“How big is this thing—has anyone tried to estimate its dimensions?” I asked.

“I know that from the settings of the telescope and the tablet,” Sammann said “It is about three miles in diameter.”

“Let me spare you having to work it out in your head,” said Fraa Criscan, watching my face, mildly amused. “If you want to generate pseudogravity by spinning part of the ship—”

“Like those old doughnut-shaped space stations in spec-fic speelies?” I asked.

Criscan looked blank. “I’ve never seen a speely, but yes, I think we are talking about the same thing.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. If you are playing that game, and you want to generate the same level of gravity we have here on Arbre—and if there is such a thing hidden inside of this icosahedron—”

“Which is kind of what I was imagining,” I allowed.

“Say it’s two miles across. The radius is one mile. It would have to spin about once every eighty seconds to provide Arbre gravity.”

“Seems reasonable. Doable,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Cord asked.

“Could you live on a merry-go-round that spun once every minute and a half?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Are you talking about where the Cousins came from?” shouted Rosk over his shoulder. He couldn’t understand Orth but he could pick out some words and he could read our tones of voice.

“We’re debating whether it is productive to have any such discussion at all,” I said, but that was a little too complicated, shouted from the back of the fetch over road noise.

“In books and speelies, sometimes you see a fictional universe where an ancient race seeded a bunch of different star systems with colonies that lost touch with each other afterwards,” Rosk volunteered.

The other avout in the vehicle looked as if they were biting their tongues.

“The problem is, Rosk, we have a fossil record—”

“That goes back billions of years, yeah, that is a problem with that idea,” Rosk admitted. From which I guessed that others had already torn this idea limb from limb before his eyes, but that Rosk liked it too much to let go of it—he’d never been taught Diax’s Rake.

Cord had put the blanket back over her head but she said, “Another idea that we were talking about earlier was, you know, the whole concept of parallel universes. Then Fraa Jad pointed out that this ship is quite clearly in this universe.”

“What a killjoy,” I remarked—in Fluccish, obviously.

“Yeah,” she said. “It is a real drag hanging around with you people. So logical. Speaking of which—did you notice the geometry proof?”

“What?”

“They couldn’t stop talking about it, earlier.”

I ducked back under the blanket with her. She knew how to pan and zoom the image. She magnified one of the faces, then dragged it around until the screen was filled with something that looked like this, though a lot streakier and blurrier:

“That’s certainly a weird thing to put on your ship,” I said. I zoomed back out for a moment because I wanted to get a sense of where this diagram was located. It was centered on one of the icosahedron’s faces, adjoining, and just aft of, the one that we had identified as the bow. If the ship’s envelope was made of gravel, held in some kind of matrix, then this diagram had been built into this face as a sort of mosaic, by picking out darker pieces of gravel and setting them carefully into place. They’d put a lot of work into it.

“It’s their emblem,” I said. Only speculating. But no one spoke out against the idea. I zoomed back in and spent a while examining the network of lines. It was obviously a proof—almost certainly of the Adrakhonic Theorem. The sort of problem that fids worked all the time as an exercise. Just as if I were sitting in a chalk hall, trying to get the answer quicker than Jesry, I began to break it down into triangles and to look for right angles and other features that I could use to anchor a proof. Any fid from the Halls of Orithena probably would have gotten it by now, but my plane geometry was a little rusty—

Wait a minute! some part of my mind was saying.

I poked my head out from under the blanket, careful this time not to blind Cord.

“This is just plain creepy,” I said.

“That’s the same word Lio used!” Rosk shouted back.

“Why do you guys all think it’s creepy?” Cord wanted to know.

“Please supply a definition of the oft-used Fluccish word creepy,” said Fraa Jad.

I tried to explain it to the Thousander, but primitive emotional states were not what Orth was good at.

“An intuition of the numenous,” Fraa Jad hazarded, “combined with a sense of dread.”

“Dread is a strong word, but you are close.”

Now I had to answer Cord’s question. I made a few false starts. Then I saw Sammann watching me and I got an idea. “Sammann here is an expert on information. Communication, to him, means transmitting a series of characters.”

“Like the letters on this shock absorber?” Cord asked.

“Exactly,” I said, “but since the Cousins use different letters, and have a different language, a message from them would look to us like something written in a secret code. We’d have to decipher it and translate it into our language. Instead of which the Cousins have decided here to—to—”

“To bypass language,” Sammann said, impatient with my floundering.

“Exactly! And instead they have gone directly to this picture.”

“You think they put it there for us to see?” Cord asked.

“Why else would you go to the trouble to put something on the outside of your ship? They wanted to mark themselves with something they knew we’d understand. And that is what’s creepy—the fact that they just knew in advance that we’d understand this.”

“I don’t understand it,” Cord protested.

“Yet. But you know what it is. And we could get you to understand it a lot faster than we could decipher an alien language. It looks to me as though Fraa Jad has already worked it out.” My eye had fallen on a leaf in his lap that bore a copy of the diagram, with some marks and notations that he had added as he had worked through the logic of the proof.

Logic. Proof. The Cousins had these—had them in common with us.

With us who lived in concents, that is.

Avout with nukes!

Roaming from star system to star system in a bomb-powered concent, making contact with their planet-bound brethren—

“Snap out of it, Raz!” I said to myself.

“Yes,” said Fraa Jad, who’d been watching my face, “please do.”

“They came,” I said, “the Cousins did, and the Sæcular Power picked them up on radar. Tracked them. Worried about them. Took pictures of them. Saw that.” I pointed to the proof on Fraa Jad’s lap. “Recognized it as an avout thing. Got worried. Figured out that the ship had been detected—somehow—by at least one fraa: Orolo.”

“I told him about it,” Sammann said.

“What?”

Sammann looked uncomfortable. But I had gotten it all so badly wrong that he couldn’t contain himself—he had to straighten me out. “A communication reached us from the Sæcular Power,” he said.

“Us meaning the Ita?”

“A third-order reticule.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. We were told to go in secret—bypassing the hierarchs—to the concent’s foremost cosmographer, and tell him of this thing.”

“And then what?”

“There were no further instructions,” Sammann said.

“So you chose Orolo.”

Sammann shrugged. “I went to his vineyard one night while he was alone, cursing at his grapes, and told him this—told him I had stumbled across it while reviewing logs of routine mail-protocol traffic.”

I didn’t understand a word of his Ita gibberish but I got the gist of it. “So, part of your orders from the Sæcular Power were to make it seem that this was just you, acting on your own—”