The Convox was as silent as it was invisible. It was just me and Lodoghir, floating in space on our scrap of plane.

Fraa Lodoghir had given up on getting Jad, and moved on to secondary targets. “I really don’t understand how you think! You say that your objective was to live in the Mathic style? You were doing that already, weren’t you?” He turned to face the crowd in the nave. “Perhaps he just wanted to do it someplace a bit warmer!”

The jest earned laughter from some but I could also hear an indignant strain out there beyond the lights. “Fraa Lodoghir wastes the time of the Convox!” a man called out. “The topic of this Plenary is the Visitation!”

“My loctor has asked me to address him by what he claims is the correct title of Fraa,” Lodoghir said in return, “and as he seems to take such matters so seriously, I am merely attempting to get the facts straight.”

“Well, I’m glad I was able to assist you,” I said. “What would you like to know about the Visitation?”

“Since we’ve all watched the speely that was recorded by your Ita collaborator, I should think that what would be most productive would be for you to relate those parts of your experience that did not make it into the speely. What went on during those rare moments when you were able to tear yourself away from your Ita friend?”

He was giving me so much to object to, that I was forced to make a choice: I had to let the Ita-baiting go for now. The best I could do was give the Ita a name. “Sammann arrived and began to record images a few minutes after the probe landed,” I began. “For several minutes, I saw what he saw.”

“Not so fast, you’re starting in the middle of the story!” Fraa Lodoghir complained, in an indulgent, fatherly style.

“Very well,” I said, “how far back do you think it would be useful for me to go?”

“As much as I’m fascinated by the auts and folkways of the Cult of Orithena,” Fraa Lodoghir said, “we ought to confine ourselves to the Visitation proper. Pray begin at the first moment when it penetrated your awareness that something extraordinary was happening.”

“It looked like a meteorite—which is unusual, but not extraordinary,” I said. “It didn’t burn out instantly, so I thought it must be a big one. At first it was difficult to make sense of its trajectory—until I figured out that it was headed toward us. I can’t tell you at what point I drew the conclusion that it was not a naturally occurring object. We began to run down the mountain. While we were en route, the probe’s parachute deployed.”

“Now, when you say ‘we,’ what size of group are you speaking of?”

Rather than wait for Fraa Lodoghir to drag this out of me, I volunteered: “Two. Orolo and I.”

“Saunt Orolo! Yes, we know about him,” Fraa Lodoghir said. “He’s all over the speely, but we haven’t known until now how he arrived at the scene. He was the first to reach the bottom of the hole, was he not?”

“If by ‘hole’ you mean the excavated Temple of Orithena, yes,” I said.

“But that’s at the foot of the volcano!” he exclaimed, in a tone of voice that somehow managed to accuse me of being such a simpleton that I did not know this.

“I’m aware of it,” I said.

“But now we learn that you and Orolo were running down from the top of the volcano while the probe was parachuting into the hole.”

“Yes.”

“What of the others? Were they so entranced by contemplation of the Hylaean Theoric World that they were unaware that an alien space probe was dropping into the middle of their camp?”

“They stayed up at the rim of the excavation while Orolo ran down to the bottom alone.”

“Alone?”

“Well, I followed him.”

“What on earth were you and Orolo doing on the top of the volcano after dark?” Fraa Lodoghir managed, somehow, to ask this in a tone that elicited some titters from the audience.

“We weren’t on the top—as ought to be obvious, if you think for a moment about what a volcano is.”

This got a whole different kind of laugh. Even Fraa Lodoghir looked faintly amused. “But you were quite high up on its slopes.”

“A couple of thousand feet.”

“Above the cloud layer?” he asked, as if this were extremely significant.

“There were no clouds!”

“I ask you again: why? What were you doing?”

Here I hesitated. I’d have liked nothing better than to help propagate Orolo’s ideas, and I’d never have a better opportunity, what with the whole Convox listening to me. But I’d only gotten to see a fragment of his argument. I didn’t fully get what I’d heard. I knew enough, though, to know that it might lead to talk of Incanters.

“Orolo and I went up the mountain to talk,” I said. “We became quite involved in our dialog, and didn’t notice it was getting dark.”

“When you choose to employ the word dialog it causes me to think that the topic was something more weighty than the charms of your new Orithenan girlfriend,” Fraa Lodoghir said dryly.

Damn, he was good! How could he know so precisely what it would take to fluster me?

Bells began ringing, high up on the Precipice. It sounded like the call to Provener. How did they wind their clock here?

A memory came to me of Lio, a few months ago, winding the clock with two black eyes after he had asked me to punch him in the face. I tried to summon whatever Lio had learned to summon that day. I forced myself to go on as if the blows had never landed.

“This much of your statement is correct, that it was a serious theorical discussion.”

“And what was so much on Orolo’s mind that he had to drag you up a volcano to get it off his chest?”

I was rolling my eyes and shaking my head in amazement.

“Did it have anything to do with the Geometers?” he tried.

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t understand your reticence on this topic. If it relates to the Geometers, it is of interest to the Convox, is it not?”

“I’m reluctant because I only got to hear a small part of his thoughts and I fear I won’t do them justice.”

“Stipulated! Everyone has heard and understood your disclaimer now, so you have no reason to go on hoarding information.”

“Because he was Anathematized, Orolo lost the ability to gather data about the Geometers. He never even saw the only good picture of their ship that he managed to take. So his thinking about them, from that point onward, had to be based on the only givens he still had access to—”

“I thought you just said he had access to no givens.”

“None emanating from the icosahedron.”

“So just what other kind of givens are there?”

“The givens that you and I are taking in all the time, simply by virtue of being conscious, and that we can observe and think about on our own, without any need for scientific instruments.”

Fraa Lodoghir blinked in fake amazement. “Do you mean to claim that the subject of your dialog was consciousness?”

“Yes.”

“Specifically, Orolo’s consciousness? Since that, presumably, is the only one he has access to.”

“His, and mine,” I corrected him, “since I was part of the dialog too, and it was clear that Orolo’s observations of his consciousness tallied with my observations of mine.”

“But I thought you told me, only a minute ago, that this very same dialog was about the Geometers!”

“Yes.”

“But you now contradict yourself by admitting it was about the features shared between your consciousness, and that of Orolo!”

“And that of the Geometers,” I said, “because they clearly possess consciousness.”

“Ohh,” Fraa Lodoghir exclaimed, and got a faraway look in his eyes, as if trying to wrap his mind around something impossibly absurd. “Are you trying to say that just because you and Orolo are conscious, and the Geometers are too (which I’ll give you for the sake of argument), that you can learn something about how the Geometers’ minds work, simply by gazing at your own navel long enough?”