“I don’t think that the differences between the Fives, the Fours, and the Sixes are germane here,” she finally decided. She turned to look at me. “I just want to know how they smelled.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. For example, you handled the parachute, right?”

“Yes.”

“If you handled a big old parachute from a military depot on Arbre, you’d be able to smell it. Maybe it would smell musty from being wadded up in a sack for a long time.”

“If only I’d had the presence of mind to pay more attention to that!” I said.

“It’s all right,” Suur Maroa said. She was a theor, used to setbacks. “You were kind of busy. Nice job, by the way.”

“Oh thanks.”

“When the cool girl—”

“Cord.”

“Yeah, activated the pressure equalization valves on the hatch, air moved—?”

“In to the capsule,” I said.

“So you didn’t get to smell their atmosphere until after it had been mixed with ours.”

“Correct.”

“Damn.”

“Maybe we should have waited,” I said.

She aimed a sharp look at me. “I don’t recommend you go around saying things like that!”

I was taken aback. She checked herself and went on in a lower voice: “This place is the world capital of know-it-alls. Everyone is jealous. Wishes they’d been there instead of you and a bunch of Lineage weirdos. Thinks they could have done better.”

“Okay, never mind,” I said. “We had to do what we did because we knew the military was coming to screw it up even worse.”

“That’s more like it,” she said. “Back to the olfactory now: do you remember smelling anything, at any time?”

“Yes! We talked about it!”

“Not when that Ita had his speelycaptor on you, you didn’t.”

“Before Sammann arrived. The probe had just landed. Orolo smelled the plume from the engines. He wanted to know if they were using toxic propellants—”

“Wise of him. Some of them are frightening,” Maroa put in.

“But we couldn’t smell anything. Decided it was all steam. Hydrogen/oxygen.”

“That is still a negative result.”

“But later, there was a definite odor inside the probe,” I said. “I remember it now. Associated with the body. I assumed it was some kind of bodily fluid.”

“Assumed, because you didn’t recognize the odor?” Suur Maroa asked, after she had thought about this for as long as she wanted to.

“It was totally new to me.”

“So the Geometers’ organic molecules are capable of interacting chemically with our olfactory systems,” she concluded. “It’s an interesting result. Theors have been breathing down my neck wanting me to answer it—because some of those reactions are quantum-mechanical in nature.”

“Our noses are quantum devices?”

“Yes!” Maroa said, with a bright look that was close to a smile. “Little-known fact.” She stood up and fetched her helmet. “It’s a useful result. We should be able to get a sample from the body and expose it to olfactory tissue in a lab.” She gave me the bright look again. “Thank you!” And, in a completely absurd departure ritual, she pulled her gloves on, and lowered her helmet over her head, which I was sorry to see the last of.

“Wait!” I said. “How could any of this be? How could the Geometers be so like us, and yet made of different matter?”

“You’ll have to ask a cosmographer,” she said. “My specialty is cornering vermin and taking them apart.”

“What does that make me?” I asked, but she was too preoccupied getting her helmet on to catch the joke. She passed out into a kind of airlock that they’d erected outside my front door. The door closed and locked, and the tape dispenser started making rude noises again.

It got dark. I fretted over the contradiction. The Geometers looked like us, but were made of matter so fundamentally different that Maroa had entertained the possibility that we wouldn’t even be able to smell it. Some at the Convox were afraid of space germs; Maroa sure wasn’t.

My being stuck in this box was a byproduct of arguments that people were having in chalk halls a few hundred yards away. I should have paid better attention to Jesry’s chitchat about what a Convox was.

Lio showed up late and made a hooting noise at the window. It was a fake bird call that we had used, back at Edhar, when we were out after curfew.

“I can’t see you at all,” I said.

“Just as well. Bumps and bruises mostly.”

“Been working out with the Valers?”

“That would be much safer. No, I’ve been working out with people who are as clumsy as I am. The Ringing Vale avout watch and laugh.”

“Well, I hope you’re giving as good as you’re getting.”

“That would be satisfying on one level,” he allowed, “but no way to shine in the eyes of my instructors.”

I felt funny talking to a blank square of plastic, so I turned off the lights and sat in the dark with him. For a long time. Thinking, not talking, about Orolo.

“Why are they teaching you how to fight?” I asked. “I thought they had that market cornered.”

“You jumped straight to a pretty interesting question, Raz,” he croaked. His voice had gotten all husky. “I don’t know the answer yet. Just starting to get some ideas.”

“Well, my body clock is screwed up, I’m going to be awake all night, and the books they left me are unreadable. My girlfriend ran off with Jesry. So, I’m happy to sit here and listen to your ideas.”

“What books did they leave you?”

“A hodgepodge.”

“Unlikely. There must be a common thread. You need to get on top of it before your first messal.”

“Jesry used that word. I was trying to parse it.”

“Comes from the diminutive of a Proto-Orth word meaning a flat surface on which food was served.”

“So, ‘small table’—”

“Think ‘small dinner.’ Turns out to be an important tradition here. It’s really different from Edhar, Raz. The way we used to eat—everyone together in the Refectory, carrying their own food around, sitting wherever they felt like it—they have a word for that too, not so complimentary. It is seen as backward, chaotic. Only fids and a few weird, ascetic orders do it. Here it’s all about messals. The maximum head count is seven. That’s considered to be the largest number you can fit around a table such that everyone can hear, and people aren’t always splitting off into side conversations.”

“So, there’s a dining hall somewhere with a lot of seven-person tables in it?”

“No, that’d be too noisy. Each messal is held in a small private room—called a messallan.”

“So, there’s a ring of these messallans, or something, around the Refectory kitchen?”

Lio was chuckling at my naivete. Not in a mean way. He’d been in the same state of ignorance a few weeks ago. “Raz, you don’t get how rich this place is. There is no Refectory—no one central kitchen. It’s all dowments and chapterhouses.”

“They have active dowments? I thought those were abolished—”

“In the Third Sack reforms,” he said. “They were. But you know how Shuf’s Dowment has been fixed up by the ROF? Well, imagine a concent with a hundred places like that—each of them bigger and nicer than Shuf’s ever was. And don’t get me started on the chapterhouses.”

“I feel like a hick already.”

“Just you wait.”

“So there is a separate kitchen—” I stopped, unable to handle such a wild thought.

“A separate kitchen for each messallan—cooking just fourteen servings at a time!”

“I thought you said seven.”

“The servitors have to eat too.”

“What’s a servitor?”

“We are!” Lio laughed. “When they let you out, you’ll be paired with a senior fraa or suur—your doyn. A couple of hours ahead of time, you go to the dowment or chapterhouse where your doyn is assigned for messal, and you and the other servitors prepare the dinner. When the bells ring eventide, the doyns show up and sit down around the table and the servitors bring out the food. When you’re not moving plates around, you stand behind your doyn with your back to the wall.”