With each morning’s fevered calculations, the scientists became more and more excited. The stacks of their notes and calculations grew massive. The ember that distinguished Kruach Aum from his compatriots-which Bellis thought of as true curiosity-waxed.

Bellis struggled but did not fail. She was translating now without even trying to understand what she said, just passing on what was said as if she were an analytical engine breaking down and reconstituting formulae. She knew that to the men and women hunched over the table, debating with Aum, she was more or less invisible.

She focused on voices as if they were music: the measured sonority of Tintinnabulum, the staccato excitement of Faber, the seesawing oboe tones of the bio-philosopher whose name Bellis could never remember.

Aum was tireless. Bellis felt faintly dismayed by exhaustion when she sat with Tanner Sack and the other engineers in the afternoon, but Aum continued without apparent difficulty, shifting his attention from the conceptual problems and philosophy of the avancs to practical issues of bait, and control, and capture of something the size of an island. And when the failing light and general fatigue forced the day’s work to end, it was never Aum who suggested it.

Bellis could not fail to realize that research problems were being overcome, one by one. It had not taken long for Aum to rewrite his data appendix, and then for the Armadans to point out errors and miscalculations, holes in his research. The excitement of the scientists was palpable; they were almost drunk on it. It was a problem-a project-of unthinkable scale, and yet one by one, the problems, the objections and obstacles, were being overcome.

They were teetering on the edge of something extraordinary. The fact of its possibility was utterly giddying.

Bellis did not fraternize with the Armadans, but she could not spend her days without speaking to them. "There you go. Get that down you," one might say, handing her a bowl of dull stew, and to refuse a word of thanks would have been a quite unnecessary violence.

Occasionally in the evenings-amid the Armadans’ dice and singsongs, which entranced the sough-voiced anophelii-she found herself on the edge of conversations.

The only one she knew by name was Tanner Sack. The fact that she had traveled above him on the Terpsichoria, free while he had been incarcerated, had poisoned any chance of trust between them, she supposed, though she had the sense that he was an open man. He was one of those who would make a little attempt to include her when he spoke. Bellis now came closer than she had ever been to Armadan society. She was allowed to listen to stories.