Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Can you please explain?” Orolo requested.

  I wouldn’t have been able to if not for the fact that I’d just been talking to Barb about it. “There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind—even the sline mind—knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible, such as you leaving.”

  “You’re leaving!?” Tulia exclaimed, utterly horrified. Others who’d joined the dialog late reacted similarly. Orolo laughed and I explained how the dialog had gotten started—and I did it hastily, before anyone could run off and start rumors.

  “I don’t think you’re wrong, Fraa Erasmas,” said Jesry, when everyone had settled down, “but I think you have a Steelyard problem. Bringing in Hemn space and action principles seems like an unnecessarily heavyweight way of explaining the fact that the mind has an instinctive nose for which outcomes are plausible enough to worry about.”

  “The point is conceded,” I said.

  But Arsibalt was crestfallen—disappointed in me for having backed down without a fight. “Remember that this came up in connection with Saunt Evenedric,” Arsibalt said, “a theor who spent the first half of his life working rigorous calculations having to do with principles of action in various kinds of configuration spaces. I don’t think he was merely speaking poetically when he suggested that human consciousness is capable of—”

  “Don’t go Hundred on us now!” Jesry snorted.

  Arsibalt froze, mouth open, face turning red.

  “It is sufficient for now to have broached this topic,” Orolo decreed. “We’ll not settle it here—not on empty stomachs, anyway!” Taking the hint, Lio, Tulia, and Ala took their leave, headed for the kitchen. Ala shot a frosty look over her shoulder at Jesry, then leaned in close to Tulia to make some remark. I knew exactly what she was complaining about: Jesry had been the one who had brought up the profusion-of-outcomes argument in the first place—but when Arsibalt had tried to develop it, he had gotten cold feet and backed out—even mocked Arsibalt. I tried to throw Ala a grin, but she didn’t notice. There was too much else going on. I ended up standing there grinning into empty space, like an idiot.

  Arsibalt began to pursue Jesry across the cloister, disputing the point.

  “Back to where we were,” Orolo continued. “Why do you worry so much, Erasmas? Are you doing nothing more productive than imagining pink nerve-gas-farting dragons? Or do you have a particular gift for tracing possible futures through Hemn space—tracing them, it seems, to disturbing conclusions?”

  “You could help me answer that question,” I pointed out, “by telling me whether you are thinking of leaving.”

  “I spent almost all of Apert extramuros,” Orolo said with a sigh, as if he had finally been run to ground. “I was expecting that it would be a wasteland. A cultural and intellectual charnel house. But that’s not exactly what I found. I went to speelys. I enjoyed them! I went to bars and got into some reasonably interesting conversations with people. Slines. I liked them. Some were quite interesting. And I don’t mean that in a bug-under-a-microscope way. They have stuck in my mind—characters I’ll always remember. For a while I was quite seduced by it. Then one evening I had an especially lively discussion with a sline who was as bright as anyone within this concent. And somehow, toward the end, it came out that he believed that the sun revolved around Arbre. I was flabbergasted, you know. I tried to disabuse him of this. He scoffed at my arguments. It made me remember just how much careful observation and theorical work is necessary to prove something as basic as that Arbre goes around the sun. How indebted we are to those who went before us. And this got me to thinking that I’d been living on the right side of the gate after all.”

  He paused for a moment, squinting off toward the mountains, as if judging whether he should go on to tell me the next part. Finally he caught me giving him an expectant look, and made a little gesture of surrender. “When I got back, I found a packet of old letters from Estemard,” he said.

  “Really!”

  “He’d been posting them from Bly’s Butte once every year or so. Of course he knew that they’d be impounded until the next Apert. He told me of some observations he’d made, using a telescope he’d built up there, grinding the mirror by hand and so forth. Good ideas. Interesting reading. Certainly not the quality of work he’d produced here, though.”

  “But he was allowed to go up there,” I said, gesturing toward the starhenge.

  Orolo thought that was funny. “Of course. And I trust that we shall be re-admitted to it one day before too long.”

  “Why? How? What basis do you have for that?” I had to ask, though I knew he wouldn’t answer.

  “Let us say I too am gifted with the faculty that you have, for envisioning how things might play out.”

  “Thanks a lot!”

  “Oh, and I can also put that faculty to work imagining what it would be like to be a Feral,” he said. “Estemard’s letters make it plain that this is a hard way to live.”

  “Do you think he made the right choice?”

  “I don’t know,” Orolo said without hesitation. “These are big questions. What does the human organism seek? Beyond food, water, shelter, and reproduction, I mean.”

  “Happiness, I guess.”

  “Which is something you can get, in a shallow way, simply by eating the food that they eat out there,” Orolo pointed out. “And yet still the people extramuros yearn for things. They join different kinds of arks all the time. What’s the point in that?”

  I thought about Jesry’s family and mine. “I guess people like to think that they are not only living but propagating their way of life.”

  “That’s right. People have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs. But there’s more than one way to get it. We may not think much of the sline subculture, but you have to admit it’s stable! Then the burgers have a completely different kind of stability.”

  “As do we.”

  “As do we. And yet it didn’t work for Estemard. Perhaps he felt that living by himself on a butte would fill that need better.”

  “Or maybe he just didn’t need it as much as some of us,” I suggested.

  The clock chimed the hour. “You’re going to miss a fascinating talk by Suur Fretta,” Orolo said.

  “That sounded kind of like changing the subject,” I pointed out.

  Orolo shrugged. Subjects change. You’d best adapt.

  “Well,” I said, “all right. I’ll go to her talk. But if you’re going to leave, don’t just walk out of this place without letting me know, please?”

  “I promise to give you as much advance knowledge as I can if such a thing is going to happen,” he said, in an indulgent tone, as if talking to a mentally unhinged person.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Then I went to Saunt Grod’s chalk hall and took a seat in the large empty space that, as usual, surrounded Barb.

  Technically, we were supposed to call him Fraa Tavener now, for that was the name he had adopted when he had taken his vow. But some people took longer than others to grow into their avout names. Arsibalt had been Arsibalt from day one; no one even remembered his extramuros name any more. But people were going to be addressing Barb as Barb for a long time.

  Whatever his name, that boy was going t
o save me. There was a lot he didn’t know, but nothing he was afraid to ask about, and ask about, and ask about, until he understood it perfectly. I decided to make him my fid. People would think I was doing it to be charitable. Maybe some would even think I was getting ready to fall back, and was making the care of Barb my avocation. Let them think so! In truth it was mostly self-interest. I had learned more theorics in six weeks, simply by being willing to sit next to Barb, than I had in six months before Apert. I saw now that in my desire to know theorics I had taken shortcuts that, just like shortcuts on a map, turned out to be longcuts. Whenever I’d seen Jesry get it quicker than me, I had misread equations in a way that had seemed easier at the time but made things harder—no, impossible—later. Barb didn’t have that fear that others were getting it faster; because of how his brain was set up, he couldn’t read that in their faces. And he did not have the same desire to reach a distant goal. He was altogether self-centered and short-sighted. He wanted only to understand this one problem or equation chalked on the slate before him now, today, whether or not it was convenient for the others around him. And he was willing to stand there asking questions about it through supper and past curfew.

  Come to think of it, Ala and Tulia had come up with a similar way of learning a long time ago. The creature with two backs was a term Jesry had coined for those two girls when they stood together outside of a chalk hall discussing—endlessly—what they had just heard. It wasn’t enough for one of them to understand something. Nor for both of them to understand it in different ways. They both had to understand it in the same way. The sound of them furiously explaining things to each other gave the rest of us headaches. Especially when we’d been younger, we’d always clap our hands over our ears and run away when we spotted the creature with two backs. But it worked for them.

  Barb’s willingness to do things the hard way in the near term was making his advancement toward the long goal—even though he didn’t have one—swifter and surer than mine had ever been. And now I was advancing in step with him.

  As a possible avocation, I had been teaching the new crop how to sing. Extramuros, everyone heard music but only a few actually knew how to make it. These new fids had to be taught everything. It was excruciating. I already knew this wasn’t going to be my avocation. We met three afternoons a week in an alcove in what passed for our nave.

  One day as I was leaving one of these practices I happened to run into Fraa Lio, who was coming in to do whatever he did at the Warden Fendant’s court. “Come up with me,” he offered, “I want to show you something.”

  “A new nerve pinch?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “You know I’m not supposed to look out from the high levels.”

  “Well, I haven’t gone through hierarch training—yet—so neither am I,” he said. “That’s not what I want to show you.”

  So I began to follow him up the stair. As we climbed, I became nervous that he was going to carry out a plot to raid the starhenge. Then I recalled what Orolo had said the other day about worrying too much, and tried to put this out of my mind.

  “You’re not supposed to look out beyond the walls,” he reminded me, as we were getting closer to the top of the southwest tower, “but you are allowed to remember what you saw there during Apert, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well, did you notice anything?”

  “Say again?”

  “Extramuros, did you notice anything?”

  “What kind of a question is that? I noticed a ton of stuff,” I sputtered. Lio turned around and gave me a brilliant smile, letting me know this was just his goofy sense of humor at work. Humor vlor.

  “All right,” I said, “what was I supposed to notice?”

  “Do you think the city’s getting bigger or smaller?”

  “Smaller. No question about it.”

  “Why are you so sure? Did you look up the census data?” Another smile.

  “Of course not. I don’t know. Just a feeling. Something about how the place looked.”

  “How did it look?”

  “Sort of…weedy. Overgrown.”

  He turned around and held up his index finger like a statue of Thelenes declaiming on the Periklyne. “Hold that idea,” he said, “while we pass through enemy territory.”

  We looked at the closed and locked portcullis, but didn’t say anything. We crossed the bridge into the Regulant court and followed its inner walkway round to the stair that led up. When we had reached safe ground above—the statue of Amnectrus—he said, “I was thinking of making gardening my avocation.”

  “Well, considering all of the weeds you’ve pulled over the years doing penance for beating me up, you are well qualified,” I said. “But why on earth would you want to?”

  “Let me show you what has been going on in the meadow,” he said, and led me out to the Fendant’s ledge. A couple of sentinels were making the rounds, swathed in bulky winter-bolts, their feet swallowed up in furry mukluks. Lio and I were hot from climbing the stairs and so the cold didn’t bother us much. We took a moment to hood ourselves. This was a way of showing respect for the Discipline. Our bolts, drawn far out in front of our faces, gave us tunnel vision. When we walked to the parapet and leaned forward, we could see down into the concent but not up and out to the world beyond.

  Lio pointed down at the back fringe of the meadow. Shuf’s Dowment rose up just on the other side of the river. With the exception of a few evergreen shrubs, everything down there was dead and brown. It was easy to see that, near the riverbank, the clover that carpeted most of the meadow became thin and patchy, and blotched with darker, coarser stuff: colonies of weeds that favored the sandy soil near the bank. Nearer the river I could see a distinct front where the clover gave way altogether to a snarl of woody trash: slashberry and the like. Behind that front I could see splats and rambling trails of green; some of the stuff back there was so tough that not even hard frost could kill it.

  “I guess your theme today is weeds. But I don’t see where you’re going with it,” I said.

  “Down there, come spring, I am going to stage a re-enactment of the Battle of Trantae,” he announced.

  “Negative 1472,” I answered in a robotic voice, that being one of the dates drilled into the head of every fid. “And I suppose you want me to play the role of a hoplite who gets a Sarthian arrow in the ear? No, thanks!”

  He shook his head patiently. “Not with people,” he said, “with plants.”

  “Say again?”

  “I got the idea during Apert from seeing how weeds and even trees are invading the town. Taking it back from humans so slowly that the humans don’t notice. The meadow is going to represent the fertile Plains of Thrania, the breadbasket of the Bazian Empire,” Lio said. “The river represents the river Chontus separating it from the northern provinces. By Negative 1474 those have long since been lost to the Horse Archers. Only a few fortified outposts hold out against the barbarian tide.”

  “Can we imagine that Shuf’s Dowment is one of those?”

  “If you like. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, during the cold winter of Negative 1473, the steppe hordes, led by the Sarthian clan, cross the frozen river and establish bridgeheads on the Thranian bank. By the time the campaigning season has opened, they’ve got three whole armies ready to break out. General Oxas deposes the Bazian Imperator in a military coup and marches forth promising to drive the Sarthians into the river and drown them like rats. After weeks of maneuver, the legions of Oxas finally meet the Sarthians in the flat countryside near Trantae. The Sarthians stage a false retreat. Oxas falls for it like a total dumbass and charges into a pincer. He’s surrounded—”

  “And three months later Baz is on fire. But how are you going to do all of that with weeds?”

  “We’ll allow the invasive species from the riverbank to make inroads into the clover. The starblossom vines run along the ground like light cavalry—it’s incredible how fast they advance. The slashberry is slower
, but better at holding ground—like infantry. Finally the trees come along and make it permanent. With a little weeding and pruning, we can make it all work out just like Trantae, except it’ll take six months or so to play out.”

  “That is the craziest idea I have ever heard,” I said. “You are some kind of a nut.”

  “Would you rather help me, or go on trying to teach those brats down there how to carry a tune?”

  “Is this a trick to get me to pull weeds?”

  “No. We’re going to let the weeds grow—remember?”

  “What’s going to happen after the weeds win? We can’t set fire to the Cloister. Maybe we could sack the apiary and drink all the mead?”

  “Someone already did that, during Apert,” he reminded me gravely. “No, we’ll probably have to clean it all up. Though if people like it we could let nature take its course and let a grove of trees grow on the conquered territory.”

  “One of the things I like about this is that, come summer, it will put me in a good position to watch Arsibalt being chased around by angry swarms of bees,” I said.

  Lio laughed. I thought to myself that his plan had another advantage as well: it was flagrantly silly. Until now, I had been dabbling in avocations, such as looking after Barb and teaching fids how to sing, that were sensible and virtuous. Typical behavior for someone who was getting ready to fall back. To spend the summer doing something absolutely ridiculous would flaunt the fact that I had no such intentions. Those members of the Edharian chapter who hadn’t wanted me would be furious.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “But I guess we have to wait a few more weeks before anything starts to grow.”

  “You’re pretty good at drawing, aren’t you?” Lio asked.

  “Better than you—but that’s not saying much. I can make technical illustrations. Barb is freakishly good at it. Why?”

  “I was thinking we should make a record of it. Draw pictures of how it looks as the battle goes on. This would be an excellent vantage point.”

  “Should I ask Barb if he’s interested?”