“Wow! If that’s really true, I’m honored.”

“Well, enjoy being honored while you can,” Lio said, “because that kind of honor doesn’t come without obligations.”

“What kind of obligations are you thinking of?”

“How should I know? I’m just saying that he was Evoked for a reason. He’s expected to do something. He’s starting to develop a strategy. And we’re part of that strategy now. Soldiers. Pawns.”

This shut me up for a little while; I could hardly think straight.

Then I remembered something that somehow made it easier.

“We were already pawns anyway,” I said.

“Yeah. And given the choice, I’d rather be a pawn of someone I can see,” Lio said. And then he smiled the old Lio smile for the first time since last night. He had been more serious than I’d ever seen him. But the sight of those kills—if that was what they were—lined up on that ship had given him a lot to be serious about.

We avout liked to tell ourselves that we lived in a humble and austere manner, by contrast with Bazian prelates who strutted around in silk robes, enveloped in clouds of incense. But at least our buildings were made out of stone and didn’t need a lot of upkeep. This place was all wooden: higher up the slope, a little ark and a ring of barracks that formed a sort of cloister, centered on a spring. Down closer to the road, two rows of cells with bunk beds and a large building with a dining hall and a few meeting rooms. The buildings were well taken care of, but it was obvious that they were in continual decay and that, if the people were to leave, the place would be a pile of kindling in a few decades.

We did not get to see how the monks lived. The cells where we stayed were clean but covered with graffiti scratched into the walls and bunks by the kids who came here by the coach-load during the summer. It was just dumb luck that no kids were there when we arrived; one group had departed a couple of days earlier, and another was expected soon. Of the half-dozen young adults who staffed the place, four had gone back to town during the break. The remaining two, and the Bazian priest who was in charge of the retreat center, had prepared a simple meal for us. After we’d deposited our bags in our cells and spent a few minutes cleaning up in the communal bathrooms, we convened in the dining hall and sat down at rows of folding tables much like the ones we used at Apert. The place smelled of art supplies.

The monks, we were told, numbered forty-three, which seemed like a small figure to us avout for whom a chapter was a hundred strong. Four of them came down to dine with us. It wasn’t clear whether they had special status, like hierarchs, or were simply the only ones of the forty-three who had any curiosity about us. All of them were greybeards, and all wanted to meet Fraa Jad. Bazian Orthodox clerical Orth was about seventy percent the same as what we spoke.

After the exchange that Lio and I just had, you might think we’d have wanted to sit next to Fraa Jad, but in fact we had the opposite reaction and ended up sitting as far away from him as we could—as if we were secret agents in a speely, making a big point of preserving our cover, playing it cool. At the last minute, Arsibalt hustled in with several of the Hundreders; they’d been running a calca in one of the cabins. He had a wild look about him, desperate to talk. He had not been able to examine the photomnenomic tablet until late in the day. Now he’d seen the geometry proof blazoned on the Cousins’ ship, and he was about to explode. I felt sorry for him when he came into the dining hall and found himself forced to choose between sitting with me and Lio, or with Fraa Jad and the Bazian monks. Ferman Beller, noting his indecision, stood up and beckoned him over. Arsibalt couldn’t decline the invitation without giving offense, so he went and sat with Ferman.

We always opened our meals by invoking the memory of Saunt Cartas. The gist of it was that our minds might be nourished by all manner of ideas originating from thinkers dating all the way back to Cnoüs, but for the physical nourishment of our bodies we relied upon one another, joined in the Discipline that we owed to Cartas. Deolaters, on the other hand, all had different pre-meal rituals. Bazian Orthodoxy was a post-agrarian religion in which literal sacrifice had been replaced by symbolic; they opened their meals with a re-enactment in effigy of that, then praised their God for a while, then asked Him for goods and services. The priest who ran the retreat center launched into it out of habit, but got unnerved in the middle when he noticed that none of the avout were bowing their heads, just gazing at him curiously. I didn’t think he was all that troubled by our not believing what he believed—he must have been used to that. He was more embarrassed that he’d committed a faux pas. So, when he was finished, he implored us to say whatever sort of blessing or invocation might be traditional in the math. As mentioned we were strangely lacking in sopranos and altos, but we were able to put together enough tenors, baritones, and basses to sing a very ancient and simple Invocation of Cartas. Fraa Jad handled the drone, and I could swear he made the silverware buzz on the tables.

The four monks seemed to enjoy this very much, and when we’d finished they stood up and did an equally ancient-sounding prayer. It must have dated back to the early centuries of their monastic age, just after the Fall of Baz, because their Old Orth was indistinguishable from ours, and it had obviously been composed in a time before the music of the maths and of the monasteries had diverged. If you didn’t listen too carefully to the words, you could easily mistake this piece for one of ours.

The conversation during the meal had to be superficial compared to the events of the last twenty-four hours, given that we had to talk in Fluccish and couldn’t mention the ship in earshot of our hosts. I became frustrated, then bored, then drowsy, and ate mostly in silence. Cord and Rosk talked to each other. They weren’t religious, and I could tell they felt awkward here. One of the young women on the staff made lavish efforts to make them feel welcome, which mostly backfired. Sammann was absorbed in his jeejah, which he had somehow patched into the retreat center’s communications system. Barb had found a list of the camp rules and was memorizing it. Our three Hundreders sat in a cluster and talked amongst themselves; they could not speak Fluccish and didn’t have the Thousander glamor that had made Fraa Jad the center of attention with the Bazian monks. I noticed that Arsibalt was deep in conversation with Ferman, and that Cord and Rosk had shifted closer to them, so I wandered over to see what they were talking about. It seemed that Ferman had been thinking about the Sconics, and wanted to know more. Arsibalt, for lack of any other way to pass the time, had launched into a calca called “The Fly, the Bat, and the Worm,” which was a traditional way of explaining the Sconic theory of time and space to fids. “Look at that fly crawling around on the table,” Arsibalt said. “No, don’t shoo it away. Just look at it. The size of its eyes.”

Ferman Beller gave it a quick glance and then returned his eyes to his dinner. “Yeah, half of its body seems to be eyes.”

“Thousands of separate eyes, actually. It doesn’t seem as though it could possibly work.” Arsibalt reached back behind himself and waved his hand around, nearly hitting me in the face. “Yet if I wave my hand back here, far away, it doesn’t care—knows there is no threat. But if I bring my hand closer…”

Arsibalt brought his hand forward. The fly took off.

“…somehow its microscopic brain takes signals from thousands of separate, primitive eyes and integrates them into a correct picture, not merely of space, but of spacetime. It knows where my hand is. Knows that if my hand keeps moving thus, it’ll soon squash it—so it had better change its position.”