Anathem

Red light woke me, or kept me from sleeping in the first place. It was not the clear, cold blood-red of warnings and emergencies, but pink/orange, warm, diffuse. It was coming in through the windows of the aerocraft, which were few and tiny. I unbuckled myself, staggered over to one-for I’d lain wrong, and my limbs were tingling and floppy-and squinted out at a spectacular dawn above the same ice-scape I’d recently traversed on a sledge.

For a confused minute I fancied we might, for some reason, be headed back to Ecba. But I had no success matching the mountain ranges and glaciers below against those I recollected. Out of habit I looked for Sammann, hoping he could conjure up a map. But he was huddled with Jules Verne Durand. Both were wearing headsets. Sammann just listened. Jules alternated between listening and speaking, but he did a lot more of the latter. Sometimes he’d sketch on Sammann’s jeejah, and Sammann would transmit the image.

I found myself irked. The Laterran’s presence in Cell 317 had seemed like a medal pinned on our chests. Through him we would know things, be capable of deeds, beyond all other cells. But I hadn’t bargained on the wireless link to the Reticulum that would make him fair game for any Panjandrum who was feeling curious about something. They were pumping him dry before he was rendered useless by inanition. I couldn’t hear a word because of the noise of the plane, but I could tell he’d been at it for a while, and that he was tired, groping for words, doubling back midsentence to repair conjugations. Orth was a murderously difficult language and I thought it a kind of miracle that Jules spoke it as well as he did, having practiced it for only a couple of years (which, we’d calculated, was about how long the Geometers had been in a position to receive signals from Arbre). Either Laterrans were smarter than we, or he was prodigiously gifted.

Arsibalt was up, pacing the aisles. He joined me at the window and we began shouting at each other. From our recollected geography we convinced ourselves that we were descending from the pole along a more easterly meridian than the one that passed through Ecba. This was confirmed as we left the ice and the tundra behind and entered into more temperate places: there was a lot of forest down there, but few cities.

No wonder people were slow to get up; we’d jumped forward through more than half a dozen time zones. I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d had a full night’s sleep. In fact, I might not have slept at all.

Lio had been sitting alone in the front row, trying to make friends with a military-style jeejah. I noticed he had set it aside, so I went up and sat next to him. “Jammed,” he announced.

I turned and looked back at Sammann and Jules. They were peeling the phones off their heads. Sammann caught my eye and threw up his hands disgustedly. Jules, on the other hand, seemed relieved to have been cut free of the Ret; he sank back heavily in his seat, closed his eyes, and began to rub his face, then to massage his scalp.

I turned back to Lio. “Such a move must have been anticipated,” I said. But he had got into one of those Lio-trances where he did not respond to words. I grabbed the jeejah, whacked him on the shoulder with it, threw up my hands, tossed it aside. He watched me curiously, then grinned. “The Ita can still make the Reticulum run on land lines and other things,” he said. “When we stop moving, we can get patched in once more.”

“What are your orders?” I asked.

“Go to ground-which we’re doing now. All the other cells are doing it too.”

“Then what?”

“At the place where we’re going, there’ll be equipment prepositioned. We’re supposed to train on it.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Don’t know, but here’s a hint: Jesry is in charge of training.”

I looked over at Jesry, who had commandeered a row of seats and constructed a sort of amphitheatre of documents all around himself. He was scanning these with an intensity that I had learned, long ago, never to interrupt.

“We’re going into space,” I concluded.

“Well,” Lio said, “that is where the problem is.”

I decided to take advantage of the noise, and of the fact that our wireless link was down. “What news of the Everything Killers?” I asked.

He looked as though in the earliest stages of airsickness. “I think I can tell you how they worked.”

“Okay.”

He pantomimed a punch to my face, pulled it so his knuckles met my cheek and nudged my head. “Violence is mostly about energy delivery. Fists, clubs, swords, bullets, death rays-their purpose is to dump energy into a person’s body.”

“What about poison?”

“I said mostly. Don’t go Kefedokhles. Anyway, what’s the most concentrated source of energy they knew about around the time of the Terrible Events?”

“Nuclear fission.”

He nodded. “And the stupidest way of using it was to split a whole lot of nuclei in the air above a city, just burn everything. It works, but it’s dirty and it destroys a lot of stuff that doesn’t need destroying. Better to nuke the people only.”

“How do you manage that?”

“The amount of fissile material you need to kill a person is microscopic. That’s the easy part. The problem is delivering it to the right people.”

“So, is this a dirty bomb type of scenario?”

“Much more elegant. They designed a reactor the size of a pinhead. It’s a little mechanism, with moving parts, and a few different kinds of nuclear material in it. When it’s turned off, it’s almost totally inert. You could eat these reactors by the spoonful and it would be no worse than eating one of Suur Efemula’s bran muffins. When the reactor goes to the ‘on’ configuration it sprays neutrons in every direction and kills-well-everything that is alive within a radius of-depending on exposure time-up to half a mile.”

“Hence the name,” I said. “What’s the delivery mechanism?”

“Whatever you can dream up,” he said.

“What causes them to turn on?”

He shrugged. “Body heat. Respiration. The sound of human voices. A timer. Certain genetic sequences. A radio transmission. The absence of a radio transmission. Shall I go on?”

“No. But what kinds of delivery mechanisms and triggers is the Sæcular Power looking at now?”

He got a distant look. “Remember, launching mass into space is expensive. With the amount of energy it takes to launch a single human, you could get thousands of Everything Killers into orbit. They’d be too small to show up on most radar. If you could get even a few of them into the vicinity of the Daban Urnud…”

“Yeah, I can see the strategy clearly. Which leads to the profoundly sickening thought-”

“Are we going to be asked to deliver these things?” Lio said. “I think the answer is no. If anything, we are going to be a diversion.”

“We’ll distract them,” I translated, “while some other technique is used to deliver the Everything Killers.”

Lio nodded.

“That’s inspiring,” I said.

He shrugged. “I could be wrong,” he pointed out.

I felt like going outside and getting some fresh air. In lieu of which I walked up and down the aisles for a bit. Jules Verne Durand was asleep. Next to him, Sammann was bent over his jeejah. But I thought it was jammed? Looking over his shoulder, I saw he was making some sort of calculation.

Looking over Jesry’s, I saw that he was, indeed, reading the manual for a space suit. This demanded a double-take. But it was as simple as that. Suur Vay was in an adjoining row, poring over many of the same documents, swapping them with Jesry from time to time. The other Valers were asleep. Fraa Jad was awake and chanting, though my ears were hard put to disentangle his drone from that of the engines. I went back to staring out the window.

We angled across a range of old, worn-down mountains and struck out over an expanse of brown that ran to the eastern horizon: the grass of the steppe, browned by the summer sun. The craft was descending. A river flashed beneath us. Then the industrial skirt of a modestly sized city. We landed at a military airbase that seemed to stretch on forever, since land here was as plentiful as it was flat, and there was no incentive to make things compact.

A canvas-backed military drummon came out to collect us. We had no windows, and could not see out the front, but through the aperture in the back we watched the streets of an ancient, none too prosperous city ramifying in our dust. There were more animals on highways than we were used to, more people carrying things that in other places might have been entrusted to wheels. Of a sudden, things got dense and old, all yellow brick adorned with polychrome tiles. A heavy shadow passed over our heads, as if we were being strafed. But no, we had only passed through an arch in a thick wall. Three successive gates were closed and bolted behind us. The vehicle stopped on a tiled plaza. We clambered out to find ourselves in a courtyard, embraced by an ancient building four stories high: stone, brick, and wrought iron, softened by cascades of flowering vines on trunks as thick as my waist. A fountain in the center supplied water for these and for gnarled fruit trees growing in pots and casting pools of shade on what would otherwise have been an unpleasant place to stand.

“Welcome to the Caravansery of Elkhazg,” said a voice in cultured Orth. We turned to see an old man in the shade of a tree: a man who did not seem to belong here, in the sense that he was of an ethnic group one would expect to find in another part of Arbre. “I am the Heritor. My name is Magnath Foral, and I shall be pleased to serve as your host.”

After introductions, Magnath Foral gave us a quick explanation of the history of Elkhazg. I made no effort to follow most of this, since I only needed a few cues and hints to reconstruct what I had been taught of the place as a fid. It was one of the oldest Cartasian maths, founded by fraas and suurs who had personally witnessed the Fall of Baz, and known Ma Cartas. They had trekked across forests and mountains to build this thing more or less out in the middle of nowhere, on an oxbow lake a few miles from the main course of a river. A trade route from the east crossed the river not far away-close enough to give them access to commerce when they needed it, not so close as to be a distraction or a menace. Centuries later, a rough winter followed by a stormy spring caused some trouble involving ice dams that altered the course of the river and turned the oxbow lake back into an active channel. The trade route adapted, choosing Elkhazg as the best place to make a crossing-since one of the side-effects of the math had been the development of a relatively stable and prosperous Sæcular community around its walls.

A certain kind of mathic personality would then have abandoned the place for something more remote, perhaps up in the mountains. The wardens of Elkhazg, though, weren’t that way, and had come to notice that the goods being carried on the backs of the beasts passing over the river included not just fabrics, furs, and spices but books and scrolls. In a compromise that would have made Ma Cartas kick her way out of her chalcedony sarcophagus and come after them with a broken bottle, they had spun off a thriving side business in the form of a caravansery adjacent to the math, and a ferry across the river. The one tariff that they charged was that the fraas and suurs of Elkhazg be allowed to make a copy of every book and scroll that passed through. Books were copied whose meanings they did not even know. But they interpreted their mandate somewhat broadly and began, as well, to make copies of the geometrical designs that they saw on fabrics, pottery, and other goods. For these fraas and suurs had a particular interest in plane geometry and in tiling problems. So, to make a long story somewhat shorter, Elkhazg had become synonymous in the minds of theors all over the world with tiling problems. Important tile shapes and theorems about their properties were named after fraas and suurs who had lived here, or specific walls and floors in this complex.

It was no longer a math. At the time of the Rebirth its library had been dispersed and copied all over the world, and the building had fallen into private hands. It had not been made over into a new math at the time of the Reconstitution. Instead-as Magnath Foral did not come out and say, but as was easy enough to figure out-it had been taken over by a long-lived complex of financial interests similar to-quite likely the same as-the one that ran Ecba.

Fraa Jad skipped the intro and wandered off into some other courtyard. Elkhazg had been big and rich and its courtyards went on and on. Now it must appear as a large, rambling black hole in the population density map of the city, since the only people who dwelled here were Magnath Foral and another man who was his liaison-partner; some visiting avout (though these had all been sent packing yesterday); and a staff of janitors-cum-curators who looked after the place. For one of the problems with this kind of art-i.e., tiles cemented to stone walls-was that you couldn’t cart it off to a museum.

My brain ought to have been shutting down, since I’d had essentially no rest since the shovel experiment at Tredegarh the day before, and the time since then had been freakishly eventful. But the visual environment of Elkhazg was overwhelmingly rich-would have been so even had I not known that every pattern of tiles was not merely a mesmerizing, intricate work of art, but a profound theorical statement as well, shouting at me in a language I was too tired or stupid to understand. This acted like a shot of jumpweed extract, or something, that kept me awake for another hour at the cost of some sanity. When I closed my eyes to get some respite from the relentless grandeur, questions crept out of the darkness. That our host had the same family name as Madame Secretary was, of course, interesting. Was it a coincidence that Cell 317 had ended up here? Of course not. What did it mean? Impossible to say. Should I even be trying to puzzle it out now? No-no more than I should be trying to grasp the significance of the tiling patterns that spread over every surface around me, and seemed to be trying to crawl beneath my closed eyelids and invade my brain.

One of the courtyards was a Decagon-of course. Fraa Jad found it. The Teglon had already been solved on it, perhaps by some master geometer of yore, perhaps by a syndev. None of us had ever seen a full solution in person before, so we spent a while gawking. Stationed around the edges were baskets of extra Teglon tiles in a different color, which Fraa Jad was nudging around with his toe. It occurred to me I’d never seen him sleep. Maybe Thousanders did something else. We left him to the Teglon. Magnath Foral took the rest of us to the Old Cloister, which had not been remodeled in five thousand years. That is to say it lacked electricity or even plumbing. Each of us got a cell. Mine had a bed, and a lot of tiles. I closed some preposterously ancient and rickety shutters so that I’d not have to see, and consequently think about, the tiles, then sank to my knees and located the bed by groping.

“It occurred to me,” said Arsibalt, the next time both of us were awake, “I don’t think we have anything like this.”

“We meaning-?”

“The modern, post-Reconstitution mathic world.”

“And this meaning-?”

He held up his hands and gazed about in an are you blind? sort of gesture.

We were standing next to a table in an alcove on the ground floor, open to the cloister on one side. The floor of the cloister itself was covered with thousands of identical, horn-shaped, nine-sided tiles that had been joined together with machine-tool precision into a nonrepeating double-spiral pattern that was giving me motion sickness just looking at it. I turned my back on this and looked at a loaf of bread that was resting on the table. This was so fresh that steam was gushing out of the end-Arsibalt, an infamous heel-filcher, had already got to it. The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a non-trivial pattern that, I feared, had deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgian Saunt. “I just don’t think we have anything this ancient, this-well, fantastic,” Arsibalt continued through a crunchy mouthful of bread-heel.

“There’s more than one way to be Inviolate, I guess,” I said, tearing off a hunk of bread, and sitting down at the table-which, inevitably, was ancient and covered with precision-cut tiles of diverse exotic woods. “You can simply stop being a math.”

“And thereby become exempt from Sacks.”

“Exactly.”

“But what kind of entity owns something for four thousand years?”

“That’s what I kept asking myself on Ecba.”

“Ah, so you have a head start on me, Fraa Erasmas.”

“I guess you could think of it that way.”

“What conclusion have you reached?”

I stalled for a while by chewing the bread-which was possibly the best I’d ever had. “That I don’t care,” I finally said. “I don’t need to know the bylaws, the org chart, the financial statements, the tedious history of the Lineage.”

Arsibalt was horrified. “But how can you not be fascinated by-”

“I am fascinated,” I insisted. “That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.”

“Here’s a candidate,” announced Sammann, who had crossed into the cloister from an adjoining court where, I inferred, Reticulum access was to be had. He sat down next to me and laid his jeejah on the table. The screen was covered with the calculations I’d noticed him doing on the plane. “Chronology,” he said. “According to Jules, the amount of time that has passed since the Daban Urnud embarked on its first inter-cosmic journey is 885 and a half years.”

“Whose years?” Jesry asked, skittering down the stairs from his cell, homing in on the smell of the bread. He closed with it like a wrestler and ripped off a hunk.

“That, of course, is the whole question,” Sammann said with a grin.

Arsibalt noticed a pitcher of water on a sideboard and began pouring it out into earthenware tumblers incised with geometric patterns.

“If Urnud years are anything like ours, that is a long time,” I said. “Thank you, Fraa Arsibalt.”

“The Urnudans, and later the Troans, wandered for a long time between Advents. Jules thinks it explains why they are a little tetchy.”

“Can we get a conversion factor-” Jesry said, in a tone that said I’ll be damned if I let this conversation wander.

“That’s what I’ve been working on,” said Sammann, nodding thanks to Arsibalt. He took a draught of water. Elkhazg was in a climate that sucked the moisture out of you. “Problem is, Jules is a linguist. Hasn’t paid a lot of attention to this. Knows the timeline in Urnud years-which is their standard unit up there-but not the conversion factor to Arbre years. Anyway, I was able to back it out from some clues-”

“What clues?” Jesry demanded.

“While the rest of us were evacuating Tredegarh, a unit of Valers assaulted the quarters of the so-called Matarrhites, and captured a lot of documents and syndevs before the Urnud/Tro guys could destroy them. My brethren are still virtualizing the syndevs-never mind-but some of the documents have timestamps in Urnud units, which can be matched against recent events on our calendar.”

“Wait a moment, please, how can we even read a document in Urnudan?” Arsibalt asked, sitting down and helping himself to the other heel.

“We can’t. But a cryptanalyst can easily see that many of the documents have the same format, which includes a string of characters readily decipherable as a timestamp. And they have a special, phonetic alphabet for transliterating proper names; they haul it out and dust it off whenever they encounter a new planet. This too is elementary to decipher. So if we see a document that has the phonetic transcription of Jesry and of his loctor at the Plenary-”

“We can infer it must be a report of the Plenary I participated in after I came back from space,” Jesry said, “and we know the Arbre date of that event. Very well. I agree that such givens would enable you to begin estimating a conversion factor relating Arbran to Urnudan years.”

“Yes,” said Sammann. “And there is still some error margin, but I believe that, in Arbran years, the Urnudans began their inter-cosmic journey 910 years ago, plus or minus 20.”

“Somewhere between 890 and 930 years ago,” I translated, but that was the limit of my arithmetical powers so early in the morning. Sammann was glaring fiercely into my eyes, willing me to wake up a little faster, to go the next step, but mere calculation was not my strong suit, especially when I had an audience.

“Between 2760 and 2800 A.R.?” said a new voice: Lio, coming across the cloister with Jules Verne Durand. These two did not look as if they’d only just gotten up; I guessed Lio had been pumping the Laterran for information.

“Yes!” Sammann said. “The time of the Third Sack.”

One of Magnath Foral’s staff came out with a huge bowl of peeled and cut-up fruit and began ladling it into bowls, which we passed around.

Jules tore off a piece of bread and began to eat it. This surprised me at first, since he could not derive any nutritional value from it; but I reasoned it would fill his stomach and make him feel less hungry.

“Wait a second,” Jesry said, “are you trying to develop a theory that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship at work? That the Urnudans began their journey because of events that took place here on Arbre?”

“I’m just saying it is a coincidence that needs looking at,” Sammann said.

We ate and thought. I had a head start on the eating, so I briefed Jesry and Lio-as well as others who drifted in, such as three of the Valers-on the conversations we’d had in the Plurality of Worlds Messal about the Wick and the idea that Arbre might be the HTW of other worlds, such as Urnud. The newcomers then had to be brought up to speed on the first part of this morning’s conversation, so the conversation forked and devolved into a general hubbub for a couple of minutes.

“So information could flow from Arbre to Urnud, in that scenario,” Jesry concluded, loudly enough to shut everyone up and retake the floor. “But why would the Third Sack trigger such behavior on the part of an Urnudan star captain?”

“Fraa Jesry, remember the margin of error that Sammann was careful to specify,” Arsibalt said. “The trigger could have been anything that happened in this cosmos in the four decades beginning around 2760. And I’ll remind you that this would include-”

“Events leading up to the Third Sack,” I blurted.

Silence. Discomfort. Averted gazes. Except for Jules Verne Durand, who was staring right at me and nodding. I recalled his willingness to broach excruciating topics at Messal, and decided to draw strength from that. “I’m done tiptoeing around this topic,” I said. “It all fits together. Fraa Clathrand of Edhar was the tip of an iceberg. Others back then-who knows how many thousands? — worked on a praxis of some kind. Procians and Halikaarnians alike. It’s hard to know the truth of what this praxis was capable of. The parking ramp dinosaur hints at what it could do when they made mistakes. We know what the S?culars thought of it, how they reacted. The records were destroyed, the practitioners massacred-except in the Three Inviolates. There’s no telling what people like Fraa Jad have been up to since then. I’ll bet they’ve just been nursing it along-”

“Keeping the pilot light burning,” Lio called.

“Yeah,” I said. “But something about what they did, circa 2760, when the praxis reached its zenith, sent out a signal that propagated down the Wick, and was noticed, somehow, by the theors of Urnud.”

“It drew them here, you’re saying,” said Lio, “like a dinner bell.”

“Like the fragrance of this bread,” I said.

“Perhaps it’s not just the smell of the bread that has drawn others to this room, Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt suggested. “Perhaps it is the sound of the conversation. Half-overheard words, not understandable at a distance, but enough to pique the interest of any sentient person in range of the voices.”

“You’re saying that’s what it might have been like to the Urnudan theors on that ship,” I said, “when they received-I don’t know-emanations, hints, signals, percolating down the Wick from Arbre.”

“Precisely,” said Arsibalt.

We all turned to Jules. He had removed some Laterran food from a bag and-having sated his appetite with stuff he could not digest-was now eating a few bites of what his body could use. He noticed the attention, shrugged, and swallowed. “Do not hold your breath waiting for an explanation from the Pedestal. Those of 900 years ago were rational theors, to be sure. But during the long, dark years of their wandering, it became something better recognizable as a priesthood. And the closer these priests get to their god, the more they fear it.”

“I wonder if we might calm them down just a little by getting them to see they’re not actually that close,” Jesry said.

“What do you mean?” Yul asked.

“Fraa Jad’s an interesting guy and all,” Jesry said, “but he doesn’t seem like a god, or even a prophet, to me. Whatever it is that he’s doing when he chants, or plays Teglon all night, I don’t think it is godlike. I think he’s just picking up signals coming to Arbre from farther up the Wick.”

By now everyone had showed up and eaten except for Fraa Jad. We found him sitting in the middle of the Decagon, eating some food that had been brought out to him by the staff. The Decagon looked altogether different. When we had passed across it yesterday, it had been paved in hand-sized clay tiles, dark brown, and grooved: just like the ones I’d played with at Orithena, except proportionally smaller. The groove seemed to run unbroken from one vertex to the opposite-I had not taken the time to verify this, but I assumed it was a correct solution. For those who wanted to try their hands at it, baskets of white porcelain tiles, marked with black glazed lines instead of grooves, had been stacked all around the edges. This morning, though, the baskets were empty, and Fraa Jad was enjoying his breakfast on a seamless white courtyard decorated with a wandering black line. During the night he had tiled the whole thing. When we understood this, we burst into applause. Arsibalt and Jesry were shouting as if at a ball game. The Valers approached Fraa Jad and bowed very low.

Out of curiosity, I backtracked to the outskirts of the Decagon and stepped off its edge-for the surface was several inches higher than the adjoining pavement. I squatted down and lifted up one of Jad’s white tiles to expose a small patch of brown tiling underneath. Jad’s was, as I’d expected, a wholly different solution of the Teglon-the positions of the older brown tiles didn’t match up with those of the new ones, proving that Fraa Jad had not merely copied the older solution.

“It is the fourth,” said a gentle voice. I looked up to find Magnath Foral watching me. He nodded at the tile in my hand. Looking more closely at the edge of the Decagon, I perceived, now, that underneath the brown tiles was a layer of green ones, and below that, one of terra-cotta.

“Well,” I said, “I guess you need to bake up a new set of tiles.”

Foral nodded, and said, deadpan: “I don’t think there is any great hurry.”

I set the white tile back into its place, stood up, and took a step up to the Decagon. It was open to the sky. I craned my neck and looked straight up. “Think they noticed?” I asked. Magnath Foral got a bemused look and said nothing.

Cell 317 moved on to convene in a courtyard we’d not visited yesterday. This one was circular, and roofed by a living bower. They had somehow trained half a dozen enormous flowering vines to arch across the top of the space and grapple with one another to form a stable dome of interlocked branches, fifty feet above the ground. Dappled light shone through it to illuminate the cool space below, but seen from above it would look like a hemisphere of solid green, freckled with color. Pallets of mysterious but expensive-looking stuff had been stationed around the edge of the yard. We devoted the remainder of the morning to breaking these open, getting rid of packaging materials, and drawing up an inventory: mindless labor that everyone badly needed.

That we’d be going into space was obvious from the nature of this stuff. By weight, it was ninety-nine percent containers. We were opening beautiful twenty-pound lockers to find pieces of equipment that weighed as much as dried flowers. We shed our bolts and chords in favor of nearly weightless charcoal-grey coveralls. “It’s all for the best,” Jesry said, eyeing me. “In zero gravity, the bolt doesn’t hang, if you get my meaning. Things would get ugly fast.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “Anything else I need to know?”

“If you get sick-which you will-it’ll last for three days. After that, you get better or you get used to it. I’m not sure which.”

“Do you think we’ll even have three days?”

“If they were only sending us up as a diversion-”

“Just to get killed, you mean?”

“Yeah-then they could just send Procians.”

Our conversation had begun to draw in others, such as the Valers, who did not understand Jesry’s sense of humor. He cleared his throat and called out, “What is happening, my fraa?” to Lio.

Lio sprang to the top of a tarp-covered pallet, and everyone went silent.

“We’re not allowed to know yet what the mission is,” he began, “or why we’re doing it. We just have to get there.”

“Get where?” Yul demanded.

“That Daban Urnud,” Lio said.

Not that we hadn’t been paying attention, but: we were really paying attention now. Everyone seemed brighter. Especially Jules. “Food, here I come.”

“How are we going to get aboard a heavily armed-” Arsibalt began to ask.

“We haven’t been told that yet,” Lio said. “Which is just fine, because simply getting off the ground is difficult enough. We can’t use the normal launch sites. I would presume that the Pedestal have threatened to rod them if they notice launch preparations. That means we can’t use the usual rockets, because those are tailor-made to be launched only from those sites. And that, in turn, means we can’t use the usual space vehicles-such as the one you rode on, Jesry-because those can only be launched by said rockets. But there is an alternative. During the last big war, a family of ballistic missiles was developed. They use storable propellants and they launch from the backs of vehicles that ramble around the countryside on treads.”

“That can’t work,” Jesry protested. “A ballistic missile doesn’t get its payload to orbit. It merely throws a warhead at the other side of the world.”

“But suppose you take off that warhead and replace it with something like this,” Lio said. He jumped down, got a grip on the tarp, collected himself, and snapped it away with a forceful movement of the hips and the arms. Revealed was a piece of equipment not a great deal larger than a major household appliance. “A gazebo on top of a welding rig” was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here. The “gazebo” was a very small one-though, as Lio demonstrated, it was large enough to house one person in a fetal position. Its roof was a lens of pressed sheet metal with some sort of hard coating. It was supported by four legs: spindly-looking, triangulated struts, like miniature radio towers.

So the gazebo had a roof and pillars, but it lacked a floor. In lieu of that were only three lugs projecting inward from a structural ring. At the moment, these were spanned by a sheet of plywood, which supported Lio’s back as he curled up on top of it. Once he rolled out, though, he took the plywood away to reveal nothing below except for structural members and plumbing. There were two big tanks-a torus encircling a sphere-and several smaller ones, all spherical, and none larger than what you’d see on the shelves of a sporting goods store. These were profoundly ensnared in plumbing and cable-harnesses. Sticking out the bottom, like an insect’s stinger, was a rocket nozzle, dismayingly small. “The real one will have a nozzle skirt bolted onto it,” Lio informed us, “as big again as this whole stage.”

“Stage!?” Sammann exclaimed. “You mean, as in-”

“Yes!” said Lio. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. This is the upper stage of a rocket. There’s one for each of us.” Then, so that we could get a better view of the nozzle, he grabbed a strut with one hand and hauled up. The entire stage rocked back, exposing the underside.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” I exclaimed, and put my hand next to his and shouldered him out of the way. He let it drop into my hand. The entire stage weighed considerably less than I did. Then everyone else had to try it.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Jesry asked.

There was an awkward silence.

“This is the whole thing,” proclaimed Jules Verne Durand, understanding it perfectly, even though he was seeing it for the first time. “The conception is monyafeek!”

“Well, since you appear to be an expert on monyafeeks,” Jesry said, “maybe you could tell us how four legs and a roof are going to contain a pressurized atmosphere!”

“It’s not called a monyafeek,” Lio protested mildly. “It’s a-oh, never mind.”

“We will have only space suits, am I right?” Jules asked, looking to Lio.

Lio nodded. “Jules gets it. Since we need space suits anyway, complete with life support and sanitation and all the rest, it’d be redundant to send up a pressurized capsule comprising extra copies of the same systems.”

I was expecting Jesry to lodge further protests but he underwent a sudden conversion, and held up both hands to silence murmurs. “I have been there,” he reminded us, “and I can tell you there is no part of the shared space capsule experience I’m eager to relive. You don’t know the meaning of nasty until you’ve been blindsided by a drifting blob of someone else’s vomit. Don’t even get me started on what passes for toilets. How hard it is to see out those tiny windows. I think this is a great idea: each of us sealed up in our own personal spaceship, keeping our farts to ourselves, enjoying the panoramic view out the facemask.”

“How long is it possible to live in a space suit?” I asked.

“You’re going to love this,” Jesry proclaimed, taking the floor with a nod from Lio. Jesry strode over to where he, with help from Fraa Gratho, had, for the last hour or so, been assembling space suits. He approached one that seemed to be complete, and slapped a green metal canister socketed into the suit’s backpack. “Liquid oxygen! A whole four hours’ supply, right here.”

“Provided you show discipline in its use,” put in Suur Vay.

“Liquid!? As in cryogenic?” Sammann asked.

“Of course.”

“How long will it stay cold?”

“In space? It’s not such an issue. It’ll stay cold as long as the fuel cell has fuel to run the chiller.” Slapping a red canister, he went on, “Liquid hydrogen. Easy on, easy off.” He twisted it off, showed us some kind of complicated latching/gasket hardware, then twisted it back on.

“So we’re competing against a fuel cell for the available oxygen?” Arsibalt asked.

“Think of it as cooperation.”

“What about waste products?” someone asked, but Jesry was ready. “Carbon dioxide is scrubbed here.” He twisted off a white can and waved it around. “When it’s used up, slap on a new one. Then-you’ll like this-take the old one over to the tender.” He paced over to a separate piece of equipment that looked as if it belonged to the same genus, but a different species, from the space suits. It had color-coded sockets all over it for tanks and canisters. He jacked the scrubber onto one of these. “It bakes the CO₂ out of the scrubber. When this bar has changed color”-he pointed to an indicator on the side of the can-“it’s ready to use again.”

“This device is also a reservoir of air and fuel?” asked Suur Vay, eyeing the sockets for oxygen and hydrogen canisters.

“If it’s available, this is where you’ll get it,” Jesry said. “It’s meant to be connected to a water bladder and an energy supply-usually solar panels, but in our case, a little nuke. It breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, liquefies them, and fills any tank you slap onto it. And it uses heat to recycle the scrubbers, as I was saying. Likewise, when your waste bags fill up-we’ll discuss those later-you attach them here-” pointing fastidiously to an array of yellow fittings.

“Do you mean to say we’ll be defecating inside the suits?” Arsibalt asked.

“Thank you for volunteering to demonstrate this amazing feature of the praxis!” Jesry proclaimed. “Lio and Raz, would you be so kind as to give your fraa some privacy?”

Lio and I collected Arsibalt’s bolt from where he had left it, and held it up, stretched between us, to make a screen as Arsibalt shed his coverall. Meanwhile, Jesry fetched a double extra large space suit and trundled it over. It was suspended from a rolling contraption that he called the Donning Rig. The suit consisted of a big rigid construct, the Head and Torso Unit or, inevitably, HTU, whose upper back hinged open like a refrigerator door. Each arm and each leg was built up out of several short, stiff, bulbous pods, stacked like beads on a string. This gave it a different appearance from the space suits I remembered seeing in speelies, and on the Warden of Heaven: this one was bigger, more rounded, reassuringly solid. Another big difference, at least cosmetically, was that this suit-like all of the others that Jesry had been working on-was matte black.

Arsibalt stepped toward the Donning Rig, raising his hands to grasp a strategically located chin-up bar, and pulling/climbing to a step poised at the threshold of the suit’s back door. He was surprisingly game. Perhaps he was remembering spec-fic speelies he used to watch before he was Collected, or perhaps he just didn’t like being naked. With some help from Jesry he introduced one pointed toe, then the other, into the leg-holes at the base of the HTU, and lowered himself into them. As his feet descended, the hard segments rotated in different ways. Each bulb, it seemed, was joined to its neighbors by an airtight bearing. All of them could rotate independently, so that elbows and knees could bend normally without the need for a complex joint mechanism. Arsibalt looked even more roly-poly than usual now. He flexed one leg, than the other, giving us a look at how the segments allowed movement by rotating against each other.

“I want to you take notice of the bags ringing your thighs and waist,” Jesry said, indicating some rubberish-looking stuff hanging limp from the inner walls of the HTU. “In a few minutes, those are going to rock your world.”

“It is so noted,” Arsibalt said, thrusting one hand, then the other, into the arm-constructs, which seemed to end in blunt hemispherical domes-handless stumps. All we could see now was his back and his arse. Jesry did us all the favor of slamming the door on that.

Now that our fraa was decent, Lio and I let the bolt drop, then migrated round to Arsibalt’s front side. We could barely hear his muffled voice. Jesry jacked a wire into a socket on the chest and turned on an amplifier. We heard Arsibalt on a speaker: “There’s much for my hands to learn about down here-I wish I could see what I was doing.”

“We’ll go over it,” Jesry promised. He spoke distractedly, since he was busy examining an array of readouts on the front of the suit-making sure his fraa wasn’t going to asphyxiate in there. I noticed others staring at Arsibalt’s front and looking amused, so I came around to that side of him and discovered that a small flat-panel speely screen was planted in the middle of his chest. It was showing a live feed of Arsibalt’s face, taken by a speelycaptor inside the helmet. It was quite distorted because shot through a fisheye lens at close range, but gave us something to look at other than the opaque smoked-glass face mask. “Pray tell, what are all these nozzles in front of my mouth?” Arsibalt asked, eyes downcast and scanning.

“Left, water. Right, food and, as warranted, pharmaceuticals. The big one in the middle is the scupper.”

“The what?”

“You throw up into it. Don’t miss.”

“Ah.” Arsibalt’s eyes rose to look out the face-mask at where his hands ought to have been. He raised one arm until its stump was up where he could see it. A hatch popped open. We all jumped back as something like a giant metal spider sprang out of it, flailing its limbs. On a second look, this proved to be a skeletal hand: bones, joints, and tendons mimicking those of a natural hand, but all made of machined, black-anodized metal, and skinless, unless you counted the black rubber pads on the tips of the fingers. It all grew out of a wrist joint that was fixed to the end of the stump. At first, it twitched and flopped spasmodically. One by one, the joints seemed to come under Arsibalt’s control, and it began to move like a real hand. His other arm came up, the hatch popped open, and another hand emerged from it. This one, though, was less human-looking; it was studded with small tools.

“Explain what you are doing with your hands,” I requested.

“The ends of the arms are roomy,” Arsibalt said. “There is a sort of glove, into which I can insert my hand. It is mechanically connected to the skeletal hand that you can all see.”

“Pure mechanism?” Sammann asked. “No servos?”

“Strictly mechanical,” said Jesry. “See for yourself.” And we gathered round for a closer look. The skelehand was animated by a number of metallic ribbons and pushrods that all disappeared into the arm-stump where, we gathered, they were connected directly to the internal glove that Arsibalt was wearing.

“Simple, in a way,” was Fraa Osa’s verdict, “yet very complex.”

“Yes. Except for the airtight seals, the whole thing could have been made by a medieval artisan with a lot of time on his hands,” Jesry said. “Fortunately, the mathic world has a large number of medieval artisans. And, believe it or not, it’s easier to build something like this than it is to make a pressurized space suit glove that’s actually good for anything.”

“There are other controls as well, in the end of the stump,” Arsibalt volunteered. “If I withdraw my hand from the glove-” The skelehand wiggled, then went limp. It snapped back into its storage compartment in the end of the stump, and the hatch closed over it. “Now,” Arsibalt said, “I’m groping around on the inner surface of the stump, which is replete with all manner of buttons and switches.”

“Be careful with those,” Jesry suggested. “Most of the suit’s functions are controlled by voice commands, but there are manual overrides that you don’t want to mess with.”

“How are we to tell all of these buttons and whatnot apart, since we can’t see them?” Arsibalt asked, and on the speely screen we could see his eyes wandering around uselessly as he felt his way around the inside of the stump.

“Most of them are a keyboard for entering alphanumeric data with the fingertips. Sammann will be able to use it immediately. The rest of us will have to hunt and peck.”

“So,” I asked, “overall, what do you think? How does it feel?”

“Surprisingly comfortable.”

“As you’ve noticed, the suit touches you in relatively few places,” Jesry said. “That is for comfort, and so that your core temp can be regulated by a simple air-conditioning system-obviates the tube garment that the Warden of Heaven had to wear. But where it touches you, it really grabs you-say the words sanitary elimination cycle commence.”

“Sanitary elimination cycle commence,” Arsibalt repeated, with trepidation rising as he climbed to the end of this ungainly phrase. The words sanitary elimination cycle appeared on a status panel below the speely of his face. His eyes got wide. “Oh, my god!” he exclaimed.

Everyone laughed. “Care to explain what’s going on?” Jesry said.

“Those air bags you pointed out to me earlier-they inflated. Around my waist and upper thighs.”

“Your pelvic region is now completely isolated from the rest of the suit,” Jesry said.

“I’ll say!”

“You can do whatever needs doing.”

“I believe we can skip that part of the demonstration, Fraa Jesry.”

“Have it your way. Say ‘sanitary elimination cycle conclude.’”

Arsibalt said it, and we got to have another laugh as we saw and heard his reaction. “I’m being sprayed with warm water. Fore and aft.”

“Yes. Boys and girls get the same treatment, like it or not,” Jesry said. Jesry now hauled down a thick hose that was part of the donning rig, and jacked it into a not very dignified part of the suit’s anatomy. “We don’t have the infinite vacuum of space to draw on, so we fake it.” He hit a switch and a vacuum cleaner howled for several seconds. More comedy on the speely screen. Arsibalt informed us that he was now being vigorously air-dried. Then: “It’s over. The bags deflated.”

“We know,” Sammann said, reading the status panel.

“You spend some air every time you do this-so use it sparingly,” Jesry cautioned us. “But the point is-”

“As long as the tender is up and running we can live in these things for a long time,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“This suit is altogether different from that worn by the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Osa pointed out. “More sophisticated.”

“Beautifully machined,” I said, wishing Cord could be here to admire the huge ring bearing that encircled Arsibalt’s waist, just below the threshold of the back door, making it possible for him to swivel his hips and shoulders independently.

“It is literally unbelievable,” was Arsibalt’s verdict. “As highly as I rate our fraas and suurs of the Convox, I can’t believe they could have designed something of such complexity on such short notice.”

“They didn’t,” Jesry said, “this suit was designed, down to the last detail, twenty-six centuries ago.”

“For the Big Nugget?” Sammann asked.

“Exactly. And that Convox had several years to devote to it. The plans were archived at Saunt Rab’s, and preserved during the Third Sack by fraas and suurs who carried the books around on their backs their whole lives. Last year, when the Geometers dropped into orbit around Arbre, there was a whole round of Vocos that we at Edhar never heard about, just to dump talent into restarting the program. Money was spent on an inconceivable scale to build these”-he slapped Arsibalt’s shoulder-“and those.” He waved at the monyafeek. “Note the attachment points.” He swiveled Arsibalt around so that the rest of us could see his back, and pointed out a triangular array of sockets, in the same configuration as the structural lugs on the monyafeek. “One plugs into the other-they become an integrated unit. So we don’t need furniture-no acceleration couches. Air bags in the suit will inflate to cushion our bodies during launch.”

“Impressive,” Sammann said. “The only thing we won’t be able to do in these things is sneak around.”

Everyone looked at him blankly. He grinned, and waved at Arsibalt’s chest, all lit up with speely feeds, alphanumeric displays, and status lights. “Pretty much rules out a covert operation.”

Gratho stepped forward, grabbed a barely noticeable ridge projecting from the HTU at collarbone level, and pulled down. A retractable black screen deployed, slid down, and latched in place just above the waist bearing. All of the lights and displays were now concealed. Arsibalt was matte black from head to toe, as if he’d been sculpted out of damp carbon.

“It is remarkable,” Osa pointed out, “when one considers that these were not even available when you, Fraa Jesry, went up with the Warden of Heaven.”

Jesry nodded. “There are now sixteen of them.”

“But there are eleven of us!” Arsibalt exclaimed, over his speaker. We’d forgotten he was there. His skelehand groped at his waist, found the latch for the screen, and yanked it back up to expose the speely. His familiar look of bulging-eyed surprise was comically magnified.

“That’s right,” said Jesry.

“The significance of that should be obvious,” Lio said, “but I will spell it out: we can’t screw this up. It is a similar story with the missile launchers. These were a military secret. There’s no reason why the Pedestal-who have obtained almost all of their knowledge of Arbre from the leakage of popular culture into space-would know of their existence. They were specifically made to be hard to see from above. But as soon as one of them is launched, its thermal signature will be picked up on the Geometers’ surveillance, and they’ll know all about them. So they must be launched all at once, or not at all. There are a couple of hundred. They are all going to be sent up within the same ten-minute launch window, which happens to be three days from now. Eleven of them will be tipped with ‘monyafeeks’ carrying the members of this cell. Quite a few others will carry the equipment and consumables we’ll be needing.”

“And the remainder?” Sammann asked.

Lio said nothing, though he did throw a glance at me. Both of us were thinking of the Everything Killers. “Decoys and chaff,” he said finally.

“What is it we’re expected to do once we get up there?” Arsibalt asked.

“Consolidate a number of other payloads into a thrust platform-I won’t dignify it as a ‘vehicle’-that will inject us into a new orbit,” Lio said, “an orbit that will bring us to a rendezvous with the Daban Urnud.”

“We could have guessed that much,” Jesry said. “What Fraa Arsibalt is really asking, is-”

Fraa Osa stepped forward, giving Lio an if I may? look. We hadn’t heard much out of the Vale leader, so everyone got where they could see him. “The greatest difficulty for ones such as you shall be, not completion of the given tasks, but instead the humiliation and uncertainty that arise from not being able to know the entire plan. These emotions can hamper you. You must simply decide, now, either to proceed with the awareness that the entire plan might never be revealed to you-and, were it revealed, might have obvious defects-or to turn away and allow some other person to occupy the space suit that has been allotted to you.” And then he stepped back. There was a minute of silence as all of us made our decisions. If that was the right word for what was going on in our heads. I didn’t feel any of the emotions connected with real decision-making. To step away from this group at the moment was simply unthinkable. There was no decision to be made. Fraa Osa, who had devoted his entire life to preparing for such situations, no doubt knew this perfectly well. He wasn’t really asking us to make a decision. He was telling us, in a reasonably diplomatic way, to shut up and concentrate on the matter at hand.

And so that is what we did eighteen hours a day until the truck came to pick us up and take us to the airfield. Though a casual observer might have thought we were working only half the time, and playing video games otherwise. Three of the cells that adjoined the courtyard had been equipped with syndevs hooked to big wraparound speely screens. In the center of each was a chair with disembodied spacesuit arms rigged to it. We’d take turns sitting in that chair with our hands stuck into the arms, groping at the controls. Projected on the screens around us was a simulation of what we might see out of our face-masks when we were floating around in low orbit, complete with all manner of readouts and indicators that, we were promised, would be superimposed on the view by the suit’s built-in syndevs. The controls beneath our fingertips could be patched through to the thrusters on the monyafeeks so that, once we reached orbit, we’d be able to scoot around and accomplish certain tasks. Beneath the left hand was a little sphere that spun freely in a cradle; beneath the right, a mushroom-shaped stick that could be moved in four directions as well as pushed down or pulled up. The former controlled the suit’s rotation, which was pretty easy to manage. The latter controlled translation-moving across space, as opposed to spinning in place. That would be tricky. Things in orbit didn’t behave like what we were used to. Just to name one example: if I were pursuing another object in the same orbit, my natural instinct would be to fire a thruster that would kick me forward. But that would move me into a higher orbit, so the thing I was chasing would soon drop below me. Everything we knew down here was going to be wrong up there. Even for those of us who’d learned orbital mechanics at Orolo’s feet, the only way for us to really grasp it was by playing this game.

“It is deceptive,” was Jules’s observation. He and I were in one of those cells together. I’d become good, early, at playing the game, since I knew the underlying theorics, so helping others learn it had become my role. “The left hand seems to make a great effect.” He spun the little sphere. I closed my eyes and swallowed as the image on the screens-consisting of Arbre, and some other stuff in “orbit” around us-snapped around wildly. “However, in truth the six elements have not been changed in the slightest.” He was referring to the row of six numbers lined up across the bottom of the simulated display: the same six numbers I’d once taught Barb about in the Refectory kitchen.

“That’s right,” I said, “you can spin around all you want and it won’t change your orbital elements-which is all that really matters.” A six-way indicator in the lower right began to flicker, which told me that Jules was using his other hand-the dexter, as he called it-to play with the mushroom, which he called a joycetick. The six orbital elements began to fluctuate. One of them changed from green to yellow. “Aha,” I said, “you just screwed up your inclination. You’re out of plane now.”

“Very significant in the long run,” he said, “and yet deceptively I observe no great difference now.”

“Exactly. Let me run it forward, though, to show you what happens.” I had an instructor’s control panel, which I used to fast-forward the simulation, compressing the next half hour into about ten seconds. The other satellites drifted so far away from us that they were lost to sight. “Once you get so far away that you can’t see your friends-or can’t tell them apart from all of the decoys-”

“I am pairdoo,” he said flatly. “Can you make it run backward?”

“Of course.” I ran the simulation back to just after he had messed up his inclination.

“How can I fix it-like so, perhaps?” he muttered, and tried something with the joycetick. The inclination got a little worse, and the eccentricity jumped through yellow to red. “Maird,” he said, “I am fouled up now on two of the six.”

“Try the reverse of what you just did,” I suggested. He fired the opposite thruster, and the eccentricity improved, but semimajor axis got worse. “Quite a fine puzzle,” he said. “Why did I study linguistics instead of celestial mechanics? Linguistics got me into this excellent mess-only physics can get me out.”

“What’s it like up there?” I asked him. He was getting frustrated and I thought he might benefit from a break.

“Oh, you have seen the model, I am sure. It is quite accurate, in the externals which can be viewed by your telescopes. Of course, most of the Forty Thousand never see any of that. Only the internals of the Orbstack where they live their whole lives.” He was speaking of the living heart of the Daban Urnud: sixteen hollow spheres, each a bit less than a mile in diameter, clustered about a central axis that rotated to produce pseudogravity.

“That’s what I’m asking about,” I said. “What’s that community of ten thousand Laterrans like?”

“Split, now, between the Fulcrum and the Pedestal.” The Fulcrum was the opposition movement, led by Fthosians.

“But in normal times-”

“Until we came here, and the positions of Pedestal and Fulcrum became so hard, it was like a nice provincial town with perhaps a university or research lab. Each orb is half full of water. The water is covered with houseboats. On the roofs of them, we grow our own food-ah, I remember food!”

“Each race has four of the orbs, I assume?”

“Officially, yes, but there is of course some mixing of the communities. When the ship is not under acceleration, we can open certain doors to join neighboring orbs, and one moves freely between them. In one of the orbs of Laterre, we have a school.”

“So there are children?”

“Of course we have children and raise them very, very well-education is everything to us.”

“I wish we did a better job of that on Arbre,” I said. “Extramuros, that is.”

Jules thought about it, and shrugged. “Understand, I do not describe a utopia! We do not educate the young ones purely out of respect for noble ideals. We need them to stay alive, and to allow the voyaging of the Daban Urnud to continue. And there is competition between the children of Urnud, Tro, Laterre, and Fthos for the positions of power within the Command.”

“Does that even extend to fields such as linguistics?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I am a strategic asset! To make its way to new cosmi and to carry out new Advents is the Rayzon Det of the Command. And almost nothing is more useful to them, in an Advent, than a linguist.”

“Of course,” I said. “So, your nice town of ten thousand is big enough for people to marry, or whatever you do-”

“We marry,” he confirmed. “Or at least, sufficient of us do, and have children, to maintain ten thousand.”

“How about you?” I asked. “Are you married?”

“I was,” he said.

So they had divorces too. “Any kids?”

“No. Not yet. Never, now.”

“We’ll get you back home,” I told him. “Maybe you’ll meet someone new up there.”

“Not like her,” he said. Then he got a wry look and shrugged. “When Lise and I were together, I always would have said such things. Sweet nothings. ‘Oh, there is no one like you, my love.’” He sniffled, and looked away. “Not insincerely, of course.”

“Of course not.”

“But the manner of her passing made so clear, so bright, the truth of it-that there truly was no one like her. And in a community of only ten thousand, cut off forever from its roots in the home cosmos-well-I know them all, Raz. All the women of my age. And I can tell you as a matter of fact that in the cosmos where you and I are standing, there is no one like my Lise.” Tears were running freely down his face now.

“I am terribly sorry,” I said. “I feel such a fool. I didn’t understand your wife was dead.”

“She is dead,” he confirmed. “I have, you know, seen the pictures of her body-her face-all over the Convox.”

“My god,” I exclaimed. I wasn’t in the habit of using religious oaths, but could think of nothing else strong enough. “The woman in the probe at Orithena-”

“She was my Lise,” said Jules Verne Durand. “My wife. I have already told Sammann.” And then he broke down altogether.

Jules and I were sitting together in the darkened cell, nothing to see by except simulated sunlight, reflecting from a simulated Arbre and a simulated moon. Simulated persons in spacesuits drifted silently around us. He was hunched over sobbing.

I remembered our Messal conversations about how we could interact in simple physical ways with the Geometers even if biological interaction was not possible. I went over and wrapped my arms around the Laterran until he stopped crying.

“He told me,” I said to Sammann later.

He knew immediately who and what I was speaking of. He broke eye contact and shook his head. “How’s he doing?”

“Better…he said something good.”

“What’s that?”

“I touched Orolo. Orolo touched Lise-gave himself up for her. When I touched Jules, it was like-”

“Closing a cycle.”

“Yeah. I told him how we had prepared her body. The respect we showed it. He seemed to like hearing that.”

“He told me on the plane,” Sammann said. “Asked me not to tell the others.”

“You have anyone like that, Sammann?” For in all the time we’d spent together, we’d never broached such topics.

He chuckled and shook his head. “Like that? No. Not like that. A few girlfriends sometimes. Otherwise, just family. Ita are-well-more family oriented.” He stopped awkwardly. The contrast with avout was too obvious.

“Well, in that vein,” I finally said, “could you help me close another cycle?”

He shrugged. “Be happy to try. What do you need?”

“You got a message off to Ala the other day. Just before the plane took off. I was sort of-shy.”

“Because of the lack of privacy,” he said. “Yeah, I could see that.”

“Can you send her another?”

“Sure. But it won’t be any more private than the last.”

I sort of chuckled. “Yeah. Well, considering everything, that’ll be acceptable.”

“Okay. What do you want me to tell Ala?”

“That if I get to have a fourth life, I want to spend it with her.”

“Whew!” he exclaimed, and his eyes glistened as if I’d slapped him. “Let me type that in before you change your mind.”

“All we do now is go forward,” I said, “there’ll be no changing of minds.”