Very comfortable, as I saw when I came up the steps and pushed the door open (again fighting the sense that I was a trespasser). ROF carpenters had been at work furnishing the stone shell with wooden floors and paneled walls. Actually “cabinet-makers” was a fairer description than “carpenters” for avout who chose woodworking as their avocation, and so the place was all fitted and joined to tolerances that Cord might have envied. It was mostly one great cubical room, ten paces square, and lined with books. To my right a fire burned on a hearth, to my left, clear northern sky-light rushed in through a bay window so large that it formed a sort of alcove, as broad, round, and comfortable as Arsibalt, who sat in the middle of it reading a book so ancient he had to handle the pages with tongs. So he had not seen me tree-climbing after all. I could have slunk away. But now I was glad I hadn’t. It was good to see him here.

“You could be Shuf himself,” I said.

“Ssh,” he commanded, and looked about the place. “People will be cross if you talk that way. Oh, all the orders have their special hideaways. Islands of luxury that must make Saunt Cartas roll over in her chalcedony sarcophagus.”

“Pretty luxurious, that, come to think of it—”

“Come off it, it’s cold as hell in the winter.”

“Hence the expression ‘cold as Cartas’s—’”

“Ssh,” he said again.

“You know, Arsibalt, if the Edharian chapter has a luxurious hideaway, they’ve yet to show it to me.”

“They are the odd ones out,” he said, rolling his eyes. He looked me up and down. “Perhaps when you have attained more seniority—”

“Well, what are you, at the age of nineteen? The FAE of the Reformed Old Faanians?”

“The chapter and I have become most comfortable with each other in, yes, a short time. They support my project.”

“What—reconciling us with the Deolaters?”

“Some of the Reformed Old Faanians even believe in God.”

“Do you, Arsibalt? All right, all right,” I added, for he was getting ready to shush me for a third time. He finally began to move. He took me on a little tour, showing me some of the artifacts of the Dowment’s halcyon days: gold drinking-cups and jeweled book-covers now preserved under glass. I accused his order of having more of the same hidden away somewhere for drinking out of, and he blushed.

Then, as all this discussion of utensils had put him in mind of food, he shelved his book. We left Shuf’s Dowment behind us and began walking back for the midday meal. We had both skipped Provener, a luxury that was possible only because some younger fraas had begun to spell us winding the clock a few days a week.

When we gave up altogether on clock-winding, which would happen in two or three years, each of us would have enough free time to settle on an avocation—something practical that one could do to help improve life at the concent. Between now and then, we had the luxury of trying different things just to see how we liked them.

Fraa Orolo, for example, and his ongoing conversation with the library grape. We were too far north. The grapes were not happy. But we did have a south-facing slope, between the page trees and the outer wall of the concent, where they deigned to grow.

“Beekeeping,” Arsibalt said when I asked him what he was interested in.

I laughed at the image of Arsibalt enveloped in a cloud of bees. “I always thought you’d end up doing indoor work,” I said, “on dead things. I thought you’d be a bookbinder.”

“At this time of year, beekeeping is indoor work on dead things,” he pointed out. “Perhaps when the bees come out of hibernation I won’t favor it so much. How about you, Fraa Erasmas?”

Though Arsibalt didn’t know it, this was a sensitive subject. There was another reason you needed an avocation: so that if you turned out to be incapable of doing anything else, you could give up on books and chalk halls and dialog and work as a sort of laborer for the rest of your life. It was called “falling back.” There were plenty of avout like that, making food, brewing beer, and carving stone, and it was no secret who they were.

“You can pick some funny thing like beekeeping,” I pointed out, “and it’ll never be anything more than an eccentric hobby—because you’ll never need to fall back. Not unless the ROF suddenly recruits a whole lot of geniuses. For me the odds of falling back are a little greater and I need to pick something I could actually do for eighty years without going crazy.”

Arsibalt now blew an opportunity to assure me that I was really smart and that this would never happen. I didn’t mind. After my rough conversation with Tulia six weeks ago I was spending less time agonizing and more time trying to get things accomplished. “There are some opportunities,” I told him, “making the instruments on the starhenge work the way they’re supposed to.”

“Those opportunities would be much brighter if you in fact had access to the starhenge,” he pointed out. It was safe for him to talk this way since we were sloshing through leaves and no one was near us, unless Suur Trestanas was hiding in a leaf pile with a hand cupped to her ear.

I stopped and raised my chin.

“Are you expecting an Inquisitor to fall out of a tree?” Arsibalt asked me.

“No, just looking at it,” I said, referring to the starhenge. From here, on this little rise, we had a good view of it. But nestled as we were in the coppice, we’d be difficult to make out from the Mynster and so I felt comfortable taking a long look. The twin telescopes of Saunts Mithra and Mylax were in the same position where they had rested during the three months or so we’d been locked out: slewed around to aim at the northern sky.

“I was thinking that if Orolo was using the M & M to look at something they didn’t want him to see, then we might get some clues from where he pointed it the last day he had access to it. Maybe he even took some pictures that night, yet to be seen.”

“Can you draw any conclusions from where the M & M is pointed now?” Arsibalt asked.

“Only that Orolo wanted to look at something above the pole.”

“And what is above the pole? Other than the pole star?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean? There must be something.”

“But it messes up my hypothesis.”

“What, pray tell, is that? And can you explain it as we walk toward a place that is warm and has food?”

I started moving my feet again, and talked to the back of Arsibalt’s head as I let him break trail through the leaves. “I had been guessing it was a rock.”

“Meaning an asteroid,” he said.

“Yeah. But rocks don’t come over the pole.”

“How can you say such a thing? Don’t they come from all directions?”

“Yeah, but they mostly have low inclinations—they are in the same plane as the planets. So you’d look near the ecliptic, which is what we call that plane.”

“But that is a statistical argument,” he pointed out. “It could simply be an unusual rock.”

“It fails the Steelyard.”

“Saunt Gardan’s Steelyard is a useful guideline. All sorts of real things fail it,” Arsibalt pointed out, “including you and me.”