The Thousander went out to Orolo’s cloister and stuffed all of the leaves into the brazier. Then he reached into Orolo’s food-locker and took out the matches. “I infer from the label that this is a fire-making praxis,” he said.

We showed him how to use matches. He set fire to Orolo’s leaves. We all stood around until they had turned to ash. Then Fraa Jad stirred the ashes with a stick.

“Time for picnic,” he said.

As we spiraled down the butte, jostling and rocking in the open back of Ganelial Crade’s fetch like so many bottles in a box, we were able to look down from time to time and see the picnic taking shape down on the village green of Samble. It appeared that these people took their picnics as seriously as they did their religious services.

Fraa Jad seemed to have other things on his mind, and said nothing until we were almost down to Samble. Then he pounded on the roof of the fetch’s cab and, in Orth, asked Crade if he wouldn’t mind waiting here for a few minutes. In really wild, barbarous-sounding Orth, Crade said that this would be fine.

It had never crossed my mind that someone like Crade would know our language. But it made sense. The counter-Bazians distrusted priests and other middlemen. They believed everyone should read the scriptures themselves. Almost all read translations into Fluccish. But it wasn’t so farfetched to think that an especially fervent and isolated sect, such as the people of Samble, might learn Classical Orth so that they would no longer have to entrust their immortal souls to translators.

Fraa Jad let me know I should get out. I vaulted from the back of the fetch and then helped him down, more out of respect than anything, since he didn’t seem to need much helping. We strolled about a hundred paces to a bend in the road where there was an especially nice view over the high desert to the mountains of the north, still patched with snow in places, and dappled by cloud-shadows. “We are just like Protas looking down over Ethras,” he remarked.

I smiled but didn’t laugh. The work of Protas was viewed as embarrassingly naive by many. It was rarely mentioned except to be funny or ironic. But to deprecate it so was a trend that had come and gone a hundred times, and there was no telling what Fraa Jad, whose math had been sealed off for 690 years, might think of it. The more I stood and looked at him and followed his gaze northward to the clouds and the shadows that they cast on the flanks of the mountains, the more glad I became that I hadn’t snickered.

“What do you think Orolo saw, when he looked out thus?” Fraa Jad asked.

“He was a great appreciator of beauty and loved to look at the mountains from the starhenge,” I said.

“You think he saw beauty? That is a safe answer, since it is beautiful. But what was he thinking about? What connections did the beauty enable him to perceive?”

“I couldn’t possibly answer that.”

“Don’t answer it. Ask it.”

“More concretely, what do you want me to do?”

“Go north,” he said. “Follow and find Orolo.”

“Tredegarh is south and east.”

“Tredegarh,” he repeated, as if waking from a dream of it. “That is where I and the others shall go after the picnic.”

“I have bent the rules quite a bit by coming here,” I said. “We’ve lost a day—”

“A day. A day!” Fraa Jad, the Thousander, thought it was pretty funny that I should care about a day.

“Chasing Orolo around could take months,” I said. “For being so late, I could be Thrown Back. Or at least given more chapters.”

“Which chapter are you up to now?”

“Five.”

“Nine” Fraa Jad said. For a moment I thought he was correcting me. Then I was afraid he was sentencing me. Finally I understood that he himself was all the way up to Chapter Nine.

He must have spent years on it.

Why? How had he gotten in that much trouble?

Had it made him crazy?

But if he was crazy or incorrigible, why had he, of all the Thousanders, been Evoked? After his Voco, why had his fraas and suurs sung the way they had—as though their hearts had been ripped out?

“I have a lot of questions,” I said.

“The most efficient way for you to get answers is to go north.”

I opened my mouth to repeat my earlier objection, but he held up a hand to stay me. “I shall make every effort to see to it you are not punished.”

It was by no means clear to me that Fraa Jad would have any such power in a giant Convox, but I didn’t have the strength of will to tell him as much to his face. Lacking that strength, I had but one way out of the conversation. “Fine. After the picnic I’ll go north. Though I do not understand what that means.”

“Then keep going north until you understand it,” Fraa Jad said.

There was no point trying to talk Cord out of going with me. We just climbed into her fetch and started as soon as the picnic was over. We had to backtrack thirty miles to find a north-going road that would not peter out before the mountains. At the first town on that road I used up my money card buying fuel, food, and warm clothes. Then I used up Fraa Jad’s.

While we were loading the stuff into the fetch, Ganelial Crade pulled up. Sitting next to him was Sammann. Both were grinning, which was a novelty. They didn’t have to announce that they were coming with us and we didn’t have to discuss it. They got busy buying the same sorts of things we’d just bought. Crade had an ammunition can full of coins and Sammann had information in his jeejah that worked in lieu of money; I got the sense that each of them had obtained funds from his respective community. I wasn’t happy to see Crade again. If it really was true that he was getting money for this journey from the people of Samble, it raised all sorts of questions as to what he was really up to.

Crade had reinstated the three-wheeler in the back of his fetch, so he didn’t have much room left over; most of the bulky stuff went into Cord’s fetch. We had no idea where we were going or what to plan for, but we all seemed to be carrying roughly the same picture in our heads, namely that Orolo had gone up into the mountains for some reason. It would be cold up there and we might have to camp, so we got things like winter bedrolls, tents, stoves, and fuel. Sammann had an idea that he might be able to track Orolo, and Crade was planning to make inquiries with some of his co-religionists along the way.

We all climbed back into our vehicles and headed north. It would be two hours’ drive to the foothills, where Crade knew of places to camp. He led the way. This was a thing he felt a compulsion to do, and I was tired of fighting it. Cord was content to follow. Crade sitting upright at the controls, and Sammann hunched over the glowing screen of his super-jeejah, gave us the feeling that the two of them must be seeing to all of the details. I wouldn’t have been comfortable following either of them alone, but together they’d never agree on anything, so I judged it was prudent.

I regretted parting from people like Arsibalt and Lio with whom I could talk about things. But once we turned north and started forging toward the mountains, the regret vanished and instead I felt relief. So much had been revealed to me over the course of the last twenty-four hours—not only about the Cousins’ ship but even more so about the world I had lived in for ten and a half years—that it was too much for me to make sense of in one go. Just to name one example, the thatched roofs on the nuclear waste cylinders, alone, if I’d learned of it in the concent, would have taken me a little getting used to. I was much more at ease sitting next to my sib, staring out the windscreen, my sole responsibility being to chase a wild fraa across the waste. The night before, at the Bazian monastery, I had accommodated certain new, odd facts in my mind just by sleeping. A similar trick might work for me now: by doing something completely different for a few days, I might chance upon a better understanding than I could get by kneeling in a cell and concentrating on it, or having a wordy discussion in a chalk hall.