Anathem

A tide of milky light spilled in over the forests and the greens and congealed into sticky haze. It was a day without a dawn. The aerocraft’s window had grown a million-edged network of tiny fractures that pulverized the light into a dust of rare colors. I was seeing it through the visor of a balloon suit. On the seat next to me was an orange suitcase that breathed and burbled like a torso, killing what ever came out of me. The avout and the Panjandrums who’d been summoned to Convox from all over Arbre were too important to risk infecting them with alien germs, and so I was living in a bubble until further notice.

This did not make sense. Why bring me to Tredegarh if there was any risk whatsoever? No dialog between rational people could have ended in the conclusion that I should be brought here-but only in a balloon suit. But as Orolo had said, the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise. And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

So my first glimpse of the Precipice was through several layers of fogged, scratched, and cracked poly, and miles of haze: smoke, steam, or dust, I couldn’t tell. The poets who wrote of it always seemed to behold the Precipice at dawn or sunset of a glorious day, and liked to wonder what the Thousanders were doing up in their turrets. They must not have known, or perhaps were too discreet to mention, that the lobe of granite beneath was riddled with tunnels for storage of nuclear waste, and that its Inviolateness was due not to the strength of its walls or the bravery of its defenders but to a deal between the mathic world and the Sæcular Power. I wondered what a poem would read like, written by one who saw the Precipice as I did now, knowing what I knew. A snort of laughter fogged my visor. But when it melted away, and gave me back again that stark, hazy, color-sapped prospect, I decided it could actually be a cool poem. The Precipice looked a thousand years older than anything on Ecba, and all of the stuff that so obscured my view gave me the same emotional distance as a cosmographer looking at a dust cloud through a telescope.

Tredegarh had been built somewhat farther away from the great cities of the late Praxic Age than Muncoster and Baritoe. That and the rugged look of the Precipice had given it the reputation of being isolated. The cities that surrounded Muncoster and Baritoe had, of course, fallen and been remade a dozen times since then, while similar ebbs and flows had lapped around Tredegarh; still, people in the mathic world insisted on thinking of it as a woodsy retreat. But we landed at a busy aerodrome no more than half an hour’s walk from its Day Gate, and as we drove there I could see that what I’d identified as forests were really arboretums, and the pastures were really lawns for the pleasure of S?culars who lived in great old houses tucked in at the verge of the woods.

The Day Gate was so lofty I didn’t notice we’d passed through it. An inlaid road of red stone, wide enough to drive two mobes abreast, veered to the right and plunged under a huge Mathic pile that I mistook for the Mynster. But this was merely their Physicians’ Commons, and the red road was a sign for illiterate patients and their visitors. I was being squired around on a motorized cart, since the suitcase grafted onto me was awkward to carry. My driver veered onto the red road and swung wide to dodge an old patient who was being aired out in a wheeled chair festooned with drip bags and readouts. We plunged through a portal arch, then turned off the red road into a service corridor. We hummed down long rows of chilly rooms with metal counters and sinister plumbing fixtures, then up a ramp and into a courtyard. This was about the size of the Cloister back home, but it felt smaller because the buildings around it were higher. Planted in the corner of this space was a housing module, brand-new, with pipes and ducts snaking out of its windows and leading away to whirring machines, or through windows to a lab. I was directed to go inside and take off my suit. When the door closed behind me I heard it being locked from the outside, then the farting of a poly tape dispenser sealing the cracks all around. I kicked my way free of the suit and powered down the suitcase, then stuffed them under the bed. The module had a bedroom, a bath, and a kitchen/dining nook. The windows had been reinforced on the outside with metal mesh-so that if I turned out to be claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks I couldn’t claw my way out-and sealed with thick, translucent poly sheeting.

Pretty bleak. Yet this was the first time I’d been alone for several weeks, and in that sense it could not have been more luxurious. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt dizzy, and knew that I was about to fall apart. Then I didn’t feel quite so private after all, since I guessed that I must be under surveillance. I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of my sobbing face that I had inadvertently captured in Clesthyra’s Eye after Orolo’s Anathem-the first time he had died. Some instinct told me to burrow. I went into the bathroom, turned off the light, turned on the shower, and ducked under the water. Once the temperature had stabilized I collapsed back against the wall, sank down until I was all folded up over the drain, and utterly lost control of myself. A lot went down that drain.

I had been through adventures that might have made for good stories if Orolo hadn’t been vaporized before my eyes. Our aerocraft, along with several others, had flown to the next island up-wind and landed on a beach, scattering a crowd of locals who’d gathered there to drink wine and watch the eruption of Ecba. Other aerocraft had run out of fuel and ditched in the sea. Since they had jettisoned their life rafts to make room for passengers, many of these would have drowned had it not been for the avout, who could easily make their spheres into life buoys. A second wave of airborne commandoes had plucked them out of the water and brought them to the same beach where the rest of us had set down. This had been commandeered by the Sæcular Power and cordoned off. Tents had been dropped on us and we had erected our own camp: “New Orithena,” complete with a canvas cloister in the middle and a digital alarm clock on a stick, where Provener was celebrated. We had said the aut of requiem for Orolo and the others who had not survived. Meanwhile the military had pitched larger tents around us, marched us through naked, hosed us down with unspecified chemical solutions, given us plastic bags in which to void urine and excrement. We had spent a few days living off military rations, wearing paper coveralls that we were supposed to burn when they got dirty, being called in at random times to be interviewed, phototyped, and biometrically scanned.

Around noon on the second day, a big fixed-wing aerocraft had landed on a nearby road that had been made into a temporary aerodrome. A little while later, a caravan of vehicles had come up the beach, carrying civilians, some of whom had been dressed in bolts and chords. My name had been called. I’d walked to the camp gate, where I had encountered-across a safe, non-infectious expanse of empty sand-a contingent from Tredegarh. There had been a couple of dozen, all told. Until they had begun speaking to me in perfect Orth, I had not even recognized some of them as avout, because the style of their bolts and chords was so different from what we wore at Edhar. They originated from many different concents. I’d recognized only one of them: a Valer who’d helped save me in Mahsht. I’d caught her eye and made a hint of a bow, and she’d responded in kind.

The FAE of this group had said something about Orolo that was actually quite respectful and well put. He had then informed me that I would help them prepare the “givens” for shipment to the Convox, and return to Tredegarh with them the next day. By “givens,” of course, he’d meant the box of vials and the body of the dead Geometer, both of which had been confiscated by the military and kept on ice in a special tent.

Meanwhile, Sammann had been having a similar conversation with one of his brethren; a small detachment of Ita, segregated in their own vehicle.

Thereafter it had mostly been work, which had probably been a good thing, since it had meant less brooding time for me. Since Orolo had traded the rest of his life for the theorical knowledge contained in the body of the Geometer, preparing it for shipment to Tredegarh had given me an opportunity to show it the same respect as I would have shown the body of Orolo, had we been able to give him a normal burial. Two lives had been sacrificed-one of Arbre, one of some other world-to bring us this knowledge.

In what free time I did have, I talked to Cord. At first, I only spoke of my feelings. Later, Cord began to share her views about what had happened, and it became obvious that she was interpreting the whole thing from a Kelx point of view. It seemed that Magister Sark had got himself a convert. His words, back in Mahsht, might have made only a faint impression on her, but something about what we had lived through at Orithena had made it all seem true in her mind. And this didn’t seem like the right time for me to try to convince her otherwise. It was, I realized, like the broken stove all over again. What was the point of my having a truer explanation of these things if it could only be understood by avout who devoted their whole lives to theorics? Cord, independent soul that she was, wouldn’t want to live her life under the sway of such ideas any more than she’d want to cook breakfast with a machine that she couldn’t understand and fix.

Wrung out, purified, shaky but stronger, I wandered around my new home.

Half the kitchen was occupied by bottled water, palletized and stacked. The cupboards had been stocked with an odd mixture of extramuros groceries and fresh produce from the tangles and arboretums of Tredegarh. Some books had been left on the table: a few very ancient spec-fic novels (the originals, machine-stamped on cheap paper, were all dust; these had been copied out by hand on proper leaves) and a dog’s breakfast of philosophy, metatheorics, quantum mechanics, and neurology. Some was famous stuff written by people like Protas, some had been produced by avout toiling in maths I’d never heard of. I concluded that some fid had been deputized to provide me with reading material and had run through a library blindfolded, pawing books off shelves at random.

On my bed lay a new bolt, chord, and sphere, wrapped and knotted into the traditional package. As I undid the knots and folds, kicked off the last of my Ecba garb, and got dressed, everything that had happened since I’d been walked out the Day Gate of Edhar began to seem dreamlike-as far back in the past as the time before I was Collected.

In the kitchen I culled all of the food from the Sæcular world, hiding it in the cupboards, and left the produce out where I could see and smell it. They’d provided me with everything I needed to make bread, so I set about it without thinking. The smell of it permeated the module and drove back the scents of fresh poly, carpet adhesive, and glueboard.

I tried to read one of the metatheorics books while the dough was rising. Just as I was beginning to doze off (the book was impenetrable and my body’s clock was out of synch with the sun) someone tried to scare me to death by pounding on the walls of my trailer. I knew it was Arsibalt by the weight of the impacts. By his footfalls as he prowled around. By the methodical way he pounded on every bit of wall that presented itself-as if I could have missed it the first time.

I opened a window and shouted through steel mesh and cloudy poly-sheet. “It is not made of stone, like the buildings you are accustomed to, and so a little pounding goes a long way.”

A vaguely Arsibalt-shaped ghost centered itself in the aperture. “Fraa Erasmas! How good it is to hear your voice, and squint at your indistinct form!”

“Likewise. Am I still even considered a fraa then?”

“They are far too busy to fit your Anathem into their schedules-don’t flatter yourself.”

A long silence.

“I am so terribly sorry,” he said.

“Me too.” Arsibalt seemed upset, so I nattered on for a while. “You should have seen me an hour ago! I was a mess,” I said. “Am still.”

“You were…there?”

“A couple of hundred feet away, I’d estimate.”

Then he began weeping in earnest. I couldn’t very well go and put my arms around him. I tried to think of something to say. It was harder, I saw, for him. Not that watching Orolo die had been easy for me. But if it had to happen, it was better to have been there and watched it. And better, as well, to have spent a couple of days afterwards with my friends on the beach.

After the contingent from Tredegarh had showed up and told me how it was going to be, I’d sat around a campfire with Cord, Yul, Gnel, and Sammann. It had not been necessary to point out that we five might never be together again.

“They wouldn’t bring me back to Tredegarh just to Anathematize me,” I speculated, “so I guess I’ll go back to being what I was.” I looked around at all of their faces, warm in firelight. “But I’ll never be the same.”

“No kidding,” Yul said, “all those head injuries.”

Ganelial Crade said, “I’m staying with these people.”

This was so unexpected that we’d all been slow to work out what he meant: he was joining the Orithenans. “I’ve talked to Landasher about it,” he went on, amused by how we were reacting. “He says they’ll try me out for a while, and if I’m not too obnoxious, maybe I can stay.”

Yul got up and went around the circle to hug his cousin from behind and pound him on the back. We all toasted him with our poly cups of dyed sugar water.

Heads turned next to Sammann, who threw up his hands and admitted, “All of this has been very good for my reputation and access.” We all hurled mock abuse at him for a while. He soaked it up with a satisfied smile. “I’ll be flying back to the Convox with Fraa Erasmas-probably in a different section of the plane, though.” This moved me, and so I got up, walked over, and embraced him while I was still allowed to.

Finally attention turned to Cord and Yul, who were sitting on a cooler and leaning against each other. “Now that we are Arbre-leading experts on Geometer technology,” Yul began, “we might go out and seek employment as such.”

“Seriously,” Cord said, “there are a lot of people here who want to ask us questions. Since the probe got destroyed, our memories of what we saw are important. We might even end up at Tredegarh.”

“Yul’s rig too,” I remarked. I had a dim memory of its wreckage hurtling past Fraa Orolo. For once, Yul had nothing to say. He just gazed out over the sea and shook his head.

Cord reminded us, “My fetch should be safe at Norslof. Once things have settled down a little, we’ll go back and collect it. Then we were thinking of going up into the mountains for a while-a delayed honeymoon.”

A silence ensued. She let it stretch out just long enough before saying, “Oh, did I mention we’re engaged?”

The previous evening, Yul had approached me with a conspiratorial look and drawn a shiny thing from his pocket: a metal ring that he had cut free from the rigging of the Geometers’ parachute. He’d heated it in a campfire blown white-hot with an improvised bellows, and hammered it into a size that he hoped would fit Cord’s finger.

“I was going to ask Cord to-well-you know. Not right away! But later, you know, when things are settled.”

I’d realized that Yul was, in a way, asking my permission, so I’d moved to embrace him and said, “I know you’ll take care of her.” His hug had nearly broken my spine and I’d thought for a moment I’d have to summon one of the Valers to come and pry him off me.

After he’d calmed down a little, he’d let me look at the ring. “Not your normal jewel,” he admitted, “but-being that it’s from another world and all-it’s the rarest, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I assured him, “it’s the rarest.” Then both of us had involuntarily looked over at my sib.

He must have asked her earlier in the day, and she must have said yes. For a while, there was wild hugging, hollering, and running around. A mob of Orithenans gathered around us, drawn by a rumor that the wedding was going to happen now. They were followed by curious soldiers, followed in turn by Convox people who wanted to know what all the fuss was about. There was a kind of crazy momentum pushing us toward holding the ceremony that day, on the beach. But after a few minutes, everyone settled down, and it turned into a party. Orithenan suurs uprooted armloads of weedy flowers from the ditch along the road and braided them into garlands. The soldiers got into the spirit of things, producing booze from nowhere, and cheering Cord and Yul with gutsy noises. A helicopter mechanic gave Cord his favorite daisy-head screwdriver.

An hour later I was on the plane to Tredegarh.

Arsibalt was settling down a little. He drew a deep, shaky breath. “He accepted his fate quite calmly, it seemed.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know the meaning of the symbol he drew on the ground? The analemma?”

Something occurred to me. “Hey!” I said. “How do you know all of this stuff? Have they been letting you watch speelies?”

He was glad to have an excuse to declaim about something. It settled him right down. “I forget you know nothing of the Convox. Whenever they wish to say something to everyone-for example, when Jesry came back from space-they summon us to a so-called Plenary in the nave of the Unarians, the only place big enough to hold the entire Convox. Rules are relaxed; they show us speelies. Anyway, there was an all-day Plenary-most enervating-after the Visitation of Orithena.”

“Is that what they’re calling it?”

I could see him nodding. It was hard to make out details through the poly, but I feared he might be trying to grow a beard again.

“Well,” I said, “I spent a few days with him before…before the events you saw on the speely. Of course, I saw the original Analemma, the ancient one on the Temple floor.”

“Now that must have been something!” Arsibalt gushed.

“It was. Especially now that we can never go back,” I said. “But as for the analemma that Orolo drew on the beach, I’m afraid I didn’t get any special insight to decode the meaning of…”

“Is something the matter?” Arsibalt asked, a few seconds later. For I had trailed off.

“I just remembered something,” I said. “A remark Orolo made. The last thing he said to me, before the probe fired its thrusters. ‘They must have deciphered my analemma!’”

“‘They’ meaning the Geometers, presumably.”

“Yeah. Too much was happening for me to ask him what it meant…”

“And then it was too late,” Arsibalt said.

Orolo’s death was still new enough that we had to stop talking for a few moments whenever it came up in conversation. But both of us were thinking. “A phototype on the wall of his cell, at Bly’s Butte,” I said, “showed the Analemma. The ancient one.”

“Yes,” Arsibalt said. “I remember seeing it.”

“Almost as if it were the equivalent of a religious symbol to him,” I said, “like the Triangle is to certain Arks.”

“But that doesn’t explain his remark about the Geometers ‘deciphering’ it,” Arsibalt pointed out.

We sat there puzzling over it for a few more moments, but could make no headway.

“So,” I said, “at the Plenary after Jesry came back from space…did you see what happened to the Warden of Heaven?”

“Did you?” he asked. Then both of us were silent for a minute, daring each other to say something funny and inappropriate. But somehow it didn’t seem like the right time, yet.

“How are the others?”

He sighed. “I don’t see much of them. We have all been assigned to different Laboratoria. Periklyne is absolute bedlam, of course. And we have chosen different Lucubs.”

I could only guess at the meanings of those words. “But maybe you can at least tell me how they are doing?”

“You need to know it is different for Jesry and Ala,” he began.

“Why?”

“Because they were summoned in Voco. They died, as do all whose names are called out thus, and they had to begin new lives. Some of them quite liked it. All of them got used to it. Then, suddenly, weeks later, the thing changed into a Convox.”

“They had to undie.”

“Yes. You should expect some awkwardness.”

“Awkwardness! Well, at least something about this place will be familiar then.”

Arsibalt cleared his throat instead of laughing.

“They are going to let you out of this contraption in no time,” Jesry told me. Somewhat confounding Arsibalt’s prediction, he came to visit me before my bread was even finished cooling.

He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice. “What is the basis of your prediction?” I asked.

“The lasers were the wrong color,” he said.

I repeated this sentence out loud, but could make nothing of it.

“The laser that shone down onto the Inviolates,” he explained, “on the night that this turned into a Convox.”

“It was red,” I said-pretty stupid, but I was trying to dislodge loose bits of information from Jesry’s brain by throwing rocks at it.

“Some here at Tredegarh are knowledgable about lasers,” Jesry said. “They knew right away that something was funny. There are only so many gases, or combinations of gases, that can be used to make a red laser. Each generates a different wavelength. A laser expert can look at a spot of light and know right away what gas mixture was used as the lasing medium. They didn’t recognize the color of the Geometers’ laser.”

“I don’t see what-”

“Fortunately a cosmographer at Rambalf had the presence of mind to expose a photomnemonic tablet to that light,” Jesry went on. “So we know its exact wavelength. And it has been confirmed that it doesn’t match up with any naturally occurring spectral lines.”

“That makes no sense! Those wavelengths fall out of quantum-mechanical calculations that are basic to everything!”

“But think of newmatter,” Jesry said.

“Okay,” I said, and considered it. If you messed around with how the nucleus was put together, it changed the way electrons orbited around it. Laser light was the result of an electron jumping from an orbit with a higher, to another with lower, energy. The energy difference determined the wavelength-the color-of the light. “Lasers made with newmatter have colors not found in nature,” I allowed.

Jesry was silent, waiting for me to go the next step.

“So,” I continued, “the Geometers have newmatter-they used it to make a laser.”

He shifted posture. Through the plastic I could see nothing but posture. Yet I knew he was disagreeing with me. And for once, I knew why.

“But they don’t,” I continued. “At least, not in any meaningful way. I’ve handled their parachute. The shroud lines. The hatch. It was just regular stuff-too heavy, too weak.”

He nodded. “What you couldn’t know-what none of us knew, until a few hours ago-is that it is all newmatter. Everything that came down in that probe-all the hardware, all the flesh-is what we would call newmatter, in the sense that the nuclei are put together in a way that is not natural-not in this cosmos, anyway.”

“But most of it was destroyed!” I protested. “Or at least buried in hundreds of feet of ash.”

“The Orithenans, and your friends, came away with some fragments. We have a T-handle panel. Some bolts that Cord put in her pocket. Scraps of chute and shroud lines. The box of blood samples. And we have the entire body of the woman who was shot in the back, thanks to Saunt Orolo.”

This almost slipped by me. Jesry hadn’t mentioned Orolo until now. Certain nuances in his posture and voice told me he was grieving-but only because I’d known him my whole life. He was going to grieve in a funny, hidden way, over a long period of time.

I cleared my throat. “Are a lot of people referring to him that way, now?”

“Actually, fewer as time goes by. Right after they showed us the speely, it just flew out of people’s mouths. His actions were so obviously those of a saunt that no one even had to think about it. In the last day or so, some are pulling back-reconsidering it.”

“What’s to reconsider!?”

He shrugged and threw up his hands. “Don’t worry about it. You know how it is. No one wants to be hasty-to be called an Enthusiast. The Procians are probably cooking up radical new interpretations of what Orolo did in their Lucubs. Forget it. He made the sacrifice. We honor that by getting as much knowledge as we can out of the dead chick. And I’m trying to tell you that every nucleus of every atom in her, the shotgun balls in her guts, the clothing she wore, is newmatter-so the same is probably true of everything in the isocahedron.”

“So the electrons around those nuclei behave correspondingly unnaturally,” I said, “such as lasing at the wrong color.”

“Electron behavior is basically synonymous with chemistry,” Jesry put in. “That’s why newmatter was invented: because monkeying around with nucleosynthesis gave us new elements and new chemistry to play around with.”

“And the functioning of living organisms is founded on chemistry,” I said.

Jesry was smarter than I. He must have known it. But he didn’t let it show very often. No matter how many times I failed to get what he was talking about, he had this steady faith in my ability to understand what he understood. It was an endearing quality-his only one. Now, he shifted posture again, leaning in as if he were actually interested in what I had to say-letting me know I was on the right track.

“We can’t interact chemically with the Geometers-or with any of their viruses or bacteria-because the laser was the wrong color!”

“Some simple interactions are doubtless possible,” Jesry said. “An electron is an electron. So our atoms can form simple chemical bonds with theirs. But there’s not the sophisticated biochemistry that germs use to go about their business.”

“So, they could make noises that we could hear. See light reflecting from our bodies. Punch us in the nose, even…”

“Or rod us.” This was the first time I’d heard rod employed as a verb, but I collected that he was talking of the projectile that had blasted Ecba.

“But not infect us,” I said.

“Nor vice versa. Oh, over time, germs will evolve that can interact with both types of matter-knit the ecosystems together. But that’ll take a long time, and we can stay ahead of it. So. You’ll be out of that box soon.”

“Do they have water? Oxygen?”

“Their hydrogen is identical to ours. Their oxygen is similar enough to give them water. We don’t know whether we could breathe it. Carbon seems to be a little different. The metals and so on show greater divergence.”

“How much more do you know about the Geometers?”

“Less than you. What was Orolo doing at Orithena?”

“Pursuing a line of inquiry that I don’t fully understand.”

“Consistent with a polycosmic interpretation of what’s going on?”

“Totally.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m afraid to talk about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m afraid I’ll make a bloody hash of it.”

Jesry did not respond, and I fancied he was eyeing me suspiciously through the plastic.

The real reason I didn’t want to talk about it, of course, was because I was afraid it would lead straight to the Incanters. And I guessed that we were under surveillance.

“Some other time,” I said, “when I’m fresher. We can go for a walk. Like when we used to hold theorical dialogs in Orolo’s vineyard.”

Orolo’s vineyard, because of its south-facing slope, was one of those parts of Edhar that wasn’t visible from any of the Warden Regulant’s windows, and as such, was where we used to go when we were up to some kind of mayhem. Jesry got the message, and nodded.

“How’s Ala?” I asked.

“Fine. I don’t know when you’ll see her, because after our Voco, she and I started having a liaison.”

My ears caught fire and serrated bristles popped out of my spine. Or at least it felt that way. But later when I checked out a mirror, I didn’t seem any different, just a little more stupid-looking. Some higher, more modern part of my brain-that is, some part of it that had evolved more recently than five million years ago-thought it might be good to keep the conversation going. “Well. Thanks for letting me know. What’s going to happen now, then?”

“Well, knowing her, she’s going to make a decision. And until she’s made it, neither one of us is probably going to hear from her.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She’s busy, anyway,” Jesry went on. I had the feeling that he was finished with me, bored, and really wanted to leave. But even he knew he couldn’t just drop this bomb and walk away. So he filled a little time talking about the structure of the Convox and how it was organized. I heard little.

That’s why he had paid me a visit so promptly. So that he could break this news to me while we were separated by steel mesh. Clever boy!

Because (as I reflected, after he had taken his leave) he knew me, and knew I’d brood on it, and be reasonable. Why shouldn’t they have started a liaison? After Ala had been Evoked, I had thought of myself as available.

Not that it had gotten me anywhere!

I ate a piece of bread. Three avout in bubble suits came into the trailer. Two of them stole even more of my blood. The other stayed behind after the blood-stealers had made their getaway. She wrenched the head from her bubble suit and tossed it on the floor. Stuffed the gloves into that. Stuck her fingers through her hair, and felt her own scalp. “Stuffy in there,” she explained, when she caught me looking. “Suur Maroa. Centenarian. Fifth Sconic. I’m from a little math you’ve never heard of. Can I have some of that bread?”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll be contaminated?”

She glanced at her helmet, then back to me.

I thought Suur Maroa was pretty attractive, but she was fifteen years older than I, and I didn’t trust myself at the moment; maybe I’d have been attracted to any female who didn’t treat me as an alien plague vector. So I got her a piece of bread. “What a godawful place!” she remarked, looking around. “Is this how extras live?”

“Most of them.”

“You should be out of it soon, though.” She inhaled deeply through her nose, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was thinking about what she smelled. Then she got an annoyed look, and shook her head. “Too many industrial byproducts in here,” she muttered.

“What are you about?” I asked. “What do Fifth Sconics do? I’m sorry, I ought to know.”

“Thank you,” she said, accepting a piece of bread from my hand, touching me incidentally. She took a bite and stared off into space as she chewed it.

Avout who followed the Sconic Discipline had begun to splinter and fight immediately after the Reconstitution and to squabble over which sect had dibs on the names Sconics, Reformed Sconics, New Sconics, and so on. Eventually they had gone over to a numbering system. They were up into the low twenties now, so Fives were pretty well-established.

“I don’t think that the differences between the Fives, the Fours, and the Sixes are germane here,” she finally decided. She turned to look at me. “I just want to know how they smelled.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. For example, you handled the parachute, right?”

“Yes.”

“If you handled a big old parachute from a military depot on Arbre, you’d be able to smell it. Maybe it would smell musty from being wadded up in a sack for a long time.”

“If only I’d had the presence of mind to pay more attention to that!” I said.

“It’s all right,” Suur Maroa said. She was a theor, used to setbacks. “You were kind of busy. Nice job, by the way.”

“Oh thanks.”

“When the cool girl-”

“Cord.”

“Yeah, activated the pressure equalization valves on the hatch, air moved-?”

“In to the capsule,” I said.

“So you didn’t get to smell their atmosphere until after it had been mixed with ours.”

“Correct.”

“Damn.”

“Maybe we should have waited,” I said.

She aimed a sharp look at me. “I don’t recommend you go around saying things like that!”

I was taken aback. She checked herself and went on in a lower voice: “This place is the world capital of know-it-alls. Everyone is jealous. Wishes they’d been there instead of you and a bunch of Lineage weirdos. Thinks they could have done better.”

“Okay, never mind,” I said. “We had to do what we did because we knew the military was coming to screw it up even worse.”

“That’s more like it,” she said. “Back to the olfactory now: do you remember smelling anything, at any time?”

“Yes! We talked about it!”

“Not when that Ita had his speelycaptor on you, you didn’t.”

“Before Sammann arrived. The probe had just landed. Orolo smelled the plume from the engines. He wanted to know if they were using toxic propellants-”

“Wise of him. Some of them are frightening,” Maroa put in.

“But we couldn’t smell anything. Decided it was all steam. Hydrogen/oxygen.”

“That is still a negative result.”

“But later, there was a definite odor inside the probe,” I said. “I remember it now. Associated with the body. I assumed it was some kind of bodily fluid.”

“Assumed, because you didn’t recognize the odor?” Suur Maroa asked, after she had thought about this for as long as she wanted to.

“It was totally new to me.”

“So the Geometers’ organic molecules are capable of interacting chemically with our olfactory systems,” she concluded. “It’s an interesting result. Theors have been breathing down my neck wanting me to answer it-because some of those reactions are quantum-mechanical in nature.”

“Our noses are quantum devices?”

“Yes!” Maroa said, with a bright look that was close to a smile. “Little-known fact.” She stood up and fetched her helmet. “It’s a useful result. We should be able to get a sample from the body and expose it to olfactory tissue in a lab.” She gave me the bright look again. “Thank you!” And, in a completely absurd departure ritual, she pulled her gloves on, and lowered her helmet over her head, which I was sorry to see the last of.

“Wait!” I said. “How could any of this be? How could the Geometers be so like us, and yet made of different matter?”

“You’ll have to ask a cosmographer,” she said. “My specialty is cornering vermin and taking them apart.”

“What does that make me?” I asked, but she was too preoccupied getting her helmet on to catch the joke. She passed out into a kind of airlock that they’d erected outside my front door. The door closed and locked, and the tape dispenser started making rude noises again.

It got dark. I fretted over the contradiction. The Geometers looked like us, but were made of matter so fundamentally different that Maroa had entertained the possibility that we wouldn’t even be able to smell it. Some at the Convox were afraid of space germs; Maroa sure wasn’t.

My being stuck in this box was a byproduct of arguments that people were having in chalk halls a few hundred yards away. I should have paid better attention to Jesry’s chitchat about what a Convox was.

Lio showed up late and made a hooting noise at the window. It was a fake bird call that we had used, back at Edhar, when we were out after curfew.

“I can’t see you at all,” I said.

“Just as well. Bumps and bruises mostly.”

“Been working out with the Valers?”

“That would be much safer. No, I’ve been working out with people who are as clumsy as I am. The Ringing Vale avout watch and laugh.”

“Well, I hope you’re giving as good as you’re getting.”

“That would be satisfying on one level,” he allowed, “but no way to shine in the eyes of my instructors.”

I felt funny talking to a blank square of plastic, so I turned off the lights and sat in the dark with him. For a long time. Thinking, not talking, about Orolo.

“Why are they teaching you how to fight?” I asked. “I thought they had that market cornered.”

“You jumped straight to a pretty interesting question, Raz,” he croaked. His voice had gotten all husky. “I don’t know the answer yet. Just starting to get some ideas.”

“Well, my body clock is screwed up, I’m going to be awake all night, and the books they left me are unreadable. My girlfriend ran off with Jesry. So, I’m happy to sit here and listen to your ideas.”

“What books did they leave you?”

“A hodgepodge.”

“Unlikely. There must be a common thread. You need to get on top of it before your first messal.”

“Jesry used that word. I was trying to parse it.”

“Comes from the diminutive of a Proto-Orth word meaning a flat surface on which food was served.”

“So, ‘small table’-”

“Think ‘small dinner.’ Turns out to be an important tradition here. It’s really different from Edhar, Raz. The way we used to eat-everyone together in the Refectory, carrying their own food around, sitting wherever they felt like it-they have a word for that too, not so complimentary. It is seen as backward, chaotic. Only fids and a few weird, ascetic orders do it. Here it’s all about messals. The maximum head count is seven. That’s considered to be the largest number you can fit around a table such that everyone can hear, and people aren’t always splitting off into side conversations.”

“So, there’s a dining hall somewhere with a lot of seven-person tables in it?”

“No, that’d be too noisy. Each messal is held in a small private room-called a messallan.”

“So, there’s a ring of these messallans, or something, around the Refectory kitchen?”

Lio was chuckling at my naivete. Not in a mean way. He’d been in the same state of ignorance a few weeks ago. “Raz, you don’t get how rich this place is. There is no Refectory-no one central kitchen. It’s all dowments and chapterhouses.”

“They have active dowments? I thought those were abolished-”

“In the Third Sack reforms,” he said. “They were. But you know how Shuf’s Dowment has been fixed up by the ROF? Well, imagine a concent with a hundred places like that-each of them bigger and nicer than Shuf’s ever was. And don’t get me started on the chapterhouses.”

“I feel like a hick already.”

“Just you wait.”

“So there is a separate kitchen-” I stopped, unable to handle such a wild thought.

“A separate kitchen for each messallan-cooking just fourteen servings at a time!”

“I thought you said seven.”

“The servitors have to eat too.”

“What’s a servitor?”

“We are!” Lio laughed. “When they let you out, you’ll be paired with a senior fraa or suur-your doyn. A couple of hours ahead of time, you go to the dowment or chapterhouse where your doyn is assigned for messal, and you and the other servitors prepare the dinner. When the bells ring eventide, the doyns show up and sit down around the table and the servitors bring out the food. When you’re not moving plates around, you stand behind your doyn with your back to the wall.”

“That is shocking,” I said. “I’m half convinced you’re pulling my leg.”

“I couldn’t believe it myself, at first,” Lio said, laughing. “Made me feel like such a hayseed. But the system works. You get to listen in on conversations you’d never get to be a part of otherwise. As years go by you move up and become a doyn and get a servitor of your own.”

“What if your doyn is an idiot? What if it’s a bad messal with the same boring conversation every evening? You can’t get up and move to another table like we do at Edhar!”

“I wouldn’t trade it for our system,” Lio said. “It’s not such an issue now, because the people who get invited to a Convox tend to be pretty interesting.”

“So, who is your doyn?”

“She’s the Warden Fendant of a small math on the top of a skyscraper in a big city that is in the middle of a sectarian holy war.”

“Interesting. And where is your messallan?”

Lio said, “My doyn and I rotate to a different one every evening. This is unusual.”

“Hmm. I wonder where they’ll put me.”

“That’s why you need to get on top of those books,” Lio said. “You might get in trouble with your doyn if you’re not prepared.”

“Not prepared to do what-fold their napkin?”

“You’re expected to understand what’s going on. Sometimes, servitors even get to take part in the conversation.”

“Oh. What an honor!”

“It might be a great honor, depending on who your doyn is. Imagine if Orolo were your doyn.”

“I take your point. But that’s out of the question.”

Lio brooded for a while before answering. “That’s another thing,” he said, in a quiet voice. “The aut of Anathem has not been celebrated at Tredegarh for close to a thousand years.”

“How can that be? This place must have twenty times the population of Edhar!”

“All the different chapters and dowments make it possible for weirdos and misfits to find homes,” Lio said. “You and I grew up in a tough town, brother.”

“Well, don’t go soft on me now.”

“That is unlikely,” Lio said, “when I spend every day sparring with Valers.”

This reminded me that he was exhausted. “Hey! Before you go-one question,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Why are we here? Isn’t this Convox a sitting duck?”

“Yes.”

“You’d think they’d have dispersed it.”

“Ala’s been busy,” he said, “drawing up contingency plans for just that. But the order hasn’t been given yet. Maybe they’re worried it would look like a provocation.”

“So-we are…”

“Hostages!” Lio said cheerfully. “Good night, Raz.”

“’Night, Lio.”

In spite of Lio’s advice, I couldn’t get a grip on the books that had been left for me. My brain was too jangled. I tried to skim the novels. These were easier to follow, but I couldn’t fathom why I had been assigned to read such things. I got about twenty leaves into the third one, and the hero jumped through a portal to a parallel universe. The other two novels had also revolved around parallel-universe scenarios, so I reasoned that I was supposed to be thinking about that topic, and that the other books must relate to that theme. But all of a sudden my body decided it was time to sleep, and I was barely able to stagger over to bed before I lost consciousness.

I woke to bells ringing strange changes, and Tulia calling my name. Not in a happy way. For a moment I fancied I was back at Edhar. But when I opened one eye-just a slit-all I saw was trailer.

“My god!” Tulia exclaimed, from terrifyingly close range. I came awake to find her standing at the foot of my bed. No bubble suit. The look on her face was as if she’d found me sprawled in a gutter outside a bordello. I did some groping, and satisfied myself that most of me was covered by my bolt.

“What is your problem?” I muttered.

“You have to move now! Instantly! They are holding up Inbrase for you!”

That sounded serious, so I rolled out of bed and chased her out of the trailer. The airlock had been torn down; we trampled the plastic. She led me across the courtyard, under an arch, and down some ancient Mathic catacomb whose far end was sealed off by an iron grille-the sort of barrier used to separate one math from another. It sported a gate, which was being held open by a nervous-seeming fid who clanged it shut behind us as we burst through into a long straight lane guarded by twin rows of enormous page trees. This lane cut through the middle of a forest of them.

My feet had grown soft from wearing shoes and I kept mincing over stones and root-knuckles, so Tulia outran me. On its far side, the page-tree wood was bordered by a stone wall, thirty-odd feet high, pierced by a massive arch, where she paused to catch her breath and wait for me.

As I drew near, she turned to face me and raised her arms. I gave her a big hug, lifting her off the ground, and for some reason both of us broke out laughing. I loved her for that. She was the only one I’d met who was responding to Orolo’s death with something other than sadness. Not that she wasn’t sad. But she was proud of him, I thought, thrilled by what he had done, glad that I had survived and come back to be with my friends once more.

Then we were running again: through the arch and into a rolling green, splashed with coppices of great old trees, that seemed to extend for miles. Stone buildings rose up every few hundred feet, and a network of footpaths joined them. These must be the dowments and chapterhouses Lio had spoken of. I was more impressed by the lawns than anything else; at Edhar, we couldn’t afford to waste ground this way.

The bells were getting marginally closer. As we came around the corner of an especially huge building-some sort of cloister/ library complex-the Precipice finally came in view. Tulia led me to a broad tree-lined lane that would take us straight to it. Then I was able to see the Mynster complex massed at the base of the cliff.

The Precipice had been formed when a dome of granite, three thousand feet high, had shed its western face. Avout had cleaned up the mess below and used the crumbly bits to make buildings and walls. Since no artificial clock-tower could compete with the Precipice, they had built their Mynster at the base of the cliff and then cut tunnels and galleries and ledges into the granite above, sculpting the Precipice into their Clock, or vice versa. A succession of dials had been built over the millennia, each higher and larger than the last, and all of them still told time: all of them told me I was late.

“Inbrase,” I gasped, “that’s-”

“Your official induction to the Convox,” Tulia said. “Everyone has to go through it-the formal end of your Peregrination-we did it weeks ago.”

“A lot of trouble for one straggler.”

She laughed once, sharply, but couldn’t maintain it owing to air debt. “Don’t flatter yourself, Raz! We’ve been doing these once a week. There’s a hundred other peregrins from eight different maths-all waiting on you!”

The bells stopped ringing-a bad sign! We picked up our pace and ran silently for a few hundred yards.

“I thought everyone got here a long time ago!” I said.

“Only from big concents. You would not believe how isolated some are. There’s even a contingent of Matarrhites!”

“So I’m with the Deolaters, eh?”

I was getting the picture that the chapterhouses closest to the Mynster were the oldest: ring around ring of cloister, gallery, walk, and yard. Glimpses, through Mathic gates and shouting arches, of chapterhouses so tiny, mean, and time-pitted that they must date back to the Reconstitution. New towers striving to make up in loftiness and brilliance what their ancient neighbors owned by dint of age, fame, and dignity.

“Another thing,” Tulia said, “I almost forgot. Right after Inbrase there is going to be a Plenary.”

“Arsibalt mentioned those-Jesry did one?”

“Yes. I wish I had more time, but…just remember it’s all theater.”

“Sounds like a warning!”

“Any time you get that many in a room, there’s no dialog worthy of the name-it’s all stilted. Filtered.”

“Political?”

“Of course. Just-just don’t try to out-politic these guys.”

“Because I’m a complete idiot when it comes to-”

“Exactly.”

We ran on silently for a few more strides, and she thought better of it. “Remember our conversation, Raz? Before Eliger?”

“You were going to nail down the political end of things,” I recalled, “so that I could memorize more digits of pi.”

“Something like that,” she said, tossing off a chuckle just to be a good sport.

“And how’s that plan working out?”

“Just tell the truth. Don’t try to be tricky. It’s not in you.”

Half of the visible universe was now grey granite. We ran up steps whose only purpose was to support steps that held up other tiers and hierarchies and systems of steps. But at some point things flattened out. An entrance was dead ahead of us, but the wrong one. Peregrins were supposed to enter from the direction of the Day Gate, so we had to run a quarter of the way around the Mynster and go in the grandest of all the entrances, which I’d have stared at for half an hour if Tulia hadn’t grabbed my chord like a leash and hauled me through. We ran through a lobby sort of thing and into a nave that was so large I thought we’d gone outdoors again. An aisle ran up the center. Three-quarters of the way along, I could see the tail end of a procession of avout, shuffling toward the chancel. Tulia dropped back, gave me a slap on the bottom that could have been heard from the top of the Precipice, and hissed: “Follow the guys in the loincloths! Do what they do!” At least thirty heads turned to stare; the pews were sparsely occupied with S?culars.

I dropped to a brisk walk-needed to get my breathing under control-and timed it so that I caught up with half a dozen “guys in loincloths” just as they got to the screen at the head of the aisle. Following them through, I found myself sharing a big semicircular chamber-the chancel-with an assortment of hierarchs, a choir, the guys in the loincloths, and several other contingents of avout.

Inbrase was another one of our mathic auts. A formal program, hinged at several instants when coded movements were performed, ancient phrases called out, or symbolic objects manipulated in certain ways, and ventilated by musical entertainments and speeches from purpled hierarchs. A Sæcular would have seen it as ludicrous foppery if not outright witchcraft. I tried to get back into the spirit of things and see it as an avout was supposed to. That, after all, was the point of Inbrase: to get peregrins back into the mathic frame of mind. To that end, it was more fabulous and impressive than daily auts such as Provener. Or perhaps that was just how they did everything at Tredegarh. Their hierarchs really knew how to put on a show-to grab the audience in the way that great actors did in a theater. Their raiments were really something, and their numbers were intimidating; the Primate was flanked not just by his two Wardens but by echelons of other hierarchs, and not junior ones either, but people who had sub-entourages of their own, and looked as if they might have been Primates themselves. I was looking, I realized, at some sort of high council of Primates who had all been Evoked from their concents, presumably so that they could run the Convox. Or the mathic side of it, at least. Somewhere on the other side of a screen there must be a cabinet of Panjandrums who were as important in the Sæcular world as these hierarchs were in the mathic.

I felt like a scabby mendicant, and considered it a brilliant stroke of good fortune that I was standing next to an order of avout who wore only handkerchiefs. As I looked at those, however, I began to see that these were actually bolts that had frayed away to almost nothing. The loose fibers that dangled from their fraying ends had clumped together into ropy dreadlocks that these men (they were all men) used to tie the remaining snatches of fabric around their midsections. It was our tradition at Edhar to allow one end of the bolt to fray. The most ancient members of our order, however, when they succumbed to old age, might be buried in bolts with fringes a few inches long. In this order, it seemed, bolts were passed down from older to younger avout. Some of them must be thousands of years old. One of these strange half-naked fraas had a pot belly, and the rest were gaunt. They belonged to a race that tended to live near the Equator. Their hair was wild, but not so wild as their eyes, which stared into the space above the chancel floor without seeming to register anything. I got the feeling they weren’t used to being indoors.

The other six contingents wore full-sized bolts in complicated wraps. That was all they had in common with one another. Each of the groups was accessorized with a completely different system of turbans, hats, hoods, footgear, under-bolts, over-bolts, and even jewelry. Plainly, we at Edhar were at the austere end of the spectrum. Perhaps only the Valers and the guys in the loincloths were more ascetic than we.

After we’d worked through the opening rounds of pomp, the Primate stepped up to say a few words. It was possible to hear people sighing and settling in the dark naves behind the screens. I risked looking down at myself and saw dirty bare feet, a rough, dull-colored bolt in the crudest possible wrap (the Just Got Up Special), scars that were still red, and bruises faded yellow-green. I was the token Feral.

One of the other Inbrase groups-the most numerous and dressed-up-stepped forward and sang a number. They had enough strong voices to pull off six-part polyphony without showing the strain. What a fine gesture, I thought. Then the group next to them rattled off a monophonic chant, using modes and tonalities I’d never heard before. I saw the next group worrying cheat sheets out of their bolts. Finally then, understanding came over me, and I got the feeling one gets only in an especially sadistic nightmare: I was perfectly trapped. Each group had to sing something! I was a group-of one! And it wasn’t going to work for me to sheepishly wave my hands and beg off. No one at the Convox would think that was cute; no one would think it was funny.

It wouldn’t be that bad, I told myself. Expectations would be low. I was a reasonably competent singer. If someone had stuck a piece of music in front of me and said “go!” I could have winged it-sight-read the thing. The hard part was deciding what to sing. Obviously these other groups had sorted it out weeks ago-chosen pieces that said something about who they were, what they thought about at their concents, what musical traditions they had developed to glorify the ideas most precious to them. The musical heritage of the Concent of Saunt Edhar could stand in the same ranks as those of much larger concents. I felt no insecurity there. A sizable contingent from Edhar had already arrived, though, and celebrated Inbrase. Arsibalt and Tulia had no doubt taken the matter in hand and organized a performance, anchored by Fraa Jad’s world-shaking drone, that the rest of the Convox was still talking about at their messals. What, then, was left for me? Harmony and polyphony were out of the question. I wasn’t good enough to blow everyone away with sheer skill. Best to be simple-not to overreach, not to make a fool of myself. Very few soloists were good enough that people would actually want to listen to them for more than a minute or two. I just had to do my bit, to show respect for the occasion, then step back and shut up.

But I didn’t want to just rattle off some random scrap of lesson, which would have been easy, and would have sufficed, because-and I well know how insane this is going to sound-I wanted to touch Ala. Jesry was right about one thing: I was not going to see her until she had made up her mind. But she had to be somewhere in this Mynster, and she had no choice but to listen to what would come out of my mouth. Singing an old lesson we’d learned at Edhar might have evoked nostalgic feelings in her breast but it would be safe and dull. Jesry had been to space. But I was capable of having adventures of my own, learning new things, taking on qualities that Ala knew nothing of-yet. Was there a way of expressing that in music?

There might be. The Orithenans had used a system of computational chanting that, it was plain to see, was rooted in traditions that their founders had brought over from Edhar. To that point, it was clearly recognizable to any Edharian. It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies. The permutation was done on the fly by following certain rules, defined using the formalism of cellular automata. After the Second Sack reforms, newly computerless avout had invented this kind of music. In some concents it had withered away, in others mutated into something else, but at Edhar it had always been practiced seriously. We’d all learned it as a sort of children’s musical game. But at Orithena they had been doing new things with it, using it to solve problems. Or rather to solve a problem, the nature of which I didn’t understand yet. Anyway, it sounded good-the results, for some reason, just tended to be more musical than the Edharian version, which was serviceable for computing things, but, as music, could be hard to take. I’d spent enough time among the Orithenans to hear some of it and to gain some familiarity with the system. I’d had one tune in particular stuck in my head during the flight to Tredegarh and my time in quarantine. Maybe if I sang it aloud, it would go away.

Once I’d thought of this, it was the obvious and easy choice. And so, when my turn came, I stepped forward and sang that piece. I sang it freely and easily, because I was not troubled by any second thoughts as to whether it was the right thing to do.

At least, not until it was too late. Because, when I had gotten a few phrases into it, a rumble of astonishment passed like a wave through one wedge of the audience. It wasn’t loud, but it was unmistakable. I couldn’t help glancing toward it, and then I faltered, and almost lost the melody, when I saw that it had come from behind the screen of the Thousanders.

Sensing I might have blundered into some kind of trouble, I did what any guilty fid would do: shot a furtive glance at the hierarchs. They were looking back at me. Most were glassy-eyed, but some were putting their heads together, starting a discussion. One of these, I noticed, was my old friend Varax the Inquisitor.

I actually derived a kind of relief then, from knowing that I was helpless-whatever basket of bugs I had overturned, I couldn’t change the result now. Most of the audience heard nothing remarkable in this piece, and listened politely, so I concentrated on bringing it to a clean finish. But seeing movement in the corner of my eye, I glanced over to see that the guys in the loincloths-who’d appeared to’ve been ignoring the aut so far-had broken ranks, and shifted position so that all of them could get a clear view of me.

When I finished, there ought to have been silence-the polite response to a well-sung number. But some of the Thousanders were still muttering to one another. I even fancied I heard a snatch of music being sung back to me. In the vast swathes of pews behind the other screens, small knots of fraas and suurs were still talking about it, and being shushed by their neighbors.

The men in the loincloths stepped up and did a computational chant of their own. It was weird-sounding in the extreme, being built on modes completely different from ours. It was hard to believe that vocal cords could be trained to make such sounds. But I had the feeling that as a computation it was quite similar to what I’d done. When they got to the end of the sequence, the potbellied one sang a sort of coda that, if I understood it correctly, stated that this was only the latest phrase of a computation that his order had been carrying out continuously for thirty-six hundred years.

The last group were the Matarrhites: one of the very few Mathic orders that believed in God. They were the residuum of a Centenarian order that had gone hundred in the centuries just after the Reconstitution. They wore their bolts over their heads, completely covering their faces, except for a screen across the eyes. They sang a kind of dirge-a lament, I realized, for having been torn from the bosom of their concent, and a warning, as if we needed any, that they weren’t going to hang out with us any more than they absolutely had to. It was well carried off, but struck me as whiny and a bit rude.

These performances were the next-to-last part of the aut of Inbrase. Though I hadn’t fully understood it at the time, we had already, earlier in the aut, been struck off the register of peregrins and formally enrolled in the Convox. We had renewed our vows, and funny-looking documents, hand-written on animal skin, had been despatched to our home concents letting them know we’d arrived. The songs we’d just sung represented our first, albeit symbolic, contributions to whatever it was the Convox was supposed to be doing. All that remained was to stand there while everyone else-the thousands behind the screens-stood up to sing a canticle stating that our contributions were duly accepted and that they were glad to have us. During the final verse, the hierarchs began parading out through the screen into the Unarians’ nave. We, the Inbrase groups, followed them in the same order as before. I brought up the rear. We had (at least symbolically) entered through the Day Gate and the visitors’ nave, as S?culars, and now, having become avout once more, we exited into a math. The canticle began to lose cohesion as the last of the hierarchs filed out, and by the time I stepped over the threshold, leaving the chancel empty behind me, the melody had been devoured by the shufflings and mutterings of the Convox taking their leave.