Anathem

Fraa Lodoghir said, “We are on the third messal already. The first seemed to be about worldtracks in Hemn space as a way of understanding the physical universe. Which was unobjectionable to me, until it turned out to be a stalking horse for the Hylaean Theoric World. The second was a trip to the circus-except that instead of gawking at contortionists, jugglers, and prestidigitators, we marveled at the intellectual backflips, sword-swallowing, and misdirection in which devotees of the HTW must engage if they are not to be Thrown Back as a religious cult. That’s quite all right, it was good to get it out of our systems, and I commend the Edharian plurality here for having, as it were, laid their cards on the messal. Ha. But what may we now say about the matter at hand-which is, in case anyone has forgotten, the PAQD, their capabilities and intentions?”

“Why do they look like us, for one thing?” asked Suur Asquin. “That is the question that my mind returns to over and over again.”

“Thank you, Suur Asquin!” I exclaimed back in the kitchen. I was scattering bread crumbs over the top of a casserole. “I can’t believe how little attention has been paid to that minor detail.”

“People simply don’t know what to make of it-have no idea where to begin,” said Suur Tris. And as if to confirm this, a welter of voices was coming through on the speaker. I hauled the oven door open and thrust the casserole in, arranging it on the center of a hand-forged iron rack. Fraa Lodoghir was going on about parallel evolution: how, on Arbre, physically similar but totally unrelated species had evolved to fill similar niches on different continents.

“Your point is well taken, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Zh’vaern, “but I believe that the similarities are too close to be explained by parallel evolution. Why do the Geometers have five fingers, one of which is an opposable thumb? Why not seven fingers and two thumbs?”

“Do you have some knowledge of the PAQD that has been withheld from the rest of us?” demanded Lodoghir. “What you say is true of the one specimen we have seen-the Antarct woman. The other three Geometer species might have seven fingers, for all we know.”

“Of course, you are correct,” Zh’vaern said. “But the Antarct-Arbre correspondence, taken alone, seems too great to be accounted for by parallel evolution.”

The point was argued all the way through the soup course. We servitors made our rounds, staggering and sidling through a messallan congested with rucksacks. For we had all been told that one should never let one’s rucksack out of sight-so that, even if the dispersal order were accompanied by a power blackout, or some sort of disaster that filled the air with dust and smoke, one would be able to find it by touch. Since we servitors couldn’t very well carry them up and down the serving corridor, we’d bent the rules by leaving ours lined up along the corridor wall. The doyns kept theirs behind the chairs in the messallan, and flipped their badges back over their shoulders to eat.

Ignetha Foral put a stop to the thumb-and-finger discourse with a glance at Suur Asquin, who silenced the room with another of her magisterial throat-clearings. “In the absence of further givens, the parallel-evolution hypothesis cannot be rationally evaluated.”

“I agree,” said Lodoghir in a wistful tone.

“The alternative hypothesis seems to be some sort of leakage of information through the Wick, if I have been taking up Fraa Paphlagon’s argument?”

Fraa Paphlagon looked a bit uneasy. “The word leakage makes it sound like a malfunction. It is nothing of the kind-just normal flow or, if you will, percolation along the world-DAG.”

“This percolation you speak of: until now, I fancied it was all theors seeing timeless truths about isosceles triangles,” Lodoghir said. “I oughtn’t to be surprised by the ever-escalating grandiosity of these claims, but aren’t you now asking us to believe something even more colossal? Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

An awkard pause.

“You do believe in evolution, don’t you?” Lodoghir continued.

“Yes, though it might have sounded strange to someone like Protas, who had frankly mystical pagan views about the HTW and so on,” said Paphlagon, “but any modern version of Protism must be reconcilable with long-established theories, not only of cosmography, but of evolution. However, I disagree with the polemical part of your statement, Fraa Lodoghir. It is not a larger claim, but a smaller, more reasonable one.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I thought that when you claimed more, it was a larger claim?”

“I am only claiming what is reasonable. That-as you yourself pointed out during your Plenary with Fraa Erasmas-tends to be the smallest, in the sense of least complicated, claim. What I claim is that information moves through the Wick in a manner that is somehow analogous to how it moves from past to present. As it moves, one of the things that it does is to excite physically measurable changes in nerve tissue…”

“That,” Suur Asquin said, just to clarify, “being the part where we see truths about cnoons.”

“Yes,” said Paphlagon, “whence we get the HTW and the theorical Protism that Fraa Lodoghir loves so well. But nerve tissue is just tissue, it is just matter obeying natural law. It is not magical or spiritual, no matter what you might think of my opinions on this.”

“I am so relieved to hear you say so!” said Lodoghir. “I’ll have you in the Procian camp by the time Fraa Erasmas brings me my dessert!”

Paphlagon held his tongue for a moment, dodging laughter, then went on. “I can’t believe all of what I just said without positing some non-mystical, theorically understandable mechanism by which the ‘more Hylaean’ worlds can cause physical changes in the ‘less Hylaean’ worlds that lie ‘downstream’ of them in the Wick. And I see no prima facie reason to assume that all those interactions have to do with isosceles triangles and that the only matter in the whole cosmos that is ever affected just happens to be nerve tissue in the brains of theors! Now that would be an ambitious claim, and a rather strange one!”

“We agree on something!” said Lodoghir.

“A much more economical claim, in the Gardan’s Steelyard sense, is that the mechanism-whatever it is-acts on any matter whether or not that matter is part of a living organism-or a theor! It’s just that there is an observational bias at work.”

A couple of heads nodded.

“Observational bias?” Zh’vaern asked.

Suur Asquin turned to him and said, “Starlight falls on Arbre all the time-even at high noon-but we would never know of the stars’ existence if we slept all night.”

“Yes,” Paphlagon said, “and just as the cosmographer can only see stars in a dark sky, we can only observe the Hylaean Flow when it manifests itself as perceptions of cnoons in our conscious minds. Like starlight at noon, it is always present, always working, but only noticed and identified as something remarkable in the context of pure theorics.”

“Er, since you Edharians are so adept at burying assertions in your speeches, let me clarify something,” Lodoghir said. “Did you just stake a claim that the Hylaean Flow is responsible for parallel evolution of Arbrans and Geometers?”

“Yes,” said Paphlagon. “How’s that for a speech?”

“Much more concise, thank you,” Lodoghir said. “But you still believe in evolution!”

“Yes.”

“Well, in that case, you must be saying that the Hylaean Flow has an effect on survival-or at least on the ability of specific organisms to propagate their sequences,” Lodoghir said. “Because that’s how we, and the Antarctans, ended up with five fingers, two nostrils, and all the rest.”

“Fraa Lodoghir, you are doing my work for me!”

“Someone has to do it. Fraa Paphlagon, what possible scenario could justify all of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“The Visitation of Orithena was only ten days ago. Givens are still pouring in. You, Fraa Lodoghir, are now on the forefront of research into the next generation of Protism.”

“I can’t tell you how uneasy that makes me feel-really, I’d rather eat what Fraa Zh’vaern is eating. What is that?”

“At last Fraa Lodoghir asks a good question,” said Arsibalt. Emman had yanked us; a boilover demanded our attention. We both knew exactly what Lodoghir was talking about. It was sitting on the stove, and we had been nervously edging around it all evening long. Stewed hair with cubes of packing material and shards of exoskeleton, or something. The hair seemed to be a vegetable. But what was really troubling Lodoghir and the others at the messal was the explosive crunching of the exoskeletons, or whatever they might be, between Zh’vaern’s molars. We could actually hear these noises over the speaker.

Arsibalt looked around, verifying that Emman and I were the only ones in the kitchen. “As a member of an ascetic, cloistered, contemplative order myself,” he said, “I probably ought not level such criticisms against the poor Matarrhites-”

“Oh, go ahead!” Emman said. He was gamely trying to repair the ruptured casserole.

“All right, since you insist!” said Arsibalt. Protecting his hand with a fold of his bolt, he lifted the lid from the stewpot to divulge a bubbling morass of expired weeds, laced with dangerous-looking carapaces. “I think it’s taking things just a little too far to selectively breed, over a period of millennia, foodstuffs that are offensive to all non-Matarrhites.”

“I’ll bet it’s one of those not-as-bad-as-it-looks, — sounds, — feels, and-smells type of things,” I said, holding my breath and approaching the pot.

“How much?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much do you bet?”

“Are you suggesting we try it?”

“I’m suggesting you try it.”

“Why only me?”

“Because you proposed the wager, and you are the theor.”

“What does that make you?”

“A scholar.”

“So you’ll take notes of my symptoms? Design my stained glass window, after I’m dead?”

“Yes, we’ll place it right there,” Arsibalt said, pointing to a smoke-hole in the wall, about the size of my hand.

Emman had drifted closer. Karvall and Tris had come in from the messallan and were standing very close to each other, watching.

Being watched by females changed everything. “What is the wager?” I said. “I am back down to three possessions.” And it was one of the oldest rules in the mathic world that we weren’t allowed to wager the bolt, chord, and sphere.

“Winner doesn’t have to clean up tonight,” Arsibalt proposed.

“Done,” I said. This was easy; all I had to do, to win the bet, was to claim it wasn’t that bad, and not throw up-at least, not in front of Arsibalt. And even if I lost, I got all kinds of childish satisfaction out of Tris’s and Karvall’s exquisitely horrified reactions as I fished something out of the pulp and put it in my mouth. It was a cube of (I guessed) some curd-like, fermented substance, tangled up in wilted fronds, flecked with a few crunchy shards. While I was pursuing the latter with my tongue, the fronds slipped halfway down my gullet and made me swallow convulsively. They dragged the cube down with them, like seaweed killing a swimmer. I had to do a bit of coughing and gagging to get the vegetable matter back up into my mouth where I could chew it decently. This added some drama to the proceedings and made it that much more entertaining to the others. I held up a hand, signaling that all was well, and took my time chewing what was left-didn’t want my innards slashed up by the sharp bits. Finally it all went down in a greasy, fibrous, thorny tangle. I put the odds at 60–40 that it wouldn’t be coming back up. “You know,” I claimed, “it’s not that much worse than just standing over the pot and wondering.”

“What’s it taste like?” Tris asked.

“Ever put your tongue across battery terminals?”

“No, I’ve never even seen a battery.”

“Mmm.”

“Now, as to the wager-” Arsibalt said uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said, “good luck with cleanup. Put your back into it when you are taking care of those casseroles, will you?”

Before Arsibalt could argue the point, his bell rang. Tris and Karvall were laughing at the look on his face as he slunk out of the kitchen.

In the messallan, the doyns had been asking Zh’vaern-much more circumspectly-about his food, but now Fraa Paphlagon took the bit in his teeth again: “Like cosmographers who sleep at day and work at night because that is when the stars can be seen, we are going to have to toil in the laboratory of consciousness, which is the only setting we know of where the effects of the Hylaean Flow are observable.” And then he muttered something to Arsibalt. Then he added: “Though instead of one single HTW we should now speak of the Wick instead; the Flow percolates through a complex network of cosmi ‘more theoric than’ or ‘prior to’ ours.”

Arsibalt returned to the kitchen. “Paphlagon doesn’t want me. He wants you.”

“Why would he want me?” I asked.

“I can’t be sure,” Arsibalt said, “but I was chatting with him yesterday and mentioned some of the conversations you had with Orolo.”

“Oh. Thanks a lot!”

“So pick the shrapnel out of your teeth and get in there!”

And that was how I came to spend the entire main course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo: the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and the second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos. Paphlagon ended up saying it better: “If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape-brightly illuminating a set of points-of cosmi-that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond.”

I gratefully stepped back against the wall, trying to fade into some shadows myself.

“I am indebted to Fraa Erasmas for allowing us to sit and eat, when so often we must interrupt our comestion with actual talk,” Lodoghir finally said. “Perhaps we ought to trade places and allow the servitors to sit and eat in silence while they are lectured by doyns!”

Barb cackled. He had lately been showing more and more relish for Lodoghir’s wit, furnishing me with the disturbing insight that perhaps Lodoghir was just a Barb who had become old. But after a moment’s reflection I rejected such a miserable idea.

Lodoghir continued, “I’d like you to know that I fully took up Paphlagon’s earlier point about using consciousness as the laboratory for observing the so-called Hylaean Flow. But is this the best we can do? It is nothing more than a regurgitation of Evenedrician datonomy in its most primitive form!”

“I spent two years at Baritoe writing a treatise on Evenedrician datonomy,” mentioned Ignetha Foral, sounding more amused than angry.

I got out of the room, which seemed more politic than laughing out loud. Back in the kitchen, I poured myself a drink and braced my arms on a counter, taking a load off my feet.

“Are you all right?” Karvall asked. She and I were the only servitors in the room.

“Just tired-that took a lot out of me.”

“Well, I thought you spoke really well-for what that’s worth.”

“Thanks,” I said, “it’s worth a lot, actually.”

“Grandsuur Moyra says we are doing something now.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She believes that the messal is on the verge of coming up with new ideas instead of just talking about old ones.”

“Well, that’s really something, from such a distinguished Lorite!”

“It’s all because of the PAQD, she says. If they hadn’t come and brought new givens, it might never have happened.”

“Well, my friend Jesry will be pleased to hear it,” I said. “He’s wanted it all his life.”

“What have you wanted all your life?” Karvall asked.

“Me? I don’t know. To be as smart as Jesry, I guess.”

“Tonight, you were as smart as anyone,” she said.

“Thanks!” I said. “If that’s true, it’s all because of Orolo.”

“And because you were brave.”

“Some would call it stupid.”

If I hadn’t had that conversation with Ala at breakfast, I’d probably be falling in love with Karvall about now. But I was pretty sure Karvall wasn’t in love with me-just stating facts as she saw them. To stand here and receive compliments from an attractive young woman was quite pleasant, but it was of a whole lesser order of experience from the continuous finger-in-an-electrical-socket buzz that I experienced during even brief interactions with Ala.

I ought to have volleyed some compliments back, but I was not brave in that moment. The Lorites had a kind of grandeur that intimidated. Their elaborate style-shaving the head, performing hours of knotwork just to get dressed-was, I knew, a way of showing respect for those who had gone before, of reminding themselves, every day, just how much work one had to do to get up to speed and be competent to sift new ideas from old. But my knowing that symbolism didn’t make Karvall any more approachable.

We were distracted by Zh’vaern’s strangely inflected voice on the speaker: “Because of the way we Matarrhites keep to ourselves, not even Suur Moyra might have heard of him we honor as Saunt Atamant.”

“I don’t recognize the name,” Moyra said.

“He was, to us, the most gifted and meticulous introspectionist who ever lived.”

“Introspectionist? Is that some sort of a job title within your Order?” Lodoghir asked, not unkindly.

“It might as well be,” Zh’vaern returned. “He devoted the last thirty years of his life to looking at a copper bowl.”

“What was so special about this bowl?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“Nothing. But he wrote, or rather dictated, ten treatises explaining all that went on in his mind as he gazed on it. Much of it has the same flavor as Orolo’s meditations on counterfactuals: how Atamant’s mind filled in the unseen back surface of the bowl with suppositions as to what it must look like. From such thoughts he developed a metatheorics of counterfactuals and compossibility that, to make a long story short, is perfectly compatible with all that was said during our first messal about Hemn space and worldtracks. He made the assertion that all possible worlds really existed and were every bit as real as our own. This caused many to dismiss him as a lunatic.”

“But that is precisely what the polycosmic interpretation is positing,” said Suur Asquin.

“Indeed.”

“What of our second evening’s discussion? Has Saunt Atamant anything to say about that?”

“I have been thinking about that very hard. You see, nine of his treatises are mostly about space. Only one is about time, but it is considered harder to read than the other nine put together! But if there is applicability of his work to the Hylaean Flow, it is hidden somewhere in the Tenth Treatise. I re-read it last night; this was my Lucub.”

“And what did Atamant’s copper bowl tell him of time?” Lodoghir asked.

“I should tell you first that he was knowledgeable about theorics. He knew that the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time’s arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in a system. The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue-records that tell a consistent story.”

“We have heard of these records before,” Ignetha Foral pointed out. “They are essential to the Hemn space picture.”

“Yes, Madame Secretary, but now let me add something new. It is rather well encapsulated by the thought experiment of the flies, bats, and worms. We don’t give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say ‘this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,’ to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this.”

“But absolutely necessary from an evolutionary standpoint,” Lodoghir pointed out.

“To be sure! But none the less remarkable for that. The ability of our consciousness to see-not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things-copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas-and making these things available to cognition-that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought. And if consciousness can identify copper-bowlness, why can’t it identify isosceles-triangleness, or Adrakhonic-theoremness?”

“What you are describing is nothing more than pattern recognition, and then assigning names to patterns,” Lodoghir said.

“So the Syntactics would say,” replied Zh’vaern. “But I would say that you have it backwards. You Procians have a theory-a model-of what consciousness is, and you make all else subordinate to it. Your theory becomes the ground of all possible assertions, and the processes of consciousness are seen as mere phenomena to be explained in the terms of that theory. Atamant says that you have fallen into the error of circular reasoning. You cannot develop your grounding theory of consciousness without making use of the power consciousness has of seizing on and conferring thisness on givens, and so it is incoherent and circular for you to then employ that theory to explain the fundamental workings of consciousness.”

“I understand Atamant’s point,” Lodoghir said, “but by making such a move, does he not exile himself from rational theoric discourse? This power of consciousness takes on a sort of mystical status-it can’t be challenged or examined, it just is.”

“On the contrary, nothing could be more rational than to begin with what is given, with what we observe, and ask ourselves how we come to observe it, and investigate it in a thorough and meticulous style.”

“Let me ask it this way, then: what results was Atamant able to deliver by following this program?”

“Once he made the decision to proceed in this way, he made a few false starts, went up some blind alleys. But the nub of it is this: consciousness is enacted in the physical world, on physical equipment-”

“Equipment?” Ignetha Foral asked sharply.

“Nerve tissue, or perhaps some artificial device of similar powers. The point being that it has what the Ita would call hardware. Yet Atamant’s premise is that consciousness itself, not the equipment, is the primary reality. The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it’s only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. The story is long and winding, but eventually he found a fruitful line of inquiry rooted in the polycosmic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He quite reasonably applied this premise to his favorite topic-”

“The copper bowl?” Lodoghir asked.

“The complex of consciousness-phenomena that amounted to his perception of a copper bowl,” Zh’vaern corrected him, “and proceeded to explain it within that framework.” And Zh’vaern-uncharacteristically talkative this evening-proceeded to give us a calca summarizing Atamant’s findings on the copper bowl. As he’d warned us, this had much in common with the dialogs I’d been reporting on a few minutes earlier, and led to the same basic conclusion. As a matter of fact, it was so repetitive that I wondered, at first, why he bothered with it, unless it was just to show off what a smart fellow Atamant was, and score one for the Matarrhite team. As a servitor, I was free to come and go. Zh’vaern eventually worked his way around to the assertion, which we’d heard before, that crosstalk among different cosmi around the time that their worldtracks diverged was routinely exploited by consciousness-bearing systems.

Lodoghir said, “Please explain something to me. I was under the impression that the kind of crosstalk you are speaking of could only occur between two cosmi that were exactly the same except for a difference in the quantum state of one particle.”

“We can testify to that much,” said Moyra, “because the situation you’ve just described is just the sort of thing that is studied in laboratory experiments. It is relatively easy to build an apparatus that embodies that kind of scenario-‘does the particle have spin up or spin down,’ ‘does the photon pass through the left slit or the right slit,’ and so on.”

“Well, that’s a relief!” Lodoghir said. “I was afraid you were about to claim that this crosstalk was the same thing as the Hylaean Flow.”

“I believe that it is,” Zh’vaern said. “It has to be.”

Lodoghir looked affronted. “But Suur Moyra has just finished explaining that the only form of inter-cosmic crosstalk for which we have experimental evidence is that in which the two cosmi are the same except for the state of one particle. The Hylaean Flow, according to its devotees, joins cosmi that are altogether different!”

“If you look at the world through a straw, you will only see a tiny bit of it,” Paphlagon said. “The kinds of experiments that Moyra spoke of are all perfectly sound-better than that, they are magnificent, in their way-but they only tell us of single-particle systems. If we could devise better experiments, we could presumably observe new phenomena.”

Fraa Jad threw his napkin on the table and said: “Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.”

Silence except for the sound of Arsibalt chalking that one down on the wall. I slipped into the messallan.

“Would you be so kind as to unpack that statement?” Suur Asquin finally said. Glancing at Arsibalt’s handiwork, she said, “To begin with, what do you mean by amplifying weak signals?”

Fraa Jad looked as if he hardly knew where to begin, and couldn’t be bothered, but Moyra was game: “The ‘signals’ are the interactions between cosmi that account for quantum effects. If you don’t agree with the polycosmic interpretation, you must find some other explanation for those effects. But if you do agree with it, then, to make it compatible with what we have long known about quantum mechanics, you must buy into the premise that cosmi interfere with each other when their worldtracks are close together. If you restrict yourself to one particular cosmos, this crosstalk may be interpreted as a signal-a rather weak one, since it only concerns a few particles. If those particles are in an asteroid out in the middle of nowhere, it hardly matters. But when those particles happen to be at certain critical locations in the brain, why, then, the ‘signals’ can end up altering the behavior of the organism that is animated by that brain. That organism, all by itself, is vastly larger than anything that could normally be influenced by quantum interference. When one considers societies of such organisms that endure across long spans of time and in some cases develop world-altering technologies, one sees the meaning of Fraa Jad’s assertion that consciousness amplifies the weak signals that web cosmi together.”

Zh’vaern had been nodding vigorously: “This tallies with some Atamant that I was reading yesterday evening. Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings-something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies. This is how we get from a solipsistic world-one that is perceived by, and real to, only one subject-to the intersubjective world-the one where I can be certain that you see the copper bowl and that the thisness you attach to it harmonizes with mine.”

“Thank you, Suur Moyra and Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Ignetha Foral. “Assuming that Fraa Jad will maintain his gnomic ways, would you or anyone else care to take a crack at the second part of what he said?”

“I should be delighted to,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “since Fraa Jad is sounding more and more Procian every time he opens his mouth!” This earned Lodoghir a lot of attention, which he reveled in for a few moments before going on: “By selective amplification, I believe Fraa Jad is saying that not all inter-cosmic crosstalk gets amplified-only some of it. To cite Suur Moyra’s example, crosstalk affecting elementary particles in a rock in deep space has no effect.”

“No extraordinary effect,” Paphlagon corrected him, “no unpredictable effect. But, mind you, it accounts for everything about that rock: how it absorbs and re-radiates light, how its nuclei decay, and so on.”

“But it all sort of averages out statistically, and you can’t really tell one rock from another,” Lodoghir said.

“Yes.”

“The point being that the only crosstalk capable of being amplified by consciousness is that affecting nerve tissue.”

“Or any other consciousness-bearing system,” Paphlagon said.

“So there is a highly exclusive selection process at work to begin with in that, of all the crosstalk going on in a given instant between our cosmos and all the other cosmi that are sufficiently close to it to render such crosstalk possible, the stupefyingly enormous preponderance of it is only affecting rocks and other stuff that is not complex enough to respond to that crosstalk in a way we’d consider interesting.”

“Yes,” Paphlagon said.

“Let us then confine our discussion to the infinitesimally small fraction of the crosstalk that happens to impinge on nerve tissue. As I’ve just finished saying, this already gives us selectivity.” Lodoghir nodded at the slate. “But, whether or not Fraa Jad intended to, he has opened the door to another kind of selection procedure that may be at work here. Our brains receive these ‘signals,’ yes. But they are more than passive receivers. They are not merely crystal radios! They compute. They cogitate. The outcomes of those cogitations can by no means be easily predicted from their inputs. And those outcomes are the conscious thoughts that we have, the decisions we put into effect, our social interactions with other conscious beings, and the behavior of societies down through the ages.”

“Thank you, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Ignetha Foral, and turned to scan the slate again. “And would anyone care to tackle ‘feedback loops’?”

“We get those for free,” Paphlagon said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s already there in the model we’ve been talking about, we don’t have to add anything more. We’ve already seen how small signals, amplified by the special structures of nerve tissue and societies of conscious beings, can lead to changes in a Narrative-in the configuration of a cosmos-that are much larger than the original signals in question. The worldtracks veer, change their courses in response to those faint signals, and you could distinguish a cosmos that was populated by conscious organisms from one that wasn’t by observing the way their worldtracks behaved. But recall that the signals in question only pass between cosmi whose worldtracks are close together. There is your feedback! Crosstalk steers the worldtracks of consciousness-bearing cosmi; worldtracks that steer close together exchange more crosstalk.”

“So the feedback pulls worldtracks close to one another as time goes on?” Ignetha Foral asked. “Is this the explanation we’ve been looking for of why the Geometers look like us?”

“Not only that,” put in Suur Asquin, “but of cnoons and the HTW and all the rest, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I am going to be a typical Lorite,” Moyra said, “and caution you that feedback is a layman’s term that covers a wide range of phenomena. Entire branches of theorics have been, and are still being, developed to study the behavior of systems that exhibit what laymen know as feedback. The most common behaviors in feedback systems are degenerate. Such as the howl from a public address system, or total chaos. Very few such systems yield stable behavior-or any sort of behavior that you or I could look at and say, ‘see, it is doing this now.’”

“Thisness!” Zh’vaern exclaimed.

“But conversely,” Moyra went on, “systems that are stable, in a tumultuous universe, generally must have some kind of feedback in order to exist.”

Ignetha Foral nodded. “So if the feedback posited by Fraa Jad really is steering our worldtrack and those of the PAQD races together, it’s not just any feedback but some very special, highly tuned species of it.”

“We call something an attractor,” Paphlagon said, “when it persists or recurs in a complex system.”

“So if it is true that the PAQD share the Adrakhonic Theorem and other such theorical concepts with us,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “those might be nothing more than attractors in the feedback system we have been describing.”

“Or nothing less,” said Fraa Jad.

We all let that one resonate for a minute. Lodoghir and Jad were staring at each other across the table; we all thought something was about to happen.

A Procian and a Halikaarnian were about to agree with each other.

Then Zh’vaern wrecked it. As if he didn’t get what was going on at all; or perhaps the HTW simply was not that interesting to him. He couldn’t get off the topic of Atamant’s bowl.

“Atamant,” he announced, “changed his bowl.”

“I beg your pardon?” demanded Ignetha Foral.

“Yes. For thirty years, it had a scratch on the bottom. This is attested by phototypes. Then, during the final year of his meditation-shortly before his death-he made the scratch disappear.”

Everyone had become very quiet.

“Translate that into polycosmic language, please?” asked Suur Asquin.

“He found his way to a cosmos the same as the one he’d been living in-except that in this cosmos the bowl wasn’t scratched.”

“But there were records-phototypes-of its having been scratched.”

“Yes,” said Zh’vaern. “so he had gone to a cosmos that included some inconsistent records. And that is the cosmos that we are in now.”

“And how did he achieve this feat?” asked Moyra, as if she already guessed the answer.

“Either by changing the records, or else by shifting to a cosmos with a different future.”

“Either he was a Rhetor, or an Incanter!” blurted a young voice. Barb. Performing his role as sayer of things no one else would say.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Moyra. “How did he achieve it?”

“He declined to share his secret,” said Zh’vaern. “I thought that some here might have something to say of it.” And he looked all around the table-but mostly at Jad and Lodoghir.

“If they do, they’ll say it tomorrow,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Tonight’s messal has ended.” And she pushed her chair back, casting a baleful glare at Zh’vaern. Emman burst through the door and snatched up her rucksack. Madame Secretary adjusted the badge around her neck as if it were just another item of jewelry, and stalked out, pursued by her servitor, who was grunting under the weight of two rucksacks.

I had grand plans for how I would spend the free time I’d won in my wager with Arsibalt. There were so many ways I wanted to use that gift that I could not decide where to start. I went back to my cell to fetch some notes and sat down on my pallet. Then I opened my eyes to find it was morning.

The hours of night had not gone to waste, though, for I awoke with ideas and intentions that had not been in my head when I’d closed my eyes. Given the sorts of things we’d been talking about lately at messal, it was hard not to think that while I’d lain unconscious, my mind had been busy rambling all over the local parts of Hemn space, exploring alternate versions of the world.

I went and found Arsibalt, who had slept less than I. He was inclined to surliness until I shared with him some of what I had been thinking about-if thinking was the right word for processes that had taken place without my volition while I had been unconscious.

For breakfast I had some dense, grainy buns and dried fruit. Afterwards, I went to a little stand of trees out behind the First Sconic chapterhouse. Arsibalt was waiting for me there, brandishing a shovel he’d borrowed from a garden shack. He scooped out a shallow depression in the earth, no larger than a serving-bowl. I lined it with a scrap of poly sheeting that I had scavenged from one of the middens that Sæcular people left everywhere they went-and that had lately begun to pock the grounds of this concent.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, hitching up my bolt.

“The best experiments,” he said, “are the simplest.”

Analyzing the givens only took a few minutes. The rest of the day was spent making various preparations. How Arsibalt and I got others involved in that work, and the minor adventures each of us had during the day, would make for an amusing collection of anecdotes, but I have made the decision not to spell them out here because they are so trivial compared to what happened that evening. Before it was over, though, we had enlisted Emman, Tris, Barb, Karvall, Lio, and Sammann, and had talked Suur Asquin into looking the other way while we made some temporary alterations to her Dowment.

The fourth Plurality of Worlds Messal began normally: after a libation, soup was served. Barb and Emman went back to the kitchen. Not long after, Orhan was yanked. Tris followed him out. About a minute later I felt a coded sequence of tugs on my rope, which informed me that things had gone according to plan in the kitchen: the stew that Orhan had been cooking had “inadvertently” been knocked over by clumsy Barb. Between that distraction, and the racket that Tris and Emman had begun making with some pots and pans, Orhan would be unlikely to notice that sound was no longer coming out of the speaker.

I nodded across the table to Arsibalt.

“Excuse me, Fraa Zh’vaern, but you forgot to bless your food,” Arsibalt announced, in a clear voice.

Conversation stopped. The messal had been unusually subdued to this point, as though all the doyns were trying to devise some way of restarting the dialog while avoiding the awkward territory that Zh’vaern had attempted to drag us into last night. Even in the rowdiest messal, though, any unasked-for statement from a servitor would have been shocking; Arsibalt’s was doubly so because of what he’d said. As long as everyone was speechless, he went on: “I have been studying the beliefs and practices of the Matarrhites. They never take food without saying a prayer, which ends with a gesture. You have neither spoken the prayer nor made the gesture.”

“What of it? I forgot,” Zh’vaern said.

“You always forget,” Arsibalt returned.

Ignetha Foral was giving Paphlagon a look that meant when are you going to throw the Book at your servitor? and indeed Paphlagon now threw down his napkin and made as if to push his chair back. But Fraa Jad reached out and clamped a hand on Paphlagon’s arm.

“You always forget,” Arsibalt repeated, “and, if you like, I can list any number of other ways in which you and Orhan have imperfectly simulated the behavior of Matarrhites. Is it because you’re not actually Matarrhites?”

Beneath the hood, Zh’vaern’s head moved. He was casting a glance at the door. Not the one through which he and the other doyns had entered, but the one through which Orhan had left.

“Your minder can’t hear us,” I told him, “the microphone wire has been cut by an Ita friend of mine. The feed no longer goes out.”

Still Zh’vaern remained frozen and silent. I nodded at Suur Karvall, who pulled aside a tapestry to reveal a shiny mesh, woven of metal wires, with which we’d covered the wall. I stepped around toward Zh’vaern, stuck a toe under the edge of the carpet, and flipped it up to reveal more of the same on the floor. Zh’vaern took it all in. “It is a fencing material used in animal husbandry,” I explained, “obtainable in bulk extramuros. It is conductive-and it is connected to ground.”

“What is the meaning of all this?” demanded Ignetha Foral.

“We’re in a Saunt Bucker’s Basket!” exclaimed Moyra. Her life, as an extremely senior, semi-retired Lorite, probably didn’t include many unexpected events, and so even something as mundane as discovering that she was surrounded by chicken wire seemed like quite an adventure. More than that, though, I believe she was pleased that the servitors had taken her exhortations to heart, and gone out and done something that the doyns never would have dreamed of. “It’s a grounded mesh that prevents wireless signals from passing into or out of the room. It means we’re informationally shielded from the rest of Arbre.”

“In my world,” said Zh’vaern, “we call it a Faraday cage.” He stood up and shrugged his bolt off over his head, then tossed it to the floor. I was behind him and so could not see his face-only the looks of awe and astonishment on the faces of the others: the first Arbrans, with the possible exception of the Warden of Heaven, to gaze upon the face of a living alien. Judging from the back of his head and torso, I guessed he was of the same race as the dead woman who’d come down in the probe. Beneath a sort of under-shirt, a small device was attached to his skin with poly tape. He reached under the garment, peeled it off, and threw it on the table along with a snarl of wires.

“I am Jules Verne Durand of Laterre-the world you know as Antarct. Orhan is from the world of Urnud, which you have designated Pangee. You had best get him inside the Faraday cage before-”

“Done,” said a voice from the door: Lio, who had just come in, cheerfully flushed. “We have him in a separate Bucker’s Basket in the pantry. Sammann found this on him.” And he held up another wireless body transmitter.

“Well-wrought,” said Jules Verne Durand, “but it has purchased you a few minutes only; those who listen will grow suspicious at the loss of contact.”

“We have alerted Suur Ala that it might become necessary to evacuate the concent,” Lio said.

“Good,” said Jules Verne Durand, “for I am sorry to say that the ones of Urnud are a danger to you.”

“And to you of Laterre as well, it would seem!” said Arsibalt. Since the doyns were all too speechless to rejoin the conversation, Arsibalt-who’d had time to prepare-was doing his bit to keep things going.

“It is true,” said the Laterran. “I will tell you quickly that those of Urnud and of Tro-which you call Diasp-are of similar mind, and hostile to those of Fthos-which you call-”

“Quator, by process of elimination,” said Lodoghir.

I’d worked my way round to a place where I could see Jules Verne Durand, and so was feeling some of the astonishment that the others had experienced a few moments earlier. First at the differences-then similarities, then differences again-between Laterran and Arbran faces. The closest comparison I can make is to how one reacts when conversing with one who has a birth defect that has subtly altered the geometry of the face-but without the deformity or loss of function that this would imply. And of course no comparison can be drawn to the way we felt knowing that we were looking on one who had traveled from another cosmos.

“What of you and your fellow Laterrans?” Lodoghir asked.

“Split between the Fthosians and the others.”

“You, I take it, are loyal to the Urnud/Tro axis?” Lodoghir asked. “Otherwise, you would not have been sent here.”

“I was sent here because I speak better Orth than anyone else-I am a linguist. A junior one, actually. And so they put me to work on Orth in the early days, when Orth was believed to be a minor language. They are suspicious of my loyalty-with good reason! Orhan, as you divined, is my watcher-my minder.” He looked at Arsibalt. “You penetrated my disguise. Not surprising, really. But I should like to know how?”

Arsibalt looked to me. I said, “I ate some of your food yesterday. It passed through my digestive system unchanged.”

“Of course, for your enzymes could not react with it,” said Jules Verne Durand. “I commend you.”

Ignetha Foral had finally recovered enough to join the conversation. “On behalf of the Supreme Council I welcome you and apologize for any mistreatment you have undergone at the hands of these young-”

“Stop. This is what you call bulshytt. No time,” said the Laterran. “My mission-assigned to me by the military intelligence command of the Urnud/Tro axis-is to find out whether the legends of the Incanters are grounded in fact. The Urnud/Tro axis-which they call, in their languages, the Pedestal-is extremely fearful of this prospect; they contemplate a pre-emptive strike. Hence my questions of previous evenings, which I am aware were quite rude.”

“How did you get here?” asked Paphlagon.

“A commando raid on the concent of the Matarrhites. We have ways of dropping small capsules onto your planet that cannot be noticed by your sensors. A team of soldiers, as well as a few civilian experts such as myself, were sent down, and seized that concent. The true Matarrhites are held there, unharmed, but incommunicado.”

“That is an extraordinarily aggressive measure!” said Ignetha Foral.

“So it rightly seems to you who are not accustomed to encounters between different versions of the world, in different cosmi. But the Pedestal have been doing it for hundreds of years, and have become bold. When our scholars became aware of the Matarrhites, someone pointed out that their style of dress would make it easy for us to disguise ourselves and infiltrate the Convox. The order to proceed was given quickly.”

“How do you travel between cosmi?” Paphlagon asked.

“There is little time,” said Jules Verne Durand, “and I am no theor.” He turned to Suur Moyra. “You will know of a certain way of thinking about gravity, likely dating to the time of the Harbingers, called by us General Relativity. Its premise is that mass-energy bends spacetime…”

“Geometrodynamics!” said Suur Moyra.

“If the equations of geometrodynamics are solved in the special case of a universe that happens to be rotating, it can be shown that a spaceship, if it travels far and fast enough-”

“Will travel backwards in time,” said Paphlagon. “Yes. The result is known to us. We always considered it little more than a curiosity, though.”

“On Laterre, the result was discovered by a kind of Saunt named Godel: a friend of the Saunt who had earlier discovered geometrodynamics. The two of them were, you might say, fraas in the same math. For us, too, it was little more than a curiosity. For one thing, it was not clear at first that our cosmos rotated-”

“And if it doesn’t rotate, the result is useless,” said Paphlagon.

“Working in the same institute were others who invented a ship propelled by atomic bombs-sufficiently energetic to put this theory to the test.”

“I see,” said Paphlagon, “so Laterre constructed such a ship and-”

“No! We never did!”

“Just as Arbre never did-even though we had the same ideas!” Lio put in.

“But on Urnud it was different,” said Jules Verne Durand. “They had geometrodynamics. They had the rotating-universe solution. They had cosmographic evidence that their cosmos did in fact rotate. And they had the idea for the atomic ship. But they actually built several of them. They were driven to such measures because of a terrible war between two blocs of nations. The combat infected space; the whole solar system became a theatre of war. The last and largest of these ships was called Daban Urnud, which means ‘Second Urnud.’ It was designed to send a colony to a neighboring star system, only a quarter of a light-year away. But there was a mutiny and a change of command. It fell under the control of ones who understood the theorics that I spoke of. They chose to steer a different course: one that was intended to take them into the past of Urnud, where they hoped that they could undo the decisions that had led to the outbreak of the war. But when they reached the end of that journey, they found themselves, not in the past of Urnud, but in an altogether different cosmos, orbiting an Urnud-like planet-”

“Tro,” said Arsibalt.

“Yes. This is how the universe protects herself-prevents violations of causality. If you attempt to do anything that would give you the power of violating the laws of cause-and-effect-to go back in time and kill your grandfather-”

“You simply find yourself in a different and separate causal domain? How extraordinary!” said Lodoghir.

The Laterran nodded. “One is shunted into an altogether different Narrative,” he said, with a glance at Fraa Jad, “and thus causality is preserved.”

“And now it seems they’ve made a habit of it!” said Lodoghir.

Jules Verne Durand considered it. “You say ‘now’ as if it came about quickly and easily, but there is much history between the First Advent-the Urnudan discovery of Tro-and the Fourth-which is what we are all living through now. The First Advent alone spanned a century and a half, and left Tro in ruins.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Lodoghir. “Are the Urnudans really that nasty?”

“Not quite. But it was the first time. Neither the Urnudans nor the Troans had the sophisticated understanding of the polycosm that you seem to have developed here on Arbre. Everything was surprising, and therefore a source of terror. The Urnudans became involved in Troan politics too hastily. Disastrous events-almost all of them the Troans’ own fault-played out. They eventually rebuilt the Daban Urnud so that both races could live on it, and embarked on a second inter-cosmic voyage. They came to Laterre fifty years after the death of Godel.”

“Excuse me,” said Ignetha Foral, “but why did the ship have to be changed so much?”

“Partly because it was worn out-used up,” said Jules Verne Durand. “But it is mostly a question of food. Each race must maintain its own food supply-for reasons made obvious by Fraa Erasmas’s experiment.” He paused and looked around the messal. “It is my destiny, now, to starve to death in the midst of plenty, unless by diplomacy you can persuade those on the Daban Urnud to send down some food that I can digest.”

Tris-who had returned to the messal early in the conversation-said, “We’ll do all we can to preserve the Laterran victuals that are still in the kitchen!” and hustled out of the room.

Ignetha Foral added, “We shall make this a priority in any future communications with the Pedestal.”

“Thank you,” said the Laterran, “for one of my ancestry, death by starvation would be the most ignominious possible fate.”

“What happened in the Second Advent-on Laterre?” asked Suur Moyra.

“I will skip the details. It was not as bad as Tro. But in every cosmos they visit, there is upheaval. The Advent lasts anywhere from twenty to a couple of hundred years. With or without your cooperation, the Daban Urnud will be rebuilt completely. None of your political institutions, none of your religions, will survive in their current form. Wars will be fought. Some of your people will be aboard the new version of the ship when it finally moves on to some other Narrative.”

“As you were, I take it, when it left Laterre?” asked Lodoghir.

“Oh, no. That was my great-grandfather,” said the visitor. “My ancestors lived through the voyage to Fthos and the Third Advent. I was born on Fthos. Similar things will probably happen here.”

“Assuming,” said Ignetha Foral, “that they don’t use the World Burner on us.”

I was just learning to read Laterran facial expressions, but I was certain that what I saw on Jules Verne Durand’s face was horror at the very mention. “This hideous thing was invented on Urnud, in their great war-though I must confess we had similar plans on Laterre.”

“As did we,” said Moyra.

“There is a suspicion, you see, planted deep in the minds of the Urnudans, that with each Advent they are finding themselves in a world that is more ideal-closer to what you would call the Hylaean Theoric World-than the last. I don’t have time to recite all the particulars, but I myself have often thought that Urnud and Tro seemed like less perfect versions of Laterre, and that Fthos seemed to us what we were to Tro. Now we are come to yet a new world, and there is terrible apprehension among the Pedestal that those of Arbre will possess powers and qualities beyond their grasp-even their comprehension. They have exaggerated sensitivity to anything that has this seeming-”

“Hence the elaborate commando raid, this ambitious ruse to learn about the Incanters,” said Lodoghir.

“And Rhetors,” Paphlagon reminded him.

Moyra laughed. “It is Third Sack politics all over again! Except infinitely more dangerous.”

“And the problem you-we-face is that there is nothing you can do to convince them that such things as Rhetors and Incanters don’t exist,” said Jules Verne Durand.

“Quickly-Atamant and the copper bowl?” asked Lodoghir.

“Loosely based on a philosopher of Laterre, named Edmund Husserl, and the copper ashtray he kept on his desk,” said the Laterran. If I was reading his face right, he was feeling a bit sheepish. “I fictionalized his story quite heavily. The part about making the scratch disappear was, of course, a ruse to draw you out-to get you to state plainly whether anyone on Arbre possessed the power to do such things.”

“Do you think that the ruse worked?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“The way you reacted made those who control me even more suspicious. I was directed to bear down harder on it this evening.”

“So they are still undecided.”

“Oh, I am quite certain they are decided now.”

The floor jumped under our feet, and the air was suddenly dusty. The silence that followed was ended by a succession of concussive thuds. These rolled in over a span of perhaps a quarter of a minute-twenty of them in all. Lio announced, “No cause for alarm. This is according to plan. What you’re hearing are controlled demolition charges, taking down sections of the outer wall-creating enough apertures for us to get out of the concent quickly, so we don’t bunch up at the Day Gate. The evacuation is under way. Look at your badges.”

I pulled mine out from under a fold of my bolt. It had come alive with a color map of my vicinity, just like the nav screen on a cartabla. My evacuation route was highlighted in purple. Superimposed over that was a cartoon rendering of a rucksack with a red flashing question mark.

The doyns took the momentous step of pushing their chairs back. They were looking at their badges, making remarks. Lio vaulted up onto the table and stamped his foot, very loud. They all looked up at him. “Stop talking,” he said.

“But-” said Lodoghir.

“Not a word. Act!” And Lio gave that command in a voice I’d never heard from him before-though I had once heard something like it in the streets of Mahsht. He’d been training his voice, as well as his body-learning Vale-lore tricks of how to use it as a weapon. I sidestepped past a stream of doyns who were headed the other way, shouldering their rucksacks. I entered the corridor, where mine was waiting. I hoisted it to one shoulder and looked at my badge again. The rucksack cartoon had disappeared. I strode out to the kitchen. Tris and Lio were helping Jules Verne Durand package what was left of his food into bags and baskets.

I walked out the back of Avrachon’s Dowment and into the midst of a total evacuation of the ancient concent of Tredegarh.

Thousands of feet above, aerocraft were landing on the tops of the Thousanders’ towers.

All of this business with the badges and the rucksacks had seemed insultingly simpleminded to me and many others I’d talked to-as if the Convox were a summer camp for five-year-olds. In the course of a fifteen-minute jog across Tredegarh, I came to appreciate it. There was no plan, no procedure, so simple that it could not get massively screwed up when thousands of persons tried to carry it out at the same time. Doing it in the dark squared the amount of chaos, doing it in a hurry cubed it. People who had mislaid their badges and their rucksacks were wandering around in more or less panic-but they gravitated to sound trucks announcing “Come to me if you have lost your badge or your rucksack!” Others twisted ankles, hyperventilated, even suffered from heart trouble-military medics pounced on these. Grandfraas and grandsuurs who failed to keep up found themselves being carried on fids’ backs. Running through the dark, mesmerized by their badges, people banged into one another in grand slapstick style, fell down, got bloody noses, argued as to whose fault it had been. I slowed to help a few victims, but the aid teams were astoundingly efficient-and quite rude about letting me know I should head for an exit rather than getting in their way. Ala had really put her stamp on this thing. As I gained confidence that the evacuation was basically working, I moved faster, and struck out across the giant page tree plantation, heavy with leaves that would never be harvested, toward a rugged gap that had been blasted through the ancient wall. The opening was choked with rubble. Lights shone through from extramuros, making the dusty air above the aperture glow blue-white, and casting long, flailing silhouettes behind the avout who were streaming through it, clambering over the rubble-pile, helped over tricky parts by soldiers who played flashlights over patches of rough footing and barked suggestions at any avout who stumbled or looked tentative. My badge told me to go through it, so I did, trying not to think about how many centuries the stones I trod had stood until tonight, the avout who’d cut them to shape and laid them in place.

Beyond the wall was a glacis, a belt of open territory that locals used as a park. This evening it had become a depot for military drummons: simple flatbeds whose backs had been covered by canvas awnings. At first I saw only the few that stood closest to the base of the rubble-pile, since these lay in the halo of light. But my badge was insisting that I penetrate the darkness beyond. When I did, I became aware that these drummons were scattered across what seemed like square miles of darkness. I heard their engines idling all around, and I saw cold light thrown off by glow buds, by the spheres of wandering avout, and by control panels reflecting in drivers’ eyes. The vehicles themselves were running dark.

Something overtook me, parted around me, and moved on. I felt rather than heard it. It was a squad of Valers, swathed in black bolts, running silently through the night.

I jogged on for some minutes, taking a winding route, since my badge kept trying to get me to walk through parked drummons. Another blown wall section, with its mountain of light, passed by on my right, and I saw yet another swinging into view around the curve of the wall. All of these gaps continued to spew avout, so I didn’t get the sense that I was late. Here and there I’d spy a lone fraa or suur, face illuminated by badge-light, approaching the open back of a drummon, eyes jumping between badge and vehicle, the face registering growing certainty: yes, this is the one. Hands reaching out of the dark to help them aboard, voices calling out to them in greeting. Everyone was strangely cheerful-not knowing what I and a few others now knew about what we were getting into.

Finally the purple line took me out beyond the last of the parked drummons. Only one vehicle remained that was large enough to carry a cell of any appreciable size: a coach, gaudy with phototypes of ecstatic gamblers. It must have been commandeered from a casino. I could not believe that this was my destination, but every time I tried to dodge around it, the purple line irritably re-vectored itself and told me to turn back around. So I approached the side door and gazed up the entry stair. A military driver was sitting there, lit by his jeejah. “Erasmas of Edhar?” he called out-apparently reading signals from my badge.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Cell 317,” he said, and with a jerk of the head told me to come aboard. “Six down, five to go,” he muttered, as I lurched past him. “Put your pack on the seat next to you-quick on, quick off.”

The aisle of the coach and the undersurfaces of the luggage shelves were lined with strips that cast dim illumination on the seats and the people in them. It was sparsely occupied. Soldiers, talking on or busy with jeejahs, had claimed the first couple of rows. Officers, I thought. Then, after a few empty rows, I saw a face I recognized: Sammann, lit by his super-jeejah as usual. He glanced up and recognized me, but I didn’t see the old familiar grin on his face. Instead his eyes darted back for a moment.

Gazing into the gloom that stretched behind him, I saw several rows of seats occupied by rucksacks. Next to each was a shaven head, bowed in concentration.

I stopped so hard that my pack’s momentum nearly knocked me over. My mind said, boy, did you ever get on the wrong coach, idiot! and my legs tried to get me out of there before the driver could close the door and pull out.

Then I recalled that the driver had greeted me by name and told me to come aboard.

I glanced at Sammann, who adopted a sort of long-suffering expression that only an Ita could really pull off, and shrugged.

So I swung my pack down into an empty row and took a seat. Just before I sat down, I scanned the faces of the Valers. They were Fraa Osa, the FAE; Suur Vay, the one who’d sewn me back together with fishing line; Suur Esma, the one who had danced across the plaza in Mahsht, charging the sniper; and Fraa Gratho, the one who had placed his body between me and the Gheeth leader’s gun and later disarmed him.

I sat motionless for a while, wondering how to get ready for whatever was to come, wishing it would just start.

Next on the coach was Jesry. He saw what I had seen. In his face I thought I read some of the same emotions, but less so; he’d already been picked to go to space, he was probably expecting something like this. As he walked past me, he socked me on the shoulder. “Good to be with you,” he said, “there is no one I would rather be vaporized with, my fraa.”

“You’re getting your wish,” I said, recalling the talk we’d had at Apert.

“More of it than I wished for,” he returned, and banged down into the seat across the aisle from me.

A few minutes later we were joined by Fraa Jad, who sat alone behind the officers. He nodded to me, and I nodded back; but once he had made himself comfortable, the Valers came up the aisle one by one to introduce themselves to him and to pay their respects.

A young female Ita came in, followed by a very old male one. They stood around Sammann for a few minutes, reciting numbers to one another. I fancied that we were going to have three Ita in our cell, but then the two visitors walked off the coach and we did not see them again.

When Fraa Arsibalt arrived, he stood at the head of the aisle, next to the driver, and considered fleeing for a good half-minute. Finally he drew an enormous breath, as if trying to suck every last bit of air out of the coach, and marched stolidly up the aisle, taking a seat behind Jesry. “I had damned well better get my own stained-glass window for this.”

“Maybe you’ll get an Order-or a concent,” I proposed.

“Yes, maybe-if such things continue to exist by the time the Advent is finished.”

“Come off it, we are the Hylaean Theoric World of these people!” I said. “How can they possibly destroy us?”

“By getting us to destroy ourselves.”

“That’s it,” said Jesry. “You, Arsibalt, just appointed yourself the morale officer for Cell 317.”

Jesry didn’t understand some of the remarks that Arsibalt and I had exchanged, and so we set about explaining what had happened at messal. In the middle of this, Jules Verne Durand came aboard, hung all about with a motley kit of bags, bottles, and baskets. His presence in the cell must have been a last-minute improvisation; Ala couldn’t have planned on him. He looked slightly aghast for a minute, then-if I read his face right-cheered up. “My namesake would be unspeakably proud!” he announced, and walked the full length of the aisle, introducing himself as Jules to each member of Cell 317 in turn. “I shall be pleased to starve to death in such company!”

“That alien must have some namesake!” Jesry muttered after Jules had passed us.

“My friend, I’ll tell you all about him during the adventures that are to come!” said Jules, who had overheard; Laterran ears were pretty sharp, apparently.

“Ten down, one to go,” called the driver to someone who was evidently standing at the base of the steps.

“All right,” said a familiar voice, “let’s go!” Lio bounded up onto the coach. The door hissed shut behind him and we began to move. Lio, like Jules before him, worked his way down the aisle, somehow maintaining his balance even as the coach banked and jounced over rough ground. Those unknown to him got handshakes. Edharian clock-winders got spine-cracking hugs. Valers got bows-though I noticed that even Fraa Osa bowed more formally, more deeply, to Lio than Lio to him. This was my first clue that Lio was our cell leader.

We were at the aerodrome in twenty minutes. The escort of military police vehicles really helped speed up the trip. No hassles about tickets or security; we drove through a guarded gate right onto the taxiway and pulled up next to a fixed-wing military aerocraft, capable of carrying just about anything, but rigged for passengers tonight. The officers at the head of the coach were its flight crew. We filed out, crossed ten paces of open pavement, and clambered up a rolling stair onto the craft. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t sad. Most of all, I wasn’t surprised. I saw Ala’s logic perfectly: once she had accepted that she was making the “terrible decision,” the only way forward was really to make it-to take it all the way. To put all of her favorite people together. The risk was greater for her-the risk, that is, that we’d all be lost, and she’d spend the rest of her life knowing she’d been responsible for it. But the risk, for each of us individually, was less, because we could help one another through it. And if we died, we’d die in good company.

“Is there a way to send a message to Suur Ala?” I asked Sammann, after we’d all claimed seats, and the engines had revved up enough to mask my voice. “I want to tell her that she was right.”

“Consider it done,” said Sammann. “Is there anything else-as long as I have a channel open?”

I considered it. There was much I could-should-have said. “Is it a private channel?” I asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he pointed out.

“No,” I said, “nothing further.”

Sammann shrugged and turned to his jeejah. The craft lunged forward. I fell into a seat, groped in the dark for the cold buckles, and strapped myself in.