Bart Faulwell grinned as he listened to Fabian Stevens try to sway Carol Abramowitz and Soloman to his choice of lunch spots.

Actually, it would be lunch for Bart and Stevens. For Soloman it was breakfast time and Abramowitz was looking for a late dinner. While transporters made it possible for members of a globe-spanning effort to meet for a meal, they did nothing to simplify the choice of restaurants.

At the moment the four of them were strolling under a noonday sun in Trizist, a pleasant enough town though its only claim to fame was a single aqueduct junction just visible over the rooftops to the south. Plus a library stocked with reliable copies of scrolls from several neighboring towns lost to the Breen bombardment.

The local architecture had a square and stolid look, though the blocklike buildings were topped with upswept gables—perfectly balanced, of course—and incongruous bits of gingerbread. The absolute symmetry dulled the spontaneity a bit, but Bart still found the effect pleasantly whimsical.

He noticed he was the only one enjoying it. Stevens and Abramowitz were deep in their debate over restaurants and Soloman had his nose to a padd, evidently counting on his companions to keep him from banging into things.

Pleasant as the architecture and climate were, however, lunchtime fare in Trizist tended toward raw vegetables, jerked meat very similar to venison, and a stew thick with barley and simmered until it was almost solid. Having sampled it yesterday, Bart came away fairly certain he would choose it over survival rations, but it would be a near thing.

“There’s plenty of reasons for having lunch in Brohtz,” Stevens insisted, focusing his argument on the cultural specialist as the harder sell.

“There are?”

“Rastentha soufflé!”

“Again?” Bart shook his head at Stevens’s enthusiasm. “I think it’s time we gave rustic Brohtz a rest. The cuisine of Franthc is, I’m told, very like Earth Asian barbecue.”

“Sounds good,” Abramowitz said. “I’m in the mood for spicy. And we need to take another look at the southern hemisphere’s concept of lunar cycles anyway. I’m thinking there’s a fundamental disconnect between how they timed their lock cycles and the schedule employed in the north.”

Soloman’s head snapped up, his large eyes locked on the cultural specialist.

“That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“A fundamental disconnect,” the Bynar said.

“I know,” Abramowitz said patiently. “We have to figure out how to resolve it.”

“You misunderstand.” Soloman turned his padd to show his companions, then realized the screen was too small for them to see clearly. He glanced about, but there were no display panels in the tourist area with which to interface. “If I could draw…” he murmured.

Bart offered him his folio, but the Bynar waved off the fine parchment. Stooping low, he snatched up a twig and began sketching in the dust. He drew a circle, remarkably precise, about half a meter in diameter.

“Bundinal.”

The humans nodded.

Soloman drew two parallel lines a hand’s width apart, bisecting the circle.

“Northern aqueduct system,” he said, indicating the hemisphere above the double line. “Southern aqueduct system.”

Then he drew a series of short lines connecting the two parallels.

“Forty-eight aqueducts, evenly spaced around the equator,” he said. “Connecting the two networks.”

“Yes,” Abramowitz said, “one for each week of the Bundinalli calendar. The length, twelve zrht, corresponding to the number of days.”

“They should not be there.”

“But they were always there.”

“They were never there.”

“Wait a minute, Soloman,” Bart spoke up. “The foundations were there. The measurements are Bundinalli tradition to the core and their placement corresponds to Bundinalli records. The reconstruction team simply restored the superstructures destroyed in the bombardment.”

“Where are the locks?” Soloman asked. “Nowhere in the Bundinalli water systems do canals or aqueducts meet without lock gates to control the flow of water. Yet there are no locks at either end of any of these forty-eight spans.”

Bart frowned at the drawing in the dust, then up toward an aqueduct junction in the middle distance. Even at a couple of kilometers, the boxy structure of the lock mechanism was clear. And he knew, from studying hundreds of drawings and verbal accounts, that every single juncture had been constructed to exactly the same specifications.

Except the forty-eight, the calendar aqueducts that had joined north and south. Those had simply connected the two hemisphere-spanning networks with plain right angles.

The houses between where they stood and the arch of the aqueduct caught his eye. Each was laid out in perfect bilateral symmetry, with windows, gingerbread, gables, and gardens all exactly matching. Including a faux front door to balance the real.

“Symbolism,” Abramowitz said, a half second quicker than he on the uptake. “The forty-eight aqueducts weren’t real, they didn’t actually connect. The Bundinalli just needed their symmetry to keep the world in balance.”

“Would the Bundinalli actually forget to tell us something like that?” Stevens asked.

“Most Bundinalli would have assumed it was so obvious they wouldn’t have thought to mention it,” Abramowitz said. “Do you remind everyone you meet not to stick their hand in a fire?”

“But if they knew what we were doing—”

“Fabe, in all your traveling has even a single Bundinalli asked you about what we were doing beyond his or her own village?” Bart asked. “Curiosity about the big picture is not in their nature.”

“If we restore the aqueducts properly,” Soloman said, focusing on the problem at hand, “and close off both ends of the connecting spans, the two systems should attain equilibrium.”

“Immediately?”

“No, they are much too massive for that. The parameters and variables are too complex for me to evaluate without computer models.” He shrugged. “Four local years, maybe six. But once started, the process will be inevitable.”

“Fabe,” Bart said with a grin, “why don’t you give Tev a call?”