“Weapons,” I mouthed. Yul nodded and looked away. Cord looked nauseated. I took my leave, tucking the pills into a fold of my bolt, for I had just noticed Emman Beldo emerging from the inflatable with an aide of, to judge from body language, lesser stature. I yanked out my earbud and tossed it aside. Emman saw me headed his way and told the other to get lost. I met him at the edge of the pool.
“Just a second,” were his first words. Around his neck he had a little electronic device on a lanyard. He turned it on and it began to talk, emitting random syllables and word-fragments in Orth. It sounded like Emman and a couple of other people, recorded and run through a blender. “What is it?” I asked, and before I had reached the end of this short utterance my own voice had been thrown into the blender too. I answered my own question: “A means of defeating surveillance,” I said, “so we can talk freely.”
He made no sign that I was right or wrong, but only looked at me interestedly. “You’ve been through some changes,” he pointed out, making an effort to speak distinctly above the murmur of Emman- and Erasmas-gibberish.
I peeled back my bolt fold and let him see what I’d collected from Yul and Cord. “Under what circumstances,” I said, “are you planning to turn these on?”
“Under the circumstance that I am given the order to do so,” he answered, with a glance back toward the tent.
“You know what I mean.”
“It is clearly a measure of last resort,” Emman said, “when diplomacy fails and it looks like we are about to be killed or taken hostage.”
“I just wonder whether the Panjandrums are even competent to render such judgments,” I said.
“I know paying attention to Sæcular politics isn’t your game,” he said, “but it has gotten a little better since our gracious hosts threw the Warden of Heaven out the airlock. And even more so since the Antiswarm started throwing its weight around.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that, would I?” I pointed out. “Since I’ve been otherwise engaged the last two weeks.”
Emman snorted. “No kidding! Nice job, by the way.”
“Thanks. Some day I’ll tell you stories. But for now—just how, exactly, did the Antiswarm throw its weight around?”
“They didn’t have to say much,” Emman told me. “It was obvious.”
“What was?”
He took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Look. Thirty-seven hundred years ago, the avout were herded into maths because of fear of their ability to change the world through praxis.” He nodded helpfully at where I had tucked the Everything Killers. “Because of clever stunts like that, I guess. So praxis stopped, or at least slowed down to a rate of change that could be understood, managed, controlled. Fine—until these guys showed up.” He raised his head and gazed around. “Turned out that all we’d been doing was losing the arms race to cosmi that hadn’t imposed any such limits on their avout. And guess what? When Arbre decided to fight back a little, who delivered the counterpunch? Our military? The Sæcular Power? Nope. You guys in the bolts and chords. So the Antiswarm has garnered a lot of clout just by doing a lot and saying very little. Hence the concept of the two Magisteria, which is—”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said.
He and I stood there for a few moments, gazing across the elliptical pond at the opposite shore, where processions of Urnudan and Troan dignitaries were emerging from their pavilions, making their way toward the water. The garble-box around Emman’s neck, however, did not know how to shut up.
“So that is the Narrative everyone is working with now?” I asked him.
He looked at me alertly. “I guess you could think of it that way.”
“Well,” I said, “if this thing goes all pear-shaped and some Panjandrum gives you the order to activate the EKs, it’d be a shame if that Panjandrum and you turned out to have the Narrative all wrong, wouldn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” he asked sharply.
“Thirty-seven hundred years ago they rounded us up, yeah. But they didn’t take away our ability to mess with newmatter. In consequence of which, we had the First Sack. Fine. No more newmatter, except for a few exemptions that got grandfathered in: factories where the stuff still gets made, staffed by ex-avout who get Evoked when they are needed. Time passes. We’re still allowed to do sequence manipulation. Things get a little spooky. There’s a Second Sack. No more sequence work, no more syndevs in the concents, except for a few exemptions that get grandfathered in: the Ita, the clocks, the page trees, and the library grapes, and maybe some labs on the outside, staffed by skeleton crews of Evoked and concent-trained praxics like you. Fine. Things are under control now, right? Not much the avout can do if they have nothing, no syndevs, no tools at all except for rakes and shovels, and are being watched over by an Inquisition. Now we’re really under the Sæcular Power’s thumb—until two and half millennia later, when it turns out that sufficiently smart people locked up on crags with nothing to do but think can actually come up with forms of praxis that require no tools and are all the more terrifying for that. So we have a Third Sack—the worst of all, much more savage than the others. Seventy years later the mathic world gets reëstablished. But, you have to ask yourself the obvious question…”
“What got grandfathered in?” Emman said, completing the sentence for me. “What were the special exemptions?” And then there was silence except for the babble coming out of his jammer. Each of us was waiting for the other to finish the sentence—to answer the question. I hoped he might know—and that he might be so forthcoming as to share the answer with me. But from the look on his face it was plain that this was not the case.
So I had to follow the logic myself. Fortunately, Magnath and Ignetha Foral chose this moment to come down to the water’s edge—as it had become obvious that something was about to happen. I looked at them, and Emman Beldo looked with me.
“Those guys,” he said.
“Those guys,” I affirmed.
“The Lineage?”
“Not exactly the Lineage—since that goes all the way back to the time of Metekoranes—but a kind of Sæcular incarnation of it, a dowment that was established and funded around the time of the Third Sack. Tied into the mathic world in all sorts of ways. Owns Ecba and Elkhazg and probably other places besides.”
“Maybe it looks that way to you,” Emman said, “but I can promise you that most of what you call the Panjandrums have never heard of this dowment. It is nothing to them—exerts no influence. Magnath Foral—if they’ve heard his name at all—is just a dried-up, blue-blooded art collector.”
“But that’s how it would happen,” I said. “They would set this thing up after the Third Sack. It would be famous and influential for about ten minutes. But after a few wars, revolutions, and Dark Ages, it would be forgotten. It would become what it is.”
“And what is it?” Emman asked me.
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said. “But I think that what I’m saying is that—”
“We Sæculars are in over our heads here?” Emman suggested. “I’m comfortable with you saying that.”
“But are you comfortable with the practical consequence,” I asked him, “which is—”
“That if I get the order,” he said, with a flick of the eyes at the place where I’d secreted the Everything Killers, “maybe I should ignore it, because it was issued by a clueless Sæcular who has been working from the wrong Narrative?”
“Exactly,” I said. And I noticed him rubbing his jeejah with his thumb. He had gotten a new jeejah since Tredegarh. Most unusual. From hanging around with Cord, I knew some of the terminology: Emman’s jeejah had been milled from a solid billet of alloy, not molded in poly or stamped out of sheet material. Very expensive. Not mass-produced.