Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Fraa Paphlagon.”

  “The Hundreder who was Evoked.”

  “Yes.”

  “Orolo’s mentor.”

  “Yes. The Steelyard says that his Evocation, and the trouble Orolo got into, must be connected.”

  “Seems reasonable,” I said. “I guess I’ve sort of been assuming that.”

  “Normally we’d have no way of knowing what a Hundreder was working on—not until the next Centennial Apert, anyway. But before Paphlagon went into the Upper Labyrinth, twenty-two years ago, he wrote some treatises that got sent out into the world at the Decennial Apert of 3670. Ten years later, and again just a few months ago, our Library got its usual Decennial deliveries. So, I’ve been going through all that stuff looking for anything that references Paphlagon’s work.”

  “Seems really indirect,” I pointed out. “We’ve got all of Paphlagon’s work right here, don’t we?”

  “Yeah. But that’s not what I’m looking for,” Jesry said. “I’m more interested in knowing who, out there, was paying attention to Paphlagon. Who read his works of 3670, and thought he had an interesting mind? Because—”

  “Because someone,” I said, getting it, “someone out there in the Saecular world must have said ‘Paphlagon’s our man—yank him, and bring him to us!’”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what have you found?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Jesry said. “Turns out Paphlagon had two careers, in a way.”

  “What do you mean—like an avocation?”

  “You could say his avocation was philosophy. Metatheorics. Procians might even call it a sort of religion. On the one hand, he’s a proper cosmographer, doing the same sort of stuff as Orolo. But in his spare time he’s thinking big ideas, and writing it down—and people on the outside noticed.”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “I don’t want to go there now,” Jesry said.

  “Well, damn it—”

  He held up a hand to settle me. “Read it yourself! That’s not what I’m about. I’m about trying to reckon who picked him and why. There’s lots of cosmographers, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So if he was Evoked to answer cosmography questions, you have to ask—”

  “Why him in particular?”

  “Yeah. But it’s rare to work on the metatheorical stuff he was interested in.”

  “I see where you’re going,” I said. “The Steelyard tells us he must have been Evoked for that—not the cosmography.”

  “Yeah,” Jesry said. “Anyway, not that many people paid attention to Paphlagon’s metatheorics, at least, judging from the stuff we got in the deliveries of 3680 and 3690. But there’s one suur at Baritoe, name of Aculoä, who really seems to admire him. Has written two books about Paphlagon’s work.”

  “Tenner or—”

  “No, that’s just it. She’s a Unarian. Thirty-four years straight.”

  So she was a teacher. There was no other reason to spend more than a few years in a Unarian math.

  “Latter Evenedrician,” Jesry said, answering my next question before I’d asked it.

  “I don’t know much about that order.”

  “Well, remember when Orolo told us that Saunt Evenedric worked on different stuff during the second half of his career?”

  “Actually, I think Arsibalt’s the one who told us that, but—”

  Jesry shrugged off my correction. “The Latter Evenedricians are interested in exactly that stuff.”

  “All right,” I said, “so you reckon Suur Aculoä fingered Paphlagon?”

  “No way. She’s a philosophy teacher, a One-off…”

  “Yeah, but at one of the Big Three!”

  “That’s my point,” Jesry said, a little testy, “a lot of important Saeculars did a few years at Big Three maths when they were younger—before they went out and started their careers.”

  “You think this suur had a fid, ten or fifteen years ago maybe, who’s gone on to become a Panjandrum. Aculoä taught the fid all about how great and wise Fraa Paphlagon was. And now, something’s happened—”

  “Something,” Jesry said, nodding confidently, “that made that ex-fid say, ‘that tears it, we need Paphlagon here yesterday!’”

  “But what could that something be?”

  Jesry shrugged. “That’s the whole question, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe we could get a clue by investigating Paphlagon’s writings.”

  “That is obvious,” Jesry said. “But it’s rather difficult when Arsibalt’s using them as a semaphore.”

  It took me a moment to make sense of this. “That stack of books in the window—”

  Jesry nodded. “Arsibalt took everything Paphlagon ever wrote to Shuf’s Dowment.”

  I laughed. “Well then, what about Suur Aculoä?”

  “Tulia’s going through her works now,” Jesry said, “trying to figure out if she had any fids who amounted to anything.”

  * * *

  Ringing Vale: (1) A mountain valley renowned for the many small streams that spill down its rocky walls from glaciers poised above, producing a musical sound likened to the ringing of chimes. Also known as the Rill Vale, or (poetically) Vale of a Thousand Rills. (2) A math founded there in A.R.17, specializing in study and developments of martial arts and related topics (see Vale-lore).

  Vale-lore: In New Orth, an omnibus term covering armed and unarmed martial arts, military history, strategy, and tactics, all of which are strongly associated, in the Mathic world, with the avout of the Ringing Vale, who have made such topics their specialty since a math was founded there in A.R.17. Note: in informal speech and in Fluccish, the word is sometimes contracted to vlor. However, note that this variant emphasizes the martial-arts side of Vale-lore at the expense of its more academic and bureaucratic aspects. Extramuros, Vlor is an entertainment genre, and (for those Saeculars who can be moved to stand up and practice such things, as opposed to merely watching them) a type of academy.

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

  Working in a hole in the ground had made me ignorant of all these goings-on. But now that Jesry had let me know that my fraas and suurs were working so hard, I redoubled my efforts with the tablet. Stored on that thing I had all of seventeen clear nights. Once I got the knack, it took me about half an hour’s work to configure the tablet to give me the time exposure for a given night. Then, using a protractor, I would spend another half hour or so measuring the angles between streaks. As Jesry had predicted, some birds made slightly larger angles than others, reflecting their longer periods, but the angle for a given bird was always the same, every orbit, every night. So in a sense it only took a single night’s observations to make a rough draft of the census. But I went ahead and did it for all seventeen of the clear nights anyway, just to be thorough, and because frankly I had no idea what to do next. I could polish off one, sometimes two nights’ observations every time I got a chance to go down into that sub-cellar, but I didn’t get that chance every day.

  By the time I finished, I had been at it for about three weeks. Buds were out on the page trees. Birds were flying north. Fraas and suurs were poking around in their tangles, arguing about whether it was time to plant. The barbarian weed-horde was marshaling on the riverbank and getting ready to invade the fertile Plains of Thrania. Arsibalt was two-thirds of the way through his pile of Paphlagon. The vernal equinox was only a few days away. Apert had begun on the morning of the autumnal equinox—half a year ago! I could not understand where the time had gone.

  It had gone the same place as all the thousands of years before it. I had spent it working. It didn’t matter that my work was secret, illicit, and could have got me Thrown Back. The concent didn’t care about that. Certain persons would have cared a lot. But this was a place for the avout to spend their lives working on such projects. And now that I had a project, I was a part of that concent in a way I’d never been before, and the place was the right place for me.

  Since
Arsibalt, Jesry, and Tulia had their minds on other projects, I didn’t tell them about Sammann. That was a topic reserved for Lio when we were out in the meadow coaxing the starblossom to grow in the right direction. Or, since it was Lio, doing whatever else had most recently jumped into his mind.

  We had reacted in different ways to the loss of Orolo. In my case, it was bloody revenge fantasies that I kept to myself. Lio, on the other hand, had become entranced by ever weirder varieties of vlor. Two weeks ago, he had tried to get me interested in rake vlor, which I guessed was inspired by the story of Diax casting out the Enthusiasts. I had declined on grounds of not wanting to get a blood infection—a weaponized rake could give you mass-produced puncture wounds. Last week he had developed a keen interest in shovel vlor, and we had spent a lot of time squatting on the riverbank sharpening spades with rocks.

  When he led me down to the river again one day, I assumed it was for more of the same. But he kept looking back over his shoulder and leading me in deeper. I’d been on enough furtive expeditions as a fid to know that he was checking the sight-lines to the Warden Regulant’s windows. Old habits kicked in; I became silent, and moved from one shady place to another until we had reached a place where the bending river had cut away the bank to form an overhang, sheltered from view. Fortunately no one was there having a liaison just now. It would have been a bad place for it anyway: mucky ground, lots of bugs, high probability of being interrupted by avout messing around on the river in boats.

  Lio turned to face me. I was almost worried that he was going to make a pass at me.

  But no. This was Lio we were talking about.

  “I’d like you to punch me in the face,” he said. As if he were asking me to scratch his back.

  “Not that I haven’t always dreamed of it,” I said, “but why would you want it?”

  “Hand-to-hand combat has been a common element of military training down through the ages,” he proclaimed, as if I were a fid. “Long ago it was learned that recruits—no matter how much training they had received—tended to forget everything they knew the first time they got punched in the face.”

  “The first time in their lives, you mean?”

  “Yeah. In peaceful, affluent societies where brawling is frowned on, this is a common problem.”

  “Not being punched in the face a lot is a problem?”

  “It is,” Lio said, “if you join the military and find yourself in hand-to-hand combat with someone who is actually trying to kill you.”

  “But Lio,” I said, “you have been punched in the face. It happened at Apert. Remember?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and I have been trying to learn from that experience.”

  “So why do you want me to punch you in the face again?”

  “As a way to find out whether I have learned.”

  “Why me? Why not Jesry? He seems more the type.”

  “That is the problem.”

  “I see your point. Why not Arsibalt, then?”

  “He wouldn’t do it for real—and then he’d complain that he’d hurt his hand.”

  “What are you going to tell people if you show up for dinner with a busted face?”

  “That I was battling evildoers.”

  “Try again.”

  “That I was practicing falls, and landed wrong.”

  “What if I don’t want to mess up my hand?”

  He smiled and produced a pair of heavy leather work gloves. “Stuff some rags under the knuckles,” he suggested, as I was pulling them on, “if you’re that worried about it.”

  Grandsuurs Tamura and Ylma drifted by on a punt. We pretended to pull weeds until they were out of sight.

  “Okay,” Lio said, “my objective is to perform a simple takedown on you—”

  “Oh, now you tell me!”

  “Nothing we haven’t done a hundred times,” he said, as if I would find this reassuring. “That’s why we came here.” He stomped the damp sand of the riverbank. “Soft ground.”

  “Why—?”

  “If I put up my hands to defend my face, I won’t be able to complete my objective.”

  “I get it.”

  Suddenly he came at me and took me down. “You lose,” he proclaimed, getting up.

  “Okay.” I sighed, and clambered to my feet. Immediately he wheeled around and took me down again. I threw a playful blow at his head, way too late. This time he took me down a lot harder. Every one of the small muscles in my head felt as if it had been strained. He planted a dirty hand on top of my face and shoved off while getting back to his feet. The message was clear.

  The next time I tried for real, but I didn’t have my feet planted and wasn’t able to hit very hard. And he was coming in too low.

  The time after that, I got my center of gravity low, planted my feet in the mud, made a bone connection from hip to fist, and drilled him right on the cheekbone. “Good!” he moaned, as he was climbing off me. “See if you can actually slow me down though—that’s the whole point, remember?”

  I think we did it about ten more times. Since I was suffering a lot more abuse than he was, I sort of lost track. On my best go, I was able to throw him off stride for a moment—but he still took me down.

  “How much longer are we going to do this?” I asked, lying in the mud, in the bottom of an Erasmas-shaped crater. If I refused to get up, he couldn’t take me down.

  He scooped up a double handful of river water and splashed it on his face, rinsing away blood from nostrils and eyebrows. “That should do,” he said. “I’ve learned what I wanted.”

  “Which is?” I asked, daring to sit up.

  “That I’ve adjusted, since what happened at Apert.”

  “We did all that to obtain a negative result?” I exclaimed, getting to my knees.

  “If you want to think of it that way,” he said, and scooped up more water.

  I’d never get such a fine opportunity again, so I rolled up, put a foot in his backside, and sent him headlong into the river.

  Later, as Lio was engrossed in the comparatively normal and sane activity of shovel-sharpening, I got us back on the topic of what I’d been seeing in the tablet: specifically, Sammann’s behavior during his noon visits.

  Once I’d gotten over that sick feeling of having been found out, I’d begun to brood over some other questions. Was it merely a coincidence that the Ita who had discovered the dust jacket was the same one who had visited Cord in the machine hall? I reckoned that either it was a simple coincidence, or else that this Sammann was some kind of high-ranking Ita who was responsible for important tasks having to do with the starhenge. In any case, it booted me nothing to speculate about it.

  “Has dis Ita tried to cobbudicade wid you?” Lio asked through puffy lips.

  “You mean, like, sneaking into the math at night to slip me notes?”

  Lio was baffled by my answer. He showed this in his usual way: by correcting his posture. The scrape of the rock on the shovel paused for a moment. Then he got it. “No, I don’t mean in real time,” he said. “I mean, on the tablet does he—you know.”

  “No, Thistlehead, I have to confess I haven’t the faintest idea—”

  “If anyone understands surveillance, it’s those guys,” Lio pointed out. “If you buy into Saunt Patagar’s Assertion, sure.”

  Lio seemed disappointed that I was so naïve as not to believe this. He went back to work on that rock. The scraping really set my teeth on edge but I reckoned it must be putting the hurt on any spies who might be eavesdropping.

  Apparently my new role at the Concent of Saunt Edhar was to be the sheltered innocent. I said, “Well, answer me this. If they have us under total surveillance, they must know everything about me and the tablet, right?”

  “Well, yeah, you’d think so.”

  “So why hasn’t anything happened?” I asked him. “It’s not like Spelikon and Trestanas have soft spots for me.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he insisted. “I don’t think there’s anything
strange about that.”

  “How do you figure?”

  He paused long enough to give me the idea he was making up an answer on the spot. He dipped his sharpening-rock into the river. “The Ita can’t be telling the Warden Regulant everything they know. Trestanas would have to spend every minute of every day with them, to take in so much intelligence. The Ita must make decisions as to what they will pass on and what they will withhold.”

  What Lio was saying opened up all sorts of interesting scenarios that would take me some time to sort out. I didn’t want to stand there with my mouth hanging open any longer than I already had, so I bent down and grabbed the handle of the shovel. It wasn’t going to get any sharper. I looked around for a stand of slashberry that needed to be massacred. It didn’t take long to find one. I made for it and Lio followed me.

  “That’s giving the Ita a lot of responsibility,” I said, raising the shovel, then driving it down and forward into the roots of the slashberry canes. Several of them toppled. Most satisfying.

  “Assume that they are as intelligent as we are,” Lio said. “Come on! They operate complicated syntactic devices for a living. They created the Reticulum. No one knows better than they do that knowledge is power. By employing strategy and tactics in what they say and what they don’t, they must be able to get things they want.”

  I took down a square yard of slashberry while thinking about what he said.

  “You’re saying there’s a whole world of Ita/hierarch politics going on over there that we know nothing about.”

  “Has to be. Or else they wouldn’t be human,” Lio said.

  Then he used Hypotrochian Transquaestiation on me: he changed the subject in such a way as to imply that the question had just been settled—that he had won the point and I had lost. “So, back to my question: does Sammann do anything else on the tablet that sends you a message—or at least indicates he knows that his image is being recorded?” He chucked his sharpening-rock into the river.

  The correct response to Hypotrochian Transquaestiation was Hey, not so fast! but Lio’s question was so interesting that I didn’t make a fuss. “I don’t know,” I had to admit, after I’d spent an enjoyable minute or so taking down more slashberry. “But I’m getting bored measuring pie-slices. And I honestly don’t know what else to look at next. So I’ll have a look.”