“Is this occurring with all of our conversations?” Lio asked. And the tone of his voice told me—as if I ever could have doubted it—that all of this was as new to him as it was to me.

“No. Only some.”

“I propose an experiment,” Jesry said. “Sammann, does it still work?”

“Oh yes. Fraa Jad destroyed only the transmitter. The syndev still functions as if nothing had changed.”

“Are you monitoring the queue now?”

“Of course.”

Jesry disconnected, and motioned for me to do the same. We formed a private connection. Jesry launched into a very old, well-worn dialog that we’d had to memorize as fids: a verbal proof that the square root of two was an irrational number. I did my best to hold up my end of it. When we were finished, we reconnected to the reticule and waited a few seconds. “Nothing,” Sammann said.

Again we disconnected and formed a two-person link.

“Do you remember back at Edhar,” I began, “when we and the other Incanters would sit around after dinner making Everything Killers out of cornstalks and shoelaces?”

“Of course,” Jesry said, “those were really good Everything Killers because they could assassinate filthy Panjandrums like no one’s business.”

“That’ll come in handy when we betray Arbre to the Pedestal,” I pointed out.

And so on in that vein for a couple of minutes. Then we reconnected to the reticule. “There’s a new file,” Sammann announced, “at the head of the queue.”

“Okay,” I announced, “so the Panjandrums seem to be really keen on knowing if we talk about certain things like the Everything Killers.”

“Ha!” Sammann exclaimed. “A new file has just been opened, and it is growing larger the longer…I…keep…talking.”

The topic of the Everything Killers had not yet been broached to the group at large, and so some people had a lot of questions, which Lio fielded. Meanwhile, Jesry and I continued the experiment we had begun, breaking and re-establishing contact with the reticule a couple of dozen times over the course of the following half-hour. Every time we broke away, we’d try a few more words, just to see which topics triggered the automatic recording system. This was a haphazard business, but we were able to discover several more trigger words, including attack, neutron, mass murder, insane, dishonor, unconscionable, refuse, and mutiny.

Every time we reconnected, we heard more ideas for possible trigger words, since the conversation was quite naturally evolving in such a way that all the words listed above, and many more, were frequently put to use. Things were becoming extremely emotional, and it was good in a way that Jesry and I were able to jack in and out of it and treat its contents as an object of theorical study. But after a while it reached a point where we reckoned we had better join and stay joined.

Arsibalt had just asked a rather probing question of the Valers: where did their ultimate allegiance lie?

Fraa Osa was answering: “To my fraas and suurs of the Ringing Vale I have a loyalty that can never be dissolved precisely because it is no rational thing but a bond like that of family. And I will not waste oxygen by discussing all of the nesting and overlapping loyalty groups to which I belong: this cell, the Mathic world, the Convox, the people of Arbre, and the community, extending even beyond the limits of this cosmos, that unites us with the likes of Jules Verne Durand.”

“Say zhoost,” answered the Laterran, which we’d figured out was his way of expressing approval.

“To untangle all acting loyalties and obligations is not possible in the thick of an Emergence, and so one falls back on simple responses that arise from one’s training.”

Jules had not yet been exposed to this concept and so Osa gave him a brief tutorial on Emergence-ology, using as an example the decision tree that a swordfighter must traverse in order to make the correct move during a duel. It was obvious that such a thing was far too complex to be evaluated in a rational way during a rapid exchange of cuts and thrusts, and so it must be the case that sword-fighters who survived more than one or two such encounters must be doing Something Different. The avout of the Ringing Vale had made the study and cultivation of that Something Different their sole occupation. Jules Verne Durand took the point readily. “The analogy works as well with complex board games. We have some on Laterre, similar to yours here in that the tree of possible moves and counter-moves rapidly becomes far too vast for the brain to sort through all possibilities. Ordinators—what you’d call syntactic devices—can play the game in this style, but successful human players appear to use some fundamentally different approach that relies on seeing the whole board and detecting certain patterns and applying certain rules of thumb.”

“The Teglon,” put in Fraa Jad. And he did not need to elaborate on this. We’d all seen the feat he had accomplished at Elkhazg, and it was obvious to all of us that it could not have been done by trial and error. Nor by building outwards from a single starting place. He’d had to grasp the whole pattern at once.

“This is dangerous,” Jesry said flatly. “It leads to saying that we may abandon the Rake and behave like a bunch of Enthusiasts, and everything will work out just fine because we have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosm.”

“What you say is indeed a problem,” said Jules, “but no one here would dare argue that it is possible to win a swordfight or solve the Teglon by behaving so self-indulgently.”

“Jesry is making a straw man argument,” Arsibalt said. “He’s raising a possible future issue. If we agree to proceed along these lines, and reach a point, somewhere down the line, where a difficult decision needs to be made, what grounds will we have for evaluating possible decisions, if we’ve already thrown rational analysis to the wind?”

“The ability to decide correctly at such moments must be cultivated over many years of disciplined practice and contemplation,” said Fraa Osa. “No one would argue that a novice could solve the Teglon simply by trusting his feelings. Fraa Jad developed the ability to do it over many decades.”

“Centuries,” I corrected him, since I saw no benefit, now, in being coy about this. I heard a couple of surprised exclamations over the reticule, but no one said anything for or against the proposition.

Not even Fraa Jad. He did say this: “Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

“Fine,” Jesry said, “but where does it get us? What are we going to do?”

“I think it has already gotten us somewhere,” I said. “When you and I re-joined this dialog a few minutes ago, passions were inflamed and people were still trying to frame the decision in terms of allegiances and loyalties. Fraa Osa has shown that any such approach will fail because we all belong to multiple groups with conflicting loyalties. This made the conversation less emotional. We’ve also developed an argument that it’s not possible to work out all the moves in advance. But as you yourself pointed out, going on naive emotion is bound to fail.”

“So we must develop the same kind of decision-making ability that Fraa Jad employs when he solves the Teglon,” said Jesry, “but that requires time and knowledge. We don’t have time and we don’t have much knowledge.”

“We have two more days,” said Lio.

“And there is much knowledge that we can infer,” said Arsibalt.

“Such as?” Jesry asked in a skeptical tone.

“That Everything Killers might be planted in this equipment. That our purpose might be to deliver them to the Daban Urnud,” Arsibalt said.