place.” She got out from behind the chair and strode down the middle of the room in a rolling, easy gait. “Avout-and Ita-are more self-contained.” She drew herself up and walked back to us with quick steps, not moving any air.

As crazy as this sounded, I had to admit that during Apert I’d been able to tell extras apart from fraas and suurs at a distance, partly based on how they moved. I turned my attention back to the screen. “Okay, I’ll give you that one,” I said. “The more I look at them, the more familiar that gait seems to me. Especially the tall one bringing up the rear. He is a dead ringer for-”

I couldn’t get a word out for a few moments. Everyone looked at me to see if I was okay. I couldn’t take my eyes off that speely. I watched it four more times, and each time I grew more certain of what-of who-I was seeing.

“Jesry,” I said.

“Oh, my god!” Cord exclaimed.

“His blessings and mercy upon you,” hissed Ganelial Crade, as was his custom when anyone used that word in an oath.

“That is absolutely your friend,” Cord said.

“Fraa Jesry is in space with the Warden of Heaven!” I shouted, just to hear it.

“I’m sure they are having some fascinating discussions,” said Sammann.

A couple of hours later, after we’d covered the windows and tried to sleep, the place began to hum and rumble, and there came a jerk that made half of our stuff fall to the floor. Gnel and I unzipped the legs of our suitsacks and ran out to the catwalk and looked down to see rimes of ice exploding into sparkling clouds as they were crushed by imperceptible shifting of the tread segments. We scurried to the end of the catwalk where a stair led down to near snow level, jumped off, got the three-wheeler started, and buzzed back to the flatbed. Explosive bangs resonated up and down the train as the locomotive budged forward and began to draw up slack. A couple of the flatbed’s boarding-ramps were dragging on the ice so that last-minute loading could proceed-it would be half an hour before the train was really moving. We blasted up one of these, veered around a drummon that was back-and-forthing into a tight slot, and found our way to Gnel’s fetch. We ran the three-wheeler up the plank ramps and stowed the planks under the fetch. Then we spent a while draining the coolants from all three vehicles’ engines and storing it in poly jugs. By the time we were finished, the train was moving faster than we could walk in snowshoes, so we made our way forward along the system of catwalks that skirted the sledges and linked them together. Cord and Yul had pulled up the window-coverings to let the sun in, and were cooking a big celebratory breakfast. We were on our way to the North Pole. I was glad of that. But when I thought of Fraa Jesry in orbit I couldn’t have felt more in the wrong place.

“Bastard!” I said. “That bastard!”

Everyone looked at me. We had pushed back from what, in these circumstances, counted as a huge breakfast.

Yulassetar Crade looked at Cord as if to say, Your sib…your problem.

“Who? What?” Cord asked.

“Jesry!”

“A few hours ago you were about to start weeping over Jesry. Now he’s a bastard?”

“This is so typical,” I said.

“He gets launched into space frequently?” Sammann asked.

“No. It’s hard to explain, but…of all of us, he is the one they would pick.”

“Who’s they?” Cord asked. “Obviously this was not a Convox operation.”

“True. But the Sæcular Power must have gone to the hierarchs at Tredegarh and said ‘give us four of your best’ and this is what they came up with.” I shook my head.

“You must be proud…a little bit,” Cord tried.

I put my hands over my face and sighed. “He gets to go meet aliens. I get to ride on a junk train.” Then I uncovered my face and looked at Gnel. “What do you know about the Warden of Heaven?”

Gnel blinked. He froze for a moment. I had been avoiding religion for so long, and now I’d asked him a direct question about it! His cousin exhaled sharply and looked away, as if he were about to witness a traffic accident.

“They are heretics,” he said mildly.

“Yes, but almost everyone is to you, aren’t they?” I said. “Can you be any more specific?”

“You don’t understand,” Gnel said. “They aren’t just any heretics. They are an offshoot of my faith.” He looked at Yul. “Of our faith.” Cord elbowed Yul just in case he’d missed this.

“Really?” I asked. “An offshoot of the Samblites?” This was news to the rest of us.

“Our faith was founded by Saunt Bly,” Gnel claimed.

“Before or after you ate his-”

“That,” said Gnel, “is an ancient lie invented to make us seem like a bunch of savages!”

“It’s almost impossible to saute a human liver without bruising it,” Yul put in.

“Are you saying that Saunt Bly turned into a Deolater? Like Estemard?”

Gnel shook his head. “It’s a shame you didn’t have an opportunity to talk more with Estemard. He isn’t a Deolater as you would define it-or as I would. Neither was Saunt Bly. And that’s where we differ from the Warden of Heaven people.”

“They think Bly was a Deolater?”

“Yes. Sort of a prophet, according to them, who found a proof of the existence of God and was Thrown Back because of it.”

“That’s funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we’d just tell him ‘nice proof, Fraa Bly’ and start believing in God,” I said.

Gnel gave me a cool stare, letting me know he didn’t believe a word of it. “Be that as it may,” he said levelly, “it’s not the version put out by the Warden of Heaven.”

My mind went back to Apert Eve and the discussion of iconographies with Grandsuur Tamura. “This is an instance of the Brumasian Iconography,” I said.

“What?”

“The Warden of Heaven is putting out the story that there is a secret conspiracy in the mathic world.”

“Yes,” Gnel said.

“Something of great import-in this instance, the existence of God-has been discovered. Most of the avout are pure of heart and want to spread the news. But they are cruelly oppressed by this conspiracy which will stop at nothing to preserve the secret.”

Gnel was getting ready to say something cautious but Yul spoke first: “You nailed it.”

“That is disheartening,” I said, “because of all the iconographies, the ones based on conspiracy theories are the hardest to root out.”

“You don’t say,” Sammann said, looking me in the eye.

I got embarrassed and shut up for a bit. Cord broke the ice: “The Cousins’ ship is still being kept secret. So we don’t know what the Warden thinks about it. But we can guess. They’ll see it as-”

“A miracle,” Yul said.

“A visitation from another world, purer and better than ours,” I guessed.

“Where the evil conspiracy doesn’t exist,” Cord said. “Come to reveal the truth.”

“What about the laser light shining down on the Three Inviolates?” Sammann asked. “How would they interpret that?”

“Depends on whether they know that the Three Inviolates are nuclear waste dumps,” I said.

“What!?” the Crades exclaimed.

“Even if they do know that,” Cord said, “they’d probably give it a more spiritual interpretation.”

Gnel was still a little off balance, but he put in, “The Warden of Heaven sees the Thousanders as the good guys.”

“Of course,” I said. “They know the truth but they can’t get the word out because they’re bottled up by conniving Tenners and Hundreders, is that it?”

“Yes,” Gnel said. “So he would interpret the laser light as-”

“A blessing,” Cord said.

“A benediction,” I said.

“An invitation,” Yul said.

“Boy, are they in for a surprise!” Sammann said delightedly.

“Probably. Maybe. We don’t know. I just hope it isn’t a nasty surprise for Jesry,” I said.

“Jesry the bastard?” Cord said.

“Yeah,” I said, and chuckled. “Jesry the bastard.”

I was feeling good because it felt like we’d gotten through this without having to endure a sermon from Ganelial Crade; but my heart fell into my gut as Cord turned to him and asked, “Where did the Warden part company from your faith, Gnel?” The last part of this sentence was a little rushed and muffled because Yul had playfully reached around her shoulder to clap his hand over her mouth, and she was twisting his fingers backwards as she talked.

“We read the scriptures ourselves in the original Bazian,” Gnel said, “so you might imagine that we are primitive fundamentalists. Maybe we are in that sense. But we aren’t blind to what has happened in the mathic world-Old and New-in the last fifty centuries. The Word of God does not change. The Book does not suffer editing or translation. But what men know and understand outside of the Book changes all the time. That’s what you avout do: try to understand God’s creation without using the direct revelations given to us by God almost six thousand years ago. To us you’re like people who’ve put out your own eyes and are now trying to explore a new continent. You’re grievously handicapped-but for that reason you may have developed senses and faculties we lack.”

After a few moments’ silence, I said, “I’m just going to hold my tongue and not even get into all that is wrong in what you’ve just said. The gist of it seems to be that we aren’t evil or misguided. You think that in the end we’ll agree with the Book.”

“Of course,” said Gnel, “it has to be that way. But we don’t think there’s a secret conspiracy to hide the truth.”

“He believes your confusion is genuine!” Yul translated. Gnel nodded.

“That’s very considerate of you,” I said.

“We preserved the notebooks of Saunt Bly,” Gnel said. “I’ve read them myself. It’s obvious he was no Deolater.”

“Excuse me for saying so,” Sammann said-this was always how he opened when he was going to insult someone-“isn’t it a little nutty for a bunch of Deolaters to found a religion based on the writings of someone they know to have been an atheist?”

“We identify with his struggle,” Gnel said, not the least bit insulted. “His struggle to find the truth.”

“But don’t you already know the truth?”

“We know those truths that are in the Book. Truths not therein we feel but we don’t know.”

“That sounds like something-” I began, then bit my tongue.

“That an avout would say? Like Estemard? Or Orolo?”

“Let’s not bring him into this, please.”

“Fine.” Gnel shrugged. “Orolo kept to himself. Preserved the Discipline, as near as I could tell. I never talked to him.”

Here I had to draw back. Count to ten. Take out the Rake. These people cared about eternal truths. Believed that some-but not all-such truths were written down in a book. That their book was right and the others wrong. This much they had in common with most of the other people who had ever lived. Fine-as long as they left me alone. Now they had this new wrinkle: they drew inspiration from a Saunt of the avout. It was not important that I be able to make sense of this.

“You feel the truth but you don’t know it,” Cord repeated. “Your service the other day, in Samble-we could hear your singing. It was very emotional.”

Gnel nodded. “That’s why Estemard attends-though he doesn’t believe.”

“He’s not intellectually convinced of your arguments,” Cord translated, “but he feels some of what you feel.”

“That’s exactly it!” Ganelial Crade was delighted. A strange thing to relate. But he was. As if he’d found a new convert.

“Well, even for one who doesn’t believe, I can sort of understand the attraction,” Cord said.

I gave her a look. Yul clapped his hands over his face. Cord became defensive. “I’m not saying I’m likely to join this ark. Just that it was remarkable, after driving through the middle of nowhere for hours, to come upon this building where people were gathered together and to feel the emotional bond that they shared. To know that they’ve been doing it for centuries.”

“Our ark, our towns like Samble,” Gnel said, “they are all dying. That’s why those services are so emotionally intense.”

This was the first thing he’d ever said that didn’t bristle with confidence, so we were taken aback by it. Yul took his face out of his hands and blinked at his cousin.

“Dying because of the Warden of Heaven?” Sammann guessed.

“He preaches a simple, unsubtle creed. It spreads like a disease. Those who adopt it turn around and spurn us as if we were the heretics. It is wiping us out,” Gnel said, and aimed a none too friendly look at Yul.

This was all very interesting but I had other stuff to think about. So Estemard has gone off the deep end. Has Orolo?

I recalled the conversation I’d had with Orolo just before the starhenge had been closed-the one about beauty. The one that had saved my life. In retrospect it could be seen as the moment when Orolo’s mind began to crack. As if he had started and I’d stopped being crazy at the same moment.

I shook it off. Orolo had been Thrown Back. He’d had only one place to seek refuge: Bly’s Butte. Once there, he’d observed the Discipline. No singing in the ark for him. And he had gotten out of the place as soon as he’d been able to.

Well-

Wait a minute. Not as soon as he’d been able to. He had departed for the north only a couple of days before we had-the morning after the lasers had shone down upon the Three Inviolates. Why would that cause him to pack up his bolt, chord, and sphere, and hurry to Ecba, of all places?

Maybe in a few days I could just ask him.