“Find it how?”

“We can work out where in the sky the sun stood at two p.m. on this day of the year. That is, which of the so-called fixed stars it’s passing in front of. This plasma-spark thing that we were tracking—it was in the same place. That means that unless it changes its orbit again, it will pass over the same fixed stars on each orbit. We can find it in the sky.”

“But it seems to have no difficulty changing its orbit,” said Ala, meticulously outlining the sun’s disk with a series of closely spaced pinpricks.

“But part of the puzzle we’ve failed to understand until now—maybe—is that it only does so when it’s passing near the sun. So as long as we have this camera obscura, we can be on the lookout for that.”

“Why should the sun’s position make any difference?”

“I think it’s hiding,” I said. “If it did what it just did in the night sky, anyone could see it with the naked eye.”

“But we were able to detect it with a pinhole and a sheet of paper!” Ala pointed out. “So it’s a pretty ineffective way to hide.”

“And Sammann can apparently see it with welding goggles,” I said. “But the difference is that people like you and me and Sammann are…”

“Are what?” she said. “Knowledgeable?”

“Yeah. And whoever, or whatever this thing is, it doesn’t or they don’t care if knowledgeable people know they are up there. They are letting their existence be known to us—”

“Which the Sæcular Power doesn’t like—”

“Which is why Orolo got Thrown Back for looking at it.”

It took us a while to get out of there. Too much was going on. I rolled up the page and stuck it inside my bolt. Ala picked up the bunch of flowers. This reminded me of why I’d come up here in the first place and of what we’d been doing before Ala had noticed the sparks. I felt like a jerk for letting this slip my mind. By that time, though, Ala had remembered about the Saunt Chandera’s Bane and was wondering what to do with it. So we traded; I gave her the chart and she gave me the flowers so that I could accept the risk of sneaking them back down.

“What should we do next?” I wondered out loud.

“About…?”

We had opened the trapdoor. There was plenty of light. I was about to blurt “what we just saw” when I noticed a look on her face—steeling herself to get hurt again. I think I stopped myself just in time.

“Do you want to—should we—” I began, then closed my eyes and just said it. “I think we should be honest about this in front of everyone.”

“I’m fine with that,” she said.

“I’ll set it up for tomorrow, I guess. After Provener.”

“I’ll tell Tulia,” she said, and something about the way she pronounced that name informed me that she knew everything; she knew I’d once had a crush on her best friend. “Who do you want as your witness?”

I had been about to say Lio, but Jesry had been such a jerk about this that I decided he had to be the one. “And our free witness can just be Haligastreme or whoever is handy,” I said.

“What kind of liaison are we to publish?” she asked.

This was not a difficult question. Liaisons were supposed to be announced when they were formed and when they were dissolved. It was a way to curtail gossip and intrigue, which could so easily run rampant in a math. The Concent of Saunt Edhar recognized several types. The least serious was Tivian. The most serious—Perelithian—was equivalent to marriage. That was out of the question for two kids of our age who’d hated each other’s guts until forty-five minutes ago. If I said Tivian, Ala would throw me out the trapdoor to my death, and I’d spend the last four seconds of my life wishing I’d said Etrevanean.

“Could you stand having people know that you were in an Etrevanean liaison with that big jerk Fraa Erasmas?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“Okay.” Then awkwardness. It seemed appropriate to kiss her one more time. This went over well.

“Now, are we going to talk about the fact that we have just discovered an alien spacecraft hiding in orbit around Arbre?” she asked in a tiny, coy voice—most unlike her. But she wasn’t as used to being in big trouble as I was and so I think she felt as though, on such questions, she had to defer to a hardened criminal.

“To a few people. I’m pretty sure Lio’s down in the Fendant court. I’ll stop there and tell him—”

“That works. We should go about separately, anyway, until our liaison is published.”

Her agility in jumping between the love topic and the alien spacecraft was making me dizzy. Or perhaps giddy. “So I’ll meet you below later. We’ll spread the news to the others as we have opportunity.”

“Bye,” she said. “Don’t forget your forbidden flower.”

“I won’t,” I said.

Just like that she was gone down the ladder.

I followed a minute later and found Lio in the reading room in the Fendant court. He was studying a book about a Praxic Age battle that had been conducted in the abandoned subway tunnels of a great city by two armies that had run out of ammunition and so had to fight with sharpened shovels. He looked at me blankly for a while. I must have looked even blanker. Then I realized that the recent events weren’t written on my face. I would actually have to communicate.

“Incredible things have happened in the last hour,” I announced.

“Such as?”

I didn’t know what to say first but concluded that alien spaceships were a better topic for the Warden Fendant’s reading room. So I gave him a full account of that. He looked a little deranged until I got to the point about how the spark track curved, and mentioned plasma. Then his face snapped like a shutter. “I know what it is,” he said.

He was so certain that doubting him never crossed my mind. Instead, I just wondered how he knew. “How can you—”

“I know what it is.”

“Okay. What is it?”

For the first time he took his eyes off mine, and let his gaze wander around the reading room. “It might be here…or it might be in the Old Library. I’ll find it. I’ll show it to you later.”

“Why don’t you simply tell me?”

“Because you won’t believe me until I show it to you in a book that was written by someone else. That’s how weird it is.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I added, “Congratulations!” since that seemed like the right thing to say.

Lio slammed his book shut, stood up, turned his back on me, and headed for the stacks.

Back at the Cloister I came to understand that things were going to move much more slowly than I wanted them to. I was on supper duty, so I spent the remainder of the afternoon in the kitchen. Ala and Tulia didn’t have to cook, but they did have to serve. While dumping a hot potato into my bowl Ala gave me a look that moved me in a way I won’t describe here. While burying it with stew Tulia gave me a look that proved Ala had told her everything. “The pinhole: nice!” I told her. Fraa Mentaxenes, who’d been nudging me in the kidney with his bowl, trying to get me to move faster, had no idea what I meant and only became more irritated.

Lio didn’t show up for supper. Jesry was there, but I couldn’t talk to him because we were at a crowded table with Barb and several others. Arsibalt sat as far from us as he could, as had been his habit of late. After supper he was on cleanup duty. Jesry went off to a chalk hall to work with some of the other Edharians on a proof. Those guys might work until dawn. But I couldn’t have talked to him anyway because I had to corner Fraa Haligastreme and set up the little aut tomorrow where Ala and I would declare our liaison before witnesses and have it entered in the Chronicle.

I did have time to work out where in the sky the sun had stood at two in the afternoon. After curfew, when the fids had gone to bed, I went out into the meadow alone, sat on a bench, and stared at that place in the sky for an hour, hoping I might get lucky and see a satellite pass through. Which was irrational, because if this spaceship could be seen with the naked eye, none of this intrigue would have been necessary. It was some combination of too small, too dark, and/or too high to bounce back enough light for our eyes to see it. But I needed to sit there alone for a while and stare into the black just to settle my thoughts. My brain zinged back and forth between the Two Topics for an hour. When I was totally exhausted I got up and crawled into a vacant cell where I slept soundly.