Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

“That might happen immediately,” I told him, “because the first destination of Cord’s fetch will be Bly’s Butte where I will try to find Orolo.”

  Now the extras really did have something to worry about, for the avout became quite loud and angry and my short tenure as self-appointed leader looked to be at an end. But before they pulled me down and Anathematized me I nodded to Sammann, who strode forward. I reached down and grabbed his hand and pulled him up to stand alongside me. The novel sight of a fraa touching an Ita broke the others’ concentration for a moment. Then Sammann began to speak, which was so arresting that after the first few words he had a silent, almost rapt audience. A couple of Centenarian suurs plugged their ears and closed their eyes in silent protest; three others turned their backs on him.

  “Fraa Spelikon told me to go to the Telescope of Saunts Mithra and Mylax and retrieve a photomnemonic tablet that Fraa Orolo had placed there hours before the starhenge was closed by the Warden Regulant,” Sammann announced in correct but strangely accented Orth. “I obeyed. He did not issue any command as to information security relating to this tablet. So, before I gave it to him, I made a copy.” And with that Sammann withdrew a photomnemonic tablet from a bag slung over his shoulder. “It contains a single image that Fraa Orolo created, but never got to see. I summon the image now,” he said, manipulating its controls. “Fraa Erasmas, here, saw it a few minutes ago. The rest of you may view it if you wish.” He handed it down to the nearest avout. Others clustered around, though some still refused even to acknowledge that Sammann was present.

  “We need to be discreet and not show this to the extras,” I said, “because I don’t think they have any idea what we are up against.” We meaning everyone on Arbre.

  But no one heard me because by then they were all looking at the image on the tablet.

  What the tablet showed did not force anyone to agree with me, but it was a huge distraction from the argument we’d been having. Those who were inclined to see things my way derived new confidence from it. The rest of them lost their nerve.

  It took an hour to figure out who was going in which vehicle. I couldn’t believe it could be so complicated. People kept changing their minds. Alliances formed, frayed, and dissolved. Inter-alliance coalitions snapped in and out of existence like virtual particles. Cord’s big boxy fetch, which had three rows of seats, was to be occupied by her, Rosk, me, Barb, Jad, and Sammann. Ferman Beller had a large mobe that was made to travel on uneven surfaces. He would take Lio, Arsibalt, and three of the Hundreders who had decided to throw in with us. We thought we had pretty efficiently filled the two largest vehicles, but at the last minute another extra who had been making a lot of calls on his jeejah announced that he and his fetch were joining our caravan. The man’s name was Ganelial Crade and he was pretty clearly some kind of Deolater from a counter-Bazian ark—whether Warden of Heaven or not, we didn’t know yet. His vehicle was an open-back fetch whose bed was almost completely occupied by a motorized tricycle with fat, knobby tires. Only three people could fit into its cab. No one wanted to ride with Ganelial Crade. I was embarrassed on his behalf, though not so embarrassed that I was willing to climb into his vehicle. At the last minute, some younger associate of his stepped up, tossed a duffel bag into the back, and climbed into the cab with him. So that completed the Bly’s Butte contingent.

  The direct-to-Tredegarh contingent comprised four mobes, each with one owner/driver and one Tenner: Tulia, Wyburt, Rethlett, and Ostabon. Other seats in these vehicles were taken up by Hundreders who wanted no part of an Orolo expedition or by other extras who had volunteered to come on the journey.

  With the exception of Cord and Rosk, all of the extras appeared to be part of religious groups, which made all of the avout more or less uncomfortable. I reckoned that if there had been a military base in this area the Saecular Power might have ordered some soldiers to dress up as civilians and drive us around, but since there wasn’t, they’d hit on the idea of relying on organizations that people were willing to volunteer for on short notice, which in this time and place meant arks. When I explained it to people in those terms, it seemed to settle them down a little bit. The Tenners sort of understood it. The Hundreders found it quite difficult to fathom and kept wanting to know more about the deologies espoused by their would-be drivers, which in no way shortened the process of getting them into vehicles.

  Ganelial Crade was probably in his fourth decade, but you could mistake him for a younger man because he was slender and whiskerless. He announced that he knew the location of Bly’s Butte and that he would lead us there and we should follow him. Then he got into his fetch and started the engine. Ferman Beller ambled over and grinned at him until he opened his window, then started talking to him. Pretty soon I could tell that they were disagreeing about something—mostly by watching Crade’s passenger, who was glaring at Beller.

  I got that mud-on-the-head sense of embarrassment again. Ganelial Crade had spoken with such confidence that I’d assumed he’d already gone over this plan with Ferman Beller and that the two of them had agreed on it. Now it was obvious that no such thing had ever happened. I’d been prepared to follow Crade wherever he led us.

  I could now see that this business of being the leader was going to be a pain in the neck because people would always be trying to get me to do the wrong things or get rid of me altogether.

  “Some leader!” I said, referring to myself.

  “Huh?” asked Lio.

  “Don’t let me do stupid things any more,” I ordered Lio, who looked baffled. I started walking towards Crade’s fetch. Lio and Arsibalt followed at a distance. Crade and Beller were openly arguing now. I really wanted no part of this but I had been cornered into doing something.

  The problem, I realized, was that Crade claimed to have knowledge we didn’t have as to the location of Bly’s Butte. That was my fault. I’d made the error of admitting that I didn’t know exactly where it was. Inside the concent it was fine to admit ignorance, because that was the first step on the road to truth. Out here, it just gave people like Crade an opening to seize power.

  “Excuse me!” I called out. Beller and Crade stopped arguing and looked at me. “One of my brothers has brought with him ancient documents from the concent that tell us where to go. By combining this knowledge with the skills of our Ita and the topographic maps on the cartabla, we can find our own way to the place we are going.”

  “I know exactly where your friend went,” Crade began.

  “We don’t,” I said, “but as I mentioned we can figure it out long before we get there.”

  “Just follow me and—”

  “That is a brittle plan. If we lose you in traffic we will be in a bad way.”

  “If you lose me in traffic you can call me on my jeejah.”

  This hurt because Crade was being more rational than I was, but I couldn’t back down at this point. “Mr. Crade, you may go on ahead if you like, and have the satisfaction of beating us there, but if you look in your rearview and notice that we are no longer visible, it is because we have decided to keep our own counsel as to how we should get there.”

  Crade and his passenger now hated me forever but at least this was over.

  This plan, however, necessitated a shake-up that put me and Sammann in Ferman Beller’s vehicle with Arsibalt. The three of us would navigate. Lio and a Hundreder moved to Cord’s fetch to balance the load; they would follow. Ganelial Crade sprayed us with loose rocks as he gunned his fetch out into the open.

  “That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it’s almost funny,” Arsibalt observed.

  “Yes,” said one of the Hundreders, “it’s as if he’d never heard of foreshadowing.”

  “He probably hasn’t,” I said. “But please remember that our driver is the only extra in this vehicle and so let’s show him the courtesy of speaking Fluccish at least part of the time.”

  “Go ahead,” said the Hundreder, “and I’ll see if I can parse it.”

&
nbsp; Fraa Carmolathu, as this Hundreder was called, was a little bit of a dork, but he had volunteered to go fetch Orolo, so he couldn’t be all bad. He was five or ten years older than Orolo, and I speculated that he was a friend of Paphlagon.

  “How many roads lead northeast, parallel to the mountains?” I asked Beller. I was hoping he’d say only one.

  “Several,” he said. “Which one do you want to take, boss?”

  “By definition a butte is free-standing—not part of a range,” Arsibalt said in Orth, “so—”

  “It rises from the plateau south of the mountains,” I announced in Fluccish. “We don’t need to take a mountain road.”

  Beller put the vehicle into gear and pulled out. I waved goodbye to Tulia. She was watching us go, looking a little shocked. Our departure had been abrupt, but I was afraid that if we waited one more minute there would be another crisis. Tulia had elected to go directly to Tredegarh so that she could try to find Ala. Perhaps I ought to have done the same. But this was not an easy choice, and I thought I was choosing rightly. If all went well, we’d get to Tredegarh only a couple of days later than Tulia’s contingent. She’d do a fine job of leading them there.

  Before leaving town we stopped, or rather slowed down, at a place where we could get food without spending a lot of time. I remembered this kind of restaurant from my childhood but it was new to the Hundreders. I couldn’t help seeing it as they did: the ambiguous conversation with the unseen serving-wench, the bags of hot-grease-scented food hurtling in through the window, condiments in packets, attempting to eat while lurching down a highway, volumes of messy litter that seemed to fill all the empty space in the mobe, a smell that outstayed its welcome.

  * * *

  Bazian Orthodox: The state religion of the Bazian Empire, which survived the Fall of Baz, erected, during the succeeding age, a mathic system parallel to and independent of that inaugurated by Cartas, and endured as one of Arbre’s largest faiths.

  Counter-Bazian: Religion rooted in the same scriptures, and honoring the same prophets, as Bazian Orthodoxy, but explicitly rejecting the authority, and certain teachings, of the Bazian Orthodox faith.

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

  By the time we’d finished eating, we’d passed out of view of the Praesidium. We had left most of the slines’ quarter behind us and were moving across a sort of tidal zone that was part of the city when the city was big and part of the country when it wasn’t. Where a tidal zone would have driftwood, dead fish, and uprooted seaweed, this had stands of scrawny trees, animals killed by vehicles, and tousled jumpweed. Where the tidal zone would be littered with empty bottles and wrecked boats, this had empty bottles and abandoned fetches. The only thing of consequence was a complex where fuel trees that had been barged down from the mountains were chewed up and processed. There we were caught for a few minutes in a traffic jam of tanker-drummons. But few of these were going our way, and soon we had got clear of them and passed into the district of vegetable gardens and orchards that stretched beyond.

  In my vehicle, besides me and Ferman Beller, were Arsibalt, Sammann, and two Hundreder Fraas, Carmolathu and Harbret. The other vehicle contained Cord, Rosk, Lio, Barb, Jad, and another Edharian from the Hundreder math: Fraa Criscan. I noted a statistical oddity, which was that there was only one female, and that was my sib, who was pretty unconventional as females went. Intramuros, we didn’t often see the numbers get so skewed. Extramuros, of course, it depended on what religions and social mores prevailed at a given time. Naturally, I wondered how this had come about, and spent a little while reviewing my memories of the hour-long scramble to get people into vehicles. Of course, the biggest factor in determining who’d go in which group was how one thought about Orolo and the mission to go and find him. Perhaps there was something about this foray that smelled good to men and bad to women.

  We numbered twelve, not counting Ganelial Crade. This was a common size for an athletic team or a small military unit. It had been speculated for a long time that this was a natural size for a hunting party of the Stone Age, and that men were predisposed to feel comfortable in a group of about that size. Anyway, whether it was a statistical anomaly or primitive behavior programmed into our sequences, this was what we’d ended up with. I spent a few minutes wondering whether Tulia and some of the other suurs in the straight-to-Tredegarh contingent hated me for letting it come out this way, then forgot about it, since we needed to think about navigation.

  From the drawing that Arsibalt had supplied—which showed the profile of a range of mountains in the distance—and from certain clues in the story of Saunt Bly as recorded in the Chronicles, and from things that Sammann looked up on a kind of super-jeejah, we were able to identify three different isolated mountains on the cartabla, any one of which might have been Bly’s Butte. They formed a triangle about twenty miles on a side, a couple of hundred miles from where we were now. It didn’t seem that far away but when we showed it to Ferman he told us we shouldn’t expect to reach it until tomorrow; the roads in that area, he explained, were “new gravel,” and it would be slow going. We could get there today, but it would be dark and we wouldn’t be able to do anything. Better to find a place to stay nearby and get an early start tomorrow.

  I didn’t understand “new gravel” until several hours later when we turned off the main highway and on to a road that had once been paved. It almost would have been faster to drive directly over the earth than to pick our way over this crazed puzzle of jagged slabs.

  Arsibalt was uncomfortable being around Sammann, which I could tell because he was extremely polite when addressing him. Complaining of motion sickness, he moved up to the seat next to Ferman and talked to him in Fluccish. I sat behind him and tried to catch up on sleep. From time to time my eyelids would part as we caught air over a gap in the road and I’d get a dreamy glimpse of some religious fetish swinging from the control panel. I was no expert on arks, but I was pretty sure that Ferman was Bazian Orthodox. At some level this was just as crazy as believing in whatever Ganelial Crade believed, but it was a far more traditional and predictable form of crazy.

  Still, if a group of religious fanatics had wanted to abduct a few carloads of avout, they couldn’t have done a slicker job of it. That’s why I snapped awake when I heard Ferman Beller mention God.

  Until now he’d avoided it, which I could not understand. If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him? Instead of which Deolaters like Beller would go on for hours without bringing God into the conversation at all. Maybe his God was remote from our doings. Or—more likely—maybe the presence of God was so obvious to him that he felt no more need to speak of it than did I to point out, all the time, that I was breathing air.

  Frustration was in Beller’s voice. Not angry or bitter. This was the gentle, genial frustration of an uncle who can’t get something through a nephew’s head. We seemed so smart. Why didn’t we believe in God?

  “We’re observing the Sconic Discipline,” Arsibalt told him—happy, and a bit relieved, to’ve been given an opportunity to clear this up. He was too optimistic, I thought, too confident he could get Beller to see it our way. “It’s not the same thing as not believing in God. Though”—he hastily added—“I can see why it looks that way to one who’s never been exposed to Sconic thought.”

  “I thought your Discipline came from Saunt Cartas,” said Beller.

  “Indeed. One can trace a direct line from the Cartasian principles of the Old Mathic Age to many of our practices. But much has been added, and a few things have been taken away.”

  “So, I guess Scone was another Saunt who added something?”

  “No, a scone is a little cake.”

  Beller chuckled in the forced, awkward way that extras did when someone told a joke that was not funny.

  “I’m serious,” Arsibalt said. “Sconism is named after the little tea-cakes. It is a system of thought that was discovered about halfway
between the Rebirth and the Terrible Events. The high-water mark of Praxic Age civilization, if you will. A couple of hundred years earlier, the gates of the Old Maths had been flung open, the avout had gone forth and mingled with the Saeculars—mostly Saeculars of wealth and status. Lords and ladies. The globe, by this point, had been explored and charted. The laws of dynamics had been worked out and were just beginning to come into praxic use.”

  “The Mechanic Age,” Beller tried, dredging up a word he’d been forced to memorize in some suvin a long time ago.

  “Yes. Clever people could make a living, in those days, just by hanging around in salons, discussing metatheorics, writing books, tutoring the children of nobles and industrialists. It was the most harmonious relationship between, er—”

  “Us and you?” Beller suggested.

  “Yes, that had existed since the Golden Age of Ethras. Anyway, there was one great lady, named Baritoe, whose husband was a philandering idiot, but never mind, she took advantage of his absence to run a salon in her house. All the best metatheoricians knew to gather there at a particular time of day, when the scones were coming out of her ovens. People came and went over the years, so Lady Baritoe was the only constant. She wrote books, but, as she herself is careful to say, the ideas in them can’t be attributed to any one person. Someone dubbed it Sconic thought and the name stuck.”

  “And it all got incorporated into your Discipline, what, a couple of hundred years later?”

  “Yes, not in a very formal way though. More as a set of habits. Thinking-habits that many of the new avout already shared when they came in the gates.”

  “Such as not believing in God?” Beller asked.

  And here—though we were driving on fair, level ground—I felt as I would’ve if we’d been on a mountain track with a thousand-foot cliff to one side, which Beller could have spilled us into with a twitch of the controls. Arsibalt was relaxed, though, which I marveled at, because he could be so high-strung about matters that were so much less dangerous.