We took turns going into the men’s and women’s toilet chambers to change. The shoes immediately drove me crazy. I kicked them off and parked them under a bench, then found a clear place on the narthex floor where I could spread out my bolt and fold it up. That involved stooping and squatting—tricky, in dungarees. I couldn’t believe people wore this stuff their whole lives!

Once I had my bolt reduced to a book-sized package, I wrapped my chord around it, put them into the department-store bag along with my balled-up sphere, and stuffed that into the bottom of the knapsack. Across the narthex, Lio was trying to perform some of his Vale-lore moves in his new clothes. He moved as if he’d just come down with a neurological disorder. Tulia’s clothes didn’t fit at all and she was negotiating a swap with one of the Centenarian suurs.

“Is this a Convox?”

“It is now.”

There had only been eight Convoxes. The first had coincided with the Reconstitution. After that, one had been held at each Millennium to compile the edition of the Dictionary that would be used for the next thousand years, and to take care of other business of concern to the Thousanders. There had been one for the Big Nugget and one at the end of each Sack.

Barb became jumpy, then unruly, and then wild. None of the hierarchs knew what to make of him.

“He doesn’t like change,” Tulia reminded me. The unspoken message: he’s your friend—he’s your problem.

Barb didn’t like being crowded either, so Lio and I crowded him. We crowded him into a corner where Arsibalt was encamped with his stack of books.

“Voco breaks the Discipline because the one Evoked goes forth alone, and from that point onward is immersed in the Sæcular world,” Arsibalt intoned. “That’s why they can’t return. Convox is different. So many of us are taken at once that we can travel together and preserve the Discipline within our Peregrin group.”

“Peregrin begins and ends at a math,” Barb said, suddenly calm.

“Yes, Fraa Tavener.”

“When we get to Saunt Tredegarh’s—”

“We’ll celebrate the aut of Inbrase,” Arsibalt prompted him, “and—”

“And then we’ll be together with other avout in the Convox,” Barb guessed.

“And then—”

“And then when we’re done doing whatever it is they want us to do, we make Peregrin back to Saunt Edhar,” Barb went on.

“Yes, Fraa Tavener,” said Arsibalt. I could sense him fending off the temptation to add if we haven’t been incinerated by an alien death ray or gassed by the Warden of Heaven.

Barb calmed down. It wouldn’t last. Once we left the Day Gate, we’d be contending with minor violations of the Discipline all the time. Barb would be certain to notice these and point them out. Why, oh why, had he been Evoked? He was just a brand-new fid! I was going to be babysitting him through the entire Convox.

As the small hours of the morning passed, though, and the lapis sphere that represented Arbre in the orrery ticked slowly around, I settled down a little bit and remembered that half of what I now knew about theorics was thanks to Barb. What would it say about me if I ditched him?

It was getting light outside. Half of the Evoked had already departed. The hierarchs were pairing Tenners with Hundreders because many of the latter would need help from the former in speaking Fluccish and coping with the Sæculum in general. Lio was summoned and went out with a couple of Hundreders. Arsibalt and Tulia were told to get ready.

I couldn’t go out barefoot. My shoes were under a bench by the orrery. Fraa Jad had parked himself on that bench. Right above my shoes. His head was bent. His hands were folded in his lap. He must be doing some kind of profound Thousander meditation. If I disturbed him just so that I could fetch my shoes, he would turn me into a newt or something.

No one else wanted to disturb him either. Tulia, then Arsibalt, left with Hundreders in tow. There were only three Evoked left: Barb, Jad, and I. Jad was still in his bolt and chord.

Barb headed for Fraa Jad. I broke into a sprint, and caught up with him just as he arrived.

“Fraa Jad must change clothes,” Barb announced, stretching his first-year Orth until it cracked.

Fraa Jad looked up. Until now I had thought that his hands were folded together in his lap. Now I saw that he was holding a disposable razor, still encased in its colorful package. I had one just like it in my bag. It was a common brand. Fraa Jad was reading the label. The big characters were Kinagrams, which he would never have seen before, but the fine print was in the same alphabet that we used.

“What principle explains the powers imputed by this document to the Dynaglide lubri-strip?” he asked. “Is it permanent, or ablative?”

“Ablative,” I said.

“It is a violation of the Discipline for you to be reading that!” Barb complained.

“Shut up,” Fraa Jad said.

“I don’t mean in any way to be disrespectful,” I tried, after a somewhat awkward and lengthy pause, “but—”

“Is it time to leave?” Fraa Jad asked, and checked the orrery as if it were a wristwatch.

“Yes.”

Fraa Jad stood up and, in the same motion, stripped his bolt off over his head. Some of the hierarchs gasped and turned their backs. Nothing happened for a little while. I rummaged in his shopping bag and found a pair of drawers, which I handed to him.

“Do I need to explain this?” I asked, pointing out the fly.

Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. “Topology is destiny,” he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time. It was hard to estimate his age. His skin was loose and mottled, but he balanced perfectly on one leg, then the other, as he put on the drawers.

The rest of getting Fraa Jad decent went by without notable incidents. I retrieved my shoes and tried once more to remember how to tie them. Barb seemed amazingly content to follow the command to shut up. I wondered why I had never tried this simple tactic with him before.

Stumbling and shuffling in our shoes, hitching our trousers up from time to time, we walked out the Day Gate. The plaza was empty. We crossed the causeway between the twin fountains and entered into the burgers’ town. An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. Some casinos had gone up around the Olde Market, hoping to cater to people who wanted to visit it or who had business of one kind or another linked to the concent. But no one wanted to visit an Olde Market that was surrounded by casinos, and frankly the concent wasn’t that much of an attraction, so the casinos were looking dirty and forlorn. Sometimes at night we could hear music playing from dance halls in their basements but they were awfully quiet at the moment.