“Don’t touch that!” Beller warned.

“I see you seeing it and having thoughts about it, and I conclude that it’s really there, just as my eyes and fingers present it to me, and that when I think about it I’m thinking about the real thing.”

“That all seems pretty obvious,” Beller said.

Then there was an awkward silence, which Beller finally broke by saying—in good humor—“I guess that’s why you called it naive.”

“At the opposite extreme, there were those who argued that everything we think we know about the world outside of our skulls is an illusion.”

“Seems kind of smart-alecky more than anything else,” Beller said after considering it for a bit.

“The Sconics didn’t much care for it either. As I said, they developed a third attitude. ‘When we think about the world—or about almost anything—’ they said, ‘what we are really thinking about is a bunch of data—givens—that have reached our brains from our eyes and ears and so forth.’ To go back to my example, I am given a visual image of that button and I am given a memory of what it felt like when I touched it, but that’s all I have to work with, as far as that button is concerned—it is impossible, unthinkable, for my brain to come to grips with the actual, physical button in and of itself because my brain simply does not have access to it. All that my brain can ever work with are the look and the feel—givens piped into our nerves.”

“Well, I guess I see the point. It doesn’t have that smart-aleckiness of the other one you mentioned. But it seems like a distinction without a difference,” Beller said.

“It’s not,” Arsibalt said. “And here is where the pie-eating contest would begin, if you wanted to understand why it’s not. Because, starting from this idea, the Sconics went on to develop a whole metatheorical system. It was so influential that no one has been able to do metatheorics since then without coming to grips with it. All subsequent metatheorics is a refutation, an amendment, or an extension of Sconic thought. And one of the most important conclusions you arrive at, if you make it to the end of the pie-eating contest, is that—”

“There is no God?”

“No, something different, and harder to sum up, which is that certain topics are simply out of bounds. The existence of God is one of those.”

“What do you mean, out of bounds?”

“If you follow through the logical arguments of the Sconic system, you are led to the conclusion that our minds can’t think in a productive or useful way about God, if by God you mean the Bazian Orthodox God which is clearly not spatiotemporal—not existing in space and time, that is.”

“But God exists everywhere and in all times,” Beller said.

“But what does it really mean to say that? Your God is more than this road, and that mountain, and all the other physical objects in the universe put together, isn’t He?”

“Sure. Of course. Otherwise we’d just be nature-worshippers or something.”

“So it’s crucial to your definition of God that He is more than just a big pile of stuff.”

“Of course.”

“Well, that ‘more’ is by definition outside of space of time. And the Sconics demonstrated that we simply cannot think in a useful way about anything that, in principle, can’t be experienced through our senses. And I can already see from the look on your face that you don’t agree.”

“I don’t!” Beller affirmed.

“But that’s beside the point. The point is that, after the Sconics, the kinds of people who did theorics and metatheorics stopped talking about God and certain other topics such as free will and what existed before the universe. And that is what I mean by the Sconic Discipline. By the time of the Reconstitution it had become in-grained. It was incorporated into our Discipline without much discussion, or even conscious awareness.”

“Well, but with all the free time you’ve got—sitting there in your concents—couldn’t someone be troubled in four thousand years to be aware of it? To discuss it?”

“We have less free time than you imagine,” Arsibalt said gently, “but nevertheless, many people have devoted much thought to the matter, and founded Orders devoted to denying God, or believing in Him, and currents have surged back and forth in and among the maths. But none of it seems to have moved us away from the basic position of the Sconics.”

“Do you believe in God?” Beller asked flat-out.

I leaned forward, fascinated.

“I have been reading a lot, lately, about things that are non-spatiotemporal—yet believed to exist.” By this, I knew he meant mathematical objects in the Hylaean Theoric World.

“Doesn’t that go against the Sconic Discipline?” Beller asked.

“Yes,” Arsibalt said, “but that is perfectly all right, as long as one isn’t going about it in a naive way—as if Lady Baritoe had never written a word. A common complaint made about the Sconics is that they didn’t know much about pure theorics. Many theoricians, looking at Baritoe’s works, say ‘wait just a minute, there’s something missing here—we can relate directly to non-spatiotemporal objects when we prove theorems and so on.’ The stuff I’ve been reading lately is all about that.”

“So you can see God by doing theorics?”

“Not God,” Arsibalt said, “not a God that any ark would recognize.”

After that he managed to change the subject. He—like I—had wondered what the Powers That Be might have told Ferman and the others when they had put out the call for volunteers.

The answer seemed to be: not much. The Sæcular Power needed some sort of puzzle solved—the sort of thing that avout were good at. Some fraas and suurs would have to be moved from Point A to Point B so that they could work on this conundrum. People like Ferman Beller were naturally curious about us. They had all learned about the Reconstitution in their suvins, and they understood that we had an assigned role to play, however sporadically, in making their civilization work. They were fascinated to see the mechanism being invoked, at least once in their lives, and were proud to be a part of it even if they hadn’t a clue as to why it was being engaged.

In the hottest part of the afternoon we pulled off into the shade of a line of trees that had once served as wind-break for a farm compound, now collapsed. We hadn’t seen Crade in hours, but Cord’s fetch was right behind us. Some of us walked around and some dozed. The mountains darkened the northwestern sky, though if you didn’t know what they were you might mistake them for a storm front. On their opposite slope they caught most of the moisture blowing in from the ocean and funneled it into the river that ran through our concent. Consequently this side was arid. Only bunchgrass and low fragrant shrubs would grow here of their own accord. From age to age the Sæcular Power would irrigate it and people would live here growing grain and legumes, but we were now on the wane of such a cycle, as was obvious from the condition of the roads, the farmsteads, and what were shown on the cartabla as towns. The old irrigation ditches were fouled by whatever would grow in them, which was mostly things with thorns, spines, and detachable burrs. Lio and I went for a brisk walk along one of these, but we didn’t say much as we were keeping an eye out for snakes.

Sammann kept looking as if he had something to say. We decided on a shake-up that put me and him in Cord’s fetch, while Lio and Barb went to Ferman’s mobe. Barb wanted to stay with Jad but we all knew that Jad must be getting a little weary of his company and so we insisted. Cord was tired of driving, so Rosk took the controls.

“Ferman Beller is communicating with a Bazian installation on one of those mountains,” Sammann told me.

This was an odd phrasing, since Baz had been sacked fifty-two hundred years ago. “As in Bazian Orthodox?” I asked.

Sammann rolled his eyes. “Yes.”