“I am so relieved to hear you say so!” said Lodoghir. “I’ll have you in the Procian camp by the time Fraa Erasmas brings me my dessert!”

Paphlagon held his tongue for a moment, dodging laughter, then went on. “I can’t believe all of what I just said without positing some non-mystical, theorically understandable mechanism by which the ‘more Hylaean’ worlds can cause physical changes in the ‘less Hylaean’ worlds that lie ‘downstream’ of them in the Wick. And I see no prima facie reason to assume that all those interactions have to do with isosceles triangles and that the only matter in the whole cosmos that is ever affected just happens to be nerve tissue in the brains of theors! Now that would be an ambitious claim, and a rather strange one!”

“We agree on something!” said Lodoghir.

“A much more economical claim, in the Gardan’s Steelyard sense, is that the mechanism—whatever it is—acts on any matter whether or not that matter is part of a living organism—or a theor! It’s just that there is an observational bias at work.”

A couple of heads nodded.

“Observational bias?” Zh’vaern asked.

Suur Asquin turned to him and said, “Starlight falls on Arbre all the time—even at high noon—but we would never know of the stars’ existence if we slept all night.”

“Yes,” Paphlagon said, “and just as the cosmographer can only see stars in a dark sky, we can only observe the Hylaean Flow when it manifests itself as perceptions of cnoöns in our conscious minds. Like starlight at noon, it is always present, always working, but only noticed and identified as something remarkable in the context of pure theorics.”

“Er, since you Edharians are so adept at burying assertions in your speeches, let me clarify something,” Lodoghir said. “Did you just stake a claim that the Hylaean Flow is responsible for parallel evolution of Arbrans and Geometers?”

“Yes,” said Paphlagon. “How’s that for a speech?”

“Much more concise, thank you,” Lodoghir said. “But you still believe in evolution!”

“Yes.”

“Well, in that case, you must be saying that the Hylaean Flow has an effect on survival—or at least on the ability of specific organisms to propagate their sequences,” Lodoghir said. “Because that’s how we, and the Antarctans, ended up with five fingers, two nostrils, and all the rest.”

“Fraa Lodoghir, you are doing my work for me!”

“Someone has to do it. Fraa Paphlagon, what possible scenario could justify all of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“The Visitation of Orithena was only ten days ago. Givens are still pouring in. You, Fraa Lodoghir, are now on the forefront of research into the next generation of Protism.”

“I can’t tell you how uneasy that makes me feel—really, I’d rather eat what Fraa Zh’vaern is eating. What is that?”

“At last Fraa Lodoghir asks a good question,” said Arsibalt. Emman had yanked us; a boilover demanded our attention. We both knew exactly what Lodoghir was talking about. It was sitting on the stove, and we had been nervously edging around it all evening long. Stewed hair with cubes of packing material and shards of exoskeleton, or something. The hair seemed to be a vegetable. But what was really troubling Lodoghir and the others at the messal was the explosive crunching of the exoskeletons, or whatever they might be, between Zh’vaern’s molars. We could actually hear these noises over the speaker.

Arsibalt looked around, verifying that Emman and I were the only ones in the kitchen. “As a member of an ascetic, cloistered, contemplative order myself,” he said, “I probably ought not level such criticisms against the poor Matarrhites—”

“Oh, go ahead!” Emman said. He was gamely trying to repair the ruptured casserole.

“All right, since you insist!” said Arsibalt. Protecting his hand with a fold of his bolt, he lifted the lid from the stewpot to divulge a bubbling morass of expired weeds, laced with dangerous-looking carapaces. “I think it’s taking things just a little too far to selectively breed, over a period of millennia, foodstuffs that are offensive to all non-Matarrhites.”

“I’ll bet it’s one of those not-as-bad-as-it-looks, -sounds, -feels, and -smells type of things,” I said, holding my breath and approaching the pot.

“How much?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much do you bet?”

“Are you suggesting we try it?”

“I’m suggesting you try it.”

“Why only me?”

“Because you proposed the wager, and you are the theor.”

“What does that make you?”

“A scholar.”

“So you’ll take notes of my symptoms? Design my stained glass window, after I’m dead?”

“Yes, we’ll place it right there,” Arsibalt said, pointing to a smoke-hole in the wall, about the size of my hand.

Emman had drifted closer. Karvall and Tris had come in from the messallan and were standing very close to each other, watching.

Being watched by females changed everything. “What is the wager?” I said. “I am back down to three possessions.” And it was one of the oldest rules in the mathic world that we weren’t allowed to wager the bolt, chord, and sphere.

“Winner doesn’t have to clean up tonight,” Arsibalt proposed.

“Done,” I said. This was easy; all I had to do, to win the bet, was to claim it wasn’t that bad, and not throw up—at least, not in front of Arsibalt. And even if I lost, I got all kinds of childish satisfaction out of Tris’s and Karvall’s exquisitely horrified reactions as I fished something out of the pulp and put it in my mouth. It was a cube of (I guessed) some curd-like, fermented substance, tangled up in wilted fronds, flecked with a few crunchy shards. While I was pursuing the latter with my tongue, the fronds slipped halfway down my gullet and made me swallow convulsively. They dragged the cube down with them, like seaweed killing a swimmer. I had to do a bit of coughing and gagging to get the vegetable matter back up into my mouth where I could chew it decently. This added some drama to the proceedings and made it that much more entertaining to the others. I held up a hand, signaling that all was well, and took my time chewing what was left—didn’t want my innards slashed up by the sharp bits. Finally it all went down in a greasy, fibrous, thorny tangle. I put the odds at 60–40 that it wouldn’t be coming back up. “You know,” I claimed, “it’s not that much worse than just standing over the pot and wondering.”

“What’s it taste like?” Tris asked.

“Ever put your tongue across battery terminals?”

“No, I’ve never even seen a battery.”

“Mmm.”

“Now, as to the wager—” Arsibalt said uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said, “good luck with cleanup. Put your back into it when you are taking care of those casseroles, will you?”

Before Arsibalt could argue the point, his bell rang. Tris and Karvall were laughing at the look on his face as he slunk out of the kitchen.

In the messallan, the doyns had been asking Zh’vaern—much more circumspectly—about his food, but now Fraa Paphlagon took the bit in his teeth again: “Like cosmographers who sleep at day and work at night because that is when the stars can be seen, we are going to have to toil in the laboratory of consciousness, which is the only setting we know of where the effects of the Hylaean Flow are observable.” And then he muttered something to Arsibalt. Then he added: “Though instead of one single HTW we should now speak of the Wick instead; the Flow percolates through a complex network of cosmi ‘more theoric than’ or ‘prior to’ ours.”

Arsibalt returned to the kitchen. “Paphlagon doesn’t want me. He wants you.”

“Why would he want me?” I asked.

“I can’t be sure,” Arsibalt said, “but I was chatting with him yesterday and mentioned some of the conversations you had with Orolo.”