We killed time for several days. I tried to read some theorics books I’d brought, but couldn’t concentrate, and ended up sleeping for unreasonable amounts of time. Sammann had found a place near an office-module where he could get patchy connections to the Reticulum. He went there once a day, then came back to scan through the information he had acquired. Yul and Cord watched speelies on a tiny jeejah screen when they weren’t “gathering firewood.” Ganelial Crade read his scriptures in Old Bazian and began to signal interest in something that he had been polite enough to avoid and that I had been dreading: religion.

Sammann once saved me from a near brush with that by looking up suddenly from his jeejah, finding my face at the other end of the room, then dropping his gaze again to the screen. He’d recently come back from one of his data-foraging expeditions; there were still a few clots of ice dangling from his whiskers. I went over and squatted next to his chair.

“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”

“How would that work?” I asked.

Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”

“Norslof,” I said.

“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”

“Okay, but how—”

“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”

“Asamocra?”

“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”

“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but maybe we can save that for later.”

“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”

“Ah. And have you succeeded?”

“I’d say yes. You might say no because you avout like your information tidily written down in a book and cross-checked by other avout. The information we trade in is noisy and ambiguous and suggestive. Often it’s images or acoustical signatures instead of words.”

“I accept your rebuke. What have you got?”

“Eight went up on that rocket.”

“So the official statement was a lie as we suspected.”

“Yes.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know. That’s where things get noisy and ambiguous. This thing was very hush-hush. Military secrets and so forth. There is no passenger manifest that I can read to you. No stack of dossiers. All I have is ten seconds of really bad images from the collision-avoidance speelycaptor on the windscreen of some janitor’s fetch, taken while he was parallel-parking in a tight spot a quarter of a mile away. Motion artifacts have been removed, of course.”

Sammann caused the jeejah to begin playing back a snippet of—as advertised—terrible speely data. It showed a coach, with military markings, parked next to a large building. A door in the side of the building opened. Eight people in white coveralls came out and climbed into the coach. They were followed by others who looked like doctors and technicians. The interval between the building and the coach was about twenty feet, so we got to see them walk that far. Sammann made the thing run on infinite loop. The first couple of dozen times through, we focused all of our attention on the first four people in the white suits. Faces were impossible to make out, but it was surprising how much could be inferred from how people moved. Three of the white-suited people moved in an ever-shifting triangle around a fourth, who was bigger than all of them, with prepossessing hair. He carried himself erect and moved in a heedless line; the others scurried and weaved. His coverall was subtly different from the others’: it had a pattern of stripes or markings crisscrossed over it, almost as if he’d been draped in a few yards of—

“Rope,” I said, freezing the image and pointing to it. “I’ve seen something like that before—at Apert. There was an extra wearing something like that. He was a Warden of Heaven priest. That is their ceremonial garb.”

By this point Cord had come over to watch the speely with us. She was standing behind Sammann’s chair looking over his shoulder. “Those four who are bringing up the rear,” she said, “they are avout.”

Until now we’d only had eyes for the high priest and his three acolytes. The other half of the crew didn’t do much: just walked in single file from the building to the coach. “What makes you say that?” I asked. “That is, other than the fact that they show zero interest in the guy with the rope. There is nothing to mark them as avout.”

“Yes there is,” Cord said. “The way they walk.”

“What are you talking about!? We’re all bipeds! We all walk the same way!” I protested. But Sammann had twisted around in his chair to grin up at Cord. He nodded enthusiastically.

“You two are nuts,” I said.

“Cord is right,” Sammann insisted.

“It couldn’t have been more obvious at Apert,” Cord said. “Extras swagger and slouch. They walk like they own the place.” She got out from behind the chair and strode down the middle of the room in a rolling, easy gait. “Avout—and Ita—are more self-contained.” She drew herself up and walked back to us with quick steps, not moving any air.

As crazy as this sounded, I had to admit that during Apert I’d been able to tell extras apart from fraas and suurs at a distance, partly based on how they moved. I turned my attention back to the screen. “Okay, I’ll give you that one,” I said. “The more I look at them, the more familiar that gait seems to me. Especially the tall one bringing up the rear. He is a dead ringer for—”

I couldn’t get a word out for a few moments. Everyone looked at me to see if I was okay. I couldn’t take my eyes off that speely. I watched it four more times, and each time I grew more certain of what—of who—I was seeing.

“Jesry,” I said.

“Oh, my god!” Cord exclaimed.

“His blessings and mercy upon you,” hissed Ganelial Crade, as was his custom when anyone used that word in an oath.

“That is absolutely your friend,” Cord said.

“Fraa Jesry is in space with the Warden of Heaven!” I shouted, just to hear it.

“I’m sure they are having some fascinating discussions,” said Sammann.