“Fine—but my question stands.”

It was unusual for Zh’vaern to become so involved in the dialog. Emman and I confirmed as much by giving each other quizzical looks. Perhaps the Matarrhite was actually getting ready to say something?

“After the Apert of 2700, various theors tried to do various things with Clathrand’s Contention,” Moyra said, “each pursuing a different approach, depending on their understanding of time and their general approach to metatheorics. For example—”

“It is too late in the evening for a recitation of examples,” said Ignetha Foral.

Which chilled the whole room, and seemed to end the discussion, until Zh’vaern, in the ensuing silence, blurted out: “Does this have anything to do with the Third Sack?”

A much longer silence followed.

It was one thing for me and Emman, standing back in the kitchen, to mention this under our breath. Even then, I’d felt excruciatingly awkward. But for Zh’vaern to raise the topic in a messal attended (and under surveillance) by Sæculars, went far, far beyond disastrously rude. To imply that the avout were in any way to blame for the Third Sack—that was mere dinner-party-wrecking rudeness. But to plant such notions in the minds of extremely powerful Sæculars was a kind of recklessness verging on treason.

Fraa Jad finally broke the silence with a chortling noise, so deep that it hardly came through on the sound system. “Zh’vaern violates a taboo!” he observed.

“I see no reason why the topic should be off limits,” Zh’vaern said, not in the least embarrassed.

“How fared the Matarrhites in the Third Sack?” Jad asked.

“According to the iconography of the time, we, as Deolaters, had nothing to do with Rhetors or Incanters and so were considered—”

“Innocent of what we were guilty of?” said Asquin, who seemed to have chosen this moment to stop being nice.

“Anyway,” Zh’vaern said, “we evacuated to an island, deep in the southern polar regions, and lived off the available plants, birds, and insects. That is where we developed our cuisine, which I know many of you find distasteful. We remember the Third Sack with every bite of food we take.”

On the speaker I heard shifting, throat-clearing, and the clink of utensils for the first time since Zh’vaern had rolled his big stink-bomb into the middle of the table. But then he ruined it all by the way he volleyed the question back at Jad: “And your people? Edhar was one of the Inviolates, was it not?” Everyone tensed up again. Clathrand had come from Edhar; Zh’vaern seemed to have been developing a theory that Clathrand’s work had been the basis for the exploits of the Incanters; now he was drawing attention to the fact that Jad’s math had somehow managed to fend off the Sack for seven decades.

“Fascinating!” Emman exclaimed. “How could this get any worse?”

“I’m glad I’m not in there,” Tris said.

“Arsibalt must be dying,” I said. A small noise in the back of the kitchen drew our notice: Orhan, Zh’vaern’s servitor, had been standing there silently the whole time. It was easy to forget he was there when you couldn’t see his face.

“You just got to the Convox, Fraa Zh’vaern,” said Suur Asquin, “and so we’ll forgive you for not having heard, yet, what has become an open secret in the last few weeks: that the Three Inviolates are nuclear waste repositories, and as such were probably protected by the Sæcular Power.”

If this was news to Zh’vaern, he didn’t seem to find it very remarkable.

“This is going nowhere,” announced Ignetha Foral. “Time to move on. The purpose of the Convox—and of this messal—is to get things done. Not to make friends or have polite conversations. The policy of what you call the Sæcular Power toward the mathic world is what it is, and shall not be altered by a faux pas over dessert. The World Burner, you must know, has quite focused people’s minds—at least where I work.”

“Where would you like the conversation to go tomorrow, Madame Secretary?” asked Suur Asquin. I didn’t have to see her face to know that the rebuke had really burned her.

“I want to know who—what—the Geometers are, and where they came from,” said Ignetha Foral. “How they got here. If we have to discuss polycosmic metatheorics all evening long in order to answer those questions, so be it! But let us not speak of anything more that is not relevant to the matter at hand.”

I’d been flattering myself that Fraa Jad might want to talk to me; he had, after all, sent me off on a mission that had almost killed me three times. But unlike Moyra he was not the type to hang around in the kitchen post-messal, rapping with the servitors and washing dishes. By the time we were done cleaning up, he was gone to wherever it was that the Convox stowed Thousanders when not in use.

It was just another reason I wanted to track down Lio. On the drive from Edhar to Bly’s Butte, Fraa Jad had confided in both of us—or so we believed—by dropping the hint that he was unnaturally old. If I were going to seek out Jad and take the dialog to the next stage—whatever that might be—Lio should be there with me.

The only problem was that I seemed to have sprouted an entourage: Emman, Arsibalt, and Barb. If I led those three into a meeting of the seditious conspiracy of which Lio was now part, Arsibalt would black out and have to be dragged back to his cell, Barb would blab it to the whole Convox, and Emman would report us to the Panjandrums.

While mopping the kitchen floor, I hit on the idea of leading them to Jesry’s Lucub instead. With luck, I could shed some or all of them there.

As we were informed while trying to find Jesry—in Emman’s case, by a jeejah message, and for the rest of us, by coded bell-ringing from a carillon in the Precipice—Lucub had been canceled. Everything, in fact, except Laboratorium and Messal had been suspended until further notice, and the only reason we still had Messal was that we had to eat in order to work. The rest of the time, we were supposed to analyze the Geometers’ ship. The Sæculars had syntactic systems for building and displaying three-dimensional models of complicated objects, and so the goal, now, was to create such a model, correct down to the last strut, hatch, and weld, of the starship orbiting our planet—or at least of its outer shell, which was all of it we could see. Emman was proficient in the use of this modeling system, and so he was called away to toil in a Laboratorium with a lot of Ita. As I understood it, he wasn’t actually doing any modeling work—just getting the system to run. Those of us with theorical training had been assigned to new Laboratoria whose purpose was to pore over the phototypes from last night and integrate them into the model.

Some such tasks were more demanding than others. The propulsion system, with jets of plasma interacting with the pusher plate, was difficult even for a Jesry to understand. He’d been assigned to penetrate the mysteries of the X-ray laser batteries. I was on a team analyzing the large-scale dynamics of the entire ship. We assumed that, inside of the icosahedron, some part of it rotated to create pseudo-gravity. So it was a huge gyroscope. When it maneuvered—as it had been forced to, last night—gyroscopic forces must be induced between the spun and despun sections, and those must be managed by bearings of some description. How great were those forces? And how did the thing maneuver, anyway? No jets—no rocket thrusters—had fired. No propulsion charges had detonated. And yet the Hedron had spun around with remarkable adroitness. The only reasonable explanation was that it contained a set of momentum wheels—rapidly spinning gyroscopes—that could be used to store and release angular momentum. Imagine a circular railway built around the inner surface of the icosahedron, making a complete circuit, and a freight train running around it in an eternal loop. If the train applied its brakes, it would dump some of its angular momentum into the icosahedron and force it to spin. By releasing the brakes and hitting the throttle, it could reverse the effect. As of last night, it was obvious that the Hedron contained half a dozen such systems—two, running opposite directions, on each of three axes. How big might they be, how much power could they exchange with the ship? What might that imply about what they were made of? More generally, by making precise measurements of how the Hedron had maneuvered, what could we infer about the size, mass, and spin rate of the inhabited section that was hidden inside?