Arsibalt was put on a team using spectroscopy and other givens to figure out which parts of the ship had been forged in which cosmi; or had it all been made in one cosmos? Barb was assigned to make sense of a triangulated network of struts that had been observed projecting from the despun part of the ship. And so on. So six hours now went by during which I was completely absorbed in the problem to which I, and a team of five other theors, had been assigned. I didn’t have a moment to think about anything else until someone pointed out that the sun was rising, and we received a message that food was to be had on the great plaza that spread before the Mynster, at the foot of the Precipice.
Walking there, I tried to force gyroscope problems out of my head for a few minutes and consider the larger picture. Ignetha Foral had made no secret of her impatience yesterday evening. We’d emerged from the messal to find ourselves in a Convox that had abruptly been reorganized—along Sæcular lines. All of us were like praxics now, working on small bits of a problem whose entirety we might never get to see. Was this a permanent change? How would it affect the movement Lio had spoken of? Was it a deliberate strategy by which the Panjandrums intended to snuff that movement out? What Lio had told me had made me anxious, and I’d been afraid of what I might learn if I ever found my way to Ala’s Lucub. So I was relieved that it had been put into suspended animation. The conspiracy could have made no progress last night. But another part of me was concerned about how it might respond to being driven further underground.
Breakfast was being served out of doors, at long tables that the military had set up on the plaza. Convenient for us—but weirdly and intrusively Sæcular in style, and another hint that the Mathic hierarchs had lost or ceded power to the Panjandrums.
Emerging from the line with a hunk of bread, butter, and honey, I saw a small woman just in the act of taking a seat at an otherwise vacant table. I walked over quickly and took the seat across from her. The table was between us, so there was no awkwardness as to whether we should hug, kiss, or shake hands. She knew I was there, but remained huddled over her plate for a long moment, staring at her food, and, I thought, gathering her strength, before she raised her eyes and gazed into mine.
“Is this seat taken?” asked an approaching fraa in a complicated bolt, giving me the sort of ingratiating look I’d learned to associate with those who wanted to suck up to Edharians.
“Bugger off!” I said. He did.
“I sent you a couple of letters,” I said. “Don’t know if you got them.”
“Osa handed one to me,” she said. “I didn’t open it until after what happened with Orolo.”
“Why not?” I asked, trying to make my voice gentle. “I know about Jesry—”
The big eyes closed in pain—no—in exasperation, and she shook her head. “Forget about that. It’s just that too much else has been going on. I’ve not wanted to get distracted.” She leaned back against her folding chair, heaved a sigh. “After the Visitation of Orithena, I thought maybe I had better open up. Zoom out, as the extras say. I read your letter. I think—” Her brow folded. “I don’t know what I think. It’s like I’ve had three different lifetimes. Before Voco. Between Voco and Orolo’s death. And since then. And your letter—which was a respectable piece of work, don’t get me wrong—was written to an Ala two lifetimes gone.”
“I think that we could all tell similar stories,” I pointed out.
She shrugged, nodded, started to eat.
“Well,” I tried, “tell me about your current life, then.”
She looked at me, a little too long for comfort. “Lio told me that you spoke.”
“Yes.”
She finally broke eye contact, let her gaze wander over the breakfast tables, slowly filling up with weary fraas and suurs, and out over the lawns and towers of Tredegarh. “They brought me here to organize people. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”
“But not in the way they wanted?”
She shook her head quickly. “It’s more complicated than that, Erasmas.” It killed me to hear her speak my name. “Turns out that once you get an organization started, it takes on a life—lives by a logic—of its own. I suppose if I’d ever done this before, I’d have known it would be that way—would have planned for it.”
“Well—don’t beat yourself up.”
“I’m not beating myself up. That’s you putting emotions on me. Like clothes on a doll.”
The old feeling—a curious mix of irritation, love, and desire to feel more of it—came over me.
“See, they knew from the start that the Convox was vulnerable. An obvious target, if the pact opened hostilities.”
“The pact?”
“We call it PAQD now for Pangee-Antarct-Quator-Diasp. Less anthropomorphic than Geometers.”
But they are anthropomorphic, I was tempted to say. But I stifled it.
“I know,” she said, eyeing me, “they are anthropomorphic. Never mind. We call them the PAQD.”
“Well, I had been wondering,” I said. “Seems risky to put all the smart people in one square mile.”
“Yeah, but what they have drilled into me, over and over, is that it’s all about risk. The question is, what are the benefits that might be had in exchange for a given risk?”
To me this sounded like the kind of organizational bulshytt that was always being spouted by pompous extras who hadn’t bothered to define their terms. But it seemed weirdly important to Ala that I listen, understand, and agree. She even reached out and put her hand on mine for a few moments, which focused my attention. So I went through a little pantomime of processing what she’d said and agreeing to it. “The benefit, here, being that maybe the Convox could do something halfway useful before it got blown up?” I asked.
That seemed to pass muster, so she plowed ahead. “I was assigned to risk mitigation, which is bulshytt meaning that if the PAQD does anything scary, this Convox is going to scatter like a bunch of flies when they see the flyswatter. And instead of scattering randomly, we are going to do it in a systematic, planned way—the Antiswarm, the Ita have been calling it—and we are going to stay on the Reticulum so that we can continue the essential functions of the Convox even as we are scurrying all over the place.”
“Did you start on this right away? Just after you got Evoked?”
“Yes.”
“So you knew from the outset that there was going to be a Convox.”
She shook her head. “I knew they—we—were laying plans for one. I didn’t know for sure it would actually happen—or who would be called. When it started to materialize, these plans that I’d been making came into sharper focus, took on depth. And then it became obvious to me—was unavoidable.”
“What became obvious?”
“What did Fraa Corlandin teach us of the Rebirth?”
I shrugged. “You studied harder than I. The end of the Old Mathic Age. The gates of the old maths flung open—torn off their hinges, in some cases. The avout dispersed into the Sæculum—okay, I think I see where this is going now…”
“What the Sæcular Power had asked me to lay plans for—without understanding—was in many ways indistinguishable from a second Rebirth,” Ala said. “Because, Raz, not only Tredegarh would open its gates. If it comes to war with the PAQD, all of the concents will have to disperse. The avout will move among—mingle with—blend into the general population. Yet we’ll still be talking to one another over the Reticulum. Which means—”
“Ita,” I said.
She nodded, and smiled, warming to the task, to the picture she was building. “Each cell of wandering avout has to include some Ita. And it won’t be possible to maintain avout/Ita segregation any more. The Antiswarm will have tasks to carry out—not the kinds of things avout have traditionally done. Work of immediate Sæcular relevance.”