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Lorite etymology: the process of appending names to concepts that were independently discovered and published by separate people in different places and times. Priority is often impossible to determine because of the peculiarities of the mathic system. In a self-referential example, many of the axioms espoused by Saunt Lora (theorized in 1537 AR, published in 1540) were also put forward by Suur Tulswin (1518/1600 respectively) and Fraa Galvaes (1209/2000).It was Jules, of all people, who reported that one of our Arbrans was refusing to eat. We were both aware of the irony, but too frustrated to be amused.My first thought was take it to Tulia, she’s the one who knows how to deal with people. My second was chastising myself for having such a reaction. Tulia might have been better at playing politics than me—most people were—but she did not enjoy it. Her choice of order had been a sacrifice to leave me free to research; now that the world had been upended and I had stumbled into being the lead founder of this yet-to-be-named institution, the least I could do was pay it forward when I had the chance. My third was the reminder that so many carefree teachers and mentors had given me: there’s no use in feeling guilty for feeling guilty, Raz. Right, sure. The mathic world had had 3690 years to devote themselves to pure reason. Had nobody found a better strategy for dealing with irrational human reactions in that time?So I went with my fourth thought, which was to say, “Who?”“Suur Meglan.”A Centenarian I didn’t know well. Maybe Paphlagon’s age. From one of the smaller maths in the southern hemisphere, but still an isolated one, not a pinprick in the city. “Where is she now?”“She passed out. A couple of Ita got her to the medical facility.” The facility was a piecemeal installation where some of the tacky tourist shops had been before. It had the advantage of modular equipment from the military that could easily be replaced by more permanent structures when the time came, and could have air pumped in to equalize with the four planetary factions if needed.“Okay, thanks. I’ll check on her when she comes around.” If she came around. It was callous, but if she didn’t survive, it would at least expedite things for the rest of us.To make a long story short, the military and the Sæcular authorities are very good with praxis, and Meglan came around. Her arm was hooked up to an intravenous tube when I saw her, and she was scowling, which I thought was uncalled for, because it wasn’t nearly as invasive as some of the places that I’d had tubes stuck on the Daban Urnud.“If you’re going to kill yourself, I can’t stop you,” I said bluntly. Whatever else was going on, I trusted she was still an avout with no time for bulshytt. “But could you at least go back to Saunt Brange’s first? This place has seen enough bloodshed.”Meglan grimaced. “I’ll get a move on when they let me out of here.”“Thanks. I don’t suppose I can talk you into considering alternatives? You’ve just discovered this isn’t the only cosmos in existence; seems awfully presumptuous to conclude that there’s no place for you.”“It’s already too late,” she said. “I’ve spent too long out—here.”On Orithena? At the Convox? With the Daban Urnud travelers? “Saunt Orolo’s is a new thing. Not everyone is going to take to it. Even if Saunt Brange’s is changing, there will certainly be some concents with more traditional practices, if that’s what you prefer.”Meglan gripped the IV tube, looking like she wanted to rip it out. “It’s inside me.”She’d given up on life, but she hadn’t walked into the ocean or thrown herself into construction machinery, she’d just stopped eating. Maybe the excitement, or feelings of duty, at the Convox, had given her momentum to ignore whatever concerned her now, until the comedown had hit. But what would a Centenarian find most intolerable about the Sæcular world?I remembered Quin’s surprise and delight at the news of the Antiswarm. Avout ate the same food as everyone else now, which meant our men could impregnate women.Meglan didn’t appear to be of an age where that would be a firsthand concern. I knew that many Sæculars were offended by discussing age, or making assumptions. I also knew that if she’d been a Millenarian at one of the Three Inviolates, she might be much younger than she looked due to the esoteric nuclear maintenance praxis, but she was neither.Again, I figured, a little awkwardness was better than a lot of bulshytt, or any quantity of being dead. “If you are concerned about birth control, there are plenty of safe and reliable praxes for individuals rather than the population at large. I am sure the doctors here would be happy to—”She interrupted with incredulous laughter. “You may be first among equals here, but I was done bleeding when your pa was a fid. And I don’t miss it, either.”Right. Okay.We all ate the same food. And frankly, a lot of Sæcular food was tastier than what we’d had at Saunt Edhar’s. It might not have been as nutritious, but they were able to synthesize a lot of brain-stimulating shortcuts since they didn’t have to do everything by hand.Shortcuts.I was pretty sure that the theors in the early centuries After Reconstitution had celebrated when they’d discovered how to sequence-engineer the staple crops that now produced blithe. They believed it would save lives. Vulnerable Sæculars no longer needed to see a doctor to regulate their allswell; it would be free and distributed everywhere, like Praxic Age polities had fortified water with enneamatter. And for those who didn’t need it, it would pass harmlessly in and out of their bodies like other trace substances.But my predecessors in the mathic world had balked. We were dedicated to following reason as far as it would allow, without syndevs or other mechanical crutches. Some of us had been slines in our extramuros lives, others were burgers, but we had all been born with a faculty for theorics. Whatever we “lacked” in the Sæcular way of doing things, like enduring the barrage of stimulus that passed for news, we more than made up for in rigor. To use blithe—to be entitled to both the comfortable peace of mind of lazy extramuros thinkers and the creative power that came from the unrelenting pursuit of truth—was to cheat.And now that Meglan had been exposed to it, a chemical that might not even have had an effect in her brain, her principles were killing her.I’d briefly panicked on my journey over the pole, worried that I might be lulled into complacency, but nobody at Saunt Orolo’s was at risk from smugglers or traffickers. During and after the Antiswarm, I had been so busy planning our approach to the Daban Urnud that I’d had no time to think about what I was putting into my body. I wanted to yell at Meglan and tell her not to be ridiculous. But did I really believe that?When you’re being hard on yourself, ask yourself; would I treat a friend that way? It was another piece of advice that not even avout realized was bulshytt. I liked my friends, and wanted them to reach truth by their own methods, in their own time; screaming and holding them to unreachable standards was unlikely to assist. But inside the confines of my own mind, where I could be—had to be—pitiless?I had a lifetime of building ahead of me at Savant Orolo’s, however we spelled it. And I had Ala. And Cord. Tulia and Jesry and Lio and Arsibalt and so many others. I was in no danger. But some small part of me, deep down, had been marked enough by the patterns of the mathic world that it agreed Meglan’s purity of thought was worth dying for. Rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t criticize her, not while that part still felt true.“Is there anyone from Saunt Brange’s you would like to speak with?” I deflected. “It would be easy to bring them here, even if the doctors decide they need to keep observing you.”“And have them contaminated too?” Meglan looked disgusted. “The aut of requiem is the same everywhere.”Rhodpluma’s Diamonds: a collection of tiles known for their nonrepeating tesselations, related to the Teglon and haberdashery problem. Fraa Rhodpluma was a committed Halikaarnian whose interpretations of quantum theory frequently got him in trouble with Procian hierarchs, however, his geometry was held in unquestioned esteem by avout of all orders.I woke up, and Ala was lying beside me.For most people, Arbrans and Geometers alike, this was nothing strange. But for an avout who’d pledged never to sleep in the same cell twice in a row, it still gave me a jolt to remember where I was. Sometimes, in my dreams, I floated through the void the way we had outside the Daban Urnud, not sure when or where I was and cognizant only of a vague terror that something was wrong. I knew that if I lived to Fraa Jad’s age, the part of my brain that generated nightmares would still carry the memory of drifting there.But nightmares faded quickly, and I breathed in and out, grateful for the simple pleasure of starting another day with my liaison-partner. We’d reached the point where the long-term planning meetings weren’t consuming all of our time, and so even us “leaders” had plenty of opportunities to haul wheelbarrows up and down hills with everyone else. Some of the questions I got were tedious, but others were thought-provoking, and when I got bored there were always plenty of other avout to step in. While my peers and I often found Tavener’s earnest verbosity to be too much, extras found him charming, and he was happy to explain the history of the Teglon ad nauseum.We’d reached a consensus that, for the most part, Saunt Orolo’s would not observe Messals. As much as those of us who’d been part of the Plurality of Worlds Messal had—eventually—come to appreciate the insights there, we wanted a community with less hierarchy or separation between avout and extras, doyns and servitors. All the same, there would be people who wanted smaller, quieter rooms, and others who preferred to cook their own food rather than eat whatever was on offer, so all that had to be incorporated into the plans for the kitchens and Refectory.In a traditional concent, the sketching and drafting alone would have taken months. But traditional concents didn’t have ex-Ita with portable syndevs to construct images. When I marveled at Sammann’s skill, he laughed and reminded me that he had no special facility with architecture; other Ita had encoded the syndevs so that anyone with access could quickly create and discard these images.We’d need to incorporate the Reticulum into the new design, too. And not behind stone walls, but somewhere that old models could be readily swapped out for new ones, to keep up with the rapidly improving designs. I wasn’t sure how we would strike a balance between the praxes they expedited and the painful overstimulus of speely news, but we’d find a way. The Sæculars had managed it for three and a half millennia.All of which is to say that, as Ala and I trudged down the mountainside, wheelbarrow in tow, Sammann jogged up to share a new draft on his speely. It proposed large dining halls would consisting of dodecagons, connected by hexagonal kitchens and square messal rooms.“It’s a beautiful tesselation, but nobody’s going to be seeing it from above,” Ala pointed out. “I still think we should have just one large Refectory, and if it’s not symmetrical, that’s no great loss.”Sammann made as if to pull up yet another floor plan, and I waved him off. “Not now! Take a break.” The new ex-Ita who were joining us looked to Sammann as somewhat of a leader, and often used him as a go-between. Considering how avout had scorned them and looked down on their praxis, I couldn’t necessarily blame them—some of us got along better with the Geometers than we did with Ita, and the Geometers were the ones who literally came from less Hylaean worlds. It was another thing we’d need to change.“Okay, okay,” he said. Then he gave a waggish grin. “And here’s where we’ll put the loudspeakers.”“Loudspeakers?” Ala echoed.“You can have any music you like summoning you to dinner. No more need to waste time with bells.”I thought Ala might take offense—she had been the leader of her band, after all—but instead she laughed merrily. “And each messal can have their own tune. Very good.”Fortunately, there was enough labor to keep everyone busy without being dragged into the syndevs’ voracious grip, and Sammann joined some friends hauling stakes up Arsibalt’s Dowment. Ala and I went back to haul another wheelbarrow-load, and we strode in pleasurable silence for a while before I asked, “Do you miss ringing?”She glanced down at the cornerstone, up at the mountain, out across the ocean. “I don’t think a bell tower should be high on our list of priorities. Casting the metal alone, never mind getting it out here…”“That wasn’t an answer.”“I want to learn how to play Extramuros instruments. And I want fraas to be able to learn the changes if they want to, instead of having to wind the clock just because they’re big and strong.”“Hey!” I teased. “Some of us are proud of being big and strong.”“Now, sure. When you were eleven?”“Point taken,” I said.“I do miss the—ritual, the patterns. But at the Convox, I was too busy to miss them, and now that you’re back, all of you—mostly I’m too grateful to worry about what we left behind.”“Mostly,” I said, and kissed her cheek. “Me, too.”Tenour: 1. Especially in the context of Dowments and Lineages, a senior fraa or suur whose theoric contributions are treated with undue reverence or insufficient skepticism; as a pejorative, someone whose bulshytt is allowed to go unchallenged due to their great age and experience. Since the Third Sack reforms, this use has been deprecated. (2. campanology) the heaviest or lowest-pitched bell rung in a given performance.I’d seen less of Cord and Yul in recent weeks. I guess I assumed they were celebrating their marriage by traveling down dangerous river rapids somewhere. But when I stopped by Cord’s new workshop, on the mainland not far from the beach where we’d been evacuated, I was blown away by the scale. The walls were covered with both syndevs and paper technical drawings, with specifications for newmatter components that were vastly more complicated than anything Jesry or Tulia had commissioned.She grinned when she took in my wonder. “Gan Odru asked me to draft a schematic for an Arbran sector on the Daban Urnud.”Four more orbs in a stack, wedded together to contain the air and water and colorful laser beams precisely calibrated to our cosmos. Some of the wanderers would stay behind in our world; if previous Advents were any guide, it was those of the Pedestal—the ones who had tried to destroy us—who would be most ready to give up their travels and make a home here. And the new orbs would be full of Arbrans, former avout and Sæculars alike, journeying up-Wick. “Are you leaving?” I blurted.It took Cord a moment to parse what I meant. “On the ship? How should I know? Advents take decades at best, you heard Jules.”I breathed out. Even though some of us were accustomed to thinking about the HTW—or HTWs—the Geometers knew it would not be an easy or abrupt transition. Maybe it would be Cord and Yul’s children who would live in Orbs Seventeen through Twenty. Maybe Ala’s and mine.Orolo would have told me to stop multiplying my worries; Ala and I were still a ways from having kids, much less from them abandoning us for another cosmos. “Right. Sorry.”Yul gave me a hearty clap on the back. “I don’t think you, of all people, can criticize us for working on a project that might take a generation to finish.”I laughed. “Touche. Just be sure you build more reliable jeejahs than the junk Sammann keeps trying to get us to use.”“We’ll use the gravity clocks instead,” said Cord. “Equally useless in space.”I let them show me around the workshop. In addition to all the preliminary machinery that might someday become Arbran life support, there were also components for shuttles and helmets that would ferry people between the Daban Urnud and the planet in the medium term. Many of the Geometers were not particularly interested in overturning our political or religious institutions; they were children who had never felt a planet’s gravity, never swum in an ocean or watched the phases of the moon change overhead. Even if our food couldn’t nourish them, Arbre was still an oasis.I noticed, too, that many of the technicians at work were from Urnud and Tro. Were humans from less Hylaean worlds better suited for the pragmatic, concrete labor of building physical habitats? Was this the Pedestal’s way of making amends after what they’d done to Arbre? Or was I just oversensitive, seeing patterns in randomness? From the easy way the Troäns joked with Yul about his misadventures swallowing Fthosian food, I hoped it was the latter.“It’s amazing,” I said, truthfully. “I won’t keep you, but come by any time you need a break.”“What’s going on?” Cord asked. “You didn’t just come here to gawk.”“Can’t I say hello to my sib when I feel like it?”“Don’t try to pull that one on me,” said Yul. “You two have the same face.”“What’s that supposed to mean?”“The ‘I’m planning something fiendishly complicated, so either leave me alone or give me a hand’ expression.”Cord burst out laughing, and a moment later I couldn’t help but join in. I thought of myself as having been forged by Saunt Edhar’s and the rigors of the mathic world, but the truth was, some of what made me myself had come earlier. If it could be dispiriting to fear that some people were just born with a dangerous tendency to mysticism, it was also reassuring to remind myself that extras and avout weren’t really all that different.“I had a commission in mind,” I admitted. “But what you’re doing is important, and I’m not sure how feasible it would be—”“What we’re doing is not in any rush,” Cord pointed out, and I handed over my rough notes; acoustic signatures, sustainable materials. We weren’t planning to raise livestock or have leatherworkers at Orolo, but there was a lot we could acquire from outside. Now that “outside” and “inside” were vague, the boundary more a wiggly fractal than a collection of well-behaved walls.She glanced over the draft. “Of course it’s feasible.” Then she smiled. “Is this for Ala?”“No. Maybe? Sort of.”“There’s that famous mathic precision,” Yul said, and I was able to laugh.Principled ring: (1. algebraics) a setting in which every ideal can be generated by a single element. Example: in the context of the integers, “the set of even numbers” is an ideal; equivalently, it can be expressed as “the set of multiples of 2.” The integers are a principled ring. (2. campanology) a method in which the highest-pitched (“treble”) bell follows the same patterns as other bells, albeit from a different starting position. Most commonly-taught methods are not principled (the treble has a simpler pattern than others, making it convenient to assign to novices).Sammann was engaged in a vigorous dialog with Ilque, a Fthosian shuttle pilot. Neither of them spoke the other’s language very well, but while Jules would normally have been called upon to translate, the newest syndev programming could do a decent job of getting the basics across, which was fine for ordinary conversations but required more pausing and backtracking during technical dialogs with lots of name-dropping. Moyra and her new meta-Lorite school were usually on hand to resolve these references.“Your Saunt Vadnis’ Second Proposition,” Ilque summarized, “demonstrates that there are formal truths beyond the capacity of any effective axiom-set to enumerate.”“Agreed,” said Sammann.“So a syndev programmed to generate consequences of such a set…”“Would neither be able to prove nor disprove such a statement.”“But it does have a truth-value, that could be reached by human upsight!”Sammann shook his head. “You’re romanticizing it. All that means is that those axiom-sets…”Our theors had not reached a satisfactory interpretation of Saunt Vadnis’ Propositions in the centuries since she’d lived, and I doubted the Geometers were going to resolve things in the next few days. But the onlookers, from several worlds, were amused. “Saunt Vadnis’ Second Proposition,” Moyra explained, “corresponds to the Purni Counterexample in Fthosian theorics, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems from Earth.”I blinked. “Gödel of the geometrodynamics?”“The same!” Jules said.“Very impressive. I suppose he resolved Vijama’s Hypothesis, too?”“Even Gödel couldn’t do it all,” said Moyra.Ilque was clarifying a technical aside with Sammann about how some infinite sets could be “effective” in the context of Vadnis’ Propositions, which allowed Jules to slip back into the crowd, a withdrawn expression on his face. I let him be; if he was anxious, the chance to eat his own food and breathe his own air would probably do him good.Later, however, I tracked him down. “I hope the dialog didn’t upset you. Sammann means well even if his vocabulary isn’t the most modern.”“By the standards of the spats I saw at Convox, that’s relatively tame,” Jules pointed out.I wanted to tell him that I was his friend, and Sammann was too, and if there was anything wrong, he could tell us. Tulia would have known how to do it without sounding like bulshytt. It would still be bad, but less bad than having to carry it himself.But while I was fumbling for the right words, in Orth at least, he pressed ahead and saved me the trouble. “I told you I was born on Fthos?”“Yeah.”“When I was a young man, after we’d left that cosmos, I became very ill with a tumor that Laterran physicians didn’t know how to treat. Usually what we’d do in those situations was go to the Fthosian curatives, instead.”“Because their praxis was better than yours.”“Exactly. But they’d never seen a disease like mine, either, only read about it on syndevs. All of them had been inoculated against it in infancy—that’s how far ahead Fthos medicine was.”“Oh. But you must have—I mean, you survived, right?” The way Jad talked about worldpaths and Narratives, I couldn’t even be certain of that, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what Jules wanted to get at right now.He nodded. “The Fthosian archives suggested that in their ‘pre-modern’ times, scientists from their world had treated it with high-density newmatter bursts. A form of radiation.”“So you had to synthesize newmatter elements.” But the heavier elements were subtly different in every cosmos. “Laterran newmatter or Fthosian newmatter?”“Neither, because neither of our orbs had those kinds of synthesizers. Only the Troäns made frequent enough use of radiation technology to bring it aboard the Daban Urnud. It had been a weapon in their wars.”I took a moment to parse that. Jules’ life had been saved, he was telling me, both by the more “advanced” knowledge of Fthos and the more “primitive,” destructive tools brought from Tro. “You must have been scared.”“Me? Not really. I was already sick enough I had nothing to lose. Lise took it harder. It made her—angry, somehow, to know that my survival was so contingent. That if I’d been born a little earlier, or my parents had stayed on Fthos, the tumor would probably have killed me.”“But that’s the same everywhere,” I pointed out. “Praxis is always advancing, polycosm or no polycosm.”“But advancements of the past are often forgotten by subsequent generations,” said Jules, which was certainly true given how many cultures had risen and fallen on Arbre alone. “Time, and even Wick flow, are unidirectional. But progress—or luck—aren’t.”“You Laterrans thought Fthos was your HTW,” I realized. “Information-flow-wise, maybe it was. But that didn’t make it utopia.” I only knew one planet; as much as I had liked to champion the mathic way of doing things, I could recognize some of the luxuries of the Sæcular world. How would it feel to be disillusioned by a world I thought was a purer, superior version of my own?“Thank you for telling me this,” I said, and Jules brightened. “If you don’t mind me asking, what does this have to do with formal axiom schema?”Jules snorted. “Our Saunt Gödel went hundred and starved to death. It’s those sorts of questions that made us somber, after the Advent; if he’d had access to Fthosian curatives, could they have healed his mind?”Maybe. Then again, maybe not; that was Lise’s point. Even if cosmi higher up the Wick were somehow “more ideal” than our predecessors, we weren’t perfect. Laterre and Fthos hadn’t invented Everything Killers, either.“But it would have been good to try,” I blurted. “Even if it wasn’t enough, any chance at life is better than none. That’s the answer.”Jules blinked. “I tend to agree, but—”“Jules,” I interrupted. “I know I’ve asked a lot of you. Can you do me a favor? Please? When you’re up to it?”“I will certainly try, Erasmas. What is happening?”“Could you tell everything you just told me—especially the part about progress not being unidirectional—to Suur Meglan? I think she would really appreciate hearing from you.”Full appeal: (1. Discipline) An appeal triggered by an avout being punished with chapter six or higher from the Book. Such an appeal necessarily involves reviewing the justice of all the cumulative prior chapters, but since each chapter is significantly more painful than its predecessors, the tedium increases factorially. (2. campanology) A performance in which each bell is rung at least 5,040 times. The significance of this number derives from the fact that 5040 = 7 factorial, so a band of seven ringers would need exactly this long to ring through every possible arrangement of their bells.The enormous bells in the Mynster at Saunt Edhar’s were meant to carry signals throughout the concent. Here, the ringers had picked an out-of-the-way terrace so they wouldn’t be an unwelcome distraction, especially since many were just learning. As I approached, avoiding stepping in the young tangles, I began to hear the chimes on the handbells Cord had forged, first repetitive scales, then launching into a pattern.In the tower, Ala had explained, everyone had their own bell, and it had taken the girls months or years just to be able to control it accurately. She’d expected to ring these the same way. But many of the theors were not content with memorizing one set of patterns at a time when they had the means to dual-wield. So now, in addition to keeping everyone straight, she also warned Jesry when his left-hand and right-hand bells had gotten crossed with themselves, until they gave up and collapsed in tired giggles. I was given to understand that this was a common state of affairs.“What I don’t understand,” said Artisan Quin, “is why you don’t ring melodies. You’re not limited by the tower bells anymore. You can make real music!” Quin had a fiddle, and had been giving lessons to Karvall and a few others now that it was no longer a forbidden decadence.“The patterns are what make it interesting,” Tavener said.For many of us, it was difficult to focus on the methods without the associations we’d had drilled into us as fids—even if we had never expected to hear Voco or Anathem rung, we were expected to have it memorized, just in case. But the next generation would develop their own tastes for which symmetries were pleasing and make up their own shorthand to memorize the long sequences. Tavener had already flown right past the typical introductory methods and pronounced himself ready and willing to dive in with the principled rings. It was good to know some things would never change.Best of all, of course, was listening to Meglan find her places with the others. The fact that she’d been so distressed by our exposure to allswell probably meant that she was one of the people who would benefit from it, a bitter paradox I had no interest in tail-chasing. But talking with Jules had been enough to reassure her that our cosmos was not so perfect that we couldn’t benefit from another Reconstitution, and she was making the most of our new era, one day at a time.Now, she had a pondering smile. “Eight factorial is only about forty thousand. These are faster and easier than tower bells. You could get through a perfect extent in less than a day.”“If you didn’t stop to eat or use the bathroom,” said Ala. “And you’d need at least as many people spotting you, to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes.”“But they could go in shifts,” said Tavener. “Maybe that’s what the Millennials did during the Third Sack. Compose eight-bell extents.”“Maybe,” said Jesry, in a tone that even Tavener understood meant that this line of thought would be unfruitful to pursue.“I’m not saying we could do it any time soon,” Meglan rushed. “Or ever. Just, in theory, I think it could be done.”If that was what gave her hope, why not?Faine’s Wheel: an equilateral triangle with rounded edges, having the circle-like property that its width is the same in every direction. First described in mathic literature by Fraa Faine (1850 AR). Lorite etymology later discovered that it was used in Kelx iconography as early as 1731.“The cornerstone is coming along.” Cord nodded down at the stone cube. “At this rate we’ll need more space for all those names.”“Good,” I said. “If there’s enough people who want to add their names, they can clear the land for the next block.”She gave a wry smile. “When the next block goes in, this face will be hidden.”“Yeah,” I said. That wouldn’t be for a long time, and it hadn’t prevented her and Yul from carving their names amidst all the others. “And?”“It’s a little strange that you of all people are so excited about leaving your marks where nobody will see.”“But they’ll know they’re there,” I said. “Or they won’t. That’s okay. It’s for us as much as them.”Cord shrugged, a hint too casual.“This isn’t, you know, some kind of Deolater thing where the future generations have no evidence anything’s there but they imagine our names because it’s symbolic or something. That’s different.”“I didn’t say anything,” she protested.She seemed content to leave it at that, but then the memory hit me. An imposing stone, much like this, carved with the names of avout who had given of themselves to build the concent where I’d lived. Except at Saunt Edhar’s, it hadn’t been the martyrs of the Third Sack who’d inscribed their own names, but the avout who came to rebuild after the Convox seven decades later. They’d believed that their predecessors’ sacrifice—bravely escaping the siege and then, more heroically, coming back—had been what gave the Millenarians the supplies they needed to remain Inviolate, keeping the unbroken chain of mathic purity alive.“And it was all a lie,” I explained to Cord. “They died for nothing. The Sæculars were afraid of our nuclear wastes, that’s all.”“I don’t think it was for nothing.”“Because the rebuilders believed it? Because they didn’t know any better? No.” If that was faith, it was cheap ignorance, and I wanted no part of it.“That’s not what I said.” Cord turned, staring back at the cornerstone. “What the Sæcular world did to the avout in the Sacks—and what the Pedestal did to Orolo and Lise—was evil.”“Of course.”“And it would still have been evil if everyone who died had been ancient and about to drop dead the next day anyway. If they’d had nothing left to say. You can’t do worse than murder.”“Isn’t that, you know, heresy? From you?”She gave me a withering look that clearly said don’t act like you understand the first thing about what I believe, how strange and complex it all is, and okay, maybe Yul had a point about us having the same expressions. “Sorry,” I hastily added.“I’m Kelx, I believe in that broader framework to see the world. But the—naive—understanding, that the tragedy of murder comes from the unfulfilled potential, the stories that could have been told, the Narratives that could have been created? Not only is that not true ethically, I don’t think it’s even true empirically.”In a flash I saw that she wasn’t only speaking of some heaven up-Wick, where unencumbered spirits might see isosceles triangles with clearer eyes than our limited instruments, but here. Orolo and Lise’s Narratives were still bound up with ours, because of what they had won with their deaths and lives, what we were continuing to build. That was the miracle.