“What’s the point of that?” Dath asked.

“That is precisely the question I am asking you to think about,” Orolo said, and turned back round to resume a conversation with Jesry’s father.

Dath threw up his hands. Arsibalt and I laughed, but not at his expense. “That’s how Pa Orolo does his dirty work,” I told him.

“Tonight, instead of sleeping, you’ll lie awake wondering what he meant,” Arsibalt said.

“Well, aren’t you guys going to help me? I’m not a fraa!” Dath pleaded.

“What would motivate someone to sit alone in a one-room apartment reading and thinking?” Arsibalt asked. “What would have to be true of a person for them to consider that a life well spent?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re really shy? Scared of open spaces?”

“Agoraphobia is not the correct answer,” Arsibalt said, a little huffy.

“What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?” I tried.

“Okayyy…”

“You might say that the difference between us and you is that we have been infected by a vision of…another world.” I’d been about to say “a greater” or “a higher” but settled for “another.”

“I don’t like the infection metaphor,” Arsibalt started to say in Orth. I kneed him under the table.

“You mean like a different planet?” Dath asked.

“That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” I said. “Most of us don’t think it’s another planet in the sense of a speculative fiction speely. Maybe it’s the future of this world. Maybe it’s an alternate universe we can’t get to. Maybe it’s nothing but a fantasy. But at any rate it lives in our souls and we can’t help striving toward it.”

“What’s that world like?” Dath asked.

Behind me, a jingle began to play from someone’s jeejah. It wasn’t that loud, but something about it made my brain lock up. “For one thing, it doesn’t have any of those,” I told Dath.

After the jeejah had been singing for a little while, I turned around. Everyone in a twenty-foot radius was staring at Jesry’s older brother, who was slapping himself all over trying to determine which of the pockets in his suit contained the jeejah. Finally he extracted it and silenced it. He stood up, as if he had not drawn enough attention to himself, and bellowed his own name. “Yes, Doctor Grane,” he went on, staring into the distance like a holy man. “I see. I see. Can they infest humans as well? Really!? I was only joking. Well, how would we be able to tell if that had happened?”

People turned back to their meals, but conversations were slow to restart, because of sporadic incursions from Jesry’s brother.

Arsibalt cleared his throat as only Arsibalt could; it sounded like the end of the world. “The Primate’s about to speak.”

I turned around and looked at Jesry, who had realized the same thing and was waving his arms at his brother, who stared right through him. He was negotiating a bulk rate on biopsies. He was a very tough negotiator. Women in the party—sisters and sisters-in-law of Jesry—had begun to feel ashamed and to tug at the man’s elbows. He spun around and stalked away from us: “Excuse me, Doctor, I didn’t catch that last part? Something about the larvae?” But in his defense, as I looked around I could see that he was only one of many who were using jeejahs for one purpose or another.

Statho had already addressed us twice. The first time had been ostensibly to greet everyone but really to nag us into taking our seats. The second time had been to intone the Invocation, which had been written by Diax himself while the rake blisters were still fresh on his hands. If you could understand Proto-Orth and if you happened to be a mushy-headed, number-worshipping Enthusiast, the Invocation would make you feel distinctly unwelcome. Everyone else just thought it added a touch of class to the proceedings.

Now he told us we were going to be entertained by a contingent of Edharians. Statho’s grasp of Fluccish was weak; the way he phrased it, he was commanding us to be entertained. This made laughter run through the crowd, which left him nonplussed and asking the Inquisitors (who were flanking him at the high table) for explanations.

Three fraas and two suurs sang a five-part motet while twelve others milled around in front of them. Actually they weren’t milling; it just looked that way from where we sat. Each one of them represented an upper or lower index in a theorical equation involving certain tensors and a metric. As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another’s paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold, involving various steps of symmetrization, antisymmetrization, and raising and lowering of indices. Seen from above by someone who didn’t know any theorics, it would have looked like a country dance. The music was lovely even if it was interrupted every few seconds by the warbling of jeejahs.

Then we ate and drank more. Then the New Circle fraas sang their piece, which was much better received than the tensor dance. Then we ate and drank more. Statho made it all tick along, like Cord running her five-axis mill. We weren’t used to seeing him do a lot of work, but he was earning his beer this evening. To the visitors, this was just a free feed with weird entertainment, but in truth it was a ritual as old and as important as Provener and so there were certain boxes that had to be checked if we were to get out of it without drawing a rebuke from the Inquisition. And Statho was the kind who would have done it the right way even if Varax and Onali hadn’t been sitting there asking him to pass the salt.

Fraa Haligastreme was introduced to say a few words on behalf of the Edharian chapter. He tried to talk about what I had mentioned to Dath earlier, and bungled it even worse. He was the funniest man in the world if you just walked up to him and asked him a question, but he was helpless when given the opportunity to prepare, and the sporadic alarums of the jeejahs shattered his concentration and reduced his talk to a heap of shards. The only shard that lodged in my memory was his concluding line: “If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.”

Next up was Corlandin for the New Circle chapter.

“I’ve been with my family the last ten days,” he announced, and smiled over at a table of Burgers who smiled back at him. “They were kind enough to organize a family reunion during Apert. All of them have busy lives out there, just as I do in here, but for these days we suspended our routines, our careers, and our other commitments so that we could be together.”

“Myself, I’ve been out watching speelys,” Orolo remarked. Only about five of us could hear him. “Ones with plenty of explosions. Some are quite enjoyable.”

Corlandin continued, “Making dinner—normally a routine chore we perform to avoid starvation—became something altogether different. The pattern of cuts my Aunt Prin made in the top crust of a pie was not just a system of vents to relieve internal pressure, but a sort of ritual going back who knows how many generations—an invocation, if you will, of her ancestors who did it the same way. The conversations we had about, say, when Grandpa Myrt fell off his porch roof while cleaning the gutters, were not just debriefings about the hazards of home renovation but celebrations—full of laughter, tears, and sometimes laughter and tears at the same time—of how much we loved each other. So you could say that nothing was about what it superficially seemed to be about. Which in another context might make it sound all just a bit sinister. But obviously it was nothing of the kind. We all got it. You’d have gotten it too. And that’s a lot like what we fraas and suurs do in this concent all the time. Thank you.” And Corlandin sat down.