Seeing that we had not massacred the Burger family or inserted probes into their orifices, a young assistant to the man with the sound amplification device came in and began to approach us one by one, handing us leaves with writing on them. Unfortunately they were in Kinagrams and so we could not read them. We had been warned that it was best to accept such things politely and claim we would read them later—not engage such persons in Thelenean dialog.

This man noticed the desolate woman. Guessing that she meant to leave her baby with us, he began trying to talk her out of it in slangy Fluccish. She recoiled; then, understanding that she was probably safe, began cursing at him. Half a dozen suurs moved forward to surround her. The Deolater became furious and looked as if he might strike someone. I noticed Fraa Delrakhones for the first time, watching this fellow closely and making eye contact with several burly fraas who were moving closer to him. But then the man with the sound device chirped out a word that must have been the younger fellow’s name. Having got his attention, he looked up at the sky for a moment (“The Powers that Be are watching, idiot!”) then glared at him (“Simmer down and keep handing out the all-important literature!”).

A tall man was walking toward me: Artisan Quin. Next to him was a shorter copy of Quin, without the beard. “Bon Apert, Fraa Erasmas,” Quin said.

“Bon Apert, Artisan Quin,” I returned, and then looked at his son. His son was looking at my left foot. His gaze traveled quickly up to the top of my hood but did not catch or linger on my face, as if this were of no more note than a wrinkle in my bolt. “Bon—” I began, but he interrupted: “That bridge is built on the arch principle.”

“Barb, the fraa is wishing you Bon Apert,” said Quin, and held out his hand in my direction. But Barb actually reached out and pulled his father’s arm down—it was blocking his view of the bridge.

“The bridge has a catenary curve because of the vectors,” Barb went on.

“Catenary. That’s from the Orth word for—” I began.

“It’s from the Orth word for chain,” Barb announced. “It is the same curve that a hanging chain makes, flipped upside-down. But the driveshaft that opens the gates has to be straight. Unless it was made with newmatter.” His eyes found my sphere and studied it for a few moments. “But that can’t be, because the Concent of Saunt Edhar was built after the First Sack. So it must have been made with old matter.” His eyes went back to the driveshaft, which seemed to follow the arch of the bridge, passing through blocks of carved stone at regular intervals. “Those stone things must contain universal joints,” he concluded.

“That is correct,” I said. “The shaft—”

“The shaft is put together from eight straight pieces connected by universal joints hidden inside the bases of those statues. The base of a statue is called a plinth.” And Barb began to walk very fast; he was the first extra to cross over the bridge into our math. Quin gave me a look that was difficult to interpret, and hustled after him.

An altercation had flared up between the desolate woman and the suurs. Apparently, this woman had been told by some ignorant person that we’d give her money for the baby. The suurs had set her straight as gently as they knew how.

Several more extras had come in. A group of half a dozen, mostly men, all wearing clothes that were respectful, but not expensive. They had engaged a small group of mostly older avout. The foremost of the visitors was draped in a thick, gaudy-colored rope with a globe at the end. I reckoned he was the priest of some newfangled counter-Bazian ark. He was talking to Fraa Haligastreme: big, bald, burly, and bearded, looking as if he’d just stepped off the Periklyne after a brisk discussion of ontology with Thelenes. He was a theorical geologist, and the FAE of the Edharian chapter. He was listening politely, but kept throwing significant glances at a pair of purple-bolted hierarchs standing off to the side: Delrakhones, the Warden Fendant, and Statho, the Primate.

Circumventing this group, I passed in earshot of a side conversation. One of the women visitors had engaged Fraa Jesry. I put her age at about thirty, though the way that extramuros women did their hair and faces made it difficult to guess such things; on second thought, she was a dressed-up twenty-five. She was paying close attention to Jesry, asking him questions about life in the math.

After what seemed like a long time, I got Jesry’s attention. He politely told the woman that he had made arrangements to go extramuros with me. She looked at me, which I enjoyed. Then her jeejah spat out a burst of notes and she excused herself to take a call.

Jesry and I walked out for the first time in ten years.

The first thing I noticed was that people had leaned a lot of junk against the outside of our walls. Apparently some of it had even been leaned against the gates, but someone had cleared it off to the sides in preparation for Apert.

During this era, the neighborhood outside the Decade Gate was where artisans kept their shops, and so the stuff leaned against the walls tended to be lumber, pipes, reels of cable or tubing, and long-handled tools. We walked silently for a while, just looking. But sooner than you might think, we got used to it and forgot we were fraas.

“Do you think that woman wanted to have a liaison with you?” I asked.

“A—what do you call it—”

“An Atlanian Liaison.” Named after a Decenarian fraa of the Seventeenth Century A.R. who saw his true love for ten days every ten years and spent the rest of the time writing poems to her and sneaking them out of the math. They were really fine poems, carved in stone some places.

“Why do you think a woman would want that?” he wondered.

“Well, no risk of getting pregnant, when your partner is a fraa,” I pointed out.

“That might be important sometimes, but I think it’s easy for them to obtain contraception in this epoch.”

“I was kind of joking.”

“Oh. Sorry. Well…maybe she wants me for my mind.”

“Or your spiritual qualities.”

“Huh? You think she’s some kind of Deolater?”

“Didn’t you see who she was with?”

“Some sort of—who knows—a contingent, I think is what they call that.”

“Those were Warden of Heaven people, I’ll bet. Their leader was got up in a kind of imitation of a chord.”

We had gone far enough that the Decade Gate was lost to view around a curve. I glanced up at the Præsidium. The megaliths rising up from the perimeter of the starhenge served as compass points to help me establish my bearings. We had come to a larger road now, running roughly parallel to the river. If we crossed it and kept going, we’d climb into a neighborhood of big houses where burgers lived. If we followed it to the right, it would take us to the commerce district and we could eventually loop back in through the Day Gate. To the left, it ran out into the fauxburbs where I had spent my first eight years.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said, and turned left.

After we had gone a few paces, Jesry said “Again?” which was his annoying way of requesting clarification. “The Warden of Heaven?”