“That’s what I’ve been working on,” said Sammann, nodding thanks to Arsibalt. He took a draught of water. Elkhazg was in a climate that sucked the moisture out of you. “Problem is, Jules is a linguist. Hasn’t paid a lot of attention to this. Knows the timeline in Urnud years—which is their standard unit up there—but not the conversion factor to Arbre years. Anyway, I was able to back it out from some clues—”
“What clues?” Jesry demanded.
“While the rest of us were evacuating Tredegarh, a unit of Valers assaulted the quarters of the so-called Matarrhites, and captured a lot of documents and syndevs before the Urnud/Tro guys could destroy them. My brethren are still virtualizing the syndevs—never mind—but some of the documents have timestamps in Urnud units, which can be matched against recent events on our calendar.”
“Wait a moment, please, how can we even read a document in Urnudan?” Arsibalt asked, sitting down and helping himself to the other heel.
“We can’t. But a cryptanalyst can easily see that many of the documents have the same format, which includes a string of characters readily decipherable as a timestamp. And they have a special, phonetic alphabet for transliterating proper names; they haul it out and dust it off whenever they encounter a new planet. This too is elementary to decipher. So if we see a document that has the phonetic transcription of Jesry and of his loctor at the Plenary—”
“We can infer it must be a report of the Plenary I participated in after I came back from space,” Jesry said, “and we know the Arbre date of that event. Very well. I agree that such givens would enable you to begin estimating a conversion factor relating Arbran to Urnudan years.”
“Yes,” said Sammann. “And there is still some error margin, but I believe that, in Arbran years, the Urnudans began their inter-cosmic journey 910 years ago, plus or minus 20.”
“Somewhere between 890 and 930 years ago,” I translated, but that was the limit of my arithmetical powers so early in the morning. Sammann was glaring fiercely into my eyes, willing me to wake up a little faster, to go the next step, but mere calculation was not my strong suit, especially when I had an audience.
“Between 2760 and 2800 A.R.?” said a new voice: Lio, coming across the cloister with Jules Verne Durand. These two did not look as if they’d only just gotten up; I guessed Lio had been pumping the Laterran for information.
“Yes!” Sammann said. “The time of the Third Sack.”
One of Magnath Foral’s staff came out with a huge bowl of peeled and cut-up fruit and began ladling it into bowls, which we passed around.
Jules tore off a piece of bread and began to eat it. This surprised me at first, since he could not derive any nutritional value from it; but I reasoned it would fill his stomach and make him feel less hungry.
“Wait a second,” Jesry said, “are you trying to develop a theory that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship at work? That the Urnudans began their journey because of events that took place here on Arbre?”
“I’m just saying it is a coincidence that needs looking at,” Sammann said.
We ate and thought. I had a head start on the eating, so I briefed Jesry and Lio—as well as others who drifted in, such as three of the Valers—on the conversations we’d had in the Plurality of Worlds Messal about the Wick and the idea that Arbre might be the HTW of other worlds, such as Urnud. The newcomers then had to be brought up to speed on the first part of this morning’s conversation, so the conversation forked and devolved into a general hubbub for a couple of minutes.
“So information could flow from Arbre to Urnud, in that scenario,” Jesry concluded, loudly enough to shut everyone up and retake the floor. “But why would the Third Sack trigger such behavior on the part of an Urnudan star captain?”
“Fraa Jesry, remember the margin of error that Sammann was careful to specify,” Arsibalt said. “The trigger could have been anything that happened in this cosmos in the four decades beginning around 2760. And I’ll remind you that this would include—”
“Events leading up to the Third Sack,” I blurted.
Silence. Discomfort. Averted gazes. Except for Jules Verne Durand, who was staring right at me and nodding. I recalled his willingness to broach excruciating topics at Messal, and decided to draw strength from that. “I’m done tiptoeing around this topic,” I said. “It all fits together. Fraa Clathrand of Edhar was the tip of an iceberg. Others back then—who knows how many thousands?—worked on a praxis of some kind. Procians and Halikaarnians alike. It’s hard to know the truth of what this praxis was capable of. The parking ramp dinosaur hints at what it could do when they made mistakes. We know what the Sæculars thought of it, how they reacted. The records were destroyed, the practitioners massacred—except in the Three Inviolates. There’s no telling what people like Fraa Jad have been up to since then. I’ll bet they’ve just been nursing it along—”
“Keeping the pilot light burning,” Lio called.
“Yeah,” I said. “But something about what they did, circa 2760, when the praxis reached its zenith, sent out a signal that propagated down the Wick, and was noticed, somehow, by the theors of Urnud.”
“It drew them here, you’re saying,” said Lio, “like a dinner bell.”
“Like the fragrance of this bread,” I said.
“Perhaps it’s not just the smell of the bread that has drawn others to this room, Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt suggested. “Perhaps it is the sound of the conversation. Half-overheard words, not understandable at a distance, but enough to pique the interest of any sentient person in range of the voices.”
“You’re saying that’s what it might have been like to the Urnudan theors on that ship,” I said, “when they received—I don’t know—emanations, hints, signals, percolating down the Wick from Arbre.”
“Precisely,” said Arsibalt.
We all turned to Jules. He had removed some Laterran food from a bag and—having sated his appetite with stuff he could not digest—was now eating a few bites of what his body could use. He noticed the attention, shrugged, and swallowed. “Do not hold your breath waiting for an explanation from the Pedestal. Those of 900 years ago were rational theors, to be sure. But during the long, dark years of their wandering, it became something better recognizable as a priesthood. And the closer these priests get to their god, the more they fear it.”
“I wonder if we might calm them down just a little by getting them to see they’re not actually that close,” Jesry said.
“What do you mean?” Yul asked.
“Fraa Jad’s an interesting guy and all,” Jesry said, “but he doesn’t seem like a god, or even a prophet, to me. Whatever it is that he’s doing when he chants, or plays Teglon all night, I don’t think it is godlike. I think he’s just picking up signals coming to Arbre from farther up the Wick.”
By now everyone had showed up and eaten except for Fraa Jad. We found him sitting in the middle of the Decagon, eating some food that had been brought out to him by the staff. The Decagon looked altogether different. When we had passed across it yesterday, it had been paved in hand-sized clay tiles, dark brown, and grooved: just like the ones I’d played with at Orithena, except proportionally smaller. The groove seemed to run unbroken from one vertex to the opposite—I had not taken the time to verify this, but I assumed it was a correct solution. For those who wanted to try their hands at it, baskets of white porcelain tiles, marked with black glazed lines instead of grooves, had been stacked all around the edges. This morning, though, the baskets were empty, and Fraa Jad was enjoying his breakfast on a seamless white courtyard decorated with a wandering black line. During the night he had tiled the whole thing. When we understood this, we burst into applause. Arsibalt and Jesry were shouting as if at a ball game. The Valers approached Fraa Jad and bowed very low.