Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  After that I couldn’t get into the cellar for almost a week. The concent was getting ready for some equinox celebrations and so I had chant rehearsals. The weed war was entering a stage that demanded I draw at least one sketch of it. I had to get my tangle planted. When I was free, there always seemed to be other people at Shuf’s Dowment. The place was becoming hip!

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Arsibalt moaned to me, one afternoon. I was helping him carry a stack of beehive frames into a wood shop. “I invited one and all to use the Dowment—now they are doing so—and I can’t work there!”

  “Nor I,” I pointed out.

  “And now this!” He picked up a putty knife, which I was pretty sure was the wrong tool for the job, and began to pick absent-mindedly at a patch of rotten wood on the corner of a frame. “Disaster!”

  “Do you know anything about woodworking?” I asked.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “How about the metatheorical works of Fraa Paphlagon?”

  “That I know a few things about,” he said. “And what is more, I think Orolo wanted us to learn about them.”

  “How so?”

  “Remember our last dialog with him?”

  “Pink nerve-gas-farting dragons. Of course.”

  “We must come up with a more dignified name for it before we commit it to ink,” Arsibalt said with a grimace. “Anyway, I believe that Orolo was pushing us to think about some of the ideas that were—are—important to his mentor.”

  “Funny he didn’t mention Paphlagon, in that case,” I pointed out. “I remember talking about the later works of Saunt Evenedric, but—”

  “One leads to the other. We would have found our way to Paphlagon in due course.”

  “You would’ve, maybe,” I said. “What’s it all about?” This seemed a reasonable question. But Arsibalt flinched.

  “The sort of stuff Procians hate us for.”

  “Like, the Hylaean Theoric World?” I asked.

  “That’s what they would call it, as a backhanded way of suggesting we are naïve. But, starting at least as early as Protas, the idea of the HTW was developed into a more sophisticated metatheorics. So you could say that Paphlagon’s work is to classical Protan thought what modern group theory is to counting on one’s fingers.”

  “But still related to it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I’m just thinking back to my conversation with that Inquisitor.”

  “Varax?”

  “Yeah. I’m wondering whether his interest in the topic—”

  “Correction: he was interested in whether we were interested in it,” Arsibalt pointed out.

  “Yeah, exactly—whether that might be further evidence for the existence of the Hypothetical Important Fid of Suur Aculoä.”

  “I think we should be careful speculating about the HIFOSA until Suur Tulia has actually found evidence of his or her existence,” Arsibalt said. “Otherwise we’ll be coming up with all manner of speculations that would never make it past the Rake.”

  “Well, without telling me everything you know about it,” I said, “can you give me a clue as to why anyone in the Saecular world would think Paphlagon’s work might be of practical importance?”

  “Yes,” he said, “if you fix this beehive for me.”

  “You know about atom smashers? Particle accelerators?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Praxic Age installations. Huge and expensive. Used to test theories about elementary particles and forces.”

  “Yes,” Arsibalt said. “If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics—it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.”

  “Wow,” I said, “I’ll bet a philosopher would really jump down your throat for talking that way. It’s like saying that philosophy is nothing more than bad theorics.”

  “There are some theors who would say so,” Arsibalt admitted. “But those people aren’t really talking about philosophy as philosophers would define it. Rather, they are talking about something that theors begin to do when they get right up to the edge of what they can prove using the equipment they’ve got. They drive philosophers crazy by calling it philosophy or metatheorics.”

  “What kind of stuff are you talking about?”

  “Well, they speculate as to what the next theory might look like. They develop the theory and try to use it to make predictions that might be testable. In the late Praxic Age, that usually meant constructing an even bigger and more expensive particle accelerator.”

  “And then came the Terrible Events,” I said.

  “Yes, no more expensive toys for theors after that,” Arsibalt said. “But it’s not clear that it actually made that much of a difference. The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.”

  “I hadn’t known that,” I said. “I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.”

  “There might as well be,” Arsibalt said, “but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

  “So the Turn to Cosmography might have happened even without the Reconstitution.”

  “It was already happening,” Arsibalt said, “as the theors of the very late Praxic Age were coming to terms with the fact that no machine would be constructed during their lifetimes that would be capable of testing the theorics to which they were devoting their careers.”

  “So those theors had no alternative but to look to the cosmos for givens.”

  “Yes,” Arsibalt said. “And in the meantime we have people like Fraa Paphlagon.”

  “Meaning what? Both theors and philosophers?”

  He thought about it. “I’m trying to respect your earlier request that I not simply bury you in Paphlagon,” he explained, when he caught me looking, “but this forces me to work harder.”

  “Fair is fair,” I pointed out, brandishing a crosscut saw that I had been putting to use.

  “You could think of Paphlagon—and presumably Orolo—as descendants of people like Evenedric.”

  “Theors,” I said, “who turned to philosophy when theorics stopped.”

  “Slowed down,” Arsibalt corrected me, “waiting for results from places like Saunt Bunjo’s.”

  Bunjo was a Millenarian math built around an empty salt mine two miles underground. Its fraas and suurs worked in shifts, sitting in total darkness waiting to see flashes of light from a vast array of crystalline particle detectors. Every thousand years they published their results. During the First Millennium they were pretty sure they had seen flashes on three separate occasions, but since then they had come up empty.

  “So, in the meantime, they’ve been fooling around with ideas that people like Evenedric came up with when they reached the edge of theorics?”

  “Yes,” Arsibalt said. “There was a profusion of them, right around the time of the Reconstitution, all variations on the theme of the polycosm.”

  “The idea that our cosmos is not the only one.”

  “Yes. And that’s what Paphlagon writes about when he isn’t studying this cosmos.”

  “Now I’m a little confused,” I said, “because I thought you told me just a minute ago that he was working on the HTW.”

  “Well, but you could think of Protism—the belief that there is another realm of existence populated by pure theorical forms—as the earliest and simplest polycosmic theory,” he pointed out.

  “Because it posits two cosmi,” I said, trying to keep up, “one for us, and one for isosceles triangles.”

  “Yes.”

  “But the polycosmic theories I’ve heard about—the circa-Reconstitution ones—are a whole different kettle of fish. In those theories, there are multiple cosmi separate from our own—but similar. Full of matter and energy and fields. Always changing. Not
eternal triangles.”

  “Not always as similar as you think,” Arsibalt said. “Paphlagon is part of a tradition that believed that classical Protism was just another polycosmic theory.”

  “How could you possibly—”

  “I can’t tell you without telling you everything,” Arsibalt said, holding up his fleshy hands. “The point I’m getting at is that he believes in some form of the Hylaean Theoric World. And that there are other cosmi. Those are the topics Suur Aculoä is interested in.”

  “So if the HIFOSA really exists—” I said.

  “He or she summoned Paphlagon because the polycosm somehow became a hot topic.”

  “And we are guessing that whatever made it hot, also triggered the closure of the starhenge.”

  Arsibalt shrugged.

  “Well, what could that possibly be?”

  He shrugged again. “That’s one for you and Jesry. But don’t forget that the Panjandrums might simply be confused.”

  Finally one day I made it down into the sub-cellar of Shuf’s Dowment and spent three hours watching Sammann eat lunches. He made the trip almost every day, but not always at the same time. If the weather was fine and the time of day was right, he would sit on the parapet, spread out some food on a little cloth, and enjoy the view while he ate. Sometimes he read a book. I couldn’t identify all of his little morsels and delicacies, but they looked better than what we had for lunch. Sometimes, if the wind blew out of the northeast, we could smell the Ita cooking. It always seemed as if they were taunting us.

  “Results!” I proclaimed to Lio the next time I was alone with him in the meadow. “Sort of.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You were right, I think.”

  “Right about what?” For so much time had passed that he had forgotten our earlier talk about Sammann. I had to remind him. Then, he was taken aback. “Wow,” he said, “this is big.”

  “Could be. I still don’t know what to make of it,” I said.

  “What does he do? Hold up a sign in front of the Eye? Use sign language?”

  “Sammann’s too clever for that,” I said.

  “What? It sounds like you’re speaking of an old friend.”

  “I almost feel that way about him by this point. He and I have had a lot of lunches together.”

  “So, how does he—did he—talk to you?”

  “For the first sixty-eight days, he’s a real bore,” I said. “Then on Day Sixty-nine, something happens.”

  “Day Sixty-nine? What does that mean to the rest of us?”

  “Well, it’s about two weeks after the solstice and nine days before Orolo got Thrown Back.”

  “Okay. So what does Sammann do on Day Sixty-nine?”

  “Well, normally, when he gets to the top of the stair, he unslings a bag from his shoulder and hangs it around a stone knob that sticks up from the parapet there. He cleans the optics. Then he goes over and sits on the parapet—it has a flat top about a foot wide—and takes his lunch out of that bag and spreads it out there and eats it.”

  “Okay. What happens on Day Sixty-nine?”

  “In addition to the shoulder bag, he is carrying something cradled in one arm like a book. The first thing he does is set this down on the parapet. Then he goes about his usual routine.”

  “So it’s sitting there in plain view of the Eye.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Can you zoom in on it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you read its title?”

  “Turns out it’s not a book at all, Lio. It is another dust jacket—just like the one Sammann found up there the first day. Except this one is big and heavy because it contains—”

  “Another tablet!” Lio exclaimed, then paused to consider it. “I wonder what that means.”

  “Well, we have to assume he had just picked it up elsewhere in the starhenge.”

  “He doesn’t leave it there, I assume.”

  “No, when he’s finished eating he takes it with him.”

  “I wonder why he’d choose that day of all days to snatch a tablet.”

  “Well, I’m thinking it must have been around Day Sixty-nine that Fraa Spelikon’s investigation of Orolo really began to pick up steam. Now, you might remember that when I sneaked up there during the Anathem, on Day Seventy-eight, I checked the M & M—”

  “And found it empty,” Lio said with a nod. “So. On Day Sixty-nine, Spelikon probably ordered Sammann to fetch the tablet that Orolo had left in the M & M. Which Sammann did. But Spelikon didn’t know about the one you’d put in Clesthyra’s Eye, so he didn’t ask for it.”

  “But Sammann knew,” I reminded him. “He had noticed it on Day Two.”

  “And had made up his mind not to tell Spelikon. But on Day Sixty-nine he didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d just grabbed Orolo’s tablet.” Lio shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he risk letting you know that?”

  I threw up my hands. “Maybe it’s not such a risk for him. He’s already Ita. What can they do to him?”

  “Good point. They can’t be nearly as afraid of the Warden Regulant as we are.”

  I was a little bit irritated to be reminded that we were afraid, but, considering all of the skulking around I’d been doing lately, I couldn’t argue.

  I’d been getting better, I realized. Recovering from the loss of Fraa Orolo. Forgetting how sad and angry I was. And when Lio mentioned the Warden Regulant, it reminded me.

  Anyway, there was a long silence now as Lio assimilated all of this. We actually got some work done. On the weeds I mean.

  “Well,” he finally said, “what happens after that?”

  “Day Seventy, cloudy. Day Seventy-one, snowing. Day Seventy-two, snowing. Can’t see anything because the lens is covered. Day Seventy-three, it’s brilliant weather. Most of the snow has melted off by the time Sammann gets there. He cleans the place up and has lunch. He’s wearing goggles.”

  “Like sunglasses?”

  “Bigger and thicker.”

  “Like what mountain climbers wear?”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “Actually, I had to watch Day Seventy-three several times before I got it.”

  “Got what?” Lio asked. “It was bright, there was snow, he wore dark goggles.”

  “Really dark,” I said. “I don’t think that these were ordinary goggles like an outdoorsman would wear. I’ve seen these goggles before, Lio. When I saw Cord and Sammann in the machine hall, during Apert, they were wearing these things to shield their eyes from the arc. An arc that’s as bright as the sun.”

  “But why would Sammann suddenly start wearing such a getup to clean the lenses?”

  “He doesn’t actually have them on while he’s cleaning. They’re dangling around his neck on a strap,” I said. “Then he puts them on and eats his lunch as usual. But the entire time that he’s eating, he’s staring directly into the sun. Sammann is watching the sun.”

  “And he never did this before Day Sixty-nine?”

  “Nope. Never.”

  “So do you think that he learned something—?”

  “Something from Fraa Orolo’s tablet, maybe?” I said. “Or something Spelikon told him? Or perhaps scuttlebutt from other Ita in other concents, talking, or whatever they do, over the Reticulum?”

  “Why watch the sun? That is completely off the track of what you have been doing, isn’t it?”

  “Completely. But it’s something. It is a big fat hint. A gift from Sammann.”

  “So, have you started looking at the sun too?”

  “I don’t have goggles,” I reminded him, “but I do have twenty-odd clear sunny days recorded on that tablet. So starting tomorrow I can at least look at what the sun was doing three and four months ago.”

  * * *

  Big Three: The Concents of Saunt Muncoster, Saunt Tredegarh, and Saunt Baritoe, which are geographically close to one another and which have numerous characteristics in common, e.g., founded in 0 A.R., relatively populous,
richly endowed, and enjoying high status for past achievements.

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

  The next morning, after a theorics lecture, Jesry and Tulia and I went talking in the meadow. It was the first really fine spring day and everyone was out walking around, so it felt as though we could do this without being conspicuous.

  “I think I found the IFOSA,” Tulia announced.

  “You mean the HIFOSA,” Jesry corrected her.

  “No,” I said, “if Tulia has found such a person, it is no longer Hypothetical.”

  “I stand corrected,” Jesry said. “Who is the Important Fid?”

  “Ignetha Foral,” Tulia said.

  “The surname sounds vaguely familiar,” Jesry said.

  “The family has been wealthy for a few hundred years, which makes them old and well-established by Saecular standards. They have a lot of ties to the mathic world—especially Baritoe.”

  Saunt Baritoe was adjacent to landforms that made a huge and excellent harbor when the sea level was behaving itself, when it wasn’t buried in pack ice, and when the river that emptied into it had not dried up or been diverted. For about a third of the time since the Reconstitution, a large city had existed around Baritoe’s walls—not always the same city, of course—and so it had the reputation of being urban and worldly, with many ties to families such as, apparently, the Forals. The Procians were powerful there, and in their Unarian math they trained many young Saeculars who later went into law, politics, and commerce.

  “What are we allowed to know of her?” Jesry asked.

  The question was aptly phrased. Once a year, at Annual Apert, our Unarians reviewed summaries of the Saecular news of the year just ended. Then, once every ten years, just before Decennial Apert, they reviewed the previous ten annual summaries and compiled a decennial summary, which became part of our library delivery. The only criterion for a news item to make it into a summary was that it still had to seem interesting. This filtered out essentially all of the news that made up the Saecular world’s daily papers and casts. Jesry was asking Tulia what Ignetha Foral had done that was interesting enough to have made it into the most recent Decennial summary.