“But there is,” Quin said, “they are incompatible.” His face wasn’t red any more; he drew breath and thought about it for a minute. Finally he shrugged. “But I see what you mean. We could have gone on using Logotype.”

“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.

“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”

Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”

“So that they could make money.”

“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”

“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”

“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”

“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better. So, I guess you’re right. It really is bul-” But he stopped in mid-word.

“You can say it. It’s not a bad word.”

“Well, I won’t say it, because it feels wrong to say it here, in this place.”

“As you wish, Artisan Quin.”

“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.

“Yes.”

“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”

“His father made him learn?” Fraa Orolo put in.

Quin smiled. “Yes.”

“He reads books?”

“All the time.”

“His age?” Obviously this was not on the questionnaire.

“Eleven. And he hasn’t been burned at the stake yet.” Quin said that in a very serious way. I wondered if Fraa Orolo understood that Quin was making a joke—taking a dig at him. Orolo made no sign.

“You have criminals?”

“Of course.” But the mere fact that Quin responded in this way caused Orolo to jump to a new leaf of the questionnaire.

“How do you know?”

“What?!”

“You say of course there are criminals, but if you look at a particular person, how do you know whether or not he is a criminal? Are criminals branded? Tattooed? Locked up? Who decides who is and isn’t a criminal? Does a woman with shaved eyebrows say ‘you are a criminal’ and ring a silver bell? Or is it rather a man in a wig who strikes a block of wood with a hammer? Do you thrust the accused through a doughnut-shaped magnet? Or use a forked stick that twitches when it is brought near evil? Does an Emperor hand down the decision from his throne written in vermilion ink and sealed with black wax, or is it rather that the accused must walk barefoot across a griddle? Perhaps there is ubiquitous moving picture praxis—what you’d call speelycaptors—that know all, but their secrets may only be unlocked by a court of eunuchs each of whom has memorized part of a long number. Or perhaps a mob shows up and throws rocks at the suspect until he’s dead.”

“I can’t take you seriously,” Quin said. “You’ve only been in the concent, what, thirty years?”

Fraa Orolo sighed and looked at me. “Twenty-nine years, eleven months, three weeks, six days.”

“And it’s plain to see you are boning up for Apert—but you can’t really think that things have changed so much!”

Another look in my direction. “Artisan Quin,” said Fraa Orolo, after a pause to make his words hit harder, “this is anno three thousand, six hundred, and eighty-nine of the Reconstitution.”

“That’s what my calendar says too,” Quin affirmed.

“3690 is tomorrow. Not only the Unarian math, but we Decenarians as well, will celebrate Apert. According to the ancient rules, our gates will open. For ten days, we shall be free to go out, and visitors such as you shall be welcome to come in. Now, ten years hence, the Centenarian Gate will open for the first, and probably the last, time in my life.”

“When it closes, which side of that gate will you be on?” Quin asked.

I got embarrassed again, because I’d never dare ask such a question. But I was secretly delighted that Quin had asked it for me.

“If I am found worthy, I should very much like to be on the inside of it,” said Fraa Orolo, and then glanced at me with an amused look, as if he’d guessed my thoughts. “The point is that in nine or so years, I can expect to be summoned to the upper labyrinth, which separates my math from that of the Centenarians. There I shall find my way to a grate in a dark room, and on the other side of that grate shall be one of those Hundreders (unless they have all died, vanished, or turned into something else) who shall ask me questions that shall seem just as queer to me as mine do to you. For they must make preparations for their Apert just as we do for ours. In their books they have records of every judicial practice that they, and others in other concents, have heard of in the last thirty-seven-hundred-odd years. The list that I rattled off to you, a minute ago, is but a single paragraph from a book as thick as my arm. So even if you find it to be a ridiculous exercise, I should be most grateful if you’d simply describe to me how you choose your criminals.”

“Will my answer be entered in that book?”

“If it is a new answer, yes.”

“Well, we still have Magistrate Doctors who roam about at the new moon in sealed purple boxes…”

“Yes, those I remember.”

“But they weren’t coming round as often as we needed them—the Powers That Be weren’t doing a good job of protecting them and some got rolled down hills. Then the Powers That Be put up more speelycaptors.”

Fraa Orolo jumped to a new leaf. “Who has access to those?”

“We don’t know.”

Orolo began moving to yet another new leaf. But before he found it, Quin continued: “But if someone commits a bad enough crime, the Powers That Be clamp a thing on their spine that makes them sort of crippled, for a while. Later it falls off and then they are normal again.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

A new page. “When you see someone wearing one of those devices, can you tell what crime they committed?”

“Yes, it says right on it, in Kinagrams.”

“Theft, assault, extortion?”

“Sure.”

“Sedition?”

Quin waited a long time before saying, “I’ve never seen that.”

“Heresy?”

“That would probably be handled by the Warden of Heaven.”

Fraa Orolo threw his hands up so high that his bolt fell away from his head and even bared one of his armpits. Then he brought them down again, the better to clamp them over his face. It was a sarcastic gesture that he liked to make in a chalk hall when a fid was being impossibly block-headed. Quin clearly took its meaning, and became embarrassed. He shifted back in his chair and pointed his chin at the ceiling, then lowered it again and looked at the window he was supposed to be mending. But there was something in Fraa Orolo’s huge gesture that was funny, and gave Quin the feeling that it was okay.

“All right,” Quin finally said, “I never thought of it like this, but now that you mention it, we have three systems…”

“The chaps in the purple boxes, the spine clamps, and this new thing that neither I nor Fraa Erasmas has ever heard of called the Warden of Heaven,” said Fraa Orolo, and began pushing through many leaves of his questionnaire—digging deep.

Something had occurred to Artisan Quin. “I never mentioned them because I thought you’d know all about them!”

“Because,” Fraa Orolo said, finding the page he’d been looking for, and scanning it, “they claimed that they came from the concent…bringing the enlightenment of the mathic world to a worthy few.”

“Yeah. Didn’t they?”

“No. They didn’t.” Seeing just how taken aback Quin was, Orolo continued: “This sort of thing happens every few hundred years. Some charlatan will appear and make a claim on Sæcular Power based on an association with the mathic world—which happens to be fraudulent.”