“You could probably talk them into worrying about it. But no, there’s a…there’s some kind of filter that kicks in…” I pondered it for a moment, and shot a glance at Jesry, inviting him to join us. After a few moments he took his hands out of his cloak and stepped forward. “If you worried about pink ones,” he pointed out, “you’d have to worry about blue, green, black, spotted, and striped ones. And not just nerve-gas farters but bomb droppers and fire belchers.”

“Not just dragons but worms, giant turtles, lizards…” I added.

“And not just physical entities but gods, spirits, and so on,” Jesry said. “As soon as you open the door wide enough to admit pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, you have let in all of those other possibilities as well.”

“Why not worry about all of them, then?” asked Fraa Orolo.

“I do!” claimed Arsibalt, who had seen us talking, and come over to find out what was going on.

“Fraa Erasmas,” said Orolo, “you said a minute ago that it would be possible to talk slines into worrying about a pink nerve-gas-farting dragon. How would you go about it?”

“Well, I’m not a Procian. But if I were, I suppose I’d tell the slines some sort of convincing story that explained where the dragons had come from. And at the end of it, they’d be plenty worried. But if Jesry burst in warning them about a striped, fire-belching turtle, why, they’d cart him off to the loony bin!”

Everyone laughed—even Jesry, who as a rule didn’t like jokes made at his expense.

“What would make your story convincing?” Orolo asked.

“Well, it’d have to be internally consistent. And it would also have to be consistent with what every sline already knew of the real world.”

“How so?”

Lio and Tulia were on their way to the Refectory kitchen, where it was their turn to prepare dinner. Lio, having heard the last few lines, chimed in: “You could claim that shooting stars were dragon farts that had been lit on fire!”

“Very good,” said Orolo. “Then, whenever a sline looked up and saw a shooting star, he’d think it was corroboration for the pink dragon myth.”

“And he could refute Jesry,” Lio said, “by saying ‘you idiot, what do striped fire-belching turtles have to do with shooting stars?’” Everyone laughed again.

“This is straight from the later writings of Saunt Evenedric,” Arsibalt said.

Everyone got quiet. We’d thought we were just being playful, until now. “Fraa Arsibalt is jumping ahead,” Orolo said, in a tone of mild protest.

“Evenedric was a theor,” Jesry pointed out. “This isn’t the kind of stuff he would have written about.”

“On the contrary,” Arsibalt said, squaring off, “later in his life, after the Reconstitution, he—”

“If you don’t mind,” Orolo said.

“Of course not,” said Arsibalt.

“Restricting ourselves to nerve-gas-farting dragons, how many colors do you think we could distinguish?”

Opinions varied between eight and a hundred. Tulia thought she could distinguish more, Lio fewer.

“Say ten,” Orolo said. “Now, let us allow for striped dragons with alternating colors.”

“Then there would be a hundred combinations,” I said.

“Ninety,” Jesry corrected me. “You can’t count red/red and so on.”

“Allowing for different stripe widths, could we get it up to a thousand distinguishable combinations?” Orolo asked. There was general agreement that we could. “Now move on to spots. Plaids. Combinations of spots, plaids, and stripes.”

“Hundreds of thousands! Millions!” different people were guessing.

“And we are only considering nerve-gas-farting dragons, so far!” Orolo reminded us. “What of lizards, turtles, gods—”

“Hey!” Jesry exclaimed, and shot a glance at Arsibalt. “This is becoming the kind of argument that a theor would make.”

“How so, Fraa Jesry? Where is the theorical content?”

“In the numbers,” Jesry said, “in the profusion of different scenarios.”

“Please explain.”

“Once you have opened the door to these hypotheticals that don’t have to make internal sense, you quickly find yourself looking at a range of possibilities that might as well be infinitely numerous,” Jesry said. “So the mind rejects them as being equally invalid, and doesn’t worry about them.”

“And this is true of slines as well as of Saunt Evenedric?” Arsibalt asked.

“It has to be,” Jesry said.

“So it is an intrinsic feature of human consciousness—this filtering ability.”

As Arsibalt grew more confident, Jesry—sensing he was being drawn into a trap—became more cautious. “Filtering ability?” he asked.

“Don’t play stupid, Jesry!” called Suur Ala, who was also reporting for kitchen duty. “You just said yourself that the mind rejects and doesn’t worry about the overwhelming majority of hypothetical scenarios. If that’s not a ‘filtering ability’ I don’t know what is!”

“Sorry!” Jesry snapped back, and looked around at me, Lio, and Arsibalt, as if he’d just been mugged, and needed witnesses.

“What then is the criterion that the mind uses to select an infinitesimal minority of possible outcomes to worry about?” Orolo asked.

“Plausibility.” “Possibility,” people were murmuring, but no one seemed to feel confident enough to stake a claim.

“Earlier, Fraa Erasmas mentioned that it had something to do with being able to tell a coherent story.”

“It is a Hemn space—a configuration space—argument,” I blurted, before I’d even thought about it. “That’s the connection to Evenedric the theor.”

“Can you please explain?” Orolo requested.

I wouldn’t have been able to if not for the fact that I’d just been talking to Barb about it. “There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind—even the sline mind—knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible, such as you leaving.”

“You’re leaving!?” Tulia exclaimed, utterly horrified. Others who’d joined the dialog late reacted similarly. Orolo laughed and I explained how the dialog had gotten started—and I did it hastily, before anyone could run off and start rumors.

“I don’t think you’re wrong, Fraa Erasmas,” said Jesry, when everyone had settled down, “but I think you have a Steelyard problem. Bringing in Hemn space and action principles seems like an unnecessarily heavyweight way of explaining the fact that the mind has an instinctive nose for which outcomes are plausible enough to worry about.”

“The point is conceded,” I said.

But Arsibalt was crestfallen—disappointed in me for having backed down without a fight. “Remember that this came up in connection with Saunt Evenedric,” Arsibalt said, “a theor who spent the first half of his life working rigorous calculations having to do with principles of action in various kinds of configuration spaces. I don’t think he was merely speaking poetically when he suggested that human consciousness is capable of—”

“Don’t go Hundred on us now!” Jesry snorted.

Arsibalt froze, mouth open, face turning red.

“It is sufficient for now to have broached this topic,” Orolo decreed. “We’ll not settle it here—not on empty stomachs, anyway!” Taking the hint, Lio, Tulia, and Ala took their leave, headed for the kitchen. Ala shot a frosty look over her shoulder at Jesry, then leaned in close to Tulia to make some remark. I knew exactly what she was complaining about: Jesry had been the one who had brought up the profusion-of-outcomes argument in the first place—but when Arsibalt had tried to develop it, he had gotten cold feet and backed out—even mocked Arsibalt. I tried to throw Ala a grin, but she didn’t notice. There was too much else going on. I ended up standing there grinning into empty space, like an idiot.