After what seemed like hours of lying awake and worrying about this, I had the upsight that the things Fraa Orolo said—even when they caused me embarrassment or outright pain—never made me wrestle with my bolt in the night-time in the way that these words from Fraa Corlandin had. This made me think I’d rather join the Edharians.
If, that is, the Edharians would have me. I was not so confident that they would. I’d never been as quick to grasp pure theorics as some of the other fids. This must have been noticed. I wondered: why had Grandsuur Tamura asked me the first, and easiest, question? Was it because she didn’t think I could handle anything more difficult? Why did Orolo have me working as an amanuensis instead of doing theorics? Why was Corlandin now trying to recruit me? Putting it all together, I came to the conclusion that everyone knew I just wasn’t fit to join the Edharian order, and some were trying to prepare a soft landing for me.
Part 2
APERT
Ita: (1) In late Praxic Orth, an acronym (therefore, in ancient texts sometimes written ITA) whose precise etymology is a casualty of the loss of shoddily preserved information that will forever enshroud the time of the Harbingers and the Terrible Events. Almost all scholars agree that the first two letters come from the words Information Technology, which is late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt for syntactic devices. The third letter is disputed; hypotheses include Authority, Associate, Arm, Archive, Aggregator, Amalgamated, Analyst, Agency, and Assistant. Each of these, of course, suggests a different picture of what role the Ita might have performed in the years before the Reconstitution, and so each tends to be advocated by a different suvin. (2) In early New Orth (up to the Second Sack), a faculty of a concent devoted to the praxis of syntactic devices. (3) In later New Orth, a proscribed artisanal caste tolerated in the thirty-seven concents that were built around the Great Clocks, all of which are in technical violation of the Second Sack reforms in that their clocks were built with subsystems that employ syntactic devices; the task of the Ita is to operate and maintain those subsystems while observing strict segregation from the avout.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
The last night of 3689 I dreamed that something was troubling Fraa Orolo, and that everyone had noticed, but on no account would he or anyone else speak of it openly. So it was a mystery. And yet everyone knew what it was: the planets were deviating from their courses, and the clock was wrong. For part of the clock was an orrery: a mechanical model of the solar system that displayed the current positions of the planets and many of their moons. It was in the narthex or lobby between the Day Gate and the north nave. It had been exactly correct for thirty-four centuries, but now it had gone out of whack. The marble, crystal, steel, and lapis spheres that represented the planets had moved to positions that were at odds with what Fraa Orolo could plainly see even in the smallest of telescopes. Never mentioned in the dream, but understood by me, was that the problem must have something to do with the Ita, because the orrery was one of the systems driven by the devices that they tended in the vaulted cavern beneath the floor of the Mynster.
The same system, it was rumored, effected subtle corrections to the rate of the main clock. If the error down in the cellar were not fixed, it would lead to greater errors that would be obvious to all, such as the bells chiming midday when the sun was not at its zenith, or the Day Gate opening before or after sunrise.
In a universe governed by the usual logic, those errors would have cropped up later than the tiny discrepancies between the orrery and the planets. But in dream-logic, it all happened at the same time, so that I was wondering what was troubling Fraa Orolo even as I saw the orrery show the phase of the moon wrong, which happened at the same time as burgers were wandering in through the Day Gate at midnight. But for some reason, none of those errors troubled me as much as the sounds emanating from the belfry: the bells ringing the wrong changes….
I opened my eyes to hear Apert ringing. Or so the other fraas in my cell speculated. There was no way of telling unless you listened carefully for a few minutes. The belfry movement could play fixed tunes, for example to chime the hours. But to announce auts and other events, our team of ringers would disengage that mechanism and ring changes, or permutations of tones. There was a pattern or code in them that we were taught to understand. This was supposedly so that messages could be cast to a sprawling concent without the people extramuros knowing what was being said.
Not that there was anything secret about Apert. This was the first day of 3690; therefore, not only the Day Gate but the Unarian and Decenarian Gates would open at sunrise. Any extra who glanced at a calendar knew this perfectly well, and so did we. But for some reason none of us would get out of bed and act upon it until we heard the right sequence of tones ring out from the belfry: a melody reversed, flipped upside-down, and turned back on itself in a particular way.
We sat up, three naked fraas in a cold cell with our bolts and chords and spheres all disheveled on the pallets. Such a day called for a formal wrap, which was difficult to manage alone. Fraa Holbane’s feet had touched the floor first, so I leaned over and rummaged through his warm, stirred-up bolt until my fingers felt the fraying end, which I drew toward me. Fraa Arsibalt, the third one in the cell, was the last to wake up; after some strong language from me and Holbane, he finally took up the selvage end. We went out into the corridor and stretched it between us. Fraa Holbane had made it short, thick, and fuzzy for warmth.
Arsibalt and I pleated Holbane’s bolt and then backed away from each other as Holbane made it three times as long and much thinner. Chord wadded in his hand, he crawled under it and then stood so that it was tented over his left shoulder. Then all he had to do was swivel this way and that, and raise and lower his arms at the right times, while Arsibalt and I moved about him, like planets in an orrery, winding the bolt, spreading or bunching pleats as necessary. The finished wrap was notoriously unstable, so we held it in place for a minute while Holbane passed his chord over it in several places and tied a few important knots. Then he was free to partner with Arsibalt in getting my bolt around me. Finally, Holbane and I did it for Arsibalt. Arsibalt always liked to go last, so that he would get the best results. Not that he was vain. On the contrary, of all of our crop, he seemed best suited to live in a math. He was big and portly, and kept trying to grow a beard so that he could look more like the old fraa that he was destined to be. But unlike, say, Fraa Lio, who invented new wraps all the time, Arsibalt insisted on having it done right.
When we were all clothed, we spent a few more minutes making extra passes with our chords and shaping the pleats that hooded our heads: just about the only part of this wrap where it was possible to show any individual style.
Completed sandals were heaped on the ground next to the exit of the cell-house. I kicked through them looking for a pair big enough for my feet. The Discipline had been created by people who lived in warm places. It allowed each of the avout to own a bolt, a chord, and a sphere, but it said nothing about footwear. That didn’t trouble us much during the summer. But the weather was getting ready to turn cold. And during Apert we might go extramuros and walk on city streets with broken glass and other hazards. We stretched the Discipline a little bit, wearing tire sandals during Apert and soft-soled mukluks during the winter months. The avout of Saunt Edhar had been doing this for a long time now and the Inquisition hadn’t come down on us yet, so it seemed that we were safe. I made a pair of sandals mine, and tied them onto my feet.
Finally, each of us took his sphere and made it fist-sized. As we strolled in the direction of the Mynster, we passed the knotted ends of our chords around these, weaving simple nets to entrap them, then made the spheres inhale and swell to draw the chords taut. Each of us then made his sphere glow with a soft scarlet light. The light was so that we could see where we were going and the color was to mark ourselves as Tenners, which was necessary since before long we’d be mixed up with One-offs.
When all of these preparations were finished,
the sphere dangled from the right hip and swung against the thigh, which looked fascinating when a couple of hundred of us were converging on the Mynster in the dark. If you wanted to look like a real Saunt in a statue, you could cup the glowing sphere in one hand and stroke it with the other while staring off into the distance as though mesmerized by the Light of Cnoüs.
Forty avout had risen earlier and gathered in the chancel. They were singing the processional of Decennial Apert as we came in. Woven into this chant was a melody I had not heard in ten years, or since I had stood inside the Decade Gate at sunrise and watched its stone-and-steel doors grind shut on everything I had ever known. To hear that melody now penetrated so deep into my brain that it literally threw me off balance, and I leaned into another fraa: Lio, who for once did not use it as an excuse to flip me over his hipbone and slam me to the ground, but rather pushed me back up straight, as if I were a crooked ikon, and turned his attention back to the aut.
All of the music was synchronized to the clock, which served as metronome and conductor. It went on for another quarter of an hour: no reading, no homily, just music.
The sky was clear, and so at the moment of sunrise, light washed down the well from the quartz prism at the top of the starhenge. The music stopped. We extinguished our spheres. I had an impression that the light from above was emerald-colored at first, or perhaps that was a trick of my eyes; by the time I’d blinked once, it had gone the color of the back of your hand when you shine a light through it in a dark cell. There was an unbearable moment of stillness when we all feared that (as in my dream) the clock was wrong and nothing would happen.
Then the central weight began to drop. This happened every day at sunrise to open the Day Gate. But today it was the signal for everyone to crane their necks and look up to where the Praesidium’s pillars pierced the Mynster’s vault. We heard, then saw movement. It was happening! Two of the weights were descending, riding down their rails to open the Year Gate and the Decade Gate.
We all gasped and exclaimed and cheered and many of us had to wipe our eyes. I could even hear the Thousanders reacting to it behind their screen. The cube and the octahedron descended into plain view and everyone roared. We applauded them as if they were celebrities at an awards ceremony. As they neared the chancel floor we hushed, as if fearing that they might smash into the ground. But as they got closer they slowed, and finally crept to a halt only a hand’s-breadth above the floor. Then we all laughed.
In some ways this was ridiculous. The clock was but a mechanism. It had no choice at this moment but to let those weights drop. Yet to see it happen created a feeling that can’t be conveyed to one who was not there. The choir were supposed to break into polyphonic singing now, and they almost couldn’t. But the raggedness of their voices was a music of its own.
Outside, beneath the singing, I could hear the sound of running waters.
* * *
Avout: (1) A person who has sworn a vow to submit himself or herself to the Cartasian Discipline for one or more years; a fraa or suur. (2) A plurality of such persons. (3) A formally constituted community of such persons, e.g., a chapter or a math.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
“There’s no right way to build a clock,” Fraa Corlandin used to say when he was teaching us modern (post-Reconstitution) history. This was his euphemistic way of saying that Saunt Edhar’s praxics had been a little bit crazy.
Our concent was nestled in the crook of a river where it dodged around one end of a range of rocky bluffs—the terminus of a mountain range that stretched for hundreds of miles to the northeast and whose glaciers and snowpacks formed the river’s headwaters. Just upstream was a series of cataracts. We could hear them at night if the slines weren’t making too much noise. Below them, the river, as though resting from all of the excitement, ran still and gentle for some distance, curving across a well-drained prairie. Part of that prairie, and a mile and a half of the river, were encompassed by our walls.
Up at the cataract, the river was easily bridged, and so a settlement tended to be there. During some eras it would grow and engulf our walls, and office workers in skyscrapers would gaze down on the tops of our bastions. At other times it would ebb and recede to a tiny fueling-station or gun emplacement at the river crossing. Our stretch of the river was hazardous with rust-eaten girders and lumps of moss-covered synthetic stone, the remains of bridges that had been raised at that crossing and, in later ages, collapsed and washed downstream.
Most of our land and almost all of our buildings were on the inside of the riverbend, but we had claimed a strip on the far bank and built our fortifications there: walls parallel to the river where it ran straight, bastions where it bent. Three of those bastions housed gates, one each for the Unarian, Decenarian, and Centenarian maths (the Millenarian Gate was up on the mountain and worked differently). Each gate was a pair of doors, supposed to swing open and closed at certain times. This had posed a problem for the praxics, in that the gates were situated far away, and on the opposite side of a river, from the clock that was supposed to command the opening.
The praxics had done it with water power. Far outside of our walls, upstream of the cataract—therefore, at an altitude well above our heads—they had carved a pool, like an open cistern, out of the river’s stony course, and made it feed an aqueduct that cut due south toward the Mynster, bypassing the cataract, the bridge, and the bend. After rushing through a short tunnel and loping on stone stilts across half a mile of broken terrain, this dove into the ground and became a buried pipe that passed beneath what was now a settled neighborhood of burgers. The water in that pipe, pressurized by gravity, erupted in a pair of fountains from the pond that lay just outside of the Day Gate. A causeway ran across the middle of that pond, connecting the central square of the burgers’ town, at its northern end, to our Day Gate at its southern, and passing right between those two fountains.
The elevation of the pond was still above that of the river and plain. Drains were plumbed into its bottom and throttled by monumental ball-valves of polished granite. One of them fed a series of ponds, canals, and fountains that beautified the Primate’s compound and, farther downstream, formed part of the barrier between the Unarian and the Decenarian maths. Three other drains were connected to systems of pipes, siphons, and aqueducts that ran out toward the Year, Decade, and Century Gates. Those systems were dry except at Apert. Now the clock’s descending weights had opened two valves and allowed water to rush from the pond to flood the Year and Decade systems.
In some ways maybe this was a crazy and ramshackle way to do it, but there was one advantage that wasn’t obvious to me until that day. The waterworks had been designed to fill up slowly. So after the rite concluded, we were able to spill out of the Mynster and follow the water at a brisk walking pace as it charged an aqueduct that ran along beside the Seven Stairs, skirted the Cloister, and reached across the Back toward the river.
A stone bridge crossed the river there, anchored on the near bank by a round tower and on the far by a bastion in the concent’s outer wall. Within the round tower was a cistern, now being filled by water from the aqueduct, with a pitcher-lip poised above the petals of a water-wheel. Most of us reached it in time to see the cistern overflow and the wheel begin to turn, accepting energy from the water before exhausting it into the river. By stainless steel gears the wheel rotated a shaft, as thick as my thigh, that ran across the bridge (you might mistake it for a very stout railing if you didn’t know what it was for). Across the river, inside of the bastion, the shaft drove another set of gears that was connected directly to the hinge-pins around which the gates swung.
Hearing them move, we ran toward them, but slowed as we got closer, not knowing what was about to happen.
Well…actually, we had a pretty good idea. But I was still young enough that I could let myself forget about Diax’s Rake when I was in love with some idea. Orolo’s yarn about a math that floated freely in time, surfing on crosscurrents of Causal
Domain Shear, had really stirred my emotions, and so for a few moments I let my imagination run away, and pretended that I lived in such a math and that I really had no idea what might be found outside its gates when they opened: Mobs of jumped-up slines rushing in with pitchforks or molotovs. Starving ones crawling in to worry potatoes out of the ground. Moshianic pilgrims expecting to see the face of some god or other. Corpses strewn to the horizon. Virgin wilderness. The most interesting moment was when the gap between the gates grew just wide enough to admit a single person. Who would it be? Male or female, old or young, carrying an assault rifle, a baby, a chest of gold, or a backpack bomb?
As the doors continued to open, we were able to make out perhaps thirty Saeculars who had gathered to watch. Several were planted facing the gate, all sharing the same awkward stance; after a while I figured out that these were aiming speelycaptors at us, or holding up jeejahs to send feeds to people far away. A small child sat on her father’s shoulders, eating something; she was already bored, and wriggling to be let down; he bent and twisted at the hips and insisted through clenched teeth that she watch, just for another minute. Eight children in identical clothes stood in a row, watched over by a lady. These must have come from one of the Burgers’ suvins. A desolate woman, looking as though she’d survived a natural disaster that hadn’t touched anyone else, walked slowly toward the gate carrying a bundle that I suspected was a newborn infant. Half a dozen men and women were gathered around something that smoked. This artifact was surrounded by a loose revetment of large brightly colored boxes, on which some of them sat, the better to eat their enormous drooling sandwiches. Half-forgotten Fluccish words came to me: barbecue, cooler, cheesburg.
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