“When I say burned, maybe what I’m getting at is that I burned my bridge. What I said to Varax is going to get repeated to Suur Trestanas and then filter down to the rest of her lot.”
“You’re afraid the New Circle won’t want you for Eliger?”
“That is correct.”
“You can avoid the stink then. Better for you.”
“What stink, Arsibalt?”
“The stink that’s going to permeate this place when most of our crop join the Edharians. The New Circle and the Reformed Old Faanians are going to be left with floor-sweepings.”
Trying to seem casual, I looked around to be sure that we were not in earshot of any of the fids Arsibalt considered to be floor-sweepings. But the only person nearby was the primeval Grandfraa Mentaxenes, shuffling around waiting for a purpose, but too proud to ask for one. I approached him with the gnawed table-opening codex of Fraa Bolo and asked him to translate it. He couldn’t have been more ready. Arsibalt and I left him to it, and trudged back toward the Mynster for the next table.
“What makes you think that’s going to happen?” I said.
“Orolo has been talking to many of us—not just you,” Arsibalt said.
“Recruiting us?”
“Corlandin recruits—which is why we don’t trust him. Orolo simply talks, and lets us draw our own conclusions.”
Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have been infected by Procian thinking. Their frequent and loud use of this word to interrupt lectures, dialogs, private conversations, etc., exacerbated the divide between Procian and Halikaarnian orders that characterized the mathic world in the years leading up to the Third Sack. Shortly before the Third Sack, all of the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn were Thrown Back, so little more is known about them (their frequent appearance in Sæcular entertainments results from confusion between them and the Incanters).
Usage note: In the mathic world, if the word is suddenly shouted out in a chalk hall or refectory it brings to mind the events associated with sense (3) and is therefore to be avoided. Spoken in a moderate tone of voice, it takes on sense (2), which long ago lost any vulgar connotations it may once have had. In the Sæculum it is easily confused with sense (1) and deemed a vulgarity or even an obscenity. It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. This places the mathic observer in a nearly impossible position. One is forced either to use this “offensive” word and be deemed a disagreeable person and as such excluded from polite discourse, or to say the same thing in a different way, which means becoming a purveyor of bulshytt oneself and thereby lending strength to what one is trying to attack. The latter quality probably explains the uncanny stability and resiliency of bulshytt. Resolving this dilemma is beyond the scope of this Dictionary and is probably best left to hierarchs who make it their business to interact with the Sæculum.
Somehow that canopy got raised. The struts were newmatter dating back to the founding of the Concent; as dusk fell, they began to emit a soft light that came from all directions and made even Fraa Mentaxenes look healthy. Beneath it, twelve hundred visitors, three hundred Decenarians, and five hundred Unarians celebrated Tenth Night.
This had originated as a harvest festival, coinciding with the end of the calendar year. Thanks to some adroit sequence-writing that had been done before the Second Sack, we had a few crops that could grow almost year-round. In our greenhouses we could cultivate less hardy plants in midwinter. But that stuff wasn’t glorious in the way that tangle food was at this time of the year.
The tangle had been invented way back before Cnoüs, by people who lived on the opposite side of the world from Ethras and Baz. Cob grew straight up out of the ground to the height of a man’s head and bore rich heads of particolored kernels late in the summer. In the meantime, it served as a trellis for climbing vines of podbeans that gave us protein while fixing nitrogen in the soil to nourish the cob. In the web that the podbean vines spun among the cob stalks, three other kinds of vegetables grew: highest from the ground, where bugs couldn’t get to them, red, yellow, and orange tommets to give us vitamins and flavor our salads, stews, and sauces. Snaking along the ground, gourds of many varieties. In the middle, hollow pepperpods. Tubers of two kinds grew beneath the ground, and leaf vegetables gathered whatever light remained. The original, ancient tangle had comprised eight plants, and the people who cultivated them had over thousands of years bred them to be as efficient as they could be without actually reaching in and tinkering with their sequences. Ours were more efficient yet, and we had added four more types of plants, two of which had no purpose other than to replenish the soil. At this time of year, the tangles we’d been cultivating since thaw were in their glory and sported a variety of color and flavor that couldn’t be had extramuros. That’s why Apert took place now. It was a way for those inside the math to share their good fortune with their neighbors extramuros, as well as to relieve them of any babies not likely to survive the winter.
I saved seats for Cord and her boyfriend Rosk. Cord also brought with her a cousin of ours: Dath, a boy of fifteen. I remembered him vaguely. He’d been the kind of youngster who was always being rushed to Physicians’ Commons for repair of astonishing traumas. Somehow he’d survived and even put on passable clothing for the event. His dents and scars were hidden beneath a mess of curly brown hair.
Arsibalt made sure he was seated across from “the exquisite” Cord; he didn’t appear to understand the significance of Rosk. Jesry caused his entire family to sit at the next table, which placed him back to back with me. Then Jesry flagged down Orolo and persuaded him to sit in our cluster. Orolo attracted Lio and several other lonely wanderers, who proceeded to fill out our table.
Dath was the kind of sweet untroubled soul who could ask very basic questions with no trace of embarrassment. I tried to answer them in the same spirit.
“You know I’m a sline, cousin,” I said. “So the difference between slines and us is not that we’re smarter. That is demonstrably not the case.”
This topic had come up after people had been eating, drinking, talking, and singing old carols just long enough to make it obvious that there really were no differences. Dath, who had come through his early mishaps with his good sense intact, had been looking about and taking note of this—I could read it on his face. And so he had raised the question of why bother to put up walls—to have an extramuros and an intramuros?
Orolo had caught wind of this and turned around to get a look at Dath. “It would be easier for you to understand if you could see one of the pinprick maths,” he said.
“Pinprick maths?”
“Some are no more than a one-room apartment with an electrical clock hanging on the wall and a well-stocked bookcase. One avout lives there alone, with no speely, no jeejah. Perhaps every few years an Inquisitor comes round and pokes his head in the door, just to see that all is well.”