As Lodoghir had proceeded through this indictment, his tone had changed: like an Inquisitor at first, but softening as he went on, so that by the time he reached the last part, he seemed regretful. Moved. I was spellbound. Perhaps this Rhetor did have magical powers to reach in and meddle with my brain—to change the past. But much more so, I was almost certain that he was right.

“You still have no evidence—only a good story,” I finally said. “Even if you do find evidence, and prove you’re right, what does it really say about Orolo? How could he have anticipated a civil war among the Geometers? The Geometer who gave the order to drop a rod on Ecba—doesn’t he, or she, and not Orolo, deserve responsibility for the deaths below? So even if some elements of your hypothesis are proved, there is still room for dialog as to Orolo’s state of mind when the glowing cloud struck him down. I think he was accepting a kind of responsibility, yes. But by planting himself on that analemma and waiting to die, I think he was saying something other than what you’re trying to put in his mouth. I think he was saying ‘I stand by what I did in spite of all this.’”

“A bit cheeky, wouldn’t you say? Don’t you think he ought to have deferred to the Sæcular Power? Let them weigh the evidence—make a considered judgment as to how best we ought to treat with the Geometers?” Lodoghir’s eyes glanced to the side, as if to remind me that the Panjandrums were out there in the dark, listening for my answer.

And now I made the only move, out of this whole Dialog, that I was later proud of: I did not say what I was thinking: the Warden of Heaven already tried that, remember? But I didn’t have to. A low murmur had begun to run through the audience, building toward mirth. All I had to do was sit silently and wait for the whole Convox to perceive just how ludicrous my loctor’s statement really was. And—I sensed—this had been a considered move on his part.

“That depends,” I said, “on how it all comes out in the end.”

Lodoghir raised his eyebrows and turned away from me to face the speelycaptor. “And that,” he said, “is the whole point of this Convox. I suppose we ought to get to work.” He made a gesture. The microphones died and the speely screen went dark. Everyone in the nave began talking at once.

I was alone on the platform, and it was dark; Fraa Lodoghir had scurried down the steps, probably so that I could not tear his tongue out with my bare hands. The crew were already dismantling the stage. I took off my microphone, had a good long drink of water, and trudged down the steps, feeling as if I’d just spent an hour as a punching bag for Lio.

A few people seemed to be waiting for me. One in particular caught my eye, because he was a Sæcular, dressed in important-person clothes. He had made up his mind that he was going to be the first person to talk to me, so rather than wait for me to reach the bottom of the steps he bounded up and met me halfway. “Emman Beldo,” he said, and then rattled off the name of some government ministry or other. “Would you mind telling me what the hell that was all about?”

He was younger than he looked in those clothes, I realized: only a few years older than I.

“Why don’t you ask Fraa Lodoghir?” I suggested.

Emman Beldo chose to interpret that as dry humor. “I came here expecting to hear about the Geometers—” he began.

“And instead we talked about consciousness and analemmas.”

“Yeah. Look. Don’t get me wrong. I put in five years as a Unarian…”

“You’re a literate, smart Burger, you read stuff and use your brain for a living, but still you can’t fathom what just happened—”

“When we need to be talking about the threat! And how to address it!”

I lost focus for a moment, gazing down to the base of the stairs where a cluster of fraas and suurs all wanted to talk to me. I was trying to size them up without making eye contact. Some, I feared, styled themselves members of the Lineage and wanted to exchange secret handshakes with me. Others probably wanted to spend the whole afternoon telling me why Evenedric was wrong. There would be hard-core Halikaarnians furious because I had not managed to plane Fraa Lodoghir, and people like Suur Maroa who had specific questions about what I’d seen at Orithena. I was thinking it might be easier to have a regular job like Emman Beldo…

Fraa Lodoghir saved me—sort of. He pushed forward to the base of the steps. He had just finished a heated discussion with a senior hierarch. “Well, now you’ve gone and done it, Fraa Erasmas!” he said.

“Gone and done what, Fraa Lodoghir?”

“Gotten us relegated to the outer darkness—the arse-end of the mathic world, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Wouldn’t that be the Concent of Savant Edhar?”

“No, there’s one place left that’s even worse,” he proclaimed. “The Plurality of Worlds Messal at Avrachon’s Dowment. That is where we will be taking our sustenance until I can get the hierarchs to see reason.”

“Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?”

“You need to pay attention, Fraa Erasmas!”

“Attention to what?”

“Your place in the Convox!”

“And what is my place?”

“Standing behind me while I eat. Folding my napkin when I get up to use the toilet.”

“What!?”

“You are my servitor, Fraa Erasmas, and I am your doyn. I like a damp face-cloth before dinner, warm but not too warm. See to it—if you don’t want to spend the rest of the Convox studying the Book.” He turned and strode out.

Emman Beldo was looking at me interestedly.

I should have been crushed by this terrible news, but I was a little punch-drunk, and it tickled me to see Fraa Lodoghir so irritated.

“Well,” I said to Emman Beldo, “now you have a choice. If you want to learn about the threat posed by the Geometers, you can go anywhere except where I’m going. If you want an answer to why we spoke of such out-of-the-way topics during this Plenary, you can join me and Fraa Lodoghir at the arse-end of the mathic world.”

“Oh, I’ll be there!” he said. “My doyn wouldn’t miss it.”

“And who is your doyn?”

“You and I will address her as ‘Madame Secretary,’” he cautioned me, “but her name is Ignetha Foral.”

The Geometers have us pinned down like a biological sample on a table,” said Ignetha Foral, after we had served the soup. “They can poke and prod us at their leisure, and observe our reactions. When we first became aware that they were in orbit around Arbre, we assumed that something was going to happen soon. But it has been maddeningly slow. The Geometers can get all the water they need from comets, all the stuff they need from asteroids. The only thing they can’t do—we suspect—is go on interstellar voyages. But it could be that they aren’t in that much of a hurry.” She paused to whet her whistle. A bracelet gleamed on her wrist. It looked valuable but not gaudy. Everything about her confirmed what Tulia had told us, months ago, at Edhar: that she came from a moneyed Burger clan with old ties to the mathic world. It wasn’t clear, yet, why she was here, and carrying the impressive-sounding title of “Madame Secretary.” According to the information Tulia had dug up, she had been deposed from her Sæcular job by the Warden of Heaven. But that was old news. The Warden of Heaven had been thrown out of the airlock a few weeks ago. Perhaps, while I’d been distracted on Ecba, the Sæcular Power had reorganized itself, and she’d been dusted off and given a new job.