Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Then why on earth did you say them to a total stranger?”

  This wasn’t helpful. I threw him a look.

  “What did you say that was so bad?” he tried.

  “Nothing,” I concluded, after I’d thought about it for a while. “I mean, I probably sounded very HTW, very Edharian. If Varax is a Procian, he hates me now.”

  “But that is still within normal limits. There are whole orders that have prospered for thousands of years, saying much more ridiculous things, without running afoul of the Inquisition.”

  “I know that,” I said. Looking across the meadow I happened to see Corlandin and several others of the New Circle getting in position to rehearse a carol that they would sing tonight. From a hundred feet away I could see them grinning and exchanging handshakes. I could smell their confidence as if I were a dog. I wanted to be like that. Not like the crusty Edharian theoricians carrying on bitter debates about the vector sums on the vertices of the canopy struts.

  “When I say burned, maybe what I’m getting at is that I burned my bridge. What I said to Varax is going to get repeated to Suur Trestanas and then filter down to the rest of her lot.”

  “You’re afraid the New Circle won’t want you for Eliger?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You can avoid the stink then. Better for you.”

  “What stink, Arsibalt?”

  “The stink that’s going to permeate this place when most of our crop join the Edharians. The New Circle and the Reformed Old Faanians are going to be left with floor-sweepings.”

  Trying to seem casual, I looked around to be sure that we were not in earshot of any of the fids Arsibalt considered to be floor-sweepings. But the only person nearby was the primeval Grandfraa Mentaxenes, shuffling around waiting for a purpose, but too proud to ask for one. I approached him with the gnawed table-opening codex of Fraa Bolo and asked him to translate it. He couldn’t have been more ready. Arsibalt and I left him to it, and trudged back toward the Mynster for the next table.

  “What makes you think that’s going to happen?” I said.

  “Orolo has been talking to many of us—not just you,” Arsibalt said.

  “Recruiting us?”

  “Corlandin recruits—which is why we don’t trust him. Orolo simply talks, and lets us draw our own conclusions.”

  * * *

  Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have been infected by Procian thinking. Their frequent and loud use of this word to interrupt lectures, dialogs, private conversations, etc., exacerbated the divide between Procian and Halikaarnian orders that characterized the mathic world in the years leading up to the Third Sack. Shortly before the Third Sack, all of the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn were Thrown Back, so little more is known about them (their frequent appearance in Saecular entertainments results from confusion between them and the Incanters).

  Usage note: In the mathic world, if the word is suddenly shouted out in a chalk hall or refectory it brings to mind the events associated with sense (3) and is therefore to be avoided. Spoken in a moderate tone of voice, it takes on sense (2), which long ago lost any vulgar connotations it may once have had. In the Saeculum it is easily confused with sense (1) and deemed a vulgarity or even an obscenity. It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. This places the mathic observer in a nearly impossible position. One is forced either to use this “offensive” word and be deemed a disagreeable person and as such excluded from polite discourse, or to say the same thing in a different way, which means becoming a purveyor of bulshytt oneself and thereby lending strength to what one is trying to attack. The latter quality probably explains the uncanny stability and resiliency of bulshytt. Resolving this dilemma is beyond the scope of this Dictionary and is probably best left to hierarchs who make it their business to interact with the Saeculum.

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

  Somehow that canopy got raised. The struts were newmatter dating back to the founding of the Concent; as dusk fell, they began to emit a soft light that came from all directions and made even Fraa Mentaxenes look healthy. Beneath it, twelve hundred visitors, three hundred Decenarians, and five hundred Unarians celebrated Tenth Night.

  This had originated as a harvest festival, coinciding with the end of the calendar year. Thanks to some adroit sequence-writing that had been done before the Second Sack, we had a few crops that could grow almost year-round. In our greenhouses we could cultivate less hardy plants in midwinter. But that stuff wasn’t glorious in the way that tangle food was at this time of the year.

  The tangle had been invented way back before Cnoüs, by people who lived on the opposite side of the world from Ethras and Baz. Cob grew straight up out of the ground to the height of a man’s head and bore rich heads of particolored kernels late in the summer. In the meantime, it served as a trellis for climbing vines of podbeans that gave us protein while fixing nitrogen in the soil to nourish the cob. In the web that the podbean vines spun among the cob stalks, three other kinds of vegetables grew: highest from the ground, where bugs couldn’t get to them, red, yellow, and orange tommets to give us vitamins and flavor our salads, stews, and sauces. Snaking along the ground, gourds of many varieties. In the middle, hollow pepperpods. Tubers of two kinds grew beneath the ground, and leaf vegetables gathered whatever light remained. The original, ancient tangle had comprised eight plants, and the people who cultivated them had over thousands of years bred them to be as efficient as they could be without actually reaching in and tinkering with their sequences. Ours were more efficient yet, and we had added four more types of plants, two of which had no purpose other than to replenish the soil. At this time of year, the tangles we’d been cultivating since thaw were in their glory and sported a variety of color and flavor that couldn’t be had extramuros. That’s why Apert took place now. It was a way for those inside the math to share their good fortune with their neighbors extramuros, as well as to relieve them of any babies not likely to survive the winter.

  I saved seats for Cord and her boyfriend Rosk. Cord also brought with her a cousin of ours: Dath, a boy of fifteen. I remembered him vaguely. He’d been the kind of youngster who was always being rushed to Physicians’ Commons for repair of astonishing traumas. Somehow he’d survived and even put on passable clothing for the event. His dents and scars were hidden beneath a mess of curly brown hair.

  Arsibalt made sure he was seated across from “the exquisite” Cord; he didn’t appear to understand the significance of Rosk. Jesry caused his entire family to sit at the next table, which placed him back to back with me. Then Jesry flagged down Orolo and persuaded him to sit in our cluster. Orolo attracted Lio and several other lonely wanderers, who proceeded to fill out our table.

  Dath was the kind of sweet untroubled soul who could ask very basic questions with no trace of embarrassment. I tried to answer them in the same spirit.

  “You know I’m a sline, cousin,” I said. “So the difference between slines and us is not that we’re smarter. That is demonstrably not the case.”

  This topic had come up after people had been eating, drinking, talking, and singing old carols just long enough to make it obvious that there really were no differences. Dath, who had come through his early mishaps with his good se
nse intact, had been looking about and taking note of this—I could read it on his face. And so he had raised the question of why bother to put up walls—to have an extramuros and an intramuros?

  Orolo had caught wind of this and turned around to get a look at Dath. “It would be easier for you to understand if you could see one of the pinprick maths,” he said.

  “Pinprick maths?”

  “Some are no more than a one-room apartment with an electrical clock hanging on the wall and a well-stocked bookcase. One avout lives there alone, with no speely, no jeejah. Perhaps every few years an Inquisitor comes round and pokes his head in the door, just to see that all is well.”

  “What’s the point of that?” Dath asked.

  “That is precisely the question I am asking you to think about,” Orolo said, and turned back round to resume a conversation with Jesry’s father.

  Dath threw up his hands. Arsibalt and I laughed, but not at his expense. “That’s how Pa Orolo does his dirty work,” I told him.

  “Tonight, instead of sleeping, you’ll lie awake wondering what he meant,” Arsibalt said.

  “Well, aren’t you guys going to help me? I’m not a fraa!” Dath pleaded.

  “What would motivate someone to sit alone in a one-room apartment reading and thinking?” Arsibalt asked. “What would have to be true of a person for them to consider that a life well spent?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re really shy? Scared of open spaces?”

  “Agoraphobia is not the correct answer,” Arsibalt said, a little huffy.

  “What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?” I tried.

  “Okayyy…”

  “You might say that the difference between us and you is that we have been infected by a vision of…another world.” I’d been about to say “a greater” or “a higher” but settled for “another.”

  “I don’t like the infection metaphor,” Arsibalt started to say in Orth. I kneed him under the table.

  “You mean like a different planet?” Dath asked.

  “That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” I said. “Most of us don’t think it’s another planet in the sense of a speculative fiction speely. Maybe it’s the future of this world. Maybe it’s an alternate universe we can’t get to. Maybe it’s nothing but a fantasy. But at any rate it lives in our souls and we can’t help striving toward it.”

  “What’s that world like?” Dath asked.

  Behind me, a jingle began to play from someone’s jeejah. It wasn’t that loud, but something about it made my brain lock up. “For one thing, it doesn’t have any of those,” I told Dath.

  After the jeejah had been singing for a little while, I turned around. Everyone in a twenty-foot radius was staring at Jesry’s older brother, who was slapping himself all over trying to determine which of the pockets in his suit contained the jeejah. Finally he extracted it and silenced it. He stood up, as if he had not drawn enough attention to himself, and bellowed his own name. “Yes, Doctor Grane,” he went on, staring into the distance like a holy man. “I see. I see. Can they infest humans as well? Really!? I was only joking. Well, how would we be able to tell if that had happened?”

  People turned back to their meals, but conversations were slow to restart, because of sporadic incursions from Jesry’s brother.

  Arsibalt cleared his throat as only Arsibalt could; it sounded like the end of the world. “The Primate’s about to speak.”

  I turned around and looked at Jesry, who had realized the same thing and was waving his arms at his brother, who stared right through him. He was negotiating a bulk rate on biopsies. He was a very tough negotiator. Women in the party—sisters and sisters-in-law of Jesry—had begun to feel ashamed and to tug at the man’s elbows. He spun around and stalked away from us: “Excuse me, Doctor, I didn’t catch that last part? Something about the larvae?” But in his defense, as I looked around I could see that he was only one of many who were using jeejahs for one purpose or another.

  Statho had already addressed us twice. The first time had been ostensibly to greet everyone but really to nag us into taking our seats. The second time had been to intone the Invocation, which had been written by Diax himself while the rake blisters were still fresh on his hands. If you could understand Proto-Orth and if you happened to be a mushy-headed, number-worshipping Enthusiast, the Invocation would make you feel distinctly unwelcome. Everyone else just thought it added a touch of class to the proceedings.

  Now he told us we were going to be entertained by a contingent of Edharians. Statho’s grasp of Fluccish was weak; the way he phrased it, he was commanding us to be entertained. This made laughter run through the crowd, which left him nonplussed and asking the Inquisitors (who were flanking him at the high table) for explanations.

  Three fraas and two suurs sang a five-part motet while twelve others milled around in front of them. Actually they weren’t milling; it just looked that way from where we sat. Each one of them represented an upper or lower index in a theorical equation involving certain tensors and a metric. As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another’s paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold, involving various steps of symmetrization, antisymmetrization, and raising and lowering of indices. Seen from above by someone who didn’t know any theorics, it would have looked like a country dance. The music was lovely even if it was interrupted every few seconds by the warbling of jeejahs.

  Then we ate and drank more. Then the New Circle fraas sang their piece, which was much better received than the tensor dance. Then we ate and drank more. Statho made it all tick along, like Cord running her five-axis mill. We weren’t used to seeing him do a lot of work, but he was earning his beer this evening. To the visitors, this was just a free feed with weird entertainment, but in truth it was a ritual as old and as important as Provener and so there were certain boxes that had to be checked if we were to get out of it without drawing a rebuke from the Inquisition. And Statho was the kind who would have done it the right way even if Varax and Onali hadn’t been sitting there asking him to pass the salt.

  Fraa Haligastreme was introduced to say a few words on behalf of the Edharian chapter. He tried to talk about what I had mentioned to Dath earlier, and bungled it even worse. He was the funniest man in the world if you just walked up to him and asked him a question, but he was helpless when given the opportunity to prepare, and the sporadic alarums of the jeejahs shattered his concentration and reduced his talk to a heap of shards. The only shard that lodged in my memory was his concluding line: “If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.”

  Next up was Corlandin for the New Circle chapter.

  “I’ve been with my family the last ten days,” he announced, and smiled over at a table of Burgers who smiled back at him. “They were kind enough to organize a family reunion during Apert. All of them have busy lives out there, just as I do in here, but for these days we suspended our routines, our careers, and our other commitments so that we could be together.”

  “Myself, I’ve been out watching speelys,” Orolo remarked. Only about five of us could hear him. “Ones with plenty of explosions. Some are quite enjoyable.”

  Corlandin continued, “Making dinner—normally a routine chore we perform to avoid starvation—became something altogether different. The pattern of cuts my Aunt Prin made in the top crust of a pie was not just a system of vents to relieve internal pressure, but a sort of ritual going back who knows how many generations—an invocation, if you will, of her ancestors who did it the same way. The conversations we had about, say, when Grandpa Myrt fell off his porch roof while cleaning the gutters, were not just debriefings about the hazards of home renovation but
celebrations—full of laughter, tears, and sometimes laughter and tears at the same time—of how much we loved each other. So you could say that nothing was about what it superficially seemed to be about. Which in another context might make it sound all just a bit sinister. But obviously it was nothing of the kind. We all got it. You’d have gotten it too. And that’s a lot like what we fraas and suurs do in this concent all the time. Thank you.” And Corlandin sat down.

  Slightly indignant murmuring from avout—not at all certain that they agreed with him—was drowned out by applause from the majority of visitors. Poor Suur Frandling had to get up next and say a few words for the Reformed Old Faanians, but she could have been reading from an economic database for all anyone cared. Most of the avout were peeved by Corlandin’s eloquence—or glibness—and Orolo was among them. But to his credit he pointed out that Corlandin had smoothed over an awkward moment and probably won us some sympathy extramuros.

  “How do you know when someone is really glib?” Jesry muttered to me.

  “I’ll bite. How?”

  “It doesn’t cross your mind that he’s glib until someone older and wiser points it out. And then, your face turns hot with shame.”

  More music then, as most of us avout got up to clear plates and fetch dessert. The entertainment, which earlier had been so intimidating, had become a little easier to enjoy. Many of the carols traditionally played over loudspeakers in stores and elevators at this time of year were derived from liturgical music that had originated in the maths and filtered out at Apert, and so many of the visitors were pleasantly surprised to hear familiar melodies spilling from the lips of these bolt-wrapped weirdos.

  Dessert was sheet cakes baked and served in broad trays. One of them ended up in front of Arsibalt—not a coincidence. He picked up the spatula that had arrived with it: a flat metal blade about the size of the palm of a child’s hand. Just before he plunged it into the cake, I had an idea, and stopped him. “Let’s have Dath do it,” I said.