“So, she was a fid of Suur Aculoa?”

“Ignetha Foral spent six years in the Unarian math at Baritoe and wrote a treatise comparing Paphlagon’s work to that of some other, er…”

“People like Paphlagon,” Jesry said impatiently.

“Yeah, of previous centuries.”

“Did you read it?”

“We didn’t get a copy. Maybe in another ten years. I already went into the Lower Labyrinth and shoved a request through the grille.”

Someone at Baritoe—presumably a Unarian fid—would have to copy Foral’s treatise by hand and send it to us. If a book were very popular, fids would do this without being asked, and copies would circulate to other maths.

“You’d think a rich family would have had copies machine-printed,” Jesry said.

“Too vulgar,” Tulia said. “But I know the title: Plurality of Worlds: a Comparative Study of Polycosmic Ideation among the Halikaarnians.”

“Hmm. Makes me feel like a bug under the Procians’ magnifying glass,” I said.

“Baritoe is Procian-dominated,” Tulia reminded me. “She wasn’t going to get anywhere calling it Why the Halikaarnians Are So Much Smarter than Us.” Too late I remembered that Tulia belonged to a Procian order now.

“So, she was interested in the polycosm,” Jesry said before this could flourish into a spat. “What could have happened that would be observable from the starhenge and that would make the polycosm relevant?” It was the sort of question Jesry would never ask unless he already knew the answer, which he now supplied: “Something’s gone wrong with the sun, I’ll bet.”

I was poised to scoff, but held back, reflecting that Sammann had, after all, been looking at the sun. “Something visible with the naked eye?”

“Sunspots. Solar flares. These can affect our weather and so on. And ever since the Praxic Age, the atmosphere doesn’t protect us from certain things.”

“Well, if that’s where the action is, why was Orolo looking at the North Pole?”

“The aurora,” Jesry said, as if he actually knew what he was talking about. “It responds to solar flares.”

“But we haven’t had a single decent aurora this whole time,” Tulia pointed out, with a catlike look of satisfaction on her face.

“That we could see with the naked eye,” Jesry returned. “This tablet of ours could be the perfect instrument for observing not only auroras but the disk of the sun itself.”

“I notice it’s ‘our’ tablet now that it’s got something good on it,” I pointed out.

“If Suur Trestanas finds it, it’ll go back to being ‘your’ tablet,” Tulia said. She and I laughed but Jesry was determined not to be amused.

“Seriously,” Tulia continued, “that hypothesis doesn’t explain why they Evoked Paphlagon. Any cosmographer can look at solar flares.”

“What’s the connection to the polycosm, you’re asking?” Jesry said.

“Exactly.”

“Maybe there is none,” I speculated, “maybe Ignetha Foral just wanted a cosmographer, and happened to remember Paphlagon’s name.”

“Maybe she’s being persecuted as a heretic, and they yanked Paphlagon so that they could burn him too,” Jesry suggested. And we chatted about such ideas for a few minutes before discarding all of them in favor of the proposition that Paphlagon must have been chosen for some good reason.

“Well,” Jesry said, “the way that the theors of old found themselves talking about the polycosm in the first place was by thinking about stars: how they formed, and what went on inside them.”

“Formation of nuclei and so on,” Tulia said.

“And not only that but, when the stars die, how do those nuclei get blown out into space so that they can form planets and—”

“And us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jesry said. “It leads to the question, why are all of those processes so fine-tuned to produce life? A sticky question. Deolaters would say, ‘Ah, see, God made the cosmos just for us.’ But the polycosmic answer is, ‘No, there must be lots of cosmi, some good for life, most not—we only see one cosmos in which we are capable of existing.’ And that is where all of this philosophical stuff originated that Suur Aculoa likes to study.”

“I think I see where you’re going now when you guess something’s gone wrong with the sun,” I said. “Maybe there are some new solar observations that contradict what we thought we knew about the theorics of what goes on in the cores of stars. And maybe this has ramifications that extend all the way to those polycosmic theories that Paphlagon’s interested in.”

“Or—more likely—Ignetha Foral mistakenly thinks so, so she’s yanked Paphlagon, and is now sending him on a wild goose chase,” Jesry said.

“I think she’s pretty smart,” Tulia demurred, but Jesry didn’t hear her because a resolution was forming in his head. He turned toward me. “I want to go down there and view this with you,” he said. “Or without you, if you are busy.”

For about twelve different reasons I hated this idea, but I couldn’t say so without making it look like I was trying to be a pig and monopolize the tablet. “Fine,” I said.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tulia said—sounding as if she were pretty sure it wasn’t. But before this could develop into a proper fight, we all took notice of the approach of Suur Ala, who was heading straight for us across the meadow. “Uh-oh,” Jesry said.

Suur Ala was unusual-looking in a way I’d never been able to pin down; sometimes I found myself staring at her during lectures or at Provener trying to make sense of her face. She had a round head on a slender neck, lately accentuated by a short haircut she had gotten during Apert; since then, one of the other suurs had been maintaining this for her. She had huge eyes, a delicate sharp nose, and a wide mouth. She was small and bony where Tulia was generous. Anyway there was something about her physical form that matched her soul.

She didn’t waste time greeting us. “For the eight-hundredth time in the last three months, Fraa Erasmas is at the center of a heated conversation. Carefully out of earshot of others. Complete with significant glances at the sky and at Shuf’s Dowment,” she began. “Don’t bother trying to explain it away, I know you guys are up to something. Have been for weeks and weeks.”

We all stood there for a long moment. My heart was pounding. Ala was squared off against the three of us, scanning our faces with those searchlight eyes.

“All right,” Jesry said, “we won’t bother.” But that was all he said. There followed another long silence. I was expecting a look of fury to come over Ala’s face. For her to make a threat to bring down the Inquisition on us. Instead of which her face slowly collapsed. For a moment I thought she might show some other emotion—I couldn’t guess what. But she passed from there to a blank resolute look, turned her back on us, and began walking away. After she’d gone a few paces, Tulia went after her, leaving Jesry and me alone. “That was weird,” he observed.

I could hardly respond. The miserable feeling that had kept me awake in my cell on the night that Ala had joined the New Circle had come over me again.

“You think she’ll rat us out?” I asked him.

I tried to put it in an incredulous tone of voice, as in are you really stupid enough to think she’d rat us out? but Jesry took it at face value. “It would be a great way to score points with the Warden Regulant.”

“But she was careful to approach us when no one else was around,” I pointed out.

“Maybe in hopes of negotiating some kind of deal with us?”

“What do we have to offer in the way of a deal!?” I snorted.

Jesry thought about it and shrugged. “Our bodies?”

“Now you’re just being obnoxious. Why don’t you say ‘our affections’ if you’re going to make such jokes.”

“Because I don’t think I have any affection for Ala,” Jesry said, “and I don’t think she has any for me.”

“Come on, she’s not that bad.”

“How can you say that after the little performance she just put on?”