“It’s an oasis!” Lio said, having fun whipping out this exotic word.

“Yeah. And if the nearer butte has an oasis large enough for a monastery and a summer camp, why couldn’t the farther one have a place where Ferals like Bly, Estemard, and Orolo could live in the shade and drink spring water?”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of getting food,” Arsibalt pointed out.

“Well, it’s an improvement on the picture that I’ve been carrying around in my head,” I said. I didn’t have to explain this to the others because they’d had it in their heads too: desperate men living on the top of a mountain, eating lichens.

“There must be a way,” I continued, “the Bazian monks do it.”

“They are a larger community, and they are supported by alms,” Arsibalt said.

“Orolo told me that Estemard had been sending him letters from Bly’s Butte for years. And Saunt Bly managed to live there for a while—”

“Only because slines worshipped him.” Lio pointed out.

“Well, maybe we’ll find a bunch of slines bowing down to Orolo then. I don’t know how it works. Maybe there’s a tourist industry.”

“Are you joking?” Arsibalt asked.

“Look at this wide spot in the road where we are stopped,” I said.

“What of it?”

“Why do you suppose it’s here?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, I’m not a praxic,” Arsibalt said.

“So that vehicles can pass each other more easily?” Lio guessed.

I held out my arm, drawing their attention to the view. “It’s here because of that.”

“What? Because it’s beautiful?”

“Yeah.” And then I turned away from Arsibalt and looked at Lio, who started to walk away. I fell in alongside him. Arsibalt stayed behind to examine the view, as if he could discover some flaw in my logic by staring at it long enough.

“Did you get a chance to look at the icosahedron?” Lio asked me. “Yeah. And I saw the proof—the geometry.”

“You think these people are like us. That they will be sympathetic to our point of view as followers of Our Mother Hylaea,” he said, trying these phrases on me for size.

I was already defensive—sensing a flank maneuver. “Well, I think that they are clearly trying to get at something by making the Adrakhonic Theorem into their emblem…”

“The ship is heavily armed,” he said.

“Obviously!”

He was already shaking his head. “I’m not talking about the propulsion charges. They’d be almost useless as weapons. I’m talking about other things on that ship—things that become obvious when you look for them.”

“I didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a weapon.”

“You can hide a lot of equipment on a mile-long shock absorber,” he pointed out, “and who knows what’s concealed under all that gravel.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“The faces have regularly spaced features on them. I think that they are antennas.”

“So? Obviously they’re going to have antennas.”

“They are phased arrays,” he said. “Military stuff. Just what you’d want to aim an X-ray laser, or a high-velocity impactor. I’ll need to consult books to know more. Also, I don’t like the planets lined up on the nose.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a row of four disks painted on a forward shock. I think that they are depictions of planets. Like on a military aerocraft of the Praxic Age.”

It took me a few moments to sort out the reference. “Wait a minute, you think that they are kills?”

Lio shrugged.

“Well, now, hold on a second!” I said. “Couldn’t it be that it’s something more benign? Maybe those are the home planets of the Cousins.”

“I just think that everyone is too eager to look for happy, comforting interpretations—”

“And your role as a Warden Fendant-in-the-making is to be way more vigilant than that,” I said, “and you’re doing a great job.”

“Thanks.”

We walked along silently for a little while, strolling up and down the length of this wide place, occasionally passing others who were taking the opportunity to get a little bit of exercise. We happened upon Fraa Jad, who was walking alone. I decided that now was the moment.

“Fraa Lio,” I said, “Fraa Jad has informed me that the Millenarian math at Saunt Edhar is one of three places where the Sæcular Power put all of its nuclear waste around the time of the Reconstitution. The other two are Rambalf and Tredegarh. Both of them were illuminated last night by a laser from the Cousins’ ship.”

Lio wasn’t as surprised by this as I’d hoped. “Among Fendant types there is a suspicion that the Three Inviolates were allowed to remain unsacked for a reason. One hypothesis is that they are dumps for Everything Killers and other dangerous leftovers of the Praxic Age.”

“Please. You speak of my home. Don’t call it a dump,” Fraa Jad said. But he was amused—not offended. He was being—if I could say this of a Thousander—playful.

“Have you seen the stuff?” Lio asked.

“Oh yes. It is in cylinders, in a cavern in the rock. We see it every day.”

“Why?”

“Various reasons. For example, my avocation is thatcher.”

“I don’t recognize the word,” I said.

“It is an ancient profession: one who makes roofs out of grass.”

“What possible application could that have in a nuclear waste d—repository?”

“Condensation forms on the ceiling of the cavern and drips onto the tops of the cylinders. Over thousands of years it could corrode them—or, just as bad, form stalagmites whose weight would crush and rupture the containers. We have always maintained thatched roofs atop the cylinders to prevent this from happening.”

This was all so weird that I couldn’t think of anything to do other than to continue making polite chatter. “Oh, I see. Where do you get the grass? You don’t have much room to grow grass up there, do you?”

“We don’t need much. A properly made thatching lasts for a long time. I have yet to replace all of those that were put in place by my fid, Suur Avradale, a century ago.”

Lio and I both walked on for a few paces before this hit us; then we exchanged a look, and wordlessly agreed not to say anything.

“He was just having us on,” I said, the next time Lio and I could speak privately, which was at the retreat center, as we were dropping our bags in the cell we were to share. “He was getting back at us for calling his math a dump.”

Lio said nothing.

“Lio! He’s not that old!”

Lio put his bag down, stood up straighter than I could, and rotated his shoulders down and back, which was a way of recovering his equilibrium. As if he could defeat opponents just through superior posture. “Let’s not worry about how old he is.”

“You think he is that old.”

“I said, let’s not worry about it.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about it. But it would be interesting to know.”

“Interesting?” Lio did the shoulder thing again. “Look. We’re both talking bulshytt, would you agree?”

“Yeah, I agree,” I said immediately.

“Enough of this. We have to talk straight—and then we have to shut up, if we don’t want to get burned at the stake.”

“Okay. You see this from a Fendant point of view. I take your point.”

“Good. So we both know what we’re really talking about now.”

“That you can’t live that long without repairing the sequences in the nuclei of your cells,” I said.

“Especially if you work around radiation.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” I pondered it for a moment, replaying the earlier conversation with Jad. “How could he have possibly made such a slip? He must know how dangerous it is even to hint that he is—er—the sort of person who can do things like repairing his own cells.”

“Are you kidding? It wasn’t a slip. It was deliberate, Raz.”

“He was letting us know—”

“He was entrusting us with his life,” Lio said. “Haven’t you noticed how he was sizing everyone up today? He chose us, my fraa.”