“The best he could do, once the starhenge had been locked, was to stand out in that vineyard, freezing his arse off, looking at the pole star through the speelycaptor. Waiting for something to streak across.”

“When it showed up, it would zoom across the viewfinder in a few moments,” I said. We were completing each other’s sentences now. “But then what? What would he have learned?”

“The time,” Jesry said. “He would know what time it was.” He shifted his gaze to the tabletop, as if it were a speely of Orolo. “He makes a note of it. Ninety minutes later he looks again. He sees the same bird making its next pass over the pole.” Lio referred to satellites as birds—this was military slang he’d picked up from books—and the rest of us had adopted the term.

“That sounds about as interesting as watching the hour hand on a clock,” I said.

“Well, but remember, there’s more than one of these birds,” he said.

“I don’t have to remember it—I spent the whole afternoon looking at them!” I reminded him.

But Jesry was on the trail of an idea and had no time for me and my petty annoyance. “They can’t all be orbiting at the same altitude,” he said. “Some must be higher than others—those would have longer periods. Instead of ninety minutes they might take ninety-one or a hundred three minutes to go around. By timing their orbits, Fraa Orolo could, by making enough observations, compile sort of—”

“A census,” I said. “A list of all the birds that were up there.”

“Once he had that in hand, if there was any change—any anomaly—he’d be able to detect it. But until such time as he had completed that census, as you call it—”

“He’d be working in the dark, in more ways than one, wouldn’t he?” I said. “He’d see a bird pass over the pole but he wouldn’t know which bird it was, or if there was anything unusual about it.”

“So if that’s true we have to follow in his footsteps,” Jesry said. “Your first objective should be to compile such a census.”

“That is much easier for me than it was for Orolo,” I said. “Just looking at the tracks on the tablet you can see that some are more widely spread—bigger slices of the pie—than others. Those must be the high flyers.”

“Once you get used to looking at these images, you might be able to notice anomalies just by their general appearance,” Jesry speculated.

Which was easy for him to say, since he wasn’t the one doing it!

For the last little while he had seemed restless and bored. Now he broke eye contact, gazed around the Refectory as if seeking someone more interesting—but then turned his attention back to me. “New topic,” he announced.

“Affirmative. State name of topic,” I answered, but if he knew I was making fun of him, he didn’t show it.

“Fraa Paphlagon.”

“The Hundreder who was Evoked.”

“Yes.”

“Orolo’s mentor.”

“Yes. The Steelyard says that his Evocation, and the trouble Orolo got into, must be connected.”

“Seems reasonable,” I said. “I guess I’ve sort of been assuming that.”

“Normally we’d have no way of knowing what a Hundreder was working on—not until the next Centennial Apert, anyway. But before Paphlagon went into the Upper Labyrinth, twenty-two years ago, he wrote some treatises that got sent out into the world at the Decennial Apert of 3670. Ten years later, and again just a few months ago, our Library got its usual Decennial deliveries. So, I’ve been going through all that stuff looking for anything that references Paphlagon’s work.”

“Seems really indirect,” I pointed out. “We’ve got all of Paphlagon’s work right here, don’t we?”

“Yeah. But that’s not what I’m looking for,” Jesry said. “I’m more interested in knowing who, out there, was paying attention to Paphlagon. Who read his works of 3670, and thought he had an interesting mind? Because—”

“Because someone,” I said, getting it, “someone out there in the Sæcular world must have said ‘Paphlagon’s our man—yank him, and bring him to us!’”

“Exactly.”

“So what have you found?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Jesry said. “Turns out Paphlagon had two careers, in a way.”

“What do you mean—like an avocation?”

“You could say his avocation was philosophy. Metatheorics. Procians might even call it a sort of religion. On the one hand, he’s a proper cosmographer, doing the same sort of stuff as Orolo. But in his spare time he’s thinking big ideas, and writing it down—and people on the outside noticed.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“I don’t want to go there now,” Jesry said.

“Well, damn it—”

He held up a hand to settle me. “Read it yourself! That’s not what I’m about. I’m about trying to reckon who picked him and why. There’s lots of cosmographers, right?”

“Sure.”

“So if he was Evoked to answer cosmography questions, you have to ask—”

“Why him in particular?”

“Yeah. But it’s rare to work on the metatheorical stuff he was interested in.”

“I see where you’re going,” I said. “The Steelyard tells us he must have been Evoked for that—not the cosmography.”

“Yeah,” Jesry said. “Anyway, not that many people paid attention to Paphlagon’s metatheorics, at least, judging from the stuff we got in the deliveries of 3680 and 3690. But there’s one suur at Baritoe, name of Aculoa, who really seems to admire him. Has written two books about Paphlagon’s work.”

“Tenner or—”

“No, that’s just it. She’s a Unarian. Thirty-four years straight.”

So she was a teacher. There was no other reason to spend more than a few years in a Unarian math.

“Latter Evenedrician,” Jesry said, answering my next question before I’d asked it.

“I don’t know much about that order.”

“Well, remember when Orolo told us that Saunt Evenedric worked on different stuff during the second half of his career?”

“Actually, I think Arsibalt’s the one who told us that, but—”

Jesry shrugged off my correction. “The Latter Evenedricians are interested in exactly that stuff.”

“All right,” I said, “so you reckon Suur Aculoa fingered Paphlagon?”

“No way. She’s a philosophy teacher, a One-off…”

“Yeah, but at one of the Big Three!”

“That’s my point,” Jesry said, a little testy, “a lot of important Sæculars did a few years at Big Three maths when they were younger—before they went out and started their careers.”

“You think this suur had a fid, ten or fifteen years ago maybe, who’s gone on to become a Panjandrum. Aculoa taught the fid all about how great and wise Fraa Paphlagon was. And now, something’s happened—”

“Something,” Jesry said, nodding confidently, “that made that ex-fid say, ‘that tears it, we need Paphlagon here yesterday!’”

“But what could that something be?”

Jesry shrugged. “That’s the whole question, isn’t it?”

“Maybe we could get a clue by investigating Paphlagon’s writings.”

“That is obvious,” Jesry said. “But it’s rather difficult when Arsibalt’s using them as a semaphore.”

It took me a moment to make sense of this. “That stack of books in the window—”

Jesry nodded. “Arsibalt took everything Paphlagon ever wrote to Shuf’s Dowment.”

I laughed. “Well then, what about Suur Aculoa?”

“Tulia’s going through her works now,” Jesry said, “trying to figure out if she had any fids who amounted to anything.”