The wedge monument was aimed, not out toward the city, but in toward the clock. This was to emphasize that those buried under it had returned.

Fifty paces from its vertex lay the entrance of the Hylaean Way. After the Mynster, this was the dominant architectural feature of the concent. The style of these buildings was more Bazian than Mathic—less vertical, more horizontal, reminding people of arks, which traditionally spread wide to welcome all comers.

I held the door open long enough for the two latecomers to scurry inside, then closed it, content—maybe even smug—in the knowledge that Barb was not with us. During the first two days of Apert, the son of Quin had attended almost every one of these tours. After memorizing every word that the guides said, he had begun to ask crippling numbers of questions. From there he’d moved on to correcting the fraas and suurs whenever they’d said something wrong, and amplifying their remarks when they were insufficiently long-winded. A couple of wily suurs had found other ways to keep him busy, but it was difficult to keep him focused for long and so he would still make occasional strafing runs. Quin and his ex-wife seemed content to give Barb the run of the concent at all hours, which was as good as telling us that they wanted him Collected.

The architects of the Hylaean Way had played a little trick by making its grand-looking entrance lead to a space that was unexpectedly dark and close—suggestive of a labyrinth, but not nearly that complicated. The walls and floors were made from slabs of greenish-brown shale quarried from a deposit that fascinated naturalists because of the profusion of early life-forms fossilized in it. I explained as much to the group as we all waited for our eyes to adjust to the dimness, then invited them to spend a few minutes looking at the fossils. Those who’d had the foresight to bring a source of light, such as the suvin kids and some of the retired burgers, dispersed into the corners of the chamber. The nun had brought a map so that she knew just where to look for the really weird fossils. I circulated among the others with a basket of hand-lights. Some accepted them. Some waved me off. Probably these were counter-Bazian fundamentalists who believed that Arbre had been created all at once in its present form shortly before the time of Cnoüs. They ignored this phase of the tour as a silent protest. A few more wore earbuds and listened to recorded tours on jeejahs. The slines only stared at me and made no response. I noticed that one of them had his arm in a sling. It took me a few moments to place this memory. Then I drew the obvious conclusion that this was the very group that had attacked Lio and Arsibalt. I felt helpless in my formal wrap—the one that could easily be pulled down over the face—and wished I’d paid more attention to how Lio had been wearing his bolt lately.

Backing away from them, I announced: “This chamber is two things at once. On the one hand, it’s an exhibit of ancient fossils—mostly weird and funny-looking ones that did not evolve into any creatures known to us today. Evolutionary dead ends. At the same time, this place is a symbol for the world of thought as it existed before Cnoüs. In that age there was a zoo of different thought-ways, most of which would seem crazy to us now. These too were evolutionary dead ends. They are extinct except among primitive tribes in remote places.” As I was saying this I was leading them around a couple of turns toward a much bigger and brighter space. “They are extinct,” I continued, “because of what happened to this man as he was walking along a riverbank seven thousand years ago.” And I stepped forth into the Rotunda, quickening my pace to draw the group along in my wake.

A long pause now, so as not to ruin the moment. The central sculpture was more than six thousand years old; it had been a world-famous masterpiece for almost that long. How it had found its way to this continent and this rotunda was a long and lively story in itself. It was of white marble, double life size, though it seemed even bigger because it was up on a huge stone pedestal. It was Cnoüs, aged but muscular, with long wavy beard and hair, sprawled back against the gnarled roots of a tree, staring up in awe and astonishment. As if to shield himself from the vision, he had raised a hand, but could not resist the temptation to peek over it. Gripped in his other hand was a stylus. Tumbled at his feet were a ruler, a compass, and a tablet graven with precisely constructed circles and polygons.

Barb hadn’t looked at the ceiling when he’d come in here for the first time. This was because Barb’s brain was so organized that he was blind to facial expressions. Everyone else—even I, who’d seen it many times—looked up to see what was having such an effect on poor old Cnoüs. The answer (at least, ever since the statue had been installed here) was an oculus, or a hole at the apex of the Rotunda dome, shaped like an isosceles triangle, and letting in a beam of sunlight.

“Cnoüs was a master stonemason,” I began. “On one ancient tablet, which was made before he had his vision, he is described by an adjective that literally means one who is elevated. This might mean either that he was especially good at being a stonemason or that he was some kind of holy man in the religion of his place and time. At the command of his king, he was building a temple to a god. The stone was quarried from a place a couple of miles upriver and floated down to the building site on rafts.”

Here one of the slines broke in with a question, and I had to stop and explain that all of this had happened far away, and that I was not speaking of our river or our quarries. A jeejah began to crow a ridiculous tune; I waited for its owner to stifle it before I continued.

“Cnoüs would draw up measurements on a wax tablet and then walk up to the quarry to give instructions to the stonecutters. One day he was trying to work out a particularly difficult problem in the geometry of the piece he needed to have cut. Under the shade of a tree that grew on the riverbank, he sat down to work on this problem, and there he had a vision that changed his mind and his life.

“Everyone agrees on that much. But his description of that vision comes to us indirectly, through these women.” I extended my arm toward a pair of slightly smaller sculptures, which (inevitably) formed an isosceles triangle with that of Cnoüs. “His daughters Hylaea and Deät, thought to be fraternal twins.”

The counter-Bazians were way ahead of me. They had already moved to the foot of Deät and knelt down to pray. Some were rummaging in their bags for candles. Others, peering into their jeejahs as they snapped phototypes, stumbled and collided. Deät was a cloaked figure sunk to her knees, facing toward Cnoüs, her garment shielding her face from the light of the oculus.

Our Mother Hylaea, by contrast, stood erect, pulling her cloak back to bare her head, the better to gaze straight up into the light. With her other hand she was pointing at it, and her lips were parted as if she were just beginning to offer up some observation.

I recited a legend concerning these two statues. They had been commissioned in −2270 by Tantus, the Bazian Emperor, specifically as companion-pieces to the older one of Cnoüs, which he had just acquired by sacking what was left of Ethras. He had also acquired the quarry whence the marble for the original statue had come, and so he had caused two more great blocks to be extracted from it and shipped to Baz in specially made barges. The finest sculptor of the age had spent five years carving these.

At the formal unveiling, Tantus had been so taken by the look on Hylaea’s face that he had ordered the sculptor to be brought before him and had asked him what it was that Hylaea was about to say. The sculptor had declined to answer the question. Tantus had insisted. The sculptor had pointed out that all of the art, and all of the virtue, in this statue lay in that very ambiguity. Tantus, fascinated, had asked him a number of questions on that theme, then drew the Imperial sword and plunged it into the sculptor’s heart so that he would never be able to undermine his own work of art by answering the question. Later scholarship had cast doubt on this story, as it did on all good stories, but to tell it at this point in the tour was obligatory, and the slines got a kick out of it.