Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Then awkwardness. It seemed appropriate to kiss her one more time. This went over well.

  “Now, are we going to talk about the fact that we have just discovered an alien spacecraft hiding in orbit around Arbre?” she asked in a tiny, coy voice—most unlike her. But she wasn’t as used to being in big trouble as I was and so I think she felt as though, on such questions, she had to defer to a hardened criminal.

  “To a few people. I’m pretty sure Lio’s down in the Fendant court. I’ll stop there and tell him—”

  “That works. We should go about separately, anyway, until our liaison is published.”

  Her agility in jumping between the love topic and the alien spacecraft was making me dizzy. Or perhaps giddy. “So I’ll meet you below later. We’ll spread the news to the others as we have opportunity.”

  “Bye,” she said. “Don’t forget your forbidden flower.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  Just like that she was gone down the ladder.

  I followed a minute later and found Lio in the reading room in the Fendant court. He was studying a book about a Praxic Age battle that had been conducted in the abandoned subway tunnels of a great city by two armies that had run out of ammunition and so had to fight with sharpened shovels. He looked at me blankly for a while. I must have looked even blanker. Then I realized that the recent events weren’t written on my face. I would actually have to communicate.

  “Incredible things have happened in the last hour,” I announced.

  “Such as?”

  I didn’t know what to say first but concluded that alien spaceships were a better topic for the Warden Fendant’s reading room. So I gave him a full account of that. He looked a little deranged until I got to the point about how the spark track curved, and mentioned plasma. Then his face snapped like a shutter. “I know what it is,” he said.

  He was so certain that doubting him never crossed my mind. Instead, I just wondered how he knew. “How can you—”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Okay. What is it?”

  For the first time he took his eyes off mine, and let his gaze wander around the reading room. “It might be here…or it might be in the Old Library. I’ll find it. I’ll show it to you later.”

  “Why don’t you simply tell me?”

  “Because you won’t believe me until I show it to you in a book that was written by someone else. That’s how weird it is.”

  “Okay,” I said. Then I added, “Congratulations!” since that seemed like the right thing to say.

  Lio slammed his book shut, stood up, turned his back on me, and headed for the stacks.

  Back at the Cloister I came to understand that things were going to move much more slowly than I wanted them to. I was on supper duty, so I spent the remainder of the afternoon in the kitchen. Ala and Tulia didn’t have to cook, but they did have to serve. While dumping a hot potato into my bowl Ala gave me a look that moved me in a way I won’t describe here. While burying it with stew Tulia gave me a look that proved Ala had told her everything. “The pinhole: nice!” I told her. Fraa Mentaxenes, who’d been nudging me in the kidney with his bowl, trying to get me to move faster, had no idea what I meant and only became more irritated.

  Lio didn’t show up for supper. Jesry was there, but I couldn’t talk to him because we were at a crowded table with Barb and several others. Arsibalt sat as far from us as he could, as had been his habit of late. After supper he was on cleanup duty. Jesry went off to a chalk hall to work with some of the other Edharians on a proof. Those guys might work until dawn. But I couldn’t have talked to him anyway because I had to corner Fraa Haligastreme and set up the little aut tomorrow where Ala and I would declare our liaison before witnesses and have it entered in the Chronicle.

  I did have time to work out where in the sky the sun had stood at two in the afternoon. After curfew, when the fids had gone to bed, I went out into the meadow alone, sat on a bench, and stared at that place in the sky for an hour, hoping I might get lucky and see a satellite pass through. Which was irrational, because if this spaceship could be seen with the naked eye, none of this intrigue would have been necessary. It was some combination of too small, too dark, and/or too high to bounce back enough light for our eyes to see it. But I needed to sit there alone for a while and stare into the black just to settle my thoughts. My brain zinged back and forth between the Two Topics for an hour. When I was totally exhausted I got up and crawled into a vacant cell where I slept soundly.

  Lio was in the Refectory at breakfast. When I caught his eye, he glanced significantly at a big old book he’d dug up: Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems.

  Cheerful.

  Jesry skipped breakfast. Afterward, Ala and I squandered most of the morning getting things ready for this afternoon. You could announce a Tivian liaison at the drop of a hat but for the Etrevanean each participant was supposed to discuss it first with an older fraa or suur. I was finishing that up when Provener rang. This was one of those increasingly rare days when my old team was supposed to wind the clock. I found the cell where Jesry was still asleep, yanked him off his pallet, and got him moving. We ended up sprinting to the Mynster, late as usual. But it felt good to have the team back together, after all that had been happening lately, and I enjoyed the simple physical work of winding the clock more than I’d used to.

  After, the four of us went to the Refectory to take the midday meal. But there was no question of talking about the spaceship there. Instead it was all about the aut that Ala and I were to celebrate later. Of all the team, I was the first to go so far as to join in such a liaison and so this was sort of like a rehearsal for a bachelor party. We became so loud and so funny (at least, we believed we were funny) that we were asked on two separate occasions to tone it down, and threatened with severe penance—which only made us louder and funnier.

  At some point during all of this I mentally stepped back from it all and took a moment to enjoy the looks on my friends’ faces and to reflect on everything that had been going on lately. And as part of that, I recollected that Orolo had been Thrown Back and that he was out there, somewhere, extramuros, trying to find his way. Which made me sad, and even brought back a spark of the old anger. But none of it stopped me from being happy with my friends. Part of this was the sheer thrill of what had happened with Ala. But part of it too was the growing certainty that Ala and Tulia and I had scored a victory over those like Spelikon and Trestanas who had locked us out of the starhenge and tried to control what we knew and what we thought about. We just needed to find a way to announce it that wouldn’t lead to my getting Thrown Back. I didn’t want to leave the concent any more. Not as long as Ala lived here.

  She and Tulia were nowhere to be seen, and before long we found out why: they had duties in the Mynster. Bells began to ring not long after we had finished eating. We sat and listened for a couple of minutes, trying to decipher the changes. But Barb had been memorizing these things and figured it out first. “Voco,” he announced, “the Saecular Power will Evoke one of us.”

  “Apparently Fraa Paphlagon couldn’t get the job done,” Jesry cracked, as we were draining our beers.

  “Or he’s calling for reinforcements,” Lio suggested.

  “Or he had a heart attack,” said Arsibalt. Lately he had been full of gloomy ideas like this, and so the rest of us gave him dirty looks until he held up his hands in submission.

  We sauntered across the meadow to the Mynster. Even so, we got there in plenty of time, and ended up in the front row, closest to the screen. Voco continued ringing for some minutes after we arrived. Then the eight ringers filed down from their balcony and found places farther back. A choir of Hundreders came out into the chancel and began a monophonic chant. I thought of going back to be near Ala but it was part of the Discipline that you didn’t engage in any of that clingy couple-like behavior before your liaison was published, so it would have to wait for a few more hou
rs.

  This time Statho didn’t have any Inquisitors with him, as he’d had during Fraa Paphlagon’s Voco. He went through the opening rounds of the rite as before, and for the first time since the bells had begun to ring, it sank in that this was for real. I wondered which avout we would say goodbye to—whether it would be one of us Tenners this time, or someone like Fraa Paphlagon whom we’d never met because they were of a different math.

  By the time Statho reached the place in the aut where he was to call out the name of the Evoked, I had become quite anxious. The Mynster was as silent as that sub-basement beneath Shuf’s Dowment. So I almost wanted to scream when he chose that moment to pause and fumble around in his vestment. He took out a page that had been folded in on itself and sealed shut with a dollop of beeswax. It took him forever to pick the thing open. He unfolded it, held it up in front of his face, and looked astonished.

  It was such an awkward moment that even he felt the need to explain. He announced, “There are six names!”

  Pandemonium was the wrong word to describe a few hundred avout standing still and muttering to each other, but it conveys the right feeling. A single Voco was rare enough. Six at a stroke had never happened—or had it? I looked at Arsibalt. He read my mind. “No,” he whispered, “not even for the Big Nugget.”

  I looked at Jesry. “This is it!” he told me. Meaning the something different he’d been waiting for.

  Statho cleared his throat and waited for the murmuring to subside.

  “Six names,” he went on. The Mynster now became silent again, except for the faint wail of police sirens outside the Day Gate, and the rumble of engines. “One of them is no longer among us.”

  “Orolo,” I said. About a hundred others said it at the same time. Statho’s face reddened. “Voco,” he called, but his voice choked up and he had to swallow before trying it again. “Voco Fraa Jesry of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math.”

  Jesry turned and socked me on the shoulder, hard enough to leave a charley horse that would still ache three days later. Something to remember him by. Then he turned his back on us and walked out of our lives.

  “Suur Bethula of the Edharian chapter of the Centenarian math…Fraa Athaphrax of the same…Fraa Goradon of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math…and Suur Ala of the New Circle, Decenarians.”

  By the time I had regained consciousness she was already on the threshold of the door through the screen. She was as shocked as I was. Tears began to run out of her eyes as she hesitated, there, and looked my way.

  When I’d watched Fraa Paphlagon step out, all those months ago, I’d understood clearly that no one in this place would ever see him again. The same thing was now happening to Ala. But it didn’t sink in. The only thing that got through to me was the look on her face.

  They told me later I knocked two people down as I made my way over to her.

  She hooked an elbow over my neck and kissed me on the lips, then pressed her wet cheek against mine for an instant.

  When Fraa Mentaxenes closed the door between us, I looked down to discover a rolled-up page stuck in my bolt. It was perforated with tiny holes. By the time I’d finished taking that in, and stepped forward to put my face to the screen, Jesry, Bethula, Athaphrax, Goradon, and Ala had already walked out the same way that Paphlagon and Orolo had gone before. Everyone was singing except for me.

  * * *

  Terrible Events: A worldwide catastrophe, poorly documented, but generally assumed to have been the fault of humans, that terminated the Praxic Age and led immediately to the Reconstitution.

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

  “You see what I mean,” Lio said, “that it’s so crazy, you wouldn’t have believed me unless I showed it to you in a book.”

  He and I, Arsibalt, Tulia, and Barb were all sitting around the big table at Shuf’s Dowment. Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems was sprawled out like an autopsy. We were looking at a double-ended foldout. It had taken us a quarter of an hour just to get the thing unfurled without tearing the ancient leaves: real paper made in a factory. We were looking at a huge, exquisitely detailed diagram of a spaceship. At one end, it sported a proper nose cone, as a rocket should. Everything else about it looked weird. It did not have engines per se. At the aft end, where the nozzle bells of a proper rocket ought to be, there was instead a broad flat disk, looking like a pedestal on which the vessel might be stood upright. Forward of that were several stout columns that ran up to what I assumed was the spaceship proper: the family of rounded pressure vessels sheltered beneath that nose cone.

  “Shock absorbers,” Lio said, pointing to the columns, “except bigger.” He drew our attention to a tiny hole in the center of the big disk astern. “This is where it would spit out the atomic bombs, one after another.”

  “That’s the part I still can’t get my mind to accept.”

  “Have you ever heard of those Deolaters who walk barefoot over hot coals to show that they have supernatural powers?” He looked over toward the hearth. We’d lit a fire there. Not that we needed one. We had a couple of windows cracked open to admit a fresh green-scented breeze that was blowing in over the young clover in the meadow. Sad songs were carried on that air. Most of the avout were so shocked by the six-fold Voco that to make music about it was all that they could do. Those of us in this room had another way to come to terms with our loss, but only because we knew things that the others didn’t. We’d lit the fire as soon as we’d arrived, not to keep warm but as a primitive way to get some comfort. It was what humans had done, long before Cnoüs, long before even language, to claim a bit of space in a dark universe that they did not understand and that was wont to claim their family and friends suddenly and forever. Lio went over to that fire and assaulted a glowing log with a poker until he had knocked off several lumps of glowing charcoal. He raked one of these out onto the stones. It was about the size of a nut, and red hot.

  I was already getting nervous.

  “Raz,” he said, “would you put this in your pocket and carry it around?”

  “I don’t have pockets,” I joked.

  No one laughed.

  “Sorry,” I said. “No, if I had a pocket I would not put that into it.”

  Lio spat into the palm of his left hand, then put the fingertips of his right into the pool of saliva. He then used them to pick up that coal. There were sizzling noises. We cringed. He calmly tossed the coal back into the fire, then slapped his hot fingertips against his thigh a few times. “Slight discomfort. No damage,” he announced. “The noise was spit being vaporized by the heat of the coal. Now imagine that the plate on the back of that ship was coated with something that served the same purpose.”

  “The same purpose as spit?” Barb asked.

  “Yes. It was vaporized by the plasma from the atomic bombs, and as it expanded into space, it would spank that plate. The shock absorbers would even out the impact and turn it into steady thrust so that the people up at the forward end would feel nice smooth acceleration.”

  “It’s just hard to imagine being that close to an atomic bomb going off,” Tulia said. “And not just one, but a whole series of them.”

  Her voice sounded pretty raw. All of ours did, except for Barb’s. He’d been perusing the book earlier. “They were special bombs. Really tiny,” he said, making a circle of his arms to show their size. “Designed not to blow out in all directions but to spew a lot of plasma in one direction—toward that ship.”

  “I too find it unfathomable,” Arsibalt volunteered, “but I vote we suspend our disbelief and move forward. The evidence is before us, in this”—he gestured toward the book—“and this.” He rested his hand on the sheet that Ala had pinpricked the day before. Then he looked stricken. I think he had seen something on my face, or Tulia’s, or both. For us, this leaf was now like one of the mementoes of bygone Saunts that the avout cherished in reliquaries.

  “Perhaps,” Arsibalt said, “it is too early for us to have this discussion
. Perhaps—”

  “Perhaps it’s too late!” I said. Which earned me a grateful look from Tulia, and seemed to settle it for everyone.

  “I’m surprised—pleasantly—you’re here at all, Arsibalt,” I said.

  “You are referring to my, ah, apparent skittishness of recent weeks.”

  “Your words, not mine,” I said, working to keep a straight face.

  He raised his eyebrows. “I do not recall—do you?—any diktat from the hierarchs to the effect that we must not make tiny holes in pieces of foil and allow the light of the sun to fall on paper. Our position is unassailable.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said. “I almost feel a little let down that we are no longer breaking any rules.”

  “I know it must be an odd sensation for you, Fraa Erasmas, but you may get used to it after a while.”

  Barb didn’t get the joke. We had to explain it. He still didn’t get it.

  “So I wonder if—perhaps—one of these ships went missing,” Tulia said.

  “Went missing?” Lio repeated.

  “Like—its crew mutinied and they headed out for parts unknown. Now, thousands of years later, their descendants have returned.”

  “It might not even be their descendants,” Arsibalt pointed out.

  “Because of Relativity!” Barb exclaimed.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Come to think of it, if the ship could travel at relativistic velocity, they might have gone on a round-trip journey that lasted a few decades to them—but thousands of years to us.”

  Everyone loved this hypothesis. We had already made up our minds it must be true. There was only one problem. “None of these ships was ever built,” Lio said.

  “What!?”

  He looked as if we were about to blame him for it. “It was just a proposal. These are nothing more than conceptual drawings from very late in the Praxic Age.”

  “Just before the Terrible Events!” Barb footnoted.

  We were all silent for a while. It takes time and effort to tear down and stow away an idea you were that excited about.