Humor was the last thing I was looking for here and so astonishment got the better of mirth and I chuckled too little and too late.

“The second Gan was weakened by illness and served for only six years. The third was a young protege of the first; he had a long career, and through the force of his personality and his uncommon intelligence, gained back some of the power that his office had ceded to that of the Prags. Late in his career, he became aware of your summons, and made the decision to alter the trajectory of the Daban Urnud so that it would—as he conceived it—fly into the past. For the signals that he and the others heard, they conceived as ancestral voices calling them home to make the Urnud that should have been but that, through its leaders’ follies, it had failed to become.

“I suppose you have already some notion of the wanderings that followed, the Advents at Tro, Earth, and Fthos and their consequences. My purpose is not to rehearse all of that history but to give an account of our actions here.”

“It will be useful,” Fraa Jad said, “to know what occurred with the Warden of Heaven.”

“For a long time,” said Gan Odru, shifting into a lower gear, as he was now making it up as he went along instead of reading from notes, “the relationship between the Gans and the Prags has been poisoned. The Prags have said that the third Gan was simply wrong. That all the wanderings of the Daban Urnud have been without meaning—simply the endless consequence of an ancient mistake. Believing that, they saw their only purpose as self-preservation. Those who think this way want only to settle down somewhere and go on living. And, with each Advent, some do. We have left Urnudans behind on Tro, Troans behind on Earth, and so on. They find ways to live even though those cosmi are not their own. So, of the cynical ones, the ones who believe it is all a meaningless error, a large fraction are bled off at each Advent. At the same time we are joined by ones from the new cosmos who believe in the quest. So the ship is rebuilt and departs for the next cosmos. At first the Gans have power and the Prags do their bidding. But the journey is long, the quest is forgotten as generations go by, the Prags gain, the Gans lose, power. The Pedestal and the Fulcrum have long been our names for these two tendencies. And so here you see me, virtually alone in this place of ceremony, doing what my predecessors did, but with little respect and no power.

“Thus came we to Arbre. Prag Eshwar, my counterpart, and her followers saw your planet as just another civilization to be raided for its resources, so that the ship could be rebuilt and the journey extended. Yet Eshwar is an intelligent woman who has read our histories and well knows that, in an Advent, the Pedestal and the Prag tend to lose power to the Fulcrum and the Gan. Already she was choosing tactics to forestall this.

“When the Warden of Heaven came to us, it was obvious that he was a fool, a charlatan. We already knew as much, of course, from our surveillance of Arbre’s popular culture. And the Prag had already devised a plan, to draw comparisons between me and this Warden of Heaven. To make his foolishness, his falseness, rub off on me.

“So the Warden of Heaven was brought here in his spacesuit. He kept wanting to take it off. We advised against it. When he came in to this room, he saw it as a kind of holy place, and insisted that the risk of removing his suit was acceptable. That his god would watch over him and keep him safe. So, off came the suit. He became short of breath. Our physicians tried to reassemble the suit around him but this did not help matters, for he had already suffered the bursting of a major blood vessel. The physicians next tried to put him in a cold hyperbaric chamber, a therapy in which they are well practiced. He was stripped naked and readied for the procedure, but it was too late—he died. A debate followed as to what should be done with the body. While some of us debated, overzealous researchers took samples of his blood and tissues, and commenced an autopsy. So the body had already been desecrated, if you will. Prag Eshwar made the decision that any effort to apologize would be taken as a sign of weakness and that any sharing of information would only benefit Arbre. And too, for internal political reasons, she was inclined to show contempt, or at least disregard, for the body—because she had made it into a symbol for me. Hence the style in which the Warden of Heaven was returned.”

“But it backfired,” I said, “didn’t it?”

“Yes. Those of the Fulcrum were embarrassed and ashamed, and conceived a plan to make an exchange of blood for blood. As we had taken samples of blood from the Warden of Heaven’s body, they would convey samples of our blood to the surface of Arbre. We had detected signals from the planet, which, as we later learned, had been sent by Fraa Orolo. These took the form of an analemma. Jules Verne Durand had become the foremost authority on Orth and on the avout. He was covertly sympathetic to the Fulcrum. He interpreted Orolo’s signal as pointing to Ecba, and suggested that it would have profound symbolic value to deliver the samples there. He even volunteered to go down on the probe. But at about the same time he was ordered to go on the raid to the concent of the Matarrhites, and so was no longer available. Lise went in his stead—without his knowledge, of course. For she had learned much of the avout, and even a few words of Orth, from Jules. It went wrong and she was shot while boarding the probe, as you know.”

We let a few moments pass untroubled by words.

“Since then things have moved fast. I would say that Prag Eshwar has done what Prags do, which is—”

“React tactically, with no thought of strategy,” Jad said.

“Yes. It led us to this pass. Thirty-one have been slain by your fraas and suurs—from the Ringing Vale, I presume?”

Fraa Jad made no response, but Gan Odru looked my way, and I nodded. He continued, “Eighty-seven more are held hostage—your colleagues herded them into a chamber and welded the doors shut.”

“A misinterpretation,” Fraa Jad said. “Such people do not take hostages, so the eighty-seven were put in that room to keep them safely out of the way.”

“Prag Eshwar interprets it, rightly or wrongly, as hostage-taking, and prepares a response with one hand. With her other hand she has reached out to me and asked me to discuss matters with you. She is shaken. I don’t really know why. The large bomb that was destroyed has always been a weapon of last resort; no one would seriously consider using it.”

“Pardon me, Gan Odru, but the Pedestal was getting ready to launch it,” I blurted.

“As a threat, yes—to hang above your planet and exert pressure. But that is its only real use. I don’t understand why its loss has shaken Prag Eshwar so deeply.”

“It didn’t,” Fraa Jad said. “Prag Eshwar sensed terrible danger.”

“How would you know this?” Gan Odru asked politely.

Fraa Jad ignored the question. “She might explain it by claiming that she had a nightmare, or that sudden inspiration struck her in the bath, or that she has a gut feeling that tells her she ought to steer a safer course.”

“And is this something that you brought about!?” Gan Odru said, more as exclamation than as question. He was getting very little satisfaction from Fraa Jad, and so turned to look at me. I can’t guess what he saw on my face. Some mix of bemusement and shock. For I had just seen a glimpse of an alternate Narrative in which we had visited appalling destruction upon one of the Orbs.

“That we might send a signal to Prag Eshwar—is that such a difficult thing to believe for you, Gan Odru, the Heritor of a tradition, a thousand years old, founded on the belief that my predecessors summoned you hither?”

“I suppose not. But it is so easy, after all this time, to harbor doubts. To think of it as a religion whose god has died.”