Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “You want something,” I said. “You’re grumpy you don’t have it yet. I don’t think that what you want is stuff, because you’ve paid no attention at all to any of this.” I jerked my head at a display of iridescent newmatter tires. Moving pictures of naked women with distended breasts came and went on the sides of the wheels.

  Jesry watched one of the moving pictures for a while, then shrugged. “I suppose I could leave, and learn to like such things. Frankly it seems pretty stupid. Maybe it helps if you eat what they eat.”

  We moved on across the pavement-slab. “Look,” I said, “it’s been understood at least since the Praxic Age that if you have enough allswell floating around in your bloodstream, your brain will tell you in a hundred different ways that everything is all right—”

  “And if you don’t, you end up like you and me,” he said.

  I tried to become angry, then surrendered with a laugh. “All right,” I said, “let’s go with that. A minute ago, we passed a stand of blithe in the median strip—”

  “I saw it too, and the one by the pre-owned-pornography store.”

  “That one looked fresher. We could go pick it and eat it, and eventually the level of allswell in our blood would go up and we could live out here, or anywhere, and feel happy. Or we could go back to the concent and try to come by our happiness honestly.”

  “You are so gullible,” he said.

  “You’re supposed to be the Edharians’ golden boy,” I said, “you’re supposed to be the one who swallows this stuff without question. I’m surprised, frankly.”

  “And what are you now, Raz? The cynical Procian?”

  “So people seem to think.”

  “Look,” Jesry said, “I see the older avout working hard. Those who have upsight—who are illuminated by the light of Cnoüs”—he said this in a mocking tone; he was so frustrated that he veered and lunged in random ways as he moved from one thought to the next—“they do theorics. Those who aren’t so gifted fall back, and cut stone or keep bees. The really miserable ones leave, or throw themselves off the Mynster. Those who remain seem happy, whatever that means.”

  “Certainly happier than the people out here.”

  “I disagree,” Jesry said. “These people are as happy as, say, Fraa Orolo. They get what they want: naked ladies on their wheels. He gets what he wants: upsight to the mysteries of the universe.”

  “Let’s get down to it then: what do you want?”

  “Something to happen,” he said, “I almost don’t care what.”

  “If you made a great advance in theorics, would that count?”

  “Sure, but what are the odds I’ll do that?”

  “It depends on the givens coming in from the observatories.”

  “Right. So it’s out of my control. What do I do in the meantime?”

  “Study theorics, which you’re so good at. Drink beer. Have Tivian liaisons with as many suurs as you can talk into it. Why is that so bad?”

  He was devoting way too much attention to kicking a stone ahead of him, watching it bound across the pavement. “I keep looking at the shrimpy guys in the stained-glass windows,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know. In the windows depicting the Saunts. The Saunts themselves, they’re always shown big. They fill most of the window. But if you look close, you can see tiny little figures in bolts and chords—”

  “Huddled around their knees,” I said.

  “Yeah. Looking up at the Saunt adoringly. The helpers. The fids. The second-raters who proved a lemma or read a draft somewhere along the way. No one knows their names, except maybe the cranky old fraa who takes care of that one window.”

  “You don’t want to end up as a knee-hugger,” I said.

  “That is correct. How does that work? Why some, but not others?”

  “So, you want a window all to yourself?”

  “It’d mean that something interesting happened to me,” he said, “something more interesting than this.”

  “And if it came to a choice between that, and having enough allswell in your blood?”

  He thought about that as we waited for a huge, articulated drummon to back out of our way.

  “Finally you ask an interesting question,” he said.

  And after that, he was quite a pleasant companion.

  Half an hour later I pronounced us lost. Jesry accepted it with pleasure, as if this were more satisfactory than being found.

  A boxy vehicle rolled past. “That is the third coach full of children that has gone by us recently,” Jesry pointed out. “Did you have a suvin in your neighborhood?”

  “Places like this don’t have suvins,” I reminded him. “They have stabils.”

  “Oh yes. That comes from—it’s an old Fluccish word—uh, cultural…”

  “Stabilization Centers. But don’t say that because no one has called them that in something like three thousand years.”

  “Right. Stabils it is.”

  We turned where the coaches turned. For the next minute or so, things were fragile between us. Inside the math, it didn’t matter that he had come from burgers and I had come from slines. But as soon as we had stepped out of the Decade Gate, this fact had been released, like a bubble of swamp gas deep in dark water. Invisibly it had been rising and expanding ever since, and had just now erupted in a great, flaming, stinking belch.

  My old stabil looked, in my eyes, like a half-scale reproduction of itself thrown together by a sloppy modelmaker. Some of the rooms had been boarded up. In my day they’d been crowded. So that confirmed that the population was declining. Perhaps by the time I was a grandfraa there would be a young forest here.

  An empty coach pulled out of the drive. Before the next drew up to take its place, I glimpsed a crowd of youngsters staggering under huge backpacks into a canyon of raucously colored light: a breezeway lined with machines dispensing snacks, drinks, and attention-getting noises. From there they would carry their breakfasts into rooms, which Jesry and I could see through windows: in some, the children all watched the same program on a single large screen, in others each had his or her own panel. To one end, the blank wall of the gymnasium was booming with low-frequency rhythms of a sports program. I recognized the beat. It was the same one they had used when I was there.

  Jesry and I had not seen moving pictures in ten years and so we stood there for a few minutes, hypnotized. But I had got my bearings now, and once I had nudged Jesry back into motion, I was able to lead us down the streets I had wandered as a boy. People here were as keen to modify their houses as their vehicles, and so when I did recognize a dwelling, it would have a new, freestanding roof lofted above the old one, or new modules plugged and pasted onto the ones I saw when I dreamed about the place. But I was helped by the fact that the neighborhood was half the size of what I remembered.

  We found where I’d lived before I was Collected: two shelter modules joined into an L, another L of wire mesh completing a weedy cloister that housed one dead mobe and two dead fetches, the oldest of which I had personally helped set up on blocks. The gate was decorated with four different signs of varying ages promising to kill anyone who entered, which, to me, seemed much less intimidating than a single sign would’ve. A baby tree, about as long as my forearm, had sprouted from a clogged raingutter. Its seed must have been carried there by wind or a bird. I wondered how long it would take to grow to a size where it would tear the gutter clean off. Inside, a loud moving picture was showing on a speely, so we had to do a lot of hallooing and gate-rattling before someone emerged: a woman of about twenty. She’d have been a Big Girl to me when I’d been eight. I tried to remember the Big Girl’s names.

  “Leeya?”

  “She moved away when those guys left,” the woman explained, as if hooded men came to her door every day incanting the names of long-lost relations. She glanced back over her shoulder to watch a fiery explosion on the speely. As the sound of the explosion died away we could hear a man’s voice demanding something. She e
xplained to him what she was doing. He didn’t quite follow her explanation, so she repeated the same words more loudly.

  “I infer that some kind of factional schism has taken place within your family while you were gone,” Jesry said. I wanted to slug him. But when I looked at his face I saw he wasn’t trying to be clever.

  The woman turned to look at us again. I was peering at her through an aperture between two signs that were threatening to kill me, and I wasn’t certain that she could see my face.

  “I used to be named Vit,” I said.

  “The boy who went to the clock. I remember you. How’s it going?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Keeping it casual. Your mama isn’t here. She moved.”

  “Far away?”

  She rolled her eyes, vexed that I had leaned on her to make such a judgment. “Farther than you can probably walk.” The man inside yelled again. She was obliged to turn her back on us again and summarize her activities.

  “Apparently she does not subscribe to the Dravicular Iconography,” Jesry said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “She said you went to the clock. Voluntarily. Not that you were taken by or abducted by the avout.”

  The woman turned to face us again.

  “I had an older sib named Cord,” I said. I nodded at the oldest of the broken fetches. “Former owner of that. I helped put it there.”

  The woman had complex opinions of Cord, which she let us know by causing several emotions to ripple across her face. She ended by exhaling sharply, dropping her shoulders, setting her chin, and putting on a smile that I guessed was meant to be obviously fake. “Cord works all the time on stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  This question was even more exasperating to her than my earlier “Far away?” She looked pointedly at the moving picture.

  “Where should I look?” I tried.

  She shrugged. “You passed it on the way probably.” And she mentioned a place that we had in fact passed, shortly after leaving the Decade Gate. Then she took a step back inside, because the man in there was demanding an account of her recent doings. “Keep it casual,” she said, and waved, and disappeared from our view.

  “Now I really want to meet Cord,” Jesry said.

  “Me too. Let’s get out of here,” I said, and turned my back on the place—probably for the last time, as I didn’t imagine I’d come back at next Apert. Perhaps when I was seventy-eight years old. Reforestation was a surprisingly quick process.

  “What’s a sib? Why do you use that word?”

  “In some families, it’s not entirely clear how people are related.”

  We walked faster and talked less, and got back across the bridge in very little time. Since the place where Cord worked was so close to the concent, we first went up into the burger neighborhood and found Jesry’s house.

  When we’d gone out the Decade Gate, Jesry had been quiet and distracted for a few minutes before he had gone on his rant. Now I had an upsight, which was that he’d been expecting his family to be standing in front of the gate to meet him. So as we approached his old house I actually felt more anxious than I had when approaching mine. A porter let us in at the front gate and we kicked off our sandals so that the damp grass would clean and soothe our blasted feet. As we passed into the deep shade of the forested belt around the main residence, we threw back our hoods and slowed to enjoy the cool air.

  No one was home except for a female servant whose Fluccish was difficult for us to make out. She seemed to expect us; she handed us a leaf, not from a leaf-tree such as we grew in the concent, but made by a machine. It seemed like an official document that had been stamped out on a press or generated by a syntactic device. At its head was yesterday’s date. But it was actually a personal note written to Jesry by his mother, using a machine to generate the neat rows of letters. She had written it in Orth with only a few errors (she didn’t understand how to use the subjunctive). It used terms with which we were not familiar, but the gist seemed to be that Jesry’s father had been doing a lot of work, far away, for some entity that was difficult to explain. But from the part of the world it was in, we knew it had to be some organ of the Saecular Power. Yesterday, she had with great reluctance and some tears gone to join him, because his career depended on her attending some kind of social event that was also difficult to explain. They had every intention of making it back for the banquet on Tenth Night, and they were bending every effort to round up Jesry’s three older brothers and two older sisters as well. In the meantime, she had baked him some cookies (which we already knew since the female servant had brought them out to us).

  Jesry showed me around the house, which felt like a math, but with fewer people. There was even a fancy clock, which we spent a lot of time examining. We pulled down books from the shelves and got somewhat involved in them. Then the bells began to ring in the Bazian cathedral across the street, followed by the chimes in the fancy clock, and we realized that we could read books any day and sheepishly re-shelved them. After a while we ended up on the veranda eating the rest of the cookies. We looked at the cathedral. Bazian architecture was a cousin to Mathic, broad and rounded where ours was narrow and pointy. But this town was not nearly as important to the Saecular world as the Concent of Saunt Edhar was to the mathic world, so the cathedral looked puny compared to the Mynster.

  “Do you feel happy yet?” Jesry joked, looking at the cookies.

  “It takes two weeks,” I said, “that’s why Apert is only ten days long.”

  We wandered out onto the lawn. Then we marched back out and headed down the hill.

  Cord worked in a compound where everything was made of metal, which marked it as an ancient place—not quite as ancient as a place made of stone, but probably dating back to the middle of the Praxic Age when steel had become cheap and heat engines had begun to move about on rails. It was situated a quarter of a mile from the Century Gate on the end of a slip that had been dug from the river so that barges could penetrate into this neighborhood and connect to roads and rails. The property was a mess, but it drew a kind of majesty just from being huge and silent. It had been outlined by a fence twice my height made from sheets of corrugated steel anchored in earth or concrete, welded together, and braced against wind by old worn-out railroad rails, which seemed like overkill for a wind brace. In fact it was such conspicuous overkill that Jesry and I interrupted each other trying to be the first to point it out, and got into an argument about what it meant. Other parts of the perimeter were made of the steel boxes used later in the Praxic Age to enclose goods on ships and trains. Some of these were filled with dirt, others stuffed with scraps of metal so tangled and irregular that they looked organic. Some were organic because they had been colonized by slashberry. There was a lot of green and growing matter around the edges of the compound, but the center was a corral of pounded earth.

  The main building was little more than a roof on stilts straddling the last two hundred feet of the canal. Its trusses were oversized to support a traveling crane with a great hook dangling from a rusty chain, each of whose links was as big as my head. We had seen this structure from the Mynster but never given much thought to it. Teed into its side was a high-roofed hall enclosed by proper walls of brick (below) and corrugated steel (above). Grafted to the side of that, down low, was a shelter module with all sorts of homey touches, such as a fake wood door and a farm-style weathervane, that looked crazy here. We knocked, waited, then pushed our way in. We made lots of noise, just in case this was another one of those places where visitors were put to death. But no one was there.

  The module had been designed to serve as a home, but everything in it had been bent to serve the purposes of an office. So for example the shower stall was occupied by a tall cabinet where records were filed. A hole had been sawed into a wall so that little pipes could be routed to a hot-beverage machine. A freestanding urinal had been planted in the bedroom. The only decoration, other than those crazy-look
ing rustic touches that had shipped with the module, was oddly shaped pieces of metal—parts from machines, I reckoned—some of which had been bent or snapped in traumatic events we could only imagine.

  A trail of oily bootprints led us to the back door. This opened straight into the cavernous hall. Both of us hunched our shoulders as we stepped over the threshold. We hesitated just inside. The place was too big to illuminate, so most of the light was natural, shining through translucent panels high up in the walls, each surrounded by a hazy nimbus. The walls and floors were dark with age, congealed smoke, and oil. More hooks and chains dangled from overhead beams. The light washing round these gave them a spindly, eroded look. The floor sprawled away into haze and shadow. Widely spaced around it were crouching masses, some no bigger than a man, others the size of a library. Each was built around a hill of metal: from a distance, smooth and rounded, from up close, rough, which led me to guess that these had been made in the ancient process of excavating molds from sand and pouring in a lake of molten iron. Where it mattered, the rough iron had been cut away to leave planes, holes, and right angles of bare grey metal: stubby feet by which the castings were bolted to the floor, or long V-shaped ways on which other castings could slide, driven by great screws. Huddled beside these things or crouching under them were architectures of wound copper wire, rife with symmetries, and, when they moved, brilliant with azure-tinged lightning. Tendrils of wire and of artfully bent tubing had grown over these machines like ivy exploring a boulder, and my eye followed them to concentrations where I was sometimes surprised to see a human being in a dark coverall. Sometimes these humans were doing something identifiable as work, but more often they were just thinking. The machines emitted noise from time to time, but for the most part it was quiet, pervaded by a low hum that came from warm resonating boxes strewn all round and fed by, or feeding, cables as thick as my ankle.