Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

  “Hey,” I said to the attendant, back inside, “this thing’s busted.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Yes it is. It can’t fix our position.”

  “Oh, none of them can today. Believe me. Your cartabla works fine. Hey, it’s showing you the map, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “He’s right,” said another customer, a driver who had just pulled into the station in a long-range drummon. “The satellites are on the blink. Mine can’t get a fix. No one’s can.” He chuckled. “You just picked the wrong morning to buy a new cartabla!”

  “So, this started last night?”

  “Yeah, ’bout three in the morning. Don’t worry. The Powers That Be depend on those things! Military. Can’t get by without ’em. They’ll get it all fixed in no time.”

  “I wonder if it has anything to do with the red lights shining on the—on the clocks last night,” I said, just to see what they might say. “I saw it on the speely.”

  “That’s one of their festivals—it’s a ritual or something they do,” said the attendant. “That’s what I heard.”

  This was news to the other customer, and so I asked the attendant where he had heard it. He tapped a jeejah hanging on a lanyard around his neck. “Morning cast from my ark.”

  The natural question would now have been: Warden of Heaven? But showing more than the weakest curiosity might have pegged me as an escapee from a concent. So I just nodded and walked out of the fueling station. Then I started to lead Barb and Jad in the direction of the machine hall.

  “The aliens are jamming the nav satellites,” I announced.

  “Or maybe they just shot them down!” said Barb.

  “Let’s buy a sextant, then,” suggested Fraa Jad.

  “Those have not been made in four thousand years,” I told him.

  “Let’s build one then.”

  “I have no idea of all the parts and whatnot that go into a sextant.”

  He found this amusing. “Neither do I. I was assuming we would design it from first principles.”

  “Yeah!” snorted Barb. “It’s just geometry, Raz!”

  “In the present age, this continent is covered by a dense network of hard-surfaced roads replete with signs and other navigational aids,” I announced.

  “Oh,” said Fraa Jad.

  “Between that and this”—I waved the cartabla—“we can find our way to Saunt Tredegarh without having to design a sextant from first principles.”

  Fraa Jad seemed a little put out by this. A minute later, though, we happened to pass an office supply store. I ran in and bought a protractor, then handed it to Fraa Jad to serve as the first component in his homemade sextant. He was deeply impressed. I realized that this was the first thing he’d seen extramuros that made sense to him. “Is that a Temple of Adrakhones?” he asked, gazing at the store.

  “No,” I said, and turned my back on it and walked away. “It is praxic. They need primitive trigonometry to build things like wheelchair ramps and doorstops.”

  “Nonetheless,” he said, falling behind me, and looking back longingly, “they must have some perception—”

  “Fraa Jad,” I said, “they have no awareness of the Hylaean Theoric World.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Really. Anyone out here who begins to see into the HTW suppresses it, goes crazy, or ends up at Saunt Edhar.” I turned around and looked at him. “Where did you think Barb and I came from?”

  Once we had gotten clear as to that, Barb and Jad were happy to follow me and discuss sextants as I led them on a wide arc around the west side of Saunt Edhar to the machine hall.

  “You come and go at interesting times; I’ll give you that,” was how Cord greeted me.

  We had interrupted her and her co-workers in the middle of some sort of convocation. Everyone was staring at us. One older man in particular. “Who’s that guy and why does he hate me?” I asked, staring back at him.

  “That would be the boss,” Cord said. I noticed that her face was wet.

  “Oh. Hmm. Sure. It didn’t occur to me that you’d have one of those.”

  “Most people out here do, Raz,” she said. “When a boss gives you that look, it’s considered bad form to stare back the way you are doing.”

  “Oh, is it some kind of social dominance gesture?”

  “Yeah. Also, busting into a private meeting in someone’s place of employment is out of bounds.”

  “Well, as long as I have your boss’s attention, maybe I should let him know that—”

  “You called a big meeting here at midday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or, as he would think of it, you—a total stranger—invited a whole lot of other total strangers to gather on his property—an active industrial site with lots of dangerous equipment—without asking him first.”

  “Well, this is really important, Cord. And it won’t last long. Is that why you and your co-workers were having a meeting?”

  “That was the first agenda item.”

  “Do you think he is going to physically assault me? Because I know a little vlor. Not as much as Lio but—”

  “That would be an unusual way to handle it. Out here it would be a legal dispute. But you guys have your own separate law, so he can’t touch you. And it sounds like the Powers That Be are leaning on him to let this thing happen. He’ll negotiate with them for compensation. He’s also negotiating with the insurance company to make sure that none of this voids his policy.”

  “Wow. Things are complicated out here.”

  Cord looked in the direction of the Praesidium and sniffled. “And they’re not…in there?”

  I thought about that for a while. “I guess my disappearance on Tenth Night probably looks as weird to you as your boss’s insurance policy looks to me.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, it wasn’t personal. And it hurt me a lot. Maybe as much as this mess hurts you.”

  “That is unlikely,” Cord said, “since ten seconds before you walked in here I got fired.”

  “That is wildly irrational behavior!” I protested. “Even by extramuros standards.”

  “Yes and no. Yes, it’s crazy for me to get fired because of a decision you made without my knowledge. But no, in a way it’s not, because I’m weird here. I’m a girl. I use the machines to make jewelry. I make parts for the Ita and get paid in jars of honey.”

  “Well, I’m really sorry—”

  “Just stop,” she suggested.

  “If there’s anything I can do—if you’d like to join the math—”

  “The math you just got thrown out of?”

  “I’m just saying, if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you—”

  “Give me an adventure.”

  In the moment that followed, Cord realized that this sounded weird, and lost her nerve. She held up her hands. “I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.”

  Now for the first time I reviewed everything that had happened in the last twelve hours. It made me a little dizzy.

  “Raz?” she said, after a while.

  “I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”

  “Great!”

  “Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

  That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

  “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

  “Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “See you here at noon. If they’ll let me back in, that is.”

  “I’ll see to it that they do. Hey, Cord—”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is probab
ly the wrong time to ask…but could you do me one favor?”

  I went into the shade of the great roof over the canal and sat on a stack of wooden pallets, then took out the cartabla and figured out how to use its interface. This took longer than I’d expected because it wasn’t made for literate people. I couldn’t make any headway at all with its search functions, because of all its cack-handed efforts to assist me.

  “Where the heck is Bly’s Butte?” I asked Arsibalt when he showed up. It was half an hour before midday. About half of the Evoked had arrived. A small fleet of fetches and mobes had begun to form up: stolen, borrowed, or donated, I had no idea.

  “I anticipated this,” Arsibalt said.

  “Bly’s relics are all at Saunt Edhar,” I reminded him.

  “Were,” he corrected me.

  “Excellent! What did you steal?”

  “A rendering of the butte as it appeared thirteen hundred years ago.”

  “And some of his cosmographical notes?” I pleaded

  No such luck: Arsibalt’s face was all curiosity. “Why would you want Saunt Bly’s cosmographical notes?”

  “Because he ought to have noted the longitude and latitude of the place from which he was making the observations.”

  Then I remembered we had no way to determine our longitude and latitude anyway. But perhaps that information was entombed in the cartabla’s user interface.

  “Well, perhaps it’s all for the best,” Arsibalt sighed.

  “What!?”

  “We are supposed to go directly to Saunt Tredegarh’s. Bly’s Butte is not between here and there.”

  “I don’t think it’s that far out of the way.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me you don’t know where it is?”

  “I have a rough idea.”

  “You can’t even be certain that Orolo went to Bly’s Butte. How are you going to persuade seventeen avout to make an illicit detour to search for a man they Anathematized a few months ago?”

  “Arsibalt, I don’t understand you. Why did you bother stealing Bly’s relics if you had no intention of going to find Orolo?”

  “At the time I stole them,” he pointed out, “I didn’t know it was a Convox.”

  It took me a moment to follow the logic. “You didn’t know we’d be coming back.”

  “Correct.”

  “You reckoned, after we got finished doing whatever it is they wanted us to do—”

  “We could find Orolo, and live as Ferals.”

  That was all interesting. Sort of poignant too. It did nothing, however, to solve the problem at hand.

  “Arsibalt, have you noticed any pattern in the lives of the Saunts?”

  “Quite a few. Which pattern would you like to draw to my attention?”

  “A lot of them get Thrown Back before everyone figures out that they are Saunts.”

  “Supposing you’re right,” Arsibalt said, “Orolo’s canonization is not going to happen for a long time; he’s not a Saunt yet.”

  “Beg pardon,” said a man who had lately been hovering nearby with his hands in his pockets, “are you the leader?”

  He was looking at me. I naturally glanced around to see what fresh trouble Barb and Jad had gotten into. Barb was standing not far away, watching some birds that had built their nests up in the steel beams that supported the roof. He’d been doing this for a solid hour. Jad was squatting in a dusty patch, drawing diagrams using a broken tap as a stylus. Shortly after we’d arrived, Fraa Jad had wandered into the machine hall and figured out how to turn on a lathe. Cord’s ex-boss almost had attacked me. Since then, both Jad and Barb had been reasonably well-behaved. So why was this extra asking me if I was the leader? He didn’t seem angry or scared. More…lost.

  I guessed that by pretending to be the leader I could make a few things go my way, at least for a little while, until they figured out I was faking it.

  “Yes,” I said, “I am called Fraa Erasmas.”

  “Oh, good to meet you. Ferman Beller,” he said, and extended his hand a little uncertainly—he wasn’t sure if we used that greeting. I shook his hand firmly and he relaxed. He was a stocky man in his fifth decade. “Nice cartabla you got there.”

  This seemed like an incredibly strange thing for him to say until I remembered that extras were allowed to have more than three possessions and that these often served as starting-points for small talk.

  “Thanks,” I tried. “Too bad it doesn’t work.”

  He chuckled. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you there!” I guessed he was one of the locals who had volunteered to drive us. “Say, look, there’s a guy over there wants to talk to you. Didn’t know if we should, you know, let him approach.”

  I looked over and saw a man with a black stovepipe on his head, standing in the sun, glaring at me.

  “Please send Sammann over,” I said.

  “You can’t be serious!” Arsibalt hissed when Ferman was out of range.

  “I sent for him.”

  “How would you go about sending for an Ita?”

  “I asked Cord to do it for me.”

  “Is she here?” he asked, in a new tone of voice.

  “I’m expecting her and her boyfriend to show up at any minute,” I said, and jumped down off the stack of pallets. “Here, figure out where Bly’s Butte is.” I handed him the cartabla.

  The bells of Provener flipped switches in my brain, as if I were one of those poor dogs that Saunts of old would wire up for psychological experiments. First I felt guilty: late again! Then my legs and arms ached for the labor of winding the clock. Next would be hunger for the midday meal. Finally, I felt wounded that they’d managed to wind the clock without us.

  “We’re going to hold much of the discussion in Orth because many of us don’t really speak Fluccish,” I announced, from my pallet-stack podium, to the whole group: seventeen avout, one Ita, and a roster of extramuros people that grew and shrank according to their attention span and jeejah usage but averaged about a dozen. “Suur Tulia will translate some of what we say, but a lot of our conversation is going to be about stuff that is of interest only to avout. So you might want to have your own conversation about logistics—such as lunch.” I saw Arsibalt nodding.

  Then I switched to Orth. I was a little slow to get going because I was waiting for someone to point out that I was not actually the leader. But I had called this meeting, and I was standing on the stack of pallets.

  And I was a Tenner. Our leader would have to be a Tenner who would be able to speak Fluccish and deal with the extramuros world. Not that I was an expert on that. But a Hundreder would be even more inept. Fraa Jad and the Hundreders couldn’t very well choose which Tenner was going to be the leader, because they’d never met any of us until a few hours ago. For years, however, all of them had watched me and my team wind the clock, which gave me, Lio, and Arsibalt the advantage that our faces were familiar. Jesry, the natural leader, was gone. I had won Arsibalt’s loyalty by speaking of lunch. Lio was too goofy and weird. So through no rational process whatsoever I was the leader. And I had no idea what I was going to say.

  “We have to divide up among several vehicles,” I said, stalling for time. “For now we’ll stick with the same mixed groups of Tenners and Hundreders that were assigned in the Narthex this morning. We’ll do that because it’s simple,” I added, because I could see Fraa Wyburt—a Tenner, older than me—getting ready to lodge an objection. “Swap things around later if you want. But each Tenner is responsible for making sure his Hundreders don’t end up stranded in a vehicle with non-Orth speakers. I think we can all happily accept that responsibility,” I said, looking Fraa Wyburt in the eye. He looked ready to plane me but decided to back down for reasons I could only guess at. “How will those groups be distributed among vehicles? My sib, Cord, the young woman in the vest with the tools, has offered to take some of us in her fetch. That’s a Fluccish word. It is that industrial-looking vehicle that seems like a box on wheels. She wants me and her liaison-partner Rosk—the
big man with the long hair—in there with her. Fraa Jad and Fraa Barb are with me. I have invited Sammann of the Ita to join us. I know some of you will object”—they were already objecting—“but that’s why I’m putting him in the fetch with me.”

  “It’s disrespectful to put an Ita in with a Thousander!” said Suur Rethlett—another Tenner.

  “Fraa Jad,” I said, “I apologize that we are discussing you as if you were not present. It goes without saying that you may choose whichever vehicle you want.”

  “We are supposed to maintain the Discipline during Peregrin!” Barb helpfully reminded us.

  “Hey, you guys are scaring the extras,” I joked. Because looking over the heads of my fraas and suurs I could see the extramuros people looking unnerved by our arguing. Tulia translated my last remark. The extras laughed. None of the avout did. But they did settle down a little.

  “Fraa Erasmas, if I may?” said Arsibalt. I nodded. Arsibalt faced Barb but spoke loudly enough for all to hear: “We have been given two mutually contradictory instructions. One, the ancient standing order to preserve the Discipline during Peregrin. Two, a fresh order to get to Saunt Tredegarh by any means necessary. They have not provided us with a sealed train-coach or any other such vehicle that might serve as a mobile cloister. It is to be small private vehicles or nothing. And we don’t know how to drive. I put it to you that the new order takes precedence over the old and that we must travel in the company of extras. And to travel with an Ita is certainly no worse than that. I say it is better, in that the Ita understand the Discipline as well as we do.”

  “Sammann’s in Cord’s fetch with me,” I concluded, before Barb could let fly any of the objections that had been filling his quiver during Arsibalt’s statement. “Fraa Jad’s wherever he wants to be.”

  “I’ll travel in the way you have suggested, and make a change if it is not satisfactory,” said Fraa Jad. This silenced the remainder of the seventeen for a moment, simply because it was the first time most of them had heard his voice.