“Why not?”

“The image quality was too good.”

“Too good in what way?” Spelikon asked.

“Quin rattled off some commercial bulshytt that I tried to capture in the journal,” I said.

“When you say you tried to capture it, are you saying that what you wrote in the journal is only a guess at what it said? Here it reads—quoting again—‘the Eagle-Rez, the SteadiHand, the DynaZoom—put those all together, and it could have seen straight across into the other parts of your Mynster, even through the screens.’ Did Quin actually use those words?”

“I don’t know. It’s partly my recollection and partly an educated guess.”

“Explain what you mean by an educated guess in this case.”

“Well, the point of the story—the basic technical reason that the Ita wouldn’t allow Flec to use the speelycaptor—was that from where he was going to be sitting, behind the north screen, he would have been able to take pictures of the Thousanders and Hundreders by pointing his speelycaptor across the chancel. With our naked eyes, we can’t see through the screens into the other naves because of the contrast between the screen, which is light-colored—cosmographers would say it has high albedo—and the dark space beyond. Also because of distance and other factors. The gist of it was that the Ita had looked up the specifications on Flec’s speelycaptor and figured out that it had some combination of features that would make it possible to see things that the naked eye couldn’t. Now, it’s a fool’s game trying to make sense of the commercial bulshytt that the makers of speelycaptors use to describe those features. But from my experience with cosmography, I have a pretty good idea what it would entail: some kind of zoom or magnification feature, a way of detecting faint images against a noisy background, and image stabilization, to correct for shaking of the hands.”

“And that is what you mean by an educated guess,” Spelikon said. “Educated, in the sense that anyone with a knowledge of cosmographical instruments would be able to infer what you inferred about the capabilities of Flec’s speelycaptor.”

“Yes.”

“It says in your journal,” Spelikon continued, “that Fraa Orolo’s hand came down on your wrist just after that, and stopped you from writing. Why?”

“Being older and wiser,” I said, “Orolo saw where the conversation was headed. Quin was about to go off chattering about Sæcular stuff, and about what had happened between Flec and the Ita, which obviously is not the kind of information we ought to be exposed to.”

“But if your ears were going to be exposed to it anyway, why did Orolo stop your hand? Why did he not plug your ears?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t the most logical thing for him to do. People don’t always think clearly at such moments.”

“Except when they do,” Spelikon said. “Well, at any rate, that is all I have for you concerning the Orolo—Quin interview. There is only one other question.”

“Yes?”

“Where were you on the ninth night of Apert?”

I thought for a minute, and frowned. “That’s one of those simple-sounding questions that is hard for a normal person to answer.”

Spelikon was almost too quick to agree with me. “If by ‘normal person’ you mean ‘non-hierarch,’ then let me assure you I have no specific memories of what I did that evening.”

“Well, I was scheduled to give a tour the next morning, so I didn’t stay up late. I had supper. Then I’m pretty sure I went to bed. I was doing a lot of thinking.”

“Really?” Spelikon asked. “About what?”

I must have gotten a very strange look on my face. He chuckled and said, “I’m just curious. I don’t think it matters.” He drew up another leaf. “According to the Chronicle, on that night you were assigned to share a cell with Fraa Branch and Fraa Ostabon. If I were to ask them, they’d both say you were in the cell with them that night?”

“I can’t imagine why they’d say anything else.”

“Very well,” Spelikon said, “that will be all. Thank you for your time, Fraa Erasmas.”

Spelikon opened the door for me. I stepped through it to discover Fraa Branch and Fraa Ostabon waiting in the gallery.

My talent for envisioning things, and spinning yarns in my head, failed me that evening, as if it had gone on vacation. I could make no sense of my interview with Spelikon. I put it down as further evidence that Suur Trestanas was cracking, and would soon be sent to Physicians’ Commons to get better—hopefully very slowly.

The next day I was up early to help serve breakfast. I spent the morning in a chalk hall with Barb, working on some fundamentals of exterior calculus that I should have understood years earlier but was only now getting a real grip on. As I was reaching the point where my brain couldn’t take any more, and noticed myself making dumb mistakes, Provener rang.

This was one of the days that my old team was supposed to wind the clock, so I went to the Mynster. It was sparsely attended, with few hierarchs in evidence. I didn’t see Fraa Orolo or any of his senior students, and Jesry didn’t show up, so Lio and Arsibalt and I had to do it without his help.

Between that and the long morning in the chalk hall, I was famished, and ate like a dog in the Refectory. When I was almost finished, Orolo came in, fetched himself a light lunch, and sat down alone in what had become his favorite spot: the table from which he could look out the window and down the mountains when the weather was clear. Today, it wasn’t; but it felt as though the clouds might later be rinsed away by a cold clear river of wind. When I had finished eating, I went over and sat with him. I guessed that Spelikon must have been pestering him with questions too. But I didn’t want to bring it up. He must be sick of it.

He gave me a little smile. “Thanks to the hierarchs,” he said, “I shall soon be making observations again.”

“They’re going to open the starhenge? That’s great news!” I exclaimed. Orolo smiled again. Things were beginning to make sense. Something had spooked the hierarchs. They had misinterpreted Orolo’s pre-Apert activities in a way I still didn’t understand. Now finally they were coming to see that they’d been mistaken, and things were about to go back to normal.

“I must admit, I have a tablet up in the M & M that I’ve been dying to get my hands on,” he said.

“When are they going to open it?”

“I don’t know,” Orolo said.

“What are you going to look at first?”

“Oh, I’d rather not say just now. Nothing that requires the power of the M & M. A smaller telescope would suffice, or even a commercial speelycaptor.”

“Spelikon was asking me all kinds of questions about those—”

He put his finger to his lips. “I know,” he said, “and it is good that you answered his questions as you did.”

I was distracted for a few moments, working through the implications. The news was good. But when people began going up to the starhenge again, they might find the tablet I’d left in Clesthyra’s Eye, which could get me in a lot of trouble. I felt stupid now for having put it there. How was I going to fetch it back?

Orolo looked out a different window, reading the time from the clock. “I saw Tulia a few minutes ago. She and Ala were rounding up the team. She asked me to give you a message.”

“Yes?”

“She won’t be turning up for this meal. She’ll see you at supper.”

“That’s the message?”

“Yes. The team have got some unusual changes to ring—it’s going to require their full attention. They’ll be starting in half an hour or so. She seemed to think that you of all people would find this especially important. I’ve no idea why.”

Voco.

It had to be another Voco. So I was going to get my chance to sneak up to the starhenge again—that was the real message that Tulia was trying to send me.