“Or wishes us to know that they have,” Lodoghir put in.

“Yes, quite…but in any case, each of the four has originated from a cosmos, or a Narrative, or a worldtrack where the constants of nature are ever so slightly different from what they are here.”

No one objected.

Ignetha Foral said, “That to me seems like an almost incredibly strange and remarkable finding, and I don’t understand why we haven’t heard more of it!”

“The results of the tests were not definitive until today’s Laboratorium,” Zh’vaern said.

“This messal seems to have been thrown together immediately afterwards—actually during Inbrase, as a matter of fact,” said Lodoghir.

“There were some who had inklings of these results a day or two ago, in Lucub,” said Paphlagon.

“Then we ought to have been made aware of it a day or two ago,” said Ignetha Foral.

“It is in the nature of Lucub work that it does not get talked about as readily as what is done in Laboratorium,” Suur Asquin pointed out, deftly playing her role as social facilitator, smoother-out of awkward bits. Jad looked at her as if she were a speed bump stretching across the road in front of his mobe.

“But there is another reason, which Madame Secretary might look on a little more benignly,” said Suur Moyra. “The predominant hypothesis, until this morning, was that the propulsion system used by the Geometers to travel between star systems had changed their matter somehow.”

“Changed their matter?”

“Yes. Locally altered the laws and constants of nature.”

“Is that plausible?”

“Such a propulsion device was envisioned two thousand years ago, right here at Tredegarh,” Moyra said. “I brought it up last week. The idea gained currency for a few days. So, you see, it is all my fault.”

“The idea would not have gained currency,” Fraa Jad announced, “but for that many were unsettled, disturbed by talk of other Narratives. They longed for an explanation that would not force them to learn a new way of thinking, and forgot the Rake.”

“Most eloquent, Fraa Jad,” said my doyn. “A fine example of the hidden currents that so often drive what pretends to be rational theoric discourse.”

Fraa Jad fixed Lodoghir with a look that was hard to read—but not what you’d call warm.

I got yanked. I’d learned to recognize Emman’s touch on the rope. Sure enough, he was waiting for me when I entered the kitchen. “The first thing Madame Secretary will say to me in the mobe on her way home is that I have to find my way into the right Lucub.”

“You yanked the wrong guy then,” I said, “I just got out of quarantine this morning.”

“That’s why you’re perfect: you’re going to be in the market.”

The picture, as I’d pieced it together, was that mornings (ante Provener) were spent in Laboratorium. I would go to a specific place and work on a given job with others who’d been similarly assigned. Post Provener, but before Messal, was a part of the day called Periklyne, when people mixed and mingled and exchanged information (such as Laboratorium results) that could be further sorted and propagated in the messals. After Messal was Lucub—burning the midnight oil. Everyone was saying there was going to be a lot of Lucub activity tonight because so much of the workday had been wiped out by the Inbrase and the Plenary. Lucub tended to be where the action was anyway. Everyone here wanted to get things done, but many felt that the structure of Laboratorium, Messal, and so on was only getting in their way. Lucub was a way for them to exercise a little initiative. You might be working with a bunch of lunkheads all morning, the hierarchs might have assigned you to a real snoozer of a messal, but during Lucub you could do what you wanted.

“I’d be happy if you wanted to accompany me to Lucub,” I told Emman—and I meant it. “But you have to understand that I can’t guarantee—”

I was drowned out by indignant shushing from Arsibalt and Karvall.

Barb turned to me and announced: “They want you to be quiet, because they want to hear what is being said in the—”

I shushed Barb. Arsibalt shushed me. Karvall shushed him.

The topic seemed to have turned to the crux of the whole evening’s discussion: how the idea of worldtracks and configuration space were related to the existence of different kinds of matter on “Pangee,” “Diasp,” “Antarct,” “Quator,” and Arbre.

“It was a strong meme, around the time of the Reconstitution,” Moyra was saying, “that the constants of nature are contingent—not necessary. That is, they could have been otherwise, had the early history of the universe been somehow different. As a matter of fact, research into such ideas is how we got newmatter in the first place.”

“So, if I’m following you,” Ignetha Foral said, “the correctness of that idea—that those numbers are contingent—was proved. Proved by our ability to make newmatter.”

“That is the usual interpretation,” said Moyra.

“When you speak of ‘early history of the universe,’” put in Lodoghir, “how early—”

“We are speaking of an infinitesimal snatch of time just after the Big Bang,” Moyra said, “when the first elementary particles congealed out of a sea of energy.”

“And the claim is, it happened to congeal in a particular way,” Lodoghir said, “but it could have congealed a little differently—leading to a cosmos with different constants and different matter.”

“Exactly,” said Moyra.

“How can we translate what’s just been said into the language that Fraa Jad prefers, of Narratives in configuration space?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“I’ll take a crack at it,” said Paphlagon. “If we traced our worldtrack—the series of points through configuration space that is the past, present, and future of our cosmos—backwards in time, we would observe configurations that were hotter and brighter, more closely packed—like running a photomnemonic tablet of an explosion in reverse. It would lead us into regions of Hemn space scarcely recognizable as a cosmos at all: the moments just after the Big Bang. At some point, proceeding backwards, we’d get to a configuration in which the physical constants we’ve been speaking of—”

“Those twenty numbers,” said Suur Asquin.

“Yes, were not even defined. A place so different that those constants would be meaningless—they would have no value, because they still had the freedom to take on any value. Now, up until this point in the story I’m telling you, there really is no difference between the old one-universe picture, and the worldtrack-through-Hemn space picture.”

“Not even when newmatter is taken into account?” asked Lodoghir.

“Not even then, because all the newmatter makers did was to build a machine that could create energies that high, and then make their own little Big Bangs in the lab. But what is new to us now, as of this morning’s Laboratorium findings, is that if you, in the same manner, traced the worldtracks of Antarct, of Pangee, Diasp, and Quator backwards, you would find yourself in a very similar part of Hemn space.”

“The Narratives converge,” said Fraa Jad.

“As you go backwards, you mean,” Zh’vaern said.

“There is no backwards,” said Fraa Jad.

This occasioned a few moments of silence.

“Fraa Jad doesn’t believe in the existence of time,” Moyra said; but she sounded as if she were realizing it and saying it at the same moment.

“Ah, well! Important detail, that,” said Suur Tris, in the kitchen, and for once no one shushed her. For some minutes, we’d all been standing around a set of dessert plates, ready to serve, waiting for the right moment.

“I don’t recommend we get sidetracked on the question of whether time exists,” said Paphlagon, to the almost audible relief of everyone else. “The point is that in that model that views the five cosmi—Arbre, and those of the four Geometer races—as trajectories in Hemn space, those trajectories are extremely close together in the vicinity of the Big Bang. And we might even ask whether they were the same up to a certain point, when something happened that made them split off from one another. Perhaps that is a question for another messal. Perhaps only Deolaters would dare to attempt it.” In the kitchen, we risked glancing at Zh’vaern’s servitor. “In any case, the different worldtracks ended up with slightly different physical constants. And so you could say that even if we were to sit in a room with a Geometer who seemed similar to us, the fact is that they would carry in the very nuclei of their atoms a sort of fingerprint that proved they came from a different Narrative.”