Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  In a stroke I had been Thrown Back by every young female in the math. All the girls seemed to be aghast, all the time, because that was the look that would come over every girl’s face when she saw me.

  The thing grew over time. If Ala had simply written up an account of what I’d done and stapled it to my chest, it wouldn’t have been so bad; but because the amount of information about what I had done was exactly zero, people’s imaginations went crazy. Young suurs cringed away from me. Older ones glared at me through supper. It doesn’t matter what you did, young man…we know you did something.

  I did not see Ala again for four days, which was statistically improbable. It suggested that other suurs were acting as lookouts, tracking my movements so that they could tell Ala where not to be.

  Arsibalt was so rattled that he could hardly speak until three days later, when he came to supper all dirty, and told me in a whisper that he had dug up the tablet from where Jesry and I had buried it (“ridiculously easy to find”) and hid it in a much better place (“safe and sound”).

  Jesry and I knew better than to try to find any object that Arsibalt considered to be safe and sound. All we could do was wait for him to calm down.

  I figured out why I never saw Ala: she and Tulia were spending an inordinate amount of time at the Mynster, doing some maintenance on the bells, practicing weird changes, and passing their knowledge down to the younger girls who would eventually replace them.

  Sunny days came more frequently. I could look up to the top of the spire sometimes and see Sammann eating his lunch and staring fixedly into the sun through his goggles. Jesry and I discussed smoking a pane of glass and using it to do likewise, but we knew that if we did it wrong we’d go blind. I even contemplated going over the wall, running off to the machine hall, and borrowing a welding mask from Cord. But all of these were really nothing more than distractions to get my mind off the Ala problem. Early on, I had thought of this as a matter of salvaging my reputation. But as time went by, and I thought about it harder, the real nature of the thing became clear: I had made a mess inside of someone else’s soul at a moment when that soul had been open to me. Now it was closed. I was the only one who could clean up the mess; but in order to do this I first had to get in there. And I had no idea how, especially in the case of someone as fierce as Ala.

  But it occurred to me, one day, as I was pursuing the weed project, that unilateral disarmament might work with someone like her. The work Lio and I had been doing along the riverbank was bringing me into contact with many spring wildflowers. The girls were up in the Mynster doing maintenance on the belfry. Suddenly it all seemed obvious. I put the plan into motion before I’d really thought it through. Ten minutes later I was sleep-walking up the Mynster stairs with a bunch of flowers on my arm, covered under a fold of my bolt because one of them was of the Eleven and I was about to carry it straight through the Warden Regulant’s court.

  The portcullis was still locked down, the stair up the buttress inaccessible, the upper Praesidium off limits. Our carillon was in the lower reaches of the chronochasm, reachable by a ladder that ran up from the Fendant court. This route dead-ended in a sort of maintenance shack just below the carillon; you couldn’t go any higher up the Praesidium that way, so I could go there without arousing any concern that I might be attempting to look at the forbidden sky.

  The bells themselves were open to the weather. Below them was this shack that sheltered some of the machinery that made the bells ring. I could hear Ala and Tulia up there talking. The ladder led up to a trapdoor in its floor. My heart was bonging like a bell as I climbed; I gripped the rungs hard so I wouldn’t fall off. I’d stuffed the flowers into my bolt to leave both hands free, and now I was sweating all over the blossoms. Disgusting. Ala laughed at some witty remark of Tulia’s. I was happy to hear that she was capable of laughter, then chagrined, in a weird way, that she’d already gotten over me.

  There was no way to make a smooth entrance. I shoved the trapdoor up and out of my way. The girls became silent. I heaved the bouquet through the aperture and dumped it on the floor to one side, thinking that this would make a more favorable first impression than my face, which of late had practically made young females run screaming. But this was only delaying the inevitable. My face was attached to the rest of me. It and I would have to arrive together. I poked the sorry thing up through the door and looked around, but couldn’t see a thing; the shack had windows, but they’d been covered. The girls, however, recognized me with their dark-adjusted eyes, and became even more silent, if such a thing is possible. I hauled the rest of me up through the door.

  Tulia made her sphere emit light. She and Ala were sitting side by side on the floor, leaning back against the wall. I wondered why. But I was leery of opening my mouth for any purpose other than the one at hand. So I knelt to one side of the trapdoor and regathered the bouquet. This gave me a few moments to realize I had no plan and nothing to say. But having grown up with Suur Ala and knowing how she reacted to things, I reckoned I couldn’t go wrong asking permission. “Ala, I would like to give you these, if it wouldn’t kill you.”

  At least one of them inhaled. Neither raised an objection. The place was larger than I imagined, but so cluttered with beams and shafts I wasn’t certain I could stand up, so I knee-walked over to where they were sitting. Something brushed past me—a bat? But the next time I took a count of persons in the room—which was much later—there were only two of us. So it must have been Tulia teleporting herself out of the place like a space captain in a speely.

  “Thank you,” Ala said—guardedly. “Did you carry these things up through the Regulant court? I guess you must have.”

  “I did,” I said. “Why?” Though I already knew why.

  “This one here is Saunt Chandera’s Bane, isn’t it?”

  “Saunt Chandera’s Bane makes a weird-looking blossom around this time of year, which I have decided is beautiful.” I was getting ready to make an analogy to Ala’s appearance but faltered, wondering how to phrase the part about her being kind of weird-looking.

  “But it’s one of the Eleven!”

  “I’m aware of it,” I said, getting a little tense, as she had broken into my analogy only to start a dispute. “Look, I put it there because it’s forbidden. And this thing between you and me—this mess that I made—is all about something else that’s forbidden.”

  “I can’t believe you carried this right up the stairs under the nose of the Inquisition.”

  “Okay. Now that you mention it, it was pretty stupid.”

  “That wasn’t the word I was going to use,” she said. “Thanks for bringing these.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “If you sit next to me I’ll show you something I’ll bet you never expected,” she said. And here I was pretty sure there wasn’t a double meaning. By the time I’d gotten myself seated in Tulia’s former spot, Ala had already climbed to her feet—she could stand up in here, at least—and padded over to the trapdoor, which Tulia had left open. Ala closed it. She sat next to me and extinguished her light. It was totally dark in here now. Totally dark, that is, except for a single splotch of white light, about the size of the palm of Ala’s hand, that seemed to hover in space just in front of us. I didn’t imagine that this was a coincidence; the girls had been sitting here because of the splotch of light. I reached out and explored it with my right hand (the left, curiously, was beyond use, as it had somehow ended up around Ala’s shoulders). There was a plank leaning against the wall, with a blank leaf pinned to it, and the light-splotch was being projected against that leaf. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see that the splotch was round. Perfectly circular, in fact.

  “Do you remember the total eclipse of 3680 when we made a camera obscura so we could see it without burning our eyes?”

  “A box,” I recalled, “with a pinhole at one end and a sheet of white paper at the other.”

  “Tulia and I have been spring cleaning up here,” she said. “We not
iced these patches of sunlight moving around on the floor and the walls. They were shining through from an old opening up high in the wall, over thataway.” She squirmed as she pointed invisibly in the dark, and somehow ended up closer to me. “We think it was put there to ventilate the place, then boarded up because bats were getting in. The light was leaking in through chinks between the boards. We fixed it—almost.”

  “That ‘almost’ being a nice neat little pinhole?”

  “Exactly, and we set up the screen down here. We have to move it, obviously, as the sun moves across the sky.”

  Ala could insert the word obviously into an otherwise polite sentence like nobody’s business. I’d spent more than half of my life being sporadically annoyed by it. Here, finally, I let it go. I was too busy admiring the cleverness of Tulia and Ala. I wished I’d thought of this. You didn’t need a lens or a mirror of ground and polished glass to see things far away. A simple pinhole could serve as well. The image that it cast was faint, though, and so you had to view it in a dark room—a camera obscura.

  Apparently Tulia had told Ala everything about the tablet, about Sammann, and about my observations. But it seemed like years since I had cared about that stuff as much as I cared about fixing my mess. In fact, as we sat there in the dark together I was finding it difficult to muster even the least bit of interest in the sun. It was shining. Photosynthesis was safe. There were no major flares, and only a few spots. Who cared?

  It was even harder to care a few minutes later. Kissing was not a subject taught in chalk halls. We had to learn by trial and error. Even the errors were not too bad.

  “A spark,” Ala said—muffled somewhat—a while later.

  “I’ll say!”

  “No, I thought I saw a spark.”

  “I’m told it’s normal to see stars at times like this—”

  “Don’t flatter yourself!” she said, and heaved me aside. “I just saw another one.”

  “Where?”

  “On the screen.”

  Somewhat bleary-eyed, I turned my attention to it. Nothing was on that page except the same pale-white disk.

  And…a spark. A pinprick of light, brighter than the sun, gone before I could be certain it was there.

  “I think—”

  “There it is again!” she exclaimed. “It moved a little though.”

  We watched a few more. She was right. All of the sparks were below and to the right of the sun’s disk. But each one was slightly higher and farther to the left. If you plotted them on the page, they’d form a line aimed right at the sun.

  What would Orolo do? “We need a pen,” I said.

  “Don’t have one,” she said. “They’re coming about once a second. Maybe faster.”

  “Is there anything sharp?”

  “The pins!” Ala and Tulia had used four stick-pins to fix the page to the plank. I worried one loose and let it tumble into her warm little hand.

  “I’m going to hold the plank still. You poke a hole in the page wherever you see a spark,” I said.

  We missed a few more while we were getting ourselves arranged. I knelt to one side, bracing the plank against the wall with my hand, holding its base steady with my knee. She threw herself down on her belly and propped herself up on her elbows, her face so close to the page that I could see her eyes and the curve of her cheek in the faint illumination scattering from the page. She was the most beautiful girl in the concent.

  I saw the next spark reflected in her eye. Up came her hand as she poked it on the page.

  “It would be really good if we knew the exact time,” I said.

  Poke. “In a few minutes this is,” poke, “going to migrate off the page, obviously.” Poke. “Then we can run out and look at,” poke, “the clock.” Poke.

  “Notice anything funny about these sparks?” Poke.

  “They’re not instant on-off.” Poke. “They flare up quickly,” poke, “but fade slowly.” Poke.

  “I was referring to the color.” Poke.

  “Kind of blue-y?” Poke.

  A sudden grinding noise nearly gave me a heart attack. It was the belfry’s automatic mechanism going into action. The clock was striking two. At this time it would have been traditional to plug one’s ears. I didn’t dare; Ala would have assailed me with that jabbing pin. Poke…poke…poke…

  “So much for knowing the time,” I said, when I thought she might be able to hear again.

  “I made a triple hole on the spark that came closest to the stroke of two,” she said.

  “Perfect.”

  “I think it’s been curving,” she said.

  “Curving?”

  “Like—whatever makes these sparks isn’t moving in a straight line. It is changing its course,” she said. “It’s obviously flying between us and the sun—it’s passing right across the sun’s disk, at the moment. But the line of pinholes doesn’t look straight to me.”

  “Well, assuming it’s in orbit, that’s really weird,” I said. “It ought to go straight.”

  “Unless it’s in the act of changing its course,” she insisted. “Maybe these sparks are something to do with its propulsion system.”

  “I remember now where I’ve seen that shade of blue before,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Cord’s shop. They have a machine that uses plasma to cut metal. The light that comes from it is that shade of blue. The same as a hot star.”

  “It’s passing off the edge of the sun’s disk,” she said. Then: “Hey!”

  “Hey what?”

  “It stopped.”

  “No more sparks?”

  “No more sparks. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, before I move this thing, make some pinpricks around the edge of the disk of the sun, so we know where it stood in relation to all this. Between that and the time—we can find this thing!”

  “Find it how?”

  “We can work out where in the sky the sun stood at two p.m. on this day of the year. That is, which of the so-called fixed stars it’s passing in front of. This plasma-spark thing that we were tracking—it was in the same place. That means that unless it changes its orbit again, it will pass over the same fixed stars on each orbit. We can find it in the sky.”

  “But it seems to have no difficulty changing its orbit,” said Ala, meticulously outlining the sun’s disk with a series of closely spaced pinpricks.

  “But part of the puzzle we’ve failed to understand until now—maybe—is that it only does so when it’s passing near the sun. So as long as we have this camera obscura, we can be on the lookout for that.”

  “Why should the sun’s position make any difference?”

  “I think it’s hiding,” I said. “If it did what it just did in the night sky, anyone could see it with the naked eye.”

  “But we were able to detect it with a pinhole and a sheet of paper!” Ala pointed out. “So it’s a pretty ineffective way to hide.”

  “And Sammann can apparently see it with welding goggles,” I said. “But the difference is that people like you and me and Sammann are…”

  “Are what?” she said. “Knowledgeable?”

  “Yeah. And whoever, or whatever this thing is, it doesn’t or they don’t care if knowledgeable people know they are up there. They are letting their existence be known to us—”

  “Which the Saecular Power doesn’t like—”

  “Which is why Orolo got Thrown Back for looking at it.”

  It took us a while to get out of there. Too much was going on. I rolled up the page and stuck it inside my bolt. Ala picked up the bunch of flowers. This reminded me of why I’d come up here in the first place and of what we’d been doing before Ala had noticed the sparks. I felt like a jerk for letting this slip my mind. By that time, though, Ala had remembered about the Saunt Chandera’s Bane and was wondering what to do with it. So we traded; I gave her the chart and she gave me the flowers so that I could accept the risk of sneaking them back down.

  “What should we do next?
” I wondered out loud.

  “About…?”

  We had opened the trapdoor. There was plenty of light. I was about to blurt “what we just saw” when I noticed a look on her face—steeling herself to get hurt again. I think I stopped myself just in time.

  “Do you want to—should we—” I began, then closed my eyes and just said it. “I think we should be honest about this in front of everyone.”

  “I’m fine with that,” she said.

  “I’ll set it up for tomorrow, I guess. After Provener.”

  “I’ll tell Tulia,” she said, and something about the way she pronounced that name informed me that she knew everything; she knew I’d once had a crush on her best friend. “Who do you want as your witness?”

  I had been about to say Lio, but Jesry had been such a jerk about this that I decided he had to be the one. “And our free witness can just be Haligastreme or whoever is handy,” I said.

  “What kind of liaison are we to publish?” she asked.

  This was not a difficult question. Liaisons were supposed to be announced when they were formed and when they were dissolved. It was a way to curtail gossip and intrigue, which could so easily run rampant in a math. The Concent of Saunt Edhar recognized several types. The least serious was Tivian. The most serious—Perelithian—was equivalent to marriage. That was out of the question for two kids of our age who’d hated each other’s guts until forty-five minutes ago. If I said Tivian, Ala would throw me out the trapdoor to my death, and I’d spend the last four seconds of my life wishing I’d said Etrevanean.

  “Could you stand having people know that you were in an Etrevanean liaison with that big jerk Fraa Erasmas?”