“I stole it from a Procian,” he explained.

“Won’t the Procian be needing it?” I asked, my face—I hoped—the picture of mock concern.

“Nah. Redundant.”

The conversation jammer turned into a conversation piece, as my friends gathered round to play with it and chuckle at the funny sounds it made. Yul got it to generate random, profane sentences by cursing into it. But after a few minutes, the voice of Jules Verne Durand—hoarse, but composed—was in our ears telling us that the next phase of the aut was about to begin. Once again we convened at the water’s edge and heard speeches from the four leaders who would be putting pens to paper in a few minutes: first Gan Odru. Then Prag Eshwar: a stocky woman, more grand-auntish than I had envisioned, in a military uniform. Then the Arbran foreign minister, and finally one of the Thousanders who had been hanging around with Fraa Lodoghir. As each of the speakers finished, they stepped aboard the barge. When our Thousander had joined the first three, the oar-ladies rowed them out into the middle. They all took up pens and began to sign. All watched in silence for a few moments. But the signing was lengthy, and so, soon enough, people began muttering to one another. Conversations flourished all over, and people began to mill around.

It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I strayed around behind the inflatable and counted the coffins. One, two, three, four.

“Taking inventory?”

I turned around to find that Fraa Lodoghir had followed me.

I flicked on the conversation jammer, which emitted a stream of profanity in Yul’s voice as I said, “It’s the only way for me to be sure who is still dead.”

“You can be sure now,” he said. “It’s over. The tally will not change.”

“Can you bring people back as well as make them disappear?”

“Not without undoing that.” He nodded at the barge where they were signing the peace.

“I see,” I said.

“You were hoping to get Saunt Orolo back?” he asked gently.

“Yes.”

Lodoghir said nothing. But I was able to work it out for myself. “But if Orolo’s alive, it means Lise is buried at Ecba. We don’t get the intelligence gleaned from her remains—none of this happens. Peace is only compatible with Lise and Orolo being dead—and staying that way.”

“I’m sorry,” Lodoghir said. “There are certain worldtracks—certain states of affairs—that are only compatible with certain persons’ being…absent.”

“That’s the word Fraa Jad used,” I said, “before he turned up absent.”

Fraa Lodoghir looked as if steeling himself to hear some sophomoric outburst from me. I continued, “How about Fraa Jad? Any chance he’ll be present again?”

“His tragic demise is extensively recorded,” said Fraa Lodoghir, “but I’d not presume to say what an Incanter is and is not capable of.” And his gaze fell away from my face and traveled across the milling crowd until it had come to rest, or so I thought, on Magnath Foral. For once, the Heritor of Elkhazg did not have Madame Secretary at his side—she was tending to official duties—and so I walked directly over to him.

“Did you—did we—summon them here?” I asked him. “Did we call the Urnudans forth? Or is it the case that some Urnudan, a thousand years ago, saw a geometric proof in a dream, and turned that into a religion—decided that he had been called to a higher world?”

Magnath Foral heard me out, then turned his face toward the water, drawing my attention to the peace that was being signed there. “Behold,” he said. “There are two Arbrans on that vessel, of coequal dignity. Such a state of affairs has not existed since the golden age of Ethras. The walls of Tredegarh have been brought down. The avout have escaped from their prisons. Ita mingle and work by their sides. If all of these things had occurred as the result of a summoning such as you suppose, would it not be a great thing for the Lineage to have brought about? Oh, I should very much like to claim such credit. Long have my predecessors and I waited for such a culmination. What honors would decorate the Lineage were it all true! But it did not come to pass in any such clean and straightforward manner. I do not know the answer, Fraa Erasmas. Nor will any born of this cosmos until we have taken ship on a vessel such as this, and journeyed on to the next.”

The need for stakes was insatiable. Our volunteers were fashioning them from anything they could find: reinforcing bar cut from buildings that had been splashed across the landscape, twisted angle irons sawed from toppled gantries, splinters of blown-apart trees. Lashed into bundles, they piled up before the flaps of my tent and threatened to block me in.

“I need to deliver those to the survey team on the rim,” I said, “would you like to walk with me?”

Artisan Quin had been sitting in a fetch for six days with Barb. My proposal sounded good to him. We pushed through mildewy canvas and came out into the white light of an overcast morning. Each of us shouldered as many stake-bundles as he thought he could carry, and we began to trudge uphill. Our early trails down from the rim had already been turned into gullies by erosion, so new arrivals were cutting terraces and properly switchbacked paths into the dirt. Hard work, and a good way to sort mere vacationers from those who would stick it out and make their livings at Orolo.

“The first draft of everything is going to be wood and earth,” I told him, as we passed by a mixed team of avout and Sæculars pounding sharpened logs into the ground. “By the time I die, we should have a rough idea of how the place works. Later generations can begin planning how to do it all over again in stone.”

Quin looked dismayed for a moment. Then his face relaxed as he understood that I was talking about dying of old age. “Where are you going to get the stone from?” he asked. “All I see is mud.”

I stopped and turned back to face the crater. It had filled with water as soon as it had cooled down, and so, with the altitude we’d already gained, we could easily see its general shape: an ellipse, oriented northwest to southeast—the direction in which the rod had been traveling. We were above its southeastern end. Its most obvious feature was an island of rubble that rose from the brown water a few hundred yards offshore. But I directed his attention to a barely visible notch in the coastline, miles away. “The river that filled it spills in over yonder, near the other end,” I said. “It’s not easy to make out from here. But if you go up that river a couple of miles, you come to a place where the impact touched off a landslide that exposed a face of limestone. Enough for our descendants to build whatever they want.”

Quin nodded, and we resumed climbing. He was silent for a while. Finally he asked, “Are you going to have descendants?”

I laughed. “It’s already happening! People started getting pregnant during the Antiswarm. We started eating normal food and the men stopped being sterile. The first avout baby was born last week. I heard about it on the Reticulum. Oh, you’ll find our access is a little spotty. For a while Sammann—he’s our ex-Ita—was keeping it running all by himself. But more ex-Ita show up here every day. We have a couple of dozen now.”

Quin wasn’t interested in that part of it. He interrupted me: “So, Barb could one day be a father.”

“Yes. He could.” Then—better late than never—I worked out the implication: “You could be a grandfather.”

Quin picked up the pace—suddenly eager to get Saunt Orolo’s constructed now. Huffing along in his wake, I added: “Of course, that raises the ancient breeding issue. But we know enough now that we can prevent a forking of the race into two species. It puts some responsibility on us to make places like this welcoming for what we used to call extras.”