Why did I cry out “No!” when I’d known it all along? Not out of disbelief. It was an objection. A refusal. A declaration of war.
Orolo was ready. He emerged through the door in our screen immediately, and closed it firmly behind him before his former brothers and sisters could begin to say goodbye, for that would have taken a year. Better to just be gone, like one who is killed by a falling tree. He walked out into the chancel and tossed his sphere to the floor, then began to untie his chord. This dropped around his ankles. He stepped out of it and then reached down, grabbed the lower fringes of his bolt, and shrugged it off over his shoulders. For a moment, then, he was standing there naked, holding a wad of bolt in his arms, and gazing straight up the well, just as Fraa Paphlagon had done at Voco.
I opened the door to the starhenge and let the light flood in. Orolo saw it and bowed his head like a Deolater praying to his god. Then I passed through and closed the door behind me. The entire, terrible scene in the Mynster was eclipsed, and replaced by the lonely vista of the starhenge.
In the same moment I began sobbing out loud. My face drew back from my skull as if I were vomiting and tears ran from my eyes like blood from gashes. I was sad—rather than surprised—because I had known that this was coming from the moment Fraa Spelikon had begun asking about speelycaptors. I hadn’t foreseen it only because it was too dreadful to think about until I could not escape it any more—until it had happened. Until now. So I didn’t have to waste any time being astonished, like those fraas and suurs down below me; I went straight to the most intense and saturating grief I had ever known.
I found my way to the Pinnacle more by groping than by sight, as I could perceive little more than light and dark. By the time I’d reached the top, I’d moved on to hysterical blubbering, but I wiped my face a couple of times with my bolt, took some deep breaths, and settled myself long enough to get the dust cover open and withdraw the tablet from Clesthyra’s Eye. This I wrapped in my bolt, which called to mind the memory of Orolo stripping his off.
He would stand there naked while the avout sang a wrathful song to Anathematize him. They were probably singing it now. You were supposed to sing it like you meant it. Maybe that would be easy for the Thousanders and the Hundreders who had never known him. But I suspected that little coherent sound was coming from behind the Tenners’ screen.
I went into the control chamber of the M & M and looked for the tablet that Orolo had placed in its objective when he and I had been here just before the whole place had been locked down. But it was empty. Someone had been here before me and confiscated it. Just as they would now go through the niches that he had used and take all of his writings.
Then I did something that might have been foolish, but that was necessary: I went to the same place where I’d watched Fraa Paphlagon and the Inquisitors take off in their aerocraft. I crouched at the base of the same megalith, and waited until Orolo walked out of the Day Gate. Once he had passed out of the chancel, and out of sight of the avout, they had given him a sort of gunny sack to cover his body, and an emergency blanket made of crinkly orange foil, which he pulled around his shoulders as he got out into the plaza and the wind hit him. His skinny white ankles were lost in a pair of old black work boots and he had to shuffle lest they fall off. He moved away from the concent without once gazing back over his shoulder. After a few moments he disappeared behind the spray of one of the fountains. I chose that time to turn my back on him and head back down.
As I passed back into the chronochasm and heard the aut of Anathem concluding, I thought it was a small mercy for me that I’d had this last sight of Orolo extramuros. Those in the Mynster merely saw him be swallowed by the unknowable beyond, which was (and was meant to be) terrifying. But I had at least seen him making his way out there. Which didn’t make things any less horrible and sad. But to glimpse him still alive and moving under his own power in the Sæculum was to have hope that someone would help him out there—that maybe, before dark, he’d be sitting in hand-me-down clothes in one of those bars he had frequented during Apert, having a beer and looking for a job.
The remainder of the service was a reaffirmation of vows and a rededication to the Discipline. I was happy to miss it. I wrapped up the tablet in a leaf of drawing paper and stashed it behind a can of ammunition; Lio could always retrieve it later.
The one question was: would my absence have been marked by any of the Tenners? But in a group of three hundred, it was easy for such a thing to go unnoticed.
In case anyone asked, I concocted a story that Orolo had dropped a hint of what was going to happen (which—come to think of it—he had, though I’d been too dense to get it) and that I had skipped the aut because I was afraid I couldn’t bear it. This would still get me in trouble. I didn’t much care. Let them Throw me Back; I’d figure out where Orolo had gone—probably to Bly’s Butte—and join him there.
But as it came out, I never had to tell anyone that lie. No one had noticed I was missing; or if they had, they didn’t care.
The story of how Orolo had come to be Thrown Back had to be reconstructed over the next few weeks, like a skull in an archaeological dig being fitted together one shard at a time. We would get lost for days as rumor or convincingly wrong data sent us up some promising path that only later proved a logical cul-de-sac. It didn’t help that all of us had suffered the psychic equivalent of third-degree burns.
He had somehow known, days before Apert, that there would be trouble related to the starhenge. He’d put Jesry to work doing some computations. He had not allowed Jesry to see the photomnemonic tablets from which the givens had been extracted; indeed, he’d gone to a lot of effort to obscure the nature of the work from Jesry and his other students, perhaps to shield them from any consequences.
When Artisan Quin had spoken of the technical capabilities of Flec’s speelycaptor, the idea had come into Orolo’s head that he might use such a device to make cosmographical observations. On the ninth night of Apert, after the starhenge had been locked, Orolo had gone to the apiary and stolen several crates of mead. He put on clothes that made him look like a visitor from extramuros and went out the Decade Gate with a large wheeled beer cooler in which he hid the loot. He made a rendezvous with a shady character of some description whom he had presumably met while hanging around in bars extramuros. Indeed, his entire motive for having frequented such places during Apert might have been to recruit such a person. In exchange for the mead, Orolo had taken delivery of a speelycaptor.
The little vineyard where Orolo pursued his avocation was difficult to see from the Mynster. During the winter, he sometimes went there to mend trellises and prune vines. In the weeks following Apert he devised a rudimentary observatory there, consisting of a vertical pole somewhat taller than a man, free to rotate, with a crosspiece lashed athwart it at eye level that could be swiveled up and down. Into this crosspiece he’d whittled a niche to fit the speelycaptor. The pole and crosspiece enabled him to hold the speelycaptor steady for long periods as he tracked his target across the sky. The device’s image-stabilization, zoom, and low-light enhancement features enabled him to get a decent look at whatever he was so curious about.
The idea of Orolo stealing from the concent, conspiring with a criminal during Apert, and making forbidden observations in the vineyard was shocking to everyone, but the story did make sense, and it was just the kind of logical plan that Orolo would have come up with. Sooner or later we all came to terms with it.