Anathem

Social conventions evolved. I’d thought some might take it the wrong way if two or three of us jacked together for a private conversation. But I didn’t feel thus when I noticed Lio talking to Osa or Sammann to Jules Verne Durand, and soon it became clear that everyone in the cell was happy to afford others privacy. Sammann strung a network of wires through the frame that everyone could connect to when it was necessary to have an all-hands meeting, and we agreed that we’d do so every eight hours. The intervals between those meetings were free time. Each of us tried to devote one out of three to sleeping, but this wasn’t going so well. I thought I was the only one having trouble with it until Arsibalt drifted over during a rest period and connected himself to me.

“You sleeping, Raz?”

“Not any more.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No. Not really. How about you?”

Up to this point it had been the same, word for word, as the conversations we used to have in the middle of the night back when we had been newly Collected fids, lying in unfamiliar cells, trying to sleep. Now, though, it took a new turn. “Hard to say,” Arsibalt said. “I don’t feel as if I am going through normal sleeping and waking cycles up here. Frankly, I can’t tell the difference between dreaming and waking any more.”

“Well, what are you dreaming about?”

“About all that could have gone wrong-”

“But didn’t?”

“Exactly, Raz.”

“I haven’t heard the whole story yet of how you rescued Jad.”

“I’m not even certain that I could relate it coherently,” he sighed. “It exists in my mind as a jumble of moments when I thought or did things-and every one of those moments, Raz, could have gone another way. And all of the other outcomes would have been bad ones. I’m certain of that. I replay it in my head over and over. And in every case, I happened to do the right thing.”

“Well, it’s kind of like the anthropic principle at work, isn’t it?” I pointed out. “If anything had been a little different, you’d be dead-and so you wouldn’t have a brain to remember it with.”

Arsibalt said nothing for a while, then sighed. “That is as unsatisfactory as anthropic arguments usually are. I’d prefer the alternate explanation.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m not only brilliant, but cool under pressure.”

I decided to let this go. “I’ve had dreams,” I admitted, “dreams in which everything is the same, except that you and Jad aren’t here because you croaked.”

“Yes, and I have had dreams in which I let Jad go because I couldn’t drag him back, and watched him burn up in the atmosphere below me. And other dreams in which you didn’t make it, Raz. We recovered the nuke, but you had simply vanished.”

“But then you wake up-” I began.

“I wake up and see you and Jad. But the boundary between waking and dreaming is so indistinct here that sometimes I can’t make out whether I’ve gone from dreaming to waking, or the other way round.”

“I think I see where this is going,” I said. “I might be dead. You might be dead. Jad might be dead-”

“We’ve become like Fraa Orolo’s wandering 10,000-year math,” Arsibalt proclaimed. “A causal domain cut off from the rest of the cosmos.”

“Whew!”

“But there is a side effect that Orolo never warned us of,” he continued, “which is that we’ve gone adrift. We don’t exist in one state or another. Anything’s possible, any history might have happened, until the gates swing open and we go into Apert.”

“Either that,” I said, “or we’re just sleepy and worried.”

“That is just another possibility that might be real,” Arsibalt said.

When we weren’t (according to most of us) dozing or (according to Arsibalt) drifting between distinct, but equally real, worldtracks, we were studying the Daban Urnud. A few paragraphs’ worth of description from Jules Verne Durand, disseminated over the Reticulum, had given the Antiswarm enough information to build a three-dimensional model of the alien ship that, according to the Laterran, was eerily faithful.

Blow a balloon out of steel, almost a mile wide, and fill it half full of water. Repeat three more times. Place these four orbs at the corners of a square, close to one another, but not quite touching.

Repeat with four more orbs. Stack the new set atop the old. But give it a forty-five-degree twist, so that the upper orbs nestle into the clefts between the ones below, like fruits stacked at a green-grocer’s.

Pile on two more such orb-squares, repeating the twist each time. Now you have sixteen orbs in a stack a little more than two miles high and a little less than two miles across. Running up the center of the stack is an empty space, a chimney about half a mile in diameter. Pack that chimney with all of the good stuff: all of the complicated, expensive, exquisitely designed praxis that we have long associated with space travel. Much of it is nothing but structure: steel trusswork to grip those orbs and hold them securely in their places while the entire thing is spinning around at one revolution per minute to create pseudogravity, maneuvering to dodge incoming bogeys, managing the resultant slosh, accelerating under atomic power, or all of the above.

Once you’re satisfied it’s never going to fall apart structurally, weave in all of the other stuff: a storage magazine capable of holding tens of thousands of nuclear propulsion charges. Reactors to supply power when the ship is far from any sun. Inconceivably complex plumbing and wiring. Pressurized corridors along which Urnudans, Troans, Laterrans, and Fthosians can move from one orb to another. Trunk lines of optical fibers to pipe captured sunlight from the exterior of the icosahedron to the orbs, to shine on their rooftop farms.

The orbs themselves are comparatively simple. Inside of them, the water’s free to find its own level. When the whole construct is spinning, the water flees to the outside and settles into a curve on which “gravity” is always equal to what it was on the home planet. When the ship is under power, the water settles into the aft part of the sphere and levels out. People live on the surface of the water in houseboats linked by a web of stretchy lines and held apart by tough air-bladders; when the shape of the water changes, there’s always a bit of jostling. Like any proper boat, though, these are rigged for that; the cabinets have latches so that they don’t fly open, the furniture is attached to the floor so it doesn’t slide around. People live as their ancestors did on the home planet, and may go for days, weeks, without thinking very much about the fact that they’re sealed in a metal balloon being spanked through space by A-bombs-as their families back on Urnud, Tro, Laterre, or Fthos might never think about the fact that they live on wet balls of rock hurtling through a vacuum.

This construct-the Orbstack-is a nice piece of work, but vulnerable to cosmic rays, wandering rocks, sunlight, and alien weaponry. So, frame walls of gravel around it, and while you’re at it, hang the walls on a network of giant shock pistons. The Orbstack is suspended in its middle, webbed to it. Anything that relates to the rest of the universe-radar, telescopes, weapons systems, scout vehicles-lives on the outside, attached to the thirty shock pistons, or the twelve vertices where the shocks join together. Three of the vertices-the ones down around the pusher plate-are naked mechanisms, but the other nine are all complex space vehicles in themselves. Some are pressurized spheres where members of the Command float around weightless. Others have wide tunnels bored through them so that small vehicles, and space-suited persons, can pass between the interior of the icosahedron and the remainder of whatever cosmos the ship happens to be in. And one is an optical observatory, better than any on Arbre because it enjoys the vacuum of space.

All of this had been modeled, in more or less detail, by the minds of the Antiswarm during the days that my cell-mates and I had been assembling space suits and playing video games in Elkhazg. The model lived in our suits now. We could fly through it using the same controls-the trackball and the stick-that we had earlier used to steer the monyafeeks. From a distance it seemed impressively complete, with a kind of organic complexity about it; as I flew in closer, though, to explore the core of the Orbstack, I found hovering, semitransparent notes that had been posted by diffident avout, writing in perfect Orth, informing me, with regret, that everything beyond this point was pure conjecture.

Fraa Jad finally got his wish: a sextant. We had been supplied with a device consisting of a wide-angle lens, like Clesthyra’s Eye, that was smart enough to recognize certain constellations. So it could know our attitude with respect to the so-called fixed stars. That in combination with the positions of the sun, the moon, and Arbre, and an accurate internal clock and ephemeris, gave this thing enough information to calculate our orbital elements. Fraa Jad seized this tool as soon as its presence was made known, and devoted hours to mastering its functions.

Now that our adventure had turned into an obvious do-or-die proposition, Jules had given up on trying to conserve what remained of his food, and was eating freely. So his energy level sprang back and his mood improved. Whenever he was awake, several others were jacked into his suit, asking him questions about internal details of the ship that had not made it into the model: for example, what the doors looked like, how to operate the latching mechanisms, how to tell a Fthosian from a Troan. I learned that the Geometers had a particular dread of fire in the zero-gravity parts of the ship, and that one could not go more than a hundred feet without encountering a locker stocked with respirators, fireproof suits, and extinguishers.

That still left a lot of free time. Two days in, I made a private connection with Jesry and told him what I knew of the Everything Killers. Jesry listened attentively, as in a chalk hall, and didn’t say much. By watching his face on the speely screen I could tell that he was thinking about it hard-talking himself into why it made sense. It had been obvious to him that there was something we weren’t being told. Otherwise, the mission made no sense on the face of it. I had given him something to think about. Until he’d thought about it-until he’d had a thought that wasn’t obvious-he’d have nothing to say.

Text messages trickled in from Cell 87 and appeared on my screen. The first few were routine. Then they started getting weird.

Tulia: Settle an argument down here…what is your head count up there?

I pecked a message back: Pardon me, but are you asking me how many of us are alive? Then I fired the message off. Only after brooding over the exchange for a few minutes did I realize that I hadn’t answered her question. By that time, though, we’d lost contact with the ground.

I called a meeting. We all jacked in.

“My support cell doesn’t know how many of us are alive,” I announced.

“Nor does mine,” Jesry said immediately. “They claim I sent them a message a few hours ago implying that two of us were dead.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“My support cell sent me no messages at all for quite a long time,” said Suur Esma, “because they were convinced I had perished in the launch.”

“It makes me wonder if something has gone wrong with the Antiswarm,” I said. “All of these cells should be talking to each other on the Reticulum, right? Comparing notes?”

We looked at Sammann. New body language was required. Since faces could not be seen directly, we had gotten in the habit of shifting our bodies toward the interlocutor to let them know we were paying attention. So, nine space suits aimed themselves at Sammann. Fraa Jad, though, didn’t seem interested. He had already jacked out of the meeting and was clambering to a different part of the space frame. But he had scarcely uttered a word since we had reached space, and so we paid him no mind. I was even starting to wonder if he had suffered brain damage.

“Something has gone wrong,” Sammann affirmed.

“Did the Geometers find a way to jam the Reticulum?” Osa asked.

“No, the Ret-its physical layer, anyway-is working fine. But there’s a low-level bug in the dynamics of the reputon space.”

“In Ita talk,” I said, “when you call something ‘low-level,’ you mean it’s really important, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you say any more about what this means for us?” Lio requested.

“Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.

“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.

“Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”

“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”

“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”

“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively.

“What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.

“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions-bogons, as we call them.”

“The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.

“Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day. However, the recent events, and the stresses posed by the Antiswarm, appear to have introduced the low-level bug that I spoke of.”

“So the practical consequence for us,” Lio said, “is that-?”

“Our cells on the ground may be having difficulty distinguishing between legitimate messages and bogons. And some of the messages that flash up on our screens may be bogons as well.”

“And this is all because a few bits got flipped in a syndev somewhere,” Jesry said.

“It’s slightly more complicated than you make it sound,” Sammann retorted.

“But what Jesry’s driving at,” I said, “is that this ambiguity is ultimately caused by some number of logic gates or memory cells, somewhere, being in a state that is wrong, or at least ambiguous.”

“I guess you could put it that way,” Sammann said, and I could tell he was shrugging even if I couldn’t see it. “But it’ll all get sorted soon, and then we’ll stop receiving goofy messages.”

“No we won’t,” said Fraa Gratho.

“Why do you say that?” asked Lio.

“Behold,” said Fraa Gratho, and extended his arm. Following the gesture, we found Fraa Jad at work on the wireless box that was our only link to the ground. He was stabbing it with a screwdriver again and again. From time to time a piece of shrapnel would float away from it, and he would fastidiously pluck it out of space with a skelehand so that it would not wander out from beneath the Cold Dark Mirror and return a radar echo.

When he was good and finished, he drifted back to the meeting and jacked himself in. Lio remained calm, and waited for him to speak.

Jad said, “The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters.”

Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorceror. That clarified things a little. We were silent for a while. We knew there was no point in requesting clarification. Fraa Jad had put it as clearly as he knew how. I saw Jesry looking my way in his speely display. This is how the Incanters do it; he’s doing it now.

Sammann finally broke the silence. “It is most odd,” he said, sounding strangely moved, “but I have been working up my nerve to do the same thing.”

“What? Destroy the transmitter?” Lio asked.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I dreamed a few hours ago I had done it. I felt good about it. When I woke up, I was surprised to find it intact.”

“Why would you wish to destroy it?” Arsibalt asked.

“I’ve been observing its habits. Once every orbit, it comes into line of sight with a facility on the ground and establishes a link. Then it empties its buffer-clears its queue.” He went on to translate these Ita terms into Orth. The queue was like a stack of leaves with messages written on them, which were transmitted down to Arbre whenever possible. They were sent down in the same order as they stood in the queue, like customers waiting in line at a store.

“So these things in the queue are, for example, the text messages I’ve been writing back to my support cell on the ground?” I asked.

“How many have you written?” he asked me.

“Maybe five.”

“Lio?”

“More like ten.”

“Osa?” Sammann polled everyone. None had written more than a few messages. “The number of items in the queue at this time,” he announced, “is over fourteen hundred.”

“What are they?” Arsibalt asked. “Can you read them?”

“No. They are all encrypted, and no one saw fit to give me the key. Most are quite small. Probably text messages, biomedical data, and associated bogons. But some of them are thousands of times larger. Since I am the only one here with knowledge of such things, I’ll tell you what would be obvious to an Ita, which is that the large items are most likely recorded sound and video files.”

I could think of any number of explanations for this but Arsibalt jumped directly to the most dramatic and, I had to admit, probably correct one: “Surveillance!”

Sammann made no objection. “I have been watching the behavior of the queue during my idle moments, of which I have many. The big files behave in certain remarkable ways. For one thing, they get priority over the little ones. The system advances them to the foremost position in the queue as soon as they are created. For another, the creation of these files seems to coincide with beginnings and ends of conversations. As an example, I saw Erasmas having a private conversation with Jesry a while ago, between about 1015 and 1030 hours. The next time Jesry connected himself to the reticule, which was only about fifteen minutes ago, a large file sprang into existence in the queue, and was promptly moved to the top. Time of creation, 1017. Last modified, 1030.”

“Is this occurring with all of our conversations?” Lio asked. And the tone of his voice told me-as if I ever could have doubted it-that all of this was as new to him as it was to me.

“No. Only some.”

“I propose an experiment,” Jesry said. “Sammann, does it still work?”

“Oh yes. Fraa Jad destroyed only the transmitter. The syndev still functions as if nothing had changed.”

“Are you monitoring the queue now?”

“Of course.”

Jesry disconnected, and motioned for me to do the same. We formed a private connection. Jesry launched into a very old, well-worn dialog that we’d had to memorize as fids: a verbal proof that the square root of two was an irrational number. I did my best to hold up my end of it. When we were finished, we reconnected to the reticule and waited a few seconds. “Nothing,” Sammann said.

Again we disconnected and formed a two-person link.

“Do you remember back at Edhar,” I began, “when we and the other Incanters would sit around after dinner making Everything Killers out of cornstalks and shoelaces?”

“Of course,” Jesry said, “those were really good Everything Killers because they could assassinate filthy Panjandrums like no one’s business.”

“That’ll come in handy when we betray Arbre to the Pedestal,” I pointed out.

And so on in that vein for a couple of minutes. Then we reconnected to the reticule. “There’s a new file,” Sammann announced, “at the head of the queue.”

“Okay,” I announced, “so the Panjandrums seem to be really keen on knowing if we talk about certain things like the Everything Killers.”

“Ha!” Sammann exclaimed. “A new file has just been opened, and it is growing larger the longer…I…keep…talking.”

The topic of the Everything Killers had not yet been broached to the group at large, and so some people had a lot of questions, which Lio fielded. Meanwhile, Jesry and I continued the experiment we had begun, breaking and re-establishing contact with the reticule a couple of dozen times over the course of the following half-hour. Every time we broke away, we’d try a few more words, just to see which topics triggered the automatic recording system. This was a haphazard business, but we were able to discover several more trigger words, including attack, neutron, mass murder, insane, dishonor, unconscionable, refuse, and mutiny.

Every time we reconnected, we heard more ideas for possible trigger words, since the conversation was quite naturally evolving in such a way that all the words listed above, and many more, were frequently put to use. Things were becoming extremely emotional, and it was good in a way that Jesry and I were able to jack in and out of it and treat its contents as an object of theorical study. But after a while it reached a point where we reckoned we had better join and stay joined.

Arsibalt had just asked a rather probing question of the Valers: where did their ultimate allegiance lie?

Fraa Osa was answering: “To my fraas and suurs of the Ringing Vale I have a loyalty that can never be dissolved precisely because it is no rational thing but a bond like that of family. And I will not waste oxygen by discussing all of the nesting and overlapping loyalty groups to which I belong: this cell, the Mathic world, the Convox, the people of Arbre, and the community, extending even beyond the limits of this cosmos, that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

“Say zhoost,” answered the Laterran, which we’d figured out was his way of expressing approval.

“To untangle all acting loyalties and obligations is not possible in the thick of an Emergence, and so one falls back on simple responses that arise from one’s training.”

Jules had not yet been exposed to this concept and so Osa gave him a brief tutorial on Emergence-ology, using as an example the decision tree that a swordfighter must traverse in order to make the correct move during a duel. It was obvious that such a thing was far too complex to be evaluated in a rational way during a rapid exchange of cuts and thrusts, and so it must be the case that sword-fighters who survived more than one or two such encounters must be doing Something Different. The avout of the Ringing Vale had made the study and cultivation of that Something Different their sole occupation. Jules Verne Durand took the point readily. “The analogy works as well with complex board games. We have some on Laterre, similar to yours here in that the tree of possible moves and counter-moves rapidly becomes far too vast for the brain to sort through all possibilities. Ordinators-what you’d call syntactic devices-can play the game in this style, but successful human players appear to use some fundamentally different approach that relies on seeing the whole board and detecting certain patterns and applying certain rules of thumb.”

“The Teglon,” put in Fraa Jad. And he did not need to elaborate on this. We’d all seen the feat he had accomplished at Elkhazg, and it was obvious to all of us that it could not have been done by trial and error. Nor by building outwards from a single starting place. He’d had to grasp the whole pattern at once.

“This is dangerous,” Jesry said flatly. “It leads to saying that we may abandon the Rake and behave like a bunch of Enthusiasts, and everything will work out just fine because we have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosm.”

“What you say is indeed a problem,” said Jules, “but no one here would dare argue that it is possible to win a swordfight or solve the Teglon by behaving so self-indulgently.”

“Jesry is making a straw man argument,” Arsibalt said. “He’s raising a possible future issue. If we agree to proceed along these lines, and reach a point, somewhere down the line, where a difficult decision needs to be made, what grounds will we have for evaluating possible decisions, if we’ve already thrown rational analysis to the wind?”

“The ability to decide correctly at such moments must be cultivated over many years of disciplined practice and contemplation,” said Fraa Osa. “No one would argue that a novice could solve the Teglon simply by trusting his feelings. Fraa Jad developed the ability to do it over many decades.”

“Centuries,” I corrected him, since I saw no benefit, now, in being coy about this. I heard a couple of surprised exclamations over the reticule, but no one said anything for or against the proposition.

Not even Fraa Jad. He did say this: “Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

“Fine,” Jesry said, “but where does it get us? What are we going to do?”

“I think it has already gotten us somewhere,” I said. “When you and I re-joined this dialog a few minutes ago, passions were inflamed and people were still trying to frame the decision in terms of allegiances and loyalties. Fraa Osa has shown that any such approach will fail because we all belong to multiple groups with conflicting loyalties. This made the conversation less emotional. We’ve also developed an argument that it’s not possible to work out all the moves in advance. But as you yourself pointed out, going on naive emotion is bound to fail.”

“So we must develop the same kind of decision-making ability that Fraa Jad employs when he solves the Teglon,” said Jesry, “but that requires time and knowledge. We don’t have time and we don’t have much knowledge.”

“We have two more days,” said Lio.

“And there is much knowledge that we can infer,” said Arsibalt.

“Such as?” Jesry asked in a skeptical tone.

“That Everything Killers might be planted in this equipment. That our purpose might be to deliver them to the Daban Urnud,” Arsibalt said.

“Most of this equipment isn’t going to make it to the Daban Urnud,” Lio pointed out. He added, perfectly deadpan, “Those of you who’ve reviewed the Terminal Rendezvous Maneuver Plan will know as much.”

“Just us, and our suits,” Jesry said. “That’s all that will make it to the ship-if we’re lucky. And they-the ones who planned this-can’t predict the fate of our suits. What if we get captured by the Pedestal? They might ditch our suits in space, or dismantle them.”

“Your point is becoming clear,” said Fraa Osa, “but it is important that you make it.”

“Fine. We are the weapons. The Everything Killers have been planted inside our bodies. We all know how it was done.”

“The giant pills,” said Jules.

“Exactly: the core temperature transponders that we swallowed before takeoff,” Jesry said. “Anyone pass theirs yet?”

“Come to think of it, no,” said Arsibalt. “It seems to have taken up residence in my gut.”

“There you have it,” said Jesry. “Until those things are surgically removed, we are all living, breathing nuclear weapons.”

“All,” said Suur Vay, “except for Fraa Jad, and Jules Verne Durand.”

This left all of us nonplussed, so she explained, “I believe you will find their core temperature transponders rattling around loose, somewhere inside their space suits.”

“I threw mine up,” explained Jules.

“I declined to swallow mine,” said Jad.

“And as the cell physician, you knew this, Suur Vay, because their core temp readings have been obviously wrong?” asked Lio.

“Yes. And the incorrect readings caused their suits to respond in inappropriate ways, which is why both of them required medical attention following the launch.”

“Why didn’t you swallow your pill, Fraa Jad?” asked Arsibalt. “Did you know what it was?”

“I judged it wiser not to,” was all that Fraa Jad was willing to supply in the way of an answer.

“This idea-that we’ve all been turned into nuclear weapons-is an amazing theory,” I said, “but I simply don’t believe that Ala would ever do such a thing.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t know,” Lio said. “This must have been added onto the plan without her knowledge.”

Fraa Osa said, “If I were the strategist in charge, I would go to Ala and say ‘please assemble the team you deem most capable of getting aboard the Daban Urnud.’ And her answer would come back: ‘I will do it by making friends with those among the Geometers who are opposed to the Pedestal; they’ll take our people in and offer them assistance.’”

“That is monstrous,” I said.

“Monstrous: probably another trigger word,” Jesry mused. I wanted to slug him. But he was making an excellent point.

Two days later we stripped off our white coveralls, then drew down the retractable shields to conceal the lights and displays on our suit-fronts. We were all matte black now. Like mountaineers, we roped ourselves together with a braided line that doubled as safety rope and communications wire. Jad, Jesry, and I had spent much of the last shift working with the sextant and making calculations. These culminated with Fraa Jad hanging off the underside of the nuke with a knife in one hand, sighting down the length of the tether as if it were a gun barrel, watching the constellations wheel behind it. At the instant when a particular star came into alignment with the tether, he slashed through it with a knife. The tether and the counterweight at its end flew off into space-and so did we, picking up a final momentum adjustment that would, we hoped, synch our orbit with that of the Daban Urnud.

Half an hour later, we all braced our feet against the underside of the Mirror and, at a signal from Lio, pushed it away-or jumped off, depending on your frame of reference. The Mirror glided out of the way to give us our first direct look at the Daban Urnud. It was so close to us, now, that we could hardly see anything: just a single triangular facet of the icosahedron, filling most of our visual field.

Essentially all of the Geometers’ surveillance and remote sensing systems had been designed to look at things that were thousands of miles away. As Jesry and the others had learned when they had brought the Warden of Heaven here, the Daban Urnud did have short-range radars for illuminating things that were nearby, but there was no reason to keep them switched on unless visitors were expected. And we had not emerged from behind the Cold Black Mirror until we had approached too close even for those radars to work very well. This was partly luck. If our trajectory had been a little less precise, we’d have been forced to ditch the Mirror farther out, and thereby exposed ourselves to the scrutiny of those systems. But Fraa Jad had wielded his knife at just the right instant. If he did nothing else for the rest of the mission he would still have earned his place.

In order to see us, they’d have to literally see us. Someone would have to look out a window, or (more likely) at a speelycaptor feed, and just happen to notice eleven matte-black humanoids gliding in against the background of space.

Its surface was like a shingle beach: flat, assembled from countless pieces of asteroids that had been scavenged from four different cosmi. Light glinted among the stones: the wire mesh that held them together. It seemed as though we were going to collide with a shock piston, which cut straight across our path like a horizon. But we cleared it by a few yards and found ourselves gliding along “above” a new face of the icosahedron, currently in shadow. Each of us was armed with a spring-loaded gun, and so at a signal from Lio, eleven grappling hooks shot out toward the rubble shield, trailing lines behind them. I’d estimate that half of them snagged in the mesh holding the rocks together. One by one the grapnel-lines went taut and began to pull back on those who’d fired them. This caused the ropes that joined us to go tight in a complex and unpredictable train of events, and so there were a few moments of bashing into one another and gratuitous entanglement as the whole cell came to the end of this improvised web of tethers. Our momentum caused us to swing forward and down toward the rubble, a scary development that was somewhat mitigated by the four Valers, who’d been issued cold gas thrusters that they held out before them like pistols and fired in the direction we didn’t want to go. This led to further collisions and entanglements that bordered on the ridiculous, but did have the net effect of slowing us down some. As we got closer, we tried to get legs and/or arms out in front of ourselves to serve as shock absorbers. I was able to plant my right foot on a boulder. The impact torqued me around. I spun and punched another 4.5-billion-year-old rock with the stumpy end of my suit-arm just in time to avoid planting my face on it. Then various ropes jerked on me from multiple vectors and dragged me along for a short ways. But soon everyone stopped bouncing and dragging and managed to grip the wire mesh with their fingers, giving Cell 317 a secure purchase on the Daban Urnud.