Anathem

All I could think of was getting to the food. First, though, I had to stop being naked. Ala slipped out, as though it were perfectly all right to see me nude, but watching me dress would be indecent. The Arbran delegation had brought us bolts and chords and spheres. The four Geometer races were more or less fascinated by the avout, and might take it the wrong way if we attempted to hide what we were.

Once I got properly wrapped, the hospital staff helped me don a backpack carrying a tank of Arbre oxygen that was connected to the tube beneath my nose. Then I followed a series of pictographic signs to a terrace on the roof of the hospital, where I found Lio and Jesry elbow-deep in their hampers. Fraa Sildanic was there. With a resigned and hopeless air, he cautioned me not to eat too fast lest I get sick. I ignored him as heartily as my fraas were doing. After a few minutes, I actually managed to lift my gaze from my bowl, and look out at the artificial world around me.

The four orbs of a given stack were so close that they almost kissed, and were linked by portals, a little bit like cars on a passenger train. When the Daban Urnud was maneuvering or accelerating, the portals had to be closed and dogged shut, but they were open today.

Laterrans lived in Orbs Nine through Twelve. The hospital was in Ten, not far from the portal that joined it to Eleven. This rooftop terrace, like all other outdoor surfaces, was intensively cultivated. A bit of space had been cleared for tables and benches. The tops of these, though, were slabs of glass, and vegetables grew in trays underneath. Bowers arched over our heads, supporting vines laden with clusters of green fruit. As long as one maintained focus on what was near to hand, it looked like a garden on Arbre. But the long view was different. The hospital consisted of half a dozen houseboats lashed together. Each had three stories below the water-line and three above. Flexible gangways linked them to one another and to neighboring houseboats, which spread across the water to form a circular mat that seemed to cover every square foot of the water’s surface. But because “gravity” here was a fiction created by spin, the surface-what our inner ears, or a plumb bob, would identify as level-was curved. So the circular mat of boats was dished into a trough. Our inner ears told us that we were at its lowest point. If we gazed across it to the other side, rather less than a mile away, our eyes gave us the alarming news that the water was above us. But if we were to make the journey blindfolded, it would feel like walking over level ground-we’d have no sense of climbing uphill.

Of the orb’s inner surface, about half was under water. The remainder constituted the “sky.” This was blue, and had a sun in it. The blue was painted on, but it was possible to forget this unless you looked at the portals to Orbs Eleven and Nine. These hung in the firmament like very strange astronomical bodies, and were linked by cable-chair systems to houseboats below. The sun was a bundle of optical fibers bringing processed and filtered light that had been harvested by parabolic horns on the exterior of the icosahedron. The fibers were fixed in place on the ceiling of the orb, but by routing the light to different fibers at different times of day, they created the illusion that the sun was moving across the sky. At night it got dark, but, as Jules had explained, fiber-pipes were hard-routed to indoor growing facilities in the cellars of many houseboats so that plants could grow around the clock. The system was so productive that these Geometers were capable of sustaining a population density like that of a moderately crowded city solely on what was produced in the city itself.

It was good, in a way, that the view from the hospital roof afforded so many remarkable things to look at and talk about, because otherwise the conversation would have been paralyzingly awkward. Lio’s and Jesry’s faces were stiff. Oh, they had cracked huge smiles when they’d seen me. And I could not have been happier to see them. We’d shared those feelings immediately and without words. But then their faces had closed up like fists, as much as forbidding me to say anything out loud.

We were eating too hard to talk much anyway. Fraa Sildanic and another Arbran medic kept coming and going. And, though I didn’t wish to think ill of our Laterran hosts, I had no way of knowing whether this terrace might be wired with listening devices. Half of the Laterrans were pro-Pedestal. Even the pro-Fulcrum ones, though, might not take kindly to the role we had played in assaulting the Daban Urnud. Some might have had friends or relatives who had been slain by the Valers. To divulge in casual conversation that a Thousander had breached the hull and then vanished would be the worst thing that could happen right now. Once I had sated my hunger a little bit, I began to get physically anxious about it.

When Arsibalt showed up, and made for his hamper like a piece of earth-moving equipment, I waited until his mouth was crammed before raising my glass and saying, “To Fraa Jad. Even as we think of the four Valers who died, let’s not forget the one who sacrificed his life in the first ten minutes of the mission, before he even made it out of Arbre’s atmosphere.”

“To the late Fraa Jad,” Jesry echoed, so quickly and forcefully that I knew he must be thinking along similar lines.

“I’ll never be able to erase the memory of his fiery plunge into the atmosphere,” Lio added with a patently fake sincerity that almost made me blow the libation out of my nose. I was keeping an eye on Arsibalt, who had stopped chewing, and was staring at us, eyes a-bulge, trying to make out if this was some kind of extremely dark and elaborate humor. I caught his eye and glanced up: an old signal from Edhar, where we would, by a flick of the eyes at the Warden Regulant’s windows, say shut up and play along. He nodded, letting me know he had taken my meaning, but the look on his face made his shock and confusion plain. I shrugged as a way of letting him know he was in good company.

Sammann showed up, dressed in the traditional Ita costume, and, showing remarkable self-control, went around and shook our hands and gave each of us a squeeze or pat on the shoulder before tearing open his hamper, full of infinitely better-and spicier-smelling foods than anything we had. We let him eat. He went about this in the same quiet, contemplative style I had once grown used to, watching him take his lunches on the top of the Pinnacle at Edhar. His face showed no curiosity as to why there were five people and five hampers, instead of some other number. In fact, he was altogether reserved and impassive, which, combined with his formal Ita garb, stirred up all sorts of old habits and social conventions that had long since settled to the bottom of my consciousness.

“Earlier we were raising a toast to the memory of the late Fraa Jad and the others who died,” I told him, when he paused in his eating and reached for his glass. He gave a curt nod, raised the glass, and said, “Very well. To our departed comrades.” Yes, I know too.

“Am I the only one who suffers from funny neurological sequelae?” Arsibalt asked, still a bit rattled.

“You mean, brain damage?” Jesry asked in a helpful tone.

“That would depend on whether it is as permanent as what ails you,” Arsibalt fired back.

“Some of my memories are a little sketchy,” Lio offered.

Sammann cleared his throat and glared at him.

“But the longer I’m awake, the more coherent I seem to get,” Lio added. Sammann returned his focus to the food.

Jules Verne Durand stopped by, took in the scene, and beamed. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “When I saw the five of you, out of your spacesuits, gasping for air, like beached fish, in the observatory, I feared I would never be able to look on a scene such as this one.”

We all raised glasses his way, and beckoned for him to join us.

“What of the others-I mean, what was done with the four corpses?” Jesry asked. Five sets of Arbran eyes went to the Laterran’s face. But if Jules noted any discrepancy in the figures, he didn’t show it. “This became a topic of negotiation,” Jules said. “The bodies of the four Valers have been frozen. As you can guess, there are those of the Pedestal who wish to dissect them as biological specimens.” A cloud passed over his face, and he paused for a few moments. We all knew he was remembering his wife Lise, whose body had been subjected to the biological-specimen treatment at the Convox. After getting his poise back, he went on: “The diplomats of Arbre have said in the strongest terms that this would be unacceptable-that the remains are to be treated as sacred and handed over, undisturbed, to this delegation of which you are now a part. This will occur at the opening ceremonies, which are to take place in Orb Four in about two hours.” The Pedestal doesn’t know yet about the Everything Killers lodged in your bodies, and I haven’t spilled the beans-but it’s really making me nervous.

Had even more Everything Killers been brought up by the delegation? Were hundreds, thousands of them now salted around the Daban Urnud? Were there some in the delegation who had the power to trigger them? I “remembered”-if that was the right word for something that had not happened in this cosmos-the silver box in Fraa Jad’s hand. The detonator. Who of the four dozen were carrying them? More to the point, who would press the trigger? To a certain kind of mind, this would make for an acceptable trade. At the cost of four dozen Arbran lives, the Daban Urnud would be sterilized, or at least crippled to the point where its survivors would have no choice but to surrender unconditionally. Much cheaper than fighting a war with them.

For more than one reason, I was no longer hungry.

Everyone else was thinking similar thoughts, and so conversation was not exactly sparkling. In fact, it was nonexistent. The silence became conspicuous. I wondered what a blind visitor would think of the place, for the sonic environment was distinctly odd. The air didn’t move much in these orbs. Each was warmed and cooled on a different diurnal schedule so that the expanding and contracting air would slosh back and forth through the portals and stir faint breezes down below. But it never blew hard enough to raise waves, or even to blow a leaf from a table. Sound carried in that still air, and it ricocheted strangely from the ceiling of the orb. We heard someone rehearsing a tricky passage on a bowed instrument, children arguing, a group of women laughing, an air-powered tool cycling. The air felt dense, the place closed-in, deadening, stifling. Or perhaps that was just the food catching up with me.

“Orb Four is Urnudan,” Lio finally said, waking us all up.

“Yes,” Jules said heavily, “and all of you will be there.” Nothing personal, but I want you walking bombs out of my orb as soon as possible.

“It is the highest-numbered of the Urnudan orbs,” Arsibalt observed, “meaning-if I understand the convention-the farthest aft, the most residential, the, er…”

“Lowest in the hierarchy, yes,” said Jules. “The oldest, the most important stuff, the highest in the Command, are in Orb One.” That’s the one you’d want to nuke.

“Will we be visiting Orb One?” Lio asked. Are we going to have an opportunity to nuke it?

“I would be astonished,” said Jules, “the people there are very strange and hardly ever come out.”

We all looked at each other.

“Yes,” said Jules, “they are a little like your Thousanders.”

“Fitting,” said Arsibalt, “since their journey has lasted for a thousand years.”

“It is doubly unfortunate that Fraa Jad perished during the launch, then,” I said, “since Orb One sounds like a place he would make a beeline for-that is, in a Narrative where he had made it here with someone like me to open doors for him.”

“What do you imagine he’d do once he reached it?” asked Jesry, keenly interested.

“Depends on what kind of reception we got when we came in the door,” I pointed out. “If things went badly wrong, we would not survive, and our consciousnesses would no longer track that Narrative.”

Sammann chopped this off by clearing his throat again.

“How long will it take for us to get from here to Orb Four?” Jesry asked. I think he was the only one capable of speech; Lio and Arsibalt were gobsmacked.

“We should leave as soon as convenient,” Jules replied. “An advance party is already there.” Everything Killers are already in Orb Four, nothing can be done about it.

We began wrapping up our food, repacking our hampers. “How many Orth interpreters are there?” Arsibalt asked. Do we get to hang out with you?

“With my level of skill, there is only I.” I’m about to become extremely busy, I won’t be able to talk to you after this.

“What kind of people make up the Arbran delegation?” Lio asked. Who’s got his finger on the Everything Killers’ trigger?

“Quite a funny mix, if you ask me. Leaders of Arks. Entertainers. Captains of commerce. Philanthropists such as Magnath Foral. Avout. Ita. Citizens-including a couple well known to you.” This was directed at me.

“You’re kidding,” I said, momentarily forgetting about all of the grim subtext. “Cord and Yul?”

He nodded. “Because of their role during the Visitation of Orithena-watched by so many on the speely that you, Sammann, put on the Reticulum-it was seen as fitting that they come here, as representatives of the people.” The politicians are pimping them to the mass media.

“Understood,” said Lio. “But among all of those pop singers and witch doctors, there must be at least some actual representatives of the Sæcular Power?”

“Four of the military, who strike me as honorable.” Not the ones who will trigger the EKs “Ten of the government-including our old friend Madame Secretary.”

“Those Forals really get around,” I couldn’t help saying. Sammann raised an eyebrow at me. Jules went on to rattle off a list of the names and titles of the Sæcular Power contingent, going out of his way to identify some of them as mere aides. “…and finally our old friend Emman Beldo, to whom, I sense, there is more than meets the eye.” He’s the one.

Whatever praxis would be used to trigger the EKs, it would be advanced, possibly nothing more than a prototype. It would have to be disguised as something innocuous. They would need someone like Emman to operate it. And he would take his orders from, presumably, the highest-ranking Panjandrum in the delegation. Not Ignetha Foral. She was here on Lineage business, of that I had no doubt. Whatever her nominal title and brief might be in the Sæcular Power, she and her cousin-or whatever he was-Magnath had not come all this way to follow the whims of whatever Panjandrum happened to have most lately gained the upper hand in the infinite clown-fight that was Sæcular politics.

Did the Forals know about Fraa Jad? Were they working with him? Had they framed a plan together during our stay at Elkhazg?

There was so much to think about that my mind shut off, and all I did for the better part of the next half-hour was take in new sensations. I had turned into Artisan Flec’s speelycaptor: all eyes, no brain. With my Eagle-Rez, my SteadiHand, and my DynaZoom, I dumbly watched and recorded our discharge from the hospital. Paperwork, it seemed, was one of those Protic attractors that remained common and unchanged across all cosmi. We were given over into the care of a squad of five nose-tube-wearing Troans in the same getups as the goons who had assaulted me and Jad in my dream, hallucination, or alternate polycosmic incarnation. Lio ogled their weapons, which tended toward sticks, aerosol cans, and electrical devices-apparently, high-energy projectiles were frowned on in a pressurized environment. They gave us a good looking-over in return, paying special attention to Lio-they’d been doing research on who was who, and some of the Valer mystique had rubbed off on him.

Two of the soldiers and Jules went ahead of us, three followed. We crossed a gangplank into someone’s garden and I looked through an open window, from arm’s length away, at a Laterran man washing dishes. He ignored me. From there we crossed into a school playground. The kids stopped playing for a few moments and watched us go by. Some said hello; we smiled, bowed, and returned the greeting. This went over well. From there we crossed to a houseboat where a couple of women were transplanting vegetables. And so it went. The community did not waste space on streets. Their transportation system was a network of rights-of-way thrown over the roofs and terraces of the houseboats. Anyone could walk anywhere, and a social convention dictated that people simply ignore each other. Heavy goods were moved around on skinny, deep-draught gondolas maneuvering through narrow leads of open water-whose existence came as a surprise, because they tunneled under flexible bowers, and so, from the hospital terrace, had looked only like dark green veins and arteries ramifying through the town.

In a few minutes we came to a boat that served as the terminal of the cable-chair system. We rode up to the hole in the sky two by two, each Arbran accompanied by a Troan soldier, until all had collected in the portal that joined Ten to Eleven. The wind was blowing in our faces strongly enough to sting our eyes and whip our bolts around.

While waiting for the others to catch up, I stood in the portal and looked at the theatrical machinery behind the blue scrim of the fake sky, the bundles of glass fibers that piped in the light. The sun was bright, but cold; all the infrared had been filtered out of it. Warmth came instead from the sky itself, which radiated gentle heat like an extremely low-temperature broiler. We felt it strongly here, and were glad of the wind.

Then another chair ride down to Orb Eleven’s houseboat-mat, a walk across, and a similar ride up to the next portal and into Orb Twelve: the highest-numbered, farthest-aft of the four Laterran orbs. Hence, there was no next portal; we had reached the caboose. But the sky supported a tubular catwalk-cum-ladder that took us “up” and around to a portal in the “highest” part of the sky-the zenith. Gravity here was noticeably weaker because we were closer to the Core. We tarried on the ring-shaped catwalk below the portal, which, down to the last rivet, was just like the one in Orb One where Fraa Jad had taken a shotgun blast. I looked around and saw details I clearly “remembered,” and I perched my butt on the railing to check it against my “memory” of being knocked over it.

Jules had to identify himself at a speely terminal and state his business to someone in a language that I assumed was Urnudan. The leader of the soldiers chimed in with bursts of gruff talk. We five had to take turns standing in front of the machine and have our faces scanned. While we waited, we examined the ball valve, which felt, and therefore looked, as if it were in the ceiling, straight above our heads. It was old hat to me. In its design I recognized the massive, thunderous praxic style-call it Heavy Intercosmic Urnudan Space Bunker-that dominated the look of the ship as seen from the outside and the Core, but was mercifully absent from the orbs.

That great steel eye would not open for us today. Instead we would use a round hatch just wide enough to admit Arsibalt, or a Troan grunt in his cumbrous gear-web. This eventually swung open by remote command, and we queued up to climb through it.

“A threat,” Jesry snorted, and nodded at the colossal ball valve. I knew his tone: disgusted that he’d been so long figuring it out. I must have looked baffled. “Come on,” he said, “why would a praxic design it that way? Why use a ball valve instead of some other kind?”

“A ball valve works even when there is a large pressure difference between its two sides,” I said, “so the Command could evacuate the Core-open it to space-and then open this valve and kill the whole orb. Is that what you’re thinking?”

Jesry nodded.

“Fraa Jesry, your explanation is unreasonably cynical,” said Arsibalt, who’d been listening.

“Oh, I’m sure there are other reasons for it,” Jesry said, “but it is a threat all the same.”

One by one we ascended a ladder through the small side hatch, up a short vertical tube, and through a second hatch-an airlock-and collected on another ring-catwalk on the bore of the vertical shaft that rose twelve hundred feet “above” us to the Core. I checked out the keypad: just where I remembered it.

Lio had passed through first, and was donning a sort of padded blindfold. Jules handed them to the rest of us as we emerged from the airlock. “Why?” I asked sharply.

“So you don’t get sick from the effects of Coriolis,” he said. “But, in case you do-” And he handed me a bag. “Come to think of it, take two-the way you were eating.”

I took a last look up before putting on the blindfold. We were getting ready to ascend a dauntingly tall ladder. But I knew that “gravity” would get weaker the higher we went, so it wouldn’t be that arduous. We would, however, be experiencing powerful, disorienting inertial effects as we moved closer to the axis. Hence the concern about motion sickness.

I groped for the lowest rung. “Slow,” Jules said, “settle on each step and wait for it to feel correct before moving to the next.”

Since the whole ladder was enclosed in a tubular cage, there was scant danger of falling. I took the rungs slowly as recommended, listening for movement from Lio, who was above me, before going to the next. But above a certain point the rungs became mostly symbolic. A flick of the wrist or finger floated us to the next one up. Still the Troan soldier at the top maintained the same steady pace-he’d learned the hard way that those who climbed too fast would soon be reaching for their bags.

I was thinking about that keypad. What if Fraa Jad had punched in one of the 9,999 wrong numbers? What if he had attempted it several times? Eventually a red light would have gone on in some security bunker. They’d have turned on a speelycaptor and seen a live feed of two firefighters screwing around with the keypad. They’d have sent someone to shoo them off. That person probably would not have been issued a shotgun-just the nonlethal weapons that our escorts were toting.

Jesry’s words came back to me: A threat. He was right. Opening that ball valve had been a way of putting a gun to the head of the whole Orb. No wonder those soldiers had simply rushed up and blown us away! In a cosmos where Fraa Jad knew-or guessed-the number on the keypad, we were sure to get killed. Freeing me, apparently, to end up somewhere else.

But what would have happened in all of the vastly more numerous cosmi where he’d punched in the wrong random number? We would have been taken alive.

What would have happened next in those cosmi?

We’d have been detained for a while-then taken to parley with Gan Odru.

My ears told me I had emerged from the top of the shaft, my hand pawed in the air but didn’t find a next rung. Instead the Troan intercepted it, hauled me out, hauled back the other way to kill the momentum he’d conferred on me, and guided me to something I could grab. I peeled up my blindfold and saw that I had emerged into the Core. The ball valve leading to the aft bearing chamber was just a stone’s throw behind us. Its length in the other direction was inestimable, but I knew it to be two and a quarter miles. It was as I “remembered” it: glowing tubes strung down its inner surface emitted filtered sunlight, and the conveyor belt ran endlessly with well-lubed clicking and humming noises.

Three other well-shafts were plumbed into the Core at this nexus. The one directly “above” or opposite us led into Orb Four; it looked like a direct, straight-line continuation of the shaft we had just finished climbing. A ring-ladder ran around the Core wall, providing access to all of them. Those who were practiced at this kind of thing could simply jump across.

There was a wait. To begin with, those below me on the ladder had to catch up. Moreover, a traffic jam had already developed in the shaft to Orb Four. There were safety rules governing how many were allowed to use the ladder at once, being enforced by a soldier stationed at the top rung. Some other delegation was going down ahead of us-though from our point of view they appeared to be ascending the ladder feet-first-and we would have to wait until they had reached the bottom.

So, Lio and I began screwing around. We decided to see if we could make ourselves motionless in the center of the Core. The goal was to place oneself near the middle of the big tunnel while killing one’s spin so that the whole ship would rotate around one’s body. This had to be done through some combination of jumping off from the wall just so, and then swimming in the air to make adjustments. Desperately clumsy would be a fair description of our first five minutes’ efforts. From there we moved on to dangerously incompetent, as, while flailing around, I kicked Lio in the face and gave him a bloody nose. The Troan soldiers watched with mounting amusement. They couldn’t understand a word we were saying, but they knew exactly what we were trying to do. After I kicked Lio, they took pity on us-or perhaps they were just scared that we’d get seriously hurt and they’d be blamed. One of them beckoned me over. He grabbed my chord in one hand and my bolt, at the scruff of my neck, at the other, and gave me a gentle push combined with a little torque. When I swam to a halt in the middle of the tunnel, I saw I was closer than I had ever been to achieving the goal.

Hearing voices in Fluccish, I looked up the Core to see a contingent of perhaps two dozen coming to join us. Most were floating down the middle of the Core instead of using the conveyors, so even if they hadn’t been speaking Fluccish I’d have known them for tourists. One of these suddenly bounded ahead of the group, drawing a rebuke from a soldier.

Cord hand-over-handed her way along the tunnel wall and launched herself at me from a hundred feet away. I feared the impending collision, but fortunately air resistance slowed her flight, so that when we banged bodies it was no more violent than walking into someone. We had a long zero-gravity hug. Another Arbran was not far behind her: a young Sæcular man. I didn’t recognize him, but I had the oddest feeling that I was expected to. He was slowly tumbling on all three axes as he drifted toward me and my sib, flailing his arms and legs as if that would help. For that, he was very impressively dressed and coiffed. One of our soldier escorts reached out and gave him a push on the knee that stopped his tumbling and slowed his trajectory to something not quite so meteoric. He came to a near-stop with respect to me and Cord. Gazing at him past Cord’s right ear, which was pressed so hard against my cheek that I was pretty sure her earrings were drawing blood, I saw him raise a speelycaptor and draw a bead on us. “In the chilly heart of the alien starship,” he intoned, in a beautifully modulated baritone, “a heartwarming reunion between brother and sister. Cord, the Sæcular half of the heroic pair, shows profound relief as she-”

I was just beginning to have some profound-but not quite so heartwarming-emotions of my own when the man with the speelycaptor was somehow, almost magically, replaced by Yulassetar Crade. Associated with the miracle were a few sound effects: a meaty thwomp, and a sharp exhalation-a sort of bark-from the man with the speelycaptor. Yul had simply launched himself at the guy from some distance away, and body-checked him at full speed, stopping on a dime in midair as he transferred all of his energy into the target.

“Conservation of momentum,” he announced, “it’s not just a good idea-it’s the law!” Far away, I heard a thud and a squawk as the man with the hairdo impacted on the end-cap. This was almost drowned out, though, by chuckling and what I took to be appreciative commentary from our soldier-escorts. If I’d been startled, at first, to learn that Yulassetar Crade had been made part of-of all things-a diplomatic legation, I saw the genius of it now.

Once Cord had settled down enough to release me, I drifted over and bumped bodies (more gently) and shared a hug with Yul too. Sammann had emerged from the Orb Twelve shaft by now, and greeted them both in high spirits. Of course, there was much more that I wanted to say to Cord and Yul, but the man with the speelycaptor had crawled back close enough to get us in his sights-though from a more respectful distance-and this made me clam up. “We’ll talk,” I said, and Yul nodded. Cord, for now, seemed content merely to look at me, her face a maze of questions. I couldn’t help wondering what she saw. I was probably drawn and pasty. She, by contrast, had gone to some effort to dress up for the occasion: all the milled titanium jewelry was on display, she had gotten a new haircut and raided a women’s clothing store. But she’d had the good sense not to get too girly, and she still seemed like Cord: barefoot, with a pair of fancy shoes buckled together in the belt of her frock.

Others filtered in: a couple of ridiculously beautiful persons I didn’t recognize. Some old men. The Forals, drifting along arm in arm as if members of their family had been going on zero-gravity perambulations for centuries. Three avout, one of whom I recognized: Fraa Lodoghir.

I flew right at him. Spying me inbound, he excused himself from his two companions and waited for me at a handhold on the tunnel wall. We wasted no time on pleasantries. “You know what became of Fraa Jad?” I asked him.

His face spoke even more eloquently than his voice knew how to do-which was saying a lot. He knew. He knew. Not the false cover story. He knew what I knew-which probably meant he knew a lot more than I knew-and he was apprehensive that I was getting ready to blurt something out. But I shut my mouth at that point, and with a flick of the eyes let him know I meant to be discreet.

“Yes,” said Lodoghir. “What can avout of lesser powers make of it? What does Fraa Jad’s fate mean, what does it entail, for us? What lessons may we derive from it, what changes ought we to make in our own conduct?”

“Yes, Pa Lodoghir,” I said dutifully, “it is for such answers that I have come to you.” I could only pray he would catch the sarcasm, but he made no sign.

“In a way, a man such as Fraa Jad lives his whole life in preparation for such a moment, does he not? All the profound thoughts that pass through his consciousness, all the skills and powers that he develops, are shaped toward a culmination. We only see that culmination, though, in retrospect.”

“Beautiful-but let’s talk of the prospect. What lies ahead-and how does Fraa Jad’s fate reshape it for us? Or do we go on as if it had never occurred?”

“The practical consequence for me is continuing and ever more effective cooperation between the tendencies known to the vulgar as Rhetors and Incanters,” Lodoghir said. “Procians and Halikaarnians have worked together in the recent past, as you know, with results that have been profoundly startling to those few who are aware of them.” He was staring directly into my eyes as he said this. I knew he was talking about the rerouting of worldtracks that, among other things, had placed Fraa Jad at the Daban Urnud at the same time as his death was recorded above Arbre.

“Such as our unveiling of the spy Zh’vaern,” I said, just to throw any surveillors off the scent.

“Yes,” he said, with a tiny, negative shake of the head. “And this serves as a sign that such cooperation must and should continue.”

“What is the object of that cooperation, pray tell?”

“Inter-cosmic peace and unity,” he returned, so piously that I wanted to laugh-but I’d never give him that satisfaction.

“On what terms?”

“Funny you should ask,” he said. “While you were in suspended animation, some of us have been discussing that very topic.” And he nodded a bit impatiently, toward the muzzle of the Orb Four shaft, where everyone else was gathering.

“Do you think that Fraa Jad’s fate affected the outcome of those negotiations?”

“Oh yes,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “it was more influential than I can say.”

I was beginning to feel a little conspicuous and I could see I’d get nothing more out of Lodoghir, so I turned and accompanied him to the head of the Orb Four shaft.

“I see we have some big-time Procians,” Jesry said, nodding at Lodoghir and his two companions.

“Yeah,” I said, and did a double-take. I had just realized that Lodoghir’s companions were both Thousanders.

“They should be in their element,” Jesry continued.

“Politics and diplomacy? No doubt,” I said.

“And they’ll come in handy if we need to change the past.”

“More than they’ve already changed it, you mean?” I returned-which I figured we could get away with, since it would sound like routine Procian-bashing. “But seriously, Fraa Lodoghir has paid close attention to the story of Fraa Jad and has all sorts of profound thoughts about what it means.”

“I will so look forward to hearing them,” Jesry deadpanned. “Does he have any practical suggestions as well?”

“Somehow we didn’t get around to that,” I said.

“Hmm. So does that mean it’s our department?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The trip down to Orb Four took a while because of the safety regulations.

“I wouldn’t have thought it possible,” said Arsibalt’s voice, somewhere on the other side of my blindfold, as we descended. “But this is already banal!”

“What? Your feet in my face?” For he kept wanting to descend too fast, and was always threatening to step on my hands.

“No. Our interactions with the Geometers.”

I descended a few more rungs in silence, thinking about it. I knew better than to argue. Instead I compiled a mental list of all that I’d seen on the Daban Urnud that had struck me as, to use Arsibalt’s word, banal: the red emergency button on the observatory hatch. The bowel-warming machine. Paperwork at the hospital. The Laterran man washing his dishes. Smudgy handprints on ladder-rungs. “Yeah,” I said, “if it weren’t for the fact that we can’t eat the food, it would be no more exotic than visiting a foreign country on Arbre.”

“Less so!” Arsibalt said. “A foreign country on Arbre might be pre-Praxic in some way, with a strange religion or ethnic customs, but-”

“But this place has been sterilized of all that, it’s a technocracy.”

“Exactly. And the more technocratic it becomes, the more closely it converges on what we are.”

“It’s true,” I said.

“When do we get to the good part?” he demanded.

“What do you have in mind, Arsibalt? Like in a spec-fic speely, where something amazingly cool-to-look-at happens?”

“That would help,” he allowed. We descended a few more rungs in silence. Then he added, in a more moderate tone: “It’s just that-I want to say, ‘All right, already! I get it! The Hylaean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across worldtracks!’ But where is the payoff? There’s got to be more to it than this big ship roaming from cosmos to cosmos collecting sample populations and embalming them in steel spheres.”

“Maybe they share some of your feelings,” I suggested. “They have been doing it for a thousand years-a lot more time to get sick of it than you’ve had. You only woke up a couple of hours ago!”

“Well, that is a good point,” Arsibalt said, “but Raz, I am apprehensive that they’re not sick of it. They’ve turned it into a sort of religious quest. They come here with unrealistic expectations.”

“Ssh!” Jesry exclaimed. He was just below me. He continued, in a voice that could have been heard in all twelve Orbs, “Arsibalt, if you keep running your mouth this way, Fraa Lodoghir will have to erase everyone’s memory!”

“Memory of what?” Lio said. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Then it is not because of any Rhetor sorcery,” called out Fraa Lodoghir, “but because failed attempts at wit fade so quickly from the memory.”

“What are you people talking about!?” demanded Yul, in Fluccish. “You’re spooking the superstars.”

“We’re talking about what it all means,” I said. “Why we’re the same as them.”

“Maybe they are weirder than you think,” Yul suggested.

“Until they let us visit Orb One, we’ll never know.”

“So go to Orb One,” Yul said.

“He’s already been there,” Jesry cracked.

We reached the bottom and climbed down an airlock-shaft just like the others and found ourselves looking straight down on the houseboat-mat of Orb Four. This had an elliptical pool of open water in the middle: a touch of luxury we hadn’t seen in any of the Laterran orbs. Perhaps the Urnudans had agriculture even more productive than the others, and could afford to waste a bit of space on decoration. The pool was surrounded by a plaza, much of which was now covered with tables.

“It is a center for the holding of meetings,” Jules explained.

My mind went straight back to Arsibalt’s complaints about the banality. The aliens have conference centers!

They had welded stairs to their sky, and painted them blue. We clanked down them, getting heavier as we went. The architecture of the houseboats below was not markedly different from what we’d seen in the Laterran orbs. There were only so many ways to build a flat-roofed structure that could float. Many of the decorative flourishes that might distinguish one style of architecture from another were buried under cataracts of fruit-bearing vines and layered canopies of orchard-trees. Our path across the houseboat complex was a narrow, but straight and unmistakable, boulevard to the elliptical pool; here, we did not ramble from one terrace to the next. Still, we did encounter the occasional Urnudan pedestrian, and as I looked at their faces I tried to resist the temptation to perceive them as mere rough drafts of superior beings from higher up the Wick. As we drew near and passed them by, they averted their gaze, got out of our way, and stood patiently in what looked to me like submissive postures.

“How much of what we’re seeing is native Urnudan culture,” I wondered out loud to Lio, who had fallen in step next to me, “and how much is a consequence of living on a military spaceship for a thousand years?”

“Same difference, maybe,” Lio pointed out, “since only the Urnudans built ships like this in the first place.”

The boulevard debouched into the plaza surrounding the meeting pool. This-as we had clearly seen from above-was partitioned into four quadrants of equal size. In turn, it was enclosed by four glass-walled pavilions that curved around it like eyebrows.

“Check out the weatherstripping on the doors!” Yul remarked, nodding at a pavilion entrance. “Those things are aquariums.” And indeed, through the glass walls we could see Fthosians, who were not equipped with nose tubes, speed-walking with documents or talking into their versions of jeejahs. “They check their breathing gear at the door,” Cord observed, and pointed to a rack just inside that heavily weatherstripped door where dozens of tank-packs had been hung up.

Jesry nudged me. “Translators!” he said, and pointed to a windowed mezzanine above the main deck of the “aquarium.” A few Fthosian men and women, fiddling with headsets, sat at consoles that overlooked the pool. And as if to confirm this, Urnudan stewards began to circulate through our delegation carrying trays of earbuds: red for Orth, blue for Fluccish. I stuffed a red one into my ear and heard in it the familiar tones of Jules Verne Durand. With a quick look around, I picked him out in the translators’ booth atop the Laterran pavilion. “The Command welcomes the Arbran delegation and requests that you gather at the water’s edge for opening ceremonies,” he was saying. I got the impression, from his tone of voice, that he’d already said it a hundred times.

We had joined up with a part of the Arbran contingent that had arrived earlier to get things sorted before the stars, journalists, and space commandos showed up to make it complicated. Ala was one of those. The Panjandrums and their aides had also preceded us, and were waiting near the water’s edge in an inflated poly bubble the size of a housing module, just off to our left as we emerged from the boulevard. Behind it was a clutter of equipment including compressed air tanks that must have been brought up on the ship from Arbre. So this was meant to be a makeshift pavilion, symbolically placing our Panjandrums on the same footing as the Geometer dignitaries. It was made of the same kind of milky poly sheeting that had covered the windows of my quarantine trailer at Tredegarh. I could make out vague shapes of dark-suited figures around a table-I thought of them as doyns-and others, servitors, hovering round the edges or darting in to handle documents.

I spent a while watching Ala run in and out of that tent, sometimes gazing off at the fake sky as she talked on a headset, other times peeling it off her head and holding her hand over the microphone as she talked to someone face to face. I was overcome by recollection of the time she and I had spent together that morning, and could not think of much else. I thought that I was like a man lame in one leg, who had learned to move about well enough that all awareness of his disability had passed out of his mind. And yet, when he tried to go on a journey, he kept finding himself back where he had started, since his weak leg made him go in circles. But if he found a partner who was weak in the other leg, and the two of them set out as companions…

Cord goosed me. I nearly toppled into the water and she had to pull me back by my bolt.

“She’s beautiful,” she said before I could get huffy.

“Yeah. Thanks. She most definitely is,” I said. “She’s the one for me.”

“Have you told her?”

“Yeah. Actually telling her isn’t the problem. You can ease up on me as far as telling her is concerned.”

“Oh. Good.”

“The problem is all of these other circumstances.”

“They are some pretty interesting circumstances!”

“I’m sorry you got swept up in it like this. It’s not what I wanted.”

“But it was never about what you wanted,” she said. “Look, cuz, even if I croak, it was a good trade.”

“How can you say that, Cord, what about-”

She shook her head, reached out, and put her fingertips to my lips. “No. Stop. We are not discussing it.”

I took her hand between mine and held it for a moment. “Okay,” I said, “it’s your life. I’ll shut up.”

“Don’t just shut up. Believe it, cuz.”

“HEY!” called a gruff voice. “What do you think you’re doing, holding hands with my girl?”

“Hey Yul, what have you been up to since Ecba?”

“Time went by fast,” he said, ambling closer and standing behind Cord, who leaned comfortably against him. “We got a lot of free aerocraft rides. Saw the world. Spent a lot of time answering questions. After three days, I laid down the law. Said I wouldn’t answer any question I had answered already. They took it hard, at first. Forced them to get organized. But after that, it was better for everyone. They put us up in a hotel in the capital.”

“An actual hotel,” Cord wanted me to understand, “not a casino.”

“Days would go by with nothing-we’d go see museums,” Yul said. “Then all of a sudden they’d get excited and call us back in, and we’d spend a few hours trying to remember whether the buttons on the control panel were round or square.”

“They even hypnotized us,” Cord said.

“Then someone ratted us out to the media,” Yul said bleakly, and cast a wary look round for the man with the speelycaptor. “Less said about that, the better.”

“They moved us to a place just outside Tredegarh, then, for a couple of days,” Cord said.

“Right before they blew the walls,” Yul added. “Then we Anti-swarmed to an old missile base in the desert. I liked that. No media. Lots of hiking.” He sighed helplessly. “But now we’re here. No hiking in this place.”

“Did they give you anything before you boarded the ship?”

“Like a big pill?” Yul said. “Like this?” He held out his hand, the Everything Killer resting in the middle of his palm. I jerked my hand out and clasped his and shook it. He looked surprised. When we let go, I made sure that pill was in my hand.

“You want mine?” Cord said. “They said it was a tracking device-for our safety. But I didn’t want to be tracked, and, well-”

“If you wanted safety you wouldn’t have come,” I said.

“Exactly.” She handed me her pill, a little more discreetly than Yul had done.

“What are they really?” Yul asked. I was drawing up a lie when I happened to glance up, and saw him looking at me in a way that said he would brook no deception.

“Weapons,” I mouthed. Yul nodded and looked away. Cord looked nauseated. I took my leave, tucking the pills into a fold of my bolt, for I had just noticed Emman Beldo emerging from the inflatable with an aide of, to judge from body language, lesser stature. I yanked out my earbud and tossed it aside. Emman saw me headed his way and told the other to get lost. I met him at the edge of the pool.

“Just a second,” were his first words. Around his neck he had a little electronic device on a lanyard. He turned it on and it began to talk, emitting random syllables and word-fragments in Orth. It sounded like Emman and a couple of other people, recorded and run through a blender. “What is it?” I asked, and before I had reached the end of this short utterance my own voice had been thrown into the blender too. I answered my own question: “A means of defeating surveillance,” I said, “so we can talk freely.”

He made no sign that I was right or wrong, but only looked at me interestedly. “You’ve been through some changes,” he pointed out, making an effort to speak distinctly above the murmur of Emman-and Erasmas-gibberish.

I peeled back my bolt fold and let him see what I’d collected from Yul and Cord. “Under what circumstances,” I said, “are you planning to turn these on?”

“Under the circumstance that I am given the order to do so,” he answered, with a glance back toward the tent.

“You know what I mean.”

“It is clearly a measure of last resort,” Emman said, “when diplomacy fails and it looks like we are about to be killed or taken hostage.”

“I just wonder whether the Panjandrums are even competent to render such judgments,” I said.

“I know paying attention to Sæcular politics isn’t your game,” he said, “but it has gotten a little better since our gracious hosts threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock. And even more so since the Antiswarm started throwing its weight around.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?” I pointed out. “Since I’ve been otherwise engaged the last two weeks.”

Emman snorted. “No kidding! Nice job, by the way.”

“Thanks. Some day I’ll tell you stories. But for now-just how, exactly, did the Antiswarm throw its weight around?”

“They didn’t have to say much,” Emman told me. “It was obvious.”

“What was?”

He took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Look. Thirty-seven hundred years ago, the avout were herded into maths because of fear of their ability to change the world through praxis.” He nodded helpfully at where I had tucked the Everything Killers. “Because of clever stunts like that, I guess. So praxis stopped, or at least slowed down to a rate of change that could be understood, managed, controlled. Fine-until these guys showed up.” He raised his head and gazed around. “Turned out that all we’d been doing was losing the arms race to cosmi that hadn’t imposed any such limits on their avout. And guess what? When Arbre decided to fight back a little, who delivered the counterpunch? Our military? The Sæcular Power? Nope. You guys in the bolts and chords. So the Antiswarm has garnered a lot of clout just by doing a lot and saying very little. Hence the concept of the two Magisteria, which is-”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said.

He and I stood there for a few moments, gazing across the elliptical pond at the opposite shore, where processions of Urnudan and Troan dignitaries were emerging from their pavilions, making their way toward the water. The garble-box around Emman’s neck, however, did not know how to shut up.

“So that is the Narrative everyone is working with now?” I asked him.

He looked at me alertly. “I guess you could think of it that way.”

“Well,” I said, “if this thing goes all pear-shaped and some Panjandrum gives you the order to activate the EKs, it’d be a shame if that Panjandrum and you turned out to have the Narrative all wrong, wouldn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” he asked sharply.

“Thirty-seven hundred years ago they rounded us up, yeah. But they didn’t take away our ability to mess with newmatter. In consequence of which, we had the First Sack. Fine. No more newmatter, except for a few exemptions that got grandfathered in: factories where the stuff still gets made, staffed by ex-avout who get Evoked when they are needed. Time passes. We’re still allowed to do sequence manipulation. Things get a little spooky. There’s a Second Sack. No more sequence work, no more syndevs in the concents, except for a few exemptions that get grandfathered in: the Ita, the clocks, the page trees, and the library grapes, and maybe some labs on the outside, staffed by skeleton crews of Evoked and concent-trained praxics like you. Fine. Things are under control now, right? Not much the avout can do if they have nothing, no syndevs, no tools at all except for rakes and shovels, and are being watched over by an Inquisition. Now we’re really under the Sæcular Power’s thumb-until two and half millennia later, when it turns out that sufficiently smart people locked up on crags with nothing to do but think can actually come up with forms of praxis that require no tools and are all the more terrifying for that. So we have a Third Sack-the worst of all, much more savage than the others. Seventy years later the mathic world gets reestablished. But, you have to ask yourself the obvious question…”

“What got grandfathered in?” Emman said, completing the sentence for me. “What were the special exemptions?” And then there was silence except for the babble coming out of his jammer. Each of us was waiting for the other to finish the sentence-to answer the question. I hoped he might know-and that he might be so forthcoming as to share the answer with me. But from the look on his face it was plain that this was not the case.

So I had to follow the logic myself. Fortunately, Magnath and Ignetha Foral chose this moment to come down to the water’s edge-as it had become obvious that something was about to happen. I looked at them, and Emman Beldo looked with me.

“Those guys,” he said.

“Those guys,” I affirmed.

“The Lineage?”

“Not exactly the Lineage-since that goes all the way back to the time of Metekoranes-but a kind of Sæcular incarnation of it, a dowment that was established and funded around the time of the Third Sack. Tied into the mathic world in all sorts of ways. Owns Ecba and Elkhazg and probably other places besides.”

“Maybe it looks that way to you,” Emman said, “but I can promise you that most of what you call the Panjandrums have never heard of this dowment. It is nothing to them-exerts no influence. Magnath Foral-if they’ve heard his name at all-is just a dried-up, blue-blooded art collector.”

“But that’s how it would happen,” I said. “They would set this thing up after the Third Sack. It would be famous and influential for about ten minutes. But after a few wars, revolutions, and Dark Ages, it would be forgotten. It would become what it is.”

“And what is it?” Emman asked me.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said. “But I think that what I’m saying is that-”

“We S?culars are in over our heads here?” Emman suggested. “I’m comfortable with you saying that.”

“But are you comfortable with the practical consequence,” I asked him, “which is-”

“That if I get the order,” he said, with a flick of the eyes at the place where I’d secreted the Everything Killers, “maybe I should ignore it, because it was issued by a clueless Sæcular who has been working from the wrong Narrative?”

“Exactly,” I said. And I noticed him rubbing his jeejah with his thumb. He had gotten a new jeejah since Tredegarh. Most unusual. From hanging around with Cord, I knew some of the terminology: Emman’s jeejah had been milled from a solid billet of alloy, not molded in poly or stamped out of sheet material. Very expensive. Not mass-produced.

“Nice, huh?” He’d caught me looking.

“I’ve seen one before,” I said.

“Where?” he asked sharply.

“Jad had one.”

“How could you know that? It was issued to him immediately before the launch. He burned up before you could talk to him.”

I just stared at him, hardly knowing where to begin.

“Is this one of those in-over-my-head things?” he asked.

“More or less. Tell me, how many more of those things?”

“Up here? At least one.” And he turned his head toward the inflatable. The outer door of its airlock had been unzipped, and a series of men and women in impressive clothes were emerging, patting their heads self-consciously as they got used to the feel of their nose-tubes. “The third one-the bald man-has one just like it.”

My right arm departed the conversation. Ala had made off with it. The rest of me caught up just in time to avoid dislocation of the shoulder joint. “You should wear your earbud,” she told me, “then you’d know we’re in the middle of an aut!” She slapped a bud into my hand and I wormed it into my ear. Music had begun to play from a band on the other side of the ellipse. I looked across and saw four long boxes-coffins-being borne down to the water’s edge by a mixed contingent of Urnudan, Troan, Laterran, and Fthosian soldiers.

Ala led me round behind the inflatable, where Arsibalt, Jesry, and Lio were standing at three corners of another coffin. “For once, I’m not the latest!” Lio said wonderingly.

“Leadership has changed you,” I said, and reported to my corner. We picked up the coffin, which I knew must contain the remains of Lise.

All of these coffins smacked me into a whole different frame of mind. We carried Lise out from behind the inflatable, centered her in the road that led to the water’s edge, and set her down as we waited for the procession on the opposite side to finish. The music, of course, sounded strange to our ears, but no stranger than a lot of stuff you might hear on Arbre. Music, it seemed, was one of those places where the Hylaean Flow was especially strong-com-posers in different cosmi were hearing the same things in their heads. It was a funeral march. Very slow and grim. Hard to say whether this was a reflection of Urnudan culture, or a sort of reminder that the four in those coffins had slain a lot of Geometers and that we’d best keep that in mind before we got to celebrating them.

It almost worked. I actually started to feel guilty for having delivered the Valers to the Daban Urnud. Then I happened to glance down at the coffin beside my knee, and wondered who up here had shot Jules’s wife in the back. Who had given the order to rod Ecba? Who was responsible for killing Orolo? Was he or she standing around this pool? Not the sorts of things I should have been thinking at a peace conference. But there wouldn’t have been a need for one if we hadn’t been killing each other.

The soldiers carried the coffins of Osa, Esma, Vay, and Gratho quite slowly, stopping for a few beats after each pace. My mind wandered, as it always did during long auts, and I found myself thinking about those four Valers, recalling my first impressions of them in Mahsht, when I’d been cornered, and hadn’t understood, yet, what they were. The scenes played in my head like speelies: Osa, perched one-legged atop the sphere that sheltered me, fending off attackers with snap-kicks. Esma dancing across the plaza toward the sniper while Gratho made his body into a bullet-shield for me. Vay fixing me up afterwards-so efficiently, so ruthlessly that snot had run out of my nose and tears from my eyes.

Were doing so, for I was weeping now. Trying to imagine their last moments. Especially Suur Vay, out on the icosahedron, in single combat against several terrified men with cutting tools. Alone, in the dark, the blue face of Arbre thousands of miles away, knowing in the last moments she’d never breathe its air again, never hear the thousand brooks of the Ringing Vale.

“Raz?” It was Ala’s voice. She had her hand-more gently, this time-on my elbow. I wiped my face dry with my bolt, got a moment’s clear view before things got all misty again. The honor guard across the pool had set the Valers’ coffins down and were standing there expectantly. “Time to go,” Ala said. Lio, Jesry, and Arsibalt were all looking at me, all crying too. We all bent our knees, got a grip on the coffin, raised it off the deck.

“Sing something,” Ala suggested. We looked at her helplessly until she said the name of a chant that we used for the aut of Requiem at Edhar. Arsibalt started it, giving us the pitch in his clear tenor, and we all joined in with our parts. We all had to do some improvising, but few noticed and none cared. As we came out in view of the Laterran pavilion, Jules Verne Durand went off the air. I glanced up through the windows of the translators’ booth and saw other Laterrans rushing to his side to lay hands on him. We all sang louder.

“So much for the Orth translation,” Jesry said, once we had reached the water and set Lise down. But he said it in a simple and plaintive way that did not make me want to hurt him.

“It’s okay,” Lio said, “that’s the good thing about an aut. The words don’t matter.” And he rested his hand absent-mindedly on the lid of the coffin.

The soldiers on the opposite bank transferred the coffins of the Valers onto a sort of flatboat. They could simply have marched them around to us, but there seemed to be something in the act of crossing the water that was of ceremonial meaning here. “I get it,” Arsibalt said, “it represents the cosmos. The gulf between us.” There was more music. The raft was staffed by four women in robes, who began rowing it across. The music was much easier on the ears than the funeral march: different instruments with softer tones, and a solo by a Laterran woman who stood at the edge of the water and seemed to make the whole orb resonate with the power of her voice. It was a good going-home piece, I reckoned.

When the ladies were halfway finished rowing across, Jesry spoke up: “Not setting any speed records, are they?”

“Yeah,” Lio said, “I was just thinking the same thing. Give us a boat! We could take ’em!”

It wasn’t that funny, but our bodies thought it was, and we had to do a lot of work in the next couple of minutes trying to avoid laughing so obviously as to create a diplomatic incident. When the boat finally arrived, we took the coffins off, then loaded Lise’s on board. To the accompaniment of more music, those slow-rowing ladies took her in a long arc to the Laterran shore, where she was brought off by half a dozen civilian pallbearers-friends of Jules and of Lise, I guessed-while Jules, supported by a couple of friends, looked on. Then in four separate trips we carried the Valers’ coffins back to the staging area behind the inflatable. Meanwhile Lise was conveyed into the Laterran pavilion so that Jules could have a private moment with her. The oar-ladies rowed back to the Urnudan shore. Fraa Lodoghir and Gan Odru, from opposite sides of the pond, each said a few words reminding us about the others who had died in the little war that we had come here to conclude: on Arbre, the ones who had been killed in the rod attacks, and up here, the ones who had fallen to the Valers.

After a moment of silence, we broke for an intermission, and food and drinks were brought out on trays by stewards. Apparently, the need to eat after a funeral was as universal as the Adrakhonic Theorem. The boat ladies went to work refitting their barge with a table, draped with blue cloth, and arrayed with piles of documents.

“Raz.”

I had been waiting for my crack at a food tray, but turned around to discover Emman a few paces away, just in the act of underhanding something to me. Reflexes took over and I pawed it out of the air. It was another one of those conversation-jamming machines.

“I stole it from a Procian,” he explained.

“Won’t the Procian be needing it?” I asked, my face-I hoped-the picture of mock concern.

“Nah. Redundant.”

The conversation jammer turned into a conversation piece, as my friends gathered round to play with it and chuckle at the funny sounds it made. Yul got it to generate random, profane sentences by cursing into it. But after a few minutes, the voice of Jules Verne Durand-hoarse, but composed-was in our ears telling us that the next phase of the aut was about to begin. Once again we convened at the water’s edge and heard speeches from the four leaders who would be putting pens to paper in a few minutes: first Gan Odru. Then Prag Eshwar: a stocky woman, more grand-auntish than I had envisioned, in a military uniform. Then the Arbran foreign minister, and finally one of the Thousanders who had been hanging around with Fraa Lodoghir. As each of the speakers finished, they stepped aboard the barge. When our Thousander had joined the first three, the oar-ladies rowed them out into the middle. They all took up pens and began to sign. All watched in silence for a few moments. But the signing was lengthy, and so, soon enough, people began muttering to one another. Conversations flourished all over, and people began to mill around.

It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I strayed around behind the inflatable and counted the coffins. One, two, three, four.

“Taking inventory?”

I turned around to find that Fraa Lodoghir had followed me.

I flicked on the conversation jammer, which emitted a stream of profanity in Yul’s voice as I said, “It’s the only way for me to be sure who is still dead.”

“You can be sure now,” he said. “It’s over. The tally will not change.”

“Can you bring people back as well as make them disappear?”

“Not without undoing that.” He nodded at the barge where they were signing the peace.

“I see,” I said.

“You were hoping to get Saunt Orolo back?” he asked gently.

“Yes.”

Lodoghir said nothing. But I was able to work it out for myself. “But if Orolo’s alive, it means Lise is buried at Ecba. We don’t get the intelligence gleaned from her remains-none of this happens. Peace is only compatible with Lise and Orolo being dead-and staying that way.”

“I’m sorry,” Lodoghir said. “There are certain worldtracks-certain states of affairs-that are only compatible with certain persons’ being…absent.”

“That’s the word Fraa Jad used,” I said, “before he turned up absent.”

Fraa Lodoghir looked as if steeling himself to hear some sophomoric outburst from me. I continued, “How about Fraa Jad? Any chance he’ll be present again?”

“His tragic demise is extensively recorded,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “but I’d not presume to say what an Incanter is and is not capable of.” And his gaze fell away from my face and traveled across the milling crowd until it had come to rest, or so I thought, on Magnath Foral. For once, the Heritor of Elkhazg did not have Madame Secretary at his side-she was tending to official duties-and so I walked directly over to him.

“Did you-did we-summon them here?” I asked him. “Did we call the Urnudans forth? Or is it the case that some Urnudan, a thousand years ago, saw a geometric proof in a dream, and turned that into a religion-decided that he had been called to a higher world?”

Magnath Foral heard me out, then turned his face toward the water, drawing my attention to the peace that was being signed there. “Behold,” he said. “There are two Arbrans on that vessel, of coequal dignity. Such a state of affairs has not existed since the golden age of Ethras. The walls of Tredegarh have been brought down. The avout have escaped from their prisons. Ita mingle and work by their sides. If all of these things had occurred as the result of a summoning such as you suppose, would it not be a great thing for the Lineage to have brought about? Oh, I should very much like to claim such credit. Long have my predecessors and I waited for such a culmination. What honors would decorate the Lineage were it all true! But it did not come to pass in any such clean and straightforward manner. I do not know the answer, Fraa Erasmas. Nor will any born of this cosmos until we have taken ship on a vessel such as this, and journeyed on to the next.”