Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  I looked for Lio, hoping he might convey a message to Cord and Dath, but he was some distance away now, recounting the fight to Delrakhones, and anyway I didn’t want to give Suur Trestanas the additional pleasure of telling me I couldn’t.

  So I turned my back on what remained of my family and started walking toward the Mynster.

  Part 3

  ELIGER

  Boredom is a mask that frustration wears. What better place to savor the truth of Fraa Orolo’s saying than a penance cell of the Warden Regulant? Some cunning architect had designed these things to be to frustration what a lens was to light. My cell did not have a door. All that stood between me and freedom was a narrow arch, shaped in the pointed ogive of the Old Mathic Age, framed in massive stones all scratched with graffiti by prisoners of yore. I was forbidden to stray through it or to receive visitors until the penance was complete. The arch opened onto the inner walkway that made the circuit of the Warden Regulant’s court. It was trafficked at all hours by lesser hierarchs wandering by on one errand or another. I could look straight out across that walkway into the vault-work of the upper chancel, but because of its parapet I could not see down to the floor two hundred feet below where Provener was celebrated. I could hear the music. I could gaze straight out and see the chain moving when my team wound the clock and the bell-ropes dancing when Tulia’s team rang changes. But I could not see the people.

  On the opposite side of the cell, my view was better. Framed in another Mathic arch was a window affording a fine view of the meadow. This was just another device to magnify frustration and hence boredom, since, if I wanted, I could spend all day looking down on my brothers and sisters strolling at liberty around the concent and (I supposed) discussing all sorts of interesting things, or at least telling funny stories. Above, the Warden Fendant’s overhanging ledge blocked most of the sky, but I could see to about twenty degrees above the horizon. My window faced roughly toward the Century Gate, with the Decade Gate visible off to the right if I put my face close to the glass. So when the sun rose the morning after Tenth Night, I was able to hear the close-of-Apert service. Looking out my cell’s doorway, I could see the chains move as the water-valves were actuated. Then by stepping across the cell and looking out my window I was able to see a silver thread of water negotiate the aqueduct to the Decade Gate, and to watch the gate grind closed. Only a few spectators were strewn about extramuros. For a little while I tortured myself with the idea that Cord was standing there forlornly expecting me to run out at the last moment and give her a goodbye hug. But such ideas faded quickly once the gates closed. I watched the avout take down the canopy and fold up the tables. I ate the piece of bread and drank the bowl of milk left at my door by one of Suur Trestanas’s minions.

  Then I turned my attention to the Book.

  Since the sole purpose of the Book was to punish its readers, the less said of it the better. To study it, to copy it out, and to memorize it was an extraordinary form of penance.

  The concent, like any other human settlement, abounded in nasty or tedious chores such as weeding gardens, maintaining sewers, peeling potatoes, and slaughtering animals. In a perfect society we’d have taken turns. As it was, there were rules and codes of conduct that people broke from time to time, and the Warden Regulant saw to it that those people performed the most disagreeable jobs. It was not a bad system. When you were fixing a clogged latrine because you’d had too much to drink in the Refectory, you might not have such an enjoyable day, but the fact of the matter was that latrines were necessary; sometimes they clogged up; and some fraa or suur had to clean them out, as we couldn’t very well call in an outside plumber. So there was at least some satisfaction in doing such penance, because there was a point in the work.

  There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane.

  Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed—but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks—and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time—after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter Nine would emerge permanently damaged.

  Enough of the Book. A more interesting question: why was I here? It seemed that Suur Trestanas wanted me removed from the community for as long as the Inquisitors were among us. Chapter Three wouldn’t have taken me long enough. Four might have done it, but she’d given me Five just in case I happened to be one of those persons who was good at memorizing numbers.

  The dawn aut—which was attended only by a smattering of avout who were especially fond of ceremonies—woke me every morning. I snapped my bolt off the wooden pallet that was the cell’s only furniture and wrapped it around myself. I pissed down a hole in the floor and washed in a stone basin of cold water, ate my bread and drank my milk, set the empty dishes by the door, sat on the floor, and arranged the Book, a pen, a bottle of ink, and some leaves on the surface of the pallet. My sphere served as a rest for my right elbow. I worked for three hours, then did something else, just to clear my head, until Provener. Then, during the whole time that Lio and Jesry and Arsibalt were winding the clock, I was doing pushups, squats, and lunges. My team were working harder and getting stronger because of my absence, and I didn’t want to be weak when I emerged.

  My teammates must have somehow figured out which cell I was in, for after Provener they’d have a picnic lunch in the meadow right beneath my window. They didn’t dare look up or wave to me—Trestanas must be glaring down at them, just waiting for such a mistake—but they’d begin each lunch by hoisting tankards of beer in someone’s honor and quaffing deeply. I got the message.

  Plenty of ink and leaves were available, so I began to write down the account you have been read
ing. As I did so, I became haunted by the idea that there was some pattern woven through the last few weeks’ events that I had failed to notice. I put this down to the altered state of mind that comes over a solitary prisoner with nothing to keep him company save the Book.

  One day about two weeks into my penance, my morning work-shift was interrupted by strange bells. Through my door I could see a stretch of the bell-ropes that ran from the ringers’ balcony up toward the carillon. I moved round to the other side of the pallet, turning my back to the window, so that I could observe the jerking and recoiling of those ropes. All avout were supposed to be able to decode the changes. I had never been especially good at it. The tones melted together in my ears and I could not shape them into patterns. But watching the movements of the ropes somehow made it easier; for such work my eyes were better suited than my ears. I could see the way in which a given rope’s movement was conditioned by what its neighbors had done on the previous beats. In a minute or two, without having to ask anyone’s help, I was able to recognize this as the call to Eliger. One of my crop was about to join an order.

  After the changes were rung, half an hour passed before the aut began, and it was another half an hour of singing and chanting before I heard Statho intone the name of Jesry. This was followed by the singing of the Canticle of Inbrase. The singing was vigorous but rough around the edges—so I knew it was the Edharians who were inducting him. During all of that time, it was difficult for me to concentrate on the Book, and afterwards I could get very little done until after Provener.

  The next day those changes rang again. Two more joined the Edharians and one—Ala—joined the New Circle. No surprise there. We’d always expected her to end up as a hierarch. For some reason, though, this one kept me awake late into the night. It was as if Ala had flown off to some other concent where I’d never see her again, never get into another argument with her, never compete with her to see who could solve a theorics problem first. Which was absurd, since she was staying right here at Edhar and I’d be dining with her in the Refectory every day. But some part of my brain insisted on seeing Ala’s decision as a personal loss for me, and punished me by keeping me awake.

  There was a little lesson hidden in the way I had deciphered the Eliger changes by seeing them. For as I continued to write out my account of the preceding weeks—all the while nagged by the sense that I was missing something—I eventually came to the part where I set down my conversation with Fraa Orolo on the starhenge, and his muffled argument with Trestanas immediately afterwards, down by the portcullis. As I wrote this, I looked out my window to the place where it had happened, and noted that the portcullis was closed—even though it was daytime. I also had a view of the Centenarians’ portcullis. It too was closed. Both of them had been closed the whole time I’d been here. With each day that went by I became more and more certain that the starhenge had been altogether sealed off, and had been from the very moment that the Master of the Keys had slammed the grate down behind me and Orolo on the eighth day of Apert. This closure of the starhenge—which I was pretty sure was unprecedented in the entire history of the Concent of Saunt Edhar—must have been the topic of the angry conversation between Orolo and Trestanas.

  Was it too much of a stretch to think that the arrival of the Inquisitors, a couple of days later, had been no coincidence? Ours looked at the same sky as every other starhenge in the world. If ours had been closed—if there was something out there we weren’t supposed to see—the others must have been closed too. The order must have gone out over the Reticulum on the eighth day of Apert and been conveyed by the Ita, to Suur Trestanas; at the same moment, I reckoned, Varax and Onali had begun their journey to the “remote hermitage” of Saunt Edhar.

  All of which made a kind of sense but did nothing at all to help me with the most perplexing and important question: why would they want to close the starhenge? It was the last part of the concent one would ever expect the hierarchs to concern themselves with. Their duty was to preserve the Discipline by preventing the flow of Saecular information to the minds of the avout. The information that came in through the starhenge was by nature timeless. Much of it was billions of years old. What passed for current events might be a dust storm on a rocky planet or a vortex fluctuation on a gas giant. What could possibly be seen from the starhenge that would be considered as Saecular?

  Like a fraa who wakes in his cell in the hours before dawn smelling smoke, and who knows from this that a slow fire must have been smoldering and gathering heat for many hours while he slumbered in oblivion, I felt not only alarm but also shame at my own slowness.

  It didn’t help that Eliger was being celebrated almost every day now. For the last year or so, I’d sensed myself falling slowly behind some of the others in theorics and cosmography. At times I’d resigned myself to joining a non-Edharian order and becoming a hierarch. Then, immediately before Trestanas had thrown the Book at me, I’d made up my mind to angle for a place among the Edharians and devote myself to exploring the Hylaean Theoric World. Instead of which, I was stuck in this room reading nonsense while the others raced even further ahead of me—and filled up the available spaces in the Edharian chapter. Technically there was no limit—no quota. But if the Edharians got more than ten or a dozen new avout at the expense of the others, there’d be trouble. Thirty years ago, when Orolo had come in, they’d recruited fourteen, and people were still talking about it.

  One afternoon, just after Provener, the bell team began to ring changes. I assumed at first that it was Eliger again. For by that time, five had joined the Edharians, three the New Circle, and one the Reformed Old Faanians. But some deep part of my brain nagged me with the sense that these were changes I had not heard before.

  Once more I set down my pen—wishing I’d been given this penance in less interesting times—and sat where I could watch the ropes. Within a few minutes I knew for certain that this was not Eliger. My chest clenched up for a few moments as I worried that it was Anathem. It was over, though, before I could make sense of it. So I sat motionless for half an hour listening to the naves fill up. It was a big crowd—all of the avout in all of the maths had stopped whatever they’d been doing and come here. They were all talking. They sounded excited. I couldn’t make out a word. But I sensed from their tone that something momentous was about to happen. In spite of my fears, I slowly convinced myself it could not be Anathem. People would not be talking so much if they had gathered to watch one of their number be Thrown Back.

  The service began. There was no music. I could make out the Primate speaking familiar phrases in Old Orth: a formal summoning of the concent. Then he switched to New Orth, and read out some formula that by its nature had to have been written around the time of the Reconstitution. At the end of it he called out distinctly: “Voco Fraa Paphlagon of the Centenarian Chapter of the Order of Saunt Edhar.”

  So this was the aut of Voco. It was only the third one I’d ever heard. The first two had occurred when I’d been about ten years old.

  As I absorbed that, a gasp and then a deep moan welled up from the floor of the chancel: the gasp, I reckoned, from most of the avout, and the moan from the Hundreders who were losing their brother forever.

  And now I did something crazy, but I knew I could get away with it: I stepped over the threshold of my cell. I crossed the walkway, and looked over the railing.

  Only three people were in the chancel: Statho in his purple robes and Varax and Onali, identifiable by their hats. The rest of the place, hidden behind the screens, was in an uproar that had stopped the aut.

  I’d only meant to peek over the rail for an instant so that I could see what was going on. But I had not been struck by lightning. No alarm had sounded. No one was up here. They couldn’t possibly be here, I realized, because Voco had rung, and everyone had to gather in the Mynster for that—had to because there was no way of knowing in advance whose name would be called.

  Come to think of it, I was probably supposed to be down there! Voco must
be one of the few exceptions to the rule that someone like me must remain in his cell.

  Then why hadn’t the Warden Regulant’s staff come and rousted me? It had probably been an oversight, I reckoned. They didn’t have procedures for this. If they were like me, they hadn’t even recognized the changes. They hadn’t realized it was Voco until it had started—and then it had been too late for them to come up and fetch me. They were stuck down there until it was over.

  They were stuck down there until it was over.

  I was free to move about, at least for a little while, as long as I was back in my cell when the Warden Regulant and her staff trudged back up here. Whereupon I’d be in trouble anyway for having ignored Voco! So why not get in trouble for something that people would be talking about in the Refectory fifty years from now?

  All of those exercises I’d been doing were going to pay off. I tore around the walkway, took the stairs up through the Fendant court three at a time, and so came into the lower reaches of the chronochasm. Here I had to move with greater care so as not to clatter and bang on the metal stairs. But by the same token I had a clear view down, so I could keep track of what was going on. Nothing had changed that I could see, but a new sound was rising up the well: the hymn of mourning and farewell, addressed by the Hundreders to their departing brother. This had taken a little while to get underway. No one had it memorized. They’d had to rummage for rarely-used hymnals and page through them looking for the right bit. Then it took them a minute to get the hang of it, for this was a five-part harmony. By the time the hymn really fell together and began to work, I was halfway to the starhenge—clambering up behind the dials of the clock, trying to stay collected, trying to move as Lio would, and not let the end of my bolt get caught between gears. The song of mourning and farewell was really hair-raising—even more emotional, somehow, than what we sang at funerals. Of course I had not the faintest idea who Fraa Paphlagon was, what he was like, or what he studied. But those who were singing did, and part of the power of this music was that it made me feel what they felt.