“Oh. Thanks a lot!”

“So pick the shrapnel out of your teeth and get in there!”

And that was how I came to spend the entire main course recounting my two Ecba dialogs with Orolo: the first about how, according to him, consciousness was all about the the rapid and fluent creation of counterfactual worlds inside the brain, and the second in which he argued that this was not merely possible, not merely plausible, but in fact easy, if one thought of consciousness as spanning an ensemble of slightly different versions of the brain, each keeping track of a slightly different cosmos. Paphlagon ended up saying it better: “If Hemn space is the landscape, and one cosmos is a single geometric point in it, then a given consciousness is a spot of light moving, like a searchlight beam, over that landscape—brightly illuminating a set of points—of cosmi—that are close together, with a penumbra that rapidly feathers away to darkness at the edges. In the bright center of the beam, crosstalk occurs among many variants of the brain. Fewer contributions come in from the half-lit periphery, and none from the shadows beyond.”

I gratefully stepped back against the wall, trying to fade into some shadows myself.

“I am indebted to Fraa Erasmas for allowing us to sit and eat, when so often we must interrupt our comestion with actual talk,” Lodoghir finally said. “Perhaps we ought to trade places and allow the servitors to sit and eat in silence while they are lectured by doyns!”

Barb cackled. He had lately been showing more and more relish for Lodoghir’s wit, furnishing me with the disturbing insight that perhaps Lodoghir was just a Barb who had become old. But after a moment’s reflection I rejected such a miserable idea.

Lodoghir continued, “I’d like you to know that I fully took up Paphlagon’s earlier point about using consciousness as the laboratory for observing the so-called Hylaean Flow. But is this the best we can do? It is nothing more than a regurgitation of Evenedrician datonomy in its most primitive form!”

“I spent two years at Baritoe writing a treatise on Evenedrician datonomy,” mentioned Ignetha Foral, sounding more amused than angry.

I got out of the room, which seemed more politic than laughing out loud. Back in the kitchen, I poured myself a drink and braced my arms on a counter, taking a load off my feet.

“Are you all right?” Karvall asked. She and I were the only servitors in the room.

“Just tired—that took a lot out of me.”

“Well, I thought you spoke really well—for what that’s worth.”

“Thanks,” I said, “it’s worth a lot, actually.”

“Grandsuur Moyra says we are doing something now.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She believes that the messal is on the verge of coming up with new ideas instead of just talking about old ones.”

“Well, that’s really something, from such a distinguished Lorite!”

“It’s all because of the PAQD, she says. If they hadn’t come and brought new givens, it might never have happened.”

“Well, my friend Jesry will be pleased to hear it,” I said. “He’s wanted it all his life.”

“What have you wanted all your life?” Karvall asked.

“Me? I don’t know. To be as smart as Jesry, I guess.”

“Tonight, you were as smart as anyone,” she said.

“Thanks!” I said. “If that’s true, it’s all because of Orolo.”

“And because you were brave.”

“Some would call it stupid.”

If I hadn’t had that conversation with Ala at breakfast, I’d probably be falling in love with Karvall about now. But I was pretty sure Karvall wasn’t in love with me—just stating facts as she saw them. To stand here and receive compliments from an attractive young woman was quite pleasant, but it was of a whole lesser order of experience from the continuous finger-in-an-electrical-socket buzz that I experienced during even brief interactions with Ala.

I ought to have volleyed some compliments back, but I was not brave in that moment. The Lorites had a kind of grandeur that intimidated. Their elaborate style—shaving the head, performing hours of knotwork just to get dressed—was, I knew, a way of showing respect for those who had gone before, of reminding themselves, every day, just how much work one had to do to get up to speed and be competent to sift new ideas from old. But my knowing that symbolism didn’t make Karvall any more approachable.

We were distracted by Zh’vaern’s strangely inflected voice on the speaker: “Because of the way we Matarrhites keep to ourselves, not even Suur Moyra might have heard of him we honor as Saunt Atamant.”

“I don’t recognize the name,” Moyra said.

“He was, to us, the most gifted and meticulous introspectionist who ever lived.”

“Introspectionist? Is that some sort of a job title within your Order?” Lodoghir asked, not unkindly.

“It might as well be,” Zh’vaern returned. “He devoted the last thirty years of his life to looking at a copper bowl.”

“What was so special about this bowl?” asked Ignetha Foral.

“Nothing. But he wrote, or rather dictated, ten treatises explaining all that went on in his mind as he gazed on it. Much of it has the same flavor as Orolo’s meditations on counterfactuals: how Atamant’s mind filled in the unseen back surface of the bowl with suppositions as to what it must look like. From such thoughts he developed a metatheorics of counterfactuals and compossibility that, to make a long story short, is perfectly compatible with all that was said during our first messal about Hemn space and worldtracks. He made the assertion that all possible worlds really existed and were every bit as real as our own. This caused many to dismiss him as a lunatic.”

“But that is precisely what the polycosmic interpretation is positing,” said Suur Asquin.

“Indeed.”

“What of our second evening’s discussion? Has Saunt Atamant anything to say about that?”

“I have been thinking about that very hard. You see, nine of his treatises are mostly about space. Only one is about time, but it is considered harder to read than the other nine put together! But if there is applicability of his work to the Hylaean Flow, it is hidden somewhere in the Tenth Treatise. I re-read it last night; this was my Lucub.”

“And what did Atamant’s copper bowl tell him of time?” Lodoghir asked.

“I should tell you first that he was knowledgeable about theorics. He knew that the laws of theorics were time-reversible, and that the only way to determine the direction of time’s arrow was to measure the amount of disorder in a system. The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.”

“We have heard of these records before,” Ignetha Foral pointed out. “They are essential to the Hemn space picture.”

“Yes, Madame Secretary, but now let me add something new. It is rather well encapsulated by the thought experiment of the flies, bats, and worms. We don’t give our consciousness sufficient credit for its ability to take in noisy, ambiguous, contradictory givens from the senses, and sort it out: to say ‘this pattern of givens equals the copper bowl that is in front of me now and that was in front of me a moment ago,’ to confer thisness on what we perceive. I know you may feel uncomfortable with religious language, but it seems miraculous that our consciousness can do this.”

“But absolutely necessary from an evolutionary standpoint,” Lodoghir pointed out.

“To be sure! But none the less remarkable for that. The ability of our consciousness to see—not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things—copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas—and making these things available to cognition—that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought. And if consciousness can identify copper-bowlness, why can’t it identify isosceles-triangleness, or Adrakhonic-theoremness?”