“Something like that.”

“Well, I’m certain that the Lorites are going to have a field day with this. But to me it seems you are saying too little and too much at the same time!” Fraa Lodoghir complained. “Too little, because we here on Arbre have been gazing at our navels for six thousand years and still don’t understand ourselves. So what does it boot us to be as in the dark about the Geometers as we are about our own minds? And too much, because you really are going too far in assuming that the Geometers would think like us at all.”

“As to that last point, one can make strong arguments that all conscious beings must have certain mental processes in common.”

“Strong arguments that no disciple of Halikaarn will examine too closely, I’m sure,” Fraa Lodoghir said dryly, earning a chortle from every Procian at the Convox.

“As to your first point,” I continued, “namely, that we still don’t understand ourselves after six thousand years of introspection, I believe that Orolo was of the view that we might be able to settle some of those ancient questions now that we have access to conscious beings from other star systems.”

This settled the crowd down, and they became so markedly quiet that I knew they must all be concentrating intensely. We had got to the heart of the matter. The Sphenic and Protan systems had been dueling for millennia, and continued the struggle here in this nave under the names of Procians and Halikaarnians, Lodoghir and Erasmas. The only thing they agreed on was the words I’d just put in Orolo’s mouth: that the Geometers might tip the scales to one side or the other. Not necessarily because they would know the answers themselves—they might be just as confused as we were—but because of the new givens we could now obtain. And that was the true goal of many at this Convox. Never mind whatever mission statement the Sæcular Power had handed us.

Even Fraa Lodoghir knew to observe a few moments’ silence, to give this the respect it deserved. Then he said: “If they were smart swarms of simple-minded bugs, or systems of pulsating energy fields, or plants speaking a chemical language to one another—something enormously different from us—then perhaps Orolo’s lucubrations in the extinct pseudo-philosophy of Evenedric might provide us with a few moments’ diversion. But the Geometers look like us. Orolo couldn’t have known that this was the case, so we may forgive him for his temporary delusion.”

“But why do they look like us?” I asked. Realizing, as I said it, that I was making a tactical error by asking a question—even a rhetorical one.

“Let me help you,” Fraa Lodoghir said, magnanimously offering the hopelessly confused fid a helping hand, his giant face, on the screen above, a picture of amused beneficence. “We know that for months and months, before anyone else knew that the Geometers were up there, Orolo was up to something. Using the cosmographical devices at your concent to track the icosahedron.”

“We know exactly what he was up to,” I began.

Fraa Lodoghir cut me off: “We know what you were told: a story that many of your own fraas and suurs refuse to believe! And we know that Orolo was Thrown Back. That his fellow-cultists in the shadowy group known as the Lineage spirited him halfway around the world to Ecba: by an amazing coincidence, the place where the Geometers just happened to make their first landfall—and to do it on the very evening when this Orolo happened to mount a long and exhausting nocturnal expedition to the rarefied heights of an active volcano!”

“It’s not long, it’s not exhausting, and we didn’t go up at night—” I tried to say. But he had reduced me once again to quibbling, and all I’d done was let him draw breath and get a sip of water.

“Help us now, Fraa Erasmas,” Fraa Lodoghir said, in a perfectly reasonable tone. “Help us solve the riddle that has so bedeviled us.”

“Who is ‘us’ in this case?” I demanded.

“Those, here at the Convox, who sense that there is something more to Orolo than what we’ve been allowed to see on the speely.”

I couldn’t keep the tiredness out of my voice as I answered. “What riddle are you speaking of?”

“How did Orolo signal the Geometers? What trick was he using to send them his secret messages?”

Here, if I’d been having a drink, I’d have spat it out. Fraa Lodoghir’s statement raised a commotion: waves of murmuring, shock, anger, and derisive laughter clashed, lapped, and rolled from one end of the nave to the other. I was too dumbfounded to speak, but merely stood there looking at him for a long while, waiting for him to show signs of embarrassment and withdraw the accusation. But the look on his face was as pleasant, as unself-conscious as it could be. And as his calm, his confidence waxed, mine waned. I wanted so desperately to plane him!

But Orolo’s words came back to me: they deciphered my analemma! As if he had somehow sent them a signal.

Why else would they have chosen to land at Orithena—the very place, in the whole world, where Orolo had sought sanctuary? Why else would Orolo have made the long and hazardous journey to Orithena?

Back to the matter at hand: I dared not enter a serious Dialog with Lodoghir, here, before this audience, on this topic. He’d plane me so badly they’d have to scrub my remains off the floor with a sandblaster. And he’d take Orolo down with me.

My dialog with Fraa Lodoghir was being witnessed by Sæculars. Important Sæculars. Panjandrums, as Orolo would call them. Maybe his sleazy tricks were actually working on them.

What was it people used to say of the Rhetors? That they had the power to alter the past, and that they did so every chance they got.

I had no power to duel a Rhetor. All I could do was speak the truth and hope it might be heard by friends who could wield such power.

“That’s a novel suggestion,” I said. “I don’t know how you do things in the Order of Saunt Proc, but as an Edharian, I would look for evidence.”

“What of the famous Steelyard?” Lodoghir asked.

“The Steelyard favors the simpler hypothesis. Orolo not sending secret messages to an alien starship is simpler than what you are proposing.”

“Oh no, Fraa Erasmas,” said Lodoghir with an indulgent chuckle, “I’ll not let you slip that one past me. Try to remember that intelligent people are listening to us! If Orolo sending messages explains what is otherwise mysterious, then it is the simpler hypothesis!”

“What mysteries do you think it explains?”

“Three, to be exact. Mystery the First: that the probe landed on the ruins of Orithena, an otherwise desolate and uninteresting site whose most conspicuous feature is an analemma, clearly visible from space.”

“Anything is clearly visible from space if you have good enough optics,” I pointed out. “Remember that the Geometers decorated their ship with a proof of the Adrakhonic Theorem. What is more reasonable than for them to land on the Temple of Adrakhones?”

“They must know we’re here,” Lodoghir pointed out. “If they wanted to talk to theors, why not simply land at Tredegarh?”

“Why blast each other with shotguns? You can’t burden me with responsibility for explaining everything that the Geometers do,” I said.

“Mystery the Second: Orolo’s suicide.”

“No mystery there. He made a choice to preserve a priceless specimen.”

“He weighed his own life against that specimen,” Lodoghir said, making a scale-balancing gesture with his two hands. “Mystery the Third: he drew an analemma on the ground in the final instants of his life, and stood on it to meet the fate he had chosen.”

I had nothing to say. It was a mystery to me as well.

“Orolo accepted his responsibility,” Lodoghir said.

“You have completely lost me.”

“Somehow, Orolo sent a message to the Geometers during those months when he was one of the only persons on Arbre who knew they were up there. I speculate that the message took the form of an analemma. A sign, telling the Geometers to make their landfall on the analemma that is—or used to be—so clearly visible at Orithena. Once Thrown Back, he went there, and waited. And lo, the Geometers did make landfall there. But not in the manner that Orolo had, perhaps naively, anticipated. A faction among the Geometers sent down an illicit probe. The alien woman sacrificed her life. The dominant faction retaliated by rodding Ecba, with deadly results at Orithena. Orolo understood that he bore responsibility for what had happened. Throwing the dead woman into the aerocraft was his self-imposed penance, and drawing the analemma on the ground was his way of admitting responsibility for what he had done.”