“Yes.”

“Do you require—”

“She’s dead,” Suur Maltha said, “we don’t need a medic.” She was speaking bluntly, a little sarcastically, astounded as I had been to realize that the soldiers didn’t know. If they had only asked us, we would have told them; we wouldn’t have been able to shut up. But they hadn’t asked. They didn’t care for our knowledge, our opinions. And so all of us—all the avout—were reacting in the same way to that: to hell with them!

The soldiers began to pop collars off their bandoliers and fit them around the necks of Maltha and her assistants. But halfway through they all stopped. Several of them raised gloves to helmets. I turned around and saw that all of the soldiers on the plaza and around the probe were behaving the same way. I reckoned the jig was up now. Some general, sitting in an office a thousand miles away where he had access to the civilian feeds, was screaming into a microphone that there was a dead alien in the back of the fetch. I supposed that in a moment all heads would turn in our direction, all soldiers would converge here.

But that was not what they did. Instead they all looked up into the sky.

Something was coming.

The hovering aerocraft had received the message too: the pitch of their engines changed, their lights shifted as they spun to new headings, banked, and sidled away, gaining altitude.

The soldiers by the fetch had turned inward on one another, though they kept glancing skywards.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Look at me!” I finally got the leader to swing his face shield in my direction. “Talk to us!” I shouted. “We can’t hear! We don’t know what’s going on!”

“…mumble mumble mumble EVACUATE!” he said.

Ganelial Crade didn’t need to hear that twice. He swung himself up into the cab of the fetch and started the engine. Suur Maltha and one of her assistants climbed into the back with the “casualty.” I decided to circle back to the probe first, just to make sure my friends there had gotten the same message—and to chivvy Orolo along if he decided to be difficult. All around the plaza, soldiers were waving their arms, herding avout toward the base of the ramp. Gnel’s fetch was headed that way at slower than walking pace, pausing here and there to pick up slower-moving avout. Yul’s vehicle had begun to do likewise, and I was comforted to see Cord in the front seat. But the ramp was already jammed with pedestrians, so the vehicles would not be able to go any faster than the slowest could walk.

Or run, as the case might be. “MOVE! MOVE!” someone was shouting. An officer had ripped his helmet off—alien infections be damned—and begun shouting into a loud-hailer. “If you can run, do so! If you can’t, get on the truck!”

I ended up a straggler along with Sammann and Orolo. We jogged toward the ramp. I threw Sammann a questioning look. He shrugged. “They jammed the Ret as soon as they got here,” he said, “and I can’t penetrate their transmissions.”

So I looked at Orolo, who was keeping an eye on the western sky as he jogged along. “You think something else is coming?” I asked.

“Since the probe was launched, about one orbital period has expired,” he pointed out. “So, if the Geometers wanted to drop something on us at the next opportunity, then now would be the time to expect it.”

“Drop something,” I repeated.

“You saw what was done to that poor woman!” Orolo exclaimed. “There is insurrection—perhaps civil war—in the icosahedron. A faction that wishes to share information with us, and another that will kill to prevent it.”

“Kill us, even?”

Orolo shrugged. We had reached the base of the ramp and got stuck in a traffic jam. Scanning the ramp circling round above us, I could see avout and soldiers, all mixed together, running. But some inscrutable law of traffic-jam dynamics dictated that those of us at the bottom were at a perfect standstill. All we could do was wait for it to clear. We were the last avout in the queue; behind us were two squads of soldiers bent under heavy packs, waiting stolidly, as was the timeless lot of soldiers. Behind them, Orithena was depopulated, empty except for the alien probe.

Orolo squared off in front of me and favored me with a bright grin. “Regarding our earlier conversation,” he began, as if inviting me to dialog in the Refectory kitchen.

“Yes? You have something to add?”

“As to the actual substance, no,” he confessed. “But things are about to become quite chaotic indeed, and it’s possible we may get separated.”

“I intend to stay by your side—”

“They may not give us a choice,” he pointed out, running his finger around his collar. “My number is odd, yours is even—perhaps they’ll sort us into different tents, or something.”

The people in front of us finally began to move. Sammann, sensing we were trying to have some kind of private conversation, went ahead. We shouldered and jostled our way onto the lower stretches of the ramp. In a few moments we were walking, then jogging.

Orolo, still casting frequent glances at the western sky, went on: “If you find yourself at Tredegarh, let us say, talking to people of your experiences here, and you tell them about what we spoke of this afternoon, the kind of reaction you will get will depend quite strongly on who they are, what math they came from—”

“As in, Procian versus Halikaarnian?” I asked. “I’m used to that, Orolo.”

“This is a little different,” Orolo said. “Most people, Procians and Halikaarnians alike, will deem it nothing more than idle, metatheorical speculation. Harmless, except insofar as it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if you talk to someone like Fraa Jad…”

He paused. I thought it was only to catch his breath, for we really were running now. Above us, aerocraft were settling in for landings outside the front gates, and the noise of their engines forced Orolo to raise his voice. But when I glanced sideways at him, I thought I saw uncertainty on his face. Not something I’d learned to associate with Pa Orolo. “I think,” he finally said, “I think that they all know this.”

“Know what?”

“That what I told you earlier is true.”

“Oh.”

“That they’ve known it for at least a thousand years.”

“Ah.”

“And that…that they do experiments.”

“What!?”

Orolo shrugged, and got a wry smile. “An analogy: when the theors lost their atom smashers, they turned to the sky and made cosmography their laboratory, the only place remaining to test their theories—to turn their philosophy into theorics. Likewise, when a lot of these people were put together on a crag with nothing to do except ponder the kinds of things you and I were talking of earlier, well…some of them, I believe, devised experiments to prove whether they were speaking truth or nonsense. And out of that arose, over time, through trial and error, a form of praxis.” I looked at him and he winked at me.

“So, you think Fraa Jad sent me here to find out whether you knew?”

“I suspect so, yes,” Orolo said. “Under normal circumstances they might simply have reached down and hauled me up into the Centenarian or Millenarian math, but…” He was scanning the western sky again. “Ah, here it comes now!” he exclaimed, delightedly, as if we had been waiting for a train, and he’d just spied it coming into the station.

A white streak sliced heaven in half, moving west to east, and ending, with no loss of speed, in the caldera of the volcano a few thousand feet above us.

In the moment before the sound reached us, Orolo remarked, “Clever. They don’t trust their aim enough to score a perfect hit on the probe. But they know enough geology to—”

After that I could not hear anything for half an hour. Hearing was worse than useless; I was sorry I’d been born with ears.

Fraa Haligastreme had taught me some geological terms which I will use here. I can imagine Cord shaking her head in dismay, giving me a hard time for using dry technical language instead of writing about the emotional truth. But the emotional truth was a black chaos of shock and fear, and the only way to recount what happened in a sensible way is to give technical details that we only pieced together later.