“Largely because I have a bit of a head start on you.”

I let this polite nothing pass without comment. “Listen, if I can tear you away from Evenedrician datonomy, we have to talk about Sæcular stuff for a minute.”

“By all means,” Orolo said.

“Several of us were Evoked to a Convox at Tredegarh,” I said, for, unbelievably, Orolo had not yet expressed any curiosity as to why or how I’d turned up at Orithena. “One of the others was Fraa Jad, a Thousander. He accompanied me and Arsibalt and Lio to Bly’s Butte—”

“And saw the leaves on the wall of my cell there.”

“He—Jad—figured out quickly—weirdly quickly—that you had gone to Ecba and, I guess, that you had ideas about the Geometers that he wanted to know more of.”

“It was neither quick nor weird,” Orolo said. “All of these matters are connected. It would have been obvious to Fraa Jad as soon as he walked in.”

“How? Do you guys communicate? Violate the Discipline?”

“What do you mean, ‘you guys’? You are carrying around some melodramatic idea of the Lineage, aren’t you?” Orolo said.

“Well, just look at this place!” I protested. “What is going on?”

“If I got interested in meteorology,” Orolo said, “I’d spend a lot of time observing the weather. I would come to have much in common with other weather-watchers whom I’d never met. We would think similar thoughts as a natural result of observing the same phenomena. Nine-tenths of what you think of as mysterious Lineage machinations is explained by this.”

“Except that instead of watching the weather you’re thinking about Evendrician datonomy?”

“Close enough.”

“But there was nothing about Evenedric or datonomy on the wall of your cell for Fraa Jad to see. Just material pertaining to Orithena, and a chart of the Lineage.”

“What you identified as a chart of the Lineage was really a sort of family tree of those who have tried to make sense of the Hylaean Theoric World. And it turns out that if you trace the branches of that tree and, so to speak, prune off all the branches populated by fanatics, Enthusiasts, Deolaters, and dead-enders, you end up with something that doesn’t look so much like a tree any more. It looks like a dowel. It starts with Cnoüs and runs through Metekoranes and Protas and some others, and about halfway along you encounter Evenedric.”

“So Fraa Jad, looking at your tree-pruned-down-to-a-dowel, would guess immediately that you must be working on Evenedrician datonomy.”

“And would assume I was doing so in hopes of gaining upsight as to how the Geometers’ minds must be organized.”

“What about Ecba? How’d he guess you went to Ecba?”

“This math was founded by people who lived in the same cells where Fraa Jad has spent his whole life. He would know or surmise that if I could get to this place they would let me in the gates and provide me with food and shelter—quite obviously a better existence than what I could manage at Bly’s Butte.”

“Okay.” I was feeling relieved of a burden I’d been carrying since that day above Samble. “So there’s not a conspiracy. The Lineage doesn’t communicate through coded messages.”

“We communicate all the time,” Orolo said, “in the way I mentioned.”

“Meteorologists watching the same cloud.”

“That’s good enough for this stage of our conversation,” Orolo said. “But you haven’t yet unburdened yourself of whatever terribly important-seeming message or mission you brought in the gates with you. What errand has Fraa Jad sent you on?”

“He said ‘go north until you understand.’ And I guess that part of the mission is accomplished now.”

“Oh really? I’m pleased that you understand. I’m afraid I am still full of questions about these matters.”

“You know what I mean!” I snapped. “He also implied I was to come back to Tredegarh later. That he’d see to it I didn’t get in trouble. I guess he wanted me to fetch you. To bring you back to the Convox.”

“In case I’d developed any ideas, concerning the Geometers, that might be useful,” Orolo hazarded.

“Well, that’s the point of a Convox,” I reminded him, “to be useful.”

Orolo shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t have enough givens to work with, concerning the Geometers.”

“I’m sure that all the givens that there are to be had, are available at Tredegarh.”

“They are probably collecting exactly the wrong sort of information,” he said.

“So go there and tell them what to collect! Fraa Jad could use your help.”

“For me and Fraa Jad and some others of like mind to try to change the behavior of this Sæcular/Mathic monstrosity called a Convox sounds like politics, which I am infamously bad at.”

“Then let me try to help!” I said. “Tell me what you’ve been doing. I’ll go back to the Convox and look for ways to use it.”

The most charitable way to interpret the look Orolo now gave me was affectionate but concerned. He waited for my brain to catch up with my mouth.

“Okay,” I said, “with a little help from some of the others, maybe.” I was thinking of the conversation I’d had with Tulia before Eliger.

“I can’t advise you on what to do at the Convox,” he finally said, “however, I am happy to explain what I’ve been up to.”

“Okay—I’ll settle for that.”

“It won’t help you—in fact, it’ll probably hurt you—at the Convox. Because it will sound crazy.”

“Fine. I’m used to people thinking that we are crazy because of the whole HTW thing!”

Orolo raised an eyebrow. “You know, on balance I think that what I’m about to discuss with you is less crazy than that. But the HTW”—he nodded in the direction of the Orithena dig—“is a cozy and familiar form of craziness.” He paused for a few moments, returning his gaze to me.

“Who are you talking to?” Orolo asked.

I was wrong-footed by this bizarre question, and took a moment to be certain I’d heard the question right. “I’m talking to Orolo,” I said.

“What is this Orolo? If a Geometer landed here and engaged you in conversation, how would you characterize Orolo to it?”

“As the man—the very complicated, bipedal, slightly hot, animated entity—standing right over there.”

“But depending on how a Geometer sees things, it might respond, ‘I see nothing there but vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves.’”

“Well, ‘vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves’ is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe,” I pointed out, “so if the Geometer was not able to recognize objects any more effectively than that, it could scarcely be considered a conscious being. After all, if it’s having a conversation with me, it must recognize me as—”

“Not so fast,” Orolo said, “let’s say you are talking to the Geometer by typing into a jeejah, or something. It knows you only as a stream of digits. Now you have to use those digits to supply a description of Orolo—or of yourself—that it would recognize.”

“Okay, I’d agree with the Geometer on some way to describe space. Then I’d say, ‘Consider the volume of space five feet in front of my position, about six feet high, two wide, and two deep. The probability waves that we call matter are somewhat denser inside of that box than they are outside of it.’ And so on.”

“Denser, because there’s a lot of meat in that box,” Orolo said, slapping his abdomen, “but outside of it, only air.”

“Yes. I should think any conscious entity should be able to recognize the meat/air boundary. What’s on the inside of the boundary is Orolo.”

“Funny that you have such firm opinions on what conscious beings ought to be able to do,” Orolo warned me. “Let me see…what about this?” He held up a fold of his bolt.

“Just as I can describe the meat/air boundary, I can describe how bolt-stuff differs from both meat and air, and explain that Orolo is wrapped in bolt-stuff.”

“There you go making assumptions!” Orolo chided me.

“Such as?”