Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  One man had planted himself in a disk of open space—or perhaps the others were just avoiding him—and was waving a banner on the end of a pole: the flag of the Saecular Power. His posture was defiant, triumphant. Another man shouted into a device that made his voice louder: some sort of a Deolater, I guessed, who wanted us to join his ark.

  The first to enter were a man and woman dressed in the kinds of clothes that people wore extramuros to attend a wedding or make an important commercial transaction, and three children in miniature renditions of those clothes. The man was towing behind him a red wagon carrying a pot with a sapling growing out of it. Each of the children had a hand on the rim of the pot so that it wouldn’t topple as the wagon’s wheels felt their way over the cobbles. The woman, unencumbered, moved faster, but in a gait that looked all wrong until I recollected that women extramuros wore shoes that made them walk so. She was smiling but also wiping tears from her eyes. She headed straight for Grandsuur Ylma, whom she seemed to recognize, and began explaining that her father, who had died three years ago, had been a great supporter of the concent and liked to go in the Day Gate to attend lectures and read books. When he had died, his grandchildren had planted this tree, and now they hoped to see it transplanted to a suitable location on our grounds. Grandsuur Ylma said that that would be fine provided it was of the One Hundred Sixty-four. The Burger lady assured Ylma that, knowing our rules, they had gone to all sorts of trouble to make sure that this was so. Meanwhile, her husband was prowling around taking pictures of this conversation with a jeejah.

  Seeing that we had not massacred the Burger family or inserted probes into their orifices, a young assistant to the man with the sound amplification device came in and began to approach us one by one, handing us leaves with writing on them. Unfortunately they were in Kinagrams and so we could not read them. We had been warned that it was best to accept such things politely and claim we would read them later—not engage such persons in Thelenean dialog.

  This man noticed the desolate woman. Guessing that she meant to leave her baby with us, he began trying to talk her out of it in slangy Fluccish. She recoiled; then, understanding that she was probably safe, began cursing at him. Half a dozen suurs moved forward to surround her. The Deolater became furious and looked as if he might strike someone. I noticed Fraa Delrakhones for the first time, watching this fellow closely and making eye contact with several burly fraas who were moving closer to him. But then the man with the sound device chirped out a word that must have been the younger fellow’s name. Having got his attention, he looked up at the sky for a moment (“The Powers that Be are watching, idiot!”) then glared at him (“Simmer down and keep handing out the all-important literature!”).

  A tall man was walking toward me: Artisan Quin. Next to him was a shorter copy of Quin, without the beard. “Bon Apert, Fraa Erasmas,” Quin said.

  “Bon Apert, Artisan Quin,” I returned, and then looked at his son. His son was looking at my left foot. His gaze traveled quickly up to the top of my hood but did not catch or linger on my face, as if this were of no more note than a wrinkle in my bolt. “Bon—” I began, but he interrupted: “That bridge is built on the arch principle.”

  “Barb, the fraa is wishing you Bon Apert,” said Quin, and held out his hand in my direction. But Barb actually reached out and pulled his father’s arm down—it was blocking his view of the bridge.

  “The bridge has a catenary curve because of the vectors,” Barb went on.

  “Catenary. That’s from the Orth word for—” I began.

  “It’s from the Orth word for chain,” Barb announced. “It is the same curve that a hanging chain makes, flipped upside-down. But the driveshaft that opens the gates has to be straight. Unless it was made with newmatter.” His eyes found my sphere and studied it for a few moments. “But that can’t be, because the Concent of Saunt Edhar was built after the First Sack. So it must have been made with old matter.” His eyes went back to the driveshaft, which seemed to follow the arch of the bridge, passing through blocks of carved stone at regular intervals. “Those stone things must contain universal joints,” he concluded.

  “That is correct,” I said. “The shaft—”

  “The shaft is put together from eight straight pieces connected by universal joints hidden inside the bases of those statues. The base of a statue is called a plinth.” And Barb began to walk very fast; he was the first extra to cross over the bridge into our math. Quin gave me a look that was difficult to interpret, and hustled after him.

  An altercation had flared up between the desolate woman and the suurs. Apparently, this woman had been told by some ignorant person that we’d give her money for the baby. The suurs had set her straight as gently as they knew how.

  Several more extras had come in. A group of half a dozen, mostly men, all wearing clothes that were respectful, but not expensive. They had engaged a small group of mostly older avout. The foremost of the visitors was draped in a thick, gaudy-colored rope with a globe at the end. I reckoned he was the priest of some newfangled counter-Bazian ark. He was talking to Fraa Haligastreme: big, bald, burly, and bearded, looking as if he’d just stepped off the Periklyne after a brisk discussion of ontology with Thelenes. He was a theorical geologist, and the FAE of the Edharian chapter. He was listening politely, but kept throwing significant glances at a pair of purple-bolted hierarchs standing off to the side: Delrakhones, the Warden Fendant, and Statho, the Primate.

  Circumventing this group, I passed in earshot of a side conversation. One of the women visitors had engaged Fraa Jesry. I put her age at about thirty, though the way that extramuros women did their hair and faces made it difficult to guess such things; on second thought, she was a dressed-up twenty-five. She was paying close attention to Jesry, asking him questions about life in the math.

  After what seemed like a long time, I got Jesry’s attention. He politely told the woman that he had made arrangements to go extramuros with me. She looked at me, which I enjoyed. Then her jeejah spat out a burst of notes and she excused herself to take a call.

  * * *

  Sline: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a slang word formed by truncation of baseline, which is a Praxic commercial bulshytt term. It appears to be a noun that turned into an adjective meaning “common” or “widely shared.” (2) A noun denoting an extramuros person with no special education, skills, aspirations, or hope of acquiring same. (3) Derogatory term for a stupid or uncouth person, esp. one who takes pride in those very qualities. Note: this sense is deprecated because it implies that a sline is a sline because of inherent personal shortcomings or perverse choices; sense (2) is preferred because it does not convey any such implication.

  —THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000

  Jesry and I walked out for the first time in ten years.

  The first thing I noticed was that people had leaned a lot of junk against the outside of our walls. Apparently some of it had even been leaned against the gates, but someone had cleared it off to the sides in preparation for Apert.

  During this era, the neighborhood outside the Decade Gate was where artisans kept their shops, and so the stuff leaned against the walls tended to be lumber, pipes, reels of cable or tubing, and long-handled tools. We walked silently for a while, just looking. But sooner than you might think, we got used to it and forgot we were fraas.

  “Do you think that woman wanted to have a liaison with you?” I asked.

  “A—what do you call it—”

  “An Atlanian Liaison.” Named after a Decenarian fraa of the Seventeenth Century A.R. who saw his true love for ten days every ten years and spent the rest of the time writing poems to her and sneaking them out of the math. They were really fine poems, carved in stone some places.

  “Why do you think a woman would want that?” he wondered.

  “Well, no risk of getting pregnant, when your partner is a fraa,” I pointed out.

  “That might be important sometimes, but I think it�
��s easy for them to obtain contraception in this epoch.”

  “I was kind of joking.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Well…maybe she wants me for my mind.”

  “Or your spiritual qualities.”

  “Huh? You think she’s some kind of Deolater?”

  “Didn’t you see who she was with?”

  “Some sort of—who knows—a contingent, I think is what they call that.”

  “Those were Warden of Heaven people, I’ll bet. Their leader was got up in a kind of imitation of a chord.”

  We had gone far enough that the Decade Gate was lost to view around a curve. I glanced up at the Praesidium. The megaliths rising up from the perimeter of the starhenge served as compass points to help me establish my bearings. We had come to a larger road now, running roughly parallel to the river. If we crossed it and kept going, we’d climb into a neighborhood of big houses where burgers lived. If we followed it to the right, it would take us to the commerce district and we could eventually loop back in through the Day Gate. To the left, it ran out into the fauxburbs where I had spent my first eight years.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said, and turned left.

  After we had gone a few paces, Jesry said “Again?” which was his annoying way of requesting clarification. “The Warden of Heaven?”

  “Moshianics,” I said, and then spent a while telling him about Fraa Orolo’s interviews with Flec and Quin.

  As we went along, the nature of the place changed: fewer workshops, more warehouses. Barges could navigate this stretch of the river and so it was where people tended to store things. We saw more vehicles now: a lot of drummons, which had up to a dozen wheels and were used for carrying large, heavy objects around districts like this. These looked the same as I remembered. A few fetches scurried around with smaller loads secured to their backs. These were more colorful. The men who owned them tended to be artisans, and it was clear that they spent a lot of time altering the vehicles’ shape and color, apparently for no reason other than to amuse themselves. Or maybe it was a kind of competition, like plumage on birds. Anyway, the styles had changed quite a bit, and so Jesry and I would stop talking and stare whenever a particularly strange or gaudy fetch went by. Their drivers stared right back at us.

  “Well, I was oblivious to all that Warden of Heaven stuff,” Jesry concluded. “I’ve been very busy computing for Orolo’s group.”

  “Why did you think Tamura was drilling us last night?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think about it,” Jesry said. “All I can say is, it’s good you are around to be aware of all this. Have you considered—”

  “Joining the New Circle? Angling to become a hierarch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. I don’t have to, because everyone else seems to be considering it for me.”

  “Sorry, Raz!” he said, not really sounding sorry—more miffed that I had become miffed. He was hard to talk to, and sometimes I’d go months avoiding him. But slowly I’d learned it could be worth the aggravation.

  “Forget it,” I said. “What have Orolo’s group been up to?”

  “I’ve no idea, I just do the calculations. Orbital mechanics.”

  “Theorical or—”

  “Totally praxic.”

  “You think they have found a planet around another star?”

  “How could that be? For that, they have to collate information from other telescopes. And we haven’t gotten anything in ten years, obviously.”

  “So it’s something nearer,” I said, “something that can be picked out with our telescopes.”

  “It’s an asteroid,” Jesry said, fed up with my slow progress on the riddle.

  “Is it the Big Nugget?”

  “Orolo would be a lot more excited in that case.”

  This was a very old joke. The Panjandrums had almost no use for us, but one of the few things that might change that would be the discovery of a large asteroid that was about to hit Arbre. In 1107 it had almost happened. Thousands of avout had been brought together in a convox that had built a spaceship to go nudge it out of the way. But by the time the ship had been launched in 1115, the cosmographers had calculated that the rock would just miss us, and so it had turned into a study mission. The lab where they’d built the ship was now the concent of Saunt Rab, after the cosmographer who had discovered the rock.

  To our right, the hill where the burgers lived had petered out. A tributary of the river cut across our path from that direction. The road crossed it on an ancient steel bridge, built, rusted, decayed, condemned, and pasted back together with newmatter. A dotted line, worn away to near invisibility, hinted to motorists that they might consider showing a little civility to pedestrians between the rightmost lane and the railing. It was a bit late for us to double back now, and we could see another pedestrian pushing a cart, piled high with polybags, so we hustled over as quickly as we could manage, trusting the drummons, fetches, and mobes not to strike us dead. To our left we could see the tributary winding through its floodplain toward the join with the main river a mile away. When I’d been younger, the angle between the two watercourses had been mostly trees and marsh, but it looked as though they had put up a levee to fend off high water and then shingled it with buildings: most obviously, a large roofless arena with thousands of empty seats.

  “Shall we go watch a game?” Fraa Jesry asked. I couldn’t tell whether he was serious. Of all of us, he looked the most like an athlete. He didn’t play sports often, but when he did, he was determined and angry, and tended to do well even though he had few skills.

  “I think you need money to get in.”

  “Maybe we could sell some honey.”

  “We don’t have any of that either. Maybe later in the week.”

  Jesry did not seem very satisfied with my answer.

  “It’s too early in the morning for them to be having a game,” I added.

  A minute later he had a new proposal: “Let’s pick a fight with some slines.”

  We were almost to the end of the bridge. We had just scurried out of the path of a fetch operated by a man about our age who drove it as if he had been chewing jumpweed, with one hand on the controls and the other pressing a jeejah to the side of his face. So we were physically excited, breathing rapidly, and the idea of getting into a fight seemed a tiny bit less stupid than it would have otherwise. I smiled, and considered it. Jesry and I were strong from winding the clock, and many of the extras were in terrible condition—I understood now what Quin had meant when he’d said that they were starving to death and dying from being too fat at the same time.

  When I looked back at Jesry he scowled and turned his face away. He didn’t really want to get into a fight with slines.

  We had entered into the fauxburb where I had come from. A whole block had been claimed by a building that looked like a megastore but was apparently some new counter-Bazian ark. In the lawn before it was a white statue, fifty feet high, of some bearded prophet holding up a lantern and a shovel.

  The roadside ditches were full of jumpweed and slashberry poking up through sediments of discarded packaging. Beneath a grey film of congealed exhaust, faded Kinagrams fidgeted like maggots trapped in a garbage bag. The Kinagrams, the logos, the names of the snacks were new to me, but in essence it was all the same.

  I knew now why Jesry was being such a jerk. “It’s disappointing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jesry said.

  “All these years reading the Chronicles and hearing strange tales told every day at Provener…I guess it sort of…”

  “Raised our expectations,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Something occurred to me: “Did Orolo ever talk to you about the Ten-thousanders?”

  “Causal Domain Shear and all that?” Jesry looked at me funny, surprised that Orolo had confided in me.

  I nodded.

  “That is a classic example of the crap they feed us to make it seem more exciting than it really is.” But I sensed Jesry had only just decided this; if
Orolo was talking to all the fids about it, how special could it be?

  “They’re not feeding us crap, Jesry. It’s just that we live in boring times.”

  He tried a new tack: “It’s a recruiting strategy. Or, to be precise, a retention strategy.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Our only entertainment is waiting for the next Apert—to see what’s out there when the gates open. When the answer turns out to be the same crap except dirtier and uglier, what can we do besides sign up for another ten years and see if it’s any different next time?”

  “Or go in deeper.”

  “Become a Hundreder? Haven’t you realized that’s worthless for us?”

  “Because their next Apert is our next Apert,” I said.

  “And then we die before the next one after that.”

  “It’s not that rare to live to 130,” I demurred. Which only proved that I had done the same calculation in my head and come to the same conclusion as Jesry. He snorted.

  “You and I were born too early to be Hundreders and too late to be Thousanders. A couple of years earlier and we might have been foundlings and gone straight to the crag.”

  “In which case we’d both die before seeing an Apert,” I said. “Besides, I might have been a foundling, but from what you’ve said of your birth family, I don’t think you’d have.”

  “We’ll see soon enough,” he said.

  We covered a mile in silence. Even though we didn’t say anything, we were in dialog: a peregrin dialog, meaning two equals wandering around trying to work something out, as opposed to a suvinian dialog where a fid is being taught by a mentor, or a Periklynian dialog, which is combat. The road dovetailed into a larger one lined with the mass-produced businesses where slines obtained food and stuff, enlivened by casinos: windowless industrial cubes wrapped in colored light. Back in some day when there had been more vehicles, the full width of the right-of-way had been claimed by striped lanes. Now there were a lot of pedestrians and people getting around on scooters and wheeled planks and pedal-powered contraptions. But instead of going in straight lines they, and we, had to stitch together routes joining the pavement slabs that surrounded the businesses as the sea surrounds a chain of islands. The slabs were riven with meandering cracks marked by knife-thin hedges of jumpweed that had been straining dirt and wrappers out of the wind for a long time. The sun had gone behind clouds shortly after dawn but now it came out again. We ducked into the shade of a business that sold tires of different colors to young men who wanted to prettify their fetches and their souped-up mobes, and spent a minute rearranging our bolts to protect our heads.