The devout Muslim and the urine deal: Pemulis recruits a clean supply

pivotal · UNDATED — ? Nov YDAU

• When: UNDATED — the closing movement of the same tunnel conversation as event 5
• What: The timeline's one plot-consequential beat. Needing a lavatory badly but forbidden by dignity to beg ("My home culture views begging as low-caste"; "I commit no illegal or degrading acts. But I will, if forced, beg."), Arslanian is drawn out by Pemulis: he is Muslim — "Devoutly. I pray five times daily in the prescribed fashion," eschewing representational art, carnality, and all Substances — which makes his bladder, to a Pemulis in the era of O.N.A.N.T.A. urine testing, an asset: Pemulis proposes they hash it out "over some porcelain," and Arslanian, relieved in prospect, pronounces him a prince in motion and a sage in repose. The deal is implied on-page, never shown consummated, and never pays off in any scene he appears in (logged open in Dating notes); the same conversation carries Pemulis's Eschaton courtship of the boy's lob ("when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob?") and his gibe at Arslanian's "little Pakistani RAM-cells" — the book's only word on his ethnicity beyond "ethnically vague," and another character's gibe at that (kept at that altitude). Arslanian also self-reports weak science ("I am one of the seldom of my home nation whose talents are weak in science, unhappily.") and an age at odds with the narration's: "I am Trivially thirteen and not yet required to grapple in hard science" (see Dating notes).