“She had an important post in the government—she was one of the dozen or so highest-ranking people—and she took a stand against the Warden of Heaven, and he got rid of her.”
“Killed her?”
“No.”
“Threw her into a dungeon?”
“No, just fired her. I speculate that she has some other job now where she still has enough pull to Evoke someone like Paphlagon.”
“So, she was a fid of Suur Aculoä?”
“Ignetha Foral spent six years in the Unarian math at Baritoe and wrote a treatise comparing Paphlagon’s work to that of some other, er…”
“People like Paphlagon,” Jesry said impatiently.
“Yeah, of previous centuries.”
“Did you read it?”
“We didn’t get a copy. Maybe in another ten years. I already went into the Lower Labyrinth and shoved a request through the grille.”
Someone at Baritoe—presumably a Unarian fid—would have to copy Foral’s treatise by hand and send it to us. If a book were very popular, fids would do this without being asked, and copies would circulate to other maths.
“You’d think a rich family would have had copies machine-printed,” Jesry said.
“Too vulgar,” Tulia said. “But I know the title: Plurality of Worlds: a Comparative Study of Polycosmic Ideation among the Halikaarnians.”
“Hmm. Makes me feel like a bug under the Procians’ magnifying glass,” I said.
“Baritoe is Procian-dominated,” Tulia reminded me. “She wasn’t going to get anywhere calling it Why the Halikaarnians Are So Much Smarter than Us.” Too late I remembered that Tulia belonged to a Procian order now.
“So, she was interested in the polycosm,” Jesry said before this could flourish into a spat. “What could have happened that would be observable from the starhenge and that would make the polycosm relevant?” It was the sort of question Jesry would never ask unless he already knew the answer, which he now supplied: “Something’s gone wrong with the sun, I’ll bet.”
I was poised to scoff, but held back, reflecting that Sammann had, after all, been looking at the sun. “Something visible with the naked eye?”
“Sunspots. Solar flares. These can affect our weather and so on. And ever since the Praxic Age, the atmosphere doesn’t protect us from certain things.”
“Well, if that’s where the action is, why was Orolo looking at the North Pole?”
“The aurora,” Jesry said, as if he actually knew what he was talking about. “It responds to solar flares.”
“But we haven’t had a single decent aurora this whole time,” Tulia pointed out, with a catlike look of satisfaction on her face.
“That we could see with the naked eye,” Jesry returned. “This tablet of ours could be the perfect instrument for observing not only auroras but the disk of the sun itself.”
“I notice it’s ‘our’ tablet now that it’s got something good on it,” I pointed out.
“If Suur Trestanas finds it, it’ll go back to being ‘your’ tablet,” Tulia said. She and I laughed but Jesry was determined not to be amused.
“Seriously,” Tulia continued, “that hypothesis doesn’t explain why they Evoked Paphlagon. Any cosmographer can look at solar flares.”
“What’s the connection to the polycosm, you’re asking?” Jesry said.
“Exactly.”
“Maybe there is none,” I speculated, “maybe Ignetha Foral just wanted a cosmographer, and happened to remember Paphlagon’s name.”
“Maybe she’s being persecuted as a heretic, and they yanked Paphlagon so that they could burn him too,” Jesry suggested. And we chatted about such ideas for a few minutes before discarding all of them in favor of the proposition that Paphlagon must have been chosen for some good reason.
“Well,” Jesry said, “the way that the theors of old found themselves talking about the polycosm in the first place was by thinking about stars: how they formed, and what went on inside them.”
“Formation of nuclei and so on,” Tulia said.
“And not only that but, when the stars die, how do those nuclei get blown out into space so that they can form planets and—”
“And us,” I said.
“Yeah,” Jesry said. “It leads to the question, why are all of those processes so fine-tuned to produce life? A sticky question. Deolaters would say, ‘Ah, see, God made the cosmos just for us.’ But the polycosmic answer is, ‘No, there must be lots of cosmi, some good for life, most not—we only see one cosmos in which we are capable of existing.’ And that is where all of this philosophical stuff originated that Suur Aculoä likes to study.”
“I think I see where you’re going now when you guess something’s gone wrong with the sun,” I said. “Maybe there are some new solar observations that contradict what we thought we knew about the theorics of what goes on in the cores of stars. And maybe this has ramifications that extend all the way to those polycosmic theories that Paphlagon’s interested in.”
“Or—more likely—Ignetha Foral mistakenly thinks so, so she’s yanked Paphlagon, and is now sending him on a wild goose chase,” Jesry said.
“I think she’s pretty smart,” Tulia demurred, but Jesry didn’t hear her because a resolution was forming in his head. He turned toward me. “I want to go down there and view this with you,” he said. “Or without you, if you are busy.”
For about twelve different reasons I hated this idea, but I couldn’t say so without making it look like I was trying to be a pig and monopolize the tablet. “Fine,” I said.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tulia said—sounding as if she were pretty sure it wasn’t. But before this could develop into a proper fight, we all took notice of the approach of Suur Ala, who was heading straight for us across the meadow. “Uh-oh,” Jesry said.
Suur Ala was unusual-looking in a way I’d never been able to pin down; sometimes I found myself staring at her during lectures or at Provener trying to make sense of her face. She had a round head on a slender neck, lately accentuated by a short haircut she had gotten during Apert; since then, one of the other suurs had been maintaining this for her. She had huge eyes, a delicate sharp nose, and a wide mouth. She was small and bony where Tulia was generous. Anyway there was something about her physical form that matched her soul.
She didn’t waste time greeting us. “For the eight-hundredth time in the last three months, Fraa Erasmas is at the center of a heated conversation. Carefully out of earshot of others. Complete with significant glances at the sky and at Shuf’s Dowment,” she began. “Don’t bother trying to explain it away, I know you guys are up to something. Have been for weeks and weeks.”
We all stood there for a long moment. My heart was pounding. Ala was squared off against the three of us, scanning our faces with those searchlight eyes.
“All right,” Jesry said, “we won’t bother.” But that was all he said. There followed another long silence. I was expecting a look of fury to come over Ala’s face. For her to make a threat to bring down the Inquisition on us. Instead of which her face slowly collapsed. For a moment I thought she might show some other emotion—I couldn’t guess what. But she passed from there to a blank resolute look, turned her back on us, and began walking away. After she’d gone a few paces, Tulia went after her, leaving Jesry and me alone. “That was weird,” he observed.
I could hardly respond. The miserable feeling that had kept me awake in my cell on the night that Ala had joined the New Circle had come over me again.
“You think she’ll rat us out?” I asked him.
I tried to put it in an incredulous tone of voice, as in are you really stupid enough to think she’d rat us out? but Jesry took it at face value. “It would be a great way to score points with the Warden Regulant.”
“But she was careful to approach us when no one else was around,” I pointed out.
“Maybe in hopes of negotiating some kind of deal with us?”
“What do we have to offer in
the way of a deal!?” I snorted.
Jesry thought about it and shrugged. “Our bodies?”
“Now you’re just being obnoxious. Why don’t you say ‘our affections’ if you’re going to make such jokes.”
“Because I don’t think I have any affection for Ala,” Jesry said, “and I don’t think she has any for me.”
“Come on, she’s not that bad.”
“How can you say that after the little performance she just put on?”
“Maybe she was trying to warn us that we’re being too obvious.”
“Well, she might have a point there,” Jesry admitted. “We should stop talking out in the open where the whole math can observe us.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Yeah. The sub-cellar of Shuf’s Dowment, next time Arsibalt sends us the signal.”
As it turned out, this was only about four hours later. It all worked fine—superficially. Arsibalt sent the signal. Jesry and I noticed it from different places and converged on Shuf’s Dowment. No one was there except for Arsibalt. Jesry and I went below and got to work.
But in every other way it was wrong from the start. Whenever I went to Shuf’s Dowment, I took a circuitous route through the back of the page-tree-coppice. I never went the same way twice. Jesry, on the other hand, just crossed the bridge and made a beeline for it. But I couldn’t say his way was any worse than mine, because that day I encountered no fewer than four different people, or groups of people, out strolling around to enjoy the weather. Within a stone’s throw of the Dowment I almost tripped over Suur Tary and Fraa Branch who were enjoying a private moment together, all wrapped up in each other’s bolts.
When I finally reached the building, it was with the intent of calling the thing off. But Jesry wasn’t about to walk away. He talked me into going down there as Arsibalt looked on, growingly horrified, eyes jumping from door to window to door. So down we went, and crammed ourselves into that tiny place where I had spent so many hours by myself. But it wasn’t the same with him there. I’d grown used to the geometric distortion wreaked by the lens; he hadn’t, and spent a lot of time zooming in on different things just to see what they looked like. It was no different from what I had done on my first few sessions with it, but it made me want to scream. He didn’t seem to understand that we did not have time for this. When he got really interested in something, he would talk much too loudly. Both of us had to go out and urinate; I had to teach him about the “all clear” signal involving the door.
It seemed like two or three hours went by before we actually got around to observing the sun. The tablet worked as well for this as it did for looking at distant stars. It could only generate so much light, and so the sun appeared, not as a blinding thermonuclear fireball, but as a crisp-edged disk—the brightest thing on the tablet, certainly, but not so bright you couldn’t look at it. If you zoomed in on it and turned down the brightness, you could observe sunspots. I couldn’t really say whether there was an exceptional number of these. Neither could Jesry. By blacking out the sun’s disk and observing the space around it, we could look for solar flares, but there was nothing unusual going on that we could see. Not that either of us was an expert on such things. We’d never paid much attention to the sun before, considering it an obnoxious, wayward star that interfered with our observations of all the other stars.
After we became discouraged, and convinced ourselves that the hypothesis about Sammann and the goggles was wrong, and that we’d wasted the whole afternoon, we attempted to leave, and found the door at the top of the stairs closed. Someone else was in the building; it wasn’t safe to go out.
We waited for half an hour. Maybe Arsibalt had closed the door in error. I crept up and put my ear to it. He was carrying on a conversation with someone there, and the longer I listened to their muffled voices the more certain I became that the other person was Suur Ala. She had tracked us here!
Jesry had uncomplimentary things to say about her when I came back down to report this news. Half an hour later she was still there. Both of us were starving. Arsibalt must be in a state of animalistic terror.
Clearly our secret was out, or soon to be out, to at least one person. Squatting there in the darkness, trapped like rats, we had more than enough time to think through the implications. To go on as if this had not happened would be senseless. So, having nothing else to do, we pulled the poly tarp up off the floor and wrapped the tablet in it. Then we maneuvered and squirmed into the remotest place we could find—the utmost frontier of Arsibalt’s explorations—and used his shovel to bury the tablet four feet deep. When we were finished with that project, and nicely covered with dirt, I went up and put my ear to the door again. This time I heard no conversation. But the door was still closed.
“I think Arsibalt has abandoned us in favor of supper,” I told Jesry. “But I’ll bet she’s still up there.”
“It’s not in her character to leave at this point,” Jesry said.
“Say, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about her.”
“What do you think we should do, Raz?”
It was strange to hear Jesry asking for my views on any topic. I savored this novel experience for a few moments before saying, “If she intends to rat us out, I’m dead no matter what. But you have a chance. So, let’s go out together. You hood yourself and go straight out the back door and make yourself scarce. I’ll approach Ala and talk to her—she’ll be distracted long enough for you to melt into the darkness.”
“It’s a deal,” Jesry said. “Thanks, Raz. And remember: if it’s your body that she wants—”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” Jesry said, pulling his bolt over his head. But I could see him shaking his head at the same time. “Can you believe this is what passes for excitement around this place?”
“Maybe someday your wish will be granted and something will happen in the world.”
“I thought this might be it,” he said, nodding toward the sub-cellar. “But, so far, there’s nothing but sunspots.”
The door opened and a light shone on us.
“Hello, boys,” said Suur Ala, “lose your way?”
Jesry was hooded; she couldn’t see his face. He bounded up the stairs, pushed his way past Ala, and headed for the back door. I was right behind him. I came face to face with Suur Ala just in time to hear a terrible thud from down the hall. Jesry was sprawled over the threshold, covered by a mess of bolt—from the waist up.
“No point hiding, Jesry. I’d know your smile anywhere,” Ala called.
Jesry got his legs under him, let his bolt drop back down over his arse, and ran off. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light I could see that Ala had stretched her chord across the doorway at ankle level and tied it off between a couple of chairs flanking the exit. Lacking any other way to keep her bolt on, she had thrown it over herself loosely and was holding it up with one arm. She turned her back on me and shuffled over to retrieve the chord.
“Arsibalt left an hour ago,” she said. “I think he lost half his weight in perspiration.”
I couldn’t muster a lot of amusement, since I knew she was in a position to say equally funny things about me or Jesry if she wanted.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asked, after a good long while.
“How many other people know?”
“You mean, how many have I told? Or how many have figured it out on their own?”
“I guess…both.”
“I’ve told no one. As to the other question, I guess the answer would be, anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which probably means…no one.”
“Why would you pay attention to me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Good question!”
“Look, what do you want, Ala? What are you after?”
“It’s part of the rules of the game that I mustn’t tell you.”
“If this is about you trying to be some sort of junior Warden Regulant—her little protégée—then get it ove
r with! Go and tell her. I’ll march out of the Day Gate at sunrise and go find Orolo.”
She was winding her chord about herself as I said this. Suddenly the bolt seemed to grow twice as large as all of the breath went out of her. Her chest collapsed and her head drooped. The big eyes closed for a few moments. Here was where any other girl would have gone to pieces.
It is hard to say just how monstrous I felt. I leaned back against the wall and let my head thud back as if attempting to escape from my own, hideously guilty skin. But there was no way out of it.
She had opened her eyes. They were gleaming, but they saw everything. Anyone who pays as much attention to you as I do, which means no one.
In a voice almost too quiet to hear, she said, “You need to take a bath.”
For once in my life I actually managed to see the double meaning. But Ala was already gone.
* * *
Eleven: The list of plants forbidden intramuros, typically because of their undesirable pharmacological properties. The Discipline states that any specimen noticed growing in a math is to be uprooted and burned without delay, and that the event is to be noted in the Chronicle. The list originally drawn up by Saunt Cartas included only three, but their number was increased over the centuries as Arbre was explored and new species were discovered.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
I’d have become a Deolater and gone on a pilgrimage of any length to find a magic bath that would wash away the mess I’d just made. The hardships of the journey would have been pleasant compared to my next week or so in the math. Not that Ala told anyone. She was too proud for that. But all the other suurs, beginning with Tulia, could tell she was suffering. And by breakfast the next morning, everyone had decided it must be my fault. I wondered how this worked. My first hypothesis was wrong on the face of it: that Ala had run home and narrated the story to a chalk hall full of appalled suurs. My second hypothesis was that she had been seen coming home miserable after having missed supper; I had been seen skulking home a little while later; ergo, I had done a bad thing to her. It wasn’t until later that I understood the much simpler truth: others had noticed that Ala had her eye on me, and so if Ala were miserable, it could only be because I had done something—it didn’t matter what—bad.
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