“I don’t know what an average person is. But look at Yul here. He built his stove himself. Didn’t you, Yul?”

Yul was uneasy that Cord had suddenly made this conversation about him. But he deferred to her. He glanced away and nodded. “Yup. Got the burners from scavengers. Welded up the frame.”

“And it worked,” Cord said.

“I know,” I said, and patted my belly.

“No, I mean the system worked!” Cord insisted.

“What system?”

She was exasperated. “The…the…”

“The non-system,” Yul said. “The lack of a system.”

“Yul knew that stoves like this were unreliable!” Cord said, nodding at the broken one. “He’d learned that from experience.”

“Oh, bitter experience, my girl!” Yul proclaimed.

“He ran into some scavengers who’d found better burner heads in a ruin up north. Haggled with them. Figured out a way to hook them up. Probably has been tinkering with them ever since.”

“Took me two years to make it run right,” Yul admitted.

“And none of that would have been possible with some kind of technology that only an avout can understand,” Cord concluded.

“Okay, okay,” I said, and let it drop there. Letting the argument play out would have been a waste of breath. We, the theors, who had retreated (or, depending on how you liked your history, been herded) into the maths at the Reconstitution, had the power to change the physical world through praxis. Up to a point, ordinary people liked the changes we made. But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on us—and they didn’t like that at all.

Cord spent a while telling Yul what she knew about the Cousins, and about all that had happened during the journey from Saunt Edhar to Samble to Norslof. Yul took it pretty calmly, which irked me. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and make him see, somehow, that this was an event of cosmic significance: the most important thing that had ever happened. But he listened to Cord’s narration as if she were relating a story of how she had fixed a flat tire on her way to work. Perhaps it was a habit of wilderness guides to feign unnatural calm when people ran up to them with upsetting news.

Anyway, it gave me an opening to carry forward the stove argument in a way that wouldn’t make Cord so irritated. When the conversation lapsed, I tried: “I see why you guys—or anyone—would feel more comfortable with a stove you could take apart and understand. And I’m fine with that—normally. But these are not normal times. If the Cousins turn out to be hostile, how can we oppose them? Because it looks like they came from a world that didn’t have anything like the Reconstitution.”

“A dictatorship of the theors,” Yul said.

“It doesn’t have to be a dictatorship! If you could see how theors behave in private, you’d know they could never be that organized.”

But Cord was of one mind with Yul on this. “Once they get to the point where they’re building ships like that one,” she said, “it is a dictatorship in effect. You said yourself it would take the resources of a whole planet. How do you think they got their hands on those resources?”

In most cases Cord and I saw things the same way and the extra/avout split simply was not important to us, so when she talked this way it made me more upset than I cared to let on. I let it drop for a while. On these endless drives, it was nothing to let the conversation pause for an hour or two.

And there was something else going on, which was that everything had changed about Cord when Yul had showed up. These two simply knew what to do around each other. Whatever was going on between them, I wasn’t part of it, and I felt jealous.

We passed through another ruin-city, almost as “shallow” as yesterday’s and almost as thoroughly erased.

“The Cousins’ praxis is nothing to jump up and down about,” I said. “We haven’t seen anything on that ship that couldn’t have been built in our own Praxic Age. That makes me think that we could build a weapon that could disable their ship.”

Cord smiled and the tension was gone. “You sound like Fraa Jad the other day!” she exclaimed, with obvious affection—for me.

“Oh really? What did the old man say?” I could hear the hurt draining out of my own speech.

She adopted a pretty good imitation of his grumbling voice. “‘Their electrical systems could be disabled by a burst of whozamajigger fields.’ Then Lio said, ‘Begging your pardon, Fraa Jad, but we don’t know how to make those.’ ‘Why, it’s simple, just build a phrastic array of whatsit-field inducers.’ ‘Sorry, Fraa Jad, but no one knows those theorics any more and it takes thirty years’ study to get up to speed!’ and so on.”

I laughed. But then—tallying the days in my head—I realized something: “They’re probably reaching Tredegarh right now. Probably starting to talk about how to make those whatsit field inducers.”

“I would hope so!”

“The Sæcular Power probably has tons of information about the Cousins that has been withheld from us until now. Maybe they’ve even been going up there and talking to the Cousins. I’ll bet they are giving all of that information to the fraas and suurs at the Convox. I wish I was there. I’m tired of not understanding! Instead I’m helping Fraa Jad understand why a Throwback wants to visit a seven-century-old archaeological dig.” I slapped the control panel helplessly.

“Hey!” Yul said in mock outrage and pretended to haul off and punch me in the shoulder.

“I guess that’s part of being a pawn,” I went on.

“Your vision of what the Convox is like sounds pretty romantic to me,” Cord said. “Way too optimistic. Remember the first day at the machine-hall when we were trying to get seventeen people into six vehicles?”

“Vividly.”

“This Convox thing is probably like that except a thousand times worse.”

“Unless there’s someone like me there,” Yul said. “You should see the way I can get seventeen tourists into four rafts.”

“Well, Yul’s not at Tredegarh,” Cord pointed out, “so you’re not missing a thing. Just relax and enjoy the drive.”

“Okay,” I said, and laughed a little. “Your understanding of human nature is better than mine.”

“What’s her problem with me then?” Yul demanded.

As the drive went on, most of us bounced back and forth between the two vehicles. The exception was Gnel who always remained in his fetch, though sometimes he’d let Sammann drive it.

The next day, when Cord and I were alone together for a couple of hours, she told me that she and Yul had become boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Huh,” I said, “I guess that explains why you two spend so much time out ‘gathering firewood.’” I wasn’t trying to be a smarty-pants, just trying to emulate the kind of banter that Cord and Yul exchanged so freely. But Cord became quite embarrassed and I realized that I had struck too close to home. I groped around for something else to say. “Well, now that you’ve told me, it seems like it was meant to be. I guess I just didn’t see it because I had this idea that you were going out with Rosk.”

Cord thought that was pretty silly. “Remember all those conversations I was having with him on my jeejah the other day?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what we were really doing was breaking up.”

“Well, Cord, I hate to be a pedantic avout, but I couldn’t help overhearing your half of those conversations, and I don’t think I heard a single word that was even remotely about breaking up.”

She looked at me as if I were insane.

“All I’m saying,” I said, holding up my hands, “is that I had no idea that that was what was going on.”

“Neither did I,” Cord said.

“Do you think…” I began, and stopped. I’d been about to say Do you think that Rosk knows? but I realized in the nick of time that it would be suicide. It seemed to me like a pretty irregular way to handle important relationships, but then I remembered how things had gone with me and Ala and decided I was in no position to criticize my sib on that score.