There might be. The Orithenans had used a system of computational chanting that, it was plain to see, was rooted in traditions that their founders had brought over from Edhar. To that point, it was clearly recognizable to any Edharian. It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies. The permutation was done on the fly by following certain rules, defined using the formalism of cellular automata. After the Second Sack reforms, newly computerless avout had invented this kind of music. In some concents it had withered away, in others mutated into something else, but at Edhar it had always been practiced seriously. We’d all learned it as a sort of children’s musical game. But at Orithena they had been doing new things with it, using it to solve problems. Or rather to solve a problem, the nature of which I didn’t understand yet. Anyway, it sounded good—the results, for some reason, just tended to be more musical than the Edharian version, which was serviceable for computing things, but, as music, could be hard to take. I’d spent enough time among the Orithenans to hear some of it and to gain some familiarity with the system. I’d had one tune in particular stuck in my head during the flight to Tredegarh and my time in quarantine. Maybe if I sang it aloud, it would go away.

Once I’d thought of this, it was the obvious and easy choice. And so, when my turn came, I stepped forward and sang that piece. I sang it freely and easily, because I was not troubled by any second thoughts as to whether it was the right thing to do.

At least, not until it was too late. Because, when I had gotten a few phrases into it, a rumble of astonishment passed like a wave through one wedge of the audience. It wasn’t loud, but it was unmistakable. I couldn’t help glancing toward it, and then I faltered, and almost lost the melody, when I saw that it had come from behind the screen of the Thousanders.

Sensing I might have blundered into some kind of trouble, I did what any guilty fid would do: shot a furtive glance at the hierarchs. They were looking back at me. Most were glassy-eyed, but some were putting their heads together, starting a discussion. One of these, I noticed, was my old friend Varax the Inquisitor.

I actually derived a kind of relief then, from knowing that I was helpless—whatever basket of bugs I had overturned, I couldn’t change the result now. Most of the audience heard nothing remarkable in this piece, and listened politely, so I concentrated on bringing it to a clean finish. But seeing movement in the corner of my eye, I glanced over to see that the guys in the loincloths—who’d appeared to’ve been ignoring the aut so far—had broken ranks, and shifted position so that all of them could get a clear view of me.

When I finished, there ought to have been silence—the polite response to a well-sung number. But some of the Thousanders were still muttering to one another. I even fancied I heard a snatch of music being sung back to me. In the vast swathes of pews behind the other screens, small knots of fraas and suurs were still talking about it, and being shushed by their neighbors.

The men in the loincloths stepped up and did a computational chant of their own. It was weird-sounding in the extreme, being built on modes completely different from ours. It was hard to believe that vocal cords could be trained to make such sounds. But I had the feeling that as a computation it was quite similar to what I’d done. When they got to the end of the sequence, the potbellied one sang a sort of coda that, if I understood it correctly, stated that this was only the latest phrase of a computation that his order had been carrying out continuously for thirty-six hundred years.

The last group were the Matarrhites: one of the very few Mathic orders that believed in God. They were the residuum of a Centenarian order that had gone hundred in the centuries just after the Reconstitution. They wore their bolts over their heads, completely covering their faces, except for a screen across the eyes. They sang a kind of dirge—a lament, I realized, for having been torn from the bosom of their concent, and a warning, as if we needed any, that they weren’t going to hang out with us any more than they absolutely had to. It was well carried off, but struck me as whiny and a bit rude.

These performances were the next-to-last part of the aut of Inbrase. Though I hadn’t fully understood it at the time, we had already, earlier in the aut, been struck off the register of peregrins and formally enrolled in the Convox. We had renewed our vows, and funny-looking documents, hand-written on animal skin, had been despatched to our home concents letting them know we’d arrived. The songs we’d just sung represented our first, albeit symbolic, contributions to whatever it was the Convox was supposed to be doing. All that remained was to stand there while everyone else—the thousands behind the screens—stood up to sing a canticle stating that our contributions were duly accepted and that they were glad to have us. During the final verse, the hierarchs began parading out through the screen into the Unarians’ nave. We, the Inbrase groups, followed them in the same order as before. I brought up the rear. We had (at least symbolically) entered through the Day Gate and the visitors’ nave, as Sæculars, and now, having become avout once more, we exited into a math. The canticle began to lose cohesion as the last of the hierarchs filed out, and by the time I stepped over the threshold, leaving the chancel empty behind me, the melody had been devoured by the shufflings and mutterings of the Convox taking their leave.

I was on my own, back in the mathic world, officially decontaminated, free to pursue my own interests—for two seconds. Then: “Fraa Erasmas!” someone called out, as if I were being placed under arrest.

I stopped. I was at the head of the Unarian nave, which was huge and insanely magnificent. A couple of hundred avout were already in here. Hundreds more, as well as a few Sæculars, were pouring in through the entrance at the back, quick-walking toward the front to stake out the best pews.

The space between the front row and the screen, which ought to have been left open to provide a clear view of goings-on in the chancel, was cruddy with all sorts of Sæcular equipment. A scaffolding of newmatter tubes had been erected, framing but not blocking the screen, and burly fids were already at work carrying platform-slabs into it and slamming them into place, clamping them together to create a stage, raised above the level of the floor so that people in back could see it. Riggers payed out ropes, allowing a speely projection screen to unfurl until it filled most of the space above the stage. A test pattern flashed across this and was replaced by a live feed from a speelycaptor out in the nave, providing a magnified picture of the stage. Harsh lights began to come on, as if to say “under no circumstances look in this direction!” These were mounted high on scaffold-towers positioned here and there around the space. A bolted and chorded suur walked past me talking into a wireless headset.

The man who’d called out my name was a young hierarch whose sole charge was to channel me to one Fraa Lodoghir: a man in his sixth or seventh decade, dressed in something that was as far evolved from my bolt as a domestic fowl was from a prehistoric reptile. “Fraa Raz, my good young man!” he exclaimed, before the hierarch could trouble with a formal introduction. “Can’t say how much I enjoyed your singing. Where did you pick up that ditty? Somewhere on your world travels?”