“Yes—an alternate theory about an alternate universe!” Barb cracked. Tulia mussed his hair and gave him a shove, which was a mistake because then he wanted to get rambunctious. We had to threaten him with Anathem and make him go outside and run five laps around Shuf’s Dowment before he would settle down.

“Talking about where this thing might have come from is a side track to the main discussion,” Lio pointed out.

“Agreed,” said Arsibalt, so authoritatively that we did agree.

“It came from somewhere. Who cares. It settled into a polar orbit around Arbre and stayed there for a while—doing what?” I said.

“Reconaissance,” said Lio. “That’s what polar orbits are for.”

“So they were learning about us. Mapping Arbre. Eavesdropping on our communications.”

“Learning our language,” Tulia said.

I went on, “Somehow Orolo became aware of it. Maybe he happened to see the deceleration burn that took it into polar orbit. Perhaps others did too. The Panjandrums knew. They sent word to the hierarchs: ‘we are putting you on notice that we deem this to be a Sæcular matter, it is none of your business, so butt out.’ And the hierarchs dutifully sent out the order to close every starhenge.”

“Inquisitors were sent to make sure it was done,” Lio said.

“Fraa Paphlagon was Evoked to go somewhere and study this thing,” Tulia said.

“He,” said Arsibalt, “and perhaps others like him from other concents.”

“The ship stayed in orbit. Maybe sometimes it would adjust its trajectory by firing those engines. But it would only do so when it was passing between Arbre and the sun—to hide its traces.”

“Like a fugitive who walks in a river not to leave footprints,” Barb put in.

“But yesterday something changed. Something big must have happened.”

“Gardan’s Steelyard says that the course change you and Ala witnessed, and the unprecedented six-fold Voco less than a day later, must be connected,” Arsibalt said.

I had been avoiding the sacred relic. That had to end. Ala had given it to me for a reason. We unrolled it on the table and weighed its corners down with books.

“We can’t figure out what it did unless we know the darn geometry!” Barb complained.

“You mean, of the pinhole, and where the screen was situated up in the Præsidium. Which way was up. Which way was north,” I said. “I agree that we have to take all of those measurements.”

Barb started backing toward the exit—ready to take those measurements at once.

But I held back. I wanted to do those things as badly as he did. But here was where Orolo would have proposed something brilliantly simple. Something that would have made me feel like an idiot for having made it too complicated. I could think of nothing like that.

“Why don’t we at least measure the angle,” I said. “It comes in from one direction. That’s its initial orbit. By firing those bombs, it curves until it is going a different direction. That’s its final orbit. We could at least measure that angle.”

So we did. The answer was something like a quarter of pi—forty-five degrees.

“So if we assume it started out in a polar orbit, then by the time this maneuver was finished, it was in a new orbit, roughly halfway between polar and equatorial,” Lio said.

“And what do you suppose would be the point of that?” I asked, since Lio knew so much more of exoatmospheric weapons systems than anyone else in the room.

“If you plot its ground track on a globe or a map of the world, well, it’s never going to ascend higher than forty-five degrees of latitude, in such an orbit. It’ll sine-wave back and forth between forty-five degrees north and forty-five south.”

“Which is where ninety-nine percent of the people live,” Tulia pointed out.

“Which they would know by now, since they have had time to compile maps of every square inch of Arbre,” Arsibalt reminded us.

“They have finished Phase One: reconaissance,” Lio concluded, “and yesterday began Phase Two: which is—who knows?”

“Actually doing something,” Barb said.

“And the Panjandrums know it,” I said. “Have been worrying about it. They’ve had a contingency plan ready for months—we know this because Orolo’s name was on that list! So it must have been written out and sealed before his Anathem.”

“I’ll bet Varax and Onali handed it to Statho during Apert,” Tulia said. “Statho’s been carrying it around ever since, awaiting the signal to break the seal and read out those names.” She got a distracted look on her face. “It bothers me that they chose Ala.”

“I never fully understood until last week how close the two of you were,” I said.

But Tulia wanted none of it. “It’s not just that,” she said. “I mean, it is. I love her. I can’t stand that she’s gone. But why her? Paphlagon—Orolo—Jesry—fine. I get it. But why would you choose Ala? What would you want someone like her for?”

“To organize a lot of other people,” Arsibalt said without hesitation.

“That,” said Tulia, “is what troubles me.”

For God’s sake, raise your sights.

Mention of the Inquisitors had put me in mind of the conversation I’d had with Varax on Tenth Night. This had slipped my mind because of what had happened a few moments afterward. But I could remember him gazing up at the starhenge—or perhaps he’d been raising his sights a little higher, looking off into space. Come to think of it, he’d been facing north at the time. Larger matters are at stake than whether a young fraa at the remote hermitage of Saunt Edhar practices his vlor on some local runagates…think bigger…the way your friend does when he decides to tackle four larger men.

What on earth did that mean? That the alien ship was a threat? That we would soon have to tackle it against long odds? Or was I reading too much into it? And why, during my earlier conversation with Varax, had he grilled me concerning my opinions on the Hylaean Theoric World? It was an odd time for someone like him to be so concerned with metatheorics.

Or maybe I was reading way too much into these conversations. Maybe Varax was just one of those guys who thought out loud.

The “raise your sights” part of it seemed pretty clear.

I didn’t need a lot of encouragement to get to work. After Orolo’s Anathem, the only thing that had kept me from going crazy had been working on the photomnemonic tablet. Ala’s loss wasn’t quite as dreadful—at least she hadn’t been Thrown Back—but unlike Orolo’s it had been entirely surprising to me. I was still feeling bad that I’d just stood there like a stunned animal while she’d walked out of my life. To have lost her, just after we’d begun something—well, suffice it to say that I really needed a project to work on.

Our group invaded the shack above the belfry with every measuring device we could scare up. Arsibalt found some architectural drawings of the Mynster dating back to the Fourth Century. We calculated the geometry of the camera obscura in three different ways, and compared the results until we got them all to agree. We were able to refine the rough measurement we had made at Shuf’s Dowment: the ship’s new orbit was inclined at about fifty-one degrees to the equator, which meant that it passed over essentially all populated areas. When the weather had become hot and dry in the centuries after the Terrible Events, people had tended to move poleward. More recently, reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had begun to gentle the climate, and people had migrated back towards the equator to get away from the solar radiation near the poles. As a matter of fact, fifty-one degrees was a higher orbit than the ship really needed, if all it wanted was to keep an eye on most of the world’s population.

We thought this mysterious until Arsibalt pointed out that if you looked at all the world’s major concents—meaning ones that had Millennium Clocks and that housed hundreds or thousands of avout—the one that was farthest from the equator was at 51.3 degrees north latitude.