Anathem

“I know that our last conversation was not completely satisfactory to you, Erasmas. I apologize for that. These ideas are unfinished. I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension. I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore. But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves. Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it. But then, before I can form any firm impression of what it is I’m seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, and get slapped in the face by another wave.”

“I feel that way all the time, when I am trying to understand something new,” I said. “Then, one day, all of a sudden-”

“You just get it,” Orolo said.

“Yeah. The idea is just there, fully formed.”

“Many have noted this, of course. I believe it is related, in a deep way, to the sort of mental process I was speaking of the other day. The brain takes advantage of quantum effects; I’m sure of it.”

“I know just enough about it to know that what you just said has been controversial for a long, long time.”

This affected him not at all; but after I looked in his eye long enough, he finally gave a shrug. So be it. “Did Sammann ever talk to you of Saunt Grod’s Machines?”

“No. What is it?”

“A syntactic device that made use of quantum theorics. Before the Second Sack, his forerunners and ours worked together on such things. Saunt Grod’s Machines were extremely good at solving problems that involved sifting through many possible solutions at the same time. For example, the Lazy Peregrin.”

“That’s the one where a wandering fraa needs to visit several maths, scattered randomly around a map?”

“Yes, and the problem is to find the shortest route that will take him to all of the destinations.”

“I kind of see what you mean,” I said. “One could draw up an exhaustive list of every possible route-”

“But it takes forever to do it that way,” Orolo said. “In a Saunt Grod’s Machine, you could erect a sort of generalized model of the scenario, and configure the machine so that it would, in effect, examine all possible routes at the same time.”

“So, this kind of machine, instead of existing in one fixed, knowable state at any given time, would be in a superposition of many quantum states.”

“Yes, it’s just like an elementary particle that might have spin up or spin down. It is in both states at the same time-”

“Until someone observes it,” I said, “and the wavefunction collapses to one state or the other. So, I guess with a Saunt Grod’s Machine, one eventually makes some observation-”

“And the machine’s wavefunction collapses to one particular state-which is the answer. The ‘output,’ I believe the Ita call it,” Orolo said, smiling a little as he pronounced the unfamiliar bit of jargon.

“I agree that thinking often feels that way,” I said. “You have a jumble of vague notions in your mind. Suddenly, bang! It all collapses into one clear answer that you know is right. But every time something happens suddenly, you can’t simply chalk it up to quantum effects.”

“I know,” Orolo said. “Do you see where I’m going, though, when I speak of counterfactual cosmi?”

“I didn’t really get it until you brought quantum theorics into the picture,” I said. “But it’s been obvious for a while that you have been developing a theory about how consciousness works. You have mentioned some different phenomena that any introspective person would recognize-I won’t bother to go back and list them all-and you have tried to unify them…”

“My grand unification theory of consciousness,” Orolo joked.

“Yes, you are saying that they are all rooted in a special ability that the brain has to erect models of counterfactual cosmi in the brain, and to play them forward in time, evaluate their plausibility, and so on. Which is utterly insane if you take the brain to be a normal syndev.”

“Agreed,” Orolo said. “It would require an immense amount of processing power just to erect the models-to say nothing of running them forward. Nature would have found some more efficient way to get the job done.”

“But when you play the quantum card,” I said, “it changes the game entirely. Now, all you need is to have one generalized model of the cosmos-like the generalized map that a Saunt Grod’s Machine uses to solve the Lazy Peregrin problem-permanently loaded up in your brain. That model can then exist in a vast number of possible states, and you can ask all sorts of questions of it.”

“I’m glad that you now understand this in the same way that I do,” Orolo said. “I do have one quibble, however.”

“Oh boy,” I said, “here goes.”

“Traditions die hard, among the avout,” Orolo said. “And for a very long time, it has been traditional to teach quantum theorics to fids in a particular way that is based on how it was construed by the theors who discovered it, way back in the time of the Harbingers. And that, Erasmas, is how you were taught as well. Even if I had never met you before today, I would know this from the language that you use to talk about these things: ‘it exists in a superposition of states-observing it collapses the wavefunction’ and so on.”

“Yes. I know where you are going with this,” I said. “There are whole orders of theors-have been for thousands of years-that use completely different models and terminology.”

“Yes,” Orolo said, “and can you guess which model, which terminology, I am partial to?”

“The more polycosmic the better, I assume.”

“Of course! So, whenever I hear you talking of quantum phenomena using the old terminology-”

“The fid version?”

“Yes, I must mentally translate what you’re saying into polycosmic terms. For example, the simple case of a particle that is either spin up or spin down-”

“You would say that, at the moment when the spin is observed-the moment when its spin has an effect on the rest of the cosmos-the cosmos bifurcates into two complete, separate, causally independent cosmi that then go their separate ways.”

“You’ve almost got it. But it’s better to say that those two cosmi exist before the measurement is made, and that they interfere with each other-there is a little bit of crosstalk between them-until the observation is made. And then they go their separate ways.”

“And here,” I said, “we could talk about how crazy this sounds to many people-”

Orolo shrugged. “Yet it is a model that a great many theors come to believe in sooner or later, because the alternatives turn out to be even crazier in the end.”

“All right. So, I think I know what comes next. You want me to restate your theory of what the brain does in terms of the polycosmic interpretation of quantum theorics.”

“If you would so indulge me,” Orolo said, with a suggestion of a bow.

“Okay. Here goes,” I said. “The premise, here, is that the brain is loaded up with a pretty accurate model of the cosmos that it lives in.”

“At least, the local part of it,” Orolo said. “It needn’t have a good model of other galaxies, for example.”

“Right. And to state it in the terminology of the old interpretation that fids are taught, the state of that model is a superposition of many possible present and future states of the cosmos-or at least of the model.”

He held up a finger. “Not of the cosmos, but-?”

“But of hypothetical alternate cosmi differing slightly from the cosmos.”

“Very good. Now, this generalized cosmos-model that each person carries around in his or her brain-do you have any idea how it would work? What it would look like?”

“Not in the slightest!” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about the nerve cells and so on. How they could be rigged together to create such a model. How the model could be reconfigured, from moment to moment, to represent hypothetical scenarios.”

“Fair enough,” Orolo said, holding up his hands to placate me. “Let’s leave nerve cells out of the discussion, then. The important thing about the model, though, is what?”

“That it can exist in many states at once, and that its wavefunction collapses from time to time to give a useful result.”

“Yes. Now, in the polycosmic interpretation of how quantum theorics works, what does all of this look like?”

“There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of different copies of me-of my brain-each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another.”

He let me stew on that for a few moments. And then it came to me. Just like those ideas we had spoken of earlier-suddenly there in my head. “You don’t even need the model any more, do you?”

Orolo just nodded, smiled, egged me on with little beckoning gestures.

I went on-seeing it as I was saying it. “It is so much simpler this way! My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more! All it needs to do is to perceive-to reflect-the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”

“The variations-the myriad possible alternative scenarios-have been moved out of your brain,” Orolo said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles, “and out into the polycosm, which is where they all exist anyway!” He opened his hand and extended it to the sky, as if releasing a bird. “All you have to do is perceive them.”

“But each variant of me doesn’t exist in perfect isolation from the others,” I said, “or else it wouldn’t work.”

Orolo nodded. “Quantum interference-the crosstalk among similar quantum states-knits the different versions of your brain together.”

“You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.”

“I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”

Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away from Arbre at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.

One of the stars was moving. So discreetly, at first, that I had to stop, find my balance, and observe it closely to be sure. It was no illusion. The ancient animal part of my brain, so attuned to subtle, suspicious movement, had picked out this one star among the millions. It was in the western sky, not far above the horizon, hence diluted, at first, in twilight. But it rose slowly and steadily into the black. As it did, it changed its color and its size. Early on, it was a pinprick of white light, just like any other star, but as it rose toward the zenith it reddened. Then it broadened to a dot of orange, then flared yellow and threw out a comet-tail. Until that point my eyes had been playing any number of tricks on me and I’d misconceived its distance, its altitude, and its velocity. But the comet-tail shocked me into the right view: the thing was not high above us in space but descending into the atmosphere, dumping its energy into shredded, glowing air. Its rise had slowed as it neared the zenith, and it was clear it would lose all forward speed before it passed over our heads. The meteor’s bearing had never changed: it was headed right at us, and the brighter and fatter it grew, the more it seemed to hang motionless in the sky, like a thrown ball that is coming straight at your head. For a minute it was a little sun, fixed in the sky and stabbing rays of incandescent air in all directions. Then it shrank and faded back through orange to a dull red, and became difficult to make out.

I realized I had tilted my head as far back as it would go, and was gazing vertically upwards.

At the risk of losing my fix on it, I dropped my chin and had a look around.

Orolo was a hundred feet downhill of me and running as fast as he could.

I gave up trying to track the thing in the sky and took off after him. By the time I caught up, we were almost at the edge of the pit.

“They deciphered my analemma!” he exclaimed between gasps.

We stopped at a rope that had been stretched at waist level from stake to stake around the edge of the pit, to prevent sleepy or drunk avout from falling into it. I looked up and cried out in shock as I saw something absolutely enormous, just above us, like a low cloud. But it was perfectly circular. I understood that it was a gigantic parachute. Its shroud lines converged on a glowing red load that hung far below it.

The lines went all quavery and the chute blurred, then began to drift sideways on a barely perceptible breeze. It had been cut loose. The hot red thing fell like a stone but then thrust out legs of blue fire and, a few seconds later, began to hiss, shockingly loud. It was aiming for the floor of the pit. Orolo and I followed the rope around to the top of the ramp. A crowd of fraas and suurs was building there, more fascinated than afraid. Orolo began pushing through them, headed for the ramp, shouting above the hiss of the rocket: “Fraa Landasher, open the gate! Yul, go out with your cousin and get your vehicles. Find the parachute and bring it back! Sammann, do you have your jeejah? Cord! Get all of your things and meet me at the bottom!” And he launched himself down the ramp, rushing alone into the dark to meet the Geometers.

I ran after him. My usual role in life. I’d lost sight of the probe-the ship-whatever it was-during all of this, but now it was suddenly there, dead level with me and only a few hundred feet away, dropping at a measured pace toward the Temple of Orithena. I was so stunned by its immediacy, its heat and noise, that I recoiled, lost my balance, and stumbled to my knees. In that posture I watched it descend the last hundred feet or so. Its attitude, its velocity were perfectly steady, but only by dint of a thousand minute twitches and wiggles of its rocket nozzles: something very sophisticated was controlling the thing, making a myriad decisions every second. It was headed for the Decagon. In the final half-second, a hell-storm of shattering tiles was kicked up by the plumes of hypersonic gas shooting from those engines. Crouching, insect-like legs took up the last of its velocity and the engines went dark. But they continued to hiss for a couple of seconds as some kind of gas was run through the engines, purging the lines, shrouding the probe in a cool bluish cloud.

Then Orithena was silent.

I picked myself up and began hurrying down the ramp as best I could while keeping my head turned sideways, the better to stare at the Geometers’ probe. Its bottom was broad and saucer-shaped and still glowing a dull red-brown from the heat of re-entry. Above that it had a simple shape, like an inverted bucket, with a slightly domed top. Five tall narrow hatches had opened in its sides, revealing slots from which the bug-legs had unfolded. Atop its dome was some clutter I could not quite make out: presumably the mechanism for deploying and cutting free the parachute, maybe some antennas and sensors. I saw all sides of it as I chased Orolo down the spiral ramp, and never saw anything that looked like a window.

I caught up with him at the edge of the Decagon. He was sniffing the air. “Doesn’t seem to be venting anything noxious,” he said. “From the color of the exhaust, I’m guessing hydrogen/oxygen. Clean as a whistle.”

Landasher came down alone. It seemed he had ordered the others to remain above. He had his mouth open to say something. He looked half-deranged, a man in over his head. Orolo cut him off: “Is the gate open?” Landasher didn’t know. But above, we could now hear vehicles roaring around. I recognized them by their sounds: they were the ones we had brought over the pole. A light appeared at the top of the ramp.

“Someone opened them,” Orolo said. “But they must be closed and bolted again, as soon as the vehicles and parachute are inside. You should prepare for an invasion.”

“You think the Geometers are launching an-”

“No. I mean an invasion of the Panjandrums. This event will have been picked up on sensors. There is no telling how quickly the Sæcular Power may respond. Possibly within an hour.”

“We cannot possibly keep the Sæcular Power out, if they wish to come in,” Landasher said.

“As much time as possible. That is all I ask for,” Orolo said.

The three-wheeler was coming down the ramp. As it drew closer I saw Cord at the controls, Sammann standing on the back, gripping Cord’s shoulders to maintain his balance.

“What do you propose to do with that time?” Landasher demanded. Until now, he had always struck me as a wise and reasonable leader, but this evening he was under a lot of stress.

“Learn,” Orolo said. “Learn of the Geometers, before the Sæcular Power takes this moment away from us.”

The three-wheeler reached the bottom. Sammann hopped off, unslinging his jeejah from his shoulder. He aimed its sensors at the probe. Cord gunned the engine briefly and swung the machine around so that its headlight, too, was aimed at the probe. Then she hopped off and began to pull gear from the cargo shelf on the rear axle.

“What of-how do you know it is safe? What about infection!? Orolo? Orolo!” Landasher cried, for Cord’s headlight gambit had offered a much better look at the thing, and Orolo was drifting toward it, fascinated.

“If they were afraid of being infected by us, they would not have come here,” Orolo said. “If we are at risk of being infected by them, then we are at their mercy.”

“Do you really fancy that bolting the gate is going to stop people who have helicopters?” Landasher asked.

“I have an idea about that,” Orolo said. “Fraa Erasmas will see to it.”

By the time I had got back up to the top of the ramp, Yul and Gnel had retrieved the parachute. They and a small crew of adventurous avout had wadded and stuffed much of it into the open back of Gnel’s fetch, restraining it with a haphazard web of cargo straps and shroud lines. Still, an acre of parachute and a mile of shroud lines trailed in the dust behind the fetch as they drew up to the edge of the pit.

Now at this point we ought to have put on white body suits, gloves, respirators, and sealed the alien chute in sterile poly and sent it to a lab to be examined and analyzed down to the molecular level. But I had other orders. So I grabbed the edge of the chute-my first physical contact with an artifact from another star system-and felt it. To me, no expert on textiles, it felt like the same stuff we used to make parachutes on Arbre. Same story with the shroud lines. I did not think that they were what we called newmatter.

Quite a crowd had gathered around the fetch. They were respecting Landasher’s order not to go into the pit. But he hadn’t said anything about the parachute. I climbed up onto the top of the fetch and announced: “Each of you is responsible for one shroud line. We’ll pull the chute out and spread it on the ground. Form a ring around its edge. Choose your line. Then radiate. Spread the lines outwards, untangling them as you go. In ten minutes I would like to see the whole population of Orithena standing in a huge circle around this parachute, each holding the end of a line.”

A pretty simple plan. It got quite a bit messier as they put it into practice. But they were smart people, and the less fussing and meddling I did, the better they showed themselves at dreaming up solutions to problems. Meanwhile I had Yul estimate the length of a single shroud line by counting fathoms with his arms.

Gnel drove his fetch out from under the spreading chute and down the ramp to the bottom of the pit. He had equipped it with a battery of high-powered lights that I had always found ridiculous. Tonight, he had finally found something to aim them at. I took a moment to glance down, and saw that Orolo and Cord had approached to within twenty feet of the probe.

Getting the Orithenans spread out around the chute took a little while. A supersonic jet screamed overhead and startled us.

Yul’s measurement confirmed my general impression, which was that the shroud lines were something like half as long as the pit was wide. Once I explained the general plan to the Orithenans, they began to move toward the edge of the pit, parting to either side and circumventing the rim while keeping the shroud lines taut. The chute glided across the ground in fits and starts. We had to get a few people underneath it to coax and waft it over snags. But presently the leading edge of the fabric curled over the rim of the pit, and then the movement took on a life of its own as gravity helped it forward. I hoped the Orithenans on the ends of the lines would have the good sense to let go the ropes if they felt themselves being pulled toward the edge. But the chute wasn’t nearly heavy enough to cause any such problems. Once all of the fabric had gone over the edge, and the Orithenans had spaced themselves evenly around it, the thing became quite manageable. The chute seemed to cover about half of the pit’s area. The Orithenans by now had figured out the general idea, which was that we wanted to suspend the parachute above the Teglon plaza as a canopy. They began to move about en masse, adjusting its position and its altitude with no further direction from me. When it seemed right, I jogged around the perimeter urging them to move away from the hole and trace their shroud lines out as far as they could go, and to lash the ends around any solid anchors they could find. For about a third of them, this ended up being the top of the concent’s outer wall. Other lines ended up finding purchase on trees, Cloister pillars, trestles, rocks, or sticks hammered into the ground.

Hearing an engine, I looked over to the top of the ramp and saw that Yul was gingerly driving his house-on-wheels down into the pit-the better, I guessed, to cook breakfast for the Geometers. I sprinted over and dived into the cabin with him. This sparked a general rebellion among the Orithenans who, ignoring Landasher’s earlier order, followed us down on foot.

Yul and I drove down the ramp in silence. The look on his face was as if he were just on the verge of hysterical laughter. When we reached the bottom, he parked amid the ruins of the Temple, just near the Analemma. He shut off the engine. He turned to look at me and finally broke the silence. “I don’t know how this is going to come out,” he said, “but I sure am glad I came with you.” And, before I could tell him how glad I was of his company, he was out the door, striding over to join Cord.

Radiant heat from the underside of the vehicle was making it difficult to approach. Yul went back to his fetch and got some reflective emergency blankets. Cord, Orolo, and I used these as bolts. Most of the vehicle was above us, so we put out a call for ladders.

It had been difficult to guess the thing’s size before, but now I was able to borrow a measuring rod from the archaeological dig and measure it at about twenty feet in diameter. I hadn’t brought anything to write with, but Sammann was using his jeejah in speelycaptor mode, taking everything down, so I called out the numbers.

A helicopter approached. We could hear it through the canopy. It circled the compound a few times, its downwash creating huge, eye-catching disturbances in the canopy. Then it withdrew to a higher altitude and hovered. It could not land here because of the parachute. All the land within the walls was built on or cultivated with trees and trellises. They’d have to land outside and knock on the door, or scale the wall.

So we had stalled them for a few minutes. But everyone felt desperately short of time now. Suddenly a dozen ladders were available-all different sizes, all hand-crafted of wood. The Orithenans began lashing them together to make a scaffold right next to the probe, on the side that seemed to have a sort of hatch. Cord clambered up and found a place to stand on a ladder that had been placed horizontally. I felt proud watching her. So much about this might have been overwhelming. At some level perhaps she was overwhelmed. But this probe was, after all, a machine. She could tell how it worked. And as long as she held her focus on that, none of the other stuff mattered.

“Talk to us!” Sammann called to her, staring at the screen of his jeejah as he lined up his shot.

“There is clearly a removable hatch,” she said. “It is trapezoidal with rounded corners. Two feet wide at the base. One and a half at the top. Four high. Curved like the fuselage.” She was doing a funny kind of dance, because the scaffold was still being improvised beneath her-she was poised between two ladder-rungs and the ladder kept shifting. She was casting an array of lapping shadows on what she wanted to see, so she fished a headlamp out of her vest, turned it on, and played its beam over the streaked and burned surface of the probe.

“Can we just go ahead and call it a door?” Sammann asked.

“Okay. There is Geometer-writing stenciled around the door. Letters about an inch high.”

“Stenciled?” Sammann asked.

“Yeah.” Cord stretched the band of the lamp over her head and adjusted its angle, freeing her hands.

“Literally stenciled?”

“Yeah. In the sense that they took a piece of paper with letter-shaped cutouts and held it up to the metal and slapped paint on it.” I heard a series of metallic raps. Cord was touching a magnet to various places around the door. “None of this is ferrous.” Then a screeching noise. “I can’t scratch it with my steel knife blade. Maybe a high-temp stainless alloy.”

“Fascinating,” Orolo called. “Can you get it open?”

“I think that the stenciled messages are opening instructions,” she said. “It is the same message-the same stencil-repeated in four places around the door. In each case, there is a line painted from it-”

“An arrow?” someone called. Others, who were standing where they could see it better, were more certain. “Those are arrows!”

“They don’t look like our arrows,” Cord said, “but maybe the Geometers do them differently. Each of them is aimed at a panel about the size of my hand. These panels appear to be held in place with fasteners-flush-head machine bolts-four per panel-I don’t have the right tool to put into them but I can fake it with a daisy-head driver.” She frisked herself.

“How do we know they are fasteners at all?” someone called. “We know nothing of these aliens and their praxis!”

“It’s just obvious!” Cord called back. “I can see little burrs where some alien mechanic over-torqued them. The heads are knurled so aliens can turn ’em with their alien fingers when they are loose. The only question is: clockwise, or counterclockwise?”

She jammed a driver into place, whacked it once with the heel of her hand to seat it, and grunted as she applied torque. “Counterclockwise,” she announced. For some reason this caused a cheer to run through the crowd of avout. “The Geometers are right-handed!” someone called, and everyone laughed.

Cord pocketed the bolts as she got them out. The little panel fell off and clattered through the scaffolding to the stone plaza, where someone snatched it up and peered at it like a page from a holy book. “Behind the panel is a cavity containing a T-handle,” she announced. “But I’m going to remove the other three panels before I mess with it.”

“Why?” someone asked-typical argumentative avout, I thought.

Going to work on another panel, Cord answered patiently: “It’s like when you bolt the wheel onto your mobe, you take turns tightening the nuts to equalize the stress.”

“What if there is a pressure differential?” Orolo asked.

“Another good reason to take it slow,” Cord muttered. “We don’t want anyone to get smashed by a flying door. As a matter of fact-” She looked out at the crowd of avout below.

Yul took her meaning. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed: “MOVE BACK! Everyone get clear of the hatch. A hundred feet away. MOVE!” The voice was shockingly loud and authoritative. People moved, and opened up a corridor all the way to Gnel’s fetch.

More aerocraft, of two or three different types, approached while Cord was undoing the panels. We could hear them landing on the other side of the wall. Someone called down news that soldiers were getting out, down on the road by the souvenir shop.

A thought occurred to me. “Sammann,” I asked, “are you sending this out over the Reticulum?”

“Smile,” Sammann answered, “right now a billion people are laughing at you.”

I tried not to think about the soldiers and the billion people.

A hiss came from the probe. Cord jumped back and almost toppled from the scaffold. The hiss died away asymptotically over a few seconds. Cord laughed nervously. “One of the things that happens when you operate a T-handle,” she said, “is that a pressure-equalizing valve opens up.”

“Did air go in, or out?” Orolo asked.

“In.” Cord operated the other three T-handles. “Uh-oh,” she said, “here it comes!” And the door simply fell out and hit the ladder she was standing on. Yul got his arms up in time to steer it down to the ground. We all watched that. Then all looked to Cord, who was standing there, hands on hips, pelvis cocked to one side, aiming the beam of her headlamp into the probe.

“What’s in there?” someone finally asked.

“A dead girl,” she said, “with a box on her lap.”

“Human or-”

“Close,” Cord said, “but not from Arbre.”

Cord crouched as if to enter the capsule, but then started as the scaffolding torqued, rocked, and rebounded. It was Yul. He had vaulted up to join her. He wasn’t about to let his girl climb into an alien spaceship until he’d checked it for monsters. The scaffold had been about right for one, and had now reached maximum capacity; no one else was going up there as long as most of the space was claimed by an agitated Yulassetar Crade. Cord was mildly offended; she refused to move, so Yul had to drop to his knees and stick his head into the doorway down around the level of her thighs. It felt haphazard, hasty, and absolutely the wrong way to treat such priceless theorical evidence. If circumstances had been different, avout would have swarmed the ladders and restrained Yul, nothing would have been touched until all had been measured, phototyped, examined, analyzed. But the hovering and circling aerocraft, as well as other sound effects from above, had put everyone in a different frame of mind. “Yul!” Sammann shouted, and as soon as Yul turned around the Ita lobbed his jeejah up to the scaffold. Yul reached instinctively, snatched it out of the air, and thrust it into the capsule. It could see in the dark better than a human and so he ended up using its screen as a night vision device. That’s how he noticed the dark stains in the clothing of the dead Geometer.

“She’s wounded,” he announced, “she’s bleeding!” There were cries of alarm from some of the avout who assumed Yul must be talking of Cord, but soon it was clear that he was speaking of the Geometer in the capsule.

“Are you claiming he, she, is alive!?” Sammann asked.

“I don’t know!” Yul said, turning his head to look down at us.

As long as he was out of the way, Cord thrust a leg into the doorway and leaned her head and upper body through. We heard a muffled exclamation. Yul relayed it: “Cord says she’s still warm!”

All kinds of theorical questions were coming up in my mind-and probably the minds of all the others: how can you tell it’s female? How do you know they even have sexes? What makes you think they have blood like we do, and that that’s what is coming out of her? But, again, the stress and chaos relegated all such questions to a kind of intellectual quarantine.

Orolo pointed out, “If there is any possibility that she might be alive, we must do whatever we can to help her!”

That was all Yul needed to hear. He tossed the jeejah back to Sammann with one hand while giving Cord a knife with the other. “She’s strapped in pretty good,” he warned us. All we could see of Cord now was one leg, which twisted and pawed as she braced it against the scaffold. A minute passed. We stood, waiting, unable to help Cord, helpless to do anything about the banging, booming, and metallic screeching noises resounding from the gates and walls of the concent high above. Finally Cord gave a great heave and tumbled half out of the door. Yul reached in for the second heave. Like a rafting guide hauling a drowned customer from a river, he brought the Geometer out with the full power of both arms and legs, and ended up lying on his back with the alien sprawled full-length on top of him. Red liquid spilled down around his ribs and dripped through the rungs onto the ground. Twenty hands reached up to accept the weight of the Geometer as Yul rolled her sideways off his body. Three hands, one of them Orolo’s, converged on her head, cradling it, taking great care it did not loll. I glimpsed the face. From fifty feet, anyone would have taken her for a native of this planet. Close up, there was no doubt that she was, as Cord had put it, “not from Arbre.” There was no one thing about her face that would prove this. But the color and texture of her skin and hair, the bone structure, the sculpture of the outer ear, the shape of the teeth, were all just different enough.

It was out of the question to lay her down on the rocket-blasted ground, still hot and strewn with jagged tile-shards, so we looked around for the nearest flat surface that might serve. This turned out to be the empty bed of Gnel’s fetch, about a hundred feet away. We carried the Geometer on our shoulders, quick-stepping as fast as we could without dropping her. Suur Maltha, the concent’s physician, met us halfway and was probing the patient’s neck with her fingertips before we had even set her down. Gnel, thinking fast, got a camp pad rolled out just in time. We laid the Geometer down on it, head on the tailgate. She was in a loose, pale blue coverall, the back sodden with what was obviously blood. Suur Maltha ripped the garment open and explored the body with a stethoscope. “Even allowing for the fact that I can’t be sure where the heart is, I hear no pulse. Just some very faint noises that I would identify as bowel sounds. Roll her over.”

We got the Geometer on her stomach. Suur Maltha cut the fabric away. It was not just soaked with blood but perforated with many holes. Maltha used a cloth to swipe a mess of gore away from the back, revealing a constellation of large round puncture wounds, extending from the buttocks up halfway to the shoulder, mostly on the left side. Everyone inhaled and became silent. Suur Maltha regarded it for a few moments, mastering her own sense of shock, and then looked as if she might be about to deliver some clinical observation.

But Gnel beat her to it. “Shotgun blast,” he diagnosed. “Heavy gauge-antipersonnel. Medium range.” And then, though it wasn’t really necessary, he delivered the verdict: “Some SOB shot this poor lady in the back. May God have mercy on her soul.”

One of Maltha’s assistants had had the presence of mind to shove a thermometer into an orifice that she had noticed down where the legs joined. “Body temp similar to ours,” she announced. “She has been dead for maybe minutes.”

The sky fell on us. Or so it seemed, for a few moments. Someone above had cut the shroud lines of the parachute and it had collapsed on our heads. Startling as all hell, but harmless. Everyone spread out and got busy pawing, dragging, stuffing, and wadding. There was no coherent plan. But eventually a lot of avout came together in the middle of the plaza, corralling a huge wad of chute-stuff which they pushed and rolled up the steps of the Temple to get it out of the way. When it was obvious that there was an oversupply of these chute-wranglers, I turned back towards the probe, meaning to go and give the people there an update. My inclination was to run. But soldiers in head-to-toe suits were coming down the ramp in force and I thought that running might only excite someone’s chase instinct.

Orolo and Sammann were examining an artifact that had been in the capsule-the box that Cord had seen on the occupant’s lap. It was made of some fibrous stuff, and it contained four transparent tubes filled with red liquid. Blood samples, we figured. Each was labeled with a different, single word in Geometer-writing, and a different circular ikon: a picture of a planet-not Arbre-as seen from space.

Soldiers yanked it out of our hands. They were all around us now. Each sported a bandolier loaded with what looked like oversized bracelets. Whenever they encountered an avout they’d yank one off and ratchet it around the avout’s throat, whereupon it would come alive and flash a few times a second. Each collar had a different string of digits printed on its front, so once they’d captured a picture of you, they would know your face and your number. It didn’t require a whole lot of imagination to guess that the collars had tracking and surveillance capabilities. But as sinister and dehumanizing as all of this was, nothing came of it, at least for now-it seemed that they only wanted to know who was where.

Fraa Landasher acquitted himself well, demanding-firmly but calmly-to know who was in charge, by what authority this was being done (“What law covers alien probes, by the way?”) and so on. But the soldiers were all dressed in suits made for chemical and biological warfare, which didn’t make engaging them in dialog any easier, and Landasher didn’t know enough about the legal procedures of this time and place. He could have mounted a fine legal defense 6400 years ago but not today.

A contingent of four soldiers, distinguished by special insignias that had been hastily poly-taped onto their suits, approached the probe and started to unpack equipment. Two of them climbed up on the scaffold, shooed away the fraa who was inside of it, and began collecting samples and making phototypes of their own.

The soldiers had naturally come to the probe first. They communicated well with one another because their suits had wireless intercoms, but they couldn’t hear or talk to us very fluently. When they did talk to us, it was to boss us around, and when they listened, it was with something worse than skepticism-as if their officers had issued a warning that the avout would try to cast spells on them. The ones who entered the probe might have noted some red fluid, but it wasn’t as obvious as you might think-the capsule had very little uncluttered floor space, the lighting was poor, and the acceleration couches were upholstered in dark material that didn’t show the stain. The face shields on the soldiers’ helmets kept fogging up. Their gloved hands could not feel the sticky wetness, their air-filtration devices removed all odors. Standing near the probe, getting used to the collar snugged around my neck, I realized that a long time might actually go by before any of the soldiers became aware of the fact that a Geometer had come down in this capsule and was lying dead in the back of a fetch a hundred feet away. The billion people watching Sammann’s feed over the Reticulum all knew this. The soldiers, isolated in their own secure, private reticule, had no idea. Sammann, Orolo, Cord, and I kept exchanging amazed and amused looks as we collectively realized this.

Yul distracted everyone for a while. He shoved away the soldiers who came to collar him, then, when they aimed weapons at him, negotiated a deal that he would collar himself. But once he’d put it on and the soldiers had walked away, he pulled the collar right off over his head. He had a thick neck and a small skull. The collar scraped his scalp and lacerated his ears, but he got it off. Then, having satisfied himself that he could do it, he pulled it back on again.

An officer finally noticed the small crowd of uncollared avout gathered around Gnel’s fetch, and sent a squad over to take care of them. It seemed that we were free to move about as long as we didn’t try to run away or interfere with the soldiers, so I followed them at a distance that I hoped they would consider polite.

Collared avout were being herded toward the Temple steps. Nearby, a line of soldiers was moving across the Teglon plaza, bent forward at the waist, picking up stray tiles and other debris that might go ballistic when they began landing things there. Big vertical-landing aerocraft were keeping station in the sky above, waiting for the landing zone to be prepared. I reckoned that the general plan was to load us on aerocraft and take us away to some kind of detention facility. The longer I could delay being on one of those flights, the better.

The squad leader did not show the least bit of curiosity as to what these half-dozen avout were doing in the back of the fetch, but only ordered them to move away from the vehicle and line up for collaring. The avout complied, looking nonplussed. A soldier circled around behind the fetch to check for stragglers. He saw the dead body, started, unslung his weapon-which drew the attention of his squad-mates-then relaxed and put the weapon back over his shoulder. He approached the fetch slowly. Something in his posture told me he was communicating with his mates on the wireless. I got in close enough to hear the squad leader saying to Suur Maltha-obviously the physician, since she was all stained with blood-“You have one casualty?”

“Yes.”

“Do you require-”

“She’s dead,” Suur Maltha said, “we don’t need a medic.” She was speaking bluntly, a little sarcastically, astounded as I had been to realize that the soldiers didn’t know. If they had only asked us, we would have told them; we wouldn’t have been able to shut up. But they hadn’t asked. They didn’t care for our knowledge, our opinions. And so all of us-all the avout-were reacting in the same way to that: to hell with them!

The soldiers began to pop collars off their bandoliers and fit them around the necks of Maltha and her assistants. But halfway through they all stopped. Several of them raised gloves to helmets. I turned around and saw that all of the soldiers on the plaza and around the probe were behaving the same way. I reckoned the jig was up now. Some general, sitting in an office a thousand miles away where he had access to the civilian feeds, was screaming into a microphone that there was a dead alien in the back of the fetch. I supposed that in a moment all heads would turn in our direction, all soldiers would converge here.

But that was not what they did. Instead they all looked up into the sky.

Something was coming.

The hovering aerocraft had received the message too: the pitch of their engines changed, their lights shifted as they spun to new headings, banked, and sidled away, gaining altitude.

The soldiers by the fetch had turned inward on one another, though they kept glancing skywards.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Look at me!” I finally got the leader to swing his face shield in my direction. “Talk to us!” I shouted. “We can’t hear! We don’t know what’s going on!”

“…mumble mumble mumble EVACUATE!” he said.

Ganelial Crade didn’t need to hear that twice. He swung himself up into the cab of the fetch and started the engine. Suur Maltha and one of her assistants climbed into the back with the “casualty.” I decided to circle back to the probe first, just to make sure my friends there had gotten the same message-and to chivvy Orolo along if he decided to be difficult. All around the plaza, soldiers were waving their arms, herding avout toward the base of the ramp. Gnel’s fetch was headed that way at slower than walking pace, pausing here and there to pick up slower-moving avout. Yul’s vehicle had begun to do likewise, and I was comforted to see Cord in the front seat. But the ramp was already jammed with pedestrians, so the vehicles would not be able to go any faster than the slowest could walk.

Or run, as the case might be. “MOVE! MOVE!” someone was shouting. An officer had ripped his helmet off-alien infections be damned-and begun shouting into a loud-hailer. “If you can run, do so! If you can’t, get on the truck!”

I ended up a straggler along with Sammann and Orolo. We jogged toward the ramp. I threw Sammann a questioning look. He shrugged. “They jammed the Ret as soon as they got here,” he said, “and I can’t penetrate their transmissions.”

So I looked at Orolo, who was keeping an eye on the western sky as he jogged along. “You think something else is coming?” I asked.

“Since the probe was launched, about one orbital period has expired,” he pointed out. “So, if the Geometers wanted to drop something on us at the next opportunity, then now would be the time to expect it.”

“Drop something,” I repeated.

“You saw what was done to that poor woman!” Orolo exclaimed. “There is insurrection-perhaps civil war-in the icosahedron. A faction that wishes to share information with us, and another that will kill to prevent it.”

“Kill us, even?”

Orolo shrugged. We had reached the base of the ramp and got stuck in a traffic jam. Scanning the ramp circling round above us, I could see avout and soldiers, all mixed together, running. But some inscrutable law of traffic-jam dynamics dictated that those of us at the bottom were at a perfect standstill. All we could do was wait for it to clear. We were the last avout in the queue; behind us were two squads of soldiers bent under heavy packs, waiting stolidly, as was the timeless lot of soldiers. Behind them, Orithena was depopulated, empty except for the alien probe.

Orolo squared off in front of me and favored me with a bright grin. “Regarding our earlier conversation,” he began, as if inviting me to dialog in the Refectory kitchen.

“Yes? You have something to add?”

“As to the actual substance, no,” he confessed. “But things are about to become quite chaotic indeed, and it’s possible we may get separated.”

“I intend to stay by your side-”

“They may not give us a choice,” he pointed out, running his finger around his collar. “My number is odd, yours is even-perhaps they’ll sort us into different tents, or something.”

The people in front of us finally began to move. Sammann, sensing we were trying to have some kind of private conversation, went ahead. We shouldered and jostled our way onto the lower stretches of the ramp. In a few moments we were walking, then jogging.

Orolo, still casting frequent glances at the western sky, went on: “If you find yourself at Tredegarh, let us say, talking to people of your experiences here, and you tell them about what we spoke of this afternoon, the kind of reaction you will get will depend quite strongly on who they are, what math they came from-”

“As in, Procian versus Halikaarnian?” I asked. “I’m used to that, Orolo.”

“This is a little different,” Orolo said. “Most people, Procians and Halikaarnians alike, will deem it nothing more than idle, metatheorical speculation. Harmless, except insofar as it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if you talk to someone like Fraa Jad…”

He paused. I thought it was only to catch his breath, for we really were running now. Above us, aerocraft were settling in for landings outside the front gates, and the noise of their engines forced Orolo to raise his voice. But when I glanced sideways at him, I thought I saw uncertainty on his face. Not something I’d learned to associate with Pa Orolo. “I think,” he finally said, “I think that they all know this.”

“Know what?”

“That what I told you earlier is true.”

“Oh.”

“That they’ve known it for at least a thousand years.”

“Ah.”

“And that…that they do experiments.”

“What!?”

Orolo shrugged, and got a wry smile. “An analogy: when the theors lost their atom smashers, they turned to the sky and made cosmography their laboratory, the only place remaining to test their theories-to turn their philosophy into theorics. Likewise, when a lot of these people were put together on a crag with nothing to do except ponder the kinds of things you and I were talking of earlier, well…some of them, I believe, devised experiments to prove whether they were speaking truth or nonsense. And out of that arose, over time, through trial and error, a form of praxis.” I looked at him and he winked at me.

“So, you think Fraa Jad sent me here to find out whether you knew?”

“I suspect so, yes,” Orolo said. “Under normal circumstances they might simply have reached down and hauled me up into the Centenarian or Millenarian math, but…” He was scanning the western sky again. “Ah, here it comes now!” he exclaimed, delightedly, as if we had been waiting for a train, and he’d just spied it coming into the station.

A white streak sliced heaven in half, moving west to east, and ending, with no loss of speed, in the caldera of the volcano a few thousand feet above us.

In the moment before the sound reached us, Orolo remarked, “Clever. They don’t trust their aim enough to score a perfect hit on the probe. But they know enough geology to-”

After that I could not hear anything for half an hour. Hearing was worse than useless; I was sorry I’d been born with ears.

Fraa Haligastreme had taught me some geological terms which I will use here. I can imagine Cord shaking her head in dismay, giving me a hard time for using dry technical language instead of writing about the emotional truth. But the emotional truth was a black chaos of shock and fear, and the only way to recount what happened in a sensible way is to give technical details that we only pieced together later.

So, the Geometers had thrown a rock at us. Actually, a long rod of some dense metal, but in principle nothing fancier than a rock. It penetrated a quarter of a mile into the solid cap of hardened lava on top of the volcano before it vaporized of its own kinetic energy, creating a huge burst of pressure that we knew as an earthquake. The pressure vented up along the wound that the rod had left through the rock, widening the hole as it roared out, founding systems of cracks that were immediately blown open by the underlying lava. This lava was wet, saturated with steam; the steam exploded into gas as the overburden was relieved, just as bubbles appear in a bottle of soda when the lid is removed. The lava, inflated by the steam, blew itself up into ash, most of which went straight up, which is why everything for a thousand miles downwind ended up buried in grey dust. But some of it came down the side of the mountain in the form of a cloud, rolling down the slope like an avalanche, and easy for us to see, since it was glowing orange. And once we had gotten over the shock of what we had seen and staggered back up to our feet after the leg-breaking jolt of the explosion and sprinted to the top of the ramp in a desperate mob, what we clearly saw was that this thing, this glowing cloud, was coming for us, and that it would simultaneously crush us like a sledgehammer and roast us like a flamethrower if we didn’t get out of its path. The only way of doing that was to get on the aerocraft, which had landed on the open slope between the walls of the concent and the souvenir shop. There were exactly enough of these to carry the soldiers who had arrived in them, plus their gear. So they had chivalrously dropped their gear on the ground. They were abandoning everything they had brought with them, the better to carry passengers-avout-away from danger. They were even flinging armloads of gear-fire extinguishers, medical kits-out onto the ground to make room for more humans.

What it came down to then was a simple calculation of the type any theor could appreciate. The pilots of the craft knew how much weight they could lift off the ground and they knew how much a person weighed, on average. Dividing the latter into the former told them how many people might be allowed on each craft. To enforce that limit, the pilots had their sidearms out, and armed soldiers posted to either side of the doors. The soldiers, by and large, knew where to go: they simply returned to the same craft they’d arrived in. The Orithenans swarmed, streamed, surged in the open spaces among the aerocraft, tripping on or vaulting over abandoned gear. Pilots pointed at them one by one, hustled them aboard, and kept count. From time to time they figured out a way to throw out more equipment and accept another passenger. This had already been going on for some time before Orolo, Sammann, and I came running out the gates. Most of the places were already taken. Full craft were lifting off, some with desperate people hanging from their landing gear. The few who hadn’t yet been chosen were running from one aerocraft to another, and I was heartened to see that many were finding spaces. I saw Gnel’s and Yul’s vehicles parked with lights on and engines running, but didn’t see them-they must have made it! I’d lost track of Orolo, though. A running soldier grabbed my arm and hurled me toward an aerocraft that was revving up its engines. I staggered toward the door through a cloud of flying dirt. Hands grabbed me and hauled me inside as the craft’s skids were leaving the ground. The soldier climbed on to the skid behind me. I spun around in the doorway to take in the scene below. I could not see Sammann and I could not see Orolo-good! Had they found places? Only two craft remained on the ground. One of them lifted off, shedding two Orithenans who pawed desperately at the frame of its door but couldn’t get a grip. At least ten other people had been left behind. Some sat despondently or lay crumpled on the ground where they had fallen. Some ran for the sea. One took off running toward the one remaining aerocraft, but he was too far away. Some part of me was thinking why couldn’t they only have taken a few more? but the answer was obvious in the way my aerocraft was performing: engines screaming full tilt, yet gaining altitude no faster than a man could climb a ladder, and shedding a hail of small objects as people found odds and ends that could be hurled out the open door. A flashlight bounced off the back of my head and tumbled to the floor; I clawed it up and tossed it out.

It almost struck a bolted figure hurrying over the ground, harshly lit from behind by the lights of Gnel’s fetch, bent under a heavy burden-light blue. The dead body of the Geometer, forgotten and abandoned in the back of Gnel’s fetch. The man bent under it was headed straight for the only aerocraft still on the ground. Arms were reaching out from the door. The runner put on a last, mighty effort, planted both feet in the dust below the aerocraft, and gave a mighty leg-thrust to hurl the Geometer’s body upward. Hands grasped it and hauled it aboard. The soldier in the doorway showed his teeth as he screamed something into his microphone. The aerocraft rose, leaving behind the man who had delivered the dead Geometer. I forced myself to look at him, and saw what I had expected and dreaded: it was Orolo, alone before the gates of Orithena.

We had enough altitude now that I could look over the walls and buildings of the concent and up the slope to see what was coming. It looked very much as Fraa Haligastreme had described it to us from ancient texts: heavy as stone, fluid as water, hot as a forge, and-now that it had fallen several thousand feet down a mountain-fast as a bullet train.

“No!” I screamed. “We have to go back!” Not that anyone could hear me. But a soldier behind me read my face, saw my eyes swing toward the cockpit. He calmly raised his sidearm and planted its muzzle in the center of my forehead.

My next thought was do I have the guts to jump out so that Orolo could have my place? but I knew that they would not set down again to pick him up. There was no time.

Orolo was looking about curiously. He seemed almost bored. He sidestepped to a position where he could get a clear view uphill through the open gates and see what was headed for him. That, I think, gave him a sense of how many more seconds he had. He picked up a trenching tool that had been discarded, and used its handle to slash an arc into the loose soil. He turned, again and again, joining one arc to another, until he had completed the graceful, neverending curve of the analemma. Then he tossed the tool aside and stood on the center, facing his fate.

The buildings of the concent imploded before the glowing cloud even reached them, for the avalanche was pushing an invisible pressure wave before it. Destruction washed across the full width of the concent in a few seconds, and slammed into the walls from the back side. The walls bulged, cracked, shed a few blocks, but held, until the glowing cloud hit them with its full force. Then they went down like a sand castle struck by a wave.

“No!” I screamed one more time, as Orolo withered under the pressure wave. He flopped to the ground like a hank of rope. For a moment, smoke shrouded him: radiant heat shining out as a harbinger of the glowing cloud. Our aerocraft rocked and skidded sideways on hard air. The cloud erupted from the gates, vaulted over the rubble of the wall, and fell on Orolo. For a fraction of a second he was a blossom of yellow flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he’d been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire.