“Nice, huh?” He’d caught me looking.

“I’ve seen one before,” I said.

“Where?” he asked sharply.

“Jad had one.”

“How could you know that? It was issued to him immediately before the launch. He burned up before you could talk to him.”

I just stared at him, hardly knowing where to begin.

“Is this one of those in-over-my-head things?” he asked.

“More or less. Tell me, how many more of those things?”

“Up here? At least one.” And he turned his head toward the inflatable. The outer door of its airlock had been unzipped, and a series of men and women in impressive clothes were emerging, patting their heads self-consciously as they got used to the feel of their nose-tubes. “The third one—the bald man—has one just like it.”

My right arm departed the conversation. Ala had made off with it. The rest of me caught up just in time to avoid dislocation of the shoulder joint. “You should wear your earbud,” she told me, “then you’d know we’re in the middle of an aut!” She slapped a bud into my hand and I wormed it into my ear. Music had begun to play from a band on the other side of the ellipse. I looked across and saw four long boxes—coffins—being borne down to the water’s edge by a mixed contingent of Urnudan, Troan, Laterran, and Fthosian soldiers.

Ala led me round behind the inflatable, where Arsibalt, Jesry, and Lio were standing at three corners of another coffin. “For once, I’m not the latest!” Lio said wonderingly.

“Leadership has changed you,” I said, and reported to my corner. We picked up the coffin, which I knew must contain the remains of Lise.

All of these coffins smacked me into a whole different frame of mind. We carried Lise out from behind the inflatable, centered her in the road that led to the water’s edge, and set her down as we waited for the procession on the opposite side to finish. The music, of course, sounded strange to our ears, but no stranger than a lot of stuff you might hear on Arbre. Music, it seemed, was one of those places where the Hylaean Flow was especially strong—composers in different cosmi were hearing the same things in their heads. It was a funeral march. Very slow and grim. Hard to say whether this was a reflection of Urnudan culture, or a sort of reminder that the four in those coffins had slain a lot of Geometers and that we’d best keep that in mind before we got to celebrating them.

It almost worked. I actually started to feel guilty for having delivered the Valers to the Daban Urnud. Then I happened to glance down at the coffin beside my knee, and wondered who up here had shot Jules’s wife in the back. Who had given the order to rod Ecba? Who was responsible for killing Orolo? Was he or she standing around this pool? Not the sorts of things I should have been thinking at a peace conference. But there wouldn’t have been a need for one if we hadn’t been killing each other.

The soldiers carried the coffins of Osa, Esma, Vay, and Gratho quite slowly, stopping for a few beats after each pace. My mind wandered, as it always did during long auts, and I found myself thinking about those four Valers, recalling my first impressions of them in Mahsht, when I’d been cornered, and hadn’t understood, yet, what they were. The scenes played in my head like speelies: Osa, perched one-legged atop the sphere that sheltered me, fending off attackers with snap-kicks. Esma dancing across the plaza toward the sniper while Gratho made his body into a bullet-shield for me. Vay fixing me up afterwards—so efficiently, so ruthlessly that snot had run out of my nose and tears from my eyes.

Were doing so, for I was weeping now. Trying to imagine their last moments. Especially Suur Vay, out on the icosahedron, in single combat against several terrified men with cutting tools. Alone, in the dark, the blue face of Arbre thousands of miles away, knowing in the last moments she’d never breathe its air again, never hear the thousand brooks of the Ringing Vale.

“Raz?” It was Ala’s voice. She had her hand—more gently, this time—on my elbow. I wiped my face dry with my bolt, got a moment’s clear view before things got all misty again. The honor guard across the pool had set the Valers’ coffins down and were standing there expectantly. “Time to go,” Ala said. Lio, Jesry, and Arsibalt were all looking at me, all crying too. We all bent our knees, got a grip on the coffin, raised it off the deck.

“Sing something,” Ala suggested. We looked at her helplessly until she said the name of a chant that we used for the aut of Requiem at Edhar. Arsibalt started it, giving us the pitch in his clear tenor, and we all joined in with our parts. We all had to do some improvising, but few noticed and none cared. As we came out in view of the Laterran pavilion, Jules Verne Durand went off the air. I glanced up through the windows of the translators’ booth and saw other Laterrans rushing to his side to lay hands on him. We all sang louder.

“So much for the Orth translation,” Jesry said, once we had reached the water and set Lise down. But he said it in a simple and plaintive way that did not make me want to hurt him.

“It’s okay,” Lio said, “that’s the good thing about an aut. The words don’t matter.” And he rested his hand absent-mindedly on the lid of the coffin.

The soldiers on the opposite bank transferred the coffins of the Valers onto a sort of flatboat. They could simply have marched them around to us, but there seemed to be something in the act of crossing the water that was of ceremonial meaning here. “I get it,” Arsibalt said, “it represents the cosmos. The gulf between us.” There was more music. The raft was staffed by four women in robes, who began rowing it across. The music was much easier on the ears than the funeral march: different instruments with softer tones, and a solo by a Laterran woman who stood at the edge of the water and seemed to make the whole orb resonate with the power of her voice. It was a good going-home piece, I reckoned.

When the ladies were halfway finished rowing across, Jesry spoke up: “Not setting any speed records, are they?”

“Yeah,” Lio said, “I was just thinking the same thing. Give us a boat! We could take ’em!”

It wasn’t that funny, but our bodies thought it was, and we had to do a lot of work in the next couple of minutes trying to avoid laughing so obviously as to create a diplomatic incident. When the boat finally arrived, we took the coffins off, then loaded Lise’s on board. To the accompaniment of more music, those slow-rowing ladies took her in a long arc to the Laterran shore, where she was brought off by half a dozen civilian pallbearers—friends of Jules and of Lise, I guessed—while Jules, supported by a couple of friends, looked on. Then in four separate trips we carried the Valers’ coffins back to the staging area behind the inflatable. Meanwhile Lise was conveyed into the Laterran pavilion so that Jules could have a private moment with her. The oar-ladies rowed back to the Urnudan shore. Fraa Lodoghir and Gan Odru, from opposite sides of the pond, each said a few words reminding us about the others who had died in the little war that we had come here to conclude: on Arbre, the ones who had been killed in the rod attacks, and up here, the ones who had fallen to the Valers.

After a moment of silence, we broke for an intermission, and food and drinks were brought out on trays by stewards. Apparently, the need to eat after a funeral was as universal as the Adrakhonic Theorem. The boat ladies went to work refitting their barge with a table, draped with blue cloth, and arrayed with piles of documents.

“Raz.”

I had been waiting for my crack at a food tray, but turned around to discover Emman a few paces away, just in the act of underhanding something to me. Reflexes took over and I pawed it out of the air. It was another one of those conversation-jamming machines.