Cord came back for yet another visit, this time without Rosk. We had a nice stroll around the math and even went into the upper labyrinth for a look round. The conversation was first about where various members of our family had ended up, and later about where she hoped she’d be at the next Apert.
Eight days into Apert, I was sick of it, and thoroughly mixed up. I had a crush on my sib. This might mean all kinds of bad things about me. As I thought about it more, though, I saw it was not the kind of crush where I wanted to have a liaison with her.
I would think about her all day, care too much what she thought of me, and wish she would come around more often and pay attention to me. Then I’d remember that in a few days the gate would close and I wouldn’t have any contact with her for ten years. She seemed never to have lost sight of this, and had kept a certain distance. Anyway, I reckoned, the parts of the concent that were most interesting to her were those that concerned the Ita, and, in a sense, she had access to that all the time because she made stuff for them.
On any given day of Apert I could have written an entire book about what I was thinking and feeling, and it would have been completely different from the previous day’s book. But by the end of the eighth day, the thing had been settled in such a way that I can sum it up much more briefly.
Liaison: (1) In Old and later Orth, an intimate (typically sexual) relationship among some number of fraas and suurs. The number is almost always two. The most common arrangement is for one of these to be a fraa and the other a suur of approximately the same age. Liaisons are of several types. Four types were mentioned by Ma Cartas in the Discipline. She forbade all of them. Later in the Old Mathic Age, a liaison between Saunt Per and Saunt Elith became famous when their hoards of love-letters were unearthed following their deaths. Shortly before the Rebirth, several maths took the unusual step of altering the Discipline to sanction the Perelithian liaison, meaning a permanent liaison between one fraa and one suur. The Revised Book of Discipline, adopted at the time of the Reconstitution, described eight types and sanctioned two. The Second New Revised Book of Discipline describes seventeen, sanctions four, and winks at two others. Each of the sanctioned liaisons is subject to certain rules, and is solemnized by an aut in which the participants agree, in the presence of at least three witnesses, to abide by those rules. Orders or concents that deviate from the Discipline by sanctioning other types of liaisons are subject to disciplinary action by the Inquisition. It is permissible, however, for an order or concent to sanction fewer types; those that sanction zero types are, of course, nominally celibate. (2) A Late Praxic Age bulshytt term, as such, impossible to define clearly, but apparently having something to do with contacts or relations between entities.
Fraa Orolo had noticed how distracted I was and summoned me to the starhenge shortly before sunset. He’d reserved the Telescope of Saunts Mithra & Mylax for the night. The weather was cloudy, but in the hope that it would clear up, he had gone there late in the afternoon to aim the telescope and blank a photomnemonic tablet. I found him at the controls of the M & M just as he was finishing these preparations. We went out and strolled around the ring of megaliths. My tongue was a long time in loosening, but after a while I told Orolo of what I’d been feeling and thinking about Cord. He asked all sorts of questions I’d never have thought of, and listened carefully to my answers, all of which seemed to confirm in his mind that I wasn’t feeling anything about her that was inappropriate for a sib.
Orolo reminded me that Cord was all the biological family I had left, not to mention the only person I really knew from extramuros, and assured me that it was normal and healthy for me to think about her a lot.
I told him about the conversations I’d been having lately that called into question all kinds of things about the Discipline and the Reconstitution. He assured me that this was an unwritten tradition of Apert. This was a time for the avout to get all of that out of their systems so that they did not have to spend the next ten years worrying about it.
He slowed and stopped as we rounded the northeastern limb. “Did you know that we live in a beautiful place?” he asked.
“How could I not know it?” I demanded. “Every day, I go into the Mynster, I see the chancel, we sing the Anathem—”
“Your words say yes, your defensive tone says something else,” Orolo said. “You haven’t even seen this.” And he gestured to the northeast.
The range of mountains leading off in that direction was obscured during winter by clouds and during summer by haze and dust. But we were between summer and winter now. The previous week had been hot, but temperatures had fallen suddenly on the second day of Apert, and we had plumped our bolts up to winter thickness. When I had entered the Præsidium a couple of hours earlier, it had been storming, but as I’d ascended the stair, the roar of the rain and the hail had gradually diminished. By the time I’d found Orolo up top, nothing remained of the storm except for a few wild drops hurtling around on the wind like rocks in space, and a foam of tiny hailstones on the walkway. We were almost in the clouds. The sky had hurled itself against the mountains like a sea attacking a stony headland, and spent its cold energy in half an hour. The clouds were dissolving, yet the sky did not get any brighter, because the sun was going down. But Orolo with his cosmographer’s eye had noted on the flank of a mountain a stretched patch that was brighter than the rest. When I first saw what he was pointing at, I guessed that hail had silvered the boughs of trees in some high vale. But as we watched, the color of it warmed. It broadened, brightened, and crept up the mountainside, setting fire to individual trees that had changed color early. It was a ray coming through a gap in the weather far to the west, levering up as the sun sank.
“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”
From Fraa Orolo, of all people, this was an astonishingly poetic and sentimental remark. I was so startled that it didn’t occur to me to wonder what Orolo was referring to when he spoke of the ugliness.
At least my eyes were open, though, to what he wanted me to see. The light on the mountain became rich in hues of crimson, gold, peach, and salmon. Over the course of a few seconds it washed the walls and towers of the Millenarian math with a glow that if I were a Deolater I’d have called holy and pointed to as proof that there must be a god.
“Beauty pierces through like that ray through the clouds,” Orolo continued. “Your eye is drawn to where it touches something that is capable of reflecting it. But your mind knows that the light does not originate from the mountains and the towers. Your mind knows that something is shining in from another world. Don’t listen to those who say it’s in the eye of the beholder.” By this Orolo meant the Fraas of the New Circle and the Old Reformed Faanites, but he could just as well have been Thelenes warning a fid not to be seduced by Sphenic demagogues.
The light lingered on the highest parapet for a minute, then faded. Suddenly all before us was deep greens, blues, and purples. “It’ll be good seeing tonight,” Orolo predicted.
“Will you stay?”
“No. We must go down. We’re already in trouble with the Master of the Keys. I must go fetch some notes.” Orolo hustled away and left me alone for a minute. I was surprised by a little sunrise above the mountains: the ray, sweeping invisibly up through empty sky, had found a couple of small wispy clouds and set them alight, like balls of wool flung into a fire. I looked down into the dark concent and felt no desire to jump. Seeing beauty was going to keep me alive. I thought of Cord and the beauty that she had, in the things she made, the way she carried herself, the emotions that played on her face while she was thinking. In the concent, beauty more often lay in some theoric proof—a kind of beauty that was actively sought and developed. In our buildings and music, beauty was always present even if I didn’t notice. Orolo was on to something; when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something—something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of. This was both a good reason not to die and a hint that death might not be everything. I knew I was perilously close to Deolater territory now. But because people could be so beautiful it was hard not to think that there was something of people that came from the other world that Cnoüs had seen through the clouds.