Back in very ancient times, when the marble columns of the Halls of Orithena still rose from the black rock of Ecba, all the world’s theors would gather beneath the great dome just before noon. Their leader (at first, Adrakhones himself; later, Diax or one of his other fids) would stand on the analemma, waiting for the shaft of light from the oculus to pass over him at midday: a climax celebrated by the singing of the Anathem to our mother Hylaea who had brought us the light of her father Cnoüs. The aut had fallen into disuse when Orithena had been destroyed and the surviving theors had embarked on the Peregrination. But much later, when the theors retreated to the maths, Saunt Cartas drew on it to anchor the liturgy that was then practiced all through the Old Mathic Age. Again it fell into disuse during the Dispersal to the New Periklynes and the Praxic Age that followed, but then, after the Terrible Events and the Reconstitution, it was revived again, in a new form, centered on the winding of a clock.

The Hylaean Anathem now existed in thousands of different versions, since every composer among the avout was likely to take at least one crack at it during his or her lifetime. All versions used the same words and structure, but they were as various as clouds. The most ancient were monophonic, meaning each voice sang the same note. The one used at Saunt Edhar was polyphonic: different voices singing different melodies that were woven together in a harmonious fashion. Those One-offs in their green robes sang only some of the parts. The rest of the voices came out through the screens. Traditionally the Thousanders sang the deepest notes. Rumor had it they’d developed special techniques to loosen their vocal chords, and I believed it, since no one in our math could sing tones as deep as the ones that rumbled out from their nave.

The Anathem started simple, then got almost too complicated for the ear to follow. When we’d had an organ, it had required four organists, each using both hands and both feet. In the ancient aut, this part of the Anathem represented the Kaos of non-systematic thought that had preceded Cnoüs. The composer had realized it almost too well, since during this part of the music the ear could scarcely make sense of all the different voices. But then, sort of as when you are looking at some geometric shape that looks like a tangle having no order at all, and you rotate it just a tiny bit, and suddenly all its planes and vertices come into alignment and you see what it is, all of those voices fell in together over the course of a few measures and collapsed into one pure tone that resonated in the light-well of our clock and made everything vibrate in sympathy with it. Whether by a lucky accident, or by a feat of the praxics, the vibration was just enough to break the seal of static friction on the winding-shaft. Lio, Arsibalt, Jesry and I, even though we knew it was coming, practically fell forward as the hub went into motion. Moments later, after the backlash in the gear train had been taken up, the meteorite above our heads began to creep upwards. And we knew that twenty beats later we could expect to feel the day’s accumulation of dust and bat droppings raining down on our heads from hundreds of feet above.

In the ancient liturgy, this moment had represented the Light dawning in the mind of Cnoüs. The singing now split apart into two competing strains, one representing Deät and the other Hylaea, the two daughters of Cnoüs. Trudging counterclockwise around the shaft, we worked up to a steady pace that fell into synchrony with the rhythm of the Anathem. The meteorite began to rise at about two inches every second, and would continue to do so until it reached its upper stop, which would take about twenty minutes. At the same time, the four sprocket-wheels from which the four other chains were suspended were also turning, though much more slowly. The cube would rise by about a foot during this aut. The octahedron would rise by about an inch, and so on. And up above the ceiling, the sphere was slowly descending to keep the clock going during the time it took us to wind it.

I should stipulate that it does not really take so much energy to run a clock—even a huge one—for twenty-four hours! Almost all of the energy that we were putting into the system went to run the add-ons, like bells, gates, the Great Orrery just inside the Day Gate, various lesser orreries, and the polar axes of the telescopes on the starhenge.

None of this was in the front of my mind while I was pushing my pole around and around the hub. True, I did look at these things afresh during the first few minutes, simply because I knew that Artisan Flec was watching, and I was trying to imagine how I might explain these things to him, supposing he asked. But by the time we had found our rhythm, and my heart had begun to thump along at a steady pace, and the sweat had begun to drip from my nose, I had forgotten about Artisan Flec. The chanting of the One-offs was better than I’d expected—not so bad as to call attention to itself. For a minute or two I thought about the story of Saunt Bly. After that, I thought mostly of myself and my situation in the world. I know that this was selfish of me, and not what I should have been doing during the aut. But unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one’s mind. You might find it in poor taste that I tell you of what I was thinking. You might find it unnecessarily personal, perhaps even immoral—a bad example for other fids who might one day find this account sticking out of a niche. But it is part of this story.

As I wound the clock on that day I was wondering what it would be like to climb up to the Warden Fendant’s ledge and jump off.

If you find such a thing impossible to comprehend, you probably are not avout. The food that you eat is grown from crops whose genes partake of the Allswell sequence, or even stronger stuff. Melancholy thoughts may never come into your mind at all. When they do, you have the power to dismiss them. I did not have that power, and was becoming weary of keeping company with those thoughts. One way to silence them forever would have been to walk out of the Decenarian Gate in a week’s time, go to live with my birth family (supposing they would have me back), and eat what they ate. Another would have involved climbing the stair that spiraled up our corner of the Mynster.

“Are people starving to death? Or are they sick because they are too fat?”

Artisan Quin scratched his beard and thought about that one. “You’re talking of slines, I assume?”

Fraa Orolo shrugged.

Quin thought that was funny. Unlike Artisan Flec, he was not afraid to laugh out loud. “Sort of both at the same time,” he finally admitted.

“Very good,” said Fraa Orolo, in a now we’re getting somewhere tone, and glanced at me to make sure I was getting it down.

After the Flec interview, I had had words with Fraa Orolo. “Pa, what are you doing with that five-hundred-year-old questionnaire? It’s crazy.”

“It is an eight-hundred-year-old copy of an eleven-hundred-year-old questionnaire,” he had corrected me.

“It would be one thing if you were a Hundreder. But how could things have changed that much in only ten years?”