Anathem

Mahsht was four times the size of the city around Saunt Edhar, and as such was the biggest city I’d yet been to in my peregrination-or my life, for that matter. To the great consternation of the regulars on this ship-the men who journeyed in transports like this one to and from the Arctic all the time-we were not given leave to enter the harbor and tie up at a pier as usual. Instead we had to stand off and keep station in the outer harbor. Word filtered down from the bridge that Mahsht had been thrown into disarray by the military convoys and that novel arrangements were being worked out from hour to hour.

I spent much of that day abovedecks, just looking at the place, and enjoying being in a part of the world where the weather wasn’t trying to kill me. Even though Mahsht was farther north than Edhar, at fifty-seven degrees of latitude, its climate was moderate because of a river of warm water in the ocean. Having said that, it wasn’t warm, just dependably chilly. You could be comfortable if you wore a jacket and stayed dry. Staying dry could be a bit of a project.

Mahsht was built around a fjord that forked into three arms. Each arm supported different kinds of facilities. One was military, and quite busy. One was commercial. It had been built around the end of the Praxic Age to handle cargo in steel boxes and hadn’t changed much since then. Normally our ship would have put in at a passenger terminal in that district. The third was the oldest. It had been built up out of stone and brick a thousand years before the Reconstitution, during the age when ships moved under power of wind and were unloaded by hand. Apparently there was still a demand for such facilities because smaller vessels went in and out of its stone docks all the time.

The old town and the port facilities were built on filled tide flats, incised with networks of canals, narrow and irregular in Old Mahsht, gridded lanes in the commercial and military sectors. Much of the land that separated the arms of the fjord was too steep to build on. The spires and ridges of stone supported ancient castles, luxury casinos, and radar stations. The territory outside of town was steeper yet: a misty green-black wall with unrecognizable constructs scraped out of it, hanging at crazy angles a mile in the sky. Alwash explained to me that these were places where people paid to slide downhill on packed snow. It didn’t appeal to me at the moment.

After a day, a tug came out and brought us to a wharf in Old Mahsht. According to the regulars, this had never happened before-they always went to the “new” commercial district. So, as much as I was absorbed in the workings of the tug and the shifting views of Old Mahsht’s warehouses, arks, cathedrals, and town center, I had now to give some thought to how I was going to find Cord, Sammann, Gnel, and Yul-or how I could help them find me. Should I walk to the commercial port on the assumption they’d be waiting for me there? Or would they have already heard about the disruptions in traffic and be looking for me in Old Mahsht?

As soon as I came down the gangplank it was clear that Old Mahsht was the right place. Since the military part of town could not tolerate disarray and the commercial part found it unprofitable, all of the chaos had been pushed into the old town, which had become the kingdom of broken plans and improvisations. All of the city’s proper lodgings had been claimed by contractors from the south who were involved in this project of moving the military north, so people were sleeping in mobes and fetches, or on the streets. Against them, all doors were locked and many were guarded, so they were channeled into such open places as could be found, such as the tops of the wharves, unbuilt stretches of tide flat, and lots where ancient warehouses had been demolished to make room for new projects that had never been realized. This is what the gangplank spewed me into. I shuffled down the ramp scanning the crowd for my friends. The longer I sought their faces, the lower I was pushed on the ramp and the less I could see. Then I was down in it and could see nothing. Having no plan, I let the currents of the multitude stir me around. When I sensed still pockets or eddies in the flow I sidled into them and stood and looked about. From what I’ve described so far you might think it was a scene of terrible poverty, but the more I observed the more it was plain to me that there was work to be had here, that people had come to find it, and that what I was seeing-what I had become part of-was a kind of prosperity. Young men queued to talk to important fellows who I assumed were buyers of labor. Many others had come to sell goods or services to those who’d found work, so people were cooking food in carts or on open fires, hawking mysterious effects from the pockets of their coats, or behaving in very strange ways that, as I slowly realized, meant that they were willing to sell their bodies. Old road-worn passenger coaches nudged through the crowds at slower than walking pace to discharge or take on passengers. The only wheeled transport that seemed to be of any practical use were pedal-powered cycles and motor scooters. Preachers of diverse arks commandeered pinch-points in the flow and shouted gospels and prophecies into crackling amps. There was a lot of uncollected garbage and open-air defecation, which made me glad it wasn’t warmer.

The generous climate had long attracted immigrants, who came from all over the world, singly or in waves, and climbed up into fjords or mountain valleys to live as they pleased. Over time they developed their own modes of dress and even distinct racial characteristics. I bought food from a cart-it was easily the best food I’d had since my last supper at Saunt Edhar-and stood there eating it and watching the pageant. Long-haired mountain men, always alone. A huge family, moving in a tight formation, males in broad-brimmed hats, females in face-veils. A multi-racial group, all wearing red T-shirts, every head-men’s and women’s alike-shaved clean. A race, if that was the right word, of tall people with bony noses and prematurely white hair, hawking fresh shellfish packed in poly crates full of seaweed.

After I’d been off the ship for an hour, it had become evident that meeting up with Cord, Sammann, and the Crades could easily take more than one day. I started considering where I might sleep that night-for I had at last reached a latitude where the sun went down for a few hours at this time of year. I knew that there were no great concents this far north. But in a city as old as this one there had to be at least one small math-perhaps even one dating to the Old Mathic Age. Wondering if I should try to seek one out and talk my way in, I walked up a broad street that ran from the waterfront up to the Bazian cathedral, scanning the fronts of old buildings for Mathic architecture or anything that looked like a cloister.

Clamped to a black iron lamp post I noticed a speelycaptor, and this put me in mind of Sammann and his ability to obtain data from such devices. Perhaps I’d been going about this in the wrong way. It could be that Sammann was tracking me on speelycaptors but that my friends hadn’t been able to catch up with me because I kept moving around. So I decided to remain still for a while in a conspicuous place and see if that helped. I had just bumped into Malter and Alwash, who had given me the address of a Kelx mission hostel where I might be able to sleep in a pinch, and as long as I had such a backup plan I thought it might be worth the gamble to sit and wait somewhere. I chose a spot in the open plaza before the cathedral, in direct view of a speelycaptor bracketed to the front of Old Mahsht’s town hall.

That’s where I got mugged.

Or at least I thought it was a mugging at first. My attention had been drawn to a street performer doing gymnastics about fifty feet away. “Hey, Vit!” someone said, behind me on the right. I turned my face straight into an onrushing fist.

While I was down, someone jerked my sweater up out of my trousers to bare my midsection. For some reason I thought of Lio, who’d been defeated at Apert when the slines had pulled his bolt over his head. So instead of protecting my face as I ought to have done I made a clumsy effort to push my sweater back down where it belonged. Someone’s hands were busy down there, jerking something out of the waistband of my trousers.

It was my bolt, chord, and sphere. I’d made them up into a neat package and stuffed them into my trousers for safekeeping and covered them with the sweater.

Ground level makes for a lousy vantage point. Especially when you’re on one side in a fetal position looking up out of the corner of one eye. But it seemed as though two men were playing tug-of-war with the package they’d stolen from me, trying to get it apart. The chord spiraled off and the bolt, which I’d pleated into a configuration called the Eight-fold Envelope, fell open. Out tumbled my pilled-up sphere. I caught it on the second bounce. A foot smashed down on my hand. “He’s trying to use it!” someone cried. A man dropped on me, one knee to either side. At this point a reflex took over. Lio had taught me that once I’d been mounted I’d never get up again, and so when I sensed what was happening I twisted sideways, getting my back up and my belly down, and drew my knees up under me, so that by the time this guy’s weight landed on me I was presenting my butt to him rather than my belly, and I had my legs under me where I could use them. My hand was still pinned to the ground by someone’s foot, but my sphere was trapped between my hand and the pavement. I made it bigger. The expanding sphere forced the man’s foot up, and when it became head-sized his foot rolled right off and my hand came free. I planted that hand under me and pushed as hard as I could with both arms and legs. The guy on top of me wrapped his arms around my trunk as I came up but I grabbed one of his pinkies in my fist and jerked it back. He screamed and let go. I surged forward without looking back. “He used a spell on me!” someone screamed. “The vout cast a spell on me!”

Part of me-not the wiser part-wanted to explain to that guy what an idiot he was being, but most of me just wanted to put distance between myself and these mysterious attackers. How had they known I had been using the name Vit? I turned back to look at them. My passage through the crowd had left an open space in my wake. Several men were charging into it, coming for me. I’d never seen them before. There was something familiar in their faces, though: they belonged to the same ethnic group as Laro and Dag. Gheeths, as Brajj had called them.

They were having trouble keeping up with me but I could not outrun their voices: “Stop him! Stop the vout!” This didn’t seem to have much effect. But then they got cleverer. “Murderer! Murderer! Stop him!” It turned out that this only made things easier for me since no one wanted to get in the way of a large, sprinting murderer. So then it became: “Thief! Thief! He stole an old lady’s money!” That was when the crowd closed in and people started sticking legs out to trip me.

I jumped over a few of those, but it was obvious I had to get out of this crowded square, so I dodged into the first street I could reach that led away from it, then into an alley off that street. This was so narrow I could touch both sides, but at least I didn’t have the feeling any more of being engulfed in a huge and hostile mob.

I heard the buzz of scooter engines. They were tracking me. Local scooter boys who knew the alley network were maneuvering to cut me off at the next intersection.

I tried a few doors but they were locked. Then I made the mistake of doing so in view of an armed guard who was standing in front of a money-changing house a few doors up. He unslung a weapon and muttered something into his collar. I backtracked, took the next side-alley that I could find, and ran down it for a hundred yards to a place where it bridged a narrow canal. A couple of scooter boys pulled up to block the bridge just as I reached it. Glancing down I saw some mucky canal-bottom exposed. The tide must be out. I jumped down without thinking, landed and rolled in the soft mud, felt pain but didn’t break anything as far as I could tell. To one direction the canal curved back toward the town square. The other direction led to open sky: the waterfront. I began running that way, thinking that if I could get to the beach I might steal or beg a ride on a small boat. Even swimming would be safer than being in the middle of that crowd.

But I couldn’t run very fast in the muck. And I was exhausted anyway. I’d forgotten to breathe. Bridges spanned the canal every couple of hundred feet, and I began to see people gathering on the bridges ahead of me, pointing at me excitedly.

I turned around to see a bigger crowd on the bridge behind. They had bottles and stones ready. Trying to run under those bridges would be suicide. The canal wall was vertical but the stonework was ancient and rough-cut; I tried to scale it. Scooter noise zeroed in on me and something hit me on the top of the head.

I woke up some time after landing in knee-deep water in the middle of the canal, and came up howling for air only to get hit by a dozen stones and bottles in as many seconds.

“Stop! Stop! The vout isn’t going anywhere! Keep him penned in,” said some kind of self-appointed leader: a stout Gheeth with shaggy hair. “Our witness is almost here!” he proclaimed.

So we all waited for the “witness.” The crowd sorted itself. Most of them had been random people who had been drawn to the bridges or the canal-brink by simple curiosity or out of the belief that they were helping to collar a purse-snatcher. But those sorts drifted away or were pushed aside by new arrivals: Gheeths with jeejahs. So by the time that the witness arrived on the back of a pedal-powered cab, a minute or so later, a hundred percent of those staring down at me were Gheeths. And none of them believed that I was a purse-snatcher. What did they believe? I doubted most of them even cared.

The witness was Laro. His leg was in a military-issue cast. “That is him! I’ll never forget his face. He used vout sorcery to save himself-but left our kinsman Dag for dead.”

I looked at him like you have got to be kidding but the look on his face was so sincere it made me doubt my own version of the story.

“The cops are coming!” someone warned. Actually, we’d been hearing such warnings the whole time I’d been at bay here. I wished those cops would hurry. But I wasn’t sure they’d treat me any better.

“Let’s get this done!” someone shouted, and looked to the leader, who stepped to the brink. Sidling along next to him was a big guy holding a huge chunk of pavement above his head in both hands and staring at me intently.

The leader pointed down at me. “He’s a vout. Laro testifies to it. These two found the evidence hidden under his clothes!”

Two young Gheeths-the pair who’d mugged me-were pushed to the front of the crowd so vigorously they almost fell in. They had my bolt, chord, and sphere. At the leader’s prompting they raised these up for all to see. The crowd oohed and aahed at the exhibits as if they were nuclear bomb cores.

“The vout has broken the ancient law that keeps his kind apart. He has come among us as a spy. We all know what he did to poor Dag. We can only imagine what fate he had in store for Laro-had Laro not bravely fought his way free of the vout’s snare. Are we going to stand for it?”

“No!” the crowd shouted.

“Are we going to get any justice from the cops?”

“No!”

“But are we going to see justice done?”

“Yes!”

The leader nodded at the big guy with the rock. He flung it down at me so ponderously that I was able to step out of its path with ease. But a score of smaller, faster projectiles came in its wake. Running back and forth just to make myself a moving target, I caught sight of a stone stairway in the canal about a hundred feet distant. If I could get to its top I’d at least be at street level again-not in this hopeless situation, down below the mob. I ran for it and took several more bottles and rocks in my back, but I had my arms folded behind my head to shield it.

I got to the top of those stairs all right, but they were waiting for me there. I’d scarcely ascended to street level before they’d tripped and shoved me down onto the street. One of them fell on me, or maybe it was a clumsy attempt to tackle me. I grabbed the lapel of his jacket and held him there, keeping him on top of me as a shield. People elbowed each other aside to get in and aim kicks at me, but most of them drew up short when they saw one of their own people in the way. Hands reached in to grab him and haul him to his feet. I ended up with his empty jacket clutched in my hand. I tried to get up but was pushed down. I went to a fetal position and clamped my arms over my head.

It was a few seconds later that I heard The Scream.

The Scream was definitely a human voice but it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. The only way I can convey just how disturbing it was, is to say that it fully expressed the way I was feeling. I even wondered, in my panicked and addled state, whether it might have escaped from my own throat. The Scream had the effect of making everyone stand still. They were no longer attacking me, no longer fighting to get within kicking distance. Instead, all stood around trying to figure out where The Scream had come from and what it portended.

I rolled over on my back. A space had opened up around me. Around me, that is, and a shaven-headed man in a red T-shirt.

He stepped toward me and drew something from his pocket that rapidly became large: a sphere. In a second he had expanded it to about five feet in diameter, leaving it somewhat flaccid. He doubled it over me. My head and feet stuck out to either end but the rest of me was shielded against further blows-at least as long as this man stood there holding the sphere in place. A gust of wind could dislodge it. But he took care of that by vaulting to its top and perching on it: a precarious pose even when you attempted it with both feet. He, however, was placing all of his weight on one foot, leaving the other drawn up beneath him. Sometimes, when we’d been younger, we’d tried to stand on our spheres as a kind of childish game. Some adults did it as an exercise to improve their balance and reflexes. This seemed an odd time and place for calisthenics, though.

It did have the useful side-effect of leaving the people around me even more nonplussed than they had been by The Scream. But after a few moments one young man spied my head-a tempting and obvious target-and stepped toward me, drawing back one leg to deliver a kick. I closed my eyes and braced myself. Above me I heard a sharp, percussive sound. I opened my eyes to see my attacker falling backwards. A second later, moisture sprayed into my face: a shower of blood. A few small pebbles or something rattled to the pavement nearby. Blinking the blood out of my eyes, I perceived that they weren’t pebbles but teeth.

Another scream emanated from the edge of the crowd. This one was altogether different. It came from a person who was experiencing an amount of pain that was incredible, in the literal sense; his scream sounded surprised, as in I had no idea anything could be as painful as whatever is happening to me now! This got the attention of everyone except for one Gheeth who was coming toward me and my protector with an odd, fixed grin on his face, drawing a knife from his pocket and flicking it open. This time I got a better view of what happened. The man perched on the sphere above me faked a snap-kick with his free leg and the other waved his knife at where he supposed the kick was going; but before he even knew how badly he’d missed, my protector had grabbed the hand holding the knife and twisted it the wrong way-not simply by flicking his wrist but by jumping off the sphere and doing a midair somersault over the attacker’s arm, whose joints and bones came undone in a series of thuds and pops. The sphere rolled off me. The knife fell to the ground and I tried to clap my hand down on top of it, but too late-my protector kicked it away and it flew over the brink of the canal and disappeared.

I was unshielded. But it hardly mattered because the crowd had all moved in the direction of that horrible, astonished screaming. I pushed myself up on hands and knees and got to a kneeling position.

The source of the screaming was an adult male Gheeth who was being held in some sort of complicated wrestling grip by a shaven-headed woman in a red T-shirt. A similar-looking man of about eighteen was standing at her back, efficiently knocking down anyone who approached. By the time I came in view of all this, the mob had begun to hurl stones at these two. My protector abandoned me and slipped through the crowd to join the other two redshirts and help bat away projectiles. They began to retreat. Most of the mob went after them but some began to edge away; throwing stones at a lone avout might have been good sport for them but they wanted no part of whatever was going on now.

I turned, thinking I might just get out of here now, and found myself staring into the eyes of the Gheeth leader. He had a gun. It was aimed at me. “No,” he said, “we haven’t forgotten about you. Move!” He gestured with the gun in the direction that the crowd seemed to be moving. They were slowly pursuing the retreating redshirts down the edge of the canal toward a more open place a hundred feet away: a square where two streets met at canal’s edge. “Turn around and march,” he commanded.

I turned around and walked toward the square. Most of the mob had gone past us, so I was now in the outer fringes, the back lines, of a crowd of perhaps a hundred, all moving at a trot, then a run, after the three retreating redshirts, who by this point had dragged their hostage all the way into the square as they tried to get away from that overwhelmingly superior force of rock-throwing, knife-waving attackers.

My captor and I entered the square. The canal’s edge was to my left, the square spread away from it to my right. War-cries now sounded from that direction. I’m using the term war-cry here to mean the unearthly scream that the first redshirt had uttered when he’d come out of nowhere to protect me. Now we heard ten of them at once. The first one, as I described, had simply paralyzed everyone. But in a short time we had learned to associate the sound with face-smashing, limb-twisting Vale-lore experts. A battle-line of redshirts had materialized on our right flank; they’d been poised in the square, waiting for the first three to draw us into position. All heads turned toward, all bodies swerved away from them. Each of the redshirts had sent one or two members of the mob down to the pavement with bloody lacerations before we could even take in the image. The line of redshirts pivoted to link up with the first three, who now released the man they’d been torturing. Beginning to understand that they were outflanked on the right and that the square in general was enemy territory, unable to move left because of the canal-edge, the mob turned back, hoping to withdraw the way they’d come. But another salvo of war-cries came from the rear as several redshirts vaulted up out of the canal. They’d been hiding down there, clinging to the rugged canal wall like rock-climbers, and we had unwittingly gone right past them. They sealed off the retreat. The only way out now for the mob was to squirt forward between the canal-edge and the redshirts into the square, or jump down into the canal. As soon as a few had escaped via these routes, everyone wanted to do it, and it flashed into a panic. The redshirts let them go. In a few moments almost all of my attackers had simply disappeared. The two lines of redshirts joined up and contracted to form a sparse ring about twenty feet in diameter. They faced outwards. Their heads never stopped moving. In the middle of the ring were three people: the gun-toting Gheeth leader, I, and a single redshirt who always moved so that he was between me and the muzzle of the gun.

A redshirted woman on the perimeter called out “Fusil” which was a ridiculously archaic Orth word meaning a long-barreled firearm. The redshirts to either side instantly turned their backs on her to look in other directions. Everyone else, though, did what came naturally: followed the woman’s gaze to the top of a parked drummon on the edge of the square. A Gheeth had climbed up there with a long weapon and was training it in our direction. The woman who had called out “Fusil” skipped forward, raising her hands, and did a cartwheel that took her to the lid of a trash container. From there she sprang sideways, rolled, and came up near a drinking fountain on which she planted a foot to shove off and make a violent reversal of direction that took her toward a scraggly tree. She got a hand on that and swung round it, scampered to the top of a bench, disappeared into a little clot of pedestrians, reappeared a moment later sprinting directly toward the man with the gun but in a moment had changed course again to duck behind a kiosk. In this manner she made rapid progress toward the gunman atop the drummon. He was hard-pressed to aim his weapon at her with all these sudden changes in course. If I’d been in his shoes, I couldn’t have fired, even to save my own life, because her gymnastics were so fascinating to watch.

A shot sounded. Not from the man on the drummon and not from the leader in the ring behind me. It came from somewhere else: hard to pin down because it echoed from the fronts of buildings all around the square. My knees buckled.

Five feet away from me, something unpleasant happened to the Gheeth leader; a redshirt had used this distraction as an opportunity to take him down and disarm him.

The woman doing the gymnastics kept moving toward the gunman atop the drummon, who had frozen up and was looking all around trying to identify the source of the shot.

A second shot sounded. The gun spun loose from the would-be sniper’s hands and clattered to the pavement. He grabbed his hand and howled. The redshirt woman stopped with the gymnastics, dropped into a normal sprinting gait, and went straight to the fallen weapon.

“Fusil!” called one of the other redshirts. He pointed across the canal. Again the two flanking him spun about to look in other directions. It took the rest of us a moment to see what he’d seen.

Across the canal was a food cart, prudently abandoned by its owner. A three-wheeler had drawn up behind it, using it and its array of signs and fluttering banners to provide visual cover. One man was operating the three-wheeler’s controls: Ganelial Crade. Another was standing on its passenger platform: Yulassetar Crade. He was carrying a long weapon. He addressed himself to the sniper atop the drummon, bellowing across the canal. “The first shot was to make you freeze,” he explained. “The second was to make you helpless. The third you’re never going to know about. Show me your hands. Show me your hands!”

The Gheeth held up his hands-one of them bloody and misshapen.

“Run away!” Yul howled, and shouldered his rifle.

The Gheeth avalanched down over the front of the drummon, rolled around on the pavement for a few moments, then came up at a run.

“Raz, we gotta go!” Yul called. “The rest of you in the red shirts-whoever or whatever you are-you’re welcome to come with. Maybe you want to be getting out of town as bad as we do.”

There was a bridge over the canal at the square. Gnel zipped over it and came towards me. The circle of redshirts parted to let him in. He passed through the gap, eyeing them a little nervously, and pulled up alongside me. I wasn’t moving too well. Yul bent down over me, grabbed my belt in his fist, just behind the small of my back, and heaved me aboard the three-wheeler like an unconscious rafter being pulled out of a river. It was extremely crowded now on this tiny vehicle. Gnel made a careful, sweeping turn into the square and headed up a street. He was wearing earphones plugged into a jeejah. Sammann must be feeding him instructions.

The redshirts followed us, jogging beside and behind the three-wheeler. Apparently they saw good sense in Yul’s point that it was time to get out of town. Once it became clear which way we were going, they picked up the pace and threatened to outrun the three-wheeler, prompting Gnel to give it a little more throttle. Before long they were sprinting. We covered a mile in a few minutes, and came into a district of railway lines and warehouses that wasn’t as crowded as the center of Old Mahsht. It was possible for full-sized vehicles to move about normally on the streets here. A pair of them came out of nowhere and nearly ran us down: Yul’s and Gnel’s fetches, driven by Cord and by Sammann respectively.

As we later established, the redshirts numbered twenty-five. We somehow got all of them onto the two fetches and the three-wheeler. I’d never seen people packed so tight. We had redshirts on the roof of Yul’s fetch, elbows linked together to keep them from falling off.

Cord took all of this pretty calmly, considering that she couldn’t have known, until just before they piled into the fetch, that she was going to be transporting a dozen and a half vlor experts in red T-shirts. As she drove us out of there, she kept looking over at me aghast. “It’s okay,” I told her. “They are avout-they must have been Evoked. I don’t know what math they are from-obviously one that specializes in vlor-maybe an offshoot of Ringing Vale or some such-”

Behind me, an amused redshirt translated all of that into Orth and got a round of chuckles.

I got embarrassed. Horribly, mud-on-the-head embarrassed.

These people were from the Ringing Vale.

I tried to turn back to look at them but something impeded movement. Groping to explore, I discovered three hands, belonging to Valers behind or beside me, pressing wads of blood-soaked fabric against my face and scalp. Lacerations. I hadn’t been aware of them. It wasn’t the strangers crammed into her fetch that so disturbed Cord; it was my face.

During most of this I’d been having the wrong emotions. At the very beginning when the two Gheeths had mugged me, I’d been scared. Appropriately. That’s why I’d run away. Then I had convinced myself that I could handle this somehow. I could evade the mob in streets or canals. I could talk some sense into Laro, plead my case. They didn’t really mean to kill me; this couldn’t be happening. The cops would get here any minute. Next had come a sort of dazed acceptance of my fate. Then the fraas and suurs of the Ringing Vale had arrived. Everything after that had been fascinating and sort of exhilarating, and I had surfed through it on some sort of chemical high: my body’s reaction to injury and stress. A minute ago I’d greeted Cord with a big bloody hug as though nothing had happened.

A few minutes into the drive, though, I fell apart. All of my injuries began sending pain to my brain, like soldiers sounding off at roll call. Whatever convenient substances my glands had been squirting into my bloodstream were withdrawn, cold turkey. It was as if a trapdoor had opened beneath me. Just like that I became a shivering, weeping tangle of nerves, squirming and grunting in pain.

Twenty minutes’ drive, under Sammann’s direction, took us to a site on the left bank of a big river that flowed from the mountains down into the Old Mahsht fjord branch. It looked as though it might have been a broad sandbar in some earlier age, but had long ago been paved over and played host to a succession of industrial complexes, now in ruins. At one end of it was a recreational boat ramp and picnic ground with a couple of smelly latrines. We pulled in there and scared off some holiday-makers. I was carried out of Yul’s fetch and laid out flat on a picnic table that they’d covered with camping pads to make it soft, and tarps to protect the camping pads from whatever was leaking out of me. Yul opened his medical kit, which like all of his other gear was not store-bought but improvised from found objects. Into a big, heavy-gauge poly bag he dumped white powder from a poly tube: salt and germicide. Then he filled it up with a couple of gallons of tap water and shook it for a minute, producing a sterilized normal saline solution. He tucked the bag under his arm and squeezed it hard against his ribs, shooting out a jet of fluid that he aimed into my wounds to flush them out. Picking a wound, he would yank off the gauze and sluice it until I screamed, then give it another thirty seconds. Gnel followed in his wake, working with something smelly. As he was using it on my split eyebrow I realized it was a tube of glue-the same stuff you’d use to stick the handle back onto a broken teacup. Wounds too big to glue were bridged with glass-fiber packing tape. At one point a Ringing Vale suur dug into me with a sewing needle and a length of fishing line from Gnel’s tackle box. Once a wound had been hit with glue, tape, or fishing line, someone in a red T-shirt would slap petroleum jelly on it and cover it with something white. A Ringing Vale fraa, obviously a masseur, went over my whole body without so much as a by-your-leave, looking for broken bones and hemorrhages. If my spleen wasn’t ruptured when he got to it, it was by the time he moved on to my liver. His verdict: mild concussion, three cracked ribs, spiral fracture of one arm bone, two small broken bones in one hand, and I could expect to pee blood for a while.

Enough time had gone by for me to be ashamed of how I’d fallen apart during the drive, so I put a lot of effort into not screaming any more than was strictly necessary. For some reason I was thinking of Lio. He’d worshipped all things Vale since before he’d even been Collected. He’d tracked down every book at Saunt Edhar that came from there, or that had been written by people who claimed to have visited the Vale or been beaten up by Valers. He’d have died of shame to know that I’d been less than totally immune to pain in the presence of these people.

Conversations I was dying to be a part of were taking place just out of earshot. Once they finished gluing my head together, I could look about and see Sammann talking to a senior fraa from the Vale, and a suur consoling Cord, who broke out crying whenever she turned her face in my direction. After a while, when it was decided I was going to live and so might be worth talking to, Fraa Osa-the First Among Equals of the Valers-came over to talk to me. With the exception of the seamstress, who was making long tedious work of a rambling slash on my calf, the wound-fixers raked up all their litter and drifted away. Yul went over and bear-hugged Cord and practically carried her over to the edge of the river where she had a good long soaking cry.

“Yesterday we were Evoked,” said Fraa Osa. He was the first redshirt I had seen during the melee: the one who had covered me with his sphere and perched on it one-legged. He was probably in his fifth decade. “They said we should go to Tredegarh. We consulted a globe and determined that the most efficient route was via Mahsht.”

The Ringing Vale was a hundred or so miles outside of Mahsht. From there a great circle route across the ocean would take one almost to Tredegarh, so this made sense as far as it went.

“Local people gave us transportation to Mahsht. We found it as you found it. Those of us who speak Fluccish sought transport on a ship. We were approached by your magister.”

“My magister!?” I shouted. Then I saw the faintest trace of irony on Osa’s face. He was half joking.

But only half. “Sark,” he said. “He is well known to us. He comes to our Aperts, and speaks to us of his ideas.” Osa shrugged and made a gentle bobbling motion with his hands, which I thought was his way of telling me that they tried to weigh Sark’s preaching fairly. “In any case, he recognized us in the street. He told us that a lone avout was being pursued by a mob. We saw it as an emergence.”

For a moment I thought he was slipping into broken Fluccish, trying to pronounce emergency. Then I remembered some of the Vale-lore that Lio had drummed into me over the years.

During the time of the Reconstitution, literally in the Year 0, when the sites of the first new maths were being surveyed so that the cornerstones of their Clocks and Mynsters could be laid down, a team of freshly sworn-in avout had journeyed to a remote place in the desert to begin such a project, only to find themselves under siege by mistrustful locals. For the place they’d been sent was covered with jumpweed plantations and they had stumbled upon a shack where the weed was being boiled down to make a concentrated, illegal drug. The avout were unarmed. They had been pulled together from all over the world and so had little in common with one another; most of them didn’t even speak Orth. But it so happened that several of them were students of an ancient school of martial arts, which back in those days had no connection with the mathic world, even if it had been developed in monastic settings. Anyway, they had never used their skills outside of a gym, but they now found themselves thrust into a position where they had to take action. Some of their number were killed. Some of the martial artists performed well, others froze up and did no better than those who’d had no training at all. That sort of situation became known as an emergence. A few of the survivors went on to found the Ringing Vale math. According to Lio, they spent almost as much time thinking about the concept of emergence as they did in physical training-the idea being that all the training in the world was of no use, maybe even worse than useless, if you did not know when to use it, and knowing when to use it was a lot harder than it sounded, because sometimes, if you waited too long to go into action, it was too late, and other times, if you did it too early, you only made matters worse.

“The most salient feature of the enemy was its thoughtless aggression,” Fraa Osa said. He reached into air and closed his hand as though grasping the wrist of an attacker who’d tried to punch him. It was an eloquent gesture, which was convenient for me, since Fraa Osa did not seem inclined to say more than that about the strategy they had used.

“You reckoned, as long as they are in such a mood, let’s really give them something to be aggressive about,” I said, trying to draw him out a little more. Fraa Osa smiled and nodded. “So you grabbed that one person and started, uh…”

Here for once I broke off instead of telling the truth, which was that they had been torturing that Gheeth. I didn’t want to seem critical towards these people who had just risked their lives saving mine. Fraa Osa just kept smiling and nodding. “It is a nerve pressure technique,” he said. “It seems to hurt a lot, but does no damage.”

This raised all sorts of interesting questions: was there really a difference between hurting, and seeming to hurt? Was it permissible to torture someone if it didn’t cause clinical injuries? But again there were all sorts of reasons not to pursue such questions now. “Well, anyway, it worked,” I said. “The mob turned against you-you staged a false retreat and drew them into a trap-then you made them panic.” More smiling and nodding. Fraa Osa simply was in no mood to wax eloquent about any of this. “And how long did you have in which to devise this plan?” I asked him.

“Not long enough.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There is no time in an emergence to think up plans. Much less to communicate them. Instead I told the others that we would emulate Lord Frode’s cavalry at Second Rushy Flats, when they drew out Prince Terazyn’s squadron. Except that the canal edge would substitute for the Tall Canes and that little square would take the place of Bloody Breaks. As you can see it does not take very much time to say these words.”

I nodded as if I had some idea what he was talking about-which I didn’t. I couldn’t even guess which war he was alluding to, in what millennium.

“What’s with the red T-shirts?” I asked, though I already had my suspicions. Fraa Osa grinned ruefully. “They were issued to us at Voco,” he said. “Donated by a local ark. I look forward to reaching Tredegarh so that I can go back to the bolt and chord.”

“Speaking of which-”

He shook his head. “Your bolt, chord, and sphere are lost. Perhaps we could have gotten them back-but we departed in some haste.”

“Of course!” I said. “Not a big deal.” And it wasn’t, in one sense. Fraas and suurs lost theirs from time to time. New ones were issued. But losing mine in this way made me feel pretty bad. They’d been with me for more than ten years and they had a lot of memories associated with them. They’d been my last physical link to the Mathic world. Now that they were gone, I could be any old Sæcular. Which might be safer-no one could yank them out from concealment and wave them around and try to lynch me. But it made me feel lonely.

Sammann went over and had a few words with Yul who jumped up, fetched the rifle, grabbed it by the barrel, and after a few running steps gave it a mighty heave. Spinning end-over-end it flew about halfway across the river, then stabbed into the current and disappeared. About a minute later, two mobes full of Mahsht constables showed up and piled out of their wailing and flashing vehicles. Except for Fraa Osa and the suur who was sewing me together, all of the Ringing Vale avout sat on the ground, feet tucked under them, and looked serene. The constables mostly gaped at them. How many thousands of speelies had been produced about the fictional exploits of the Valers? The cops couldn’t begin to think of them as suspects. They saw them more as tourist attractions. Zoo animals. Movie stars. What’s more, the Valers knew as much, and knew how to exploit it. They showed us the meaning of posture, and pretended to meditate. The cops ate it up. The boss cop had a long and (at first) tense conversation with Yul and Fraa Osa. The suur with the needle kept running that string through my flesh and I gritted my teeth so hard I could hear them creaking. Finally she tied it off and walked away without a word-without even a look. I had an upsight: I might have warm feelings for these people because they had helped me and because I had seen way too many speelies about them before I’d been Collected. The Valers, however, had not been Evoked because they were nice guys.

Cord came over and stood with her hands in her pockets taking inventory of my bandages.

“See what a small percentage of my body they actually cover,” I pointed out.

She was having none of it.

“Our plan didn’t work out so well,” I offered.

She looked off to the side and sniffled-the last emotional aftershock of a long day. “Not your fault. How could we have known?”

“I’m sorry to have put you through this. I don’t understand how things could have gone so wrong.”

She looked at me acutely and saw nothing, I guess, except for a stupid look on my face. “You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you?”

“I guess not. Just that the military has been moving toward the pole.” A memory popped into my head. “And a magister on the ship made some weird comment about the Warden of Heaven being cast out in wrath.”

Even as I was saying this, an old rattletrap coach was pulling in off the road. At its controls was Magister Sark. It was one of those freakish coincidences that made some people believe in spirits and psychic phenomena. I explained it away by supposing that my unconscious mind had seen the coach out of the corner of my eye a few moments before I’d consciously recognized him.

“You still with me?” Cord asked.

“Yeah. Hey-what about Jesry? Is he okay?”

“We think so. We’ll get you caught up.”

We looked over at Yul, who had somehow managed to get the police captain laughing. Something had been decided between them. The official part of the conversation was over.

The captain came over and made a few appreciative remarks about how banged up I was and what a tough guy I must be, then asked if I wanted to pursue it-to press charges. Absolutely lying through my teeth, I said no. By doing so, I apparently closed a deal. The particulars were never explained to me, but the gist of it was that all of us were free to go. The leaders of that mob would get off free except for injuries and insults already suffered. And these constables would dodge a mountain of paperwork: paperwork that would have been ten times as bad as what they were used to simply because many of those concerned were avout and hence of tricky legal status.

Magister Sark had not been idle during all of these other goings-on. The coach belonged to his Kelx in Mahsht; it was painted all over with Triangle iconography. It was large enough to transport all of the Valers. Some other member of his Kelx had volunteered to drive them south to a bigger city, less chaotic than Mahsht at the moment, whence they could arrange transport to Tredegarh. This driver, he explained, was on his way, but because of the difficult conditions in town, we might have to wait for a little while.

The magister glanced at me as he was explaining these things, and for some reason I felt a thrill of resentment. I did not like being indebted to him, and did not relish the prospect of having to sit gratefully through another sales pitch for his faith while we waited for the driver to show up. But it seemed he was more interested in checking my status than starting a conversation, and as soon as he stopped looking my way I felt ashamed of the way I’d reacted. Was there really that much of a difference between the Kelx notion of having one’s story related to the Magistrate, and the Valers’ concept of emergence? They seemed to produce very similar behavior; I owed my life to the fact that Sark and Osa had been of one mind, earlier today in Mahsht.

I was on my feet by now; I limped over to him, held out my hand, and thanked him. He shook my hand firmly and said nothing.

“The Condemned Man had a good yarn to spin for the Magistrate today,” I said. I guess I was trying to humor him.

His face darkened. “But he could not tell it without speaking too of the ones who behaved evilly. Yes, it is the case that-thanks to the spirit of the Innocent-some good was achieved. But I can scarcely believe that the Magistrate’s ultimate judgment of this world was much shifted, either way, by what he heard from the Condemned Man today.”

Not for the first time I was astonished by Magister Sark’s ability to be intelligent and wise while spouting prehistoric nonsense. “For your own part, anyway,” I pointed out, “it seems you chose in a way that reflects well on you and your world.”

“The Innocent moved me,” he insisted. “Give all credit to her.”

“I give you my personal thanks,” I said, “and ask you to relay it to the Innocent the next time you hear from her.”

He shook his head in exasperation, then finally chuckled; though such a grim fellow was he that his chuckle was something between a gag and a cough. “You don’t understand at all.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I am in no shape for Dialog right now, but perhaps some other time I can try to explain to you how I see all of these matters.”

His reaction was noncommittal, but he understood that the conversation was over. He wandered away. I collected some blank paper from Yul’s fetch and began to scribble out notes to my friends at the Convox. Magister Sark got into a long conversation with Yul and Cord, interrupted from time to time by Ganelial Crade, who of course belonged to a completely different faith, and who paced back and forth at a distance, fuming, then darted in from time to time to dispute some fine point of deology.

A mobe swung through, dropped off the driver who would take the Valers south, and picked up Magister Sark. The Valers began to find seats aboard the coach. Fraa Osa was the last to board. I handed him a stack of notes. “For my friends at Tredegarh,” I explained, “if you would not mind bearing them.”

He bowed.

“You’ve already done me plenty of favors, so it is okay to say no,” I went on.

“You did us a favor,” he countered, “by creating an emergence nested within the larger emergence, and giving us an opportunity to train.”

I said nothing. I was wondering what he meant by “the larger emergence,” and reckoned he must be talking about the Cousins. He was sifting through the letters I’d given him. “You have many friends at the Convox!” he remarked, and looked up at me quizzically. This was probably an indirect way of asking what the heck are you doing!? but I ignored it. “The long one, there, is for a girl named Ala. The others are for some other fraas and suurs of mine-”

“Aah!” exclaimed Fraa Osa, holding one up. “You know the famous Jesry!”

I didn’t even want to think about what was implied by Jesry’s being famous, so I glided past it and directed his attention to the last letter in the stack. “Lio,” I said, “Fraa Lio is a student of Vale-lore.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed. As if Lio were unique; as if the world, for thousands of years, at any given moment, had not contained millions of vlor students.

“Mostly self-taught. But it is important to him. If this letter were handed to him by even the most junior member of the Ringing Vale math, it would be the greatest honor of his life. Uh, don’t tell him I said that.”

Fraa Osa bowed again. “I shall comply with all of your instructions.” He put his foot on the coach’s running board. “Here I say farewell-unless-?” And he looked between me and the coach.

I fell for it hard. I imagined the long ride on the coach full of authentic Ringing Vale avout, maybe a night or two in a room at a casino down south, a journey-safe and well-organized-to Tredegarh, reunion with my friends there. If these people could somehow get their hands on a plane, it could even happen in a day. I imagined all of that long and hard enough to savor it, to look forward to it.

But I knew it was all a daydream. That I had to pull back. That the longer I kept on this way the harder it was going to be.

“I want to climb on board that thing and go to Tredegarh with you like that water wants to find the ocean,” I said, gesturing to the river. “But to quit in the middle”-just because I’m beat up and homesick and scared-“seems wrong. Fraa Jad-he’s the Millenarian who sent me-would never understand.”

This was the first thing that had happened all day that startled Fraa Osa. “A Thousander,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Then you had best finish the task.”

“That’s kind of what I’m thinking.”

He bowed one more time-more deeply than before. Then he turned his back on me and climbed into the coach. I went to the latrine and peed blood and boarded Yul’s fetch. Sammann was in there too. We pulled on to the main road and turned south. I slept.

They said I only slept for half an hour but it felt much longer. When I woke up I crawled into the back of the fetch, where it was darker, and Sammann showed me a speely on his jeejah.

Sammann was the only member of the crew who didn’t make remarks or ask questions about my injuries and emotional state. This might make it sound like he was insensitive. Frankly, though, I could have done with a lot less sensitivity by that point in the day.

“There is not a lot of explanatory content connected to this data because of the way in which it was obtained,” he warned as he was queueing it up.

The image quality was, as usual, terrible. It took me a minute even to be sure that it had been shot in color. Everything was either solid black (space, and shadows) or blinding white (anything with sun shining on it). As I slowly came to realize, it had been made by aiming a hand-held speelycaptor out a dirty window. “Outgassing,” Sammann said, which meant little to me. He went on to explain that the materials used to build the space capsule had, in the vacuum of space, let go of vaporous byproducts that had congealed on the spacecraft windows. “You’d think they would have solved that problem,” I said. “They built it in a rush,” he answered.

A perfect circle, centered in a perfect equilateral triangle, dominated the view. “It’s the back end of the alien ship,” Sammann explained. “The pusher plate on the rear. They always kept it oriented toward the capsule-think about it.”

After a few moments I tried: “They-the Cousins-couldn’t be sure that our space capsule wasn’t carrying a nuclear warhead. So they kept the nuke-proof part of their ship aimed towards it.”

“That’s part of it,” Sammann said, and gave me a wicked grin-egging me on.

“They could spit one of their own nukes out the back of that thing and blow up the space capsule any time they felt like it.”

“You got it. Also: we can’t get a good look at their ship from this angle. No way to gather military intelligence.”

“Where’s the hole that the nukes come out of?” I asked.

“Don’t bother looking. You can’t see it. It’s tiny compared to the scale of the plate. It’s closed by a shutter when it’s not in use. You won’t be able to see it until it opens.”

“It’s going to open!?”

“Maybe it’s better if we just watch the speely.” Sammann reached in and turned up the volume a bit. The sound track was a roar of ambient noise: whooshes, hums, buzzes, and drones at many different pitches. There was the occasional human word or phrase, shouted over the roar, but people spoke rarely, and when they did it tended to be in terse military jargon.

“Bogey,” someone said, “two o’clock.”

The image veered and zoomed, the big triangle expanding until its edge had become a straight division separating white from black. In the black part a grey blob was discernible: just a mess of pixels a few shades brighter than black. But it got brighter and bigger. “Incoming,” someone confirmed.

The murk of noise took on new overtones. People were conversing. I thought I heard the cadences of an Orth sentence.

“Prepare for egress!” someone commanded, in a voice that meant business. For the first time, the speelycaptor turned away from the window and refocused to show the interior of the space capsule. This view was shockingly crisp, clear, and colorful after the endless dreary shot of the pusher plate. Several people were floating around in a confined space. Some were strapped into chairs before consoles. Some were gripping handles, the better to keep their faces pressed against windows. One of these was definitely Jesry. In the middle of the capsule was the big man with the hairdo. He didn’t look good. Weightlessness had made his hair go funny. His face was swollen and greenish; I could tell he was nauseated. He looked tired and uncaring-maybe from anti-nausea drugs? His impressive clothes were gone, revealing all sorts of things about his physique that no one except for his doctor really needed to know. A couple of people were striving to fit him into an outlandish garment consisting of a network of tubes in a matrix of stretchy fabric. It seemed that this project had been going on for a while, but just now they threw it into high gear and one of the others pushed himself away from a window and flew over to help jerk the thing on. The Warden of Heaven (I didn’t know for a fact that this was he, but it seemed unmistakable) woke up enough to become indignant. He glared at the camera and lifted a finger. One of his aides drifted into position to block the view, and said, “Please give His Serenity some-”

“Some serenity?” cracked Jesry, off-camera.

Testy words were exchanged. The authoritative voice commanded them to shut up. The argument was replaced by technical conversation pertaining to the suit that they were building around the Warden of Heaven’s body. One of the console-watchers called out updates on the approach of the bogey.

Jesry said, “You’re about to become the first person ever to converse with aliens. What is your plan?”

The Warden of Heaven made some brief and indistinct response. He was farther from the microphone, he wasn’t feeling well, and he’d seen enough of Jesry by this point to know that the conversation wasn’t going to end well.

The speelycaptor swung round to point at the Warden again. They’d finished putting the tube-garment around his body and were building a space suit over that, one limb at a time.

Off-camera, Jesry answered: “How do you know that the Geometers are even going to recognize that concept?”

Another muffled, noncommittal response from the Warden (who, to be fair, couldn’t talk well because they were mounting a headset on him).

“Geometers?” I asked.

“That’s what people at the Convox have been calling the aliens, apparently,” Sammann said.

“I would try to go in there with a mental checklist of basic observations I wanted to achieve,” Jesry went on. “For example, do they take any precautions against infection? It would be quite significant if they were afraid of our germs-or if they weren’t.”

The Warden of Heaven deflected Jesry’s suggestion with a humorous remark that his aides thought was funny.

“You ever look at bugs under a lens?” Jesry tried. “That’d be good preparation for this. They look so different from anything we normally experience that it’s easy to be kind of stunned and bewildered by their appearance at first. But if you can get past that emotional reaction, you can see how they work. How do they transmit their weight to the ground? Count the orifices. Look for symmetries. Observe periodicities. By which I mean, how often do they breathe? From that, we can make inferences about their metabolism.”

One of the aides cut Jesry short by telling him it was time to pray. The suit was all on now except for the helmet. The Warden’s head-unrecognizable under the earphones, the mike, the heads-up goggles-poked up out of a huge, rigid carapace. He held hands with his aides as best he could through the bulky gloves. They closed their eyes and said something in unison. A loud metallic pop/crunch interrupted them. “Contact,” someone called, “we have been grappled by a remote manipulator.”

The speelycaptor swung past a crew member checking his watch and aimed back out the dirty window to focus on the bogey. This was a skeletal craft, altogether mechanical, no pressurized compartments where a Cousin might ride along: just a frame with half a dozen robot arms of various sizes, and thruster nozzles, spotlights, and dish antennas pointed every which way. One of its arms had reached out and grabbed an antenna bracket on the outside of the capsule.

Things happened fast now. The helmet had already been clamped down over the Warden of Heaven’s head, and crew members had shooed away the aides and were manipulating the suit’s controls. Through the bubble the Warden’s eyes could be seen moving back and forth uncertainly, responding to inscrutable hisses and creaks from the suit as its systems came alive. His lips moved and he nodded and gave thumbs-up signs as communications were tested.

They pushed him through a pressure hatch at one end of the capsule, closed it behind him, and turned a wheel to dog it shut. He was in the airlock.

“Why’s he going alone?” I asked.

“Supposedly that’s how the Cousins-excuse me, the Geometers-wanted it,” Sammann said. “Send one, they said.”

“So we sent him?” I asked incredulously.

Sammann shrugged. “But that’s part of the Geometers’ strategy, isn’t it? If we were allowed to send a whole delegation, we could hedge our bets. But if the whole planet is allowed to send only one representative, whom do we pick? That tells them a lot.”

“Yeah, but why-?”

Sammann cut me off with an even more exaggerated shrug. “You seriously expect me to be able to explain why the Sæcular Power makes the decisions it makes?”

“Okay. Sorry. Never mind.”

Hisses and clanks and terse utterances from the crew signaled the opening of the airlock’s outer door. A small arm unfolded itself from the Geometers’ robot probe and reached toward the ship, out of view of this window. When it drew back, a few moments later, it brought the Warden of Heaven with it. The arm’s steely hand had gripped a metal bracket that projected from the suit’s round shoulder-a lifting point. The Geometers understood our engineering, and knew a bracket for a bracket.

The bogey disengaged from the capsule and fired a puff of gas to get itself drifting away, then, after a few seconds, ignited larger thrusters that accelerated it toward the icosahedron. The Warden of Heaven waved back to us. “Everything is okay,” he announced over the wireless. Then his voice was replaced by a harsh buzzing tone. A crew member turned it down. “They’re jamming us,” he announced. “His Serenity is on his own.”

“No,” said an aide, “God is with him.”

The speelycaptor zoomed in on the Warden, being drawn backwards toward the icosahedron. He was getting harder to see, even at maximum zoom, but it looked like he was gesticulating, tapping his helmet and throwing up his hands in confusion. “Okay, we get it!” Jesry said. “You can’t hear.”

“I’m worried about his pulse. Way too high for a man his age,” said a crew member.

“You’ve still got telemetry?” Jesry asked.

“Just barely. They jammed vox first. Now they are attacking the other channels…nope. Lost it. Bye-bye.”

“The Geometers are some kind of military hardasses,” Sammann said, perhaps unnecessarily.

The video went on with little further commentary until the robot probe and the Warden had shrunk to a tiny cluster of grey pixels. Then it cut out and went to black. Sammann paused it. “In the original, what follows is four hours of basically nothing,” he said. “They just sit there and wait. Your friend Jesry baits the Warden’s toadies into a philosophical debate and crushes them. After that, no one wants to talk. There is only one event of note, which is that after about one hour the jamming stops.”

“Really? So they can talk to the Warden again?”

“I didn’t say that. The jamming signals are turned off, but they can’t get any data from the Warden’s spacesuit. Most likely what it means is that the suit had been shut down.”

“Because something happened to the Warden of Heaven or…”

“Most people think he got out of the suit. Since it was no longer necessary, it was turned off to conserve power.”

“That implies…”

“That the Hedron-as people are calling it-has an atmosphere we can breathe, yes,” Sammann said. “Or that the Warden was dead on arrival.”

“The Warden of Heaven’s dead?”

Sammann started the speely playing again. The time code in the corner had jumped forward a few hours.

“New signal from the Hedron,” announced a tired crew member. “Repetitive pulses. Microwaves. High power. I’d say they are illuminating us with radar.”

“Like they don’t already know where we are!” someone scoffed.

“Cut the chatter!” ordered the voice I’d come to think of as the captain’s. “Do you think they are acquiring us?”

“As in acquiring a target for a weapons launch,” Sammann translated.

“It’s definitely that kind of a narrow-beam signal,” said the other, “but steady-not homing in.”

“Activity on the base plate!” Jesry called. “Dead center.”

The image once again wheeled to the huge circle-in-triangle. Then it zoomed. A dark mote was visible in the center. As the zoom went on, this grew and resolved itself as a circular pore.

“Give us some distance!” the captain ordered.

“Brace for emergency acceleration…three, two, one, now,” said another voice, and then everything went out of whack for a minute. People and stuff flew around. Loud clunks and hisses sounded. Everything that was loose ended up plastered against the bulkhead closest to the icosahedron as the capsule accelerated away from it. The woman holding the speelycaptor did her share of gasping and cursing. But soon enough she got it pointed back out the window. “Something is coming out of that port!” Jesry announced, and once again we were treated to a long, veering zoom-in. But this time the hole wasn’t crisp-edged and black. It was pinkish, its boundaries ill-defined. The pink part was moving; it separated itself from the base of the icosahedron. It had been cast off. It was adrift in space. The hole irised shut behind it.

“That doesn’t look like a nuke,” someone said.

“Understatement of the year,” Sammann muttered.

“Move in on it.”

“Brace for acceleration…three two, one, now.” There was another messy scene as the capsule reversed its direction and began heading back toward the icosahedron. Yet again we had to wait as the indefatigable woman with the speelycaptor made her way back to that tiny, filthy window and re-acquired the shot.

She gasped.

So did I.

“What is it?” asked one of the voices. They couldn’t see what she-what I-could see because they weren’t peering at it through magnifying optics.

“It’s him,” said the woman holding the speelycaptor. “It’s the Warden of Heaven!” She refrained from mentioning one important detail, which was that he was stark naked. “They threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock!”

Sammann stopped it. “That has become the hip catch phrase of the moment,” he told me. “Technically, though, it’s not an airlock. It’s the port where they spit out the little nukes.”

The Warden at this point was still small and poorly resolved, but he had been getting bigger, and I had been steeling myself for what he would look like close-up. “I can keep playing it if you want,” Sammann offered, none too enthusiastically, “or-”

“I’ve seen enough gore for one day, thanks,” I said. “Don’t you explode or something?”

“There was a little bit of that. By the time they got him back into the capsule-well, it was a mess.”

“So the Geometers just-executed him?”

“This is not known. He might have died of natural causes. They found a burst aneurysm on autopsy.”

“I imagine they found a lot of burst stuff!”

“Eew!” Cord said from up front.

“Exactly-so it’s hard to say whether it blew before or after he was thrown out.”

“Have the Geometers sent out any communications since this happened?”

“We’d have no way of knowing that. This speely was leaked. Other than that, the Powers That Be have managed to control information pretty effectively.”

“Is everyone looking at this speely? Does the whole world know about it?”

“The Powers That Be have shut down most of the Reticulum in order to control propagation of this speely,” Sammann said. “So only a few people have seen it. Most people, if they’ve heard anything, have only heard rumors.”

“That’s almost worse than facts,” I said, and told him about Magister Sark. “When did this happen?” I asked.

“While we were going over the pole,” he said. “The capsule landed a day later. Everyone except the Warden was safe and sound. Meanwhile the military had begun moving toward the poles, as you found out.”

“Which makes no sense to me,” I mentioned.

“I’m told that the Hedron is in an orbit that confines its ground track to a belt around the Equator…”

“Yes, and so if you go to the far north or south you can get out from under it-”

“And maybe out of reach of its weapons?”

“Depends on what kind of weapons they are. But the part that doesn’t make sense to me is that the Geometers could change their orbit any time they wanted to. The first few months they were here, they were in a polar orbit, remember?”

“Yes, of course I remember,” Sammann said.

“Then they changed and…”

“And what?” Sammann asked after a while, since I’d gone silent.

“…and I saw-Ala and I saw-light from the nukes that they fired to make that change in their orbit. ‘Plane change maneuvers are expensive.’ For them to change back to a polar orbit now-where they could shoot down on our military forces at the poles-they’d have to fire that many nukes again.” I looked at Sammann. “They’re out of fuel.”

“You mean…out of nukes?”

“Yeah. Nuclear bombs are the fuel that makes the ship go. They can only store so many of them. When they run low, they have to…”

“To go get more,” Sammann said.

“Which means zeroing in on a technically advanced civilization and raiding them. Pillaging their stockpile of nuclear material. Which, in our case, means-”

“Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh,” Sammann said.

“That was the message they were sending on the night that the lasers shone down,” I said, “the night I was Evoked.”

“The night Fraa Orolo walked down off Bly’s Butte,” Cord put in, “and headed for Ecba.”