Orolo sat with us. It was the first time I’d talked to him in ages. He sat where he could gaze out a window at the mountains, in much the same mood as I’d been looking at the starhenge a few minutes earlier. It was a clear day, and the peaks were all standing out, seeming as if they were close enough to throw stones at. “I wonder what the seeing will be like tonight on top of Bly’s Butte,” he sighed. “Better than here, anyway!”

“Is that the one where the slines ate Saunt Bly’s liver?” I asked.

“The same.”

“Is that around here? I thought it was on another continent or something.”

“Oh no. Bly was a Saunt Edhar man! You can look it up in the Chronicle—we have all of his relics salted away somewhere.”

“Do you really mean to suggest that there’s an observatory there? Or are you just pulling my leg?”

Orolo shrugged. “I’ve no idea. Estemard built a telescope there, after he renounced his vow and stormed out the Day Gate.”

“And Estemard is—”

“One of my two teachers.”

“Paphlagon being the other?”

“Yes. They both got fed up with this place at about the same time. Estemard left, Paphlagon went into the upper labyrinth one night after supper and then I didn’t see him for a quarter of a century, until—well—you know.” A thought occurred to him. “What were you doing during Paphlagon’s Evocation? At the time, you were still a guest of Autipete.”

Autipete was a figure of ancient mythology who had crept up on her father as he lay sleeping and put out his eyes. I had never heard Suur Trestanas referred to this way. I bit my lip and shook my head in dismay as Arsibalt blew soup out his nostrils. “That is not fair,” I said, “she’s only following orders.”

Orolo squared off to plane me. “You know, during the Third Harbinger it was quite common for those who had committed terrible crimes to say—”

“That they were just following orders, we all know that.”

“Fraa Erasmas is suffering from Saunt Alvar’s Syndrome,” Arsibalt said.

“Those people during the Third Harbinger were shoving children into furnaces with bulldozers,” I said. “And as far as Saunt Alvar goes—well, he was the sole survivor of his concent in the Third Sack and was held captive for three decades. Locking the door to the telescopes for a few weeks doesn’t really measure up, does it?”

Orolo conceded the point with a wink. “My question stands. What did you do during Voco?”

Of course I’d have loved to tell him. So I did—but I made it into a joke. “While no one was looking, I ran up to the starhenge to make observations. Unfortunately, the sun was out.”

“That damned luminous orb!” Orolo spat. Then something crossed his mind. “But you know that our equipment can see some things during the daytime, if they are very bright.”

Since Orolo had decided to play along with my joke, it would not have been sporting for me to drop it at this point. “Unfortunately the M & M was pointed in the wrong direction,” I said. “I didn’t have time to slew it around.”

“The wrong direction for what?” Orolo asked.

“For looking at anything bright—such as a planet or…” I faltered.

Jesry sat down at an empty table nearby, facing me and Orolo, and remained still, ignoring his food. If he’d been a wolf his ears would have been erect and swiveled toward us.

Orolo said, “Would it be too much trouble for you to bring your sentence to a decent conclusion?”

Arsibalt looked as rattled as I felt. This had started as a joke. Now, Fraa Orolo was trying to get at something serious—but we couldn’t make out what.

“Aside from supernovae, very bright objects tend to be nearby—within the solar system—and things in the solar system are, by and large, confined to the plane of the ecliptic. So, Fraa Orolo, in this absurd fantasy of me running to the starhenge to look at the sky in broad daylight, I’d have to slew the M & M from its current polar orientation to the plane of the ecliptic in order to have a chance of actually seeing anything.”

“I just want your absurd fantasy to be internally consistent,” Fraa Orolo explained.

“Well, are you happy with it now?”

He shrugged. “Your point is well reasoned. But don’t be too dismissive of the poles. Many things converge there.”

“Like what? Lines of longitude?” I scoffed.

Arsibalt, in similar spirit: “Migratory birds?”

Jesry: “Compass needles?”

Then a higher-pitched voice broke in. “Polar orbits.”

We turned and saw Barb coming toward us with a tray of food. He must have been listening with one ear as he stood in line. Now he was giving the answer to the riddle in a pre-adolescent voice that could have been heard from Bly’s Butte. It was such an odd thing to say that it had turned heads all over the Refectory. “By definition,” he continued, in the singsong voice he used when he was rattling off something he had memorized from a book, “a satellite in a polar orbit must cross over each of the poles during each revolution around Arbre.”

Orolo stuffed a piece of gravy-sopped bread into his mouth to hide his amusement. Barb was now standing right next to me with his tray a few inches from my ear, but he made no move to sit down.

I had the feeling I was being watched. I looked over at Fraa Corlandin a few tables distant, just in the act of glancing away. But he could still hear Barb: “A telescope aimed north would have a high probability of detecting—”

I yanked down on a loose fold of his bolt. One arm dropped. All the food slid to that end of his tray and threw it out of balance. He lost control and it all avalanched to the floor.

All heads turned our way. Barb stood amazed. “My arm was acted on by a force of unknown origin!” he stated.

“Terribly sorry, it was my fault,” I said. Barb was fascinated by the mess on the floor. Knowing by now how his mind worked, I rose, squared off in front of him, and put my hands on his shoulders. “Barb, look at me,” I said.

He looked at me.

“This was my fault. I got tangled up with your bolt.”

“You should clean it up, if it was your fault,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I agree and that is what I shall do now,” I said. I went off to fetch a bucket. Behind me I could hear Jesry asking Barb a question about conic sections.

One form of drudgery led straight into another as Suur Ala helpfully reminded me that it was my day to clean up the kitchen following the midday meal. I hadn’t been at it for long before I noticed that Barb was in there with me, just following me around, making no move to help. Which irked me at first: yet another case of his almost perfect social cluelessness. But once I got over that, I decided it was better that way. Some things were easier to do alone. Communicating and coordinating with others was often more trouble than it was worth. Many tried to help anyway because they thought it was the polite thing to do, or because it was an avenue for social bonding. Barb’s thinking wasn’t muddled by any such considerations. Instead, he talked to me, which in my view was preferable to being “helped.”

“Orbits are about as much fun as what you are doing,” he observed gravely, watching me get down on my knees and reach elbow-deep into a grease-choked drain.