Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

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

  Fraa Orolo had noticed how distracted I was and summoned me to the starhenge shortly before sunset. He’d reserved the Telescope of Saunts Mithra & Mylax for the night. The weather was cloudy, but in the hope that it would clear up, he had gone there late in the afternoon to aim the telescope and blank a photomnemonic tablet. I found him at the controls of the M & M just as he was finishing these preparations. We went out and strolled around the ring of megaliths. My tongue was a long time in loosening, but after a while I told Orolo of what I’d been feeling and thinking about Cord. He asked all sorts of questions I’d never have thought of, and listened carefully to my answers, all of which seemed to confirm in his mind that I wasn’t feeling anything about her that was inappropriate for a sib.

  Orolo reminded me that Cord was all the biological family I had left, not to mention the only person I really knew from extramuros, and assured me that it was normal and healthy for me to think about her a lot.

  I told him about the conversations I’d been having lately that called into question all kinds of things about the Discipline and the Reconstitution. He assured me that this was an unwritten tradition of Apert. This was a time for the avout to get all of that out of their systems so that they did not have to spend the next ten years worrying about it.

  He slowed and stopped as we rounded the northeastern limb. “Did you know that we live in a beautiful place?” he asked.

  “How could I not know it?” I demanded. “Every day, I go into the Mynster, I see the chancel, we sing the Anathem—”

  “Your words say yes, your defensive tone says something else,” Orolo said. “You haven’t even seen this.” And he gestured to the northeast.

  The range of mountains leading off in that direction was obscured during winter by clouds and during summer by haze and dust. But we were between summer and winter now. The previous week had been hot, but temperatures had fallen suddenly on the second day of Apert, and we had plumped our bolts up to winter thickness. When I had entered the Praesidium a couple of hours earlier, it had been storming, but as I’d ascended the stair, the roar of the rain and the hail had gradually diminished. By the time I’d found Orolo up top, nothing remained of the storm except for a few wild drops hurtling around on the wind like rocks in space, and a foam of tiny hailstones on the walkway. We were almost in the clouds. The sky had hurled itself against the mountains like a sea attacking a stony headland, and spent its cold energy in half an hour. The clouds were dissolving, yet the sky did not get any brighter, because the sun was going down. But Orolo with his cosmographer’s eye had noted on the flank of a mountain a stretched patch that was brighter than the rest. When I first saw what he was pointing at, I guessed that hail had silvered the boughs of trees in some high vale. But as we watched, the color of it warmed. It broadened, brightened, and crept up the mountainside, setting fire to individual trees that had changed color early. It was a ray coming through a gap in the weather far to the west, levering up as the sun sank.

  “That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

  From Fraa Orolo, of all people, this was an astonishingly poetic and sentimental remark. I was so startled that it didn’t occur to me to wonder what Orolo was referring to when he spoke of the ugliness.

  At least my eyes were open, though, to what he wanted me to see. The light on the mountain became rich in hues of crimson, gold, peach, and salmon. Over the course of a few seconds it washed the walls and towers of the Millenarian math with a glow that if I were a Deolater I’d have called holy and pointed to as proof that there must be a god.

  “Beauty pierces through like that ray through the clouds,” Orolo continued. “Your eye is drawn to where it touches something that is capable of reflecting it. But your mind knows that the light does not originate from the mountains and the towers. Your mind knows that something is shining in from another world. Don’t listen to those who say it’s in the eye of the beholder.” By this Orolo meant the Fraas of the New Circle and the Old Reformed Faanites, but he could just as well have been Thelenes warning a fid not to be seduced by Sphenic demagogues.

  The light lingered on the highest parapet for a minute, then faded. Suddenly all before us was deep greens, blues, and purples. “It’ll be good seeing tonight,” Orolo predicted.

  “Will you stay?”

  “No. We must go down. We’re already in trouble with the Master of the Keys. I must go fetch some notes.” Orolo hustled away and left me alone for a minute. I was surprised by a little sunrise above the mountains: the ray, sweeping invisibly up through empty sky, had found a couple of small wispy clouds and set them alight, like balls of wool flung into a fire. I looked down into the dark concent and felt no desire to jump. Seeing beauty was going to keep me alive. I thought of Cord and the beauty that she had, in the things she made, the way she carried herself, the emotions that played on her face while she was thinking. In the concent, beauty more often lay in some theoric proof—a kind of beauty that was actively sought and developed. In our buildings and music, beauty was always present even if I didn’t notice. Orolo was on to something; when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something—something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of. This was both a good reason not to die and a hint that death might not be everything. I knew I was perilously close to Deolater territory now. But because people could be so beautiful it was hard not to think that there was something of people that came from the other world that Cnoüs had seen through the clouds.

  Orolo met me at the top of the stairs, notes under his arm. Before we began our descent, he took one last look at the stars and planets beginning to come out, like a butler counting the spoons. We went down in silence, lighting our way with our spheres.

  Fraa Gredick, the Master of the Keys, was waiting by the portcullis just as Fraa Orolo had predicted. Another, slighter person stood next to him. As we came down the buttress, we saw that it was Gredick’s superior: Suur Trestanas. “Ugh, looks like we’re going to get penance,” I muttered. “This just demonstrates your point.”

  “Which point do you mean?”

  “The ugliness coming in from all directions.”

  “I don’t think this is that,” Fraa Orolo said. “This is something exceptional.”

  We stepped down into the stone cupola and crossed the threshold. Gredick slammed the grid down behind us with too much force. I looked at his face, thinking he was angry we’d made him wait. But that wasn’t it. He was unsettled. He only wanted to get out of there. We all watched him fumble with his key ring. As he was locking the portcullis down, I looked north to the Unarians’ cupola and then east to the Centenarians’. Both of their gridirons were also closed. The whole thing seemed to have been shut down. Perhaps a security precaution for Apert?

  I expected Gredick to leave so that Suur Trestanas could give me and Orolo a scolding. But Gredick looked me in the eye and said, “Come with me, Fid Erasmas.”

  “Where to?” I asked. It was unusual for the Master of the Keys to make such a request; it wasn’t his job.

  “Anywhere,” he said, and then nodded toward the head of the stairs that would lead us down.

  I looked at Orolo, who shrugged and made the same nod. Then I looked at Suur Trestanas, who only stared back at me, putting on a show of patience. She was early in her fourth decade of life, and not unattractive. She was brisk and organized and confident—the kind of woman who in the Saecular world might have gone into commerce, and scampered up the hierarchy of a firm. During her first months as Warden Regulant, she had handed out a lot of penance for small infractions that her predecessor
would have ignored. Older avout had assured me that this was typical behavior for a new Warden Regulant. I was so certain that she was going to give me and Orolo penance for being late that I hesitated to leave before she had done so. But it was clear that she had come here for another purpose. So I took my leave of Trestanas and Orolo, and began descending the stairs, followed by Fraa Gredick.

  When Trestanas judged that Gredick and I were far enough away, she began telling Orolo something in a low voice. She talked for a minute or so, as if delivering a little speech that she had prepared.

  When Orolo answered—which he did only after a long pause—it was in a voice that was wound up tight. He was making some kind of argument. And it was not the cool voice that he used when he was in dialog. Something had upset him. From this I knew that Suur Trestanas had not given him penance, because that was something one had to accept meekly, lest it be doubled and doubled again. They were talking about something more important than that. And Suur Trestanas had obviously told Gredick to get me out of that place so that she and Orolo could have privacy.

  This was not a very satisfying end to the conversation that Orolo and I had shared on the starhenge! But it was further proof of the point he had made, and a challenge for me to put the idea into practice.

  You must have this and hold to it or you’ll die. By the time I awoke the next morning I could not recall whether this was something Orolo had said in so many words, or a resolution that had formed in my own mind. Anyway I woke up exhilarated and determined.

  In the Refectory I saw Fraa Orolo, sitting alone, several tables away. He gave me a tight smile and looked away in the next instant. He did not wish to fill me in on his argument with Suur Trestanas. He ate quickly, then got up and headed in the direction of the Decade Gate for another day on the town.

  More important than the argument with Trestanas was my conversation with Orolo just before. I knew I could not talk about this in the Refectory. It would not survive Diax’s Rake; it would not be considered sound by the avout. Those of a more Procian bent would say I’d become a kind of Deolater. I’d be unable to defend myself without invoking all kinds of ideas that would sound ridiculously fuzzy-minded to them. At the same time, though, I knew that this was how the Saunts had done it. They judged theorical proofs not logically but aesthetically.

  I wasn’t the only one with a lot on his mind. Arsibalt sat alone, ate practically nothing, and then skulked out. Later Tulia picked up her bowl and came over and sat by me, which made me happy until I understood that she only wanted to talk about him. Arsibalt had been doing a lot of brooding, and he had been doing it in conspicuous places, as much as demanding that we ask him what was wrong. I’d refused to do so because I found it such an annoying tactic. But Suur Tulia had been checking on him from time to time. She let me know I ought to go and see him. I did so only because the request had come from her.

  After the Reconstitution, the first fraas and suurs of the Order of Saunt Edhar had come to this place where the river scoured around a ramp of stone and attacked it with explosives and water-jet cutters, cleaning away the scree and rotten rock—which they moved to the perimeter and piled up to fashion the concent’s walls—until they hit the sound stone at the heart of the mountain. This they cleaved off in slabs and prisms that tumbled to the valley floor, sometimes rolling almost to the walls before they came to rest. The ramp became a knob, the knob was sharpened to a crag. The first Thousanders whittled a narrow meandering stair up its face and went up there one day and never came back again, but pitched a camp on its top and set to work building their own walls and towers. The valley below remained a rubble-field for centuries. The avout swarmed over the strewn stones wherever they had come to rest and carved out of them the pieces of the Mynster. Almost all of them were now gone, and the land was flat, fertile, and stoneless. But a few of the great boulders were still dotted around the meadow, partly for decoration and partly as raw materials for our stonecutters, who were still fiddling with the Mynster’s gargoyles, finials, and such.

  I found Arsibalt perched on the top of a boulder, surrounded by empty beverage containers that had been strewn around the place by slines. All around him, visitors were sleeping it off in the tall grass. Across the meadow, Lio was cavorting around a statue of Saunt Froga, flinging the end of his bolt out and letting it waft over the statue’s head, then snapping it back like a whip. I wouldn’t have looked twice if this hadn’t been Apert. But there were visitors on the meadow, watching, pointing, laughing, and speelycaptoring. Another useful function of Apert: to be reminded of how weird we were, and how fortunate to live in a place where we could get away with it.

  Exhibit A: Fraa Arsibalt. Speaking whole paragraphs, complete with topic sentences, in perfect Middle Orth, with footnotes in Old and Proto-Orth, he explained that he felt aggrieved by his father’s refusal to talk to him, because he was not so much abjuring his father’s faith as trying to build a bridge between it and the mathic world.

  This struck me as an ambitious project for a nineteen-year-old to undertake, seven thousand years after the two daughters of Cnoüs had stopped speaking to each other. Still, I heard him out. Partly so that I could later impress Tulia with what a good guy I was. Partly because I didn’t want to be a Lorite. But also partly because what Arsibalt was saying was nearly as crazy as my discussion with Orolo the evening before. And so perhaps, after I had heard Arsibalt out, he would let me confide some of my thoughts. But as the conversation (if listening to Arsibalt talk could be called that) went on, this hope curdled. It had not crossed his mind that I too might have some things I wanted to discuss—perhaps not as clever or as momentous as what was on his mind, but important to me. I bided my time. And just when I saw an opening, he changed the subject altogether and ambushed me with a rhapsody about “the exquisite Cord.” And so instead of talking about what I wanted to talk about, I was forced to come to grips with the idea of Cord as being exquisite. He wondered whether she might be open to an Atlanian liaison. I thought not, but who was I to judge? And a boyfriend who was (a) sterile and (b) only allowed out once every ten years seemed like a safe boyfriend to have, so I shrugged and allowed that anything was possible.

  Then, back to Suur Tulia to file a report.

  Seventeen years ago, Tulia had been found at the Day Gate, wrapped in newspapers and nestled in a beer cooler with the lid ripped off. The stump of her umbilical cord had already fallen off, which meant that she was too old and too touched by the Saecular world to be accepted by the Thousanders. Anyway she had been sickly at first and so she had been kept in the Unarian math, which was more convenient to Physicians’ Commons. There she had been raised (as I pictured it) by the doting burgers’ wives and daughters who populated that math until she’d graduated through the labyrinth at the age of six. She had emerged, all alone, from our side of the maze and gravely introduced herself to the first suur she saw. Anyway, she had no family on the outside. Watching the rest of us cope with our families during Apert had led her to understand how very fortunate she might be. She was too deft to say anything, but it was clear she’d spent the whole time being bemused at the rest of us. She had seen me strolling around chatting with my sib and concluded that everything was fine and simple for me. I sensed it would boot me nothing to try to explain to her what I had discussed with Orolo.

  So, instead, I talked to groups of total strangers from extramuros who showed up to take tours of the Unarian math.

  My math was small, simple, and quiet. The Unarian math, by contrast, had been built to overawe people who came in from outside: ten days out of each year, groups of extramuros tourists, and the rest of the time, those who’d made a vow to spend at least one year in it. Few of these graduated to the Decenarian math. “Burgers’ wives trying to feel something,” was an especially cruel description I had once heard from an old fraa. As often, they were younger, unmarried, and looking for the final coat of polish and prestige needed to go out into adult society and seek a mate. Some studied under Halika
arnians and became praxics or artisans. Others studied under Procians; these tended to go into law, communications, or politics. Jesry’s mother had done two years here just after she’d turned twenty. Not long after coming out, she’d married Jesry’s father, a somewhat older man who had put in three years and used what he’d learned to start a career doing whatever it was he did.

  * * *

  Plane: (1) In Diaxan theorics, a two-dimensional manifold in three-dimensional space, having a flat metric. (2) An analogous manifold in higher-dimensional space. (3) A flat expanse of open ground in the Periklyne of ancient Ethras, originally used by theoricians as a convenient place to scratch proofs in the dirt, later as a place to conduct dialogs of all types. (4) Used as a verb, utterly to destroy an opponent’s position in the course of a dialog.