“It’s a spinoff of Saunt Edhar. But a lot of other Edharian maths around the world contributed fraas and suurs to get it started.”

“How many avout live there?” Cord asked. I could see her doing the calculation in her head: if each avout moves twenty wheelbarrow loads of dirt per day, for 690 years, how big does the hole get?

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Sammann said, grimacing. “Most of the information on this topic is crap.”

“What do you mean by that?” Crade demanded. We all looked at him, because in an instant he had become markedly defensive.

Sammann raised his eyes from the screen of the jeejah and gazed interestedly at Crade. He let a few moments go by, then responded in a calm and matter-of-fact tone: “Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what’s on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered. The filtering systems are ancient. My people have been improving them, and their interfaces, since the time of the Reconstitution. They are to us what the Mynster is to Fraa Erasmas and his kind. When I look at a given topic I don’t just see information about that topic. I see meta-information that tells me what the filtering systems learned when they were conducting the search. If I look up analemma, the filtering system tells me that only a few sources have provided information about this and that they are mostly of high repute—they are avout. If I look up the name of a popular music star who just broke up with her boyfriend,” Sammann continued, nodding at a tearful female on the speely, “the filtering system tells me that a vast amount of data has been posted on this topic quite recently, mostly of very low repute. When I look up the excavation of the Temple of Orithena on the Island of Ecba, the filtering system informs me that people of very high and very low repute have been posting on this topic, slowly but steadily, for seven centuries.”

Sammann’s explanation had failed if its purpose had been to settle Crade down. “What’s an example of a person of high repute? Some fraa sitting in a concent?”

“Yes,” Sammann said.

“And what would a low-repute source be?”

“A conspiracy theorist. Or anyone who makes a lot of long rambling posts that are only read by like-minded sorts.”

“A Deolater?”

“That depends,” Sammann said, “on what the Deolater is writing about.”

“What if he’s writing about Ecba? Orithena? The Teglon?” Crade asked, whacking his index finger into a phototype that depicted the ten-sided plaza in front of the ancient temple.

“The filters tell me that a lot has been posted in that vein,” Sammann said, “as you appear to know very well. Sorting it out is difficult. When I see such a pattern emerging in the filter interface, my gut tells me that most of it is probably crap. It’s a quick and superficial judgment. I could be wrong. I apologize if my choice of words offended you.”

“You’re forgiven,” Crade snapped.

“Well!” I exclaimed, after a few moments’ awkward silence had gone by. “This has been fascinating. It’s good that we figured this out before we wasted a lot of time searching the mountains! Obviously, the whole premise of my search for Orolo has changed. None of you imagined he would be going to the other side of the world. So you’ll all want to turn around and head back south at this point.”

Everyone just looked at me. None of their faces was readable.

“Or so I imagine,” I added.

“This changes nothing,” Sammann said.

“I’m not about to ditch my sib in this dump,” Cord said.

“You have to have two vehicles in case one breaks down in the cold,” said Ganelial Crade. I couldn’t argue with his logic. But I didn’t for one moment think that this was his real reason for wanting to tag along. Not after he had let the word Teglon slip out.

“From here to Eighty-three North is two thousand miles on a great circle route,” said Sammann, working his jeejah. “On the highway, it’s twenty-five hundred and some.”

“If you and Sammann learn to drive, Raz, so that we can switch off, we can make it in three or four days,” Crade said.

“The road’s bound to get worse as we go north,” Cord said. “I would plan on it taking a week.”

Crade was eager to dispute that with her but she added, “And we’ll have to modify the vehicles.”

So we encamped in the fueling station’s back lot and set to work. Once the proprietors understood that we were just passing through en route to the far north, they became more comfortable with us and things got easier. They assumed we were just another crew of vagabonds going up to mine the ruins, and better equipped and financed than most.

The next day we used Cord’s fetch to go out and buy new tires for Crade’s. Then we used his to get tires for hers. The new tires were deeply grooved and had hobnails sticking out of them. Cord and Gnel (as Ganelial Crade now insisted we call him) worked together on some sort of tool-intensive project to replace the vehicles’ coolants and lubricants with ones that would not freeze. Neither Sammann nor I knew much about working on vehicles, so we stood around and tried to be useful. Sammann used his jeejah to study the route north, reading logs posted by travelers who’d gone that way recently.

“Hey,” I said to him at one point, “my mind keeps going back to an image I saw on that speely feed yesterday.”

“The burning librarian?”

“No.”

“The mudslide hitting the school?”

“No.”

“The brain-damaged boy playing with the puppies?”

“No.”

“Okay, I give up.”

“A rocket taking off.”

He looked at me. “And—what? Blowing up? Crashing into an orphanage?”

“No. That’s the thing. It just took off.”

“Did it have celebrities on board or—”

“Not that they showed. They’d show that, wouldn’t they?”

“I wonder why they bothered to show it then. Rockets take off all the time.”

“Well, I’m no judge of these things, but it looked like an especially big one.”

For the first time Sammann seemed to take my meaning. “I’ll see what I can find,” he said.

An elderly but bustling lady—one of Gnel’s co-religionists—came out with a cake that had been baked for us, then snared Gnel in a conversation that never seemed to end. While they were talking, a big, mud-splattered fetch with a wooden cabin on its back thundered into the fueling station, circled around us a couple of times, and claimed four parking spaces. The cake lady marched away, her face all pinched up. A big man with a beard shambled out of the cabin-fetch and came toward Gnel with his hands in his pockets, looking about curiously. When he got closer to Gnel he suddenly flashed a grin and extended his hand. Gnel extended his after a moment’s hesitation and let the other heave it up and down for a while. They spoke for no more than a few seconds, then the newcomer began to pace around our little encampment taking a mental inventory of what we had and reconstructing in his mind what we’d been doing there. After a few minutes of that, he unfolded a sort of deployable counter from the side of his cabin-on-wheels and fired up a stove and began to make hot beverages for us.

“That’s Yulassetar Crade. My cousin,” Gnel told me as we watched him erect a little kitchen, blowing dust out of teacups and polishing pots with a rag from his pocket.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” Gnel asked, nonplussed.

“It’s obvious from the way that you and that lady react to him that there is some history. Some kind of trouble between you.”

“Yul is a here—” Gnel began, and stopped himself before he had got to the end of the word. “An apostate.”

I wanted to ask, other than that, is he all right? but I let it drop.

Yul made no effort to introduce himself, but when I approached him he turned to me with a smile and shook my hand before turning back to his chores. “Hold your arms out,” he said, and when I complied he put a tray on them and then placed cups of hot stuff on the tray. “For your friends,” he said.