“A second Praxic Age,” I said.

“Exactly!” She’d become enthusiastic. I felt the excitement too. But I drew back from it, recollecting that it could only come to pass if we got into out-and-out war. She sensed this too, and clamped her face down into the kind of expression I imagined she wore when sitting in council with high military leaders. “It started,” she said, in a much lower voice—and by it I knew she meant the thing Lio had told me of—“it started in meetings with cell leaders. See, the cells—the groups we’re going to break into, if we trigger the Antiswarm—each has a leader. I’ve been meeting with those leaders, giving them their evacuation plans, familiarizing them with who’s in their cells.”

“So that’s—”

“Preordained. Yes. Everyone in the Convox has already been assigned to a cell.”

“But I haven’t—”

“You haven’t been informed,” Ala said. “No one has—except for the cell leaders.”

“You didn’t want to upset people—distract them—there was no point in letting them know,” I guessed.

“Which is about to change,” she said, and looked around as if expecting it to change now. And indeed I noticed that several more military drummons had pulled onto the grounds and parked at one end of this open-air Refectory. Soldiers were setting up a sound system. “That’s why we’re all eating together.” She snorted. “That’s why I’m eating at all. First meal worthy of the name I’ve had in three days. Now I get to relax for a little—let things play out.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Everyone’s going to receive a pack, and instructions.”

“It can’t be random that we’re doing this out of doors under a clear sky,” I observed.

“Now you’re thinking like Lio,” she said approvingly, through a bite of bread. She swallowed and went on, “This is a deterrence strategy. The PAQD will see what we’re up to and, it is hoped, guess that we’re making preparations to disperse. And if they know that we are ready to disperse at a moment’s notice, they’ll have less incentive to attack Tredegarh.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I guess I’ll have many more questions about that in a minute. But you were saying something about the meetings with the cell leaders—?”

“Yes. You know how it is with avout. Nothing gets taken at face value. Everything is peeled back. Dialoged. I was meeting with these people in small groups—half a dozen cell leaders at a time. Explaining their powers and responsibilities, role-playing different scenarios. And it seemed as though every group had one or two who wanted to take it further than the others. To put it in bigger historical perspective, draw comparisons to the Rebirth, and so on. The thing that Lio told you about was an outgrowth of that. Some of these people—I simply couldn’t answer all of their questions in the time allotted. So I put their names on a list and told them, ‘Later we’ll have a follow-up meeting to discuss your concerns, but it’ll have to be a Lucub because I have no time otherwise.’ And the timing just happened—and you can consider this lucky or unlucky, as you like—to coincide with the Visitation of Orithena.”

We were distracted now, as the sound system came alive. A hierarch asked for “the following persons” to come to the front—to approach the trucks, where soldiers were breaking open pallet-loads of military rucksacks, prepacked and bulging. The hierarch had obviously never spoken into a sound amplification device before, but soon enough she got the hang of it and began to call out the names of fraas and suurs. Slowly, uncertainly at first, those who’d been called began to get up from their seats and move up the lanes between tables. Conversation paused for a little while, then resumed in an altogether different tone, as people began to exclaim about it, and to speculate.

“Okay,” I said, “so here you are in a Lucub, in a chalk hall somewhere with all of the pickiest, most obstreperous cell leaders—”

“Who are wonderful, by the way!” Ala put in.

“I can imagine,” I said. “But they are all wanting to go deep on these topics—at the same moment you are getting news of that poor woman from Antarct who sacrificed her life—”

“And of what Orolo did for her,” she reminded me. And here she had to stop talking for a few moments, because grief had overtaken her in an unwary moment. We watched, or pretended to watch, avout coming back to their seats, each with a rucksack slung over one shoulder and a sort of badge or flasher hanging around the neck.

“Anyway,” she said, and paused to clear her throat, which had gone husky. “It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. I’d expected we’d talk until dawn, and never arrive at a consensus. But it was the opposite of that. We walked in with a consensus. Everyone just knew that we had to make contact with whatever faction had sent that woman down. And that even if the Sæculars wouldn’t allow such a thing, well, once we had turned into the Antiswarm—”

“What could they do to stop us?”

“Exactly.”

“Lio said something about using the guidestar lasers on the big telescopes to send signals?”

“Yes. It’s being talked about. Some might even be doing it for all I know.”

“Whose idea was that?”

She balked.

“Don’t get me wrong!” I assured her. “It’s a brilliant idea.”

“It was Orolo’s idea.”

“But you couldn’t have talked to him—!”

“Orolo actually did it,” Ala said, reluctantly, watching me closely to see how I’d react. “From Edhar. Last year. One of Sammann’s colleagues went up to the M & M and found the evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“Orolo had programmed the guidestar laser on the M & M to sweep out an analemma in the sky.”

A week or a month ago, I’d have denied it could possibly be true. But not now. “So Lodoghir was right,” I sighed. “What he accused Orolo of, at the Plenary, was dead on.”

“Either that,” Ala said, “or he changed the past.”

I didn’t laugh.

She continued, “You should know, too, that Lodoghir is one of this group I’ve been telling you about.”

“Fraa Erasmas of Edhar,” called the voice on the speaker.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d better go find out which cell you put me in.”

She shook her head. “It’s not like that. You won’t know that until it’s time.”

“How can we meet up with our cell if we don’t know who to look for?”

“If it happens—if the order goes out—your badge will come alive, and tell you where to go. When you get there,” Ala said, “the other people you will see, are the rest of your cell.”

I shrugged. “Seems sensible enough.” Because she had suddenly become somber, and I couldn’t guess why. She lunged across the table and grabbed my hand. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at me.”

When I looked at her I saw tears in her eyes, and a look on her face unlike any I’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was the same way my face had looked when I had gazed down out of the open door of the aerocraft and recognized Orolo. She was telling me something with that face that she did not have power to put in words. “When you come back to this table, I’ll be gone,” she said. “If I don’t see you again before it happens”—and I sensed this was a certainty in her mind—“you have to know I made a terrible decision.”

“Well, we all do, Ala! I should tell you about some of my recent terrible decisions!”

But she was already shaking me off, willing me to understand her words.

“Isn’t there any way to change your mind? Fix it? Make amends?” I asked.

“No! I mean, I made a terrible decision in the way that Orolo made a terrible decision before the gates of Orithena.”

It took me a few moments to see it. “Terrible,” I said at last, “but right.”

Then the tears came so hard she had to close her eyes and turn her back on me. She let go my hand and began to totter away, shoulders hunched as if she’d just been stabbed in the back. She seemed the smallest person in the Convox. Every instinct told me to run after her, put an arm around her bony shoulders. But I knew she’d break a chair over my head.