“Well, this is just what I was saying earlier,” Beller complained, “they have to have a language—not just an alphabet.”

Arsibalt asked, “What is the only sort of language that could possibly serve?”

Beller thought for a minute.

“What are they trying to convey to each other?” Arsibalt prompted him.

“Three-dimensional geometry,” Beller said. “And, since parts of the clock are moving, you’d also need time.”

“Everything that a worm could possibly say to a fly, or a fly to a bat, or a bat to a worm, would be gibberish,” Arsibalt said, leading Beller forward.

“Kind of like saying ‘blue’ to a blind man.”

“‘Blue’ to a blind man, except for descriptions of geometry and of time. That is the only language that these creatures could ever possibly share.”

“This makes me think of that geometry proof on the Cousins’ ship,” Beller said. “Are you saying that we are like the worms, and the Cousins are like the bats? That geometry is the only way we can speak to each other?”

“Oh no,” Arsibalt said. “That’s not where I was going at all.”

“Where are you going then?” Beller asked.

“You know how multicellular life evolved?”

“Er, single-celled organisms clumping together for mutual advantage?”

“Yes. And, in some cases, encapsulating one another.”

“I’ve heard of the concept.”

“That is what our brains are.”

“What!?”

“Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That’s what a brain is. That’s what it is to be conscious.”

Beller spent a few seconds mastering the urge to run away screaming, then a few minutes pondering this. Arsibalt watched him closely the whole time.

“You don’t mean literally that our brains evolved that way!” Beller protested

“Of course not.”

“Oh. That’s a relief.”

“But I put it to you, Ferman, that our brains are functionally indistinguishable from ones that evolved thus.”

“Because our brains have to be doing that kind of processing all the time, just—”

“Just in order for us to be conscious. To integrate our sensory perceptions into a coherent model of ourselves and our surroundings.”

“Is this that Sconic stuff you were talking about earlier?”

Arsibalt nodded. “To a first approximation, yes. It is post-Sconic. Certain metatheoricians who had been strongly influenced by the Sconics came up with arguments like this one later, around the time of the First Harbinger.” Which was a bit more detail than Ferman Beller really wanted to hear. But Arsibalt’s eyes flicked in my direction, as if to confirm what I’d been suspecting: he had been reading up on this kind of thing as part of his research into the work that Evenedric had pursued later in his life. I lingered on the edge of that dialog until it started to wind down. Then I got up and headed straight for my bunk, planning to sleep good and hard. But Arsibalt, moving uncharacteristically fast, chased me out of the dining hall and ran me down.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked him.

“Some of the Hundreders held a little calca just before dinner.”

“I noticed.”

“They couldn’t get the numbers to add up.”

“Which numbers?”

“That ship simply isn’t big enough to travel between star systems in a reasonable amount of time. It can’t possibly hold a sufficient number of atomic bombs to accelerate its own mass to relativistic velocity.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it split off from a mother ship that we haven’t seen yet, and that is that big.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s that kind of vessel,” Arsibalt said. “It is huge, with space to support tens of thousands of people indefinitely.”

“Too big to be a shuttle—too small for interstellar cruising,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions though.”

“That is a fair criticism,” he said with a shrug. But I could tell he had some other hypothesis.

“Okay. What do you think?” I asked him.

“I think it is from another cosmos,” he said, “and that is why they Evoked Paphlagon.”

We were at the door of my cabin.

“This cosmos we’re living in has me flummoxed,” I said. “I don’t know whether I can start thinking about additional ones at this point in the day.”

“Good night then, Fraa Erasmas.”

“Good night, Fraa Arsibalt.”

I woke to the sound of bells. I couldn’t make sense of them. Then I remembered where I was and understood that they were not our bells, but those of the monks, rousing them for some punishingly early ritual.

My mind was about half sorted out. Many of the new ideas, events, people, and images that had come at me from every direction the day before had been squared away, like so many leaves rolled up and thrust into pigeonholes. Not that anything had really been settled. All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping: it’s when we work hardest.

The peals faded slowly, until I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing the bells themselves, or ringing in my ears. Enduring was a deep tone, solid, steady, but faint because distant. I knew somehow that I’d been hearing it for hours—that in those moments of semi-waking when I’d rolled over or pulled up the covers I’d marked this sound and wondered what it was before falling back to sleep. An obvious guess would be some nocturnal bird. But the tone was low, for an avian throat: like someone playing a ten-foot-long flute half-choked with rocks and water. And birds tended not to just sit in one place and make noise for half the night. Some kind of big amphibian, then, crazy for a mate, squatting on a rock by the spring and blowing wind through a quivering air-sac. But the sound was regular. Patterned. Perhaps the hum from a generator. An irrigation pump down in the valley. Trucks descending a grade using air brakes.

Curiosity and a full bladder were keeping me awake. Finally I got up, moving quietly so as not to disturb Lio, and tugged at my blanket. Out of habit, I was going to wrap it around myself. Then I hesitated, remembering that I was supposed to wear extramuros clothes. In the predawn gloom I couldn’t even see the pile of trousers and underwear and whatnot I’d left on the floor last night. So I went back to plan A, peeled the blanket off the bed, wrapped it around myself, and went out.

The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, but by the time I’d used the latrine and emerged into the cool morning air, I’d started to get an idea of where it came from: a stone retaining wall that the monks had built along a steep part of the mountain to prevent their road from crumbling into the valley. As I walked toward it my perceptions cleared suddenly and I shook my head in amazement at my own silliness in having imagined it was an amphibian or a truck. It was plainly a human voice. Singing. Or rather droning, for he had been stuck on the same note the whole time I’d been awake.

The note changed slightly. Okay, so it wasn’t a drone. It was a chant. A very, very slow one.

Not wanting to stroll right up to Fraa Jad and disturb him, I maneuvered around on the soft wet grass of the retreat center’s archery range until I was able to bring him in view at a distance of a couple of hundred feet. The retaining wall ran in straight segments joined by round, flat-topped towers about four feet in diameter. Fraa Jad had rescued his bolt from his luggage, plumped it up to winter thickness, and put it on, then climbed to the top of a pillar that had a fine view to the south across the desert. He was sitting there with his legs tucked under him and his arms outstretched. Off to the left, the sky was luminescent purplish, washed of stars. To the right, a few bright stars and a planet still shone, striving against the light of the coming day, succumbing one by one as the minutes went by.