“Good stuff!” I said.

“How about you—what results have been produced by your group, Raz?” Barb asked.

I was collecting my things, getting ready to go inside. Arsibalt shuffled over to help me. “It sloshed,” I said.

“Sloshed?”

“When the Hedron made its spin move the other evening, the rotation wasn’t steady. It jiggled a little. We conclude that the spun part contains a large mass of standing water, and when you hit it with a sudden rotation, the water sloshes.” And I went off into a long riff about the higher harmonics of the sloshing, and what it all meant. Barb lost interest and went inside.

“What were you discussing with Fraa Jad?” Arsibalt asked.

I didn’t feel comfortable divulging the part of the talk that had been about praxis, so I answered—truthfully—“The Matarrhites. We’re supposed to keep an eye on them—learn from them.”

“Do you suppose he wants us to spy on them?” Arsibalt asked, fascinated. This gave me the idea that Arsibalt wanted, for some reason, to spy on them, and was looking for Jad’s blessing.

“He said it would be impossible to pay too much attention to the cloaked ones.”

“Is that how he phrased it!?”

“Pretty near.”

“He said ‘cloaked ones,’ rather than ‘Matarrhites’?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not Matarrhites at all!” Arsibalt said in an excited whisper. “I’ll take that if you don’t mind,” I said. For in his eagerness to help, he had reached for my cutting board. I confiscated the knife.

“You think I’m so profoundly insane that I can’t be trusted with sharp objects!” Arsibalt said, crestfallen.

“Arsibalt! If they aren’t Matarrhites, what are they? Panjandrums in disguise?”

He looked as if he were about to spill a great secret, but then Suur Tris came around, and he clammed up.

“I’ll take your hypothesis under advisement,” I said, “and weigh it on the Steelyard against the alternative—which is that the Matarrhites are Matarrhites.”

Fraa Lodoghir said, “We are on the third messal already. The first seemed to be about worldtracks in Hemn space as a way of understanding the physical universe. Which was unobjectionable to me, until it turned out to be a stalking horse for the Hylaean Theoric World. The second was a trip to the circus—except that instead of gawking at contortionists, jugglers, and prestidigitators, we marveled at the intellectual backflips, sword-swallowing, and misdirection in which devotees of the HTW must engage if they are not to be Thrown Back as a religious cult. That’s quite all right, it was good to get it out of our systems, and I commend the Edharian plurality here for having, as it were, laid their cards on the messal. Ha. But what may we now say about the matter at hand—which is, in case anyone has forgotten, the PAQD, their capabilities and intentions?”

“Why do they look like us, for one thing?” asked Suur Asquin. “That is the question that my mind returns to over and over again.”

“Thank you, Suur Asquin!” I exclaimed back in the kitchen. I was scattering bread crumbs over the top of a casserole. “I can’t believe how little attention has been paid to that minor detail.”

“People simply don’t know what to make of it—have no idea where to begin,” said Suur Tris. And as if to confirm this, a welter of voices was coming through on the speaker. I hauled the oven door open and thrust the casserole in, arranging it on the center of a hand-forged iron rack. Fraa Lodoghir was going on about parallel evolution: how, on Arbre, physically similar but totally unrelated species had evolved to fill similar niches on different continents.

“Your point is well taken, Fraa Lodoghir,” said Zh’vaern, “but I believe that the similarities are too close to be explained by parallel evolution. Why do the Geometers have five fingers, one of which is an opposable thumb? Why not seven fingers and two thumbs?”

“Do you have some knowledge of the PAQD that has been withheld from the rest of us?” demanded Lodoghir. “What you say is true of the one specimen we have seen—the Antarct woman. The other three Geometer species might have seven fingers, for all we know.”

“Of course, you are correct,” Zh’vaern said. “But the Antarct-Arbre correspondence, taken alone, seems too great to be accounted for by parallel evolution.”

The point was argued all the way through the soup course. We servitors made our rounds, staggering and sidling through a messallan congested with rucksacks. For we had all been told that one should never let one’s rucksack out of sight—so that, even if the dispersal order were accompanied by a power blackout, or some sort of disaster that filled the air with dust and smoke, one would be able to find it by touch. Since we servitors couldn’t very well carry them up and down the serving corridor, we’d bent the rules by leaving ours lined up along the corridor wall. The doyns kept theirs behind the chairs in the messallan, and flipped their badges back over their shoulders to eat.

Ignetha Foral put a stop to the thumb-and-finger discourse with a glance at Suur Asquin, who silenced the room with another of her magisterial throat-clearings. “In the absence of further givens, the parallel-evolution hypothesis cannot be rationally evaluated.”

“I agree,” said Lodoghir in a wistful tone.

“The alternative hypothesis seems to be some sort of leakage of information through the Wick, if I have been taking up Fraa Paphlagon’s argument?”

Fraa Paphlagon looked a bit uneasy. “The word leakage makes it sound like a malfunction. It is nothing of the kind—just normal flow or, if you will, percolation along the world-DAG.”

“This percolation you speak of: until now, I fancied it was all theors seeing timeless truths about isosceles triangles,” Lodoghir said. “I oughtn’t to be surprised by the ever-escalating grandiosity of these claims, but aren’t you now asking us to believe something even more colossal? Correct me if I’m wrong: but did you just try to link percolation of information through the Wick to biological evolution?”

An awkard pause.

“You do believe in evolution, don’t you?” Lodoghir continued.

“Yes, though it might have sounded strange to someone like Protas, who had frankly mystical pagan views about the HTW and so on,” said Paphlagon, “but any modern version of Protism must be reconcilable with long-established theories, not only of cosmography, but of evolution. However, I disagree with the polemical part of your statement, Fraa Lodoghir. It is not a larger claim, but a smaller, more reasonable one.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I thought that when you claimed more, it was a larger claim?”

“I am only claiming what is reasonable. That—as you yourself pointed out during your Plenary with Fraa Erasmas—tends to be the smallest, in the sense of least complicated, claim. What I claim is that information moves through the Wick in a manner that is somehow analogous to how it moves from past to present. As it moves, one of the things that it does is to excite physically measurable changes in nerve tissue…”

“That,” Suur Asquin said, just to clarify, “being the part where we see truths about cnoöns.”

“Yes,” said Paphlagon, “whence we get the HTW and the theorical Protism that Fraa Lodoghir loves so well. But nerve tissue is just tissue, it is just matter obeying natural law. It is not magical or spiritual, no matter what you might think of my opinions on this.”