Paphlagon had some infighting skills of his own; he simply ignored what Lodoghir had just said. “A couple of weeks ago, at a Plenary, you and some of the other Procians floated the suggestion that the diagram of the Adrakhonic Theorem on the Geometers’ ship was a forgery, inserted into Saunt Orolo’s Phototype by Orolo himself, or someone else at Edhar. Do you now retract that allegation?” And Paphlagon glanced over his shoulder at an astoundingly high-resolution phototype of the Geometers’ ship, taken last night by the largest optical telescope on Arbre, on which the diagram was clearly visible. The walls of the messallan were papered with such. The table was scattered with more.
“There is nothing wrong with mentioning hypotheses in the course of a discussion,” Lodoghir said. “Clearly that particular one happened to be incorrect.”
“I think he just said ‘yes, I withdraw the allegation,’ said Tris, in the kitchen. I had gone back there ostensibly to fulfill my duties, but really to plow through heaps of more phototypes. Everyone in the Convox had been looking at them all day, but we weren’t even close to being tired of it.
“It is such good fortune that this gambit worked,” Emman reflected, gazing fixedly at a grainy close-up of a strut.
“You mean, that we did not get rodded?” Barb asked—sincerely.
“No, that we got pictures,” Emman said. “Got them by doing something clever, here.”
“Oh—you mean it is good fortune politically?” Karvall asked, a little uncertain.
“Yes! Yes!” Emman exclaimed. “The Convox is expensive! It makes the Powers That Be happy when it yields discernible results.”
“Why is it expensive?” Tris asked. “We grow our own food.”
Emman finally looked up from his pictures. He was checking Tris’s face, in order to see whether she could possibly be serious.
Over the speaker, Paphlagon was saying: “the Adrakhonic Theorem is true here. It’s apparently true in the four cosmi the Geometers came from. If their ship had turned up in some other cosmos, the same as ours, but devoid of sentient beings, would it be true there?”
“Not until the Geometers arrived to say it was true,” said Lodoghir.
Back in the kitchen, I intervened before Emman could blurt out anything he might have to apologize for. “It must be expensive for people like Emman and Ignetha Foral to keep tabs on it,” I pointed out.
“Of course,” Emman said, “but even if you ignore that: there is a huge amount of mathic effort going into it. Thousands of avout working night and day. Sæculars don’t like wasted effort. That goes double for Sæculars who know a thing or two about management.”
Management was a Fluccish word. Faces went blank around the kitchen. I stepped in to translate: “Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox. Lots of people putting in time with no results makes them nervous.”
“Oh, I see,” Tris said, uncertainly.
“How funny!” Karvall said, and went back to work.
Emman rolled his eyes.
“I admit I am no theor,” Ignetha Foral was saying on the speaker, “but the more I hear of this, the less I understand your position, Fraa Lodoghir. Three is a prime number. It is prime today, was prime yesterday. A billion years ago, before there were brains to think about it, it was prime. And if all the brains were destroyed tomorrow, it would still be prime. Clearly its primeness has nothing to do with our brains.”
“It has everything to do with our brains,” Lodoghir insisted, “because we supply the definition of what it is to be a prime number!”
“No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the cnoöns exist independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples’ brains at any given moment,” Paphlagon said. “It is a simple application of the Steelyard. What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras, different sub-disciplines, different cosmi even, time and time again prove the same results—results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof-chains—results, some of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of the physical universe? The simplest answer is that the cnoöns really exist, and are not of this causal domain.”
Arsibalt’s bell jingled. I decided to go in with him. We took down a huge rendering of the icosahedron that had been pinned to a tapestry behind Paphlagon. Karvall and Tris came out and helped take the tapestry down, exposing a wall of dark grey slate, and a basket of chalk. The dialog had turned to an exposition of Complex versus Simple Protism, and so Arsibalt was called upon to draw on that slate the same sorts of diagrams that Fraa Criscan had drawn in the dust of the road up Bly’s Butte when he had explained this topic to me and Lio some weeks earlier: the Freight Train, the Firing Squad, the Wick, and so on. I drifted back and forth between there and the kitchen as the exposition went on. Ignetha Foral had long been familiar with this material, but it was new to several of the others. Zh’vaern, in particular, asked several questions. Emman, for once, understood less of what was going on than his doyn, and so as he and I worked on garnishes for the desserts, I watched his face, and jumped in with little explanations when his eyes went out of focus.
I returned to the messallan to clear plates just as Paphlagon was explaining the Wick: “A fully generalized Directed Acyclic Graph, with no distinction made any more between, on the one hand, so-called theoric worlds, and, on the other, inhabited ones such as Arbre, Quator, and the rest. For the first time, we have arrows leading away from the Arbran Causal Domain towards other inhabited worlds.”
“Do you mean to suggest,” Lodoghir asked, as though not quite believing his ears, “that Arbre might be the Hylaean Theoric World of some other world that has people living on it?”
“Of any number of such worlds,” Paphlagon said, “which might themselves be the HTWs of still other worlds.”
“But how could we possibly verify such a hypothesis?” Lodoghir demanded.
“We could not,” Jad admitted, in his first utterance of the whole evening, “unless those worlds came to us.”
Lodoghir broke into rich laughter. “Fraa Jad! I commend you! What would this messal be without your punch lines? I don’t agree with a word of what you’re saying, but it does make for an entertaining—because completely unpredictable—mealtime!”
I heard the first part of this in person, the back half over the speaker in the kitchen, to which I had repaired with an armload of plates. Emman was standing over the counter where we had spread out the phototypes, thumbing something into his jeejah. He ignored me, but he did glance up and fix his gaze on nothing in particular as Ignetha Foral began to speak: “The material is interesting, the explanation well carried off, but I am at a loss, now. Yesterday evening we were told one story about how Plurality of Worlds might be understood, and it had to do with Hemn space and worldtracks.”
“Which I spent all day explaining to rooms full of bureaucrats,” Emman complained, with a theatrical yawn. “And now this!”
“Now,” Ignetha Foral was saying, “we are hearing an altogether different account of it, which seems to have nothing to do with the first. I cannot help but wonder whether tomorrow’s Messal will bring another story, and the day after that, yet another.”
This touched off a round of not very interesting conversation in the messallan. The servitors pounced and cleared. Arsibalt trudged to the kitchen and busied himself at the keg. “I’d best fortify myself,” he explained, to no one in particular, “as I am condemned to spend the remainder of the evening drawing light bubbles.”