The FAE of this group had said something about Orolo that was actually quite respectful and well put. He had then informed me that I would help them prepare the “givens” for shipment to the Convox, and return to Tredegarh with them the next day. By “givens,” of course, he’d meant the box of vials and the body of the dead Geometer, both of which had been confiscated by the military and kept on ice in a special tent.
Meanwhile, Sammann had been having a similar conversation with one of his brethren; a small detachment of Ita, segregated in their own vehicle.
Thereafter it had mostly been work, which had probably been a good thing, since it had meant less brooding time for me. Since Orolo had traded the rest of his life for the theorical knowledge contained in the body of the Geometer, preparing it for shipment to Tredegarh had given me an opportunity to show it the same respect as I would have shown the body of Orolo, had we been able to give him a normal burial. Two lives had been sacrificed—one of Arbre, one of some other world—to bring us this knowledge.
In what free time I did have, I talked to Cord. At first, I only spoke of my feelings. Later, Cord began to share her views about what had happened, and it became obvious that she was interpreting the whole thing from a Kelx point of view. It seemed that Magister Sark had got himself a convert. His words, back in Mahsht, might have made only a faint impression on her, but something about what we had lived through at Orithena had made it all seem true in her mind. And this didn’t seem like the right time for me to try to convince her otherwise. It was, I realized, like the broken stove all over again. What was the point of my having a truer explanation of these things if it could only be understood by avout who devoted their whole lives to theorics? Cord, independent soul that she was, wouldn’t want to live her life under the sway of such ideas any more than she’d want to cook breakfast with a machine that she couldn’t understand and fix.
Wrung out, purified, shaky but stronger, I wandered around my new home.
Half the kitchen was occupied by bottled water, palletized and stacked. The cupboards had been stocked with an odd mixture of extramuros groceries and fresh produce from the tangles and arboretums of Tredegarh. Some books had been left on the table: a few very ancient spec-fic novels (the originals, machine-stamped on cheap paper, were all dust; these had been copied out by hand on proper leaves) and a dog’s breakfast of philosophy, metatheorics, quantum mechanics, and neurology. Some was famous stuff written by people like Protas, some had been produced by avout toiling in maths I’d never heard of. I concluded that some fid had been deputized to provide me with reading material and had run through a library blindfolded, pawing books off shelves at random.
On my bed lay a new bolt, chord, and sphere, wrapped and knotted into the traditional package. As I undid the knots and folds, kicked off the last of my Ecba garb, and got dressed, everything that had happened since I’d been walked out the Day Gate of Edhar began to seem dreamlike—as far back in the past as the time before I was Collected.
In the kitchen I culled all of the food from the Sæcular world, hiding it in the cupboards, and left the produce out where I could see and smell it. They’d provided me with everything I needed to make bread, so I set about it without thinking. The smell of it permeated the module and drove back the scents of fresh poly, carpet adhesive, and glueboard.
I tried to read one of the metatheorics books while the dough was rising. Just as I was beginning to doze off (the book was impenetrable and my body’s clock was out of synch with the sun) someone tried to scare me to death by pounding on the walls of my trailer. I knew it was Arsibalt by the weight of the impacts. By his footfalls as he prowled around. By the methodical way he pounded on every bit of wall that presented itself—as if I could have missed it the first time.
I opened a window and shouted through steel mesh and cloudy poly-sheet. “It is not made of stone, like the buildings you are accustomed to, and so a little pounding goes a long way.”
A vaguely Arsibalt-shaped ghost centered itself in the aperture. “Fraa Erasmas! How good it is to hear your voice, and squint at your indistinct form!”
“Likewise. Am I still even considered a fraa then?”
“They are far too busy to fit your Anathem into their schedules—don’t flatter yourself.”
A long silence.
“I am so terribly sorry,” he said.
“Me too.” Arsibalt seemed upset, so I nattered on for a while. “You should have seen me an hour ago! I was a mess,” I said. “Am still.”
“You were…there?”
“A couple of hundred feet away, I’d estimate.”
Then he began weeping in earnest. I couldn’t very well go and put my arms around him. I tried to think of something to say. It was harder, I saw, for him. Not that watching Orolo die had been easy for me. But if it had to happen, it was better to have been there and watched it. And better, as well, to have spent a couple of days afterwards with my friends on the beach.
After the contingent from Tredegarh had showed up and told me how it was going to be, I’d sat around a campfire with Cord, Yul, Gnel, and Sammann. It had not been necessary to point out that we five might never be together again.
“They wouldn’t bring me back to Tredegarh just to Anathematize me,” I speculated, “so I guess I’ll go back to being what I was.” I looked around at all of their faces, warm in firelight. “But I’ll never be the same.”
“No kidding,” Yul said, “all those head injuries.”
Ganelial Crade said, “I’m staying with these people.”
This was so unexpected that we’d all been slow to work out what he meant: he was joining the Orithenans. “I’ve talked to Landasher about it,” he went on, amused by how we were reacting. “He says they’ll try me out for a while, and if I’m not too obnoxious, maybe I can stay.”
Yul got up and went around the circle to hug his cousin from behind and pound him on the back. We all toasted him with our poly cups of dyed sugar water.
Heads turned next to Sammann, who threw up his hands and admitted, “All of this has been very good for my reputation and access.” We all hurled mock abuse at him for a while. He soaked it up with a satisfied smile. “I’ll be flying back to the Convox with Fraa Erasmas—probably in a different section of the plane, though.” This moved me, and so I got up, walked over, and embraced him while I was still allowed to.
Finally attention turned to Cord and Yul, who were sitting on a cooler and leaning against each other. “Now that we are Arbre-leading experts on Geometer technology,” Yul began, “we might go out and seek employment as such.”
“Seriously,” Cord said, “there are a lot of people here who want to ask us questions. Since the probe got destroyed, our memories of what we saw are important. We might even end up at Tredegarh.”
“Yul’s rig too,” I remarked. I had a dim memory of its wreckage hurtling past Fraa Orolo. For once, Yul had nothing to say. He just gazed out over the sea and shook his head.
Cord reminded us, “My fetch should be safe at Norslof. Once things have settled down a little, we’ll go back and collect it. Then we were thinking of going up into the mountains for a while—a delayed honeymoon.”
A silence ensued. She let it stretch out just long enough before saying, “Oh, did I mention we’re engaged?”
The previous evening, Yul had approached me with a conspiratorial look and drawn a shiny thing from his pocket: a metal ring that he had cut free from the rigging of the Geometers’ parachute. He’d heated it in a campfire blown white-hot with an improvised bellows, and hammered it into a size that he hoped would fit Cord’s finger.