“So that they could later deny that they had anything to do with it,” Sammann said, “when it came time to crack down.”

“I doubt that they were so premeditated,” Fraa Jad put in, using a mild tone of voice, as Sammann and I had become heated—conspiratorial. “Let us get out the Rake,” Jad went on. “The Sæcular Power had radar, but not pictures. To get pictures they needed telescopes and people who knew how to use them. They did not want to involve the hierarchs. So they devised the strategy that Sammann has just explained to us. It was only a means of getting some pictures of the thing as quickly and quietly as possible. But when they did get the pictures, they saw this.” He rested the palm of his hand on the proof in his lap.

“And then they realized that they’d made a big mistake,” I said, in a much calmer tone than before. “They had divulged the existence and nature of the Cousins to the last people in the world they’d want to know about them.”

“Hence the closure of the starhenge and what happened to Orolo,” Sammann said, “and hence me in this fetch, as I have no idea what they’ll want to do to me.”

I’d assumed until now that Sammann had obtained permission to go on this journey. This was my first hint that it was more complicated than that. I found it strange to hear an Ita voicing fear of getting in trouble, since usually it was we who worried about their sneaky tricks—such as the one that had ensnared Orolo. But then my point of view snapped around and I saw it his way. Precisely because people believed the things they did about the Ita, no one was likely to believe Sammann’s story or stand up for him if all of these doings broke out into the open.

“So you made this copy of the tablet and kept it so that you would have—”

“Something,” he said, “that I could leverage.”

“And you showed yourself in Clesthyra’s Eye. Announcing, in a deniable way, that you knew something—that you had information.”

“Advertising,” Sammann said, and the shape of his face changed, whiskers shifting on whiskers—his way of hinting at a smile.

“Well, it worked,” I said, “and here you are, on the road to nowhere, being driven around by a bunch of Deolaters.”

Cord got fed up with hearing Orth and moved up to the front of the fetch to sit with Rosk. I felt sorry—but some things were nearly impossible to talk about in Fluccish.

I was dying to ask Fraa Jad about the nuclear waste, but was reluctant to broach this topic with Sammann listening. So I drew my own copy of the proof on the Cousins’ ship and began working it. Before long I got bogged down. Cord and Rosk started playing some music on the fetch’s sound system, softly at first, more loudly when no one objected. This had to be the first time Fraa Jad had ever heard popular music. I cringed so hard I thought I’d get internal injuries. But the Thousander accepted it as calmly as he had the Dynaglide lubri-strip. I gave up trying to work the proof, and just looked out the window and listened to the music. In spite of all of my prejudices against extramuros culture, I kept being surprised by moments of beauty in these songs. Most of them were forgettable but one in ten sheltered some turn or inflection that proved that the person who had made it had achieved some kind of upsight—had, for a moment, got it. I wondered if this was a representative sampling, or if Cord was just unusually good at finding songs with beauty in them and loading only those onto her jeejah.

The music, the heat of the afternoon, the jouncing of the fetch, my lack of sleep, and shock at leaving the concent—with all of these affecting me at once, it was no wonder I couldn’t work a proof. But as the day grew old and the sun came in more and more horizontally, as the dying towns and ruined irrigation systems came less and less frequently and the landscape was purified into high desert, spattered with stony ruins, I started thinking that something else was working on me.

I was used to Orolo being dead. Not literally dead and buried, of course, but dead to me. That was what Anathem did: killed an avout without damaging the body. Now, with only a few hours to get used to the idea, I was about to see Orolo again. At any moment, for all I knew, we might spy him hiking up one of these lonely crags to get ready for a night’s observations. Or perhaps his emaciated corpse was waiting for us under a cairn thrown up by slines descended from those who’d eaten Saunt Bly’s liver. Either way, it was impossible for me to think of anything else when I might be confronted by such a thing at any moment.

Cord’s face was shining on me. She reached for a control and turned down the music, then repeated something. I had gone into a sort of trance, which I shattered by moving.

“Ferman’s on the jeejah,” she explained. “He wants to stop. Pee and parley.”

Both sounded good to me. We pulled off at a wide place in the road along a curving grade, a third of the way into a descent that would, over the next half-hour, take us into a flat-bottomed valley that connected to the horizon. This was no valley of the wet and verdant type, but a failure in the land where withered creeks went to die and flash floods spent their rage on a supine waste. Spires and palisades of brown basalt hurled shadows much longer than they were tall. Two solitary mountains rose up perhaps twenty or thirty miles away. We gathered around the cartabla and convinced ourselves that those were two of the three candidates we’d chosen earlier. As for the third—well, it appeared that we had just driven around it and were now scouring its lower slopes.

Ferman wanted to talk to me in my capacity as leader. I shook off the last wisps of the near-coma I had sunk into, and drew myself up straight.

“I know you guys don’t believe in God,” he began, “but considering the way you live, well, I thought you might feel more at home staying with—”

“Bazian monks?” I hazarded.

“Yes, exactly.” He was a little taken aback that I knew this. It was only a lucky guess. When Sammann had mentioned earlier that Ferman was talking to a “Bazian installation,” I had imagined a cathedral or at any rate something opulent. But that was before I’d seen the landscape.

“A monastery,” I said, “is on one of those mountains?”

“The closer of the two. You can see it about halfway up, on the northern flank.”

With some hints from Ferman I was able to see a break in the mountain’s slope, a sort of natural terrace sheltered under a crescent of dark green: trees, I assumed.

“I’ve been there for retreats,” Ferman remarked. “Used to send my kids there every summer.”

The concept of a retreat didn’t make sense to me until I realized that it was how I lived my entire life.

Ferman misinterpreted my silence. He turned to face me and held up his hands, palms out. “Now, if you’re not comfortable, let me tell you we have enough water and food and bedrolls and so on that we can camp anywhere we like. But I was thinking—”

“It’s reasonable,” I said, “if they’ll accept women.”

“The monks have their own cloister, separate from the camp. But girls stay at the camp all the time—they have women on the staff.”

It had been a long day. The sun was going down. I was tired. I shrugged. “If nothing else,” I said, “it might make for a good story or two, for us to tell when we get to Saunt Tredegarh.”

Lio and Arsibalt had been hovering. They pounced on me as soon as Ferman Beller started to walk away. They both had the somewhat tense and frayed look of people who’d just spent several hours cooped up with Barb. “Fraa Erasmas,” Arsibalt began, “let’s be realistic. Look at this landscape! There’s no way anyone could live here on his own. How would one obtain food, water, medical care?”

“Trees are growing on one place on that mountain,” I said. “That probably means that there is fresh water. People like Ferman send their kids here for summer camp—how bad can it be?”