About halfway into the four-day cruise I had recovered to the point where I was capable of introspection. I spent a lot of time sitting very still in the ship’s mess, eating. I had to sit still because I’d messed up my ribs and back in the fall, and it hurt to move—even to breathe. The food was good compared to energy bars. Perhaps I ate so much of it in hopes that it would bring up the level of Allswell in my blood and chase the dark thoughts from my head.

Getting me killed couldn’t have been part of Fraa Jad’s plan. Where then had it gone wrong? My foolish choices? The migrant traffic over the pole had been going on at least long enough for Jad to have heard about it—he’d known that a Feral like Orolo would take that route to Ecba. So it was an ancient and settled practice. We’d all underestimated its dangers precisely because it was so ancient. We’d assumed that nothing could go on for so long unless it was safe—the way avout would run things if we were in charge.

But we weren’t in charge and it wasn’t run that way.

Or maybe it was a safe and settled thing most of the time but the military convoy had thrown it into chaos.

Or maybe we’d just been unlucky.

“You look like you’ve been through a harrowing experience.”

I snapped out of it, and looked up by rotating my eyeballs—not my head, as I had a terrible crick in the neck. A man was standing there looking at me. Probably in his third decade. I’d noticed him eyeing me the day before. Now he’d come over and said this to me as a way of striking up a conversation.

I’m sorry to say I broke out laughing. It took me a minute to get it under control.

Harrowing was a thing that we did—literally—to our tangles during the spring. We went through the beds on hands and knees identifying the weeds and rooting them out with hand-hoes, throwing the weeds on a pile to be burned, leaving nothing except churned-up soil, pulverizing the clods in our hands to leave a loose bed for expansion of the tangle plants’ root systems. So when this stranger suggested I’d been through a harrowing experience, my mind went straight to that and I thought he was trying to say that I looked as if I’d been crawling through dirt. Which I did. Or perhaps that I looked like a heap of dead weeds. Which I also did. Finally I remembered that I was extramuros, where the old literal meaning of harrowing had been forgotten thousands of years ago, and it had become a cliche, uprooted from any concrete meaning.

None of this could be explained to the stranger, so all I could do was sit there and helplessly giggle—which made my ribs hurt—and hope he wouldn’t take umbrage and slug me. But he was patient. He even looked a little pained to behold someone in such a pathetic state. Which was fortunate since he was a big man and could have slugged me hard.

This gave me an idea that stopped the giggle. “Hey,” I said, “do you have any spare clothes? I’d buy them from you.”

“You do need clean clothes,” the stranger said. This brought me back to giggling. From time to time I’d get a whiff of myself. I knew it was bad. But I couldn’t very well don my bolt.

“I have more clothes than I need and will gladly part with them,” he said.

He had an odd way of talking. Quasi-literate Sæculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures. They were written in a stilted language that no one ever spoke aloud—except for this guy who was standing in front of me letting fly with words like harrowing.

He went on, “I don’t ask for anything in return. But I do hope you’ll join me for services—after you’ve changed.”

So that was it. This guy wanted to convert me to his ark. He’d been watching me and had picked me out as a wretch—a soul ripe for saving.

I had nothing better to do, and it had become all too obvious that I needed to grow a little wiser in the ways of the Sæcular world. So I threw away my stinking clothes and my suitsack, bathed as best as I could while standing in front of a sink, and put on this guy’s funny-smelling clothes. Then I went to a hot crowded cabin where his ark was holding its services. There were a dozen and a half devotees and one magister—a leathery man named Sark who apparently spent his life banging around on ships like this, ministering to sailors and fishermen.

This was a Kelx—a Triangle ark. Its adherents were called Kedevs. It was a completely different faith from that of Ganelial Crade. It had been invented about two thousand years ago by some ingenious prophet who must have been unusually self-effacing, since little was known about him and he wasn’t worshipped as such. Like most faiths it was as fissured and fractured as the glaciers I’d been walking over lately. But all of its sects and schisms agreed that there was another world outside of and greater—in a sense, more real—than the one we lived in. That in this world there was a robber who had waylaid a family. He’d slain the father outright, raped and killed the mother, and taken their daughter with him as a hostage. Not long after, while trying to evade capture, he’d strangled the innocent girl. But he’d been caught anyway and locked up in a dungeon for a long time (“half of his life”) while waiting for his case to come before a Magistrate. At the trial he had admitted his guilt. The Magistrate had asked if there was any reason why he should not be put to death. The Condemned Man had responded that there was such a reason, one that had come to him during his years in the dungeon. As he had meditated over his hideous crimes, the one thing he’d never been able to chase from his mind was the murder of the girl—the Innocent—because in her there had been the potential to do so many things that could now never be realized. In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in. But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not—no one should ever—be put to death.

The Magistrate upon hearing this had voiced skepticism that the Condemned Man really had it in him to generate a whole world. Taking up the challenge, the Condemned Man had begun to tell the tale of a world he had thought up in his mind and to relate the stories of its gods, heroes, and kings. This had taken up the whole day, so the Magistrate had adjourned the court. But he had warned the Condemned Man that his fate was still in the balance because the world he had invented seemed to be just as full of wars, crimes, and cruelty as the one that they lived in. The Condemned Man’s stay of execution was only as good as the world he had invented. If the various troubles in that world could not be brought to a satisfactory conclusion in tomorrow’s session, he would be executed at sundown.

The next day the Condemned Man had attempted to satisfy the Magistrate, and made a little headway, but in so doing introduced new troubles and gave birth to new characters no less morally ambiguous than the first lot. The Magistrate could not find sufficient grounds to execute him and so had continued the case to the next day, and the next, and the next.

The world that I lived in with Jesry and Lio and Arsibalt, Orolo and Jad, Ala and Tulia and Cord and all the others, was the very world that was being created from day to day in the mind of the Condemned Man in that courtroom. Sooner or later it would all end in a final judgment by the Magistrate. If that—if our—world seemed, on balance, like a decent place to him, he would let the Condemned Man live and our world would go on existing in his mind. If the world, as a whole, only reflected the Condemned Man’s depravity, the Magistrate would have him executed and our world would cease to exist. We could help keep the Condemned Man alive and thus preserve the existence of ourselves and our world by striving at all times to make it a better place.