Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  Statho Evoked seventeen.

  “Lio.”

  “Tulia.”

  “Erasmas.”

  “Arsibalt.”

  “Tavener.” And some other Tenners.

  I stepped over the threshold into the chancel—a step I’d taken thousands of times to wind the clock. But when I wound the clock I always knew that a few minutes later Fraa Mentaxenes would open the door again. This time, I turned my back on three hundred faces I’d never see again—unless they got Evoked and sent to—well—wherever I was being sent.

  I found myself with several I knew well, and some who were strangers to me: Hundreders.

  The intonation of the names stopped. There had been so many that I’d lost count, and supposed we were finished. I looked at Statho, expecting him to move on to the next phase of the aut. He was staring at the list in his hand. His expression was difficult to read: his face and body had gone stiff. He blinked slowly and shifted the list toward the nearest candle as if having trouble reading it. He seemed to be scanning the same line over and over. Finally he forced himself to raise his gaze, and looked directly across the chancel at the Millenarians’ screen.

  “Voco,” he said, but it came out husky and he had to clear his throat. “Voco Fraa Jad of the Millenarians.”

  Everything got quiet; or maybe it was blood raging in my ears.

  There was a long wait. Then the door in the Thousanders’ screen creaked open to reveal the silhouette of an old fraa. He stood there for a moment waiting for the dust to clear—that door didn’t get opened very often. Then he stepped out into the chancel. Someone closed the door behind him.

  Statho said a few more words to formally Evoke us. We said the words to answer the call. The avout behind the screens took up their anathem of mourning and farewell. All of them sang their hearts out. The Thousanders shook the Mynster with a mighty croaking bass line, so deep you felt more than heard it. That, even more than the singing of my Decenarian family, made the hairs prickle on my scalp, made my nose run and my eyes sting. The Thousanders were going to miss Fraa Jad and they were making sure he knew it in his bones.

  I looked straight up, just as Paphlagon and Orolo had. The light of the candles only penetrated a short distance up the well. But I wasn’t really doing this in an attempt to see something. I was doing it to prevent a deluge from running out of my nostrils and my eyes.

  The others were moving around me. I lowered my chin to see what was happening. A junior hierarch was leading us out.

  “There’s a hypothesis, you know, that we just get taken to a gas chamber now,” Arsibalt muttered.

  “Shut up,” I said. Not wanting to hear any more in this vein from him, I lingered, and let him go well ahead of me. Which took a while since he had made half of his bolt into a sack and was lugging a small library.

  The hierarchs, all formally robed in purple, led us down the center aisle of the empty north nave and from there to the narthex just inside the Day Gate. We congregated below the Great Orrery. The Day Gate had been opened, but the plaza beyond was empty. No aerocraft was waiting for us there. No buses. Not even a pair of roller skates.

  Junior hierarchs were circulating through the group handing things out. I got a shopping bag from a local department store. Inside were a pair of dungarees, a shirt, drawers, socks, and, on the bottom, a pair of walking shoes. A minute later I was handed a knapsack. Inside was a water bottle, a poly bag containing toiletries, and a money card.

  There was also a wristwatch. It took me a while to understand why. Once we got more than a couple of miles from Saunt Edhar, we’d have no way of knowing the time.

  Suur Trestanas addressed us. “Your destination is the Concent of Saunt Tredegarh,” she announced.

  “Is it a Convox?” someone asked.

  “It is now,” she answered. This killed all discussion for a minute as everyone absorbed that news.

  “How are we to get there?” Tulia asked.

  “Any way you can,” said Trestanas.

  “What!?” That or some variation of it came from all of the Evoked at once. Part of the romance of Voco—a small consolation for being ripped away from everyone you knew—was that you got whisked away in some kind of vehicle, as Fraa Paphlagon had been. Instead of which we’d been issued walking shoes.

  “You are not to wear the bolt and the chord under the open sky, night or day,” Trestanas went on. “Spheres are to be kept fist-sized or smaller and not used to make light. You are not to walk out of this gate all together—we’ll have you emerge in groups of two or three. Later, if you want, you can meet up somewhere, away from the Concent. Preferably underneath something.”

  “What is the resolution of their surveillance?” Lio asked.

  “We have no idea.”

  “Saunt Tredegarh’s is two thousand miles away,” Barb mentioned. In case this was of interest. Which it was.

  “There are local organizations, connected with arks, that are trying to round up vehicles and drivers to get you there.”

  “Warden of Heaven people?” Arsibalt asked—he beat me to it.

  “Some of them,” Trestanas said.

  “No, thanks!” someone called out. “One of those people tried to convert me during Apert. Her arguments were pathetic.”

  “Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!” went someone very close to me.

  I turned and looked. It was Fraa Jad, standing behind me with his shopping bag and his knapsack. He wasn’t laughing that loudly, so no one else had noticed him. He smelled like smoke. He had not bothered to look into the shopping bag yet. He saw my head turn, and looked me in the eye—very amused. “The Powers That Be must be pissing their pants,” he said, “or whatever they wear nowadays.”

  Everyone else was too stunned by all that had happened to say much. Here I had an advantage: I had gotten used to being stunned. Like Lio was used to being punched in the head.

  I climbed up onto a stone bench that had been placed where visitors could sit on it and watch the orrery. “South of the concent, not far from the Century Gate, west of the river, there’s a great roof on stilts that straddles a canal. Next to it is a machine-hall. You can’t miss it. It’s the biggest structure in the neighborhood by far. We can meet there under cover. Go there in small groups, like Suur Trestanas said. We’ll convene there later and come up with a plan.”

  “What time shall we meet?” asked one of the Hundreders.

  I considered it.

  “Let’s meet when we—I mean, when they—ring Provener.”

  Part 6

  PEREGRIN

  Peregrin: (1) In ancient usage, the epoch beginning with the destruction of the Temple of Orithena in-2621 and ending several decades later with the flourishing of the Golden Age of Ethras. (2) A theor who survived Orithena and wandered about the ancient world, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of other such. (3) A Dialog supposedly dating to this epoch. Many were later written down and incorporated into the literature of the mathic world. (4) In modern usage, an avout who, under certain exceptional circumstances, leaves the confines of the math and travels through the Saecular world while trying to observe the spirit, if not the letter, of the Discipline.

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

  We took turns going into the men’s and women’s toilet chambers to change. The shoes immediately drove me crazy. I kicked them off and parked them under a bench, then found a clear place on the narthex floor where I could spread out my bolt and fold it up. That involved stooping and squatting—tricky, in dungarees. I couldn’t believe people wore this stuff their whole lives!

  Once I had my bolt reduced to a book-sized package, I wrapped my chord around it, put them into the department-store bag along with my balled-up sphere, and stuffed that into the bottom of the knapsack. Across the narthex, Lio was trying to perform some of his Vale-lore moves in his new clothes. He moved as if he’d just come down with a neurological disorder. Tulia’s clothes didn’t fit at all and she was negotiating a swap with one of the
Centenarian suurs.

  “Is this a Convox?”

  “It is now.”

  There had only been eight Convoxes. The first had coincided with the Reconstitution. After that, one had been held at each Millennium to compile the edition of the Dictionary that would be used for the next thousand years, and to take care of other business of concern to the Thousanders. There had been one for the Big Nugget and one at the end of each Sack.

  Barb became jumpy, then unruly, and then wild. None of the hierarchs knew what to make of him.

  “He doesn’t like change,” Tulia reminded me. The unspoken message: he’s your friend—he’s your problem.

  Barb didn’t like being crowded either, so Lio and I crowded him. We crowded him into a corner where Arsibalt was encamped with his stack of books.

  “Voco breaks the Discipline because the one Evoked goes forth alone, and from that point onward is immersed in the Saecular world,” Arsibalt intoned. “That’s why they can’t return. Convox is different. So many of us are taken at once that we can travel together and preserve the Discipline within our Peregrin group.”

  “Peregrin begins and ends at a math,” Barb said, suddenly calm.

  “Yes, Fraa Tavener.”

  “When we get to Saunt Tredegarh’s—”

  “We’ll celebrate the aut of Inbrase,” Arsibalt prompted him, “and—”

  “And then we’ll be together with other avout in the Convox,” Barb guessed.

  “And then—”

  “And then when we’re done doing whatever it is they want us to do, we make Peregrin back to Saunt Edhar,” Barb went on.

  “Yes, Fraa Tavener,” said Arsibalt. I could sense him fending off the temptation to add if we haven’t been incinerated by an alien death ray or gassed by the Warden of Heaven.

  Barb calmed down. It wouldn’t last. Once we left the Day Gate, we’d be contending with minor violations of the Discipline all the time. Barb would be certain to notice these and point them out. Why, oh why, had he been Evoked? He was just a brand-new fid! I was going to be babysitting him through the entire Convox.

  As the small hours of the morning passed, though, and the lapis sphere that represented Arbre in the orrery ticked slowly around, I settled down a little bit and remembered that half of what I now knew about theorics was thanks to Barb. What would it say about me if I ditched him?

  It was getting light outside. Half of the Evoked had already departed. The hierarchs were pairing Tenners with Hundreders because many of the latter would need help from the former in speaking Fluccish and coping with the Saeculum in general. Lio was summoned and went out with a couple of Hundreders. Arsibalt and Tulia were told to get ready.

  I couldn’t go out barefoot. My shoes were under a bench by the orrery. Fraa Jad had parked himself on that bench. Right above my shoes. His head was bent. His hands were folded in his lap. He must be doing some kind of profound Thousander meditation. If I disturbed him just so that I could fetch my shoes, he would turn me into a newt or something.

  No one else wanted to disturb him either. Tulia, then Arsibalt, left with Hundreders in tow. There were only three Evoked left: Barb, Jad, and I. Jad was still in his bolt and chord.

  Barb headed for Fraa Jad. I broke into a sprint, and caught up with him just as he arrived.

  “Fraa Jad must change clothes,” Barb announced, stretching his first-year Orth until it cracked.

  Fraa Jad looked up. Until now I had thought that his hands were folded together in his lap. Now I saw that he was holding a disposable razor, still encased in its colorful package. I had one just like it in my bag. It was a common brand. Fraa Jad was reading the label. The big characters were Kinagrams, which he would never have seen before, but the fine print was in the same alphabet that we used.

  “What principle explains the powers imputed by this document to the Dynaglide lubri-strip?” he asked. “Is it permanent, or ablative?”

  “Ablative,” I said.

  “It is a violation of the Discipline for you to be reading that!” Barb complained.

  “Shut up,” Fraa Jad said.

  “I don’t mean in any way to be disrespectful,” I tried, after a somewhat awkward and lengthy pause, “but—”

  “Is it time to leave?” Fraa Jad asked, and checked the orrery as if it were a wristwatch.

  “Yes.”

  Fraa Jad stood up and, in the same motion, stripped his bolt off over his head. Some of the hierarchs gasped and turned their backs. Nothing happened for a little while. I rummaged in his shopping bag and found a pair of drawers, which I handed to him.

  “Do I need to explain this?” I asked, pointing out the fly.

  Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. “Topology is destiny,” he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time. It was hard to estimate his age. His skin was loose and mottled, but he balanced perfectly on one leg, then the other, as he put on the drawers.

  The rest of getting Fraa Jad decent went by without notable incidents. I retrieved my shoes and tried once more to remember how to tie them. Barb seemed amazingly content to follow the command to shut up. I wondered why I had never tried this simple tactic with him before.

  Stumbling and shuffling in our shoes, hitching our trousers up from time to time, we walked out the Day Gate. The plaza was empty. We crossed the causeway between the twin fountains and entered into the burgers’ town. An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. Some casinos had gone up around the Olde Market, hoping to cater to people who wanted to visit it or who had business of one kind or another linked to the concent. But no one wanted to visit an Olde Market that was surrounded by casinos, and frankly the concent wasn’t that much of an attraction, so the casinos were looking dirty and forlorn. Sometimes at night we could hear music playing from dance halls in their basements but they were awfully quiet at the moment.

  “We can obtain breakfast in there,” Barb said.

  “Casino restaurants are expensive,” I demurred.

  “They have a breakfast buffet that you can go to for free. My father and I would eat there sometimes.”

  This made me sad but I could not dispute the logic, so I followed Barb and Jad followed me. The casino was a labyrinth of corridors that all looked the same. They saved money by keeping the lights dim and not washing the carpets; the mildew made us sneeze. We ended up in a windowless room below ground. Fleshy men, smelling like soap, sat alone or in pairs at tables. There was nothing to read. A speely display was mounted to the wall, showing feeds of news, weather, and sports. It was the first moving picture praxis that Fraa Jad had ever seen, and it took him some getting used to. Barb and I let him stare at it while we got food from the buffet. We put our trays down on a table and then I returned to Fraa Jad who was watching highlights of a ball game. A man at a nearby table was trying to draw him into conversation about one of the teams. Fraa Jad’s T-shirt happened to be emblazoned with the logo of the same team and this had caused the man to jump to a whole set of wrong conclusions. I got between Fraa Jad’s face and the speely and managed to break his concentration, then led him over to the buffet. Thousanders didn’t eat much meat because there wasn’t room to raise livestock on their crag. He seemed eager to make up for lost time. I tried to steer him toward cereal products but he knew what he wanted.

  While we were eating, a news feed came up on the speely showing a Mathic stone tower, seen from a distance, at night, lit from above by a grainy red glow. The scene was very much like what the Thousanders’ math had looked like last night. But the building on the feed was not one that I had ever seen.

  “That is the Millenarians�
� spire in the Concent of Saunt Rambalf,” Fraa Jad announced. “I have seen drawings of it.”

  Saunt Rambalf’s was on another continent. We knew little of it because it had no orders in common with ours. I’d run across the name recently, but I could not remember exactly where—

  “One of the three Inviolates,” Barb said.

  “Is that what you call us?” Jad asked.

  Barb was right. The Flying Wedge monument inside our Year Gate bore a plaque telling the story of the Third Sack and mentioning the three Thousander maths, in all the world, that had not been violated: Saunt Edhar, Saunt Rambalf, and—

  “Saunt Tredegarh is the third,” Barb continued.

  As if the speely were responding to his voice, we now saw an image of a math that seemed to have been carved into the face of a stone bluff. It too was illuminated from above by red light.

  “That’s odd,” I said. “Why would the aliens shine the light on the Three Inviolates? That is ancient history.”

  “They are telling us something,” said Fraa Jad.

  “What are they telling us? That they’re really interested in the history of the Third Sack?”

  “No,” said Fraa Jad, “they are probably telling us that they have figured out that Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh are where the Saecular Power stored all of the nuclear waste.”

  I was glad we were speaking Orth.

  We walked to a fueling station on the main road out of town and I bought a cartabla. They had them in different sizes and styles. The one I bought was about the size of a book. Its corners and edges were decorated with thick knobby pads meant to look like the tires of off-road vehicles. That’s because this cartabla was meant for people who liked that kind of thing. It contained topographic maps. Ordinary cartablas had different decorations and they only showed roads and shopping centers.

  When we got outside I turned it on. After a few seconds it flashed up an error message and then defaulted to a map of the whole continent. It didn’t indicate our position as it ought to have done.