I walked up to the truck and got my rucksack and my badge: a rectangular slab, like a small photomnemonic tablet that had been blanked.

Then I went back to work estimating the inertia tensor of the Geometers’ ship.

I slept most of the afternoon and woke up feeling terrible. Just when my body had adjusted to local time, I had messed it up by keeping odd hours.

I went early to Avrachon’s Dowment. This evening’s recipe called for a lot of peeling and chopping, so I brought a knife and cutting board around to the front veranda and worked there, partly to enjoy the last of the sunlight, but also partly in hopes I might intercept Fraa Jad on his way to messal. Avrachon’s Dowment was a big stone house, not quite so fortress-like as some Mathic structures I could name, with balconies, cupolas and bow windows that made me wish I could be a member of it, just so that I could do my daily work in such charming and picturesque surrounds. As if the architect’s sole objective had been to ignite envy in the hearts of avout, so that they’d scheme and maneuver to get into the place. I was fortunate that such an exceptional chain of events had made it possible for me even to sit on its veranda for an hour peeling vegetables. My conversation with Ala had reminded me that I had better take advantage of the opportunity while I could. The Dowment was situated on a knoll, so I had a good view over open lawns that rambled among other dowments and chapterhouses. Groups of avout came and went, some talking excitedly, some silent, hunched over, exhausted. Fraas and suurs were strewn at random over the grounds, wrapped in their bolts, pillowed on their spheres, sleeping. To see so many, clothed in such varied styles, reminded me again of the diversity of the mathic world—a thing I’d never been aware of, until I’d come here—and cast Ala’s talk of a Second Rebirth in a different light. The idea of tearing the gates off the hinges was thrilling in a way, simply because it represented such a big change. But would it mean the end of all that the avout had built, in 3700 years? Would people in the future look with awe at empty Mynsters and think that we must have been crazy to walk away from such places?

I wondered who else might be assigned to my cell, and what tasks we might be assigned by those in charge of the Antiswarm. A reasonable guess was that I’d simply be with my new Laboratorium group, and that we’d go on doing the same sorts of things. Living in rooms in a casino in some random city, toiling over diagrams of the ship, eating Sæcular food brought up by illiterate servants in uniforms. The group included two impressive theors, one from Baritoe and one from a concent on the Sea of Seas. The others were tedious company and I didn’t especially relish the idea of being sent on the road with them.

Occasionally I would glimpse one of the Ringing Vale contingent and my heart would beat a little faster as I imagined what it would be like to be in a cell with them! Rank fantasy, of course—I would be worse than useless in such company—but fun to daydream about. No telling what such a cell would be ordered to do. But it would certainly be more interesting than guessing inertia tensors. Probably something incredibly dangerous. So perhaps it was for the best that they were out of my league.

Or—in a similar yet very different vein—what would Fraa Jad’s cell look like, and what sorts of tasks would they be assigned? How privileged I’d been, in retrospect, to have traveled in a Thousander’s company for a couple of days! As far as I’d been able to make out, he was the only Millenarian in the Convox.

I’d settle for being in a cell with at least one of the old clock-winding team from Edhar. Yet I doubted that this would be the case. Ala was quite obviously troubled by some aspect of the decisions she had made regarding cell assignments, and though I could not know just what was eating at her so, it did serve as a warning that I should not lull myself into imagining a happy time on the road with old friends. The respect—I was tempted to call it awe—with which we Edharians were viewed by many at the Convox made it unlikely that several of us would be concentrated in one cell. They would spread us out among as many cells as possible. We would be leaders, and lonely in the same way Ala was.

Fraa Jad approached from the direction of the Precipice. I wondered if they had given him a billet up on top, in the Thousanders’ math. If so, he must be spending a lot of time negotiating stairs. He recognized me from a distance and strolled right up.

“I found Orolo,” I said, though of course Jad already knew this. He nodded.

“It is unfortunate—what happened,” he said. “Orolo would have passed through the Labyrinths in due time, and become my fraa on the Crag, and it would have been good to work by his side, drink his wine, share his thoughts.”

“His wine was terrible,” I said.

“Share his thoughts, then.”

“He seemed to understand quite a lot,” I said. And I wanted to ask how—had he deciphered coded messages in the Thousanders’ chants? But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. “He thinks—he thought—that you have developed a praxis. I can’t help but imagine that this accounts for your great age.”

“The destructive effects of radiation on living systems are traceable to interactions between individual particles—photons, neutrons—and molecules in the affected organism,” he pointed out.

“Quantum events,” I said.

“Yes, and so a cell that has just undergone a mutation, and one that has not, lie on Narratives that are separated by only a single forking in Hemn space.”

“Aging,” I said, “is due to transcription errors in the sequences of dividing cells—which are also quantum-level events—”

“Yes. It is not difficult to see how a plausible and internally consistent mythology could arise, according to which nuclear waste handlers invented a praxis to mend radiation damage, and later extended it to mitigate the effects of aging and so on.”

And so on seemed to cover an awful lot of possibilities, but I thought better of pursuing this. “You’re aware,” I said, “of how explosive that mythology is, if it gains currency in the Sæculum?”

He shrugged. The Sæculum was none of his concern. But the Convox was a different matter. “Some here want badly to see that mythology promoted to fact. It would give them comfort.”

“Zh’vaern was asking some weird questions about it,” I said, and nodded at a procession of Matarrhites wafting across the lawn some distance away.

It was a gambit. I hoped to bond with Fraa Jad by giving him an opening to agree with me that those people were weird and obnoxious. But he slid around it. “There is more to be learned from them than from any others at the Convox.”

“Really?”

“It would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

Two Matarrhites detached themselves from the procession and set a course for Avrachon’s Dowment. I watched Zh’vaern and Orhan come towards us for a few moments, wondering what Jad saw in them, then turned back to the Thousander. But he had slipped inside.

Zh’vaern and Orhan approached silently and entered the Dowment after greeting me, rather stiffly, on the veranda.

Arsibalt and Barb were a hundred feet behind them.

“Results?” I demanded.

“A piece of the PAQD ship is missing!” Barb announced.

“That structure you’ve been studying—”

“It’s where the missing piece used to be attached!”

“What do you think it was?”

“The inter-cosmic transport drive, obviously!” Barb scoffed. “They didn’t want us to see it, because it’s top secret! So they parked it farther out in the solar system.”

“How about your group, Arsibalt?”

“That ship is patched together from subassemblies built in all four of the PAQD cosmi,” Arsibalt announced. “It is like an archaeological dig. The oldest part is from Pangee. Very little of it remains. There are only a very few odds and ends from Diasp. Most of the ship is made of material from the Antarct and Quator cosmi—of the two, we are fairly certain that Quator was visited more recently.”