“It is Praxic Orth and so it sounds quaint to your ears,” Fraa Orolo admitted.

“Why don’t you just call it by its real name?”

“Speeling in?”

“Yeah.”

“Because when Fraa Erasmas, here, came into the math ten years ago, it was called ‘cruising the speely’ and when I came in almost thirty years ago we called it ‘Farspark.’ The avout who live on the other side of yonder wall, who celebrate Apert only once every hundred years, would know it by some other name. I would not be able to talk to them.”

Artisan Flec had not taken in a word after Farspark. “Farspark is completely different!” he said. “You can’t watch Farspark content on a speely, you have to up-convert it and re-parse the format…”

Fraa Orolo was as bored by that as the artisan was by talk of the Hundreders, and so conversation thudded to a stop long enough for me to scratch it down. My embarrassment had gone away without my noticing it, as with hiccups. Artisan Flec, believing that the conversation was finally over, turned to look at the scaffolding that his men had erected beneath the bad rafter.

“To answer your question,” Fraa Orolo began.

“What question?”

“The one you posed just a minute ago-if I want to know what things are like extramuros, why don’t I just speel in?”

“Oh,” said the artisan, a little confounded by the length of Fra Orolo’s attention span. I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.

“First of all,” Fraa Orolo said, “we don’t have a speely-device.”

“Speely-device?”

Waving his hand as if this would dispel clouds of linguistic confusion, Orolo said, “Whatever artifact you use to speel in.”

“If you have an old Farspark resonator, I could bring you a down-converter that’s been sitting in my junk pile-”

“We don’t have a Farspark resonator either,” said Fraa Orolo.