A couple of hours later, after we’d covered the windows and tried to sleep, the place began to hum and rumble, and there came a jerk that made half of our stuff fall to the floor. Gnel and I unzipped the legs of our suitsacks and ran out to the catwalk and looked down to see rimes of ice exploding into sparkling clouds as they were crushed by imperceptible shifting of the tread segments. We scurried to the end of the catwalk where a stair led down to near snow level, jumped off, got the three-wheeler started, and buzzed back to the flatbed. Explosive bangs resonated up and down the train as the locomotive budged forward and began to draw up slack. A couple of the flatbed’s boarding-ramps were dragging on the ice so that last-minute loading could proceed—it would be half an hour before the train was really moving. We blasted up one of these, veered around a drummon that was back-and-forthing into a tight slot, and found our way to Gnel’s fetch. We ran the three-wheeler up the plank ramps and stowed the planks under the fetch. Then we spent a while draining the coolants from all three vehicles’ engines and storing it in poly jugs. By the time we were finished, the train was moving faster than we could walk in snowshoes, so we made our way forward along the system of catwalks that skirted the sledges and linked them together. Cord and Yul had pulled up the window-coverings to let the sun in, and were cooking a big celebratory breakfast. We were on our way to the North Pole. I was glad of that. But when I thought of Fraa Jesry in orbit I couldn’t have felt more in the wrong place.

“Bastard!” I said. “That bastard!”

Everyone looked at me. We had pushed back from what, in these circumstances, counted as a huge breakfast.

Yulassetar Crade looked at Cord as if to say, Your sib…your problem.

“Who? What?” Cord asked.

“Jesry!”

“A few hours ago you were about to start weeping over Jesry. Now he’s a bastard?”

“This is so typical,” I said.

“He gets launched into space frequently?” Sammann asked.

“No. It’s hard to explain, but…of all of us, he is the one they would pick.”

“Who’s they?” Cord asked. “Obviously this was not a Convox operation.”

“True. But the Sæcular Power must have gone to the hierarchs at Tredegarh and said ‘give us four of your best’ and this is what they came up with.” I shook my head.

“You must be proud…a little bit,” Cord tried.

I put my hands over my face and sighed. “He gets to go meet aliens. I get to ride on a junk train.” Then I uncovered my face and looked at Gnel. “What do you know about the Warden of Heaven?”

Gnel blinked. He froze for a moment. I had been avoiding religion for so long, and now I’d asked him a direct question about it! His cousin exhaled sharply and looked away, as if he were about to witness a traffic accident.

“They are heretics,” he said mildly.

“Yes, but almost everyone is to you, aren’t they?” I said. “Can you be any more specific?”

“You don’t understand,” Gnel said. “They aren’t just any heretics. They are an offshoot of my faith.” He looked at Yul. “Of our faith.” Cord elbowed Yul just in case he’d missed this.

“Really?” I asked. “An offshoot of the Samblites?” This was news to the rest of us.

“Our faith was founded by Saunt Bly,” Gnel claimed.

“Before or after you ate his—”

“That,” said Gnel, “is an ancient lie invented to make us seem like a bunch of savages!”

“It’s almost impossible to saute a human liver without bruising it,” Yul put in.

“Are you saying that Saunt Bly turned into a Deolater? Like Estemard?”

Gnel shook his head. “It’s a shame you didn’t have an opportunity to talk more with Estemard. He isn’t a Deolater as you would define it—or as I would. Neither was Saunt Bly. And that’s where we differ from the Warden of Heaven people.”

“They think Bly was a Deolater?”

“Yes. Sort of a prophet, according to them, who found a proof of the existence of God and was Thrown Back because of it.”

“That’s funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we’d just tell him ‘nice proof, Fraa Bly’ and start believing in God,” I said.

Gnel gave me a cool stare, letting me know he didn’t believe a word of it. “Be that as it may,” he said levelly, “it’s not the version put out by the Warden of Heaven.”

My mind went back to Apert Eve and the discussion of iconographies with Grandsuur Tamura. “This is an instance of the Brumasian Iconography,” I said.

“What?”

“The Warden of Heaven is putting out the story that there is a secret conspiracy in the mathic world.”

“Yes,” Gnel said.

“Something of great import—in this instance, the existence of God—has been discovered. Most of the avout are pure of heart and want to spread the news. But they are cruelly oppressed by this conspiracy which will stop at nothing to preserve the secret.”

Gnel was getting ready to say something cautious but Yul spoke first: “You nailed it.”

“That is disheartening,” I said, “because of all the iconographies, the ones based on conspiracy theories are the hardest to root out.”

“You don’t say,” Sammann said, looking me in the eye.

I got embarrassed and shut up for a bit. Cord broke the ice: “The Cousins’ ship is still being kept secret. So we don’t know what the Warden thinks about it. But we can guess. They’ll see it as—”

“A miracle,” Yul said.

“A visitation from another world, purer and better than ours,” I guessed.

“Where the evil conspiracy doesn’t exist,” Cord said. “Come to reveal the truth.”

“What about the laser light shining down on the Three Inviolates?” Sammann asked. “How would they interpret that?”

“Depends on whether they know that the Three Inviolates are nuclear waste dumps,” I said.

“What!?” the Crades exclaimed.

“Even if they do know that,” Cord said, “they’d probably give it a more spiritual interpretation.”

Gnel was still a little off balance, but he put in, “The Warden of Heaven sees the Thousanders as the good guys.”

“Of course,” I said. “They know the truth but they can’t get the word out because they’re bottled up by conniving Tenners and Hundreders, is that it?”

“Yes,” Gnel said. “So he would interpret the laser light as—”

“A blessing,” Cord said.

“A benediction,” I said.

“An invitation,” Yul said.

“Boy, are they in for a surprise!” Sammann said delightedly.

“Probably. Maybe. We don’t know. I just hope it isn’t a nasty surprise for Jesry,” I said.

“Jesry the bastard?” Cord said.

“Yeah,” I said, and chuckled. “Jesry the bastard.”

I was feeling good because it felt like we’d gotten through this without having to endure a sermon from Ganelial Crade; but my heart fell into my gut as Cord turned to him and asked, “Where did the Warden part company from your faith, Gnel?” The last part of this sentence was a little rushed and muffled because Yul had playfully reached around her shoulder to clap his hand over her mouth, and she was twisting his fingers backwards as she talked.

“We read the scriptures ourselves in the original Bazian,” Gnel said, “so you might imagine that we are primitive fundamentalists. Maybe we are in that sense. But we aren’t blind to what has happened in the mathic world—Old and New—in the last fifty centuries. The Word of God does not change. The Book does not suffer editing or translation. But what men know and understand outside of the Book changes all the time. That’s what you avout do: try to understand God’s creation without using the direct revelations given to us by God almost six thousand years ago. To us you’re like people who’ve put out your own eyes and are now trying to explore a new continent. You’re grievously handicapped—but for that reason you may have developed senses and faculties we lack.”